In a sharp reversal from his previous policy, President Obama now says he will seek to block the release of photographs similar to the one above that depict American military personnel abusing captives in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying he fears the images could spark a hostile backlash against U.S. troops. Details, A8

AP

WASHINGTON — A federal agent involved in the first interrogations of a top al-Qaida figure has contradicted assertions of Bush administration officials — including the former president — that harsh interrogation techniques helped to unmask Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In fact, former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Ali Soufan told senators Wednesday that Abu Zubaydah, suspected as one of the terrorist group’s key planners, fingered Mohammed during interrogations that relied on nothing more harsh than deception and psychological trickery. Soufan said his team likewise got their detainee to give up the lead that gave rise to the capture of Jose Padilla, the American-born al-Qaida operative later convicted of conspiracy to detonate a “dirty bomb” in the United States.

But when a team of contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency took over the questioning, using such tough tactics as stripping Abu Zubaydah and depriving him of sleep, the suspect immediately stopped talking, Soufan told a hearing convened by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the Rhode Island Democrat.

The Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing was the first by Congress on harsh interrogation methods since the Obama administration last month released Bush administration legal opinions authorizing them.

Whitehouse said the hearing was an effort to uncover what he variously called a “bodyguard of lies,” “meretricious” lies, and “a near avalanche of falsehood” about practices that he flatly labels as torture.

Without calling for criminal charges against any Bush administration officials, Whitehouse made a point of rebutting those who argue against prosecutions.

But Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who has condemned the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, portrayed Wednesday’s hearing as “a political stunt” aimed at tarring political foes as evil or criminal.

“Would we be having this hearing if we were under attack this afternoon?” Graham demanded.

Graham later referred to the controversy over when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, was informed in confidential CIA briefings about the interrogations. “I really don’t think she was a criminal if she was told about waterboarding and did nothing,” he said.

One expert, Jeffrey F. Addicott of St. Mary’s School of Law in San Antonio, Texas, cited cases involving soldiers in Northern Ireland and Israel to argue that even waterboarding, the worst of the harsh interrogation practices, “did not constitute torture under international law or U.S. domestic law.”

But no one at Wednesday’s hearing went as far as Vice President Dick Cheney’s assertion that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” secured valuable intelligence that prevented American deaths. Graham and other Republicans called for the release of memos that Cheney has said will substantiate that claim.

Whitehouse said, “Nothing I have seen as a member of the Intelligence Committee convinces me that this was the case.”

Soufan told Whitehouse’s subcommittee that the methods “are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and as a result, harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida.”

Soufan said the sheer number of waterboardings of Abu Zubaydah — 83 during the month of August 2002 — suggests that the technique, authorized as legal by Bush administration lawyers, was so ineffective that the CIA contractors had to keep stepping up the sessions.

But Soufan acknowledged that he and his team — who strenuously opposed the switch to harsh interrogation tactics — were not present during the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and therefore cannot say what intelligence value the Bush administration derived from the practice.

Also testifying Wednesday was Philip Zelikow, a Bush-era State Department official who opposed the use of waterboarding and other interrogation methods that have since been outlawed by President Obama. He detailed how Justice Department officials not only rejected his arguments but ordered the destruction of the memos in which he made his arguments.

David Luban of the Georgetown University Law Center said the Bush administration memos that justified the interrogation techniques “involve a selective and, in places, deeply eccentric reading of the law. The memos cherry-pick sources of law that back their conclusions and leave out sources of law that do not” — all with the apparent intent to approve “waterboarding and the other CIA techniques.”

Luban also said that one of the Bush administration lawyers, Jay S. Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, enunciated “a startlingly broad theory of executive power” that he compared to “President Nixon’s notorious statement that ‘When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.’ ” Luban suggested, however, that Nixon’s sin was more venial because the former president was “speaking off the cuff in a high-pressure interview, not a written opinion” by the Justice Department office that advises the White House on the law.

Whitehouse has said there is “a whiff of impeachability” about Bybee, who sits in the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Robert Turner, a former military lawyer who specializes in national security issues at the University of Virginia’s law school, testified in detail about why he viewed the authorization of waterboarding as “a tremendous blunder and clearly contrary to our treaty obligations.”

But Turner said the context of the Bush administration’s memoranda authorizing waterboarding — the fearful aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks — was comparable to that of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s decision, endorsed by many revered officials, to incarcerate 100,000 Japanese during World War II. “They were frightened and they desperately wanted to prevent another Pearl Harbor,” he said.

The move to harsh interrogations was “horribly wrong but I don’t think it was an evil decision,” Turner said.

Whitehouse said he plans more hearings of his investigative subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. He said he will start with an examination of how Bybee and other top federal lawyers produced the legal authority for waterboarding and the other practices, once the Justice Department completes its long-awaited internal probe of that issue.

jmulligan@belo-dc.com