The Crossed Pond

Today’s must-read is an article in Newsweek about the experience of FBI interrogator Ali Soufan. Soufan was the agent who first questioned Abu Zubaydah. He did so by engaging in interrogation in the method used by American agents for centuries–a mixture of psychological chess and just plain winning over his confidence. These methods worked, and Zabaydah willing gave up a fair bit of actionable intelligence.

Here is a good description of the methods and the result:

“We kept him alive,” Soufan says. “It wasn’t easy, he couldn’t drink, he had a fever. I was holding ice to his lips.” Gaudin, for his part, cleaned Abu Zubaydah’s buttocks. During this time, Soufan and Gaudin also began the questioning; it became a “mental poker game.” At first, Abu Zubaydah even denied his identity, insisting that his name was “Daoud.”

But Soufan had poured through the bureau’s intelligence files and stunned Abu Zubaydah when he called him “Hani”—the nickname that his mother used for him. Soufan also showed him photos of a number of terror suspects who were high on the bureau’s priority list. Abu Zubaydah looked at one of them and said, “That’s Mukhtar.”

Now it was Soufan who was stunned.

The FBI had been trying to determine the identity of a mysterious “Mukhtar,” whom bin Laden kept referring to on a tape he made after 9/11. Now Soufan knew: Mukhtar was the man in the photo, terror fugitive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and, as Abu Zubaydah blurted out, ” the one behind 9/11.”

As the sessions continued, Soufan engaged Abu Zubaydah in long discussions about his world view, which included a tinge of socialism. After Abu Zubaydah railed one day about the influence of American imperialist corporations, he asked Soufan to get him a Coca-Cola—a request that prompted the two of them to laugh. Soon enough, Abu Zubaydah offered up more information—about the bizarre plans of a jihadist from Puerto Rico to set off a “dirty bomb” inside the country. This information led to Padilla’s arrest in Chicago by the FBI in early May.

Indeed, every bit of actionable good intel we got came from Soufan’s interrogation. Then, at some point, Zabaydah was handed over to the CIA, who relentlessly tortured him—he’s the guy that got waterboarded 83 times in August 2002. And the CIA got nonsense and goose chases.

Torture apologists love to present the Hollywood version of “The Terrorist”. Unyielding, fanatic, a ticking time bomb always in the pocket, and who would never willingly give over information. The truth is, anyone can be worked over psychologically, and in fact it’s the soft touch that has the most success. Even the Nazis understood this, as has every generation of American intelligence professionals and front line military mine since the founding of our republic. Torture, if you ask any of them, just does not work as well as the kind of non-illegal methods we’ve been refining for centuries.

But George W. Bush and Dick Cheney decided that they—not the military, not the intelligence agencies on the front lines every day, not history, not a mountain of applicable precedent covering the entire gambit of modern warfare and intelligence gathering—they and they alone had the inside track, and so they decided to slam on the brakes and do a 180, radically altering the foundations of the American interrogation system. And so, they got worse intelligence through a profoundly less moral means and with a massive blowback of unintended consequences the extent of which will be rippling for decades and which we likely won’t understand the full scope of for generations. The American system was fundamentally upended, and all because an “I’m not a cowboy but I play one on T.V.” dullard with delusions of grandeur and his five-times-deferred Vice President with a host of residual Cold War fantasies decided it must be so. When you step back and take in the full picture, the scope of the sheer smallness of the two men and their perspective is staggering, and combined with the sheer massiveness of the change they exerted is enough to horrify even the most cynical.