Abu Zubaydah at least 83 Times Waterboarded During August 2002

Waterboarding, the near-drowning technique that top Obama administration officials have described as illegal torture, was used by CIA interrogators far more frequently on two key al-Qaeda prisoners than had been previously reported.

A 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum says that CIA officers used waterboarding at least 83 times during August 2002 against Abu Zubaydah, who has been described as an al-Qaeda operative.

And waterboarding was used 183 times in March 2003 against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a May 30, 2005 memo. That memo was quoting a 2004 investigation by the CIA inspector general.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou told ABC News and other news media organizations in 2007 that Zubaydah had undergone waterboarding for only 35 seconds before agreeing to tell everything he knew.

The New York Times reported in 2007 that Mohammed had been barraged more than 100 times with harsh interrogation methods, causing CIA officers to worry that they might have crossed legal limits. They stopped his questioning. But the precise number and the exact nature of the interrogation method used so many times was not previously known.

The release of the numbers is likely to become part of the debate about the morality and usefulness of interrogation methods that the Bush administration Justice Department declared legal even though the United States had historically treated them as torture.

President Barack Obama plans to visit CIA headquarters today and speak publicly to employees, as well as meeting privately with officials, an agency spokesman said Sunday night. It will be his first visit to the agency, whose use of harsh interrogation methods he often condemned during the presidential campaign and whose secret prisons he ordered closed on the second full day of his presidency.

CIA officials had opposed the release of the interrogation memos, but when Obama ordered the papers' release on Thursday, he said CIA officers who had used waterboarding and other harsh methods with the approval of the Justice Department would not be prosecuted. He has also repeatedly suggested that he opposes congressional proposals for a "truth commission" to examine Bush administration counterterrorism programs, including interrogation and warrantless eavesdropping.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said Sunday that Obama does not intend to prosecute Bush administration officials who devised the policies.

Asked Sunday on ABC's This Week about the fate of those officials, Emanuel said the president believes they "should not be prosecuted either and that's not the place that we go."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has begun a yearlong, closed-door investigation of the CIA interrogation program, in part to assess claims of Bush administration officials that brutal treatment, including slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in standing positions for days and confining them in small boxes, was necessary to get information.

The fact that waterboarding was repeated so many times might raise questions about its effectiveness, as well as assertions by Bush administration officials that their methods were used under strict guidelines.

A footnote to another 2005 Justice Department memo released Thursday said waterboarding was used both more frequently and with a greater volume of water than the CIA rules permitted.

The information came out over the weekend when a number of bloggers, including Marcy Wheeler of the blog emptywheel, discovered the numbers in the memo.

The sentences in the memo including the number of times the two men were waterboarded appeared to be blacked out from some copies but visible in others. Initial news reports about the memos did not include the numbers.

Michael Hayden, director of the CIA for the last two years of the Bush administration, would not comment when asked on Fox News on Sunday if Mohammed had been waterboarded 183 times. He said he believed that information was still classified.

A CIA spokesman, reached Sunday night, would not comment on the new information.

Hayden said he had opposed the release of the memos, even though Obama has said the techniques will never be used again, because they would tell al-Qaeda "the outer limits that any American would ever go in terms of interrogating an al-Qaeda terrorist."

He also disputed an article in The New York Times on Saturday saying that Abu Zubaydah revealed nothing new after being waterboarded, saying that he believed that after unspecified "techniques" were used, Abu Zubaydah revealed information that led to the capture of another terrorist suspect, Ramzi Binalshibh.

The Times story, based on information from former intelligence officers who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Abu Zubaydah revealed a great deal of information before harsh methods were used and after his captors stripped him of clothes, kept him in a cold cell and kept him awake at night. The article said interrogators at the secret prison in Thailand believed he had given up all the information he had, but officials at headquarters ordered them to use waterboarding.

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