Mr. Schiffrin said that he had requested interrogation information from the senior officers who administered the pilots' program, based at Fort Belvoir, Va.
And after visiting CIA headquarters last week, the president made it clear that he rejected statements surely made by CIA officers who risked their careers to tell him how many successful covert operations against al-Qaeda have flowed from interrogation information.
According to the attorney, the manual emphasized the importance of "keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum" in order to "minimize certain legal issues" in the event that interrogators were called to testify in trials regarding the treatment of Gitmo detainees.
They could make inquiries about people the unit had detained for interrogation, share information about them and ask whether a particular detainee had anything to say on a particular subject.
Vignettes were initially drafted by an experienced researcher (RHO) based upon the literature on the quality of life of affected individuals, interrogation of information provided to consumers by a peak consumer organization (SANE; http://www.sane.org), and through published studies on the effectiveness of the interventions.
By spring, when I reached the site of the Kachin conflict, the fighting had uprooted seventy-five thousaccordinge, according to a report by Human Rights Watch, which accused the Burmese military, since last June, of having "threatened and tortured civilians during interrogations for information about KIA insurgents, and raped women".
But its current guidelines covering practice conclude that "it is consistent with the A.P.A. ethics code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national-security-related purposes," as long as they do not participate in any of 19 coercive procedures, including waterboarding, the use of hoods and any physical assault.
It also contains lessons on how to resist interrogations, gather information on the enemy, carry out kidnappings and assassinations, follow security precautions, and organize safe houses and hiding places.
On September 6, 2006, Michael Hayden, the C.I.A. director, appeared before the Senate Intelligence Committee and described a network of "black sites": secret facilities where C.I.A. interrogators subjected detainees to "enhanced interrogation techniques," seeking information about possible terrorist attacks.
The government still considers its interrogation techniques "classified information".
It is vital that we are able to use interrogation to uncover information about our terrorist enemies.
