“It’s easier to hit somebody than outsmart them.”
This was the response today of the FBI interrogator Ali Soufan to Sen Lindsay Graham’s quip that waterboarding must work since it has been around for hundreds of years. That is what was reported on NPR this evening, but not in any of the reported accounts I’ve looked at yet. But here’s McClatchy on this afternoon’s hearing:
Soufan was a lead FBI interrogator of Abu Zubaydah, one of the first major al Qaida figures to be captured after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The initial interrogation of Zubaydah, using the bureau’s traditional, rapport-building techniques, yielded valuable intelligence, including the role of Khalid Sheik Mohammed as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, he said.
Then-CIA director George Tenet congratulated the interrogators — until he learned that they were from the FBI, not the CIA, Soufan said. A team from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center that included a government contractor quickly replaced him and his colleagues. They introduced harsh interrogation techniques, and Zubaydah’s cooperation stopped, Soufan said.
After complaints from officials in Washington about the dried-up intelligence flow, Soufan and colleagues reverted to the traditional approach, and Zubaydah began talking again
Interestingly, Senator Feingold notes that he saw the memos Dick Cheney has been touting and says they don’t help Cheney’s case.
But Soufan’s comeback to Graham nicely encapsulates the whole of the moral argument that conservatives insist on avoiding here. For the most powerful country on earth to resort to stealing interrogation tactics from the world’s tyrants (tactics that don’t work for them, either — think about why we call them tyrants) and to be seen as so insecure in all of the power we wield to gin up bad Hollywood movie scenarios to justify the tyrant’s torture methods is to completely undermine this country’s claim to be the Shining City on the Hill. In other word , there’s no point to American exceptionalism if we are following the lead of (name your tyrant or dictator).
We further learned today that President Obama was changing his mind on the release of the photos showing the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by members of the U.S. military. Why?
The president said he believes the publication of the photos would not provide any additional information and that, “The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger.”
The White House announced Obama’s decision Wednesday, after top military commanders in the two wars expressed fears that showing the pictures could put their troops at higher risk….
This does, of course, fly in the face of the promise of accountability and transparency the Obama Administration committed itself to. This is not a good thing, but I want to know who will follow the logical links to the claims about the benefits of torture and ask the big question here. Does the fact that the President has been convinced these photos would be harmful to us and our soldiers an admission that all of this torture and abuse of prisoners made us less safe?
Tags: torture
I think this turn around is the wisest thing Obama has done since entering office. He made the decision to release photos he had not seen; this does not sound like a very deliberative, thinking man. He did the same thing at Guantanamo; sent a commission to investigate and announced he was shutting the complex down before he got their findings. Now he might be backing off of that one since no one, Red Cross included, says that those detainees are being mistreated. I hope he makes the right decision in that case as well.
I also hope he has learned his lesson about thinking before speaking . Or (cheap shot) thinking before reading the teleprompter.
The bigger point is that Bush threw out 200 years of American tradition, morality, common sense, tested methodologies, reason, and science while idiots and pretend libertarians cheered him on.
We’ll all be paying for that for decades to come.
No, the bigger point is why does the ACLU want more war porn?
So we count Jason Z for hiding our abuse of detainees (especially so that we avoid the black mark on a Repub administration) rather than actually stopping the abuse of detainees. This is the mark of the modern conservative — collective bedwetting.
The info coming out now is that Cheney ordered torture to get proof of the non-existent Saddam/al Qaeda link.
The conservative argument now is that torture is o.k. if you really, really think it will work. I can’t believe Republicans have nerve to stand up and judge anyone’s behavior considering their own situational ethics.
The link between the two organizations was very much existent.
One, enhanced interrogation is not torture no matter how many times you chant it.
Two, giving our adversaries any intelligence about tactics is dangerous and stupid.
Three, the pictures in question were of illegal activity that people were punished for committing. They serve no purpose except for ACLU (American Criminal Lawyer’s Union) fundraising.
“no one, Red Cross included, says that those detainees are being mistreated”
Mistreatment is not the issue there. The lack of habeas corpus is.
“The link between the two organizations was very much existent.”
Making unsupported statements of fact with no supporting evidence might fly with your conservative buddies, Ignorant Man, but not here.
Delusional David still doesn’t know that the Saddam/al-Qaeda link has been pretty thoroughly debunked for a few years now. But give Delusional David a break — this wasn’t on Fox News or some local news outlet with checks and balances and stuff.
So you admit that the mistreatment of those detainees makes us less safe, then? Because they only way you can come up with a defense of holding on to them is to pretend that they paint a big target on our backs or soldier’s backs.
The good news here is that the court already told the government to release those pictures. The court didn’t think that the government’s national security arguments held any water. Obama will go back and try again, but with any luck the court will maintain its stance.
No, I say that giving any intelligence to our adversaries makes us less safe. Don’t give them information that they can use in their training or elsewhere.
Once again the illegal, unauthorized mistreatment of detainees was punished. This case was about illegal activity. President Obama is Commander in Chief during war time. He has no obligation to listen to a district court. He as the right of a national security determination, the court does not have that jurisdiction.
Pictures of abuse of detainees counts as “intelligence”?
This is why no one believes a thing your party has to say these days.
Either these pictures showed unauthorized treatment (in which case they’d have no intelligence value whatsoever) or they were permitted acts that people could learn from. It can’t be both.
@ #10 This is why I love Cassandra.
David, where do you get that these photos are of something illegal?
I might be missing something, but we’re not talking Abu Graib right? Those pictures were released and those actions were illegal.
These photos are of interrogations of the men behind 9/11, Danny Pearl’s decapitation by rusty deboning knife, the attack on the USS Cole, and an undetermined number of intercepted plots. The techniques were signed off on by the DoJ and used after the interogators couldn’t “hug-it-out.” These men are already the heroes of radical islamofascism; if those photos are released, they will become full blown martyrs.
Cassandra, yes, visual instruction on how we interrogate the bad guys helps the bad guys figure out how to train against it. I’ll also repeat that there is no evidence anyone was abused at Gitmo. How many SEALS, journalists, protestors, etc. have been waterboarded by now? How many of them are in therapy? How many have died or even gone to the hospital? It is not torture.
Jason Z — you don’t even know what you are talking about. So — haul your ass off to figure out what these pictures are first of all, before you presume to lecture anybody about what you don’t know about interrogating bad guys.
And while I’m at it, it really would have been less embarrassing for you to know what you were pontificating about before you joined the collective bedwetting.
Sorry, I conflated these with the recently released Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos.
I agree with you, these would not constitute “intelligence.”
I also think President Obama has prostrated the country enough in recent overseas trips, we can stop whipping ourselves on the back now.
I’ll prostrate myself and apologize again for not doing my homework. Maybe you should try that bedwetting line again, that’d be really funny a third time.
It isn’t meant to be funny — just shorthand for a bunch of people panicking over the monsters under their beds that wouldn’t be there if their President had been abit more conservative and cautious about the business of both belligerence and nation building. YMMV.
And this President is fixing the horrible position the previous one put us in. That doesn’t count as prostration by any stretch.