CIA, FBI battle over questioning of Zubaydah

I only just stumbled on this article in "Radar" by Charles Kaiser. Essentially he describes the ABC news story by Brian Ross on the effectiveness of waterboarding Zubaydah as a single-source crock, presenting the views of ex-CIA man John Kiriakou who wasn't even a witness to the events.

Kaiser refers back to the Story published in Vanity Fair last July by Katherine Eban which rather fully described the capture and questioning of Zubaydah, and points out that it contradicts Brian Ross' story on ABC at every turn. But for some odd reason, the ABC story never mentions the prior Vanity Fair story.

From Charles Kaiser at RADAR:

It turns out that ABC's amiable source is at the center of an all-out war between the CIA and the FBI over which agency actually got the terrorist Abu Zubaydah to talk—and whether or not any of the CIA's coercive techniques were useful, or totally counterproductive. But Brian Ross never mentioned that. Here are some of the discrepancies between the ABC and the Vanity Fair versions:

• The FBI says that after Zubaydah was shot during the effort to capture him, he was stabilized at the nearest hospital. There, the FBI questioned him, using its typical rapport-building techniques. An FBI agent showed him photographs of suspected al Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then laid out the details of the plot. According to Eban, "America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely"—exactly the opposite of what ABC reported.


• ABC's CIA man says he was the first person to speak to Zubaydah when he came out of his coma, and he learned nothing useful from him before he was waterboarded. The FBI says no CIA man was present when Zubaydah first started to talk.


• Vanity Fair says Zubaydah's cooperation actually evaporated "with the arrival of the CIA's interrogation team."


• According to Eban, after Zubaydah clammed up, the CIA was left to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence.

Kaiser also points to the Washington Post article by Walther Pincus and Dan Eggen that lays out the facts of the capture and interrogation of Zubaydah.

It looks like the real story is that ABC and Brian Ross either screwed up badly, or were used by the CIA in a public disagreement with the FBI, or ABC and Brian Ross have other reasons to publish pure disinformation as fact. The ABC report reports as fact things that no one else does, and they do not appear to have any confirmation.

Of course, the CIA kept videotapes of the entire interrogation, so we can learn which it the truth very easily. Except, of course, the CIA and much of the Bush administration concealed those tapes until they convinced someone in the CIA to destroy them. But now, even if someone who is aware of what was on those tapes tells his story, it is still just "he said; he said" with no likely confirmation possible.

Can you spell "Obstruction of Justice?"