By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Interesting week: An ex-CIA guy, virtually sobbing that torture is not us — “we’re Americans, and we’re better than this” — claims that water boarding nevertheless broke top al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah in “less than 35 seconds.”

Across town, a tough Army general was expressing admiration for a Saudi program that gives its jihadis a get-out-of-jail free card if they promise never to do it again.

But the big show was former CIA man John Kiriakou, whose message was: torture works.

“From that day on, he answered every question,” Kiriakou said of Abu Zubaydah, captured in 2003. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

“Maybe” is the key word here.

Kiriakou was a Pakistan-based CIA operative who neither witnessed Zubaydah’s interrogation or could have known first-hand how its results were used, unless the agency suddenly violated all its rules for compartmentalizing information.

In any event, Zubaydah’s value had been debunked years ago, even as he was choking on the water forced down his throat in a back room of a Pakistani hospital, according to Dan Coleman, the FBI’s top al Qaeda analyst at the time.

“This guy is insane, certifiable, (a) split personality,” Coleman was telling his bosses in Washington while Zubaydah was being interrogated, as reporter Ron Susskind told it in his much heralded 2005 book, “The One Percent Solution.”

Coleman, now retired, confirmed the same to me last year.

“They got nothing useful from the guy,” he said.

Far from being a top al Qaeda operative, Coleman and other sources said, Zubaydah was more like Osama bin Laden’s go-fer, somebody who booked flights and took grocery deliveries.

Last week, the White House was still insisting he was a player.

Was the timing of ABC’s exclusive (quickly matched by The Washington Post) fishy, or is it just me?

Was it just a coincidence that Kiriakou popped up to justify torture with a soft-sell just as news broke that the CIA had destroyed videotapes of Zubaydah’s interrogation?

I asked the CIA whether Kiriakou had been cleared to discuss such classified information, but didn’t get an answer.

Predictably, hardliners jumped on Kiriakou’s dewey-eyed tale to assert, once again, that torture works in real life like it does on “24,” despite all evidence to the contrary.

(Question to torture-boosters: How come Jack Bauer never gives in when he is being knifed, pummeled, burned, water-boarded and shot — only the bad guys he puts on the hot seat?)

Promises, Promises

As the Kiriakou mishegas unfolded, one of America’s real-life tough guys was extolling the value of talk over torture at a lunchtime seminar at a downtown think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Former Army Gen. Dell Dailey, the State Department’s new counterterrorism coordinator, spent more than 36 years on active duty, most of it wearing a beret. At the pinnacle of his career, he ran the Joint Special Operations Command, lording over the “black” military missions of the Navy Seals, Army Rangers and Delta Force.

No softie, he. But either the State Department’s water coolers are dispensing Ecstasy or Dailey is seriously out of step with macho White House pronouncements about working “the dark side” in the war on terror.

Dailey declared that “our most important task in the war on terrorism is not the ‘destructive’ task of eradicating enemy networks, but the ‘constructive’ task of building legitimacy, good governance, trust, rule of law and tolerance.”

Sounds suspiciously close to “nation-building.” Not long ago, the very notion convulsed administration officials in a reflux disorder.

Maybe Dailey also didn’t notice that his boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice , did a U-turn last summer away from promoting democracy in Egypt and other non-good government regimes in the Middle East.

Or maybe he just doesn’t give a damn after all his years in the trenches fighting al Qaeda and the like.

The fight against terrorism, he said, must address “the underlying conditions that terrorists exploit at the national and local levels and use to induce alienated or aggrieved populations to become sympathizers, supporters, and ultimately members of terrorist networks.”

“Incarcerating or killing terrorists will not end terrorism,” he added, sounding like he was auditioning for a job with the Democrats. “It only buys us time.”

Dailey didn’t stop there. In stark contrast to all the knuckle-cracking by Bill O’Reilly and company, Dailey plumped a Saudi program that “re-educates” holy warriors and puts them back out on the street — after they “sign a promise” not to carry out any more terrorist attacks or join any outlawed jihadi group.

“The Saudi program is about the best program in existence today . . .” the square-jawed general pronounced. “It is geared for the Saudi people, it is focused on their people and treats them as a victim, not a criminal.”

That was too much for Eli Lake, the national security correspondent for the conservative New York Sun. He told Dailey that, according to his sources, the Saudis only have to promise not to attack targets inside the kingdom. Outside, no problem.

“I can’t say specifically if in the program they are allowed to go off and do jihad in other countries,” he said.

What about the recent capture of al Qaeda documents in Iraq indicating that half its foreign operatives come from Saudi Arabia? Lake followed up.

“Let’s let somebody else ask a question,” he said, moving along.

He better not run for president. No doubt some nasty rival would run a campaign commercial showing a Saudi terrorist going in and out of jail through a revolving door, Willie-Horton style.

But all this — torture, re-education, nation-building, etc — is beside the point, fog obscuring the stark fact of jihad’s allure for thousands of Muslim youth around the world: Iraq.

Iraq is the recruiting poster for al Qaeda. It’s not our way of life or religions or anything else. It’s our support for corrupt and repressive governments, and the war in Iraq.

Everybody knows this, but nobody in the Bush administration can say it.

Dailey never mentioned the war in his prepared remarks, which touched on building stronger liaison relationships with foreign governments, so I asked him about it.

I told him I’d been in Italy a few weeks ago and had lengthy conversations with top counterterrorism officials, who told me they had wiped out al Qaeda’s first generation. Now they faced another one, Arab and even European youths signing up to go kill Americans in Iraq, then coming back seasoned.

Did he hear anything about this in his discussions with foreign counterparts, I asked Dailey?

He nodded, looking slightly pained.

“Iraq is certainly a factor, he allowed. “They are all aware of it.”

What’s the bottom line? I asked Dailey. “Are we winning the ‘war on terror’?”

The general allowed a half-smile.

“How many times did I use it today?” he asked, meaning the much mocked phrase. His audience of insiders chuckled. (Do we declare war on murder?)

He himself never spoke of “the war on terror” with “international audiences,” Dailey said.

No, the war on terror is just for domestic consumption

Just like the efficacy of torture, it’s just for the rubes back home.

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

Radical: Legislation to create a “National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” (HR 1955) died a quiet death in the Senate last week. Much maligned here as a $22 million boondoggle, the idea to create yet another government entity to study an overblown threat already addressed by the $44 billion-a-year U.S. intelligence community, not to mention countless think tanks and authors, was the brainchild of Rep. Jane Harman , D-Calif. A few years ago local police and the FBI broke up a prison-based plot to bomb synagogues in the name of jihad in her district. Sen. Susan Collins , R-Maine, introduced a companion measure, but it was doomed by a lack of specificity on who the commission’s targets were, among other problems.

TV Spies: If you can tear yourself away from “24” reruns for a moment, you’ll find some tasty intrigue from real life on PBS.

“Missing in MiG Alley,” which first airs on Tues. Dec. 18, recounts the epic battles that unfolded in the skies over North Korea as American and Russian pilots faced off in history’s first jet war. “The files are still open on over two dozen Sabre pilots who were shot down behind enemy lines and whose fate has never been definitively established,” the PBS program guide says. “Years after the Korean War ended in 1953, rumors persist of pilots held captive by the Soviets.”

Soviet pilots also tell PBS how they had to keep kept their participation in the war secret for decades.

“Neither before nor after the war were we allowed to reveal that we were going to fly for the North Koreans,” MiG pilot Sergei Kramarenko tells NOVA. “Kramarenko was one of the top Soviet aces of the war. In addition to helping their North Korean allies, the Soviets were eager to test their planes and pilots against the U.S. Air Force as a proving ground for a possible World War III.”

In January comes “Astrospies”, which reveals the top-secret space race between American and the Soviets to control the orbits around Earth.

“Millions remember the countdowns, launchings, splashdowns, and parades as the U.S. raced the USSR to the moon in the 1960s,” PBS says. “But few know that both countries also ran parallel space programs, whose covert goal was to launch military astronauts on spying missions. Coproduced by the Washington, D.C.-based investigative journalist James Bamford, author of such best-selling books on the NSA as “The Puzzle Palace,” “Astrospies” describes the Air Force-run program known by its cover name, the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL. “The public was informed only that the project involved placing military astronauts in space to conduct scientific research. But in reality, as the MOL pilots themselves tell NOVA, their actual mission was far different — although even they were kept in the dark at first.”

The Soviets figured out what we were doing and designed a similar manned spy station called Almaz, the program recounts, which included “a cannon designed to destroy hostile satellites — or attack American astrospies.”

It seems almost quaint now that the astrospies and hundreds of others associated with the program kept their mouths shut about it for a half century.

“We did have a joke in the program,” reminisces one of the pilots, Richard Truly, “that one day there was going to be a little article back on page 50 of a newspaper that said, ‘an unidentified spacecraft was launched from an unidentified launch pad with unidentified astronauts to do an unidentified mission.’ That’s the way it was.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.