Ex-Official Testifies About Efforts to Halt Harsh Tactics

Partisan Attacks Pepper Senate Hearing

By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 14, 2009

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 in 2003 . He said administration officials tried to destroy the memo, which is still classified, in early 2006.

That experience, Zelikow said, "told me that the lawyers involved in that opinion did not welcome peer review and indeed would shut down challenges even inside the government. If I was right, their whole interpretation . . . was unsound."

(More here.)