"We tortured an insane man"

That's what we're finding today, in terms of these competing press conferences. The president vs. the Pentagon; the Pentagon folks are listing out two dozen or so techniques that we'll use, which are fairly tame. Going forward, the president is saying, well, we got some valuable things from using these harsh interrogation techniques. Ultimately, one is message, the other is reality. This is the way the White House does a very careful bit of calibration to say that we thought at the beginning it wasn't quite right in terms of using harsh or extra-legal methods, many of them qualifying as torture, on the folks who've been captured.

What techniques have they dropped?

Death threats, waterboarding, profound deprivation issues, heat, cold, denial of medical attention -- those are now abandoned.

One of the dark moments in the so-called war on terror, as I disclosed in the book, along with all the other stuff, is that we threatened Khalid Sheik Mohammed's children to get him to talk. According to those involved in that incident, he pretty much looked them straight in the eye and said, "Fine, they'll be in a better place with Allah." Once you threaten someone's children there's pretty much nowhere else to go in terms of building the kind of relationship where they at some point tell you things that you really need to hear.

The president said today that Zubaydah was a "senior terrorist leader" and a "trusted associate of bin Laden," and that the "intelligence community believes he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained, and that he helped smuggle al-Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan after coalition forces arrived." What do you think of that characterization?

Zubaydah was not involved in key operational planning for al-Qaida. He was involved largely in logistics.

So you think describing him as a "senior terrorist leader" and a "trusted associate of bin Laden" is an overstatement?

I think, again, that the president is overstating a little less than the overstatements when Zubaydah was first captured, but nevertheless, still a bit of an overstatement.

The president also talked about Zubaydah giving away "what he thought was nominal information -- and then stopp[ing] all cooperation," and then they used these harsher tactics and he gave up what the president said was "information on key al-Qaida operatives, including information that helped us find and capture more of those responsible for the attacks on September the 11th. For example, Zubaydah identified one of KSM's [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] accomplices in the 9/11 attacks -- a terrorist named Ramzi bin al Shibh. The information Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of bin al Shibh. And together these two terrorists provided information that helped in the planning and execution of the operation that captured Khalid Sheik Mohammed."

Zubaydah gave us the information he gave us because, in using softer techniques, we convinced him that his religious belief in predetermination was such that he believed that he wasn't killed, but captured, when other people died, obviously, that he was wounded and captured for a reason, and the reason was to give us some information. That was why he gave us some information, that was the rationale he used. That was what one would consider more sophisticated, "soft" interrogation techniques, where we got the stuff of value.

So the stuff about bin al Shibh, that came through softer interrogation tactics?

Bin al Shibh, no. I'm not talking about the bin al Shibh stuff or the KSM stuff. Ultimately, we ended up getting the key breaks on those guys, KSM and bin al Shibh, from the Emir of Qatar, who informed us as to their whereabouts a few months before we captured bin al Shibh. That was the key break in getting those guys. KSM slipped away; in June of 2002, the Emir of Qatar passed along information to the CIA as to something that an Al Jazeera reporter had discovered as to the safehouse where KSM and bin al Shibh were hiding in Karachi slums. He passed that on to the CIA, and that was the key break. Whether Zubaydah provided some supporting information is not clear, but the key to capturing those guys was the help of the Emir.

So considering the parts of the speech we've just discussed, how do you feel about it generally now?

The president is trying to stick to message here, and it's not easy, because the facts are more complex, and in some cases contradict the claims of the U.S. government. This is the White House trying to do a bit of a recalibration as to the views and strategies in terms of interrogation and the handling of prisoners without having to admit that it made mistakes early on and maybe even learned something along the way.

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