Believe It or Not

"Sources have said that besides waterboarding and temperature extremes, the techniques included the repeated use of sleep deprivation and restricted diets beyond what is authorized under military rules. . . .

"Bush said that 'by giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this program has saved lives.'

"But an hour before Bush spoke, two senior military officers gave a different account of the efficacy of using such rough interrogation methods. Lt. Gen. John F. Kimmons, Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, said in briefing reporters at the Pentagon on the military's new interrogation rules that 'no good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.'"

Dana Priest writes in The Washington Post: "When it set up the program, the CIA -- at the urging of Vice President Cheney and a White House general counsel's office with an unconventional view of what constituted torture -- asserted that it needed to hide prisoners in secret locations around the world and to harshly interrogate them to extract time-sensitive information about possible terrorists attacks. . . .

"A written defense of the program issued by the administration yesterday said it would be 'practically impossible' to act quickly on 'information from one detainee in the questioning of another' if they were all in the custody of different foreign governments. But the statement did not explain why that couldn't also have been accomplished if the detainees had been held together at Guantanamo Bay.

"Prisoners were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques including feigned drowning, extreme isolation, slapping, sleep deprivation, reduced food intake, and light and sound bombardment -- sometimes in combination with each other. Human rights groups and many international legal experts have said these techniques amount to torture. The administration insists, as Bush did again yesterday, that it has never authorized or used torture."

Case Study in Credibility

To assess Bush's credibility, it is worth examining one of the stories at the heart of his defense of the CIA program yesterday.

Dan Eggen and Dafna Linzer writes in The Washington Post: "The secret interrogation of senior al-Qaeda aide Abu Zubaida provided U.S. authorities with the clues they needed to capture the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and other key terrorism suspects around the world, according to new accounts provided yesterday by President Bush and administration officials. . . .

" DNI documents portray the capture and intermittent interrogations of Zubaida as crucial to unraveling much of what the government knows about the Sept. 11 attacks and the internal operations of al-Qaeda. But some of the portrayal appears to be at odds with other published reports, and intelligence sources indicated yesterday that Zubaida's case is more complicated than the administration let on. . . .

"During an initial interrogation, he provided information 'that he probably viewed as nominal,' but which included identifying [alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik] Mohammed as the Sept. 11 mastermind who used the nickname 'Mukhtar,' the documents say. The information 'opened up new leads' that eventually resulted in Mohammed's capture, the documents say.

"But in his recent book, 'The One Percent Doctrine,' Ron Suskind reported that a tipster led the CIA directly to Mohammed and subsequently collected a $25 million reward. Intelligence sources said yesterday that Suskind's description is correct but that Zubaida's information was also helpful."

Zubaida was Bush's primary example of why tougher interrogation tactics were needed.