The Center for Public Integrity
By David Heath
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Osama bin Laden’s death has renewed the debate over harsh interrogation techniques, and defenders say rough treatment is the only way to get hard-core terrorists to talk. But in the months before 9/11, one high-profile terrorist was voluntarily divulging all he knew about his time with al-Qaida.
Ahmed Ressam was arguably the FBI’s most valuable informant when terrorists struck U.S. targets with deadly precision on Sept. 11, 2001. Trained at two al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, Ressam became the leader of a plot to massacre holiday travelers at the Los Angeles International Airport at the end of 1999. The plot was foiled when…
By the time of the 9/11 attacks, Ressam had already spent months naming names and revealing details about al-Qaida’s recruiting, training and plotting. Intelligence from those sessions was included in the infamous presidential briefing on…
…But three years later, Ali Soufan, an FBI agent involved in the initial interrogations, said that Zubaydah talked about the dirty bomb before he was stripped naked and waterboarded. Soufan contends that for months Zubaydah provided “actionable intelligence” without brutality.
Ressam’s case shows that the assumption that terrorists won’t talk is wrong, said Steven Kleinman, a military interrogator and intelligencer office with 30 years of experience including Iraq.
“It’s easy to get swept up in media images of terrorists as monsters without the same vulnerabilities as other humans,” Kleinman said, “but that’s …”
But Kleinman said memory is fragile and making someone tell a story over and over again will naturally lead to inconsistencies. What’s more, the longer the interrogations went on…
To read the full article please click on the link below:http://www.iwatchnews.org/2011/06/03/4802/ahmed-ressam-mastermind-foiled-lax-plot-gave-valuable-details-about-al-qaida-without