Ex-CIA chief defends waterboarding of al Qaeda leader

A nearly three-year-long investigation by Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats is expected to find there is little evidence the harsh "enhanced interrogation techniques" the CIA used on high-value prisoners produced counter-terrorism breakthroughs.


People familiar with the inquiry said committee investigators, who have been poring over records from the administration of President George W. Bush, believe they do not substantiate claims by some Bush supporters that the harsh interrogations led to counter-terrorism coups.

The backers of such techniques, which include "water-boarding," sleep deprivation and other practices critics call torture, maintain they have led to the disruption of major terror plots and the capture of al Qaeda leaders.


One official said investigators found "no evidence" such enhanced interrogations played "any significant role" in the years-long intelligence operations which led to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last May by U.S. Navy SEALs.


President Barack Obama and his aides have largely sought to avoid revisiting Bush administration controversies. But the debate over the effectiveness of enhanced interrogations, which human rights advocates condemn as torture, is resurfacing, in part thanks to a new book by a former top CIA official.


In the book, "Hard Measures," due to be published on Monday, April 30, the former chief of CIA clandestine operations Jose Rodriguez defends the use of interrogation practices including water-boarding, which involves pouring water on a subject's face, which is covered with a cloth, to simulate drowning.


Rodriguez says the interrogation program, which also included stress positions, nudity and "insult slaps," was "about instilling a sense of hopelessness...despair...so that he [the detainee] would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us." He says that even Khalid Sheik Mohammed, whom he termed "the toughest detainee we had," eventually gave up information.


KSM, as the mastermind of 9/11 was known, would not cooperate at first. "He eventually told us, 'I will talk once I get to New York and I get my lawyer,'" Rodriguez recalls. But KSM was subjected to the enhanced techniques, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation, and Rodriguez believes, "it was the cumulative effect of waterboarding and sleep deprivation and everything else that was done that eventually got to him."


Rodriguez maintains he got information from the interrogations of KSM and others that enabled the CIA to disrupt at least 10 large-scale terrorist plots. But when Stahl reminds him the CIA's own inspector general said that his enhanced interrogation program did not stop any imminent attack, Rodriguez says, "We don't know. ...if, for example, al Qaeda would have been able to continue on with their anthrax program or nuclear program...or sleeper agents ...working with Khalid Sheik Mohammed to take down the Brooklyn Bridge, for example."

Stahl then suggests that KSM was never really broken, because he never gave up Osama bin Laden. "There is a limit...to what they will tell us," replies Rodriguez.


Rodriguez regrets the cancellation of his enhanced interrogation program by the current administration, accusing the White House of tying America's hands in the war on terror. "We don't capture anyone anymore Lesley...the default option of this administration has been to kill all prisoners. Take no prisoners," he tells Stahl. "The drones. How could it be more ethical to kill people rather than capture them?"