It's easy to forget that when the U.S. began interrogating al-Qaeda operatives in 2002, the CIA had no idea what it was doing. The last time the agency had been charged with conducting hostile interrogations was during the Vietnam era, and most of those officers were long retired. The wisdom inside the CIA has always been that the best intelligence is obtained through persuasion rather than coercion. New CIA recruits have even been counseled against using blackmail because the information it produced couldn't be relied on.
When the CIA was asked to resume hostile interrogations after Sept. 11, some agency leaders were dead set against it, arguing that the military was better equipped for the task. But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld insisted the job belonged to the CIA. We now know that Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in one month. His interrogator, a former CIA colleague of mine, admits he had almost no training in the technique and knew nothing about how the cumulative effect of waterboarding might affect the quality of the information he was trying to extract.
President Obama's decision to declassify Justice Department memos detailing the interrogation techniques legalized by his predecessor has sparked a predictable partisan furor. Bush Administration officials say the release has somehow compromised national security and let the enemy in on our secrets--even though U.S. interrogators' use of harsh and even sadistic techniques has been known for years. Liberals criticized the President for initially rejecting the idea of prosecuting former Bush officials, though Obama later said he is open to a 9/11-commission-style inquiry into interrogation abuses.
That would be a start. Obama shouldn't stop at declassifying the memos. He needs to launch a full-scale investigation into our intelligence-gathering practices over the past eight years, because once you get past the details of what was made legal to fight the war on terrorism, there's an even starker realization: we tortured people for almost no verifiable information.
Obama apparently spent weeks debating the merits of releasing the documents and was lobbied by CIA Director Leon Panetta to keep them classified. In the end, the case for transparency was too great. The harsh tactics--isolation, sleep deprivation, humiliation, waterboarding--not only had been widely reported, but much of it was also acknowledged to have originated in "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War," a 1957 article written for the Air Force about abusive Chinese interrogations of U.S. troops during the Korean War. Anyone who wanted to could find it via Google for years.