Did Army Bureaucracy Force Enhanced Interrogation?

What if there’s a better interrogation method that the Army wouldn’t authorize to keep an old purveyor of outdated technology happy resulting in the use of questionable interrogation methods like waterboarding? To be clear: What if the Army still officially authorizes polygraph testing to use during interrogations when it is less effective, more invasive and puts soldiers in harms way, when the more up-to-date and remarkably effective voice stress recognition system detects liars better and saves lives? And better yet, what if the new technology negates the need for a method like waterboarding–which users say it does just that?

Investigative blogger Bob McCartey asserts exactly that in his must-read article titled, “If Not for Memo, Torture Might Not Be An Issue“:

The question of whether members of the U.S. military and intelligence communities should be allowed to use waterboarding and other forms of torture during interrogations might be largely irrelevant today if not for a memo signed by Under Secretary of Defense James R. Clapper Jr. Oct. 29, 2007.

On that day, Clapper issued a memo granting “Operational Approval of the Preliminary Credibility Assessment Screening System (PCASS)” and designating the polygraph and its cousin, the PCASS, as the “only approved credibility assessment technologies” in the Department of Defense.

This outdated tech, not admissible in courts because of unreliability was the “official” tech by the DOD, when soldiers on the ground use and rely upon this:

One of the technologies that has proven itself more worthy, according to Jim Kane, executive director of the National Institute for Truth Verification in West Palm Beach, Fla., is the Computer Voice Stress Analyzer® developed by his company more than two decades ago and refined several times since.

It was the success of CVSA® technology in Iraq and Afghanistan that Kane says led DoD to create the PCASS system.

“They needed something to issue to troops in the field who used the CVSA and whose commanders — including some general officers — supported the CVSA,” the veteran with more than 30 years of diverse intelligence experience explained before adding that PCASS was never tested for countermeasures before it was deployed to troops in the field.

“The demand for our system was so great that the DoD polygraphers had to take some action or they would have been put out of business by the CVSA,” he continued. “Their resistance to CVSA is doing great damage to our national security by keeping it from the war fighters who need it the most.”

Please go read the whole thing. Turf protection shouldn’t be the reason solid methods are discarded thus forcing methods that work but are questionable.

Posted in Political Animals
Tags: Military • Terrorists