Then he avers that Obama’s rejection of torture has cost U.S. interrogators “any tools at our disposal” to “compel” information out of terrorist captures. Except that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the would-be bomber of Northwest Flight 253, is cooperating with his interrogators after they used pressure from his family to compel that cooperation. Also, the elite interrogators of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group will surely be surprised to hear they have no available tools for interrogating a resistant detainee. Then he says that torture stopped an attempted attack on the Los Angeles library tower, a misstatement that has been so thoroughly debunked it raises questions about Thiessen’s honesty.

Then Daniel Freedman — a former Rudy Giuliani aide, aide to ex-FBI counterterrorist agent Ali Soufan and torture opponent, more than ably points out that despite the torture of senior al-Qaeda captives like Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, several attacks in Europe and throughout the Middle East nevertheless occurred. To say nothing of al-Qaeda’s demonstrable reconstitution in the tribal areas of Pakistan. And Thiessen — a former speechwriter — wants to credibly contend that torture is the difference between security and insecurity. “The problem Marc has is that he takes things out of context and doesn’t read the full documents,” Freedman observes. Yet he’s your newest Washington Post columnist.

Watch the whole thing — especially when Marc Thiessen implies that he knows more about interrogation than Gen. David Petraeus. And shame on Joe Scarborough for portraying Soufan, a man who has actually broken up al-Qaeda cells, as a “guy who writes a lot” and not one of the most experienced counterterrorists in American history:

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I’m sorry, just one more thing. Thiessen objects to the use of the non-torture techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual on Interrogation against the highest-value detainees because the manual is “on the Internet” and terrorists can train against it. That’s just a flat-out misunderstanding of the field manual in particular and the interrogations process itself. The field manual does not and never has required only the use of those techniques it lists, but it proscribes physical and psychological abuse. That’s why people like Abdulmutallab can, say, have their parents’ opprobrium be used against them, a technique not explicitly listed in the field manual but still legally and morally kosher — and proven to be effective.

I worry though when we capture these leaders that we no longer have the option of using any of the enhanced interrogation techniques because the president took those off the table. When you’ve got people in captivity we’d like our CIA officials in particular to have the capacity to do more than just ask the terrorists to please tell us what they want.

I guess it’s not so surprising that a Cheney loves torture, but I don’t recall Liz Cheney being quite so explicit about her enthusiasm for torturing people. More significant is her presumption that only torture is effective in eliciting intelligence, which every experienced interrogator — Ali Soufan, Malcolm Nance, the people at the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group — will tell her is the direct opposite of the truth. It would be interesting to hear her tell Gen. David Petraeus why the Central Command leader is wrong about the relationship between torture and success in counterinsurgency, to say nothing of Petraeus’ views on the relationship between torture and the moral fabric of America. No one who doesn’t have the last name Cheney or hasn’t ever depended on a Cheney for a position or a paycheck believes that Liz Cheney has more credibility on this subject than these individuals.

One of the advantages America has in the war on terror is that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies can potentially draw on the talents and experiences of Americans who are Muslim or whose families have cultural or ethnic origins in Muslim countries, who have the kind of linguistic and cultural backgrounds that are all too scarce in U.S. agencies at the moment. Political stunts alienate the very communities whose help the government needs in order to effectively protect national security.

One of the most talented counterterrorism agents the U.S. government had is retired FBI agent Ali Soufan. Soufan is a Muslim. Think it’s a coincidence? Here’s a man who actively disrupted al-Qaeda plots and al-Qaeda cells. But under the standards set out by the bigoted four GOP members of the House, Soufan would be suspect. That should be proof enough that their disgusting efforts harm America. But I suppose all they see when they see Soufan is another Muslim who tried to undermine government efforts to torture people.

The profile makes reference to a number of personality factors. First, not only is Abu Zubaydah a senior member of al-Qaeda, but he’s “a highly self-directed individual who prizes his independence,” possessing “narcissistic features” and who “wrestles with issues regarding the killing of civilians.” A “private person,” Abu Zubaydah is said to be “skeptical of others’ intentions and alert for ulterior motives.” He possesses an eschatological view of the inevitable victory of al-Qaeda, which makes him determined “to delay, mislead and lie to protect what is most critical to the success of his cause.” And he’s “remarkably resilient and confident to overcome adversity.”

All of these things taken together indicate a brief for torturing Abu Zubaydah, said Steven Reisner, a psychological ethics adviser to Physicians for Human Rights, and not an impartial psychological profile. “If you were trying to experiment [with torture], you would write a psychological report just like this,” he said, as it emphasizes Abu Zubaydah’s alleged resilience, facility with resistance, and knowledge of al-Qaeda’s operations. Indeed, there’s a reference in the report to a presumption that Abu Zubaydah is “probably well-versed regarding al-Qa’ida’s captivity and resistance training.” In late 2001, as the CIA inspector general’s report reminds (and the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 report has already disclosed), CIA contracted with an “independent contractor psychologist” with experience in the SERE program to describe precisely that captivity and resistance training”; that psychologist, James Mitchell, took direct part in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation.

All this represents an often-overlooked conflict of interest, Reisner said: “They’re providing research that justifies the use of the techniques [advocated] and they’re being paid for it. It’s opportunism.” It’s not known how much Mitchell and his colleague, Bruce Jessen, ultimately benefited from the CIA, but in 2002 the two started a company that made “millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.,” according to a recent New York Times profile.

There is no evident indication from the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that John Helgerson, the former inspector general who conducted the review, factored in the conflict of interest into his assessment. It’s possible that such treatment occurred in the still-classified parts of the review.

Update: This post has been corrected to fix the misspelling of Steve Reisner’s name, for which I am very sorry.

These techniques include, but are not limited to, all lawful forms of questioning employed by U.S. law enforcement and military interrogation personnel. Among standard interrogation techniques are the use of isolation, sleep deprivation not to exceed 72 hours [reduced in December 2003 to 48 hours' maximum], reduced caloric intake (so long as the amount is calculated to maintain the general health of the detainee), deprivation of reading material, use of loud music or white noise (at a decibel level calculated to avoid damage to the detainee’s hearing), the use of diapers for limited periods (generally not to exceed 72 hours), [REDACTED] at moderate psychological pressure. The DCI [Director of Central Intelligence] Interrogation Guidelines do not specifically prohibit improvised actions. A CTC/Legal officer has said, however, that no one may employ any technique outside specifically identified standard techniques without Headquarters approval.

Before then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld began the process of expanding the definitions of what military interrogation personnel were allowed to do in November 2002 and culminating in April 2003 — a process significantly based, in chicken-and-egg fashion, on what the CIA was already doing to detainees — none of these listed techniques would have been acceptable for U.S. military interrogators. And FBI interrogators (like Ali Soufan) objected to similar treatment of detainees witnessed in 2003 at Guantanamo Bay. It’s unclear what basis Tenet had for thinking that keeping someone in a diaper for up to three days was acceptable for non-CIA interrogators. But it’s also an example of how torture, once adopted, spreads — and becomes normative. Remember, these techniques aren’t even “enhanced” ones.

Before 11 September (9/11) 2001, Agency personnel sometimes used the terms interrogation/interrogator and debriefing/debriefer interchangeably. The use of these terms has since evolved and, today, CTC [the Counterterrorist Center] more clearly distinguishes their meanings. A debriefer engages a detainee solely through question and answer. An interrogator is a person who completes a two-week interrogations training program, which is designed to train, qualify, and certify a person to administer EITs ["enhanced interrogation techniques."]. An interrogator can administer EITs during an interrogation of a detainee only after the field, in coordination with Headquarters, assesses the detainee as withholding information. An interrogator transitions the detainee from a non-cooperative to a cooperative phase in order that a debriefer can elicit actionable intelligence through non-aggressive techniques during debriefing sessions. An interrogator may debrief a detainee during an interrogation; however, a debriefer may not interrogate a detainee.

The report goes on to say that the agency’s “detention and interrogation of terrorists has provided intelligence that has enabled the identification and apprehension of other terrorists and warned of terrorist plots planned for the United States around the world.” Because of the joint relationship of “interrogators” and “debriefers,” it’s extraordinarily difficult to distinguish between what approaches worked and what didn’t for the purposes of the report. (Even factoring out moral and legal considerations.) That lack of disaggregation may be what contributed to the documents that Cheney wanted the CIA to declassify showing the alleged utility of torture.”

The report supports a lot but not all of retired FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan’s account of the torture. Soufan testified in May that both the FBI and the CIA members of the team interrogating Abu Zubaydah came to oppose Mitchell’s abusive techniques. Warrick and Finn report that most of the team were appalled by what Mitchell proposed — inducing a state of “learned helplessness” through making Abu Zubaydah terrified of the team — but it took a long time for opposition to congeal; and even then, not many people aside from Soufan actively tried to stop the torture. But The Post’s account supports Soufan’s testimony that the harsher techniques produced less valuable information than Soufan’s attempts to build an emotional bond with Abu Zubaydah.

The Post’s report also introduces an often overlooked element to the torture: the degree to which CIA headquarters — and, it seems, the Bush White House — directed Abu Zubaydah’s torture from halfway around the world. Owing in large part to the heated post-9/11 climate, there were institutional pressures against stopping the torture. When Mitchell and Jessen were convinced that Abu Zubaydah had nothing to further to tell after four or five days’ worth of 83 waterboarding sessions, this was the reply:

“Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent,” the former official said. “Headquarters said it would be on the team’s back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, ‘You’ve lost your spine.’ “

This, of course, was the implicit message that Mitchell and Jessen gave to the FBI and CIA interrogators who didn’t endorse Mitchell’s fear-based interrogation approach. And this is something that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence appears to be exploring: how the widespread state of fear in the United States after 9/11 led the Bush administration to embrace an interrogations regimen that presumed its conclusions: al-Qaeda have bombs ready to go off at any minute; al-Qaeda members possess the information necessary to stop the attacks; al-Qaeda members will only respond to physical and psychological horror.

These premises turned out not to be true. But in the climate that existed after 9/11, when the intelligence community appeared to have missed warning signs for the attacks (never mind the August 2001 “bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” presidential briefing), knowledgeable interrogators like Ali Soufan who tried to introduce calm professionalism to the interrogations were marginalized.

Postscript: one thing the piece doesn’t answer is how Mitchell and Jessen came to the CIA’s attention in the first place. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find this out and was summarily rejected.

In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the biggest unanswered questions was how and why the CIA under George Tenet knew to turn to contract psychologists with SERE experience like James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen for assistance in devising interrogation programs. Retired FBI agent Ali Soufan testified that one such contractor — identified by Jane Meyer as Mitchell — on the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, the wellspring from which all future CIA “enhanced interrogation” emerged, overrulled all his FBI and CIA colleagues in order to experiment with SERE techniques.

That raised an additional concern: how deeply did CIA interrogation involvement with Mitchell and Jessen, who started a consulting firm after leaving SERE, actually run? Apparently pretty deeply: CIA Director Leon Panetta canceled all contractor involvement in interrogations in the spring, although Mayer reports there are some caveats to that. But it’s unclear, and so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA for “all contracts signed between the CIA and the firm of Mitchell Jessen & Associates between September 2001 and April 2009″ including those where M-J are subcontractors. After I filed it, I realized it was imprecisely worded: since there was no Mitchell Jessen & Associates in late 2001, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer my first question anyway.

As it happens: moot point! Today I got my response, courtesy of Delores M. Nelson, the CIA’s information and privacy coordinator:

… [T]he CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, your request has been denied pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).

Now, the fact of Mitchell Jessen & Associates contracting for CIA is not a secret. In addition to Mayer’s reporting, Katherine Eban delved deeply into the company’s history with CIA for Vanity Fair in 2007. The company even replied to her questions. And yet the CIA contends that even confirming the existence of any contracts it signed with the company would jeopardize national security. There’s an appeals process for my rejected FOIA request; I’ll be taking full advantage of it.

In that spirit, consider some newly-declassified information from the so-called Combatant Status Review Tribunals — a now-abandoned procedure to determine if a detainee posed a threat to U.S. interests — at Guantanamo Bay of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. KSM:

“I make up stories,” Mohammed said, describing in broken English an interrogation probably administered by the CIA concerning the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” Mohammed said of his interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’ “

Abu Zubaydah:

“They told me, ‘Sorry, we discover that you are not Number 3, not a partner, not even a fighter,’ ” said Abu Zubaida, speaking in broken English, according to the new transcript of a Combatant Status Review Tribunal held at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now, according to former Vice President Dick Cheney — and, just so we don’t get distracted, I AM NOT SAYING DICK CHENEY IS AS BAD AS MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD — there are two CIA documents from 2004 and 2005 wherein the CIA vouched for the accuracy of information it obtained from torturing Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah. It would be nice to see those documents. But what could they possibly indicate other than that the agency told Cheney what he wanted to hear about a cherished interrogation program? Or are we to believe that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is lying about having lied? His diabolical skills of deception are just that good? Waterboarding him 183 times, denying him sleep for a week by contorting his body into unnatural positions, restricting his diet to between 1000 and 1500 calories a day — that’s the stuff that works, not any of the rapport-building crap that trained interrogators like Ali Soufan of the FBI advocate because of, like, their experience.

On Friday, the CIA will release a 2004 report on interrogations and detentions written by former inspector general John Helgerson, a report referenced in the recently declassified Office of Legal Counsel documents from 2005. Read it and ask: what would we say about this behavior if another country performed it?

NPR’s Ari Shapiro adds significant new information to that picture. According to Shapiro, Mitchell was in frequent contact with the CIA’s Counterterrorist Center from the site at which Abu Zubaydah was being held, asking for approval for the use of his techniques, and the ACLU yesterday obtained a document to support the claim. Counterterrorist Center officials apparently ran the gauntlet for approving the techniques up to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales.

The source says nearly every day, Mitchell would sit at his computer and write a top secret cable to the CIA’s counterterrorism center. Each day, Mitchell would request permission to use enhanced interrogation techniques on Zubaydah. The source says the CIA would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique. That would provide the Administration’s legal blessing for Mitchell to increase the pressure on Zubaydah in the next interrogation.

A new document is consistent with the source’s account.

Late May 19, the CIA sent the ACLU a spreadsheet as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act. The log shows the number of top secret cables that went from Zubaydah’s black site prison to CIA headquarters each day. Through the spring and summer of 2002, the log shows someone sent headquarters several cables a day.

Now, note that Gonzales at the time wasn’t the attorney general. He wasn’t the chief legal official for the government. He was the president’s lawyer, powerless to bless the actions of a federal agency like the CIA. (Shapiro quotes a number of ex-officials who establish that point.) A separate CIA-White House channel in the spring of 2002 would, at the least, contextualize the CIA’s efforts at getting the approval of the Justice Department for the harsh interrogation regimen — though it’s unclear what legal butt-covering Gonzales would have been able to provide in the first place. Gonzales didn’t respond to NPR, according to Shapiro.

If you go to this page and click on “List of Contemporaneous and Derivative Records (May 18, 2009)” then you can see this voluminous log. There are 580 listed communications from the “field” to CIA headquarters, almost all from 2002. It takes until communication #471 before reaching a point in time when the communication could be about a different detainee from Abu Zubaydah, since it’s not until sometime in November 2002 that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another detainee the CIA waterboarded, was captured. And 249 of these communications occur before the August 1, 2002 Office of Legal Counsel memo blessing the torture techniques Mitchell advocated. [UPDATE: Marcy Wheeler emails to remind me that the International Committee of the Red Cross' report on the CIA's ex-detainees lists al-Nashiri's arrest as occurring in October 2002 in Dubai, so there are 415 communications that could only be about Abu Zubaydah, not 470. The ACLU's Jameel Jaffer says that these logs, obtained thanks to their lawsuit about the CIA's destroyed torture tapes, only concern the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri.]

This still doesn’t address a central question raised by Soufan’s testimony to a Senate Judiciary Committee subpanel. If Soufan is telling the truth, then someone at the CIA must have overruled the agency’s own torture-dissenting interrogators at the Abu Zubaydah interrogation in favor of Mitchell, an agency contractor. Did any of them send cables to the Counterterrorist Center? Was the Counterterrorist Center aware of their objections to torturing Abu Zubaydah? And if so, why did they overrule their own officers in favor of a contractor who didn’t come from an agency that conducts interrogations? Cofer Black was head of the Counterterrorist Center when the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah began — he’s now an official with Blackwater Xe — and Jose Rodriguez, he of the torture-tapes destruction scandal, took over for Black in May 2002. What did they know and when did they know it? How many of the communications to CIA headqurters listed in the logs were from CIA interrogators at Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation chamber objecting to Mitchell’s techniques?

Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and a trained interrogator affiliated with the military office that oversees the SERE program, told me last week that the real linchpins here aren’t Mitchell and his SERE colleague, Bruce Jessen, but the senior CIA officials who gave them contracts in late 2001 and “brought [them] in with eyes wide open, to run an interrogation program.” These logs give Kleinman more support for that proposition.