I’m still wondering who the other suspect whose name was redacted would be. The CIA tried to eliminate the fact that there was even a second suspect by removing the “and” in their redaction. But it’s still clear from the rest of the content elsewhere in the paragraph that Binalshibh was not the only one chained up naked.

As we shall come to see, there was an entire period of degenerating boundaries between SERE inoculation and SERE counter-engineering, and that occurred in the 1990s. Some of this happened because of pressure from the special operations side, as Steven Kleinman described in the Educing Information document, since the SO people were impressed by the SERE mock-interrogators “professionalism”. On the other hand, the JSSA/JPRA/SERE leadership got more and more greedy, trying to expand their territory within the national security environment post-Cold War. Nor was this development happening without notice by some at CIA.

In a sense, the final plunge of SERE into the torture business was the outcome of a number of factors, most of which pre-dated 9/11. 9/11 itself gave the impetus for these developments to come together, midwifed by the Offices of the President and Vice-President.

There are plenty of people who are chafing at the bit to come forward on this. They only want to know their government won’t let the whistleblowers hang twisting slowly in the wind. They want this to happen…. Maybe it will.

*or whatever they want to call it now.

C

It makes me wonder whether Soufan and Gaudin clashed at all over this. Obviously, a minor point but it would be interesting to find out what some of these other SERE techniques were Gaudin appeared to be OK with

Hint: the FBI are not the good guys. Some of the agents are stand-up people. But the agency as a whole fell way down after 9-11, including on the torture issue. EW points to Serwer’s article (one of two), and it’s well worth reading, noting how the FBI filed away what it knew were “war crimes”, and had no particular method of reporting them, until Abu Ghraib pushed everyone’s buttons. In some cases, in fact, agents may have been told to suppress what they knew.

The ethical thing to do was NO interrogation under these circumstances, and to report these crimes against the prisoners immediately. But as with Zubaydah, it’s not clear Soufan reported the abusive conditions immediately, nor did he find it unacceptable to work around these conditions.

So, Soufan got better “actionable” info out of al-Shibh? How did he know? Such evaluations of the worth of intel is commonly not made by interrogators at the scene, but by those who evaluate the material the interrogators produce. Even so, is “actionable” intel from a naked shackled man an acceptable FBI technique?

Meanwhile, off-thread, but important:

November 2, 2009, New York – Today, a federal Court of Appeals dismissed Canadian citizen Maher Arar’s case against U.S. officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured and interrogated for a year. Arar is represented by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The court concluded that Arar’s case raised too many sensitive foreign policy and secrecy issues to permit relief. It leaves the federal officials involved free of any legal accountability for what they did.

Maher Arar is not available to comment in person, but is issuing the following statement: “After seven years of pain and hard struggle it was my hope that the court system would listen to my plea and act as an independent body from the executive branch. Unfortunately, this recent decision and decisions taken on other similar cases, prove that the court system in the United States has become more or less a tool that the executive branch can easily manipulate through unfounded allegations and fear mongering. If anything, this decision is a loss to all Americans and to the rule of law.”