Ask Me, I Won't Say No, How Could I?

Spencer has a whopper of a summary piece in the newly launched Washington Independent on the state of U.S. interrogations. Here's a snippet:

[T]he program that developed within the Central Intelligence Agency after 9/11 has left the intelligence community playing a fateful role. Surprising as it may be, the CIA has never really been in the interrogation business. After 9/11, it turned its back on its own limited history of interrogations and never consulted those in the U.S. with solid experience in that difficult art. Even in the seven years since it has built an interrogation capability mostly from scratch, the agency has never applied the best practices in behavioral science to improve its regimen. The result has been to privilege brutality out of ignorance, which, according to many experts and insiders interviewed, means that interrogation practices that produce faulty information are now at the very heart of the U.S. efforts against a mysterious and still-unfamiliar enemy.

In short, despite innumerable statements from the Bush administration about the value of the CIA's interrogation program, U.S. interrogators are still mostly in the dark—in the dark not only about al-Qaeda, but about how to effectively elicit vital national-security information from the detainees in its custody.

Read on about the Polygraph Unit, where "employees—who were not case officers or intelligence analysts—would perform the closest thing to interrogations as existed institutionally in CIA." Not exactly a professional Inquisition the Bush administration is running. The thing that the report makes clear is that there isn't any dominant philosophy about interrogation. You have on the one hand the Bush administration claiming that harsh interrogations produce results, committing to a sort of consequentialist defense of its policies. It's hardly clear whether CIA interrogators agree but it's also not clear that there is polarization on the issue. As Spencer writes, "The former senior CIA official rejected rejected the idea that behavioral scientists know more about interrogation than interrogators. 'Some of these people are like sex experts who know 80 ways to make love but don’t know any girls,' he said."

Worse still, the interrogators can't seem to tell the girls from the terrorists, so you wind up with the CIA wasting time—and the Bush administration blowing political capital and international goodwill—on detainee interrogations that produce no valuable information. Meanwhile, the Bush administration doesn't identify this situation as a problem to fix—the only question they bother to address is the legality of torture (perfectly legal, they say). They're fixing the CYA, not the CIA.

Posted by Kriston at January 28, 2008 8:46 AM