Fifth Degree, Second Thoughts
The best way to get information from a detainee? Rapport, personal trust and . . . manipulation.
By ALI SOUFAN
WSJ
A persistent and damaging national-security myth is that in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks a dispute developed between the FBI and the CIA over the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The intelligence agency was uniformly in favor, or so the story went, and the FBI was strongly opposed. What should have been a simple question about efficacy (what is the fastest and best way to gain reliable information from terrorists?) was transformed into a highly charged debate in which facts were discarded and emotions ran high.
In "The Interrogator: An Education," Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who retired in 2007, confirms what I knew from my own experience as an FBI agent at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and at so-called black sites: It would be a struggle to find a CIA operative who endorses the use of enhanced-interrogation techniques. The agency's supporters of such measures were predominately political appointees and desk officials, not professional field operatives. Anyone with actual interrogation experience knows that rapport-building techniques, which use knowledge to outwit detainees and gain cooperation, produce better intelligence than enhanced interrogation.
I served alongside CIA officers in interrogation rooms at Guantanamo and at black sites. I saw the officers disagree with instructions to start using coercive interrogation and demand to have the orders in writing; some even left the locations in protest. CIA officers also complained to their inspector general, John Helgerson, who conducted an investigation and produced a report in 2004, later released by the Obama administration, that was critical of enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. This is why I've publicly opposed calls to prosecute CIA officers involved in the interrogations: The officers registered their protests through the channels available.
The officials behind the enhanced-interrogation program, to prevent criticism, over-classified everything to do with it. They fought to prevent the declassification of the CIA's Inspector General Report—it wasn't released to the public until April 2009, and then with heavy redactions. The officials also wrote secret memos making false claims about the successes of the interrogations and allowed only officials supportive of the techniques to speak publicly.
(Original here.)
By ALI SOUFAN
WSJ
A persistent and damaging national-security myth is that in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks a dispute developed between the FBI and the CIA over the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. The intelligence agency was uniformly in favor, or so the story went, and the FBI was strongly opposed. What should have been a simple question about efficacy (what is the fastest and best way to gain reliable information from terrorists?) was transformed into a highly charged debate in which facts were discarded and emotions ran high.
In "The Interrogator: An Education," Glenn Carle, a 23-year CIA veteran who retired in 2007, confirms what I knew from my own experience as an FBI agent at the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba and at so-called black sites: It would be a struggle to find a CIA operative who endorses the use of enhanced-interrogation techniques. The agency's supporters of such measures were predominately political appointees and desk officials, not professional field operatives. Anyone with actual interrogation experience knows that rapport-building techniques, which use knowledge to outwit detainees and gain cooperation, produce better intelligence than enhanced interrogation.
I served alongside CIA officers in interrogation rooms at Guantanamo and at black sites. I saw the officers disagree with instructions to start using coercive interrogation and demand to have the orders in writing; some even left the locations in protest. CIA officers also complained to their inspector general, John Helgerson, who conducted an investigation and produced a report in 2004, later released by the Obama administration, that was critical of enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs. This is why I've publicly opposed calls to prosecute CIA officers involved in the interrogations: The officers registered their protests through the channels available.
The officials behind the enhanced-interrogation program, to prevent criticism, over-classified everything to do with it. They fought to prevent the declassification of the CIA's Inspector General Report—it wasn't released to the public until April 2009, and then with heavy redactions. The officials also wrote secret memos making false claims about the successes of the interrogations and allowed only officials supportive of the techniques to speak publicly.
(Original here.)
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