Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan (USUHSy/ZUMA Press)

The new unit created by the Obama administration to interrogate the highest-value terrorism targets is unlikely to play a role in the case of the highest-profile new potential terrorist target in U.S. custody: Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter.

The director of the new interrogation unit, FBI Special Agent Andrew McCabe — who has not been previously identified in the press as the leader of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) — referred all questions about the Hasan case to the FBI’s public affairs office and said he would not be able to elaborate on HIG operations beyond an August statement by Attorney General Eric Holder announcing the group’s creation. Still, it is unlikely that the HIG would interview Hasan. Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the Justice Department’s national security division, clarified that the new group is mandated to operate “overseas only.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

It is not clear whether Hasan ought to be considered a terrorist, and most evidence to date suggests he is better understood as a criminal suspect. An inquiry that began shortly after he allegedly shot and killed 14 people at Fort Hood on Nov. 7 has yet to determine any substantive links to extremist organizations, and reportedly indicates that he acted alone. An FBI spokeswoman, Denise Ballew, declined to comment, and referred all questions about Hasan to the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is leading the Hasan inquiry with FBI support. Spokespeople for the Criminal Investigation Division did not return phone messages.

But an al-Qaeda affiliated cleric now based in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaqi, has confirmed to The Washington Post that he communicated with Hasan, and Army psychiatrist, repeatedly before the shooting occurred. While Hasan is convalescing from wounds sustained when police officers stopped the attack, he might shed light on the circumstances that lead a very small minority of radicalized American Muslims to commit acts of extremism and even seek to connect with the broader terrorist infrastructure, which the counterterrorism community refers to as the “self-starter” or “lone-wolf” problem.

In a Senate hearing on Thursday, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) called the shooting a “homegrown terrorist attack,” a point not entirely accepted by his panel’s witnesses. Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corporation, testified that while “radicalization and recruitment to terrorism is occurring in the United States and is a security concern,” the small handful of examples of such behavior meant that American Muslim communities are “overwhelmingly unsympathetic to terrorist appeals,” a point Lieberman endorsed.

Individuals close to the HIG had mixed perspectives about whether it should play any role with Hasan. None agreed to speak for attribution, citing both the ongoing investigation into Hasan’s case and the secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s new interrogation unit. “I can think of a lot of uses I could make of a HIG team while waiting for someone to be captured in Afghanistan,” said one such individual. “There’s no reason the HIG couldn’t be used domestically. There’s a ban on the CIA doing things in country, so they might just have to use FBI interrogators or interviewers. But aside from that I don’t see any other issues.”

A U.S. official involved with the establishment of the HIG said that it remained an open question whether Hasan is a “lone wolf with mental pathology” or someone who “latched onto extremist ideology and influence” like al-Awlaqi. As a result, there is insufficient evidentiary basis for involving the HIG, since it is unclear what actual information Hasan might have that could illuminate aspects of the broader terrorist puzzle. “I also have not seen anything that indicates known or suspected outside influence — other than firebrand al-Awlaqi’s call-to-arms, which is dangerous enough in itself — whether non-state actor or otherwise” is involved in the Hasan case, the official said.

A former U.S. counterterrorism official agreed: “The HIG is for high-value detainees and he’s not a high-vale detainee. He’s a criminal who did a heinous act.” The ex-official went on to say that if information emerged changing that picture, Army CID and FBI investigators have “a process to share information with behavioral analysis groups, [and] share with the HIG, to be careful to watch for other possible wackos.”

There are a number of investigations open into Hasan aside from the main CID-FBI probe. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates announced the Pentagon would undertake its own review of the Hasan case to determine if its personnel missed warning signs leading to Hasan’s attack that might have prevented it. The intelligence community is reviewing what it knew about Hasan’s communications with al-Awlaqi or other extremists. Late last week, President Obama directed all relevant agencies to turn over information about those communications to his principle White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser, John Brennan — who, coincidentally, is also the White House liaison with the HIG.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

The task force advising the Obama administration on interrogating terrorism-related detainees is wrapping up its work this week, and although some of its final recommendations remain unfinished, officials familiar with its work indicate that it will focus less on specific interrogation techniques than on recommending interrogators develop their non-abusive strategies around known information about the specific detainees being questioned.

As first reported in June by The Washington Independent, the task force, chaired by J. Douglas Wilson of the Justice Department, is likely to recommend removing the CIA as the lead federal agency in charge of terrorism interrogations in favor of a mixed team of interrogation specialists from the FBI, the CIA and the military. A consensus has formed within the task force that creating such teams is the optimal path for eliciting vital information from the highest-value terrorism suspects without jeopardizing potential prosecutions of those detainees.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The task force, convened as part of a January executive order from President Obama ending the CIA’s so-called enhanced interrogation program, is supposed to recommend which non-coercive interrogation techniques ought to be employed. But a source familiar with the task force’s work cautioned that experienced interrogators on the task force believe that a narrow focus on the use of particular techniques missed the point of interrogation work.

“One of the major recommendations was an investment in research and the application of science to better the elicitation of information, more than [specific] techniques,” said one such official, who requested anonymity because the task force’s report has yet to be delivered to the White House. “As far as techniques go, it’s not about techniques, it’s more about the application” of interrogation plans built around the specific circumstances of a detainee.

The Wall Street Journal also quoted an official familiar with the task force’s work as saying that professional interrogators find the Army Field Manual on Interrogations, a mostly Geneva Conventions-compliant instruction manual for tactical military interrogations, as less relevant for their work with high-value targets. “That’s good for 18-year-olds who need an operator’s manual in the field,” the official told The Journal’s Siobhan Gorman, but “you want to have a spectrum of things, and to know what the borders are — what you can’t do.”

Nothing in the task force’s recommendations would approach “extreme physical or mental discomfort,” an official told TWI, as Obama’s executive order has banned any such approaches and revoked all Justice Department legal foundations for the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, and there are “no signs those measures work.” The official added that within the bounds of the executive order’s torture ban, the task force’s discussion on interrogation approaches centered on “what works, what’s known to work, and not have an extreme price on it.”

While the executive order creating the task force mandated it to deliver its finished product by July 21, the Journal reported that the task force was unlikely to meet the deadline. The Washington Post reported that it was still likely to give its recommendations to the White House by week’s end. It is unclear why the task force might require an extension to its deadline.

TWI reported in June that the task force was favorably inclined to a proposal making the interrogation teams report jointly to the attorney general and the director of national intelligence when interrogating high-value terrorism detainees. The logic behind the proposal is to ensure that even when the purpose of an interrogation is to develop intelligence — such as information around a specific plot or about the structure of a terrorist organization — the interrogations do not preclude the Justice Department from seeking prosecutions of those detainees.

In a May speech at the National Archives, Obama lamented how the abuse of detainees in hidden CIA prisons and the Guantanamo Bay detention facility during the Bush administration may have jeopardized his Justice Department’s ability to convict some detainees in civilian courts. He has used that abuse as part of an argument to construct a system of preventive detention, possibly including captives off the battlefields of Afghanistan — something civil libertarians have fiercely resisted.

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 extremely sensitive intelligence program.

Your call. Rostam has a good reputation as a reporter, and finding out anything about torture takes a lot of work. We’ve also learned over the years that no one ever went broke overestimating the Bush-era CIA’s capacity for inventive torture techniques. But I’d really want a lot more than drunken boasting before I ran an inflammatory story.

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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.  In some limited cases, a contract interrogator may possess the best combination of skills to obtain critical intelligence and this provision, therefore, could prevent U.S. Forces from conducting lawful interrogations in the most effective manner.  The Administration fully supports the application of ordinary Defense Department rules and regulations to contractors engaged in interrogations (as contemplated in subsection (a)(2) of the current section 823), and could support a revised version of the section that would apply such provisions to contractors who participate in interrogations.  The Administration also would object to any amendment requiring video recording of all intelligence interrogations. Although the Administration is open to studying a possible video recording requirement, implementing a mandatory requirement at this time would be imprudent, unduly burdensome, and could risk significant unintended consequences in current and future military operations.

Emphasis added. CIA Director Leon Panetta banned contractor involvement in CIA interrogations. Why should contractors be acceptable in military interrogators? After all, the military has a more robust interrogation capability than CIA does. And this video provision is also noteworthy. As a state senator in Illinois, Barack Obama was instrumental in requiring police interrogations to be videotaped, which was both a civil liberties and a quality-control measure.

The “disclosure of explicit details of specific interrogations” would provide al-Qaeda “with propaganda it could use to recruit and raise funds,” Panetta said, describing the information at issue as “ready-made ammunition.” He also submitted a classified statement to the court that he said explains why detainees could use the contents to evade questions in the future, even though Obama has promised that the United States will not use the harsh interrogation techniques again.

The propaganda-fuel argument is at least straightforward. But — and I freely concede that this is speculative, occurring in the absence of information due to the statement’s classified nature — how can al-Qaeda detainees learn how to evade questioning from descriptions of techniques that the Obama administration has forsworn? This is the sort of move that suggests that remnants of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program are going to live on, speeches in Cairo promising new beginnings notwithstanding. Another thing to watch closely as the administration’s interrogations and detentions review proceeds.

For more on this, Marcy Wheeler goes off.

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 to interrogate him, with each side attempting to win. The “contractor” — probably James Mitchell — “insisted on stepping up the notches of his experiment,” even after Abu Zubaydah apparently stopped cooperating with coercive interrogations. That contractor  “requested the authorization to place Abu Zubaydah in a confinement box” — which Soufan saw as “borderline torture.” He doesn’t give a precise breakdown of when this all happened, but indicates he “was pulled out” by FBI Director Robert Mueller after that; and it all occurred before the August 1, 2002 OLC legal memoranda blessing Abu Zubaydah’s torture. (He wrote in his April New York Times op-ed that it happened in June 2002; the Justice Department’s Inspector General 2008 report suggests it was around mid-May.)

By contrast, here’s how Soufan interrogated an al-Qaeda operative known as Abu Jandal after 9/11. He “advised him of his rights” — what he acidly calls an “Informed Interrogation Approach” — and then the interrogation allegedly reaped:

extensive information on Osama bin Laden’s terror network, structure, leadership, membership, security dtails, facilities, family, communication methods, travels, training, ammunitions, and weaponry, including a breakdown of what machine guns, rifles, rocket launchers, and anti-tank missiles they used. He also provided explicit details of the 9/11 plot operatives and identified many terrorists who we later successfully apprehended.

But nothing on how Saddam Hussein was working with al-Qaeda, so you know you can’t trust a detainee who wasn’t placed in a confinement box with an insect. Indeed, Soufan references Ibn Sheikh al-Libi’s torture, noting that it led to “false information on Iraq, al-Qaeda and WMD.”  Information obtained through torture provides “no way to know whether the detainee is being truthful or just speaking to either mitigate his discomfort or to deliberately provide false information.” Agents therefore chase “false leads” and waste valuable time and resources.

Just as no accounts of information obtained through torture should be taken at face value, neither should Soufan’s account of information obtained without torture. A thorough investigation has to follow up what he’s said to determine its veracity against other information.  But this is an interesting insight: “Nor can it be said that the harsh techniques were effective, which is why we had to be called back in repeatedly.” That, at least, is one explanation for the FBI’s frequent 2002-2004 participation in military and CIA interrogations that I wondered about in my piece yesterday.

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Adelman writes at Shadow Government:

I’m having trouble figuring out why staunch conservatives aren’t as outraged by the torture memos and practices as the American public. Maybe it’s because they’ve become so estranged from the public. Republican leaders have stumbled around, since the closing of the Bush era, much like a duck whacked on the head, as Abraham Lincoln once quipped about one of his generals who was chasing Lee’s forces. Or maybe it’s because of high, and justified, concerns over national security. Or considerable, again justified, preference for presidential leadership over that of the Congress (especially one with the twin faces of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid).

I have my own suspicions, centering around moral turpitude and repressed sexuality. See, for instance, the Raekwon/Method Man “Torture” skit on the first Wu-Tang record. But anyway.

The conservatism of Goldwater, like all American conservatism, stressed limited government — not only in programs and budgets, but also in the power and reach of the state. Hence it leads to firm stands on civil liberties, perhaps even stronger than among the liberal left (though there continues to be lots of overlap). The staunch conservative Bill Safire, for instance, was just as staunch a civil libertarian. We didn’t want government strong enough to control, or even poke around, in our personal lives — let alone having enough power to torture citizens.

So the conservative jaw should drop when Philip Zelikow — who knows both the law and the anti-terrorism field — concludes that these Justice Department memos legally empower the government to subject American citizens to the same “enhanced interrogation techniques” as practiced on the terrorists. That’s such a gross violation of Goldwater-conservative principles as to make any of us still-believers wince, rather than ponder, explain, or (worst of all) justify. …

Torture is not only immoral; it’s not conservative. And conservatives shouldn’t be defending it.

And yet the conservatism of today, by contrast, thinks that your freedom is under dire threat by a return to Clinton-era top marginal tax rates and by not torturing people.

The ICRC explains that Abu Zubaydah’s narrative begins in “May 2002,” after he had “been held in hospital for what he believes were several weeks” as he convalesced from a gunshot to his leg during his capture. Soufan discusses interrogating Abu Zubaydah from “March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August.” I can’t really adjudicate the dispute. It could be that Abu Zubaydah is misremembering and the ICRC is going off what he told them. Or it’s possible that Abu Zubaydah is excluding discussions he had with people like Soufan or the CIA’s John Kiriakou from his hospital bed.  (Additionally, the ICRC said the interrogation took place in Afghanistan; I had understood it to take place in a Thai safe house.) I can’t explain it.

Continuing, this is all from stuff that Abu Zubaydah said took place before “the real torturing started.” He’s describing being “naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room” that had “metal bars separating it from a larger room.” He was “shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks,” which led to blistering on his legs.

I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure [a nutrient supplement] and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit, but this became less with time.

The cell and room were air-conditioned and were very cold. Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes the music stopped and was replaced by a loud hissing or crackling noise.

The guards were American, but wore masks to conceal their faces. My interrogators did not wear masks.

During this first two to three week period I was questioned for about one to two hours each day. American interrogators would come to the room and speak to me through the bars of the cell. During the questioning the music was switched off, but was then put back on again afterwards. I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face.

Presumably Soufan was one such interrogator. Even if we’re to go by the ICRC’s timetable, we’d still be in either late May or early June at this point, which overlaps with the time Soufan gives for his interrogations of Abu Zubaydah. Anyhow, during this time he “began to receive food, rice, to eat on a daily basis.” But he was kept “naked and in shackles,” a situation that continued for “another one and a half months.” A woman doctor “who asked why I was still naked” examined him after “about one and a half to two months,” which by the ICRC’s timetable would be mid June to early July for the period in which he was kept naked. After that he was given clothing. But:

[T]he next day guards came into my cell. They told me to stand up and raise my arms above my head. Then they cut the clothes off of me so that I was again naked and put me back on the chair for several days. I tried to sleep on the chair, but was again kept awake by the guards spraying water in my face.

When my interrogators had the impression I was cooperating and providing the information they required, the clothes were given back to me. When they felt I was being less cooperative the clothes were again removed and I was again put back on the chair. This was repeated several times.

There followed a period of either one month or two months — Abu Zubaydah seems like he’s repeating himself in the narrative — with no questioning. But then, “about two and a half or three months after I arrived in this place… the real torturing started.” This would, in either case, be either August or September, going off the May 2002 baseline. What he then describes is consistent with the post-August 2002 OLC approval of techniques like the “confinement box” and “walling”:

Two black wooden boxes were brought into the room outside my cell. One was tall, slightly higher than me and narrow. Measuring perhaps in area 1m x 0.75m and 2m in heigh. The other was shorter, perhaps only 1m in height. I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. As I was still shackled, the pushing and pulling around meant that the shackles pulled painfully on my ankles.

I was then put into the tall back [I think this should be 'black'] box for what I think was about one and a half to two hours. The box was totally black on the inside as well as the outside…

And it goes on in that fashion, with descriptions of waterboarding, forced shaving and more, including an account that “I was told during this period I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

In outline form, Abu Zubaydah’s account correlates with Soufan’s. There’s a period in which things are a certain way, and then a period where they get much worse for Abu Zubaydah. Examined with greater scrutiny, though, that earlier period is not a nice or pleasant one. Soufan never explicitly says otherwise. But he does say that during the period in which he interrogated Abu Zubaydah, he used “traditional interrogation methods.” Yet if Abu Zubaydah is to be believed, during this period he was subjected to a cold cell, prolonged nudity, prolonged shackling, constant noise, and what appears to be the manipulation of his sleep patterns. FBI agents might not recognize that as “traditional.”

Again, it could be that Abu Zubaydah is simply misremembering or misrepresenting his experience. But these are discrepancies worth exploring.