A Dubious C.I.A. Shortcut - Zelikow

[groovedaddy]

(note - I probably don't need to tell DUers to take this with a grain of salt, but just in case...gd)

A Dubious C.I.A. Shortcut

GOOD intelligence can sometimes be gained by tormenting captives beyond endurance. It is an old, old technique, refined during the 20th century by science — and pseudo-science. By 1949 George Orwell could envision the shrewdly calibrated torments that induced his protagonist in “1984” to love Big Brother. Such methods worked all too well, Orwell feared. The United States experimented in the 1950s and 1960s with novel ways of extracting information. But, until 2002, it never considered the kind of systematic and truly Orwellian C.I.A. program that has now been revealed. Yet the question lingers: Do such methods really work? Don’t we need something like this?

The C.I.A. program did generate a huge volume of intelligence material. Many of these interrogation reports did contain valuable information. After all, the C.I.A. had exclusive custody of many of the most important Qaeda captives for years. Any of the flow from that river would be theirs. Agency officials thus wrote memos recounting plots prevented and people captured.

Yet the C.I.A.’s claims that its methods produced actionable information can also be misleading. Former Vice President Dick Cheney says he would like all of the agency’s defenses of its interrogation program declassified. But that would declassify only one side of the intelligence argument. Each of these accounts of disrupted plots and captured terrorists has a back story, full of lore and arguments about who developed which lead and whose sources proved out.

A professional evaluation of the C.I.A.’s claims would have to examine these cases to sift and weigh the contributions. The Senate Intelligence Committee is embarking on an important effort to sort out the claims and counterclaims.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/opinion/24zelikow.html?th&emc=th