Judge Napolitano was the inspiration for this assignment. Last week he wrote an excellent article in the Daily Wire commenting on the apparent failure of the criminal case against Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. The judge wrote:
As preliminary hearings in the case of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others accused of masterminding the 9/11 attacks proceed at the Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, the government continues to stumble with its own witnesses. In hearings last week, government lawyers sought to show that the defendants’ statements to CIA and FBI agents were voluntary.
When the government’s chief torturer, a now retired psychologist, had difficulty remembering that during a torture session he had threatened one of his victims by offering to slit the throat of the victim’s young son and that he had recounted that threat under oath in an earlier testimony, it became clear to everyone in the courtroom and to those of us monitoring these terrible proceedings that the government was having a strange and unexpected difficulty in defending the behavior of its torturers.
The judge’s judicial instincts are perfect. But there is much more to this story. The American public, and much of the world, has been led to believe that torture is an effective interrogation technique. It is not. It’s counterproductive.
Hollywood and novelists played a key role in my vision of popularizing torture as a necessary evil. The TV show 24, starring Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer, routinely relied on torture to gain information from terrorists. Hell, even Supreme Court Justice Scalia, when he was alive, believed Jack Bauer had the right to torture:
“Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” Justice Scalia said. Then, recalling the second season, in which the agent’s brutal interrogation tactics saved California from a terrorist attack, the Supreme Court justice drew a line in the sand.
“Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Justice Scalia challenged his fellow justices. “You say the criminal law is against him? “Are you entitled to a jury trial?” Is there any jury that will convict Jack Bauer? I do not believe.“So the question really is whether we believe in these absolutes. And should we believe in these absolutes?
Then there’s the late Vince Flynn. As you can see from the image posted at the top of this piece, I was friends with Vince—at least until he became famous—and helped him with his first five books. His opinions on torture are his. I suggested the opposite, but he explains his thoughts in this interview with Robert Bidinotto:
Flynn: YES. Here’s where I sit. It’s really simple. If Al Qaeda signed the Geneva Convention, put on a uniform, planted the flag on the ground and said, “Let’s meet on the battlefield,” I would say, “Absolutely. Torture: you can’t do it. Period. End of discussion.” But we have an enemy who does not wear a uniform, has not signed the Geneva Convention, hides behind men, women and children and then attacks men, women and children: civilians.
I think it’s a joke that we’re even having this debate, as a nation. I think torture should only happen to high value targets where we know they are hiding information that could help us destroy cells, funding, organization and possible operations.
The problem is, because we are a civilized society and because we have lost our mooring, we have lost our attachment to our Judeo-Christian beliefs, we have gone on this little PC safari. We think we have to say things so that people think, “He’s smart, he’s compassionate, he cares, he has a good heart.” The reality is that if you asked the American people, “When Mitch Rapp starts torturing some bad guy who knows where the nuke is, would you sit there in the privacy of your home crying and saying, ‘Please stop torturing this guy? lad? ‘? Or are you saying, “Take it, Mitch!” Get him the information!’”
Vince violated Gannon’s rule. Dick Gannon was my boss at State CT. He was a retired Marine colonel and Vietnam combat veteran. He liked to say, “If he makes you feel really good, he’s probably wrong.” What I tried to tell Vince was that no matter how emotionally satisfying it is to torture a villain for the purpose of entertaining the audience, in the real world it is counterproductive and fails to produce reliable intelligence.
Unfortunately, most of the world lives under the false belief, fueled by Jack Bauer and Vince Flynn, that the CIA is skilled and expert in the art of torture. This is a lie. The opposite is true. The CIA’s training program for case officers offered no instruction on torture or interrogation. The primary mission of a CIA operations officer is to recruit foreigners to spy for us, i.e., commit treason against their own country. This process is a seduction, not a coercion. If you convinced someone to betray their country or cause, it had better not be based on anger at you for inflicting pain or threatening to harm their loved ones. This is a recipe for getting screwed by the recruited source.
The CIA’s operational training course at its main facility in the United States focused on source identification and recruitment. Questioning or sweating a suspect for information is not part of that training. That’s why the CIA, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, turned to two contract psychologists – James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen – to design an interrogation program for use on terrorist suspects. This proved to be a lethal clown show because neither Mitchell nor Jessen “had any experience as interrogators, any knowledge of al Qaeda, or any science to justify their methods.” Apparently they were avid fans of Vince Flynn.
I credit people like former FBI agent Ali Soufan with trying to bring some common sense to the CIA’s interrogation program. Unfortunately, he was ignored, vilified, and became a target of CIA officials eager to discredit him.
I explain the backstory to much of this in the following video. Enjoy.