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So I tried to do this nuanced piece for the Washington Independent. I stand by it. But you tell me if I succeeded.
Obama creates this new top-level-detainee interrogation task force. It’s called the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group or the HIG. (Now is not the time to discuss precision in acronyms! This country faces ruthless enemies, damn it!) The idea is that they use the best legal – i.e., non-torture — interrogation practices, based on copious amounts of social science, to elicit information relevant to preventing terrorist attacks or rolling up extremist networks in a manner that doesn’t get crosswise with potential prosecutions. FBI is the lead agency here, not CIA, although it’s a hybrid team with FBI, CIA and the Defense Department components.
But I learned they’re not going to be talking to Major Hasan. Now, I know, I know — we don’t even know if we ought to consider Hasan a terrorist, and he sure as hell isn’t Usama bin Laden. So maybe it’s a category error to even point out that the HIG won’t be getting involved here. But at the same time, even if Hasan is what the evidence so far suggests he is — a disturbed criminal murderer who turned to a very perverted understanding of religion as a pretextual accelerant for his pathologies — nevertheless his contacts with Anwar al-Aulaqi might be able to tell us something about how someone like Hasan tries to connect back to the broader, online-enabled takfiri infrastructure. In other words, I thought there was a story here, but a subtle one. As someone who’s been writing about the importance of not lumping Hasan into an improper terrorism construct and certainly not stigmatizing American Muslim communities, I had, and have, a lot of concerns about the pirouetting I needed to do to make this piece non-hysterical.
I think I succeeded. But you tell me. I did, in any case, extract a previously unreported fact: the leader of the HIG is an FBI special agent named Andrew McCabe. I wrestled with just peeling that bit off and blogging it, but it was kind of tweet-sized & I wasn’t able to build enough around it. Anyway, check the piece out and tell me if I succeeded at writing what I describe in this post. How could I have done this better?
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I haven’t read the article yet, but I can say that I’d want to see this connection
tied up pretty tight on the Aulaqi-to-infrastructure-you-describe end before accepting as the premise of any article the presumption that we might want U.S. citizens and former Army majors, not all of whom are Muslim, huge numbers of whom likely have contact with religious leaders of various faiths, and any of whom could have committed the acts Hasan is alleged to have committed, would be interrogated by this group if alleged to have done similar acts and had similar (which is to say radical religious, though not necessarily Muslim)connections. (I’m not in the military, so i can still be PC and Joe Lieberman won’t come after me.)
But with that in mind I will definitely have a look as soon as I can.
From your article, it doesn’t seem that the new HIG is really clear on whether they could even talk to Hasan whether they wanted to or not although, at the top it seems they are mandated to overseas only while later they seem to think maybe they can speak with him.
Anyways, the first question of course is seeing if he is just an insane criminal, then the other question after that is what is the meaning of High-Value because you layout that he could provide insight into what could drive someone like him to extremism.
seems you did a good job to me
Unsure about Hasan aspect of the article. I didn’t feel put-off.
You might want to add that McCabe is formerly with (or still with, for all I know) the counter-terrorism division of the FBI’s Washington Field Office.
I couldn’t confirm whether he still is, so it became hard for me to say “was” or “may still be” or “until recently,” and at that point, it’s a donnybrook, so I left it for people to Google.
I’m guessing that the HIG in practice will mostly review tape and transcript of other interrogators. I’m guessing that in practice if a suspect gets a face-to-face with the HIG, it’s because there’s no longer any question as to his terrorist nature in the court of Congressional opinion.
In my opinion, the HIG is a feint. I’ll elaborate on this more in a future post.