Word: qaeda
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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...
...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 the group's communications, its use of safe houses and codes, and the outlines...
...asked the former CIA officer the question that former Vice President Dick Cheney wants more of a focus on these days - whether the abusive interrogations worked. To a degree, he said. Through the course of the interrogations of Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda prisoners the CIA learned a lot more than it knew before about al-Qaeda communications, its use of safe houses, codes, and the way al-Qaeda looks at the world. In other words, pretty much all low-level stuff. He said there were no dramatic confessions he knew of, the kind we see virtually every...
...Last Sunday former CIA Director Michael Hayden argued that abusive interrogations do indeed work. He cited the arrest of a mid-level al-Qaeda member who helped coordinate 9/11, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. According to Hayden, Abu Zubaydah gave up the name after being waterboarded. This may be true, but the deeper question is, Was it worth the candle? Isn't all of the international condemnation, not to mention the demoralization of the CIA, too high a price to pay for the arrest of a mid-level al-Qaeda operative? (See pictures of the aftermath of Abu Ghraib...
...Critics of such claims argue that what was thwarted were merely al-Qaeda fantasies. "Torture gets people to talk - no question," says a former senior U.S. national security official involved in such matters. "They talk and talk and talk, until you stop hurting them. But in every instance, bar none, you later discover that they've just been lying or exaggerating, or telling you what they think you want to hear." In fact, a 1963 CIA interrogation manual warned that those resisting questioning "are likely to become intractable if made to endure pain" or generate "false, concocted as a means...