What to do with High Value Detainees in Overseas Contingency Operations?

Flopping Aces ^ | 08-19-15 | Wordsmith

[Starman417]

Daily Beast:

Umm Sayyaf, who is an Iraqi citizen, was captured by U.S. forces in Syria. She was interrogated in Iraq by an American unit that operates outside the traditional criminal justice system. But the decision on where to try her was based largely in deference to Iraqi law. And she will now be turned over not to the government of Iraq in Baghdad, but Iraq’s Kurdish regional government in Erbil, which is expected to “throw the book” at her, and perhaps do much more than that.

But President Obama banned torture, make no mistake about it. Oh yes, and also "enhanced" interrogation practices.

This "special unit" is the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group that has replaced the CIA's Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program.

This is worth snarfing your morning coffee:

Senior administration officials said it was too early to say whether the scientific research program would yield new techniques to be used in interrogations. One official emphasized the program’s goal was not only to identify new methods but to stay abreast of ways of enhancing existing ones.

Since its inception, has the HIG been effective?

WASHINGTON -- When President Barack Obama took office, he promised to overhaul the nation's process for interrogating terror suspects. His solution: the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, or HIG, a small interagency outfit that would use non-coercive methods and the latest psychological research to interrogate America's most-wanted terrorists -- all behind a veil of secrecy.

Today, the HIG often gets the first jab at America’s most-wanted terror suspects. Since its creation in August 2009, HIG teams have questioned a bevy of top detainees, including Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Umm Sayyaf, the wife of a high-profile Islamic State leader killed in a drone strike.

But six years on, the Obama administration’s elite interrogation force is on shaky ground. U.S. officials and outside critics question the effectiveness of its interrogators, whether they're following their own training, and whether they can continue to rely on psychological research to help break suspects. Congress and the White House, which once saw the group as a key to reinventing the nation's counterterrorism strategy, aren't paying attention. And those struggles illuminate a broader reality: Obama's limited reforms to how American detains, interrogates and prosecutes suspected terrorists are ad-hoc and fragile. His successor could scrap most of them -- the HIG included -- with the stroke of a pen.

And of course under the auspices of the "most transparent administration in history":

Many of the details of the HIG's work remain secret. The group’s charter, authored by the National Security Council, remains classified. Neither the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Council nor the FBI would say how many people work at the HIG, how many operational MITs it houses, how big its budget is, how many times it has been dispatched, where it interrogates people -- or even whether any of that information is classified. (“Elements” of the HIG were deployed 14 times between its inception in 2009 and early 2012, former FBI Director Robert Mueller, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told Congress that March.) How interrogators join the HIG "is kind of a mystery,” too, one former U.S. government official familiar with the group said. (The official, along with others HuffPost talked to, requested anonymity, citing the group's sensitive operations.)

Unfortunately for our national security interests, the CIA RDI Program, black sites, waterboarding, etc. all became public knowledge; and a source of much hyperventilating and hyperbole.

"The mission of the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) is to deploy the nation’s best available interrogation resources against terrorism subjects identified as having access to information with the greatest potential to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies," the FBI told HuffPost in a statement. "Although national security sensitivities limit our ability to publicly discuss operational matters, all HIG interviews are lawfully conducted in strict compliance with U.S. domestic law and international legal obligations. The HIG is subject to interagency legal oversight, as well as oversight by appropriate congressional committees."

Wow. That bit of PR could just as well have described the Bush-era Justice Department-approved CIA program. They had legal cover through the OLC. There were multiple legal opinions that reinforced the original judgment. And the CIA had extensively lawyered up before agreeing to move forward with the program.

[Cincinnatus.45-70]

What to do with them? Three words: Ready, Aim, ....

[DesertRhino]

How many weasel word euphemisms can we cram into the headline. That mentality is why they don’t know what to do with them.
This war needs the Iwo Jima and Tarawa solution. Very few prisoners should be taken.

[DesertRhino]

That article neatly sums up about 35 things wrong with our bloated, paralytic, nervous, pussified, overbureaucratic, ineffective government.

[Chode]

wring-em dry, then wring their necks...