Spencer Ackerman, writing at his new home,
The Washington Independent, has a chilling article on the development of torture techniques within the CIA. Before 9/11, he argues, the CIA simply wasn't tasked with interrogation. It wasn't something they did, or knew how to do. After 9/11, Bush charged them with developing a system. Here's how they did it:
Despite having nearly no off-the-shelf experience, the CIA was tasked by President Bush to come up with a robust interrogation program for the most important al-Qaeda captives. So the agency turned to its partners for assistance in designing its interrogation regimen: Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia—all countries cited by the State Department for using torture—among others. Additionally, as Mark Benjamin has reported for Salon, two psychologists named Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, who worked as contractors for CIA, helped the agency "reverse-engineer" the military and CIA training on resisting torture for use on detainees. Suddenly, waterboarding, an illegal practice of simulating or in some cases inducing drowning, became an American-administered practice.Interestingly, one place that the CIA didn’t look for help was the place where interrogations have been performed, lawfully, for decades: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "In terms of actual interrogations, when you have a suspect in custody, the FBI does that hundreds of times a day, 365 days a year, for 90 years," said Mike Rolince, who spent over three years as Special Agent in Charge of counterterrorism at the FBI’s Washington field office before retiring in October 2005. "The FBI brought serious credibility and a track record to the table. That said, the U.S. government decided to go about [interrogations] in a different way. The results speak for themselves. I don’t think we need to be where we are."
It's worth thinking about that. In order to learn how to interrogate, we studied those we've condemned for torturing. But Egypt tortures for many reasons, only one of which is to extract information. They also torture to extract false confessions, to punish enemies of the state, to broadcast a brutal warning for those who would oppose the government. Oftentimes one of these outcomes is as good as another. But for us, one of these outcomes is not as good as another, or shouldn't be. Where we were studying torture as a blunt instrument, we needed it as a narrow tool that could extract relevant information quickly. That, however, is a complicated business. We rarely knew who we were torturing, or what they could tell us, or whether their information was accurate. And as Ackerman goes on to explain, this caused problems.The whole article is eye-opening, and well worth a read. It's good journalism, and an auspicious start for the Washington Independent -- one of the new journalism models that tries to decouple high quality journalistic content from the dead weight of paper and older publishing models. Similarly, Brian Beutler, who's pioneering investigative pool reporting at
the Media Consortium, is also blazing a new path. Given the sorry state of contemporary journalism, we really need these experiments that try and save the content before it's wrecked by the economics of yesterday's news models. (
Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Sandeep Thukral.)
