Ali Soufan, a Lebanon-born Muslim and one of the few FBI agents with the pedigree to go undercover in the Middle East, was an eyewitness to lost opportunities for intelligence-gathering in the war on terror.
"When knowledge replaces fear of the unknown, when competence replaces panicked responses and where expert advice replaces political messages, there is no enemy we cannot defeat," Soufan told a crowd at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs this week.
Unfortunately, Soufan, a special agent in the FBI from 1997 to 2005 who investigated the East Africa bombings and the attack on the USS Cole, said he watched as private contractors took over interrogations of key detainees such as high-ranking terrorist Abu Zubaydah. They used increasingly harsh interrogation techniques that may have gained compliance but lost credible intelligence.
Soufan, now chief executive officer of his own risk management and security company, said recently declassified documents show evidence that the use of harsh interrogation techniques thwarted intelligence gathering with false leads.
"These techniques give you compliance. There's a big difference between compliance and cooperation," he said. "Compliance is basically giving you whatever you want to hear. But is it true?"
Despite the romance and fictionalized effectiveness of the TV show "24," a subsequent CIA Inspector General's Report found no evidence that any of the plots revealed from interrogations of detainees such as Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Riduan Isamuddin, Abd al-Rahim Al-Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah were imminent.
"We had programs run by people with no interrogation or subject matter experience, and their product was judged by people with limited interrogation and subject matter experience," he said.
All the talk of taking the high road and the mistakes of the past could be wiped out if there is another domestic terrorist attack, he admitted.
