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thedrifter
06-19-08, 06:58 AM
Harsh interrogation methods stain US image, endanger soldiers: experts

by Karin Zeitvogel
Wed Jun 18, 3:44 PM ET

The use by the United States of harsh interrogation methods against suspected terrorists has stained the country's image and is putting US soldiers' lives at risk, experts said here Wednesday.

"If we use torture when we question prisoners, we forfeit the right to demand that anyone treat our soldiers decently if they are taken prisoner," former army intelligence officer Stuart Herrington told AFP at a forum on the use of torture in interrogations.

"If we engage in that kind of activity, we put our soldiers at increased risk," he said.

"Our place in the world has been eroded" by the use of torture in interrogations at "war-on-terror" prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, said Ken Robinson, who served for 20 years in organizations including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency.

"We have lost the moral high ground," he said.

Furthermore, the experts said, hardball interrogation tactics don't work.

"We know that anytime you hurt someone, you make them reticent to talk in future. As far as we are concerned, we want to talk to them multiple times," said Joe Navarro, a veteran FBI interrogator.

"I've never had anyone confess because I treated them like crap. They confess because you seduce them," he said.

"Coercive techniques don't work and are not necessary."

"If you start with pain and torture, you close the door on getting the 'aha' factor," said Robinson.

Herrington agreed, and said he was "stunned" when he learned that harsh interrogation methods were being used in Iraq and the US detention center for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.

"I went to Guantanamo and Iraq to give advice (on interrogation methods)... and found we had a mess on our hands. I was stunned," Herrington said, insisting that he and those who worked with him in Vietnam, Panama and the 1991 Gulf War never "laid a hostile hand on people we interrogated."

Interrogators working in the new US theaters of conflict have "reinvented the wheel, and the rules from on-high are different," he said.

Sarah Mendelson of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which hosted the forum along with Human Rights First, deplored the US administration's "new ambivalence towards torture prohibition."

In a report, she accused the administration of President George W. Bush of appearing "increasingly prepared to pay lip-service to or ignore entirely US obligations under international human rights and humanitarian law."

The forum came a day after Carl Levin, the Democratic head of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told a congressional hearing that top US government officials had ignored the advice of lawyers from all branches of the military and sanctioned the use of harsh interrogation methods when questioning terrorism suspects.

Levin tied the hardball US interrogation policies to Donald Rumsfeld, the powerful defense secretary from 2001 to 2006, and other top officials in Bush's administration.

Many US allies would call those tough interrogation methods -- including waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and sensory deprivation -- torture, Mendelson said in her report.

Bush has made "an egregious mistake" in turning a blind eye to the use of harsh interrogation methods, and has "made the United States into an entity that is feared, as opposed to being loved and respected," Herrington said.

The US military and the FBI were opposed to the use of harsh interrogation methods, said Navarro.

"The FBI did not ask for these techniques. The army did not ask. The Marines didn't ask," said Navarro.

"Only one organization (the CIA) asked, and we have to wonder what's going on," he said.

In February, the CIA confirmed that the agency had used waterboarding in interrogations of three top Al-Qaeda detainees nearly five years ago.

Ellie