Many of those talking points have been cited publicly in recent years by senior government officials, starting with President Bush when he disclosed the CIA's secret prison system in September 2006.
At the time, Bush said that "alternative" interrogation methods had been crucial to getting Al Qaeda operatives, including Abu Zubaydah and self-professed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, to talk.
"I cannot describe the specific methods used," Bush said. "But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary."
By then, Bush administration officials had become concerned with a shifting legal landscape. Congress had passed new laws on the treatment of detainees, and the Supreme Court issued a ruling that undercut the administration's claim that detained terrorism suspects were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.
But officials said that the first high-level concern about the direction of the CIA's interrogation program had come in 2003, when then-CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson began distributing draft copies of his report on the program across the executive branch.
The document triggered alarms about waterboarding, documenting that it had been employed far more frequently -- including 263 times against two Al Qaeda suspects -- than had been widely believed.
The report also faulted how agency operatives applied the method, dumping large quantities of water on prisoners' faces, apparently violating the agency manual and its agreements with the Justice Department. Nervous about the report's implications, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet suspended the use of waterboarding in 2003.
The document also was critical of other approaches, including sleep deprivation. But for all of its criticism of the program, the 200-plus-page document also included passages that have been cited by some as evidence that the interrogation operation was effective.
A May 2005 Justice Department memo noted that the inspector general's report described an "increase in intelligence reports attributable to the use of enhanced techniques."
A U.S. intelligence official familiar with its contents confirmed that the inspector general's report contains language that is consistent with the assertions by former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and others that the interrogation program accounted for more than half of the intelligence community's reports on Al Qaeda.
