Jane Mayer: CIA interrogators waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 183 times over 5 day period of time

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/06/cia-interrogations-disclosure.html

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A person speaking on behalf of Mitchell and Jessen, who asked to remain anonymous, said, in their defense, that everything they did was authorized all the way up the chain of command to the director of Central Intelligence at the time, George Tenet. (In his 2007 book, “At the Center of The Storm,” Tenet wrote, “C.I.A. officers came up with a series of interrogation techniques that would be carefully monitored at all times to ensure the safety of the prisoner. The administration and the Department of Justice were fully briefed and approved the use of these tactics.” A call to Tenet’s spokesman has not yet been returned.) The person also said (as the New York Times has reported) that interrogators received orders from top C.I.A. officials to waterboard Abu Zubaydah even longer, but the interrogators refused to do so. These officials, the source said, wanted to continue waterboarding Zubaydah for thirty days. But after five days, during which he was waterboarded at least a hundred and eighty-three times, the interrogators believed he had divulged all he knew and refused to push him further. According to the source, the interrogators were told that it was “an order” to keep going. The top officials relented only after the interrogators prepared a videotape of Zubaydah undergoing the brutal treatment and showed it during a video conference with the top officials in Washington. Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said he couldn’t confirm the account.

Lawyers at the C.I.A. later authorized the agency to destroy ninety-two videotapes of detainee interrogations, almost all of them of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, which had been sought by a federal judge and the 9/11 Commission. A special prosecutor is currently leading a criminal investigation into the destruction of these videotapes.