Scott Horton interviews former CIA interrogator Glenn Carle, who has become a high profile critic of the Bush administration's torturous interrogation program. Carle discusses the interrogation of "CAPTUS," an al Qaeda associate who was put through extraordinary rendition after officials decided he simply wasn't talking enough:
“Enhanced” techniques make it more difficult to ascertain when a detainee had answered truthfully. The techniques increased the detainee's resentment, confusion, and incentive to lie. Conducting a sound interrogation is remarkably similar to conducting a good human intelligence operation: it must be based upon a rapport between officer and detainee. Successful interrogation takes understanding of the detainee's motivations, hopes, and fears, and then interaction with the detainee as a trusted interlocutor. Fear and pain do not obtain good intelligence; trust and a sound human relationship may. And I'd like to point out what is clear when one reads my book: I refused all physical measures from the get-go, as wrong on every conceivable level. I devoted a lot of effort to stopping the use of most measures of any sort on CAPTUS. To the extent possible, I questioned CAPTUS, and sought to keep any other measures from being used.
The detainee in question is Pacha Wazir, who is one of the three detainees in Afghanistan who is being held at Bagram Prison and has been refused habeas rights because the prison remains in a zone of active military combat. Wazir is an Afghan citizen, and so his petition was dismissed early on even though he was not apprehended in Afghanistan. He was ultimately released last year after seven years in detention. While Wazir had some links to al-Qaeda (Carle compares him to a " small shop owner who is doing business with the mob,") he did not turn out to be a high level financier as suspected. But he was detained for years after the fact anyway.
Goodness. I recommended that he be released because we had assessed him to be a critical senior member of Al Qaeda when he wasn't. I have no problem with my colleagues or the CIA making mistakes. We all err. But we simply must try to rectify our errors if we can, even if it embarrasses us, especially when human lives are involved. We can't leave a man incorrectly detained in a prison because of an error we have recognized and can fix. It's simply obvious, and a duty.
Therein lies another problem with indefinite detention outside of a military context, particularly when it's secret. Once someone's captured, there's little incentive to correct a mistake even when one has been made. Wazir was in a particularly difficult position of course, being an Afghan citizen and being held at Bagram where there is no right to habeas. The courts have said though, that if the government tried to transfer detainees there in the future to forestall habeas proceedings they might revisit their conclusion that habeas doesn't apply there. What's confusing to me is that if Wazir was guilty, why not simply charge him?
