Other current and former U.S. intelligence officials told me that it was almost a certainty that al-Baluchi was at the very least threatened with torture when he was in a Pakistani jail.
“If this was someone first picked up by a liaison service, I don’t know if we would always have much insight into how they were treated or more importantly, how they might have expected to be treated,” said Michael Hayden, the CIA director at the end of the George W. Bush presidency who has taken to the news media this week to defend the CIA’s interrogations.
Al-Baluchi is not the only high-value detainee who gave up valuable information to foreign intelligence services before being sent to a CIA black site, according to the Senate report. Others include Majid Khan and Hassan Ghul, who were held by the Pakistanis. In both cases, the Senate report says or implies that they were questioned in a non-coercive manner, usually through interrogators pointing out inconsistencies in the suspect’s initial story or attempting to befriend the detainee and earn his trust. And both Khan and Ghul opened up in response to this non-coercive interrogation, according to the report.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member