Ali Soufan: Torture contractors shocked CIA interrogators


MSNBC has the segment from The Rachel Maddow Show, Ali Soufan: Torture contractors shocked CIA interrogators.

Ali Soufan, former FBI special agent who took part in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, talks with Rachel Maddow about how the Senate torture report squares with his experience and why the CIA switched to torture interrogations they knew don’t work.


For a long time I have known about the claim from professional interrogators that torture is a counterproductive technique. This is the reason why I am categorizing this blog post under Greenberg’s Law of Counterproductive behavior “If you see a behavior that seems to you to be counterproductive, perhaps you have misunderstood what the behavior was trying to produce.”

This especially applies to the ordinary citizens who still want to torture suspects. Are they just ignorant of the facts about torture, or do they have some ulterior motive that I cannot even guess?

And now that I think about it, what about people in the Bush White House? What were their motives? Were they actually trying to silence the suspects lest they implicate the Bush administration or its allies?

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