Bowden on Interrogations

Spencer Ackerman's trying an interesting experiment called "sources holler back" where he says that "from time to time I'll share with you the responses I get to my work from my sources, pending their approval, in the interest of providing a more in-depth airing of the issues I'm reporting on." Thus I note that in response to his piece on CIA interrogation policy, John Sullivan, longtime CIA polygrapher, complains:

In your article, you made no mention of Michael Koubi, the legendary Israeli interrogator. May I refer you to Mark Bowden’s interview, "The Truth About Torture," that appeared in the September 11, 2003 Atlantic Monthly and his related article, "The Dark Art of Interrogation," that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in October 2003. If I wanted to learn something about interrogating Arabs, Israel is the first place I would go.

Thanks to our newly-free archives, you can read "The Truth About Torture" and "The Dark Art of Interrogation" along with Bowden's more recent, torture-free interrogation piece "The Ploy".

Comments

Interesting comment from "Dark Art":

"Koubi says that only in rare instances did he use force to extract information from his subjects; in most cases it wasn't necessary."

So according to Koubi, most of his success wasn't due to waterboarding, needles under the fingers, beatings, cigarette burns, etc.

Posted by David | January 31, 2008 11:37 AM

Was Mr. Sullivan running the polygraph machine when Aldridge Ames was being tested?

Posted by SLC | January 31, 2008 11:49 AM

When I visited Tuol Sleng, two things became clear. One was that our techniques were mostly the same as what Pol Pot used. We just have a slightly expanded range of options. Pol Pot couldn't afford refrigeration, so he had no extreme cold techniques. The second thing that became clear was that our results were similar. Most of them are false; and most of them involve people lying about people they don't like. The reason for that is that most people you interrogate are actually innocent. But they must make up a story to stop the torture. So they do, and it involves some conspiracy about the guy with which they had a property dispute recently. And we base our strategies on that fanciful information. That's not a good thing.

Posted by fostert | January 31, 2008 11:56 AM

Well, look. Israel also has a long history of routinely slaughtering large numbers of POWs during most of its wars. So does this mean this is also a military policy America should now adopt?

Posted by RKU | January 31, 2008 11:57 AM

Israeli use of torture seems to go hand-in-hand with ethnic hatred between torturer and victim. That's surely been one of the motives behind our own embrace of torture.

"The Ploy" demonstrates how we nailed Zarqawi on the basis of good old-fashioned rapport-based interrogation. Some flattery, some lies, and boom!

Posted by Anderson | January 31, 2008 12:16 PM

Re RKU

Would Mr. RKU like to provide a source for this rather startling piece of information. Currently, there some 10,000 Arab prisoners currently being held in Israeli jails. In addition, several thousand Egyptian prisoners were taken in the 1956 and 1967 wars with no mention of wholesale killing of POWs. But maybe Mr. RKU thinks that the Israelis are going soft these days. After all, only some 4000 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing intifada since 2000. They have a long way to go to catch up to Hafaz Assad who killed 20,000+ in the City of Hama in two days.

Posted by SLC | January 31, 2008 12:18 PM

I thought most of Israeli legendary successes were in the operations arena; assassinations, Entebbe, Osirak, etc... I don't recall much publicity of famous human intelligence breakthroughs.

Posted by Scott Ferguson | January 31, 2008 12:22 PM

IIRC, Israelis also use the lure of sex with female intelligence agents as a means to gain intelligence from young Arab men, who are often hard-up due to their societal mores concerning sex.

Posted by Harry | January 31, 2008 1:04 PM

My understanding is that Israel relied on the fact that it was widely assumed that they tortured so that any given Israeli interrogator could essentially play "good cop" to the rumored bad cops. The idea is that any prisoner would be so relieved about not receiving the rumored Israeli torture, they'd be caught off guard and spill the beans. Then 'cause the prisoner would have been assumed to have been tortured, he wouldn't face recrimination from his compatriots (who might expect a quick, if not painless in a suicide bombing, martyrdom from their fellows but not maybe standing up to torture for extended periods).

One might wonder if the need of the US to be so cagey about what it is we actually do to our prisoners might be that we do want people to think we torture even if we don't. But I don't trust Bush & CO (why should we trust them? what did they do to earn our trust?) to be anything but mean spirited and to really just want to torture people (or have others do the torturing ... the upper echelons wouldn't want to get their hands dirty).

*

In the long run, though, even if Israel has been successful with interrogations, do we really want to emulate them? Have they really, in the long run been successful? They may win battles and wars, but they still haven't reached peace, which is what the citizens of Israel and of Palestine really deserve. Now, as you know, I'm not one to entirely blame Israel for the situation (there is more than enough blame to go around), but still ... do we really want to emulate a nation which has not managed to, whether or not its their fault per se, escape from a constant state of seige? Unless it is a never-ending war on terror that we, for various reasons (c.f. Michael Moore on why we "need" a new cold war), want ...

Posted by DAS | January 31, 2008 1:21 PM

Bowden's point about criminal vs. intelligence interrogations is an important one, as well. When you’re looking for a confession, you gear your questioning in that direction. When you want intel, you couldn’t really care less about whether the guy incriminates himself. you’re just trying to get him to drop the dime on his associates, preferably those higher than him. These two spheres obviously have substantial overlap, but as a mindset, it’s a completely different ballgame.

So according to Koubi, most of his success wasn't due to waterboarding, needles under the fingers, beatings, cigarette burns, etc.
Posted by David

Actually, in Israel there is no right to silence, so prisoners are hooded if they are uncoperative and sleep-deprived and slapped and from lightly to severely beaten until they do give answers.
The other huge thing the Israelis had for many decades is full access to and control over the Palestinian terrorist's family. And they were not above regularly threatening prisoners with possible repercussions meted out to the family for lack of uncooperation or not serving as informants - house bulldozed, family jobs all lost in the Occupied Lands, and even moving the whole family into a refugee camp. And Israel is far more interesting in killing or seriously maiming low-value targets than going through the bother of taking prisoners.

Posted by Chris Ford | January 31, 2008 3:02 PM

SLC:

Well admittedly I first read the details many, many years ago in some tiny fringe publication published by lunatic anti-Semites...I believe it was called "The New York Times". But since then, I seen them discussed elsewhere in sufficient places as to overcome any skepticism derived from such a totally tainted initial source.

And since our good friend SLC has endlessly called for mass extermination campaigns against tens of millions of innocent civilians in countries he doesn't like, I can't quite see why he's all that concerned about simply lining up and machine-gunning (relatively) smaller numbers of enemy POWs during time of war...

Posted by RKU | January 31, 2008 5:15 PM

Way, way too much of the discussion of U.S. torture proceeds from a shaky assumption: that the detention and "interrogation" is fundamentally for the purpose of gathering useful information.

For the most part, it's not. The purpose of torture and indefinite, secret, lawless detention is to produce fear and humiliation in its victims and to produce fear and doubt in others -- to remind them that they might be detained and tortured at any time.

Acceptance of the terms of discussion put forward by CIA employees means ignoring the decades of systematic CIA funding and application of research into torture. It means ignoring our government's careful, massive sponsorship of dictatorships and their torturing "security" services.

Spencer Ackerman has a job to do and has to cultivate CIA sources to do it. The rest of us, free of that professional deformation, should avoid buying into the bullshvt the agency is selling.

Posted by Nell | January 31, 2008 5:20 PM

To be blunt, the reason that torture is used is that it certainly does work. From the Atlanitic article
" A Nasty Business":

At the time, Colombo was on "code red" emergency status, because of intelligence that the LTTE was planning to embark on a campaign of bombing public gathering places and other civilian targets. Thomas's unit had apprehended three terrorists who, it suspected, had recently planted somewhere in the city a bomb that was then ticking away, the minutes counting down to catastrophe. The three men were brought before Thomas. He asked them where the bomb was. The terrorists—highly dedicated and steeled to resist interrogation—remained silent. Thomas asked the question again, advising them that if they did not tell him what he wanted to know, he would kill them. They were unmoved. So Thomas took his pistol from his gun belt, pointed it at the forehead of one of them, and shot him dead. The other two, he said, talked immediately; the bomb, which had been placed in a crowded railway station and set to explode during the evening rush hour, was found and defused, and countless lives were saved.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200201/hoffman

This is a real life example of the so called " ticking bomb" scenario that Matt and other liberals confidently say never happens in real life.
There are good moral arguments to be made against torture, but " it doesn't work" isn't really one of them.

Posted by stonetools | January 31, 2008 6:58 PM

The case cited above by stonetools perfectly illustrates what I've been saying from day one on this issue.

That was NOT "torture" - that was execution on pain of failure to talk.

The threat of immediate death WILL work - most of the time. The case of Dunn in the linked articles also illustrates the point. He was prepared to talk - to a significant degree - to avoid being executed. That illustrates my point again. But he would not reveal serious secrets even when directly threatened with a gun to his head. But when the interrogator saw that, he did not execute the man. There was no point.

Killing someone to get information from someone else does work. It's not torture, however. Torture would never have worked in the situation stonetools refers to, because there would have been no time to break down the dedicated terrorists. So in reality the case cited operates powerfully AGAINST the notion that "torture works".

Also, NOTHING in the linked articles establishes that the technigues used by the Israeli interrogator could not have been replaced by the technigues used by the police interrogator. This is my other primary point I have been making since day one - that torture techniques CANNOT and HAVE NOT been established as being BETTER in ANY situation than OTHER techniques.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | February 1, 2008 12:04 AM