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?