In an eye-opening interview with a former top FBI terrorism investigator, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff provides startling insight into why UC Berkeley prof John Yoo and other Bush officials were so incredibly wrong about torture. In early 2002, Ali Soufan was the United States’ lead interrogator of Abu Zubaydah, the first high-ranking Al Qaeda operative captured after 9/11. Zubaydah was seriously injured during his arrest, so Soufan and his partner nursed him slowly back to health. Using the traditional FBI interrogation technique of rapport-building, Soufan, who speaks fluent Arabic and is an expert on the Koran, convinced Zubaydah to identify the planner of the 9/11 attacks and give up other crucial details about Al Qaeda. But then a CIA contractor showed up and took over the interrogation, and began torturing Zubaydah, in apparent belief that that was the only way the prisoner would tell all he knew. Soufan was horrified: “I swear to God,” he shouted to his FBI superiors in Washington D.C. after learning some of what the CIA contractor had in mind. “I’m going to arrest these guys!”
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