"No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that," said Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence.
Information extracted by abusive tactics was of questionable credibility, Kimmons said. Moreover, any good that came from the information would be undercut by the damage to America's reputation once the abuse became known.
"And we can't afford to go there," he said.
Kimmons' comments reflect a common refrain among instructors at the Army intelligence academy at Ft. Huachuca, Ariz. Nevertheless, many interrogators privately acknowledge that coercive methods that stop short of torture have proven effective in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In Afghanistan, for instance, interrogators who questioned prisoners early in the war complained that they had little success with straightforward approaches, and only began to get meaningful information from prisoners after embracing harsher methods, including short-term deprivation of sleep.
Over time, those harsher techniques came to include putting prisoners in "stress positions" and placing hoods on their heads -- all explicitly banned by the new Army field manual.
The new manual allows 19 interrogation methods. Cambone said officers were asked if they needed more than the 19 approved techniques. They said they did not.
"They are of the view that the manual gives them what they need to do the job," Cambone said.
Most of the Army's methods are traditional approaches that were included in the old manual -- techniques called "ego-up," where detainees with low self-esteem are flattered into revealing information; or "fear-up," where interrogators try to play off a pre-existing fear or anxiety of a detainee and suggest that the soldier could help the detainee.
New techniques include one called "Mutt and Jeff" -- essentially a good cop, bad cop routine -- and "false flag," in which an interrogator pretends not to be a U.S. citizen.
The new manual includes one restricted technique that will only be used on so-called unlawful combatants -- such as Al Qaeda suspects -- not traditional prisoners of war.
That technique, called "separation," involves segregating a detainee from other prisoners. Military officials said separation was not the equivalent of solitary confinement and was consistent with Geneva Convention protections.
