Ex-Official Testifies About Efforts to Halt Harsh Tactics

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Partisan Attacks Pepper Senate Hearing
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051301281.html?hpid=topnews

The Senate's first hearing exploring the alleged torture of detainees rapidly descended into partisan counterattacks yesterday, as Democrats sought to portray the Bush administration's decision making about the interrogation techniques as riddled with misstatements and defective legal conclusions.

Former State Department counselor Philip D. Zelikow and retired FBI agent Ali Soufan told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee about their unsuccessful attempts to block or reverse detainee interrogation techniques that included waterboarding and repeatedly slamming detainees into flexible walls.

Soufan left a secret overseas prison in 2002 after registering concerns to his superiors at the bureau about CIA contractors engaged in what he called "amateurish, Hollywood-style interrogation methods." Zelikow and his colleagues had forcefully argued that the Bush White House should halt the practices. He said he wrote a memo challenging the legality of the interrogation techniques. The most controversial of those techniques -- waterboarding -- had ended three years earlier. He said administration officials tried to destroy the memo, which is still classified, in early 2006.

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Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who convened the Judiciary hearing, cited a "near avalanche of falsehood" surrounding the Bush interrogations program, which he said for years had employed "false devices thrown out there to confuse and distract."

Also on the table was the effectiveness of the harsh interrogation tactics. Soufan, who investigated the East Africa embassy bombings, said that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were ineffective and unreliable, and "as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaeda.

[MasonJar]

1. Then why did Zelikow pander for and obfuscate for the Bushista at the

9/11 Commission hearings? He kept important info out and allowed Bush/Cheney to hold hands with no oath. Zelikow knew the extent of the damage and yet did not let it come out. (I know that the 9/11 hearings were not about Iraq, but still he had a good idea what kind of people he was dealing with, since he is such a Condi pal.) Soufan, on the other hnd, is a national hero. I also admire Whitehouse. Whitehouse for the White House!!!