SpyTalk

"They're looking for very different things," Amy Zegart, a UCLA professor who has written extensively on the intelligence agencies, told Time magazine. "For the military, it's what's over the next hill; for the (FBI), it's evidence that will hold up in a courtroom; for the CIA, it's information that gives the President decision advantage."  

Time also quoted an anonymous retired "veteran interrogator" as saying the multiagency idea "is either stupid, or very stupid."  

But opinions are as divergent as each agency's interrogation methods.

Carl Ford, an ex-CIA analyst and onetime head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, said, "a small professional cadre of interrogators, which can be brought in by any agency that needs their services, would be a good idea."

Some think the Defense Department, whose interrogators are supposedly required to follow strict, written procedures prohibiting practices amounting to torture, should be in overall charge.

But critics note that some of the worse abuses of detainees were carried out by military interrogators, most of whom had little experience when they were sent into Abu Ghraib and other, now notorious detention centers.

As I wrote in my weekend column, some CIA officers remain convinced that harshest policy is the best policy when it comes to cracking hard-core terrorists.

"Techniques such as sleep deprivation and blasting loud music are considered coercive but not torture," according to some spy agency veterans, The Wall Street Journal reported, quoting former CIA lawyer and federal prosecutor John Radsan.

"We have to figure it out tactic by tactic," Radsan said. "Would we allow some things that go beyond the criminal-justice system or the Army Field Manual?"

I advised Radsan and other torture recalcitrants to read the transcript of a panel discussion featuring three real-life interrogators that convened here last summer.

Conducted under the auspices of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, three tough hombres who actually have questioned terrorists debunked the persistent idea that torture produces effective results. And that includes sleep deprivation.

"If you were one of my interrogators and you came to me and said, 'I want the guard to wake him up every 30 minutes and not let him get a night's sleep because I want to soften him up' I would have immediately, first of all, told you you're nuts, no way,' said retired Army Special Forces Col. Stuart Herrington, who first cut his interrogator's teeth on hard core North Vietnamese 40 years ago."

"That shows me, when you want to do those kinds of things, that you simply don't get it," Herrington said. "You don't understand that an interrogation (is about) trying to gain ascendancy over that person," not torturing him into resistance, silence, or giving up false information to stop the pain.

"We can live without food for almost two weeks, but right at the edge of three days to four days, we cannot live, we literally die without sleep," added former FBI counterterrorism specialist and interrogator Joe Navarro. "So does that rise to torture? I would argue that it does."

Navarro and others on the panel ridiculed TV and movie versions of interrogations that so excite talking heads and ordinary folks.

"I've talked to the public, and they say, 'Well, you know, if you just shoot the guy next to him, the other guy will talk,' " Navarro said.

There's a lot of anger, and we want to hurt somebody because we've been hurt," said Navarro, who spent 30 years interrogating prisoners of all kinds.

Slapping prisoners around, shooting them in the leg, attaching electrodes to their testicles, and, of course, water-boarding, seem not just defensible, but sensible, the former interrogators acknowledged.

And arguing against it seems so ... wussy.

"If you're an American and you hear this, it's not fitting your myth, it's not fitting your culture, it sounds Pollyanna-ish," said former CIA and NSA agent Ken Robinson.

"You're like, 'Please. We're going to have tea with these people? They're killers. Killers, I tell you!' And, you know, then we get the Fox-CNN thing going back and forth, which is unhelpful."

He laughed.

"But in reality, we're telling you that we're using what works and what keeps the nation safe and what enables us to go back and exploit those sources."

But how do you break the torture-works myth? somebody asked.

Turn Hollywood around, Robinson said. Ditch the electrodes and other imaginative techniques in favor of interrogation tactics that work in real life. (See panel transcript for details).

It won't be easy, Robinson said. Torture has worked on the silver screen since the first war movie. It could take a half-century showing interrogations working effectively some other way to change mass perceptions -- and is cool, to boot!

"It has to be repetitive, and you have to continue it because they have a short memory out there," Robinson said.

Robinson meant the general public, but he might as well have been talking about the lingering dunderheads in denial at the CIA.