You can read my fuller thoughts on the Washington Post‘s great piece on James Mitchell, Bruce Jessen and the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah over at the Washington Independent‘s blog tomorrow morning. But what’s so striking about the atmosphere around the interrogation is the institutional disincentive against believing that Abu Zubaydah didn’t know about any ticking bombs or other actionable intelligence.

In the initial stages, Abu Zubaida was stripped of his clothes while CIA officers took turns at low-intensity questioning. Later, Mitchell added sleep deprivation and a constant bombardment of loud music, including tracks by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. After each escalation, he would dispatch an interrogator into Abu Zubaida’s cell to issue a single demand: "Tell me what I want to know."

Now, if you’re Abu Zubaydah, the rational response is to try to discern what it is your tormentors want to know in order to confirm their predispositions and stop the pain. It’s in this manner that suspicions and conclusions become the same thing. And once that happens — and happens through the application of pain and fear — there is no logical way of saying that the detainee is sufficiently broken. Indeed, this is what results:

"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 was after even Mitchell and Jessen believed waterboarding had lost its utility on Abu Zubaydah. But if you believe you have to inflict pain on someone to stop an attack, if the attack doesn’t materialize, it’s as rational to believe you have to inflict more pain as it is to believe that you’ve proven yourself able to thwart the attack. And if you’ve spent weeks and months convincing your bosses that pain and fear are the most reliable interrogation techniques available, and the surest way to stop imminent attacks, your bosses are acting rationally when they demand that the pain and the fear continue. Not legally. Not morally. But rationally. Hysteria is a perpetual motion machine. 

Update: Here’s that blog post I mentioned for the Windy.