Soufan, a long-time special agent working with the FBI, worked on some of the more notorious terrorist cases post-9/11, including the interrogation of Mohamed Al-Qahtani and Abu Zubaydah. According to Soufan, he was pulled off these interrogations when the CIA or military officials wanted to use torture on the detainees. In these cases, and it turns out others, Soufan and his colleagues were pulled out of interrogations at the behest of the Bush administration or the CIA.

Just past noon on July 31, 2002, Jennifer Koester sent Patrick Philbin an email alerting him that the White House wanted them to finish the memos authorizing Abu Zubaydah’s torture by close of business the next day. Those memos would either retroactively or prospectively authorize Abu Zubaydah to be exposed to the same kind of treatment Ibn Sheikh al-Libi had undergone five months earlier.

If Soufan’s claims are correct, then it shows that the FBI repeatedly got intelligence the CIA was unable to get–and that the CIA, on at least two occasions, shut down the FBI access when they were succeeding.

As the torture apologists tee up for another attempt at justifying torture by claiming it worked, it’s worth remembering that just after the CIA finished waterboarding KSM, they wrote a report acknowledging that he had been lying to them.

The death of former CIA “ghost prisoner” Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, aka Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, is beginning to make some serious waves in the press. The story was initially broken in the U.S. on May 10 by Andy Worthington. Now Newsweek is reporting (H/T, again, the redoubtable Mr. Worthington) that al-Libi was “healthy and had no apparent physical ailments” when Human Rights Watch (HRW) visitors met him on April 27, only days