Cookies, not Torture, convinced Al-Qaeda Suspect to Talk

From Time:

The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or “walling” and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.

From Raw Story:

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered — sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn’t eat sugar cookies he’d been offered.

“Soufan noticed that he didn’t touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: ‘He was a diabetic and couldn’t eat anything with sugar in it,’ Time’s Bobby Ghosh wrote. “At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal’s angry demeanor.

“We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him,” Soufan told Ghosh. “So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures.”

The seemingly absurd report calls into question the efficacy of the Bush administration’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” A 2005 memo by a Bush administration official revealed that CIA interrogators had waterboarded alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month.

Waterboarding — or partial drowning — also drew fire late last week when a conservative radio host voluntarily underwent the procedure and lasted just six seconds before calling off the procedure. He later said that he would have said anything to have gotten his handlers to stop.

Ghosh also paints Abu Jandal as having transformed almost miraculously after his interrogators showed him humanity.

Prior to the cookies incident, “Abu Jandal’s guards were so intimidated by him, they wore masks to hide their identities and begged visitors not to refer to them by name in his presence,” Ghosh writes. “He had no intention of cooperating with the Americans; at their first meetings, he refused even to look at them and ranted about the evils of the West. Far from confirming al-Qaeda’s involvement in 9/11, he insisted the attacks had been orchestrated by Israel’s Mossad.”

Afterward, the al Qaeda operative who grew up in Saudi Arabia and had been held in a Yemeni prison, offered myriad details about the terror network and its membership.

“It took more questioning, and some interrogators’ sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda — including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers — but the cookies were the turning point,” Ghosh writes.

“After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans,” Soufan said. “Now he was thinking of us as human beings.”

Soufan’s comments come on the heels of statements by a former military interrogator who said that he believed that the Bush administration’s torture policies actually cost “hundreds — if not thousands” of American lives.

“Torture does not save lives,” the interrogator, who spoke under a pseudonym, said. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”

-John Byrne