Mat
18:34 KJV And
his lord was wroth, and delivered him to the tormentors, till he should pay all
that was due unto him.
The
Truth About Interrogation | The Weekly Standard http://tws.io/1EEMDH1
The enhanced techniques work.
"The Central Intelligence Agency
repeatedly tortured suspected terrorists, regularly lied about it to Congress
and the White House, and, for all the pain and trouble this caused the agency
and the United States, didn’t end up extracting a single piece of valuable
information not readily available by other means." - Michael Hayden meets
the press, January 2009.
That, at least, is the conclusion of the
forthcoming Feinstein report, a long and, in certain quarters, much-anticipated
review of the CIA’s detainee and interrogation programs during the Bush
administration. A steady stream of leaks in news stories over several months
has provided the public a preview of its contents.
The goal of those leaks, and the report itself,
is not hard to discern: to ensure that the coming debate over enhanced
interrogation isn’t so much a debate but a public condemnation of those who
conceived and participated in the program.
There are certainly parts of the program that
deserve criticism. There were major problems with the way it was conceived,
approved, and carried out. There were troubling abuses in the early years, and
later some misleading briefings about the enhanced interrogation techniques
used. There were conflicts of interest and questionable accounting practices.
Some of the public claims about the intelligence derived from enhanced
techniques were clearly exaggerated, and at least one of those claims was
patently false.
Such matters should be subject to tough,
dispassionate, fact-based investigation. Actual failings should be condemned by
both Republicans and Democrats, by supporters of the program as well as
opponents.
That’s not what happened here.
Instead, the report was produced by the
Democratic staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by
Dianne Feinstein. Republicans declined to participate.
Feinstein required former CIA directors and
deputy directors to sign nondisclosure agreements in order even to see the
accusations made against them. Despite the fact that virtually all of the
500-plus-page report has been declassified for release, the Feinstein committee
also imposed, as a condition of access to the report, severe restrictions on
what those officials may say in their own defense. Michael Hayden, former
director of the CIA, told The Weekly Standard: “Based on the nondisclosure
agreement I signed, I cannot talk to you about the details of the Feinstein
report, the Republican rebuttal, or the agency response—all as a condition of
my being able to see it.”
In the clearest evidence that the committee was
interested in blame rather than truth, the staffers did not seek to interview
those involved in the interrogations.
Now, for the first time, one of the lead
interrogators is attempting to tell the other side of the story. Writing under
the pseudonym Jason Beale, he has produced a provocative 39-page document in an
effort to counter the narrative pushed by Democrats and amplified by
journalists eager to discredit the program. The document—which Beale says was reviewed,
redacted, and cleared by a U.S. government agency—does not reveal Beale’s
precise role in the program. A spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency
would not confirm that the CIA was the agency that reviewed Beale’s document.
And in an email interview, Beale refused even to acknowledge that he conducted
interrogations in the CIA program. “The opinions I expressed on interrogations
in the document I sent you,” he wrote, “are representative of the insight I’ve
gained during my career as an interrogator. While I am aware that you and
others may draw some inference from the approved portion of the text as to the
basis of my arguments regarding enhanced techniques, I am not presently in a
position to elaborate on how I formed those opinions.”
Sources familiar with the program independently
confirm that Beale served as a senior interrogator beginning in 2004.
Beale’s document covers many aspects of the
debate over enhanced interrogation—the morality of enhanced interrogation
techniques, the use of EITs on U.S. servicemen and women during their survival
training, the hypocrisy of public officials who approved the program and later
pretended that they opposed it, the unearned authority of several top critics
of the program, and, most important, the effectiveness of the techniques.
page 2
News accounts of the forthcoming Feinstein
report make clear that a central claim of that narrative will be its most
contentious: The techniques didn’t work. Beale challenges that contention on
the basis of his experience in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape (SERE) course taken by intelligence and military
personnel exposed to a high risk of capture. Tens of thousands of Americans
have been subjected to EITs as part of their SERE training. Beale participated
in the course first as a student, then as an interrogator.
As a student, I learned that I could resist,
and occasionally manipulate, a talented interrogator during my numerous
“soft-sell” interrogations—the rapport-building, we-know-all, pride-and-ego
up/down, do-the-right-thing approaches. I had my story relatively straight, and
I simply stuck to it, regardless of how ridiculous or implausible the
interrogator made it sound. He wasn’t doing anything to me—there was no
consequence to my lies, no matter how transparent.
I then learned the difference between
“soft-sell” and “hard-sell” by way of a large interrogator who applied enhanced
techniques promptly upon the uttering of my first lie. I learned that it was
infinitely more difficult for me to remember my lies and keep my story straight
under pressure. I learned that it became difficult to repeat a lie if I
received immediate and uncomfortable consequences for each iteration. It made
me have to make snap decisions under intense pressure in real time—and fumble
and stumble through rapid-fire follow-up questions designed to poke massive
holes in my story.
I learned that I needed to practically live my
lie if I were to be questioned under duress, as the unrehearsed details are the
wild-cards that bite you in the ass. I learned that I would rather sit across
from the most talented interrogator on earth doing a soft-sell than any
interrogator on earth doing a hard-sell—the information I had would be safer
because the only consequences to my lies come in the form of words. I could
handle words. Anyone could.
Ask any SERE Level C graduate which method was
more effective on him or her—their answer should tell you something about the
effectiveness of enhanced techniques, whether you agree with them or not. In my
case, I learned that enhanced techniques made me want to tell the truth to make
it stop—not to compound my situation with more lies. The only thing that kept
me from telling the truth was the knowledge that at some point it had to
end—that there were more students to interrogate and only so many hours in a
day. Absent that knowledge, I would have caved.
As a TDY [temporary duty] interrogator in the
SERE course, I learned that the toughest, meanest, most professional special
operations soldiers on earth had a breaking point. Every one of them. And of
all the soldiers I interrogated, all of the “breaks” came during hard-sell
interrogations—using as many enhanced techniques as necessary to convince the
soldier that continuing to lie would result in immediate consequences. It
worked—time and again, it worked.
The techniques were effective, Beale claims,
not only with U.S. soldiers being prepared for what they might encounter if
captured by an enemy, but also with senior al Qaeda prisoners. Defenders of
EITs point to the extraction of important information on al Qaeda’s couriers to
make their case. The information on one courier in particular—Abu Ahmed
al-Kuwaiti—led to the location of Osama bin Laden’s safe house in Abbottabad,
Pakistan.
In a heavily redacted section of his document,
Beale writes that the EITs were essential to obtaining that information. Others
have reported that two high-value detainees subject to enhanced
interrogation—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi—went to great lengths
to conceal information about the courier. That they did so after providing a
steady stream of accurate and valuable information suggested to interrogators
and analysts that the information about al-Kuwaiti was important. Beale writes:
That high-level detainee would no more have
voluntarily sat down across from a debriefer and provided his list of Al Qaeda
couriers without having been conditioned to do so than he would have walked ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
and asked to speak to the CIA debriefer. It simply would not have happened
without incentive, and his incentive was to not go back to enhanced techniques.
Period. Love it or hate it, that’s the way it worked.
page 3
Beale believes that Barack Obama and others
briefed on the use of EITs understand that they worked. In support of this
view, he notes a subtle but telling change in Obama’s language:
Go back and take a look at the difference
between Candidate Obama’s characterization of the efficacy of the interrogation
program versus President Obama’s version. Candidate Obama repeatedly stated
that enhanced interrogation was not only immoral and un-American, but it didn’t
work. People will say anything to make it stop. Every leading interrogator and
intelligence professional will tell you that “torture” never works—it produces
bad intelligence. That was Candidate Obama.
President Obama told a slightly different
story. During his [100th]-day press conference in April 2009, President Obama
used an entirely different construct when responding to a question about shutting
down the interrogation program: “I am absolutely convinced it was the right
thing to do—not because there might not have been information that was yielded
by these various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but because we
could have gotten this information in other ways, in ways that were consistent
with our values, in ways that were consistent with who we are.”
He went on to say, “But here’s what I can tell
you—that the public reports and the public justifications for these
techniques—which is that we got information from these individuals that were
subjected to these techniques—doesn’t answer the core question, which is: Could
we have gotten that same information without resorting to these techniques? And
it doesn’t answer the broader question: Are we safer as a consequence of having
used these techniques?”
Finally, this: “And so I will do whatever is
required to keep the American people safe, but I am absolutely convinced that
the best way I can do that is to make sure that we are not taking shortcuts
that undermine who we are.”
Note the difference—it’s important. After being
briefed by serious people using actual intelligence information gained from the
EIT interrogation program, President Obama knew that he could not continue with
the “it never works” campaign rhetoric as President—to do so would have been
insulting and objectionable to the national security team who briefed him, and
would be a lie. So . . . “we don’t
know if we could have collected the same information using standard techniques”
became the talking point for every administration official on the subject of
EITs.
I know. I know that we couldn’t have collected
the same information using standard techniques because I was an expert in using
standard techniques—I used them thousands of times over two decades—and the
notion that I could have convinced the detainees ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ to
provide closely-held information (or any information at all) without the use of
EITs is laughable. There is zero chance. Zero.
In an interview, I pointed out that much of the
coming debate will be about the effectiveness of the techniques and asked Beale
directly: Were they effective? He made a simple point that he hadn’t made in
his document. He noted that those subject to enhanced interrogation haven’t
boasted about their ability to withstand the techniques and to withhold
valuable information.
That is probably a question best asked of the
former detainees—did Abu Zubaydah, Abu Faraj al-Libi, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
Ramsi bin al-Shib, Hambali, Nashiri, or any of their brethren give up protected
information during their time in the custody of CIA? If they didn’t they should
be proud of their ability to withstand such torturous tactics—I would think
they would mock the feeble and misguided efforts of the CIA interrogators to
get them to talk, or to make a mistake, rather than claim that such treatment
made them say things they later regret. That’s the point of enhanced
interrogation—at least from my perspective as a former TDY SERE
interrogator—you hope that they say things they will later regret.
Beale wrote his document “to remind the
American public that there are two sides to every story” and to make clear
“that the upcoming [Senate] report should be read with an understanding that
the outcome was predetermined by the political and ideological leanings of the
majority, which produced the report.”
He is concerned that the documentation included
in the summary report was selected to make the argument that Senate Democrats
wanted to make and that information complicating that narrative was
deliberately excluded.
“I believe an objective reading of the
documents would show that the program was effective,” he wrote, “and I would
urge the declassification and release of the entire report and all associated
documents so that the American people can make their own decision.”
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly
Standard.
[Ed. Note: You can read the document here.]
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