Inside the Ring

New interrogation study

Amid the current debate over past harsh interrogation of terrorist suspects by the CIA, the Obama administration made clear this week it is prepared to add new interrogation techniques beyond the relatively mild approved methods outlined in the Army Field Manual.

The administration stated Monday, in announcing the work of a White House-level task force on the issue, that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate past abuses does not mean that tough interrogations will be abandoned.

The Justice Department announcement on the task force includes a little-noticed reference to plans for developing better interrogation methods.

In addition to producing a “best practices” system for questioning captured terrorists, the task force urged setting up “a scientific research program for interrogation be established to study the comparative effectiveness of interrogation approaches and techniques, with the goal of identifying the existing techniques that are most effective and developing new lawful techniques to improve intelligence interrogations.”

President Obama approved the recommendation, administration officials said in a background briefing Tuesday.

The approval means intelligence officials, psychiatrists, human-behavior experts and others will work on ways to make people talk in captivity.

The likely source for the research is expected to be the Intelligence Science Board, which studied and reported on U.S. interrogations several years ago. The board is made up of former intelligence officials and scientists.

One senior Obama administration official told reporters the president has approved that recommendation and that the new techniques could go beyond those outlined in the Army Field Manual, which currently limits both military and intelligence interrogations.

“There has been a lot of academic and scientific research done in the past half-dozen years or so looking at elicitation techniques and ways to gain information from individuals who may be under detention,” the official said, noting that “we want to make sure that we’re able to leverage anything that is newly identified as far as appropriate techniques that should be used.”

Asked about going beyond the Field Manual, which authorizes the use of such techniques as sleep deprivation and harsh temperatures, the official said any new measures would depend on the outcome of a study by the scientific panel.

“I think the study is really focused not just on the possibility of new techniques - and as I said earlier I think the best learning on this is to get away from speaking about individual techniques in isolation - but also to study the propriety and effectiveness of existing practices to see which ones work best and how they’re going to be best deployed to achieve best results,” the official said.

Any new interrogation practices recommended by the scientific study “would be dealt with appropriately in the same way that the executive order contemplated that possibility from the outset,” he said.

Asked if the new technique would be made public, the official said Congress would be notified, “but it’s really premature to sort of make any judgments on that score at this point because we’re just getting off the ground here with our thinking.”

A second senior official went further and said: “I think that it would be fair to say that any new techniques that might, in fact, be allowed, there would be full transparency on that.

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