The Washington Post is fronting a story – quoting anonymous (possibly non-existent) sources that “rough” interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaida foiled no plots:

“When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

Abu Zubaida’s case presents the Obama administration with one of its most difficult decisions as it reviews the files of the 241 detainees still held in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Abu Zubaida — a nom de guerre for the man born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein — was never charged in a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, but some U.S. officials are pushing to have him charged now with conspiracy.

The Palestinian, 38 and now in captivity for more than seven years, had alleged links with Ahmed Ressam, an al-Qaeda member dubbed the “Millennium Bomber” for his plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999. Jordanian officials tied him to terrorist plots to attack a hotel and Christian holy sites in their country. And he was involved in discussions, after the Taliban government fell in Afghanistan, to strike back at the United States, including with attacks on American soil, according to law enforcement and military sources.

Others in the U.S. government, including CIA officials, fear the consequences of taking a man into court who was waterboarded on largely false assumptions, because of the prospect of interrogation methods being revealed in detail and because of the chance of an acquittal that might set a legal precedent. Instead, they would prefer to send him to Jordan.

Some U.S. officials remain steadfast in their conclusion that Abu Zubaida possessed, and gave up, plenty of useful information about al-Qaeda.

“It’s simply wrong to suggest that Abu Zubaida wasn’t intimately involved with al-Qaeda,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much about Abu Zubaida remains classified. “He was one of the terrorist organization’s key facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated, provided critical information on senior al-Qaeda figures . . . and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members. How anyone can minimize that information — some of the best we had at the time on al-Qaeda — is beyond me.”

This is not only incorrect, but journalistic malfeasance.

The sources that Finn and Warrick note are not CIA, but second level State Department flunkies, which could be named but won’t be. Zubaida was in fact a high level find and did in face supply good information on Al Qaeda activities throughout the world.

Back in 2004 Delroy Murdock detailed the value.

” Pakistan’s January 2002 surrender of Libyan al-Qaeda leader Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi to the CIA revealed a plot to bomb America’s embassy in Yemen. Al-Libi also ratted out Abu Zubaida, a top September 11 conspirator.

After his March 2002 capture in Pakistan, Zubaida helped the CIA find al Qaeda leaders Ramzi bin-al-Shibh in Pakistan, Amar al-Faruq in Indonesia, Rahim al-Nashiri in Kuwait, and Muhammad al Darbi in Yemen. The Washington Post’s Dana Priest reports that Zubaida had been shot in the groin as he was arrested; the CIA selectively offered him painkillers until his cooperation improved.

Bin-al-Shibh, in turn, squealed on Khalid Sheik Mohammed. The Justice Department calls him al Qaeda’s “lead operational planner and organizer.” The March 24, 2003, Time explained that Mohammed had “given U.S. interrogators the names and descriptions of about a dozen key al-Qaeda operatives believed to be plotting terrorist attacks on America and other western countries.”

Mohammed and Zubaida reportedly informed on Jose Padilla/Abdullah al Muhajir, the Brooklyn-born Muslim convert better known as “the dirty bomber.” Beyond his dreams of triggering a radioactive blast on American soil, Justice says Padilla also spent time in al Qaeda camps “learning how to prepare and seal an apartment in order to obtain the highest explosive yield” after filling it with natural gas and a detonator.

Mohammed reportedly endured “water boarding,” a CIA technique in which he was tied to a plank and dunked in a mock-drowning exercise. Pretty? No, but a blazing apartment building with tenants leaping from windows in their pajamas is not especially elegant, either.

A Guantanamo interrogator named “Tom” told CBS’s 60 Minutes II that al-Qaeda prisoners there have offered “keys to the network, how it works, who was involved, how it fundraises, how it recruits, how it travels. Ongoing operations, imminent attacks on a number of occasions.”

Facts as they are.

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