Torture failed on September 11 mastermind

NEW YORK - The story of a CIA agent who got the alleged planner of the Sept 11, 2001 terror attacks across the United States to talk sheds new light on interrogation techniques, according to a dispatch in Sunday's New York Times.

Citing unnamed sources, the newspaper said suspected chief planner Khalid Shaikh Muhammad did not reveal much useful information about Al-Qaeda under torture, until soft-spoken CIA agent Deuce Martinez befriended him and used the relationship to get him to talk.

The newspaper identified Martinez as a second-generation CIA agent who began his career tracking narcotics traffickers by analysing data records, someone who had no experience in interrogation techniques and spoke no Arabic. But his success with the recalcitrant Khalid Shaikh was considered amazing by his colleagues, some of whom said he reached the terrorist on a personal level. The Times said numerous interviews with unnamed intelligence sources revealed torture is not the most effective way to get information from terror suspects.

The treatment of Khalid Shaikh at the hands of US interrogators, as well as that of other suspected Al-Qaeda operatives, has opened a wide-ranging debate on the use of torture as a tool for dealing with terrorists. The hunt for Khalid Shaikh involved the entire American intelligence establishment, with its billion-dollar arrays of spy satellites and global eavesdropping net, The Times said in a lengthy dispatch. But his capture came down to a simple text message sent from an informant who had slipped into the bathroom of a house in Rawalpindi.