"We tortured an insane man"

Harsh interrogation works -- that's the argument President Bush made on Wednesday even as he announced that al-Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah and 13 other alleged al-Qaida operatives will be transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to face trial. Acknowledging for the first time the existence of secret CIA prisons where the 14 men had been held, Bush claimed that the extreme interrogation techniques used on Zubaydah, whom he called 'a senior terrorist leader,' and others in the 'war on terror,' were justified. Bush said that Zubaydah, under the pressure of what Bush referred to as the CIA's 'alternative set of procedures,' had given up information that proved vital to the United States.

But Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind paints a more complicated picture of Zubaydah. In one of the most hotly discussed sections of his book 'The One-Percent Doctrine,' Suskind reveals that at least one top FBI analyst considered Zubaydah an 'insane, certifiable, split personality' and that he was mainly responsible only for logistics like travel arrangements. According to Suskind's reporting, the interrogation methods used on Zubaydah -- waterboarding and sleep deprivation, among others -- only yielded information about plots that did not exist.

"We tortured an insane man" | Salon News