You know how we’ve been trying to figure out why PapaDick and BabyDick never claim waterboarding worked with Rahim al-Nashiri? Ali Soufan tells us what we didn’t learn from him using torture: details of his operation on the Arabian peninsula.
A third top suspected terrorist who was subjected to enhanced interrogation, in 2002, was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the man charged with plotting the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole. I was the lead agent on a team that worked with the Yemenis to thwart a series of plots by Mr. Nashiri’s operatives in the Arabian Peninsula — including planned attacks on Western embassies. In 2004, we helped prosecute 15 of these operatives in a Yemeni court. Not a single piece of evidence that helped us apprehend or convict them came from Mr. Nashiri.
And what we didn’t learn from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed–the location of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri–is even more incendiary.
Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.
Some of this, btw, is almost certainly explained in Soufan’s interview with the 9/11 Commission, which has been imminently pending to be declassified since April.
So how long until PapaDick and BabyDick and their apologists start getting asked about how torture may have prevented us from finding Osama bin Laden?