After Barack Obama shut down the CIA’s terrorist-interrogation program, the FBI retook the lead in the interrogation business. They have not had many subjects to work on in the last three years, since the Obama administration kills virtually every high-value terrorist it finds. But if Mitt Romney is elected this fall, chances are America will again be capturing and interrogating senior terrorist leaders — and the debate between the FBI’s “rapport building” techniques and the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques will come roaring back.
The most vocal advocate of the rapport-building approach has been former FBI agent Ali Soufan. In 2009, Soufan came to public attention when he testified before Congress from behind a black curtain to declare the CIA’s techniques useless and say he could have extracted the same intelligence from al-Qaeda terrorists using the FBI’s traditional, non-coercive methods. Since then, Soufan has traded the black curtain for a book deal and appearances on Colbert and Jon Stewart — but his story remains the same.
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