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Padilla, however, was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002, more than two months before the issuance of the Justice Department's Aug. 1, 2002, memo authorizing the use of harsh methods in interrogating Abu Zubaida. "The dates just don't add up," wrote Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent, in an opinion piece in the New York Times last week. Soufan, who questioned Abu Zubaida between his capture in March 2002 and early June of that year, said the detainee gave up Padilla without any physical or psychological duress. He also said Abu Zubaida identified Mohammed as the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks "under traditional interrogation methods."

Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was sentenced in January 2008 to 17 years in prison after being convicted of conspiracy and providing material support for terrorism.

An attack on both coasts was conceived by Mohammed before Sept. 11, 2001, but the plot was scaled back to target only New York and Washington. Mohammed continued to consider striking the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, administration officials said. His interrogation led to information that he planned "to use East Asian operatives to crash a hijacked airliner into a building in Los Angeles," according the 2005 Justice Department memo.

It is unclear from unclassified reports whether the information gained was critical in foiling actual plots. Mohammed later told outside interviewers that he was "forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop" and that he "wasted a lot of their time [with] several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.," according to the Red Cross, whose officials interviewed Mohammed and other detainees after they were transferred to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006.

Mohammed continued to be a valued source of information long after the coercive interrogation ended. Indeed, he has gone on to lecture CIA agents in a classroom-like setting, on topics from Greek philosophy to the structure of al-Qaeda, and wrote essays in response to questions, according to sources familiar with his time in detention.

Counterterrorism officials also said the two men and other captured suspects provided critical information about senior al-Qaeda figures and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members, associates and financial backers. if ( show_doubleclick_ad && ( adTemplate & INLINE_ARTICLE_AD ) == INLINE_ARTICLE_AD && inlineAdGraf ) { placeAd('ARTICLE',commercialNode,20,'inline=y;',true) ; } The accumulation and triangulation of information also allowed officials to vet the intelligence they were receiving and to push other prisoners toward making full and frank statements.