SpyTalk

Interrogating terrorists, is "misunderstood because of the mythology that we have in the United States ..." Robinson said. "Just watch an episode of 24 and it's all fixed and everything's good and we sew up the story and we're on to the next thing."

These are guys who've actually interrogated bad guys, remember, not those who've championed waterboarding and other "enhanced measures" from the comfort of their desks in Washington.

At CSIS, retired Army Col. Stuart Herrington recounted how over a 40-year career "it was given to me to interrogate hundreds of people: Vietnamese, North Vietnamese soldiers, Viet Cong political officers, male, female, Panamanian kleptocrats and thugs who worked for Manuel Noriega scarfed up in our liberation of that country ... and then Iraqi senior captured officers in the Gulf War."

How did it go? Did he shoot them in the leg to make them talk, like Bauer?

"We never laid a hostile glove on them ..." said Herrington, who worked in the CIA's notoriously brutal Phoenix Program in Vietnam and later wrote a memoir about it, Stalking the Viet Cong. 

No softie, he.

"(W)e collected the information we needed to collect," Herrington told his rapt audience, simply by engaging them in dialogue with a regimen of non-corporeal sticks and carrots.

Herrington, who still teaches his interrogation techniques to the military services, said he was "stunned" by revelations that CIA and military interrogators were waterboarding, humiliating and otherwise roughing up detainees.

"After having gone to Guantanamo and given good advice on these [non-torture] methods," he said, "and after having gone to Iraq about a year after that and given equally good advice along these lines, that we had this mess on our hands and that it appeared like guidance had come from the top down to people in the field to cross these lines that had been so sacrosanct to me, I was stunned."

Even FBI agents refused to participate, as the Justice Department Inspector General's recent report disturbingly documented.

To be sure, anecdotal evidence continues to surface in reputable quarters suggesting that torture does have a role to play in successful interrogations.

Take the riveting story by Scott Shane in last Sunday's New York Times, which offered yet another version of the CIA's interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. 

The hero of the piece was interrogator Deuce Martinez, who seduced KSM in spilling the beans without personally raising a hand. The prisoner even began to write poetry to Martinez's wife.

Martinez, "a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a CIA offer to be trained in waterboarding," Shane wrote. "He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called 'knuckledraggers'."

Ostensibly, the Shane's story makes a case for skillful interrogations without violence. But what about the "knuckledraggers" effectively softening up Mohammed for Deuce? 

It's an image that's stayed with me for days, maybe because I've seen it in so many movies, with the German gestapo or North Koreans in the role. 

The story's underlying message seemed to be that the gentle questioning works only after the goons applied what Bush administration lawyers euphemistically call "enhanced techniques," as if it were a Japanese body message. 

But while the New York Times was fronting the alchemy of knuckledraggers and poetry, the McClatchy newspapers were surfacing an entirely different world of interrogation.

In a stunning five-part series, the product of eight month's research and interviewing of interrogators, prisoners and officials, McClatchy reporters Tom Lasseter and Matthew Schofield uncovered "dozens of men -- and, according to several officials, perhaps hundreds -- whom the U.S. has wrongfully imprisoned in Afghanistan, Cuba and elsewhere on the basis of flimsy or fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments."

So how do you feel about torture now? A little less gung-ho?

A Senate Armed Services Committee investigation reported last week that interrogators were using the same techniques on detainees that North Vietnam and North Korea used on American prisoners of war. 

That prompting a grim deninciation from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., an Air Force Reserve colonel who teaches military law to the service.

"The guidance (administration lawyers) provided will go down in history as some of the most irresponsible and shortsighted legal analysis ever provided to our nation's military and intelligence communities," Lindsay said.

Of course, I'm not the first to praise the McClatchy series and again lament that its extraordinary Washington reporters have repeatedly scooped -- and been ignored by -- the big boys on some of the most fundamental issues of the so-called war on terror, including the manufactured intelligence that stampeded the public into supporting the invasion of Iraq. The Nieman Watchdog blog, under famed former Washington Post Watergate editor Barry Sussman, has been particularly vigorous in applauding the McClatchy team's great work. 

Still, it's been a tree falling in the forest.

But interrogators are persistent.

On Monday, 15 of them, including Joe Navarro, Ken Robinson and Stu Herrington, tough guys all, banded together under the banner of the liberal New York-based Human Rights First organization and issued a simple statement. 

Torture, they said, is an "unlawful, ineffective and counterproductive" way to gather intelligence.

We'll see if Jack Bauer's creators get the message -- or ignore the pros.

According to his executive producer, the final episode of "24," starting its seventh season in November, will revolve on "how [Bauer] tries to resolve a particularly thorny conflict in the final episode."  

Want to bet he goes for the gun? 

Talking is for sissies, right?.