8/25/09

Yesterday brought more clarity on the failed interrogation and detention policies of the Bush administration—including new insight into the torture and abuse that permeated their prosecution of the “War on Terror.” But it also brought forward important reforms from the Obama administration: looking at best practices from professional interrogators in the FBI, CIA and elsewhere to create policies that will make America more secure and prevent abuses. The newly announced High-Value Interrogation Group goes a long way in dispensing with the fog of law and general confusion that led to abuse and diminished our ability to protect Americans and bring terrorists to justice. By creating a clear framework for the interrogation of terror suspects with direct oversight from the White House, the Obama administration has undone one of the greatest failures of the Bush administration – and given our military, intelligence a law enforcement officials the tools they need to do their jobs effectively and confidently. 

The released documents from the Justice Department fail to bear out Cheney’s claim that torture saved American lives, refuting a major defensive talking point from Bush administration supporters. By restoring the rule of law to interrogations, mounting an investigation into how interrogations were conducted, and working to ensure that we gather reliable intelligence from high value targets through legal means, the Obama administration is repairing and restoring credibility to our intelligence apparatus while unraveling the legal and national security mess left from the Bush administration. Reversing these policies and shedding sunlight on their negative effects is the best approach available to ensure that the mistakes of the past eight years are not repeated again and reverse their consequences in whatever ways we can. 

Obama administration creates a new interrogation regime that builds on best practices and amounts to a sharp break from failed Bush administration policies.  The Washington Post reported that “President Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects, part of a broader effort to revamp U.S. policy on detention and interrogation, senior administration officials said Sunday.”  White House Spokesperson Bill Burton elaborated on the unit, saying “The president, at the consensus recommendation of his inter-agency task force on interrogations and detainees did put in place a new group, the High-Value Interrogation Group, which will be housed at the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigations],” adding that the unit “will bring together all the different elements of the intelligence community to get the best intelligence possible.” Administration officials interviewed by the Voice of America stated that “the CIA will continue to take part in interrogations, but that an FBI official will direct the effort with oversight by the National Security Council, which reports directly to the president.”  According to the Washington Post, “members of the new interrogation unit will have the authority to travel around the world to talk to suspects and will be trained to handle certain high-interest people, such as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Linguists and cultural and interrogation specialists will be assigned to the group and will have ‘some division of responsibility’ regarding types of detainees, a senior administration official said. Most of the group's members will work there full time, although they will have part-time support from the FBI.” 

Time.com Intelligence Columnist and former CIA officer Bob Baer elaborated on the need to shift responsibility for interrogations away from the CIA, a task the agency was not prepared to perform following 9/11.  According to Baer, “[t]he CIA does not specialize in the interrogation of war prisoners.”  Baer added that “the FBI has done a very good job after 9/11.  Its interrogators used normal interrogation techniques, got a lot of information, and I think we’re going to see in the CIA report that we didn’t get much out of the abusive interrogations.” [Washington Post, 8/24/09. VOA, 8/24/09. Time.com Intelligence Columnist Bob Baer, 8/24/09]

The release of the documents further confirms professional interrogators’ insistence that  Cheney is wrong and torture doesn’t work. Yesterday, in response to the release of previously classified documents and the announcement that a prosecutor will look into Bush-era interrogation practices, former Vice President Cheney said that he has “doubts about this administration’s ability to be responsible for our nation’s security.” The former vice president has claimed in the past that the documents released yesterday bear out his case: “I haven't talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw, that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country... I've now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was.”

However, in early analysis of the new documents, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent says that, “strikingly, they provide little evidence for Cheney’s claims that the ‘enhanced interrogation’ program run by the CIA provided valuable information. In fact, throughout both documents, many passages — though several are incomplete and circumstantial, actually suggest the opposite of Cheney’s contention: that non-abusive techniques actually helped elicit some of the most important information the documents cite in defending the value of the CIA’s interrogations.” This reinforces what professional interrogators have previously said.  This May, Ali Soufan, the former FBI terrorist interrogator who through traditional interrogation methods on Abu Zubaydah was able to ascertain that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was the 9/11 mastermind, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that, “from an operational perspective, are slow, ineffective, unreliable, and harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaida.” [Vice President Richard Cheney, Politico, 8/25/09. Richard Cheney, FOX News 4/20/09. Washington Independent, 8/24/09. Ali Soufan, 5/13/09]

The worst practices documented in the Inspector General’s report emerged out of a broader culture of abuse encouraged by “strained legal reasoning” and the indifference of senior Bush administration officials.  Former Vice President “Cheney said those who carried out the interrogations ‘deserve our gratitude’ and do not deserve ‘to be the targets of political investigations or prosecutions,’” writes the AP.  However, it was his administration’s poor leadership that led to these abuses.  The Washington Post reported this morning that “A partially declassified CIA report released Monday by the Obama administration describes the early implementation of the agency's interrogation program in 2002 and 2003 as ad hoc and poorly supervised, leading to the use of ‘unauthorized, improvised, inhumane and undocumented’ techniques.” In fact the CIA Inspector General at the time “[John] Helgerson, however, said in an e-mailed comment on Monday that he undertook the study in part because many CIA employees involved in or aware of the program ‘expressed to me personally their feelings that what the Agency was doing was fundamentally inconsistent with long-established US Government policy and with American values, and was based on strained legal reasoning.’”

The Senate Armed Services Committee noted last December that the use of abusive interrogation methods stemmed from senior Bush administration officials.  A report released by Senators Carl Levin (D) and John McCain (R), says "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own... The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

Attorney General Holder’s decision to launch a preliminary review of how interrogations were conducted will help draw a clear line under past policies and protect the men and women in our intelligence agencies.  Holder said, “The men and women in our intelligence community perform an incredibly important service to our nation, and they often do so under difficult and dangerous circumstances.  They deserve our respect and gratitude for the work they do.  Further, they need to be protected from legal jeopardy when they act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance.”

[Vice President Richard Cheney, Associate Press, 8/25/09. Washington Post, 8/25/09. Washington Post, 8/25/09. Senate Armed Services Committee, 12/08, Eric Holder, 8/24/09]

What We’re Reading

While officials in Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s cabinet believe Karzai won last week’s elections convincingly, preliminary results show a split vote with the main challenger, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Various claims of fraud continue to be raised.

Pakistan continues its crackdown on militants, with a recently announced arrest of 13 militants.

Bombings continue in Iraq, with 20 Iraqis killed in two bus bombings. Al Qaeda claims responsibility for previous bombings that killed over 100 people last week.

Reform presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi publishes accounts of rape of political prisoners in Iranian prisons following the disputed presidential elections in June.

Fury in Britain and the United States continues over the early release of the Lockerbie bomber. However, the United States has limited options.

North and South Korea discuss an initiative to unify families separated by the Korean War, while South Korea launches its first rocket into space.

China surpasses the United States in the production of solar panel technology.

The Malaysian government postpones its strict enforcement of Islamic law against a woman who drank a beer in a hotel lobby.

South Africa embraces the opportunity to improve the implementation of its public health policy following a series of critical reports.

As the population grows dramatically in the Philippines, the government is running of out of money and space to educate all of its children.

Commentary of the Day

Bob Herbert discusses the incongruity of Obama’s characterization of Afghanistan as a war of necessity while maintaining an all-volunteer army that uses only a fraction of the US population to fight our wars of need.

David Ignatius argues that Iranian influence in Iraq’s national intelligence service is exacerbating sectarian differences and reducing managerial integrity.

An Afghan witness describes how threats of Taliban intimidation during the recent Afghan presidential election were exploited by election officials to commit fraud in favor of incumbent Hamid Karzai.

Michael Lynch elucidates why the concept of “peak oil” is a poor frame by which to analyze our national energy policy.