Ali Soufan goes nuclear on Cheney

Four months ago Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who extracted reams of actionable intelligence from Abu Zubaydah using rapport-based techniques before the CIA took over and commenced torturing him, broke a seven-year silence to assert that the CIA's torture regimen interrupted and undercut effective noncoercive interrogation and never yielded any actionable intelligence that could not have been gleaned without coercion.

Today, in a second Times op-ed, Soufan goes further, suggesting that the U.S. failed to capture top al Qaeda leadership because it turned to ineffective torture:

It is surprising, as the eighth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that none of Al Qaeda’s top leadership is in our custody. One damaging consequence of the harsh interrogation program was that the expert interrogators [e.g., Soufan] whose skills were deemed unnecessary to the new methods were forced out.

Mr. Mohammed knew the location of most, if not all, of the members of Al Qaeda’s leadership council, and possibly of every covert cell around the world. One can only imagine who else we could have captured, or what attacks we might have disrupted, if Mr. Mohammed had been questioned by the experts who knew the most about him.

There's a fearful symmetry here: Cheney claims that torture prevented further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. Soufan suggests that torture prevented the capture of top Al Qaeda leadership.

This inflammatory claim follows a point-by-point demolition of the various claims made for torture-based interrogation: that it led to foiling a plot to fly a plane into the tallest building on the West Coast; that it led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; that torture induced KSM to give up new information about Al Qaeda's organizational structure. According to Soufan's parsing of the CIA inspector general's report of 2004 and the two CIA memos on intelligence gained from detainees, virtually all actionable intelligence cited by torture's defenders came from "pocket litter" and from captives' assumption that they were giving up information their questioners already had.

Soufan is plainly tormented by the conviction that he personally had what it took to get the highest-value information out of the top-level detainees, and that he and other informed and skilled interrogators were prevented from doing so by the thugs at the top who imposed the torture regime. Of course he can never prove what he might have accomplished -- just as torture's defenders can't prove that any info gained once the"program" commenced could not have been gained by other means. But Soufan does know a) what was gained in the interrogations he did conduct; what is false in most of the explicit claims about knowledge gained under torture; and c) a good deal about the psychology of the top detainees and the knowledge in their possession at the time of capture.

Philip Zelikow, who interviewed Soufan for the 9/11 Commission, says that he "seemed to us to be one of the more impressive intelligence agents -- from any agency -- that we encountered in our work." Soufan is a far more credible witness than Cheney and his henchmen.

Ali Soufan, Tragedian

Ali Soufan, the highly skilled FBI interrogator who recently broke a seven year silence to assert in the New York Times that his successful non-coercive interrogations of al Qaeda operatives were halted in favor of an ineffectual course of torture, has a playwright's sensibility.

His Senate testimony on May 13 in a hearing on "What What Wrong" in Bush's OLC was a tragic narrative, rife with irony. The plot is simple: a highly successful, ethical enterprise steeped in the finest U.S. military tradition was thwarted in stages by a gang of malign incompetents who replaced it with an untested, ineffective, brutal program that did untold damage to our intelligence efforts as well as to our position in the world.

Philip Zelikow, in his testimony at the same hearing, allowed that the torture program may have yielded useful information but stressed its unacceptable costs. The irony in Soufan's narrative stems from his focus on the torture program's ineffectiveness as interrogation. The U.S. intelligence community sold its inheritance for a mass of pottage. Soufan weaves this core irony out of several strands:

Our tough guys were not brutal enough for al Qaeda:

Al Qaeda terrorists are trained to resist torture. As shocking as these techniques are to us, the al Qaeda training prepares them for much worse – the torture they would expect to receive if caught by dictatorships for example. This is why, as we see from the recently released Department of Justice memos on interrogation, the contractors had to keep getting authorization to use harsher and harsher methods, until they reached waterboarding and then there was nothing they could do but use that technique again and again. Abu Zubaydah had to be waterboarded 83 times and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed 183 times. In a democracy there is a glass ceiling of harsh techniques the interrogator cannot breach, and a detainee can eventually call the interrogator's bluff.

Torture is slower than classic relationship-building interrogation:

A third major problem with this technique is that it is slow. It takes place over a long period of time, for example preventing the detainee from sleeping for 180 hours as the memos detail, or waterboarding 183 times in the case of KSM. When we have an alleged "ticking timebomb" scenario and need to get information quickly, we can't afford to wait that long.

Torture neutralized our best operatives and sabotaged post-9/11 institutional reform:

Another disastrous consequence of the use of the harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the "Chinese Wall" between the CIA and FBI – similar to the wall that prevented us from working together to stop 9/11. In addition, the FBI and the CIA officers on the ground during the Abu Zubaydah interrogation were working together closely and effectively, until the contractors' interferences. Because we in the FBI would not be a part of the harsh techniques, the agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An FBI colleague of mine, for example, who had tracked KSM and knew more about him than anyone in the government, was not allowed to speak to him.

Furthermore, the CIA specializes in collecting, analyzing, and interpreting intelligence. The FBI, on the other hand, has a trained investigative branch. Until that point, we were complimenting each other's expertise, until the imposition of the "enhanced methods." As a result people ended doing what they were not trained to do.

The torture program was outsourcing run amok:

It is also important to realize that those behind this technique are outside contractors with no expertise in intelligence operations, investigations, terrorism, or al Qaeda. Nor did the contractors have any experience in the art of interview and interrogation. One of the contractors told me this at the time, and this lack of experience has also now been recently reported on by sources familiar with their backgrounds.

Soufan's crowning irony is to stress the naivete of those who prided themselves on their cold-eyed realism -- the gang that decided, in the words of the Gonzales torture memo, that the "new paradigm" of the war on terrorism "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."

It was a mistake to abandon it [Soufan's noncoercive "Informed Interrogation Approach"] in favor of harsh interrogation methods that are harmful, shameful, slower, unreliable, ineffective, and play directly into the enemy's handbook. It was a mistake to abandon an approach that was working and naively replace it with an untested method. It was a mistake to abandon an approach that is based on the cumulative wisdom and successful tradition of our military, intelligence, and law enforcement community, in favor of techniques advocated by contractors with no relevant experience.

The mistake was so costly precisely because the situation was, and remains, too risky to allow someone to experiment with amateurish, Hollywood style interrogation methods- that in reality- taints sources, risks outcomes, ignores the end game, and diminishes our moral high ground in a battle that is impossible to win without first capturing the hearts and minds around the world. It was one of the worst and most harmful decisions made in our efforts against al Qaeda.

"To steal a man's soul and give him nothing in return" is the highest aspiration of C.S. Lewis' devil Screwtape, a skilled operative at tempting humans to perdition. In Soufan's telling, the purveyors of so-called "EIT"--those who empowered Soufan's unnamed "outside contractor" (identified elsewhere as the former SERE psychologist James Mitchell) to institute his torture program-- sold themselves, the executive branch, and the U.S. intelligence community on just those terms.

The sum of all Constitutional fears: Zelikow

Philip Zelikow's remarkable testimony yesterday before the Senate Judiciary Committee
Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts yesterday centered on the context and purpose for his now-famous 2006 memo countering the Office of Legal Counsel's findings that the CIA's "program of coolly calculated dehumanizing abuse and physical torment to extract information," as he put it, did not violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.

Donald Rumsfeld rejected the arguments of that memo and ordered it destroyed. At least one copy has been located in State Department files; it remains classified.

As described in Zelikow's testimony yesterday, a core purpose of the memo was to restore Americans' Constitutional protections against cruel and inhuman punishment. The memo suggests that as long as the findings in Jay Bybee's May 30, 2005 memo that the CIA program did not violate the Fifth Amendment were allowed to stand, Americans essentially have no civil liberties.

In a shocking bit of sophistry, the Bybee memo held that the CIA's interrogation program could not not violate Article 16 of the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which prohibits "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," because a) The Senate stipulated that this statute was to be interpreted in light of the Fifth Amendment, and b) the Fifth Amendment does not apply to aliens outside the United States. In other words, the U.S. committed itself to nothing in signing onto the CAT.

More to Zelikow's point, though, the Bybee memo held that the CIA program did not in any case violate the Fifth Amendment. Using a "shocks the conscience" standard, the memo held, among other things, that treatment does not "shock the conscience" unless it involves "the exercise of power without any reasonable justification in the service of a legitimate government objective." The interrogation practices at issue "are employed by the CIA only as reasonably deemed necessary to protect against grave threats to United States interests" - ergo, they do not shock the conscience.

In other words, the end justifies the means. Governmental authority can do anything to anyone "in the service of a legitimate government objective." Zelikow spells out what this means:

Further, the OLC position had implications beyond the interpretation of international treaties. If the CIA program passed muster under an American constitutional compliance analysis, then - at least in principle -- a progrma of this kind would pass American constitutional muster even if employed anwhere in the United States, on American citizens. Reflect on that for a moment.

Yes, let's. As long as that memo was operative,Americans had no constitutional protections against being held without trial and tortured at will, as long those doing the torturing held that they acted "in the service of a legitimate government objective."

"Did torture work?" is the wrong question - Ali Soufan shows why

Today's NYT op-ed by Ali Soufan, one of the FBI agents who interrogated Abu Zubaydah before the CIA entered the scene and began torturing him, shows that it's pointless to parse rival claims about whether Zubaydah gave up information ultimately leading to the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed before or after the CIA began first subjecting him to cold, nakedness, incessant loud music and sleep deprivation, and later out-and-out torturing him. It's pointless, first, because the claim by Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey that Zubaydah "was coerced into disclosing information that led to the capture of Ramzi bin al Shibh...who in turn disclosed information which -- when combined with what was learned from Abu Zubaydah -- helped lead to the capture of KSM and other senior terrorists" is simply false:

The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods.

Even more important, arguments about whether specific bits of information were elicited by torture is ultimately beside the point. Leaving aside the undermining of U.S. civil liberties and America's standing in the world, torture undermines the interrogation process itself:

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process...

One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.

Philip Zelikow, who interviewed Soufan for the 9/11 Commission, says that he "seemed to us to be one of the more impressive intelligence agents -- from any agency -- that we encountered in our work."

Having read many passionate claims by people I admire that torture always yields false information, I have feared that such assertions are too simple and too comforting. Soufan, who credibly claims to have obtained valuable results without coercion, provides an honorable practitioner's clarity. The point -- again leaving aside the damage torture does to the society that authorizes it -- is not that torture may never yield true information, but that it corrupts and short-circuits the painstaking, intense long-term engagement required to obtain a body of credible information. Torture yields an indistinguishable mishmash of truth and fiction conforming to what the torturers want to hear -- as when Zubaydah affirmed operational ties between al Qaeda and Iraq.

Zelikow: Obama is "potliticizing" detainee issue with attempt to forestall prosecution

Philip Zelikow makes a simple point about the limits of Obama's authority:

I am not eager to see any government officials prosecuted for crimes because of their zeal to protect their country. But crimes committed for worthy motives are still crimes, and we have institutions to sort this out.

So has anyone beside me found it troubling that President Obama is making announcements on who should be prosecuted for possible crimes? Whatever one's view of the matter, didn't the administration ardently announce its dedication to depoliticizing the Department of Justice? So why is it proper for the president to tell Attorney General Eric Holder what he should conclude?

Zelikow goes on to point out that the only constitutional way Obama can control the ultimate legal fate of those who designed or implemented the Bush Administration's interrogation policies is to issue a blanket pardon.

Update 4/21: It would appear that Obama at least half-agrees with Zelikow (my emphasis):

Mr. Obama said the memos "that were released reflected, in my view, us losing our moral bearings. That's why I've discontinued those enhanced interrogation programs. For those who carried out some of these operations within the four corners of legal opinions or guidance that had been provided from the White House, I do not think it's appropriate for them to be prosecuted. With respect to those who formulated those legal decisions, I would say that that is going to be more of a decision for the attorney general, within the parameters of various laws, and I don't want to prejudge that."