As mentioned yesterday, thought I’d do a follow up on the enhanced interrogation technique blog I wrote yesterday. I asked the following question during the May 5th press call sponsored by the National Security Network and the Center for American Progress:
…if I’m understanding and hearing correctly, there was historical precedence as well as proof as we continued on with these enhanced interrogation techniques that they weren’t working, and in fact, were counterproductive. I was wondering how and why did the government make that decision? Did they not – were there any dissenting voices, or did they choose to ignore them?
Ken Gude said the government chose to ignore them stating: “I think that the lessons of history are quite clear, and especially when you identify where the techniques that were used at the CIA black sites were derived from, which was the training of U.S. special forces soldiers, special forces operatives that was based on interrogation practices that were used against them in Korea that were developed by the Chinese and the Soviets largely to extract false confessions. This, as Glenn mentioned before, the CIA’s KUBARK manual basically describes what not to do as an interrogator if you want to produce reliable and valuable intelligence information. But in the wake of September 11th, just in those few, first months caught up in that moment, all of that history was cast aside. And unfortunately we had to re-learn it at great pain and great cost to the United States.”
Glenn Carle said there was a great deal of debate among various government agencies on it. He gave insight into the issue by sharing his personal experience.
“I was just one person among an infinite number. I was brought into a case that was considered to be – presented to me as a critical success and very important; it possibly could lead us to bin Laden, so this is a high honor. And I’m very excited; and they said, you will do whatever it takes to obtain the information that we need. Do you understand? To which I responded, we don’t do that. And the answer was, we do now. And I said, well, we would need at least a presidential finding, direct authorization from the president if something is of grave national security concern, signed off and approved by the relevant agencies and parties in the government. And the answer was, well, we have it. The “it” was the infamous torture memo written by John Yoo, which when I finally saw the thing – I’m not a lawyer, but I studied Constitutional law, and I know my oath – it was a bit of hack work – I mean, clearly not in concert with the history of the United States, of habeas corpus, the Magna Carta, the whole thing that founds America and gives meaning to our flag. And so then I was confronted with a situation of, OK, the president, the attorney general, the Department of Justice, the director of the CIA, the head of the Counterterrorism Center and the head of the unit that I was reporting to have all formally authorized this. And who are you, Glenn Carle, having been readied on this case for five minutes, to challenge the full, legal, authorized weight and orders of the United States government? Do you execute your orders or not? It’s a very acute dilemma.”
In the May 6th edition of the Wall Street Journal, Michael Mukasey, attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009, wrote an oped called The Waterboarding Trail to bin Laden. He seems to feel the program provided valuable intelligence and makes the point of saying intelligence that led to bin Laden had came about because of these practices and “… began with a disclosure from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed …Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has said that, as late as 2006, even with the growing success of other intelligence tools, fully half of the government’s knowledge about the structure and activities of al Qaeda came from those interrogations. The Bush administration put these techniques in place only after rigorous analysis by the Justice Department, which concluded that they were lawful. Regrettably, that same administration gave them a name—‘enhanced interrogation techniques’—so absurdly antiseptic as to imply that it must conceal something unlawful.”
Mukasey also says the techniques were used on a small number of people. He doesn’t give the exact number but says out of the thousands captured only 100 were questioned in the CIA run program and “fewer than one-third were subjected to these techniques.”
There is one fact that I seldom see mentioned in the press; and that is a lot of these techniques, to include waterboarding, have been used on U.S. troops as part of overall training. I don’t know if they are still done but it was common place during my time in the service. If you were going to certain assignments where you might go in harms way you were sent to survival training. Part of that included being locked up and treated like a prisoner of war. I have to disclose I have no first hand experience with the training and the knowledge I have is based on stories co-workers told me over the years. My first assignment in the navy required the training but because I was a female and the navy’s test case for assigning women to that particular job I was told I would not be allowed to go to that part of the training program. I was eager to show they didn’t have to treat me different because of my sex. Outraged I asked why and was told the school was not set up to handle women. I asked if the Navy could guarantee if I was ever taken prisoner the “enemy” would return me because they had no facilities for women prisoners…but that’s another blog.
Back to the topic at hand, friends and peers over the years told of being slapped and subjected to waterboarding among many other things during the training. I often wondered if U.S. officials who came up with the enhanced interrogation policy thought it wasn’t a draconian procedure since we subjected our own troops to it as part of their training. The major difference is U.S. troops undergoing training knew they were being trained and could endure it because they knew it would end at a specific point in time. I wonder if that made it easier for the policy makers to decide to use these techniques on the prisoners? I don’t know.
As to what intelligence was used to find and kill Bin Laden. To quote Oprah, what I know for sure is that when looking at problems the intelligence community uses information from many different sources. As I’ve blogged many times, intelligence analysts screen millions of pieces of intelligence and out of all of that; it is rare to get a complete enough picture that would stand up in a court. All of that information is screened, with relevant data fused together to form as complete a picture as possible. In a 4 May article in Foreign Policy, Matthew Alexander stated: “…the information about the existence of a courier working for bin Laden was provided by several detainees, not just waterboarded al Qaeda operatives…The key pieces of information…were the courier’s real name and location. His family name was first uncovered by CIA assets in Pakistan through other sources. The NSA (National Security Agency) subsequently figured out his full name and location…” As has been reported, even with all of information the intelligence community was able to provide, the Seals had only a little over 50% certainty that Bin Laden was in that compound. This was a success for ALL of the intelligence community.
As for using enhanced interrogation techniques, I haven’t conducted an extensive investigation nor do I have the time or access to all of the information. If in fact the majority of the people involved in the program felt it didn’t work and that other intelligence tactics, techniques and procedures were more productive…I don’t know why their input would be ignored by the higher ups. I leave you with one cautionary statement. Those of us sitting on the sidelines without access to all of the information should be very careful with condemning one side or the other. This is too important a topic to discuss using only media sound bites as the primary source of information. Again as always my views are my own.
