NYT had an absolute must-read over the weekend. Here's an excerpt designed to convince you to read the whole thing:
In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda's engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called "knuckledraggers."Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers.
A canny opponent, Mr. Mohammed mixed disinformation and braggadocio with details of plots, past and planned. Eventually, he grew loquacious. "They'd have long talks about religion," comparing notes on Islam and Mr. Martinez's Catholicism, one C.I.A. officer recalled. And, the officer added, there was one other detail no one could have predicted: "He wrote poems to Deuce's wife."
Mr. Martinez, who by then had interrogated at least three other high-level prisoners, would bring Mr. Mohammed snacks, usually dates. He would listen to Mr. Mohammed's despair over the likelihood that he would never see his children again and to his catalog of complaints about his accommodations.
"He wanted a view," the C.I.A. officer recalled.
The story of Mr. Martinez's role in the C.I.A.'s interrogation program, including his contribution to the first capture of a major figure in Al Qaeda, provides the closest look to date beneath the blanket of secrecy that hides the program from terrorists and from critics who accuse the agency of torture.
Beyond the interrogator's successes, this account includes new details on the campaign against Al Qaeda, including the text message that led to Mr. Mohammed's capture, the reason the C.I.A. believed his claim that he was the murderer of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the separate teams at the C.I.A.'s secret prisons of those who meted out the agony and those who asked the questions.
In the Hollywood cliché of Fox's "24," a torturer shouts questions at a bound terrorist while inflicting excruciating pain. The C.I.A. program worked differently. A paramilitary team put on the pressure, using cold temperatures, sleeplessness, pain and fear to force a prisoner to talk. When the prisoner signaled assent, the tormenters stepped aside. After a break that could be a day or even longer, Mr. Martinez or another interrogator took up the questioning.
Mr. Martinez's success at building a rapport with the most ruthless of terrorists goes to the heart of the interrogation debate. Did it suggest that traditional methods alone might have obtained the same information or more? Or did Mr. Mohammed talk so expansively because he feared more of the brutal treatment he had already endured?
Stories like this remind us of the power of newspapers like the NYT. Blogging is wonderful, but even the best muckraking blogs have nowhere near the resources necessary to do a story like this.
As for the story itself, I come away from it oddly comforted. For reasons I will never understand (fear and panic are excuses, not reasons), we became everything we once fought to oppose. Throughout Eastern Europe and Asia, we built and operated a series of secret detention centers, facilities where prisoners were interrogated and at times tortured. The torture regimes were modeled explicitly after programs run by our cold-war adversaries, and they were established in contravention of both US law and tradition.
But in the end it appears that we rediscovered something we already knew: in addition to being immoral and illegal, these methods simply don't work. At least that's the sense I get reading between the lines of this piece. It is true: because everything about these programs has been classified, we cannot know for sure. But sections like this leave me very cautiously hopeful for our future:
John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer who was the first to question Abu Zubaydah, expressed such conflicted views when he spoke publicly to ABC News and other news organizations late last year. In a December interview with The Times, before being cautioned by the C.I.A. not to discuss classified matters, Mr. Kiriakou, who was not present for the waterboarding but read the resulting intelligence reports, said he had been told that Abu Zubaydah became compliant after 35 seconds of the water treatment.
"It was like flipping a switch," Mr. Kiriakou said of the shift from resistance to cooperation. He said he thought such "desperate measures" were justified in the "desperate time" in 2002 when another attack seemed imminent. But on reflection, he said, he had concluded that waterboarding was torture and should not be permitted. "We Americans are better than that," he said.
...Mr. Mohammed met his captors at first with cocky defiance, telling one veteran C.I.A. officer, a former Pakistan station chief, that he would talk only when he got to New York and was assigned a lawyer -- the experience of his nephew and partner in terrorism, Ramzi Yousef, after Mr. Yousef's arrest in 1995.
But the rules had changed, and the tough treatment began shortly after Mr. Mohammed was delivered to Poland. By several accounts, he proved especially resistant, chanting from the Koran, doling out innocuous information or offering obvious fabrications. The Times reported last year that the intensity of his treatment -- various harsh techniques, including waterboarding, used about 100 times over a period of two weeks -- prompted worries that officers might have crossed the boundary into illegal torture.His cooperation came in fits and starts, and interrogators said they believed at times that he gave them disinformation. But he talked most freely to Mr. Martinez.
An obvious chasm separated these enemies -- the interrogator and the prisoner. But Mr. Martinez shared a few attributes with his adversary that he could exploit as he sought his secrets. They were close in age, approaching 40; they had attended public universities in the American South (Mr. Mohammed had studied engineering at North Carolina A&T); they were both religious; and they were both fathers.
Mr. Mohammed, according to one former C.I.A. officer briefed on the sessions, "would go through these emotional cycles."
"He'd be chatty, almost friendly," the officer added. "He liked to debate. He got to the stage where he'd draw parallels between Christianity and Islam and say, 'Can't we get along?' "
By this account, Mr. Martinez would reply to the man who had overseen the killing of nearly 3,000 people: "Isn't it a little late for that?"
At other times, the C.I.A. officer said, Mr. Mohammed would grow depressed, complaining about being separated from his family and ranting about his cell or his food -- a common theme for other prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah, who protested when the flavor of his Ensure nutrition drink was changed.
Sometimes Mr. Mohammed wrote letters to the Red Cross or to President Bush with his demands; the letters went to C.I.A. psychologists for analysis.
And there were the poetic tributes to Mr. Martinez's wife, scribbled in Mr. Mohammed's ungrammatical English and intended as a show of respect for his interrogator, according to a colleague who heard Mr. Martinez's account.
But as time passed, Mr. Mohammed provided more and more detail on Al Qaeda's structure, its past plots and its aspirations. When he sometimes sought to mislead, interrogators often took his claims immediately to other Qaeda prisoners at the Polish compound to verify the information.
The intelligence riches ultimately gleaned from Mr. Mohammed were reflected in the report of the national 9/11 commission, whose footnotes credit his interrogations 60 times for facts about Al Qaeda and its plotting -- while also occasionally noting assertions by him that were "not credible."
Given that all of the information you seek is locked inside the mind of another human being, and given that you want to get as much of that information as you possibly can, it should be obvious that cooperative approaches are going to find the most success. Remember: these people are already in captivity, and they are fully aware that they aren't ever likely to go free again. They will never see their families, their children, their friends, or their homelands again. They already know they are facing a lifetime of captivity. Faced with that awful and near endless prospect, most people - yes, even evil ones! - are going to try and make the best of a bad situation. And that's what gives the softer interrogation techniques their power.
We can win this war the right way, or we can lose ourselves and win it the wrong way. Those are the options.
