Waterboarding Necessary !

In the first public comment by any CIA officer involved in handling high-value al Qaeda targets, John Kiriakou, now retired, said the technique broke Zubaydah in less than 35 seconds.

The next day, he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate," said Kiriakou in an interview to be broadcast tonight on ABC News´ "World News With Charles Gibson" and "Nightline."

Kiriakou said the feeling in the months after the 9/11 attacks was that interrogators did not have the time to delve into the agency´s bag of other interrogation tricks.

"Those tricks of the trade require a great deal of time -- much of the time -- and we didn´t have that luxury. We were afraid that there was another major attack coming," he said.

Now retired, Kiriakou, who declined to use the enhanced interrogation techniques, says he has come to believe that water boarding is torture but that perhaps the circumstances warranted it.

"Like a lot of Americans, I´m involved in this internal, intellectual battle with myself weighing the idea that waterboarding may be torture versus the quality of information that we often get after using the waterboarding technique," Kiriakou told ABC News. "And I struggle with it."

But he says the urgency in the wake of 9/ll led to a desire to do everything possible to get actionable intelligence.

And, in the case of Abu Zubayda, it ended with waterboarding.

"What happens if we don´t waterboard a person, and we don´t get that nugget of information, and there´s an attack," Kiriakou said. "I would have trouble forgiving myself."

"It wasn´t up to individual interrogators to decide, ´Well, I´m gonna slap him.´ Or, ´I´m going to shake him.´ Or, ´I´m gonna make him stay up for 48 hours.´

"Each one of these steps, even though they´re minor steps, like the intention shake, or the open-handed belly slap, each one of these had to have the approval of the deputy director for operations," Kiriakou told ABC News.

And it was always a last resort.

"That´s why so few people were waterboarded. I think the agency has said that two people were waterboarded, Abu Zubaydah being one, and it´s because you really wanted it to be a last resort because we didn´t want these false confessions. We didn´t want wild goose chases," Kiriakou said.

And they were faced with men like Abu Zubaydah, Kiriakou says, who held critical and timely intelligence.

In that context, at that time, Kiriakou says he felt waterboarding was something the United States needed to do.

"At the time, I felt that waterboarding was something that we needed to do. And as time has passed, and as September 11th has, you know, has moved farther and farther back into history, I think I´ve changed my mind," he told ABC News.

"I think we´re chasing them all over the world. I think we´ve had a great deal of success chasing them...and, as a result, waterboarding, at least right now, is unnecessary," Kirikou said.

Brian Ross: "Did it compromise American principles? Or did it save American lives? Or both?"

John Kiriakou: "I think both. It may have compromised our principles at least in the short term. And I think it´s good that we´re having a national debate about this. We should be debating this, and Congress should be talking about it because, I think, as a country, we have to decide if this is something that we want to do as a matter of policy. I´m not saying now that we should, but, at the very least, we should be talking about it. It shouldn´t be secret. It should be out there as part of the national debate."