Interrogation versus De-Briefing

I found an interesting article by Marc Thiessen here about a meeting Thiessen had with CIA interrogators in 2006 in which the CIA interrogators described the difference between interrogation and de-briefing. As the files on Guantanamo detainees reveal in great detail, the intelligence gathered in Guantanamo over the years has been extremely valuable, not simply information on pending attacks, but also information on the building blocks of the terror network - travel routes, guesthouses, recruiters, training, and more. Many on the left argue that such information is worthless because it is based on "torture" when in fact it is based on piecing together information from interrogations and cross-checking with differents kinds of information such as computer databases from safehouse raids or information gained from foreign intelligence agencies. But Thiessen's article also points out that enhanced interrogation techniques, or "torture" as the left says, was not used to gain information, but to break down resistance and gain cooperation. Only in subsequent de-briefings did interrogators seek to find out what a detainee knew.

It might be objected that de-briefing still entailed a measure of coercion, because the memory of enhanced interrogation presumably makes a detainee believe that de-briefing will resort back to enhanced interrogation if he resists and stops talking. Thus, the threat of enhanced interrogation means that de-briefing still amounts to interrogation under duress.

However, the article contains an interesting nugget about the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah:

Indeed, the first terrorist to be subjected to enhanced techniques, Zubaydah, told his interrogators something stunning. According to the Justice Department memos released by the Obama administration, Zubaydah explained that “brothers who are captured and interrogated are permitted by Allah to provide information when they believe they have reached the limit of their ability to withhold it in the face of psychological and physical hardship.” In other words, the terrorists are called by their religious ideology to resist as far as they can — and once they have done so, they are free to tell everything they know.

Several senior officials told me that, after undergoing waterboarding, Zubaydah actually thanked his interrogators and said, “You must do this for all the brothers.” The enhanced interrogation techniques were a relief for Zubaydah, they said, because they lifted a moral burden from his shoulders — the responsibility to continue resisting.

The importance of this revelation cannot be overstated: Zubaydah had given the CIA the secret code for breaking al-Qaeda detainees. CIA officials now understood that the job of the interrogator was to give the captured terrorist something to resist, so he could do his duty to Allah and then feel liberated to speak. So they developed techniques that would allow terrorists to resist safely, without any lasting harm. Indeed, they specifically designed techniques to give the terrorists the false perception that what they were enduring was far worse than what was actually taking place.

The article then proceeds to delineate a number of plots that were disrupted. But the point is that Zubaydah himself described the effect of enhanced interrogation as releasing him from a duty to resist, thus providing a kind of validation of the accuracy of any statements made under de-briefing.