The Anonymity Files, #2
The Washington Post, “Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots,” by Peter Finn and Joby Warrick, March 29, 2009:
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
This is not exactly breaking news, although it’s true, as Michael Stickings writes, that it is still important to have a major national media source reporting that “the torture, by the U.S. (which has tortured, denials from Bush et al. notwithstanding), of one supposedly ‘high-value’ al Qaeda figure turned out to produce nothing in the way of value[.]“
Unfortunately, the impact of this story is once again undermined by an almost complete reliance on anonymous sources, as Libby points out:
… [T]he article is based almost solely on unnamed sources and unidentified court documents. In four pages, there are two attributed quotes. One to his lawyer and one to a former CIA agent. …
Finn and Warrick do mention in passing that one source — a “U.S. counterterrorism official” who insisted that Abu Zubaida was “intimately involved with Al Qaeda” (which Zubaida “admitted” under torture) — asked not to be named “because much about Abu Zubaida remains classified.” This does not explain much of anything, since this unnamed official spoke in nothing but generalities and did not tell Finn and Warrick anything (at least nothing that they put in the article) that hasn’t already been said by apologists for the CIA torture program many times before. We are being asked to believe that this individual was giving away classified information by saying, “He [Abu Zubaidah] was one of the terrorist organization’s key facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated, provided critical information on senior al-Qaeda figures . . . and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members.” Why, the purveyors of paranoid ravings on the right side of the blogosphere have said that any number of times (and still do).
Joby and Warrick are silent on why they agreed to on-background-only interviews for the “former senior government officials” who are now saying that the CIA got nothing of value from their coercive interrogations of Abu Zubaidah. Why former Bush administration officials who are no longer in the government should require anonymity to tell the Washington Post what has been reported many times before and is therefore news to no one, escapes me.
Tags: 9/11, Abu Zubaida, CIA, Jose Padilla, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
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