Word: cia
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...easy to forget that when the U.S. began interrogating al-Qaeda operatives in 2002, the CIA had no idea what it was doing. The last time the agency had been charged with conducting hostile interrogations was during the Vietnam era, and most of those officers were long retired. The wisdom inside the CIA has always been that the best intelligence is obtained through persuasion rather than coercion. New CIA recruits have even been counseled against using blackmail because the information it produced couldn't be relied...
...When the CIA was asked to resume hostile interrogations after Sept. 11, some agency leaders were dead set against it, arguing that the military was better equipped for the task. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA. We now know that Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract...
Obama apparently spent weeks debating the merits of releasing the documents and was lobbied by CIA Director Leon Panetta to keep them classified. In the end, the case for transparency was too great. The harsh tactics--isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding--not only had been widely reported, but much of it was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations of U.S. troops during the Korean War. Anyone who wanted to could find it via Google for years...
...crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can't be relied on to produce more than false confessions--because people will say anything to make the pain stop. This is the history that Bush officials chose to ignore. I asked a former CIA officer privy to the decision-making that led to the waterboarding of al-Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah whether he thought the abusive tactics worked. His answer: to a degree. From the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, Mohammed and other al-Qaeda prisoners, the CIA learned a lot more than it knew before about...
...declassified Justice Department memos, former CIA director Michael Hayden asserts that it was only after the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah that authorities learned about Ramzi Binalshibh, a midlevel al-Qaeda member who helped coordinate the Sept. 11 attacks. The memos also say it was because of the waterboarding of Mohammed that U.S. intelligence learned about a "second wave" of attacks planned for after Sept. 11. Was there truly another 9/11 in the works? Maybe. Or maybe Mohammed made it up to stop the waterboarding...