Robert Baer

I was in Baghdad at the end of the second Gulf war. You could see the US military had destroyed every piece of armour the Iraqis owned. Not only armour but museums, too, cultural looting, the destruction of all infrastructure. It was a war against the Iraqi state, against an Arab country. That creates the humiliation and anger which fuel suicide bombing attacks. If you keep it up, you're going to get hit. You can't go randomly kill Muslims and not expect a reaction here.

Since Vietnam the CIA got out of the interrogation business. They weren’t very good at it. They didn’t have much experience at it. When I was in the CIA they trained us in counter-interrogation techniques. If you were captured, they prepared you for what you would face, the whole gamut, from psychological tricks to actual torture. The CIA changed after 9/11. As I understand it, there’s a lot of franchising stuff out. Syria is a country, like Iraq, where they torture people. They use electrodes, water torture. They take torture to the point of death, like the Egyptians. The way you get around involving Americans in torture, is to get someone else to do it. Psychological abuse. Sleep deprivation, lights on 24 hours a day, controlling all news, the good guy bad guy technique. You read about this stuff in fiction. It works with some people, and others it doesn’t. For the hard core, you would send them to Syria or some place like that. These countries on the front of terrorism aren’t playing around. You still have a lot of problems with the information from these interrogations. You’ve got a problem in the US. There is the misuse of information by the government. The CIA is not giving information to FBI, even after 9/11. The attitude is they will break these people, one way or another. The interrogation is changing because they are franchising it. Franchising out assassinations, the collection of intelligence and franchising out torture to Egypt and Syria. If you have a problem with someone who’s not talking and you have suspicions that they could give you something, you send them to Syria for a start. Syrians have a bunch of people in jail being interrogated and the information is being sent to US government. It’s schizophrenic, of course. The CIA’s out looking for allies and the neo conservatives in the White House are looking for new targets. Now God knows what we are getting from the Syrians. They are not very good intelligence collectors, they are not very objective, they have their own agenda and they are probably trying to implicate another country in terrorism, for example Jordan. So we don’t know what we are getting from these guys but if you’re going to torture someone you give it to the professionals. The Syrians are hoping for is to get immunity, not to be attacked, they want to help on terrorism, they want the US to lift their pressure on Lebanon, Hamas, Palestinians' Islamic Jihad, so by helping the US with the Syrian Muslim brotherhood, Al Qaeda giving us information, torturing people ,they hope to get some recognition from Washington. The CIA is full of professional intelligence officers that want to get to the bottom of 9/11 but the White House is looking to mine data for talking points for its policies. They are looking for political talking points. Let’s say they need to indict another country before the next election, not attack it, but indict it, say we’ve got a problem. So what they will do is they go through the intelligence reports until they find something that would suggest that Iran is causing the problem internally in Iraq. If they admit that it’s the Iraqis that are killing people,that the Iraqis are against the US and are unhappy and are in opposition, they’ve lost. So they go through the intelligence selectively picking out things. And trust me, when you’re being tortured, you turn in everyone - your mother, your friends, anything to get the pain to stop. So the information is generally unreliable. It’s totally unconstitutional. It’s not the United States I know. Keeping American citizens without access to a lawyer, with questionable evidence against them and holding them indefinitely is totally against our traditions. It’s totally unnecessary. The CIA is full of professional intelligence officers that want to get to the bottom of 9/11 but the White House is looking to mine data for talking points for its policies. They are looking for political talking points. Let’s say they need to indict another country before the next election, not attack it, but indict it, say we’ve got a problem. So what they will do is they go through the intelligence reports until they find something that would suggest that Iran is causing the problem internally in Iraq. If they admit that it’s the Iraqis that are killing people,that the Iraqis are against the US and are unhappy and are in opposition, they’ve lost. So they go through the intelligence selectively picking out things.

If it goes very badly in Iraq and we leave, the Arabs and the Iranians will be pulled into the war one way or another, either through surrogates or directly. If it stays chaotic, the chaos will migrate to the other side of the Gulf. Every time you kill a Muslim, whether it's an Israeli killing them or an American or a Brit, there is humiliation, anger, reaction and bombs go off somewhere. I was in Baghdad at the end of the second Gulf war. You could see the US military had destroyed every piece of armour the Iraqis owned. Not only armour but museums, too, cultural looting, the destruction of all infrastructure. It was a war against the Iraqi state, against an Arab country. That creates the humiliation and anger which fuel suicide bombing attacks. If you keep it up, you're going to get hit. You can't go randomly kill Muslims and not expect a reaction here.

Robert Baer has worked for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations for more than two decades and spent most of his career in the Middle East. An Arabic speaker, he was considered one of the best on-the-ground field officers in the Middle East. He has also published a book about his time within the CIA. The memoirs are entitled See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War Against Terrorism.