Prisoner Abuse and National Security

Amy Zegart, associate professor of Public Policy, joined a panel of experts on KCRW’s nationally-syndicated public radio program, “To the Point,” (8/25/09) to discuss CIA interrogation and President Obama’s creation of a new Interagency Interrogation Group, the quality of intelligence information-gathering in U.S. agencies. Hosted by Warren Olney, the panel also featured R. Jeffrey Smith, national investigative correspondent for The Washington Post; Jane Mayer, investigative reporter for The New Yorker, and Tim Weine, author of Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA. Zegart is the author of Spying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11.

Listen to the entire broadcast here. [3]

The following is an excerpt transcribed from the radio broadcast:

Tim Weiner
The FBI is all about interrogation under the rule of law, they have hundreds of people who are extremely skilled in the art of it and the science of interrogation...you get better information, better information by actually talking to people instead of beating them up.

Warren Olney
So you think then that the FBI and the military agencies are more appropriate than the CIA for this kind of work?

Tim Weiner
If you were going to conduct a global system of interrogation and do it according American laws and American values, they are better suited by training and by temperament to carry out those interrogations.

Warren Olney
Do you have a different view than Tim Weiner with regard to the FBI as the appropriate agency to conduct intelligence interrogations

Amy Zegart
I do. Tim and I don’t disagree about much. But, I do disagree with him here. I think he is right that the FBI is all about interrogation under the rule of law but, the question is: interrogation for what? The FBI is used to interrogating about specific cases and gathering information to submit in a court of law. I think this new interrogation unit is a very, very bad idea. The best way to change interrogation policy in the U.S. government is to change interrogation policy, not create what the Obama administration has done, yet another interagency unit staffed with different people from different agencies with different missions who see intelligence differently. And, the FBI, as Tim knows quite well, is an organization that does not treat its own intelligence analysts like first-class citizens. So, I think it’s a big stretch to suggest that this new unit, led by the FBI, is going to improve interrogation practices.

Warren Olney
What do you mean when you say they don’t treat their own analysts like first-class citizens?

Amy Zegart
Well, analysts inside the FBI traditionally have not been the sort of the glorious people in the bureau. There’s an old joke in the FBI that there are only two kinds of people: special agents and furniture. So, traditionally it’s the people who carry the badges and the guns that are considered the heart and soul of bureau and that is still true today. Just to give you an example, no analyst at the FBI can run any of the FBI’s fifty-six field offices. No analyst has ever led the FBI. So analysis is something that is relatively new for the bureau and analysts have repeatedly told me over the past several years that they are struggling to have intelligence, and analysis in particular, be taken equally into consideration with special agents.

Warren Olney
Well, what about the military agencies that are involved in this interagency task force? Tim Weiner said a moment ago, that the military, like the FBI, is all about interrogation under the rule of law and uses honey as opposed to vinegar.

Amy Zegart
I think that’s true. I think the question is: does this organizational set up improve interrogation practices? And, I’m very skeptical that it does. Just to give you an idea what constitutes good intelligence for a CIA official. It’s information that gives the President decision-advantage. Good intelligence for the military tends to be tactical in nature, where is the next IED attack in Iraq going to be? Good intelligence for the FBI is information that can lead to a conviction. So you can imagine these different agencies sitting in the room and what they consider to be the gold nugget of intelligence information, that “a-ha” moment, could be, in fact, very, very different.

Warren Olney
I didn’t ask you directly if you thought this interagency task force was a good idea.

Tim Weiner
Well, interagency task force is one of the most dreaded phrases in the language of government and bureaucratise. What we’re seeing now under the Obama administration is a much clearer delineation of responsibility than what we saw under President Bush after 9-11 when it was all hands on deck, this is an emergency. And, what we’re seeing now is a delineation of responsibility where the CIA is going to kill people with unmanned drones. The FBI and the Justice Department are going to take the people that are imprisoned, still imprisoned, and attempt to impose the rule of law on them through the criminal justice system and through law enforcement. And, the military has its hands full fighting two wars on two very different fronts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The role of the CIA in terms of the interrogation and detention of terror suspects is over.

Warren Olney
Over all together. So no more secret prisons and no more CIA interrogators. What about the outsourcing of these responsibilities, is that going on, has it gone on, or did it go on under the Bush administration?

Tim Weiner
That started in a big way in the 1990s under the Clinton administration. It expanded enormously under President Bush when the intelligence budgets of the CIA and its sister agencies doubled and you didn’t have people. So, what you had was, a ton of money, a ton of requirements responsibilities, and the outsourcing of that government money and those government responsibilities to General Dynamics and Lockheed and Black Water and a hundred other companies that sprung up like mushrooms on the beltway of retired military and intelligence officers.

Warren Olney
So that went on in a big way. Professor Zegart, is that still going on and is that something that the task force might make unnecessary?

Amy Zegart
It’s still very much going on and I should say it’s not limited to the CIA. I was in Washington last week and found out that in the Department of Homeland Security, the intelligence branch of that department, 60 percent of those positions are staffed by contractors. So this is a large and growing problem. Tim’s exactly right. This has long roots, dates back to the so-called peace dividend of the 1990s when we had dramatic cuts in intelligence agency work forces. And so now we have on the one hand a gray level of executives inside intelligence agencies and a very green level of newcomers, relative newcomers in these agencies. So, in the CIA, it’s the youngest analytic workforce in the agency’s history. So, this is a problem that’s been years in the making.

Warren Olney
Professor Zegart, how difficult is it to control the independent contractors that are so deeply involved in all of this?

Amy Zegart
Well I think the question of accountability is the central question. It’s hard to get a handle on what they’re doing. It’s hard to know how much they are following agency guidelines. And then it’s hard to know how the accountability to Congress or the Executive Branch would work. And so I know that seems to be an area that Congress is increasingly interested in getting involved in.

Warren Olney
Given all you have said professor, what is the quality of intelligence we’re getting now of the kind that the President needs to have what you referred to as decision-advantage?

Amy Zegart
That’s a very, very difficult question to answer. Intelligence is often discussed as putting pieces of a puzzle together except that, instead in intelligence, we don’t even know what the puzzle looks like and the pieces are scattered and we may never know what we have. So, intelligence officials are saying that things are better than they were before 9-11 but, it’s awfully hard to know what the answer to that is. Let me just, if I can, say just a word about the inspector general report. What struck me about the report was that it was, it started by investigating violations of approved methods. And where it ended up was really raising grave concerns about the approved methods themselves and I think that’s really important. The report itself found that there were, and I quote, “few instances of deviations from approved procedures.” But what the inspector general found was that many inside the CIA were worried that this day would come. They were worried about the political risks of following these approved policies and they were worried that the U.S. government would not stand by them in the end.

Warren Olney
Do you think, Professor Zegart, that those officers will be hung out to dry?

Amy Zegart
I agree with Tim. I think the odds are very low but I think no matter what happens this is a political loser for the President. It’s awfully hard to generate good will inside the CIA when you’re generating investigations about CIA officials. It probably won’t satisfy the left wing of the Democratic Party because it doesn’t look like Justice Department officials or senior Bush Administration officials will be included. Prosecutions are unlikely. These cases have already gone to the Justice Department for investigation as director Panetta noted yesterday. And as we see it’s distracting the country mightily from the President’s agenda. So no matter what happens with this investigation I think the President is in a situation he’d rather not be in.