A Top Interrogator Who's Against Torture

[one...two...tree 2,762]

By Bobby Ghosh / Washington D.C.

He's the special agent who came in from the cold — and waded straight into the debate over the use of harsh interrogation techniques. Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent and perhaps the most successful U.S. interrogator of al-Qaeda operatives, says the use of those techniques was unnecessary and often counterproductive. Detainees, he says, provided vital intelligence under non-violent questioning, before they were put through "walling" and waterboarding.

The crux of the argument over the CIA's techniques lies, not just in whether they constituted torture, but in whether or not they worked: did detainees like Abu Zubaydah — the first to go through the controversial coercive interrogation program — give up vital information? Defenders of the program have claimed that Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda recruiter and close associate of Osama bin Laden, did provide crucial information, including the identities of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of 9/11, and "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla. (See six ways to fix the CIA.)

In an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Soufan says Abu Zubaydah gave up the information between March and June 2002, when he was being interrogated by Soufan, another FBI agent and some CIA officers. But that was not the result of harsh techniques, including waterboarding, which were not introduced until August. "We were getting a lot of useful material from [Abu Zubaydah], and we would have continued to get material from him," Soufan told TIME. "The rough tactics were not necessary."

Amid the politically charged debate over the techniques, Soufan's criticism carries special weight because it comes from someone intimately familiar with the little-understood art of extracting information from hard-as-nails jihadists. As a supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005 — and one of the FBI's few Arabic speakers — Soufan was involved in a string of crucial investigations and interrogations, from the Millennium Bombing plot in Jordan to the U.S.S. Cole bombing in Yemen and a number of Gitmo interrogations. His greatest success was the interrogation of Abu Jandal, bin Laden's former bodyguard. After the 9/11 attacks, Soufan's interrogation of Abu Jandal yielded a rich trove of information on al-Qaeda, including the identities of some of the 9/11 attackers and the terror group's top leadership. (See pictures from inside Guantanamo Bay.)

Throughout that period, Soufan says he never felt the need for harsh interrogation methods. He argues that techniques like waterboarding don't work. "When they are in pain, people will say anything to get the pain to stop. Most of the time, they will lie, make up anything to make you stop hurting them," he says. "That means the information you're getting is useless." But his main objection to the techniques, Soufan says, is moral. To use violence against detainees, he says, "is [al-Qaeda's] way, not the American way."

Soufan says that view was shared by the CIA officials who worked with him on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and others. But then the harsh methods were introduced, he says, by CIA contractors and Soufan protested. He was backed by his bosses at the FBI and pulled out of the interrogations. This led to a rift between the Bureau and the CIA that has not fully healed. Yet Soufan says that if any CIA officials are prosecuted for the use of harsh techniques, he "will be the first person to defend them." The real blame, he says, lies with "those who told them it is legal to do such things."

Soufan has left the FBI and now runs a security consultancy. Although he rarely speaks of his past life in public, he has given testimony to several Congressional hearings on Gitmo.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,...1893679,00.html

[mendeleev 68]

Torture was wrong. Torture was ineffective. Bush and his fellow criminals could have learned it, if they had been truly interested in the safety of the nation, from our British and Israeli allies, who have learned, to their cost, the ineffectiveness of torture.

Instead, we had a war criminal for a president who has stained the good name and honor of our country.

[jundp 191]

It's amazing to me that every single person I've ever had a conversation with about this subject will say the same thing: torture is wrong and ineffective. Yet, our country still use(s)(d) it. Amazing.

Of course torture is wrong. Don't give me any BS about "why do you hate America?" "Why don't you want the bad guys stopped?" Torturing them will not reveal answers to the questions sought. It will merely cause pain. If your aim is to hurt and cause pain (in a manner, get 'revenge') then be man (or woman) enough to admit it. Don't hide behind "interrogation."

Grrr....

[I AM NOT THAT GUY 5,715]

This is torture's true purpose: to terrorize--not only the people in Guantánamo's cages and Syria's isolation cells but also, and more important, the broader community that hears about these abuses. Torture is a machine designed to break the will to resist--the individual prisoner's will and the collective will.

This is not a controversial claim. In 2001 the US NGO Physicians for Human Rights published a manual on treating torture survivors that noted: "perpetrators often attempt to justify their acts of torture and ill treatment by the need to gather information. Such conceptualizations obscure the purpose of torture....The aim of torture is to dehumanize the victim, break his/her will, and at the same time, set horrific examples for those who come in contact with the victim. In this way, torture can break or damage the will and coherence of entire communities."

Yet despite this body of knowledge, torture continues to be debated in the United States as if it were merely a morally questionable way to extract information, not an instrument of state terror. But there's a problem: No one claims that torture is an effective interrogation tool--least of all the people who practice it. Torture "doesn't work. There are better ways to deal with captives," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 16. And a recently declassified memo written by an FBI official in Guantánamo states that extreme coercion produced "nothing more than what FBI got using simple investigative techniques." The Army's own interrogation field manual states that force "can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."

And yet the abuses keep on coming--Uzbekistan as the new hot spot for renditions; the "El Salvador model" imported to Iraq. And the only sensible explanation for torture's persistent popularity comes from a most unlikely source. Lynndie England, the fall girl for Abu Ghraib, was asked during her botched trial why she and her colleagues had forced naked prisoners into a human pyramid. "As a way to control them," she replied.

Exactly. As an interrogation tool, torture is a bust. But when it comes to social control, nothing works quite like torture.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050530/klein

Torture, in its true context, is a means to punish, and control by example.

Edited April 26, 2009 by Mister_Bill