While some would cite this NYT story as evidence that
waterboarding and other forms of harsh interrogation methods are
unnecessary, because it features a soft-spoken, non-Arabic speaking
interrogator Duce Martinez getting terrorists Abu Zubaydah and
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to cooperate by earning their trust, it is
important to note that Martinez was able to play "good cop" only
after the captive terrorists were already
subjected to waterboarding.
The article says that the new techniques were used only if
"officers believed the prisoner was holding out" and "[t]he tough
treatment would halt as soon as the prisoner expressed a desire to
talk. Then the interrogator would be brought in."
Zubaydah cracked within 35 seconds of waterboarding according to
the article, but KSM "proved especially resistant, chanting from
the Koran, doling out innocuous information or offering obvious
fabrications."
KSM was subjected to "various harsh techniques, including
waterboarding, used about 100 times over a period of two weeks,"
and cooperated on and off, but mostly with Martinez.
But here's what we got out of it, according to the article:
By then, whether it was a result of a fear of
waterboarding, the patient trust-building mastered by Mr. Martinez
or the demoralizing effects of isolation, Mr. Mohammed and some
other prisoners had become quite compliant. In fact, according to
several officials, they had become a sort of terrorist focus group,
advising their captors on their fellow extremists' goals, ideology
and tradecraft.
Asked, for example, how he would smuggle explosives
into the United States, Mr. Mohammed told C.I.A officers that he
might send a shipping container from Japan loaded with personal
computers, half of them packed with bomb materials, according to a
foreign official briefed on the episode.
"It was to understand the mind of a terrorist -- how
a terrorist would do certain things," the foreign official said of
the discussions of hypothetical attacks. Thus did the architect of
9/11 become, in effect, a counterterrorism adviser to the American
government he professed to despise.
I've long been torn on the use of waterboarding or other forms
of harsh interrogation, or torture, or however else you choose to
describe it. I have no moral qualms about torturing a monster on
the level of KSM and never bought the idea that the Geneva
Conventions apply when fighting an enemy who doesn't wear a uniform
or recognize any international codes of conduct. But at the same
time, I am aware of the tremendous PR cost associated with the U.S.
using such techniques. I'd be perfectly willing for America to take
that PR hit if doing so was necessary to protect the nation. So
really, for me, the debate comes down to efficacy, to how much
useful information can be extracted by the use of such techniques
that we otherwise could not obtain from standard methods. I think
this story leaves that an open question.
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