Alleged abuse of CIA interrogations: what to do about it?

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Some great voices in this episode of the podcast.

Paul Pillar of Georgetown University was at the CIA for 28 years before retiring in 2005. He was an expert on South Asia and counter-terrorism at the agency. Pillar told me there’s good reason for frustration at the CIA over all this.

I also talked with former CIA officer Robert Baer. Much of his career was spent in the Middle East. Baer told me he could have tortured detainees a number of times over the years. But he never did. He said that’s not because he was categorically against it on moral grounds in all cases. But he said it’s simply because torture doesn’t work. It doesn’t produce solid intelligence. Baer wants President Obama to take the preliminary investigation into CIA abuse and kick it up a notch.

Mark Bowden has written fantastic stuff for The Atlantic on the issue of interrogations. He told me this would be a simple matter if it was always true that non-coercive methods of interrogations worked best in all cases. But it’s not that simple, Bowden said. However, he’s also very supportive of the way the Obama administration has broken with the past.

David Cole is the author of The Torture Memos. Cole said failing to hold those responsible for breaking laws on torture would allow future American presidents to repeat the mistakes of the Bush administration. But he added that this could be achieved without going down the road of full-blown criminal investigation.

There are, of course, differences of opinion on the question of how far up the chain of command the Obama administration should go with any investigation or inquiry. I talked about this with Stephen Walt of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Robert Jervis of Columbia, and David Kennedy at Stanford.