CIA ignored warnings from US soldiers that torture and extreme stress would not work

At the heart of the debate is whether the CIA interrogation techniques produced useful information from detainees Photo: AP

The country’s spy chiefs were also warned that harsh techniques were likely to produce “unreliable information”. But under pressure from the White House, the CIA brushed the concerns aside and approved a controversial interrogation programme for suspected al-Qaeda prisoners that included simulated drowning by waterboarding.

The military document described forms of extreme questioning as torture 13 times in two pages, just a month before government lawyers said the techniques did not reach that threshold and interrogators first used waterboarding against a captive.

The lessons from this SERE programme – Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape – were viewed as crucial in devising coercive tactics for questioning terrorist suspects. So the fact that JPRA interrogation specialists raised such strong concerns about the efficacy of extreme duress, in the memo obtained by The Washington Post, will dramatically raise the stakes in the row over torture now engulfing Washington.

The document is fuelling the political firestorm that has raged in the US since President Barack Obama ordered the release of four memos by former Justice Department lawyers, detailing harsh interrogation techniques and ruling they did not constitute torture.

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney has led the Republican assault on Mr Obama, insisting that the tactics elicited information that has kept America from terrorist attacks since 2001. It is an unprecedented attack by such a senior former White House figure on the new incumbent.

Mr Obama has also come under fire from anti-war activists and liberal Democrats demanding that former officials be prosecuted. The row on the right and left and has spun out of the White House’s control.

At the heart of the debate is whether the CIA techniques produced useful information from detainees such as Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al Qaeda operative who was waterboarded 83 times in Aug 2002.

Breaking a seven-year silence, Ali Soufan, the former chief FBI interrogator who questioned Abu Zubaydah for three months before he was handed to the CIA, has flatly contradicted Mr Cheney, saying that no additional “actionable intelligence” was gained from the extreme tactics.

Tellingly, the JPRA document asserted that “upwards of 90 per cent” of interrogations achieved their goals by establishing a rapport with the captive, rather than by imposing duress.

The memo was compiled at the height of discussions about how to interrogate suspects involving President George W Bush’s then national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, the CIA chief George Tenet and legal advisers from the Department of Justice.

The JPRA memo, part of a bundle of documents detailing the effect of severe interrogation tactics on American prisoners in past conflicts such as Korea, raised repeated red flags that were evidently ignored. It expressed concern that captured US personnel would face greater danger of torture if the US practiced the tactics on its prisoners. But most seriously, the memo dwelt on the efficacy of of coercive questioning.

“If an interrogator produces information that resulted from the application of physical and psychological duress, the reliability of this information is in doubt,” it stated. “A subject in extreme pain may provide an answer, any answer or many answers to get the pain to stop.

“The application of extreme physical and/or pyschological duress (torture) has some serious operational deficits, most notably the potential to result in unreliable information.”

The concerns dovetail with criticisms made by Mr Soufan, who now runs a security consultancy. “I saw that using these alternative methods on terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions – all of which are still classified,” he said.

The unease was not limited to the FBI, Art Keller, a former CIA Middle East case officer, told The Sunday Telegraph. “Unbeknownst to the general public, the CIA has been haemorrhaging experienced field personnel, resignations of conscience over harsh interrogation tactics and other mistakes in the ‘global war on terror’,” he said.

The released memos revealed that the CIA allowed 10 forms of physical and psychological coercive torture, including waterboarding – a technique used since the Spanish Inquisition. It has been widely considered as torture and after ther Second World War the US military executed Japanese soldiers who were found to have used it on captives.

The technicalities of extracting information under duress were spelled out in careful detail. They included keeping detainees awake for up to 11 straight days, placing them in a dark confined boxes and playing on their phobias by putting insects into the box with them. Other techniques involved “walling” (slamming naked detainees into walls), dousing prisoners with freezing water and waking them up for prayers every half hour.

With military precision the CIA set out how each technique should be used. Waterboarding involved strapping a prisoner downwards to a stretcher inclined at an angle of “10 to 15 degrees”, covering his nose and mouth with a cloth and and pouring water “from a height of approximately 6 to 18 inches” for up to 40 seconds at a time.

Earlier, using standard interrogation techniques, Zubaydah had shared secrets of the September 11 attacks with the FBI team. These included the vital detail that key planner was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subsequentlty captured and waterboarded 183 times in March 2003.

But there was intense pressure from the White House to prove that al-Qaeda was working with Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The desired answers were not being obtained through standard interrogation methods.

Mr Soufan’s FBI team was frozen out by the CIA and a retired Air Force psychologist named James Mitchell took the lead, even though he had never conducted an interrogation before he took over.

He began by declaring that Abu Zubaydah had to be treated “like a dog in a cage,” at which point the FBI withdrew its investigators. Working with the CIA, Mr Mitchell is reported to have “reverse-engineered” harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding which Chinese Communists used to break down US captives in the Korean War for propaganda purposes.

The role played by psychologists in the harsh interrogations has led to disturbing claims about the role of the American Psychological Association (APA). The world’s largest pyschologists’ body convened a specially convened task force in July 2005 that ruled that psychologists could assist in military interrogations.

But there are concerns that the task force was dominated by psychologists associated with the military, one of the largest employers of the profession through its veterans hospitals.

Meanwhile, the controversy over the Obama White House’s approach to the previous administration’s tactics is certain to deepen after it agreed to release up to 2,000 photographs of alleged abuse at US-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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