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So my Washington Independent wrap of the Soufan testimony focuses on how Soufan said that the FBI and the CIA contingent interrogating Abu Zubaydah objected to the SERE psychologist/CIA contractor — probably James Mitchell — who wanted to waterboard the al-Qaeda detainee; place him in a "confinement box," etc. If true, that means that senior CIA officials overruled their own interrogators and pushed, with the Bush administration, for torturing Abu Zubaydah. And that speaks to the "did they act in good faith" question.
CIA officials signaled opposition to Soufan’s characterization of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation. “Today we heard one account of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah,” said CIA spokesman George Little in an email message. “There are others.” He did not elaborate.
Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel of the ACLU, said Soufan’s account raised questions about whether senior CIA officials should have pushed for the abusive techniques ultimately approved by the OLC. If CIA interrogators “are raising concerns about ‘borderline torture,’ [and asking] is this legal, those kinds of things, that certainly would go to whether there should’ve been good-faith reliance on later legal opinions,” Anders said. “It certainly goes to people at the CIA and top levels of the administration — whether they should have been just relying on the Bybee opinions because they were getting conflicting advice.”
Bmaz, that’s for you. If Soufan is right, then senior CIA officials from the Tenet era did not act in good faith when confronted with an interrogation team’s torture dissent. I reached out to several Tenet-era officials for this piece; none of them got back to me by my deadline; I’ll of course update if/when I hear more. One caveat: Soufan didn’t specify why his CIA colleagues objected. Figuring that out, apparently, is a job for the Senate intelligence committee inquiry.
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Of course it wasn’t in good faith. They were ignoring the fact that there was a track record of effective alternatives to their “experiments” in applying EITs.
AND (see my comment to your prior post) they weren’t telling the NSC principals (like Condi) that there were any alternatives.
If emptywheel is right that it is Bellinger who gave the anonymous quote to WaPo (see prior comment), the NSC was being told that the EITs that Tenet wanted the OK for in summer 2002 were safe, effective, and there was no alternative. While at the same time they had the counter experience of Saufan with AZ AND they had the memo from the SEREs folks saying the techniques were dangerous and possibly produced unreliable info.
Ackerman you or somebody has to try to track down that CIA psychologist. If that person really left in protest then that means that before the CIA ever waterboarded anybody (supposedly anyway) a member of their own team thought what they were already doing rose to the level of torture. Thats important because so far one of the pro torture talking points is “we only waterboarded 3 people”. But if we could nail down the fact that EITs other than waterboarding were seen as torture by that psychologist it could be a game changer when it comes to public opinion. Besides that I am wondering if that psychologist may have had more first hand knowledge of what the contracters actually did to Zubaydah than Soufan had.
Great catch Spencer, the good faith argument continues to get increasingly difficult to maintain.
By the way, “CIA spokesman” would suggest that George Little’s job is to cover the brass rather than the worker bees, right? If so, that would certainly give him a motive to cast aspersions on Soufan. Are the Tenet-era officials you are reaching out to high level, mid level, or junior? Just curious, because it sounds like different people would be inclined to give a different answer…