Interrogation News

There is some good news trickling out about the interrogations of Al Queda operatives. I must admit that I really want to believe news like this, but I remain a bit skeptical that we're getting anything like the full picture. As Mark Bowden pointed out in the September issue of the most interesting magazine in the world, our government has a lot of incentives to misrepresent the information they get from interrogations. There are, of course, domestic political concerns, but there are also practical issues as well. For example, relevations that people are cooperating will lower the spirits of Al Queda operatives, but may also encourage them to change their plans, making it harder to catch them. This article, unfortunately, gives us very little information that we can use to evaluate how reliable these reports are. All we know is the information came from "interrogation reports." We don't know what interrogation reports, who provided them, or even who did the interrogating.

So, the problem is, Mohammed could be completely uncooperative and those reports could all be nothing but dishonesty. But, we can still hope for the best. I'm hoping all this information is true, but that we're getting lots more that the goverment has decided not to share.
- posted by Tom Sawyer @ 12:22 PM