Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent, sets the record straight (again) on Abu Zubayda. Some of the claims about the intelligence he offered were false, but all the useful information we got out of him was disclosed before he was tortured.
We've talked about the ways torture makes us less safe--it undermines our moral standing in the world, it gives our enemies a cause to rally others to, it puts the treatment of captured American soldiers in danger, and it makes our allies less likely to cooperate with us. It's also unreliable. But Soufan identifies another effect of the Bush administration's torture regime: the result of the CIA torturing prisoners was that some of our most experienced counterterrorism experts were shut out:
One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.
Soufan also writes that there were instances of torture "backfiring" which he says are "still classified."
First of all, I think it almost goes without saying that there's something comforting about the fact that the FBI recognized that these interrogations were illegal and refused to participate in them. I think that has a great deal to do with the fact that the FBI is a law enforcement organization as opposed to an intelligence gathering one, there impetus is very different. It's also worth pointing out that while a number of former Bush administration officials claimed torture "worked" and intelligence gleaned from such methods saved American lives, FBI director Robert Mueller III* has said this wasn't the case.
But here's my question. As a result of the previous administration's torture program, some of the country's best interrogators and counterterrorism experts were frozen out of the intelligence gathering process. How does that make us any safer?
*He's still the FBI director. My bad ya'll.
-- A. Serwer
