Brain Ross, of ABC News, interviewed retired CIA agent John Kiriakou about the capture and interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. Kiriakou has many interesting things to say. He tells Ross that Zubaydah was waterboarded, that he lasted all of 35 seconds (more than three times as long as the CIA interrogators did in training) and immediately cooperated the next day. The former agent leaves no doubt that the “enhanced technique” works.But something else Kiriakou said struck me. The interview starts off with Kiriakou describing the situation of Zubaydah’s capture and immediately after. He tells Ross that al Qaeda was very much surprised by the United States actions after September 11^th.

Kiriakou: [Zubaydah’s] view was that 9/11 was supposed to be a wake up call to the United States. It wasn’t supposed to be something that so shook the United States that it lead the US to attack al-Qaeda’s bases in Afghanistan. In previous attacks (the USS Cole, the US Embassy bombing in East Africa) the US Government responded with missile strikes against alleged al-Qaeda sites and they truly believed that is how we were going to respond to September 11th. They didn’t think their would be an all out attack.

Yet another reminder of why Bin Laden thought Americans were “paper tigers.” The fecklessness of the distracted Clinton administration was sending signals to our enemies.