WASHINGTON — The controversy over destroyed CIA videotapes has highlighted weaknesses in American intelligence agencies' methods of interrogation of Al Qaeda suspects, according to current and former officials and experts, who say those methods are compromising the ability to extract critically important information about the threat from Islamic extremism.
Congress, the Justice Department and the CIA inspector general are investigating why the CIA destroyed tapes of its 2002 interrogations of two alleged senior Al Qaeda leaders, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri. Investigators think Zubaydah was recorded being waterboarded -- a controversial tactic that mimics the experience of drowning. The tapes were destroyed in 2005.
By their own accounting, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have not videotaped the interrogations of potentially hundreds of other terrorism suspects. That indicates an outmoded level of secrecy and unprofessionalism, the interrogation experts contend.
They say that the U.S. is behind the curve of current best practices, and that videotaping is an essential tool in improving the methods -- and results -- of terrorism interrogations. And the accountability provided by recording is needed to address international concerns about the United States' use of harsh, potentially illegal techniques, these experts add.
They say that the United States could learn a lot from methods used by Israel, Britain and other countries with decades of experience in interrogating terrorists but that so far, it has not.
"We are operating in a vacuum," said Col. Steven M. Kleinman, a reserve senior intelligence officer for the Air Force's Special Operations Command who was a military interrogator in Panama, during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, and in Iraq in 2003. "We are not giving our interrogators the skill set or the tool chest to get the information that we need in the war on terrorism."
Kleinman is one of several government experts participating in a study of interrogation for the Intelligence Science Board, an advisory body of the national intelligence director's office and other U.S. intelligence agencies.
Last year the board issued its first report, a politely worded but critical document titled "Educing Information: Interrogation: Science and Art." It concluded that the U.S. government had not in any scientific manner studied the effectiveness of its methods of interrogation since the end of World War II and that it was still using the same unproven techniques.
