US: Two senior al-Qaeda figures held in secret CIA prisons have been subjected to such excessively harsh questioning that their testimony is unreliable, according to internal CIA inspectors cited in the New York Times.
The paper says the Bush administration changed its mind about charging Jose Padilla with plotting a radioactive "dirty bomb" attack on America and planning to blow up apartment buildings because it was unwilling to allow testimony from the two al-Qaeda figures, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah.
US officials believe Mr Mohammed was the mastermind behind the September 11th, 2001, attacks and that Mr Zubaydah was a senior al-Qaeda recruiter. They are among about 30 detainees US media reports say the CIA is holding in secret prisons outside the US.
Last year, the CIA inspector general found that Mr Mohammed had been subjected to too much use of a technique involving near drowning, and the New York Times quotes another intelligence assessment of information gained from him as "precious truths, surrounded by a bodyguard of lies".
Mr Padilla has been detained in military custody without charge for three years, during which the Bush administration stressed his alleged role in a "dirty bomb" plot and a plan to blow up apartment buildings with natural gas. There was no mention of those plots, however, in his criminal indictment this week on lesser charges of conspiracy to support violent jihad.
Officials told the New York Times that the authorities feared that evidence from Mr Moham- med and Mr Zubaydah might be inadmissible because it was obtained as a result of torture and could expose classified information about the CIA's secret prisons. They said that part of the government's case against Mr Padilla hinged on incriminating statements he made after he was in military custody and denied access to a lawyer.
The administration claimed that Mr Padilla worked on the bomb plot with Binyan Mohammed, who was captured in Pakistan in 2002. But Mr Mohammed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, says his client was taken to Morocco and forced to sign a confession.
"They took him to Morocco to be tortured. He signed a confession saying whatever they wanted to hear," he told the New York Times.