Given the CIA’s long distinguished history of bungling and incompetence with regard to intelligence gathering generally, I suppose it should come as no surprise that the CIA doesn’t know what it’s doing with regard to interrogation either:
Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy. In short, despite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA’s interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark—
in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.Those with intimate knowledge of the program say that in many cases, U.S. interrogators haven’t even been able to learn the basics about many of those they hold or have held, to say nothing of whatever crucial information they possess.
Interestingly, one place that the CIA didn’t look for help was the place where interrogations have been performed, lawfully, for decades: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. “In terms of actual interrogations, when you have a suspect in custody, the FBI does that hundreds of times a day, 365 days a year, for 90 years,” said Mike Rolince, who spent over three years as Special Agent in Charge of counterterrorism at the FBI’s Washington field office before retiring in October 2005. “The FBI brought serious credibility and a track record to the table. That said, the U.S. government decided to go about [interrogations] in a different way. The results speak for themselves. I don’t think we need to be where we are.”
FBI agents familiar with the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah have claimed that the waterboarding was worthless—and that the only valuable information from Abu Zubaydah came from documents captured from him. “He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn’t believe him,” FBI agent Dan Coleman told The Washington Post. “The problem is they didn’t realize he didn’t know all that much.”
More. (HT: Megan McArdle)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In