interrogation

An official familiar with the task force’s work cautioned that experienced interrogators on the task force believe that a narrow focus missed the point of interrogation work.

The latest in high-minded criticism from National Review’s in-house conspiracy theorist Andy McCarthy. He’s infuriated because Jennifer Daskal from Human Rights Watch is working at the Justice Department, as she — get the smelling salts ready — worked for years to bring the Bush administration’s detentions and interrogations regime in line with civilized understandings of [...]

OK, so which is more shocking:
1. Aram Rostam’s report for The Huffington Post that the CIA used fire ants on a detainee’s head to “break him”; or
2. The fact that Rostam ran a report based on a second-hand account of a years-old outburst by a CIA “supervisor” (whatever that means) around a bar concerning an [...]

More from the White House’s letter objecting to certain provisions in the fiscal 2010 defense authorization. I thought this deserved to be quoted in full:
Interrogation Duties:  The Administration objects to section 823 in its current form, which would prohibit contractor personnel from interrogating persons detained during or in the aftermath of hostilities under any circumstances.  [...]

This is a … curious argument for CIA Director Leon Panetta to make in a court filing arguing that the CIA shouldn’t have to describe the contents of interrogation videotapes it destroyed. The Washington Post:
The “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would provide al-Qaeda “with propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds,” [...]

Here’s Ali Soufan, from his written opening statement and his spoken summary, delivered from behind the wooden partition.
One aspect of Ali Soufan’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that’s now somewhat cleared up, according to the ex-FBI agent’s opening statement: the FBI and the CIA/SERE-contractor team were in a back-and-forth during the spring of 2002 for how [...]

Greg Sargent mines a Washington Post piece to discover that the Obama administration is looking to declassify a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that laid out grave doubts about the agency’s “enhanced interrogation” program. Background on the value of that report — referred to numerous times in the May 2005 torture memos from the Justice [...]

No, not Larry Korb. I’m not being cute here. I mean Ken Adelman, the former chair of the Reagan-era Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the guy who said conquering Iraq would be a cakewalk, the onetime Balki Bartokomous to Donald Rumsfeld’s Larry Appleton. That guy’s against torture.

For a forthcoming piece, I was combing through the International Committee of the Red Cross’s formerly-confidential 2007 interviews with the 14 detainees who, until September 2006, the CIA kept at its undisclosed “black site” secret prisons. (Mark Danner disclosed the document in a recent New York Review of Books piece.) The first annex to the [...]

John Kiriakou was a CIA counterterrorism official involved in the initial capture of Abu Zubaydah in 2002. He was not involved in Abu Zubaydah’s torture. In 2007, he came forward to disclose that the CIA waterboarded Abu Zubaydah for “probably 30, 35 seconds” and Zubaydah “broke” afterward. Kiriakou said from the start that he did [...]