David Ignatius has a column today on how the administration's decision to release the torture memos has affected CIA field agents. I don't have Ignatius' sources in the intelligence community, but parts of his article just don't seem to pass the smell test. For instance:
...Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong but because he knew it would blow up. "We all knew the political wind would change eventually," he recalled. Other officers who didn't make that cynical but correct calculation are now "broken and bewildered," says the former operative.
CIA officers do illegal stuff for a living, more or less, so they do count on an implicit bargain with the political process to prevent their work protecting national security today from making them criminals tomorrow. But that doesn't excuse them from basic moral considerations; it seems to me that it's possible to create a distinction between a lot of typical law-breaking they may engage in during the course of collecting foreign intelligence and torturing someone for information. The impression I've gotten in my discussions with intelligence sources is that our efforts are not a lot of James Bond stuff at all, but rather the slow-grind cultivation of sources, etc., so it would be interesting as well to learn how much of the overall CIA field operation turns on capturing and interrogating people. Incidentally, Ignatius' assertion that the decision not to torture someone is "cynical" was truly amazing. Another note:
One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called "risk of capture" interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and "pocket litter" were exploited quickly.
Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I'm told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn't even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.
I'm sorry, I don't understand why the revelation of now-forbidden torture techniques would prevent an agent from interrogating a suspect or going through cellphone contacts, unless "questioned aggressively" is a euphemism for torture. Also, and I'd be interested to learn more from Ignatius or anyone else who knows these procedures -- do CIA agents frequently grab suspects without talking to their superiors first? If they do so in a war zone where they frequently collaborate with the armed forces, is turning a captured suspect over to the military such a bad thing?
I take Ignatius' point that CIA agents might feel demoralized by the decision to release the memos, but I'm not convinced that they should be; the article raises more questions than it answers. His comparison to the 1995 efforts to end agency contacts with politically-sensitive sources like Guatemalan death squads seems to have nothing to do with the task at hand; the administration isn't saying what sources an operative can have; they're giving them guidance on what they cannot do with people they've captured. At the end of the day, the lack of evidence that torture was effective at all, and my suspicion that a majority of CIA agents spend the bulk of their time doing things other than torture, makes me confident the administration made the correct decision.
-- Tim Fernholz
