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People were tortured on the basis of "presumptions. Nice.A More "Robust Approach
Back to Abu Zubaydah: his capture in March 2002 "presented the Agency with a significant dilemma, as the IG explains the Introduction to the Special Review:
"The Agency was under pressure to do everything possible to prevent additional terrorist attacks. Senior Agency officials believed Abu Zubaydah was withholding information that could not be obtained through then-authorized interrogation techniques. Agency officials believed that a more robust approach was necessary to elicit threat information from Abu Zubaydah and possibly from other senior Al-Qa'ida high value detainees.
"An interrogator is a person who completes a two-week [!] interrogations training program, which is designed to train, qualify, and certify a person to administer EITs. An interrogator can administer EITs during the interrogation of a detainee only after the field, in coordination with Headquarters, assesses the detainee as withholding information. An interrogator transitions the detainee from a non-cooperative to a cooperative phase in order that a debriefer can elicit actionable intelligence through non-aggressive techniques during debriefing sessions.
Got that? It's the same basic rationale that former Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller introduced into Guantanamo, and then Abu Ghraib. Remember? The MPs were instructed to soften up the detainees. The preferred euphemism was "prepare the conditions for successful interrogation.
As reluctant as President Barack Obama seems to be to address the torture issue, the CIA Inspector General report, for which the ACLU filed a successful Freedom of Information Act suit, is impossible to ignore. A spokesman for Obama said Tuesday that decisions on how to proceed with the inquiry lie in the hands of Attorney General Holder, who appears willing to take the heat. Fox News, oblivious to the irony, is already calling Holder's announcement the beginning of an "Inquisition.
While the inquiry is said to involve only those CIA people who went beyond the Department of Justice's very flexible guidelines regarding harsh interrogation, in my view it will be very difficult to keep the investigation within those tight parameters.
There is a growing chance that, at the end of the day, those up the food chain will not escape being held accountable. By this point in time most observers are fully aware that the most rotten apples were at the very top, not the bottom, of the barrel.
Endangering Morale at CIA?
What Americans need to know is that only a miniscule percentage of CIA officers approve of torture. The vast majority oppose it "whether for utilitarian reasons (as we have seen, it does not work, unless you are after unreliable information); or for moral reasons (including a decent respect for the opinion of mankind, as someone once put it). Most believe Patrick Henry had it right, when he insisted that the rack and screw have no place in the New World.
So what about morale? Let's address head-on the self-serving canard that would have us believe that exposing torture and other abuses would damage morale at the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
You may recall that Gen. Michael Hayden, even while still CIA director, was going around town telling folks that he had warned the new president not to allow an investigation into controversial activities like waterboarding, or else "no one in Langley will ever take a risk again. Rubbish.
Hayden was not only blowing smoke; he was also gravely insulting the great majority of CIA employees who have served, and continue to serve, with honor.
At a public forum in late April, former Vice President Walter Mondale exposed the speciousness of the Hayden-cum-Bush-holdovers argument. Mondale was one of the Senators on the Church Committee, which during the mid-Seventies unearthed the unlawful activities of COINTELPRO and other serious abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies.
Speaking out of that experience, Mondale noted that then, too, concern over the effect on agency morale was voiced both before the Church investigation got under way and while it was proceeding.
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