“HOTEL CALIFORNIA”:

A persistent and damaging national-security myth is that in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks a dispute developed between the FBI and the CIA over the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The intelligence agency was uniformly in favor, or so the story went, and the FBI was strongly opposed. What should have been a simple question about efficacy (what is the fastest and best way to gain reliable information from terrorists?) was transformed into a highly charged debate in which facts were discarded and emotions ran high.

In “The Interrogator: An Education,” Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who retired in 2007, confirms what I knew from my own experience as an FBI agent at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and at so-called black sites: It would be a struggle to find a CIA operative who endorses the use of enhanced-interrogation techniques. The agency’s supporters of such measures were predominately political appointees and desk officials, not professional field operatives. Anyone with actual interrogation experience knows that rapport-building techniques, which use knowledge to outwit detainees and gain cooperation, produce better intelligence than enhanced interrogation.

more, including explanation of the perverse irony and machismo behind this post’s title

Via Mark Shea.