“The Interrogation Perfect Storm”
by
Colonel (ret) Stuart A. Herrington
Part I: Introduction
Good afternoon. It is an honor to attend this first annual Fort Leavenworth Ethics Symposium to
provide an interrogator’s operational perspective. I would like to thank Colonel (retired) Bob
Ulin, the C&GSC Foundation, and the College for this opportunity, and for their timely and firm
commitment to the ethical challenges we face in today’s Army.
I’ve entitled my remarks, “The Interrogation Perfect Storm,” with apologies to author Sebastian
Junger.
You may recall Junger’s best-selling book, “The Perfect Storm,” which describes the deadly
Halloween Nor’easter that hit the waters off New England in late October, 1991. Three elements
combined to create Junger’s “perfect storm.” A cold front from Canada collided with a front of
warmer and dry air in the North Atlantic, with the resulting storm magnified by a third ingredient,
heavy moisture left over from Hurricane Grace. The result: a once-in-a-century storm, with 100foot waves and winds of 120 mph. The Gloucester-based fishing trawler Andrea Gail was lost
with its crew of six and a National Guard helicopter crashed attempting a rescue. Coast Guard
rescue personnel saved almost thirty lives in four days.
Today I would like to borrow Sebastian Junger’s concept of the Perfect Storm and apply it to
events in the shadowy world of prisoner interrogation since 9-11. The analogy might be a touch
tortured (no pun intended), but the confluence of interrogation-related factors that propelled the
United States down an ethical and moral cul de sac after 9-11 evokes the perfect storm
concept—to wit, “a rare combination of circumstances that aggravate a situation drastically.”
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As with Junger’s storm, the “Interrogation Perfect Storm” occurred when events from several
different fronts collided to produce consequences of damaging proportions. But Junger’s storm
was a freak of nature that raged for four days, while the Interrogation Perfect Storm, wrought by
men, has been permanently enshrined in infamy and continues to harm our country.
Permit me to begin by setting the stage. I served thirty years as a counterintelligence and human
intelligence officer.
I was not officially an interrogator.
Interrogation was considered
“sergeant’s business,” carried out by school-trained enlisted and NCO personnel, seasoned with a
small cadre of the most experienced, who became warrant officers. During times of peace, my
colleagues and I waged the Silent War, “spy vs. counterspy.” During deployments, I morphed
into the interrogator identity when it became clear there was a need.
In Vietnam, hundreds of MI captains were assigned to the Phoenix Program. The Vietcong
“shadow government” was our target. Information from prisoners or ralliers was essential. Our
Vietnamese allies were in the habit of torturing prisoners, and a MACV regulation advised us
that when we encountered such abuses, we were to attempt to stop the activity, leave the scene,
and report the incident.
The idea was noble, but ratting out one’s counterparts as the MACV regulation required would
have been poisonous to one’s effectiveness as an advisor. Vietnamese military personnel
routinely beat and otherwise abused captured Viet Cong, emaciated bunker-dwellers who would
spin magnificent lies to stop the abuse. To show our ally the folly of brutalizing prisoners to
obtain information, I began to “borrow” recalcitrant and often defiant captives from the province
jail, men who had been beaten (or worse), then written off by my counterparts as liars.
The approach was intuitive. I avoided conduct that labeled me as an interrogator. Instead,
posturing myself as a concerned fellow soldier, I blurred the lines by showing empathy with my
subject and offering unconditional, decent treatment—food, medical care, and clothing. Taking
the moral high ground psychologically confused and disarmed the prisoner. I was not what
communist political cadre had told him I would be. Invariably, my new “friend” would start
talking, curious about this unthreatening American who spoke his language. From that point on,
I was winning, as the first goal of any interrogator is to initiate a dialogue.
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Initially,
conversations dealt with simple, mundane matters, not military information, but that came soon
after.
Prisoners dismissed as liars by the South Vietnamese opened up, admitting to providing false
names and cover stories about themselves and their units. They willingly led me and my
surprised counterparts on operations targeting base areas, caches, and covert VC cadre. Working
with CIA interrogator Orrin DeForest, who was running a “guest house” interrogation center in
Bien Hoa using the same techniques, we showed the Vietnamese that information given
voluntarily was far superior to whatever a prisoner might say when he was fighting off water
torture or electrocution. Vietnamese reliance on torture in Hau Nghia Province and at the
Vietnamese III Corps headquarters ended.
These experiences illustrated the hallowed first canon of interrogation. A prisoner is a
recruitment challenge, an opportunity. One can employ legions of effective stratagem to achieve
control over a potential recruit, but brutality, abuse, and torture have no place.
A truly
professional interrogator is more like a precise scalpel than a blunt force instrument. Real
interrogators know this. They rely on a mastery of area knowledge and human nature, and a
healthy dose of guile. Real interrogators assess the motivations and psyche of their subject, do
their homework about their target’s world, and deftly manipulate the situation to achieve control.
Those who lack such skills resort to abuse and torture. Instead of recruiting their prisoner, they
reinforce his belief in his cause and radicalize him.
Years later, by then a colonel, I deployed to Panama for Operation Just Cause. Several thousand
detainees had been captured, including Manuel Noriega’s closest henchmen—kleptocrats,
torturers, election riggers, drug-runners, and murderers. When I arrived a day after Christmas,
1989, Noriega’s senior officers were housed in the Ft. Clayton jail, sixteen to a cell, at the mercy
of junior interrogators who taunted and threatened them. These communal cells enabled the
Panamanians to organize and collude. All knew who was being interrogated and how long each
spent with the interrogator. It was a recipe for failure, I told the J2 and CINCSOUTH General
Maxwell Thurman. The CINC’s guidance was crisp. “Fix it,” he ordered.
Authorized by Panamanian Vice President Ricardo Arias Calderon, we co-opted an island off the
coast and set up a “guest house” facility to which we secretly moved captured archives and
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selected Panamanian detainees--those who could provide information in response to the CINC’s
and national requirements. Each “guest” had a private, air conditioned room. Our lead card was
unconditional decent treatment. My pick-up team employed captured archives, area knowledge
provided by “good” Panamanians who had run afoul of Noriega and his thugs, and information
provided by the “guests” themselves to play one source off against another. We never once
threatened or laid a finger on a detainee. Over six months, we interviewed more than a hundred
“guests.” Almost all of them eventually cooperated. They told us the sordid story of Noriega’s
raging alcoholism, the attack against U. S. Marines at the Arrajan petroleum farm, Noriega’s ties
to Castro, the covert training of Panamanian special operations soldiers at the Cuban base in
Punto Cero, attempts to acquire SA-7 missiles from the PLO, Libya, and the Soviet Union,
murder, drug-cartel deals, election-rigging, and massive financial corruption. When we returned
these men to Panamanian custody to face prosecution, some gave their interrogators gifts, and
more than one cried as they thanked our team for treating them humanely.
Within a few months of our return to the United States, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Our
team was summoned to Saudi Arabia and directed by the CINC to establish a special
interrogation center. The “guests” were to be Iraqi general officers whom we expected to
capture when the coalition attack was launched. Our approach was modeled after the recentlysuccessful Panama example.
We afforded unconditional decent treatment to our Iraqi guests.
We did not gloat at the
coalition’s lopsided victory, but channeled their anger towards Saddam Hussein, who had set
them up for defeat and humiliation. We told the Iraqis that we were not interrogators, but rather
a team whose mission was to shed light on how our two countries managed to fight the wrong
war, at the wrong time, against the wrong enemy (Iran being our common enemy). We told them
that their bravery was not in question. Not only had they fought the Iranians for eight brutal
years, but since the invasion of Kuwait, they had hunkered down in the desert, terrified at the
prospects of Saddam’s promised “mother of all battles,” and sweating through a 39-day air
offensive more intense than the aerial bombardments of World War II.
We immersed ourselves in captured documents, plied our guests with Middle Eastern food,
medical care, and a generous dose of officer-to-officer empathy, all the while discreetly playing
one guest off against the other. Cooperation approached 100%, as each Iraqi officer shared
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information sufficient to get him executed for treason by Saddam. We developed details on such
command-sensitive matters as chemical weapons, the massacre of Kurds at Halabja, the secret
run-up to the Kuwait invasion, Saddam’s possible successors, and how Iraqi ingenuity enabled
them to avoid mass casualties in the face of the relentless coalition air campaign.
The Panama and Desert Storm projects reinforced the principle that approaching high-value
detainees in a harsh, adversarial manner was counterproductive. Ours was the rapport-based,
developmental approach, always employed from the moral and ethical high ground. There was
no room on our team for charlatans who believed in sleep deprivation, inducing hypothermia,
stress positions, face slapping, forced nudity, water boarding, blaring heavy metal music, or other
amateurish, ineffective, and ethically-flawed tricks.
The Panama and Desert Storm interrogation centers were ad hoc facilities not called for in
doctrine. But when operations result in the takedown of entire countries, the defeat of a huge
army like Saddam’s legions, or the capture of senior jihadists, we need a capability more
sophisticated than young NCO interrogators trained to squeeze tactical information from
captured enemy riflemen. I retired in the spring of 1998, but not before ensuring that a new Joint
Publication directed theater commanders in warfighting contingencies to establish a senior-level
interrogation and debriefing center to exploit high-value detainees.
By then, the shadow of repeated fundamentalist terrorist attacks told many of us that we were
facing a new conflict against a new kind of foe. I believed that the interrogation methods we had
successfully employed in Vietnam, Panama, and Desert Storm had laid the groundwork for smart
exploitation of such enemies, executed from the ethical and moral high ground—using guile, not
force. In that belief, I was mistaken.
Part II: The Interrogation Perfect Storm
The first element of the Interrogation Perfect Storm came from the “high strategic level” of the
War on Terror.
Media reports and declassified documents are persuasive that Vice President
Cheney, his Legal Counsel and Chief of Staff, David Addington, and a coterie of high-ranking
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DoD, and DoJ persons, names like Rumsfeld, Cambone, Yoo, Haynes, and Gonzalez (none
known for interrogation experience), came to believe that a shortcut to obtaining good
intelligence from terrorist detainees was to “take off the gloves.” Against ruthless enemies,
ruthless methods were in order. It was a seductive line of reasoning.
A flurry of memoranda and legal briefs reinforced and enabled this conviction.
Efforts were
made to parse and redefine torture, to define some prisoners as “unlawful enemy combatants,”
and to unleash interrogators armed with new weapons, now called by the euphemism “enhanced
interrogation techniques.” This “wrong turn” taken by our leadership, while well-intentioned
and emanating from the shock of 9-11, led to sanctioned use of treatment and techniques long
rejected by our government, our military, and the intelligence community as illegal, ethically
wrong, ineffective, and reprehensible. Their employment was based upon two false premises,
namely, that harsher, brutal methods would quickly yield more and better information, and that
the end justifies the means.
The results of this ill-advised wrong turn were not long in surfacing. The Special Operations
Task Force in Afghanistan, and ultimately in Iraq, treated detainees harshly, beating them, even
burning them. Had my men and I done such things in Vietnam, Panama, or Desert Storm, we
would have been reprimanded, or even faced charges. At Camp Nama, controlled by the Special
Operations Task Force in Iraq, army enlisted interrogators humiliated prisoners by stripping
them, induced hypothermia with fire hoses, mud, and air conditioners, and used military dogs to
induce fear.
Some Nama interrogators feared legal consequences. They told their commander such treatment
was against all of their training.
Their colonel quickly produced two JAG attorneys who
explained the concept of “unlawful enemy combatants,” reassuring the wary junior interrogators
that such treatment was legal and “would not come back at you.” The measures being used
against the prisoners were not inhumane, one JAG lawyer advised, because “they left no lasting
mental or physical effects.”
In Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world, hastily-formed CIA interrogation nodes crossed the
line. When some CIA officers expressed skepticism and reservations at the new path, which
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included waterboarding, they were told by their CIA superiors that the CIA’s Office of General
Counsel and the Department of Justice had ruled that such treatment was legal. A few savvy
pros declined to participate; others saw it as their patriotic duty and joined the team, a decision
they surely regret today.
During a visit to Guantanamo in March 2002 to advise the new Army Commander of the
Interrogation Task Force, I noticed that inmates were living in near-communal conditions and
that camp custodial personnel adopted a harsh, one-size-fits-all treatment of detainees, treatment
that frustrated DoD, FBI and CIA officers on site told me was facilitating militancy and collusion.
Designed to control “the worst of the worst,” rather than to collect intelligence, Guantanamo was
the diametric opposite of how I would have set up a facility. I recommended that the general
adopt a “guest house” approach, at least for “Top Forty” detainees.
Instead, six months later, faced with increasing collusion and militancy of the detainee
population, the general requested approval of a list of “counter-resistance strategies” that
included deprivation of light and auditory stimuli, hooding, removal of clothing, forced
grooming, and using “detainees’ individual phobias” (such as fear of dogs) to induce stress. The
general’s Staff Judge Advocate forwarded the request, observing that the “proposed strategies do
not violate applicable federal law.” Some military interrogators (to the dismay of FBI officers on
site) became increasingly abusive, resulting in a number of cases of harsh, humiliating and
amateurish interrogation tactics that brought scandal to the facility, to our Army, and our country.
Iraq was worse. During a visit there in December 2003 to evaluate interrogation practices, I
reported, in writing, that the Special Operations Task Force was brutalizing detainees at their
Camp Nama facility before turning them in to the Baghdad Airport confinement facility.
Unaware of the “wrong turn” taken in Washington, I expected a major investigation of rogue
activity, but a feeble attempt to investigate was quickly dropped. Investigations into Camp
Nama were unwelcome, because, we now know, the excesses that I and others reported were
sanctioned at very high levels of the U.S. government.
Camp Nama was what you got when
leaders took a “wrong turn” in Washington—the first ingredient of the Interrogation Perfect
Storm.
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The second element of the Interrogation Perfect Storm rocketed up from the tactical level, from a
miserable prison called Abu Ghraib. Tactical events can sometimes take on major significance,
negatively impact on the strategic and operational levels of the conflict, and create havoc on the
global stage where what we now call the “information war” is waged. Until Abu Ghraib, the
massacre of civilians at the Vietnamese village of My Lai by American infantrymen was perhaps
the best-known example of this.
At Abu Ghraib, months before it became a household word, I observed a situation that was a
recipe for disaster:
It was not secure. Unvetted Iraqi police, some of them insurgent sympathizers, were
inside the walls. Outside the walls, insurgents found the prison an easy target for their mortars.
A few hundred demoralized MPs with inadequate training, leadership and experience
were trying to run a detention center with more than 6000 inmates. MP leadership was weak.
MI leadership was substandard. Instead of a human intelligence full colonel, a civil
affairs lieutenant colonel ran the interrogation effort.
Undermanned and under-resourced interrogators were swamped by requirements,
pressured by the chain of command for quick response, and faced with more sources than they
could possibly interrogate.
MPs were sneaking alcohol on site, in violation of General Orders.
More than 1000 detainees were on “MI Hold” for interrogation. More than half of them
were living in large tents, dozens per tent, where they could organize resistance and collude to
frustrate interrogators. Twenty interrogators were supposed to screen and question this mob.
Unlike the brutality at Camp Nama, the misconduct at Abu Ghraib was not the direct result of the
top-down orders from Washington to take off the gloves. MPs were bored, angry, ill-led, and
alienated. One of their numbers, a former prison guard, became the equivalent of an “emergent
leader.” He set the tone for the night shift’s misconduct and hi-jinx. Victims were largely
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criminals. The sexual humiliation of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib, while equally abhorrent as the Camp
Nama mistreatment, was a separate show, not ordered and sanctioned by the chain of command.
At Abu Ghraib, I had hoped to find a sophisticated strategic interrogation facility being
professionally run and resourced. Instead, I reported to BG Barbara Fast, who had invited me to
conduct the inspection, Abu Ghraib was a squandered and lost opportunity. Not even a vestige
of the decent treatment approach could be found. The second ingredient of the Interrogation
Perfect Storm emanated from Abu Ghraib when bored, poorly led, and resentful night shift
personnel breached discipline.
The wrong turn ordered from Washington and the misconduct at Abu Ghraib required only the
third element of a Perfect Storm, the “moist air” if you will, to lubricate the whole thing and
make it even more damaging. Enter the global media, for whom Abu Ghraib and its sick photos
became one of the most compelling stories of the war. And why not? The sheer depravity of the
mistreatment, the idea that American soldiers would descend to such depths of conduct, and the
availability of victims willing to describe their shame—these were the ingredients of a story that
had to be reported. As with My Lai thirty-five years earlier, Abu Ghraib was a godsend for those
who wished to discredit and end the war.
The resulting Interrogation Perfect Storm was also a precious gift to our enemies, who could and
did use the story to prove that the American infidels were evil incarnate. Gone was the moral
high ground. Not surprisingly, anti-war elements in the U.S. and around the world have been
only too pleased to keep the story alive.
Let’s turn briefly to the operational impact.
Part III: Challenges to Interrogation Operators in the Post-Interrogation Perfect Storm
Environment
After the Interrogation Perfect Storm broke, a great but painful national debate ensued. Congress
became involved. Human rights organizations and the media went into a frenzy of Freedom of
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Information Act requests to fix responsibility—the higher up, the better. Laws were passed and
the President issued an Executive Order. Congress decreed that all government agencies must
interrogate according to the new Army Human Intelligence Collector Operations Field Manual,
and that the manual be unclassified. Only those approaches listed in it can be used. A bevy of
court actions resulted in the determination that some classes of detainees have habeas corpus
rights and the right to counsel.
The Supreme Court ruled that Article 3 of the Geneva
Conventions applies as a matter of law to the conflict with Al Qaeda.
For interrogators, it has become a new ball game.
The unambiguous message sent by the Administration, the Congress, and the Courts forbidding
torture, abuse, or cruel and degrading treatment is a positive. The pending creation of a HighValue Detainee Interrogation Group run by the FBI, with DoD and CIA assets, reporting to the
White House through the National Security Council, is fraught with possible problems. But
regardless of which agency interrogates high-value detainees in the future, the operator’s
challenges have become more difficult.
The people who conceived of the “wrong turn”
described here are no longer in government, but the consequences of the ill-conceived and
ethically deficient path they followed remain. Here is what I would have to cope with if called
tomorrow to set up an interrogation operation in some faraway theater of operations.
Loss of the moral high ground: Historically, interrogation was often advantaged by the fact
that most prisoners, once recovered from the trauma of capture, were relieved and even content
to be held by the Americans. In 1991, one captured Iraqi general described how he and the
division staff undertook a risky nocturnal march to the west so they would be captured by the
Americans, not by the British or any of the Arab forces in the coalition. Another Iraqi general
recalled how an American colonel spotted his general’s epaulets and took him to his track,
offering him dry clothing and warm tea. One Iraqi brigade commander shed tears of rage as he
described how his British captors had ripped his brigadier’s epaulets from his shoulders and
stomped them into the sand, humiliating him in front of his soldiers. These officers were so
happy to be in American custody that half of our job was done when they walked through the
door. In the wake of the Interrogation Perfect Storm, one suspects that fewer battlefield
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adversaries would go out of their way to surrender to Americans. Some might fight all the
harder.
Forfeiture of secrecy: In past contingencies, my sensitive interrogation facilities were shrouded
in secrecy. The press did not even know we existed in Vietnam, Panama and Desert Storm. No
reports were leaked to the media for political reasons. Our “guests” did not have to worry that
their revelations would appear the next day in the Washington Post. As Commandant of our
facilities, I had zero interface with the media. Those days are gone, and understandably so.
There are now journalists whose “beat” is the interrogation world, and leaking interrogation
results has become a political weapon. If, tomorrow, I answered the call to set up and run an
interrogation center, I would be joined at the hip with the Public Affairs Officer, and the media
would be camped outside my facility.
More lawyers: Again, understandable in view of events. In Panama and Desert Storm, we
coordinated closely with the JAG, who reviewed our operational concept and SOPs. We were
happy to welcome the JAG or the Red Cross on site, announced or spontaneous. After the recent
scandals, in which some JAG officers were complicit, confidence in the sanctity of legal advice
has been undermined at a time when legal oversight of interrogation operations will surely be
more rigorous than ever.
If I ran a facility now, some prisoners might have a right to an attorney, unheard of in my career.
A detainee advised by an attorney is an interrogator’s worst nightmare. Most attorneys of even
minimal competence know that rule number one is to instruct their client to say nothing. Rule
number two is to discredit anything the client might have already revealed, by insisting, for
example, that he was tortured. One captured Al Qaeda counter-interrogation manual advises
“brothers” to always claim that they were tortured.
Congressional oversight: Members of Congress and their staffers would surely flock to my
location. I never saw one member or staffer in Vietnam, Panama, or Desert Storm. Not having
to manage such distractions was helpful to mission accomplishment. We worked seven days a
week, fifteen hours a day, and had no time for weekly VIP hand-holding of the sort I saw at
Guantanamo. Those days are likely gone.
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The “guests” have read our playbook: Everything is public. Interrogation approaches are
limited to those that appear in the unclassified Army Field Manual (FM 2-22.3), which has
become the equivalent of U.S. law. An Arabic-language translation of this manual has already
been captured in Iraq, annotated with Al Qaeda advice on how to cope with each approach. The
bad guys know our limitations, and they are training their operatives on lessons-learned provided
by colleagues who have been released from Guantanamo. Nothing would preclude us from using
the rapport-based, developmental approach I have described to you today, but we would operate
against guests who have read our unclassified playbook, and whose fanatical belief in their cause
has been reinforced by the abuse scandals.
Restrictions on who may interrogate: The Army Field Manual directs that interrogations may
only be carried out by persons who have been formally trained and certified.
Most
understandable, but with this restriction, neither I nor many of the officers whom I recruited and
served with in Vietnam, Panama and Desert Storm would be allowed to perform interrogations,
since we were older, more senior human intelligence officers without formal interrogation
training. If deployed tomorrow, valuable area expertise and human intelligence savvy would be
lost to me unless I could persuade the chain of command to somehow waive the interrogator
training requirement of the field manual.
The Army has activated two full interrogation battalions since Operation Iraqi Freedom. But
new interrogators are primarily enlisted soldiers, in their early twenties, too young and fresh to
exploit Mullah Omar’s deputy operations chief.
Stigma of interrogation duty: In light of efforts to investigate and possibly prosecute those
interrogators who went along with the Cheney “wrong turn,” I have little doubt that many
talented intelligence officers would walk away from the chance to serve in an interrogation
facility rather than take the risks and hassles that such duty might bring. How many CIA officers
would wish to tackle interrogation duties if offered or assigned? Some Agency officers, assured
that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were blessed by the lawyers, are now hiring lawyers to
defend themselves in future lawsuits, while avoiding travel to countries in Europe that may indict
them for their actions.
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New Restrictions on “Separation:” In all interrogation centers I have worked in or commanded,
we separated the guests from one another. Most welcomed this. A prisoner might cooperate if
decently and cleverly treated, but only if we could provide a discreet environment where he
could feel comfortable spending long hours talking with us. That meant each “guest” had to
have a private room, and could not be exposed to any other detainee (encounters in the hallways,
for example). This was critical. Housing high-value detainees communally is fatal to successful
interrogation. At Gitmo’s Camp X-Ray, where trips to the interrogation booths were public
events, I was told that detainees were shouting in Arabic, “Abdul, stay strong!” or “Ibrahim,
what took you so long? What did they ask you?”
The new Army Field Manual, in Appendix M, has classified “Separation” as a “Restricted
Interrogation Technique.”
Separation may only be used against specific unlawful enemy
combatants, initially only for a period of thirty days. Its employment in a theater of war requires
the written approval of the combatant (4-star) commander. That obtained, I may only isolate a
detainee from his fellow detainees after I have provided a justification and an overall
interrogation plan to the first general or flag officer in my chain of command, who must
personally approve it. These procedures are for unlawful enemy combatants. Other prisoners—
an Iranian Quds colonel or a North Korean officer, for example, cannot be separated, a true
show-stopper.
Operating under this restriction, we could not have successfully interrogated the “guests” in
Vietnam, Panama, and Desert Storm, since none of them could have been separated under the
restrictions of the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M. Professional interrogators who cannot
separate key targets have their hands tied.
Part IV: Conclusion
For a professional interrogator, these new operating conditions are onerous, and translate into a
net loss for our national security. Responsibility for this can be traced back to zealous officials
in the Bush Administration who decided that brutality in interrogations was an effective shortcut
to obtaining good information—against the wisdom and experience of mainstream professional
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interrogators. These senior officials, from the Vice President on down, co-opted more than a few
attorneys in key positions—who should have known better—and launched some American
military officers—who also should have known better—on one of the most errant paths in recent
American history. Ironically, their ill-advised and unethical actions were taken in the name of
protecting the nation, but wound up doing harm. The United States, which has historically
condemned brutal interrogations by the Gestapo, the Japanese Kempeitai, the North Koreans,
and the North Vietnamese, suddenly seemed to be saying, “It was wrong when done by others,
but it’s OK for us, as long as it’s necessary for ‘national security.’”
Reflecting on the coterie of senior government and military officers who perpetrated the
“Interrogation Perfect Storm” in the name of national security, one is reminded of the wise words
of Justice Louis Brandeis. “The greatest dangers to liberty,” he observed, “lurk in the insidious
encroachment by men of zeal; well-meaning but without understanding.”
Colonel Herrington is a retired United States Army Military Intelligence Officer. During his 30year career, he served as a counterintelligence officer. He interrogated in three overseas
operations in Vietnam, Panama, and Saudi Arabia. He has written several books, including
“Stalking the Vietcong: Inside Operation Phoenix,” (Original title: “Silence Was A Weapon:
The Vietnam War in the Villages”) and “Traitors Among Us: Inside the Spy Catcher’s World.”
Since his retirement, he has traveled at the behest of the Department of the Army to Guantanamo
and Iraq to evaluate interrogation efforts.
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