Soon after the Obama Administration released documents which showed that the CIA had used waterboarding hundreds of times on two high level Al Qaeda detainees, I received a phone call from former FBI Special Agent Joe Navarro.
"They would not have had to use the technique so many times if it actually worked," Navarro practically shouted in exasperation into the phone. "Only an amateur would use this stuff. Professionally trained interrogators know that they don't need it."
Later that day, Vice President Dick Cheney went on FOX News to say that it was not fair to only release the memos that provided a legal rationale for the use of torture. The Vice President told FOX News' Sean Hannity that he had asked the CIA to also release documents that showed that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" were effective.
I hope the CIA takes the Vice President up on his request.
Navarro believes that if they do, we may find that the two detainees talked after they were waterboarded but that what they had to say was of little or no value.
Ken Robinson, a former Special Forces soldier and interrogator, agrees. "We have seen guys hold out and hold out until a moment when it seems plausible and then they appear to break. Our guys rushed out in the field based on the new information and only later did we learn that it was false," Robinson said. "Basically they played us."
Though he may be reluctant to talk about it, Vice President Cheney and the administration have mistaken information gathered via torture for valuable intelligence at least once before. In 2002, the CIA turned a detainee named Ibn Shaykh Al Libi over to Egyptian security forces for questioning. Al Libi provided his interrogators with details of a connection between Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons manufacturing capacity and Al Qaeda.
That information was used several times by the Administration to justify the impending invasion of Iraq. The President cited the information in a speech in Cincinnati and Secretary Colin Powell cited the same evidence in his speech to the United Nations.
Intelligence agencies later found evidence that proved that Al Libi had made it up.
Some members of the intelligence community speculate that Al Libi purposefully misled the U.S. in the hopes of drawing the country into a protracted war in Iraq. Others believe Al Libi told his captors what they wanted to hear to make the pain stop.
There is no scientific evidence that suggests that waterboarding is an effective method to interrogate people, according to COL Steve Kleinman, an Air Force intelligence officer who helped produce a comprehensive study of interrogation and torture for the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2006.
To the contrary Kleinman said, the limited scientific evidence suggests that waterboarding is counter-productive. "It makes people more resolute and more determined that the cause they are fighting for is correct," Kleinman told me recently. "It does not make them want to talk."
"Even if it did work," Navarro said, "it is not necessary. We have dealt with these sorts of people before."
Navarro spent more than 25 years hunting terrorists in Latin America, Europe and Asia. He has conducted thousands of interrogations - or what the FBI calls "interviews" - of suspects in an effort to stop those who seek to do the US harm.
Khalid Sheik Muhammed, one of the detainees who was waterboarded by the CIA, is "a classic narcissist," Navarro said. "He wants to talk. He wants to tell the world all of the things he is doing and has done. To get him to talk you have to draw him out. Appeal to his ego."
It is time, as Vice President Cheney seems to be suggesting, to provide the American people with a full accounting of the CIA's use of water-boarding.
Releasing the documents that Vice President Cheney suggests would be helpful, but they will not provide a complete enough picture.
The President and the Congress should establish a non-partisan commission to review the CIA's practice. It should review the information that was collected. Was the information accurate?
The panel should also try to determine if it was necessary to waterboard these subjects to get them to talk. And it should examine the larger strategic costs to the United States as a result of the use of these techniques.
"Was it worth it to America to use Gestapo tactics, for what we got?" asks Navarro. Can we say how many more recruits joined Al Qaeda when they learned that torture was an official US policy? What impact did the use of these techniques have on our efforts to fight the insurgents in Iraq? Or to cultivate moderate voices in Iran?
A report like this would help the American public better understand the risks of engaging in torture. Thanks for suggesting it Mr. Vice President.
David Danzig is the Deputy Program Director at Human Rights First.