Trump’s call to bring back torture alarms professional interrogators
WASHINGTON – Hard-nosed interrogators who say they’ve thwarted terror attacks in the United States by extracting key information from suspects have a message for Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, who’s vowing to bring back waterboarding and even harsher questioning techniques if elected president:
Don’t do it.
Trump’s recent pledge to return “enhanced interrogation techniques” to the methods U.S. interrogators can employ has sent ripples across the country’s close-knit circle of forensic psychologists, intelligence analysts and terror experts inside the government and beyond.
Trump made the pledge in an exchange on combating terrorism during a Republican debate in New Hampshire last Saturday, three days before that state’s first-in-the-nation primary, which the New York billionaire won going away.
“I’d bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” Trump said.
The audience of Republican activists applauded Trump’s stance, but it caused dismay among experts.
“I’m not really surprised because Mr. Trump is just catering to his voters,” Ali Soufan, a pioneering former FBI interrogator who in Senate testimony in May 2009 accused the CIA of having lied about the success of its brutal techniques, told Tribune News Service. “He appears to be running on a war-crimes platform. This is possible because, unfortunately, no one has been held accountable for our past torture, and when you don’t have people being held accountable, others are going to repeat it.”
Soufan, a Lebanese-American who as an FBI agent went undercover to investigate al-Qaida and was the lead investigator into the bombing of the USS Cole and 9/11, now runs the Soufan Group, a New York-based company that advises corporations and governments on security.
Maria Hardwig, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice just blocks from Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan, said Trump’s debate comments alarmed her.
“I think it’s disgraceful and worrisome,” said Hardwig, a leading academic expert on police and intelligence interrogations. “It betrays a complete lack of understanding about the nature of intelligence-gathering. Torture, in short, has repeatedly been categorized by professional interrogators as an amateur approach. It’s simply not an effective way of getting diagnostic information.”
President Barack Obama formally ended the use of torture in the anti-terror fight with an executive order issued Jan. 22, 2009, two days after he took office. Obama’s order halted the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program that had permitted waterboarding, forced “rectal rehydration,” sexual humiliation and other techniques documented in a December 2014 Senate report.
Seven years after Obama’s order, the specter of past torture still haunts the country.
In the days since Trump’s public support for forceful ways of questioning terror suspects, the Obama administration has waged a quiet counter-campaign against any attempt to re-legitimize such abusive techniques.
In a rare move to discuss a classified program, the FBI called in reporters for sit-down interviews with the head of a little-known initiative named the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, called HIG by intelligence insiders.
“Everything that we do, all the techniques that we employ and train, are humane, lawful and based on the world-class research that we’re doing,” Frazier Thompson, the group’s director, told Tribune News Service on Wednesday. “And what that world-class research says and has shown to us is that the rapport-based techniques … will elicit more credible intelligence and evidence than any other type of technique. So that’s how we operate.”