Tortured by the past

There's a disturbing link between Gitmo and the interrogation tactics I used in Vietnam.

By Frank Snepp
LA Times
April 27, 2009

When Bush administration lawyers wrote their memos authorizing extreme interrogation tactics at Guantanamo, they had to conjure up horrible images: Prisoners gagging and sputtering as their interrogators reproduced the sensation of drowning. Human heads slammed repeatedly into walls. Insect-phobic prisoners cowering in fear in 8-by-10-foot cages.

How can the lawyers live with those images? And what damage did the interrogators who used the techniques sustain to their souls?

These are not academic questions for me. As a CIA interrogator in Vietnam during the last five years of the war, I know I put my soul at extreme peril. I am still haunted by what I did, and I suspect that what I witnessed and perpetrated in those years set the stage for the Bush Justice Department's approach to torture

In the six months leading up to the Vietnam War cease-fire in 1973, I was assigned to debrief eight North Vietnamese and Viet Cong prisoners at the National Interrogation Center in downtown Saigon. I had been trained as an intelligence analyst, not an interrogator. But because I was, by then, one of the CIA's most knowledgeable experts on North Vietnamese politics and strategy, it was thought I might engage the prisoners in "meaningful" discourse, albeit through translators because I spoke no Vietnamese.

(More here.)