Adam Goldman today reports for the Washington Post on the history of a secret U.S. torture prison in Poland. On of the people tortured there was one Abu Zubaida. Goldman writes:
Other Counterterrorism Center officials believed that Nashiri was a key al-Qaeda figure and was withholding information. After a tense meeting in December 2002, top CIA officials decided they needed to get tougher with him, two former U.S. intelligence officials recounted.
…
Zubaida also provided important information to his interrogators, officials said. He identified people in photographs and provided what one official called “hundreds of data points.”Officials said Zubaida said was even willing to help get new detainees to talk.
But back in 2009 Peter Finn and Joby Warrick reported, astonishingly also in the Washington Post, that Zubaida was of no value at all:
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.
The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
What is it then? Should we trust the reporting of the Washington Post or the reporting of the Washington Post?