Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been repeating a talking point that I guess he thinks is witty, saying that Larry King is tougher on his interviews than the FBI. Just today he said, "Larry King has interrogated people longer and better than that," referring to the Christmas Day "Underwear Bomber."
While I don't doubt the CNN host's interviewing skills, McConnell's jab at the FBI is not only a cheap political stunt aimed at the Obama administration, but it is way out of line with what actually happened during the interrogation of the "Underwear Bomber."
First of all, the FBI is trained to interrogate, and terrorism experts who have worked firsthand on the issue agree that the FBI does this pretty well. Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism advisor to Presidents Clinton and Bush, and a career intelligence official, said earlier this week that "the FBI is good at getting people to talk ... they have been much more successful than the previous attempts of torturing people and trying to convince them to give information that way. The FBI does it right."
In fact some of the most important intelligence that we have received from interrogating terrorism suspects was gained by the FBI. Ali Soufan, was the FBI interrogator who, through traditional interrogation techniques of Abu Zubaydah discovered that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. This was some of the most important intelligence gathered on al Qaeda, and it was obtained by an FBI agent. In fact once he and his FBI team were removed from the interrogation, Zubaydah stopped talking. They were then asked to return. Shortly after they returned they received more actionable intelligence.
What makes McConnell's comments even more egregious is that it is based off of a completely erroneous premise: that the FBI did not gain useful information from the "Underwear Bomber." If Sen. McConnell read the newspapers he would have realized that earlier this week it was revealed that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has, in fact, been providing useful intelligence to authorities for weeks.
Before the Senate Intelligence Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller described it as an ongoing process saying: "It is a continuum in which over a period of time, we have been successful in obtaining intelligence, not just on day one, but on day two, day three, day four, and day five down the road." In addition, senior officials say that that the agents and officials at the FBI and Justice Departments did exactly what they were supposed to do.
The official said in an interview that "the men and women in the FBI, the Department of Justice, did precisely what they were trained to do, what their policies require them to do and what the nation expects them to do ... there has been a fair process that has been followed, and in the past five weeks or so, every day we have had the opportunity to evaluate and reevaluate the case and to determine whether or not the course we were on was the right one. And we determined that that was the case."
Justice and FBI officials not only did the right thing, but if other courses of action were taken, it's possible that less information could have been obtained. If McConnell was unhappy with the FBI's interrogation, then he would presumably prefer a military or CIA interrogation at Guantanamo Bay -- assuming that Larry King was not available.
But, officials who had access to Abdulmutallab said that putting him in front of military personnel would have foreclosed further cooperation and made him "more opposed to any type of cooperation."
Furthermore, it is agreed that working with Abdulmutallab's family was essential in gaining his cooperation. Does anyone think that if Abdulmutallab was sent off to Guantanamo Bay or some secret black site, that the parents would have helped American officials? One official with knowledge of the case said that the reason the parents did cooperate was that "they had complete trust in the U.S. system of justice and believed that Umar Farouq would be treated fairly and appropriately. And that they would be as well."
There have been a bunch of conservative politicians out there insulting the competencies and abilities of the FBI, and America's criminal justice system as a whole, simply to gain cheap political points against the Obama administration. This is damaging not only to the reputation of those civil servants in the FBI and Justice Department, but also to the larger national security debate.
When leaders of a party say they would prefer a 77-year-old cable talk show host over an FBI agent for a terrorism interrogation, it is ignoring the facts on important national security matters: Cooperation and intelligence was received, not in spite of our criminal justice system, but because of it.