The omniscient “Counter Terrorist Unit” on the television hit
“24” is comprised of people who are so consumed with their petty
personal problems that they would — were they ever to bump up
against reality — fail in every task. In one recent episode the
hero forced a suspect to disclose information on an ongoing
terrorist attack by shooting him in the knee. Forget Jack Bauer and
his idiot boss. Our military and civilian interrogators are
apparently shunning tough tactics in an over-reaction to last
year’s highly-publicized cases of prisoner abuse. We need to drink
a large dose of reality and recalibrate the methods we use to
interrogate terrorist prisoners. That reality compels us to choose
between doing everything our law allows and failing to get
time-sensitive intelligence that can save American lives.
There are three kinds of prisoners we are taking in the war
against terrorists and the nations that support them. None — with
the exception of those, like the thousands of Iraqis we captured
and released — are POWs under the Geneva Conventions. Some are
innocents detained in error. Our guys aren’t perfect, and sometimes
they’re going to crash into the wrong room, and take the wrong
prisoners. Such errors are both inevitable, and permissible. Our
people have to be confident that they won’t be subjected to
unreasonable second-guessing in these operations.
The second kind of prisoner is the terrorist who is not believed
to have information that is time sensitive. He can be interrogated
over days, weeks and months, and subjected to measures that will
break down his resistance. When the interrogation is over, he can
be tried and punished. But what about the third type of prisoner?
What about the man or woman who is believed to be a terrorist and
knows information that is time-sensitive? Just how far should we go
to compel them to tell us what they know?
Wayne Simmons is a big, affable guy who radiates joy at being
alive. Which is understandable, given the fact that he was an
undercover CIA operative for more than two decades, and — as he
tells it — had a 9mm pistol pressed to his head so many times that
he almost became blasé about it. He’s been on both ends of
some very tough interrogations, and he, like many professionals, is
worried that the CIA isn’t doing what clearly needs to be done with
terrorist suspects.
A couple of weeks ago, Fox News interviewed ex-CIA agent Lindsey
Moran, a supposed interrogation expert. A thoroughly exasperated
Wayne Simmons sent me an e-mail about it. Part of the message said,
“…it was very frustrating listening to an individual who
clearly has NO experience with interrogation under real conditions
and NONE with terrorists. It was so apparent that she was soft, by
her eyes, voice, answers and mannerisms, that I cringed with
embarrassment for her naiveté. Her statement that harsh
interrogation of terrorists doesn’t work flies in the face of not
only my personal experience but also of what our interrogators are
telling us today in Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Simmons — like all of us — abhors torture. But that doesn’t
mean we can’t do things to terrorist prisoners that we don’t do to
people we intend to prosecute in federal court. “If there are
people we know, or strongly believe, are terrorists, then we can
approach this from a long-term interrogation standpoint, as opposed
to ‘let’s take out the sledge hammer and beat him into the ground.”
When we really believe there is time-sensitive information of great
importance in someone’s head, we need to be able to take
interrogation to the next level. That, too, says Simmons, “doesn’t
mean taking a sledge hammer to the ‘hard drive.’”
Simmons says these prisoners have to be taken beyond their “zone
of comfort.” We know, from captured al-Qaeda training manuals, that
al-Q terrorists were trained in the limits of American
interrogation. Simmons said, “…we know that in some
instances, some of our interrogators have been bright enough to
take it past the level the terrorists thought they were allowed to
go.” When you do that, you shatter the defensive wall in the mind
of a terrorist. The interrogator takes control of the situation
away from the prisoner. “And the only way that you will get through
to these people is sometimes to make them very, very uncomfortable.
That does not mean the bamboo shoots nonsense.…The moment
pain is brought into the equation, he then says ‘oh, my god,
everything that I’ve been told must be wrong.’” Inflicting pain is
not the solution: breaking down the prisoner’s defenses is. Some
level of rough treatment, manipulation of the prisoner’s body clock
and psychotropic drugs are all legal, and should not be out of
bounds. And the prisoner can’t be allowed to know just where the
bounds lie.
To solve the problem, Simmons proposes creating a new covert
special unit within the CIA. Its existence would never be
disclosed, nor would the identity of its members. CIA civilians,
given covert status, could operate confidently that their
identities — and thus their families — would be protected. The
President, by the kind of secret decision directive that authorizes
other covert operations, can create such a unit. In the directive,
he should limit the interrogations to exclude torture as it is
defined by U.S. law and the portions of the International
Convention Against Torture which the U.S. has signed. Everything
else — everything — would be permitted.
Such a “special interrogation squad” would have global reach,
and be used to interrogate the hard case terrorist suspects both in
long-term and time-sensitive interrogations. There are obvious
risks in this approach, not the least of which is that we have to
trust the CIA to largely police itself and prevent and punish
torture. Can they do it? Perhaps. Can we afford to not let them
try? There are a lot of unpleasant realities in this war. Harsh
interrogations — stopping short of torture — should occur
whenever necessary. Let’s get on with it.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than
You Think (Regnery Publishing).
