Former FBI agent calls waterboarding counterproductive
 

Posted: 12:35 PM ET
WASHINGTON (CNN) — The contentious debate over so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" took center stage on Capitol Hill Wednesday as a former FBI agent involved in the questioning of terror suspects testified that such techniques — including waterboarding — are ineffective.

Ali Soufan, an FBI special agent from 1997 to 2005, told members of a key Senate Judiciary subcommittee that such "techniques, from an operational perspective, are ineffective, slow and unreliable, and harmful to our efforts to defeat al Qaeda."

His remarks followed heated exchanges between committee members with sharply differing views on both the value of the techniques and the purpose of the hearing itself.

Soufan, who was involved in the interrogation of CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah, took issue with former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has argued that enhanced interrogation techniques helped the government acquire intelligence necessary to prevent further attacks after September 11, 2001.

The techniques, which were approved by the Bush administration, are considered torture by many critics.

"From my experience — and I speak as someone who has personally interrogated many terrorists and elicited important actionable intelligence — I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as the 'enhanced interrogation techniques,'" Soufan noted in his written statement.

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This isn't really news.

I still think it's bull**** that our people in the military have to do time while the CIA agents who did the same thing don't. They should all go to prison for a long time.

This is the United States of America and we don't torture. I don't take the simple view on too many issues, but this is one that (as I've learned more about it) I think should be a very simple analysis.

Water is wet.

Well, I mean, I have absolutely no doubt that waterboarding did indeed reveal pertinent and usable information about threats to national security while in use during the Bush regime, at least at some point . . . Chaney might be a nutjob, but he's not an idiot, and his push is undoubtedly backed by 'facts' of some sort. The sheer amount of torture means they probably got something, even if only by the law of large numbers.

The real issue is whether acquiring this information was worth the rest - the deterioration of core American/Constitutional values, the bad publicity/face toward the radical Muslim world, steeling the resolve of enemy combatants, etc., and much like Kevin, I openly doubt the gains were worth it.

So yeah - I don't think it's nearly as simple as "water is wet", and in that vein it feels counterproductive for this FBI agent to give a ringing dismissal (on what appear to be very valid grounds) while still leaving the door open for Chaney et al. to smash a foot in with specific instances of success. This is really why idiots think that "enemies of America" deserve torture etc. - the spin is better controlled by the other side.

More simply put: "It doesn't work" is an intellectual argument, not an intuitive argument, and for idiots (who are the people we need to actually convince) it is simply rebutted by even a single instance of it "working."

I'm no international law or international human rights expert, but I'm not sure it's even as simple as you guys are making it. The US has been using torture for some time (KUBARK and the "Phoenix Program" are the first instances that comes to mind, although both were pre-Convention Against Torture).

I'm not saying I'm for torture...but, to be perfectly honest, I can understand the arguments for it in certain circumstances, and I know a few reasonably intelligent people (i.e. people who aren't idiots) who feel the same way.

At the end of the day, I don't know. I've never been in the military, never had to extract information from someone, and have never had to make these choices of whether or not to use these tactics. I do, however, suspect that one of the reasons we'll never see anyone from the Bush administration put on trial is because this administration, and future administrations, would endorse some methodology that could qualify as torture.

No one is talking about whether it was illegal, just whether it was effective, and even if it was effective, whether it was worth the consequence of lowered standing in the international community and a loss of moral authority to accomplish our global goals.

No one of consequence in the United States is or really seems to be particularly concerned about human rights violations or anything of that nature. We do not submit the jurisdiction of the ICC and our own courts and justice department don't seem to be interested in enforcing whatever legal obligations we have under those Conventions/treaties.

Personally, I'd like to see people prosecuted an made examples of. I think the U.S. should still aspire to be Reagan's "shining city on a hill." To that end, I'd love to see serious examples made out of these people, soldier and CIA agent alike. It's not going to happen and my wish here is probably 'out there' enough to qualify me as a raving moonbat on this subject. But there it is.

To be very clear, the "idiots" portion was simply in reference to the legion majority of torture proponents who promote it as just punishment for going "against America" in some way. Seriously, read any national paper's comments section on related stories, and you'll see tons of "DID THE TERRORISTS CARE ABOUT 2,000 PEOPLE ON 9/11?"-style justifications.

If reasonable people want to argue its situational effectiveness (which I've ceded) as indicative of its usefulness of a tactic, that's a completely different conversation - but these reasonable people are able to convince the throng very easily if the other side's reasonable arguments deny any situational effectiveness. Which was my main point.

This is the way I think about it, as far as the "water is wet = waterboarding is counterproductive" thing.

Most of the "information" given through torture is unreliable. People that aren't resistant to torture are going to tell you what they think you want to hear, whether or not it's true. Most people that aren't resistant to torture don't know what you want to know anyway. People that are resistant to torture are either going to tell you nothing, lies, or you're going to have to torture them for a long time to get any actionable intelligence.

That's where I get my "water is wet" argument. Torture is not an effective method of gaining actionable intelligence.

I'm a little confused by the two parts I've put in bold. Do you mean no one is talking about the legality, but they should be in the first part?

I think the overall effectiveness is going to be impossible to actually evaluate. I think KSigRC is right about how arguments are made to the general population, and so I think the initial linked story is pretty meaningless because it's easy to refute using a similar standard of evidence: this guy says it doesn't work, but this guy says it does, etc.

I agree with Kevin that even if it "works," if it were solely up to me, the US wouldn't use it?*, but I find Pelosi's BS and the general political spin that only terrible Republicans like Cheney out of pure concentrated evilness would do such a thing sort of wearing me down on how much I really care about discussing this practice.

*It's not about what the person being interrogated deserves.

I was commenting that up to that point, the issue was the effectiveness of it, not whether anything was illegal.

I do think that our soldiers and the CIA agents should be treated exactly the same insofar as the 'justice' response to this issue.

I don't think there should be retro-active investigations of this for incidences occurring 2002-2009 of the techniques that were addressed in the memos or the briefings as "enhanced interrogation" or whatever it was called other than torture. I think we clarify the policy and we go forward and prosecute anyone who uses the techniques in the future. If permission is sought for techniques and given, I don't think the people below that level in the chain of command should be penalized for using them. And unless it can actually be demonstrated that the people seeking clarification misrepresented the techniques they knew to be illegal, I don't think they should be prosecuted either.

I also hope that members of congress who think that claiming to be duped is a good strategy for leadership will be held accountable for their own stupidity/incompetence or deceit by the voting public, but I think I'm probably dreaming.

I think this is demonstrably false, which is exactly my point.

It's easy to demonstrate that torture "works" in very limited scenarios - of course, every once in a while it will produce sound information. It's also easy to "prove" that it is wholly ineffective - just show the intelligence garnered from waterboarding then compare it to the ill will (which is rampant) garnered from violating our Constitutional guarantees. There's nearly no chance torture was worth it - if it were, wouldn't we have heard about all the apocalyptic terrorism prevented by Bush? Come on.

The danger is that it's easy to say "TORTURE WORKS! IT DID HERE SPECIFICALLY!" and harder to say ". . . but we've fucked ourselves in the long-term, and acted on dozens of unactionable tips based on shitty intelligence." Which makes dumb people luuuuuurve torture, even though it's absolutely the most un-American thing possible.

What's the "this" refer to in your first sentence? My whole previous post or something more specific?

Is it the idea that you'd use the same standard of evidence?

Personally, I think it's really hard to do what you claim is easy in terms of comparing intelligence gathered to ill will created, but whatever. I agree that using torture isn't likely to be worth it overall, meaning when you consider the negative effects that it has beyond whether it "works" in terms of intelligence gathering or not.

But I still think the effectiveness in terms of intelligence is hard to evaluate. How can you ever say what would have happened had we not gotten the intelligence using a particular means? Even when the intelligence is "good," what percentage of plans would have yielded actual attacks? What constitutes preventing an attack? What percentage of attacks fail simply because the people planning them think the plan has been compromised? I've got no idea, and I have no idea how you would measure it. In the whole intelligence game, how can you evaluate what contributed to something that didn't happen?

I can conceive of very few scenarios when I think torture could be acceptable, and I don't think the long term, systematic use we've been talking about lately would fall into any of them. I'm not 100% sure that waterboarding is torture, but I don't think it's a good idea to use it.

ETA: not that this post isn't long enough, but I realize I was reading and expressing myself poorly. I see that I suggested that it was too hard to measure and evaluate every possible bad outcome of torture, which is one pretty likely way to interpret "overall effectiveness," but wasn't what I meant. I don't really think that the negative effects of using torture are immeasurable or even hard to grasp, but, you're right that they're a more complicated sell than just "torturing this horrible person allowed us to keep America safe."

I simply think that it's almost impossible to evaluate the effectiveness of the intelligence we gather in its own right. I think we get truthful information sometimes, but I think it's hard to say what it's worth.

i think it should be a last resort. but an option nonetheless. the moral high ground is easy to be on when everyone is playing by the same rules. but they're not playing by the same rules. in this instance, the end DOES justify the means.

a "enemy of the US" whether a country or not will torture and do anything to our people and that doesn't hinge on whether or not we torture.

In just about every war the U.S. has fought in recent history, we've faced an enemy who didn't feel itself to be constrained by the rules of war, the Geneva Conventions, etc.

In each of those cases until recently, the U.S. has treated its prisoners with relative dignity and care.

Allow an anecdotal example of where this has been experienced (and I think I've shared this before on here). My chapter initiated a kid who was a Japanese student -- President of the school's international student body, etc. He came to the U.S. because his grandfather really loved the United States. This gentleman's grandfather fought in WWII and was caught by U.S. forces. Rather than being subjected to the horrible conditions he expected as a P.O.W., he was placed in a P.O.W. camp in the United States where he was treated extremely well. He came to love the United States, what we stand for (stood for?), etc. He imparted this admiration on his children and grandchildren. Treating P.O.W.s well shows these other countries what the U.S. stands for pays dividends down the road.