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U.S. Frustrated By Elusive Justice Served to USS Cole Plotters May 04, 2008 It's been called "the forgotten attack" but it's one of the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history. Eight years after the USS Cole was attacked by a motorboat packed with explosives, all of the six men convicted of the strike have escaped from prison, or been freed by Yemeni officials. Seventeen sailors were killed and 40 more wounded in the strike, blamed on Usama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Jamal al-Badawi, who helped organize the Cole plot, has reportedly escaped from Yemeni prisons twice. He is supposedly...

Lots of good posts lately from the authors about the interrogation of Zubaydah, the latest being Word's post on the book The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack by Ronald Kessler. To add a few more cents Tom Maguire at Just One Minute has noticed an interesting discrepancy in the tall tale coming from Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, in which he says: It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002,...

A Senate Judiciary Subcmte. looks into the legal conduct of Justice Dept. lawyers who approved harsh interrogation techniques. One of the witnesses, fmr. FBI agent Ali Soufan, interrogated Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah.

For seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned. One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah,...