Tony Arend alertly reposts an NPR story detailing the creation of a new elite civilian interrogating unit in the FBI, which is almost certainly an excellent move. The suggestion for the unit came from a high-level panel Obama appointed just after taking office, and it is now being put into effect. The development is likely to be positive for two reasons.
First, despite all the tremendous attention being given to interrogation tactics in the previous administration, the consensus among knowledgeable observers seems to be that a) very little good information came out of the extreme interrogation methods we did apply, and that b) we had few productive methods of extracting information. The article cites experience of Matthew Alexander’s elite interrogating team that eventually located al-Zarqawi by eschewing torture and employing alternative techniques. His subsequent piece in the Washington Post was one of the very best and most haunting reads of last year. He and Steven Kleinman had been pushing Obama’s panel toward reaching this conclusion.
The other reason is that locating the unit in the FBI is one more step toward transitioning the “War on Terror” to a question of civilian law enforcement, which is what it should been in the first place. Alexander’s quote to NPR underscores the point: “Al-Qaida has more in common with a criminal gang or criminal organization than it does with rank-and-file soldiers,” he said. Properly classifying terrorism as a problem of transnational criminality rather than as a “war” could have avoided the calamitous costs associated with the misclassification—trying to pursue the former with the methods of the latter.
a.j.m.
Filed under: Other transnat. , interrogation, Obama, terrorism
