As everyone and their uncle rushes to comment on Bush's detainee bombshell yesterday (which, as Dahlia Lithwick points out, was 100 percent recycled from what Bush has been saying all along), the one piece that really fills in the details of Ray McGovern's comprehensive analysis is Salon's interview with Ron Suskind.
Bush claimed yesterday that the CIA used "an alternative set of procedures" to interrogate allegedly high-ranking members of al-Qaida, calling the procedures "tough ... safe, and lawful and necessary." He claimed that had it not been for information provided by those interrogations, "our intelligence community believes that al-Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland," and that the interrogations also "played a critical role in helping us understand the enemy we face in this war. Terrorists in this program have painted a picture of Al Qaida's structure and financing and communications and logistics. They have identified Al Qaida's travel routes and safe havens, and explained how Al Qaida's senior leadership communicates with its operatives in places like Iraq." Yet Bush acknowledged that despite that, the interrogators are at risk of prosecution under the War Crimes Act for violating provisions of the Geneva Convention "that prohibit outrages upon personal dignity and humiliating and degrading treatment."
Suskind's sources have given him a detailed understanding of what intelligence we really did get by torturing Zein al-Abideen Mohammed Hussein, a.k.a. Abu Zubeidah:
At the same time, I think we oversold [Zubaydah's] value -- the administration did -- to the American public. That's indisputable. As well, what folks inside the CIA and FBI were realizing, even as the president and others inside the administration were emphasizing the profound malevolence and value strategically to the capture of Zubaydah, is that Zubaydah is psychologically imbalanced, he has multiple personalities. And he was not involved in various events that we thought he was involved in. During various bombings in the late '90s, he was not where we thought he would be. That's shown in the diaries, where he goes through long lists of quotidian, nonsensical details about various people and what they're doing, folks that he's moving around, getting plane tickets for and serving tea to, all in the voices of three different characters; page after page of his diary, filled, including on dates where, I'm trying to think, it was either the Khobar Towers or the Cole, where we thought he was involved in the bombing and he clearly wasn't.
More importantly, Suskind emphasizes that what useful intelligence out of al-Qaida detainees is precisely not through "getting tough":
The fact is that the history of interrogation shows that you do not do particularly well when you confirm expectations, when everybody plays their preordained role. In this case, al-Qaida operatives are trained to believe that the United States, and representatives of the U.S., are bloodthirsty mobsters who will dismember and disembowel. The fact is, when we use harsh techniques we essentially say, "We are going to confirm your expectations."
What has largely worked in all the interrogations, what we got -- and in many cases it's not very much -- but whatever we got, for the most part occurred because we were, let's just say, a little more clever than that. Instead of going medieval, which is the tactic our enemies here embrace, we essentially find a way to confuse their expectations. In many cases, just by treating them as human beings we have created an environment where we get what we so desperately need, which is information that might help save American lives.
That's the key. The key is to not give in to anger, but to do whatever works best. There's clearly been a learning curve on that; some of the harsh techniques used early on have been I think largely abandoned because they didn't work.
--Ethan Heitner |
Thursday, September 7, 2006 11:25 AM
