TPR: Former Top Interrogators Back Wide-Ranging Criminal Probe Into Torture

Three of the country’s former top counterterrorism interrogators and intelligence experts, are speaking out publicly in support of a wide-ranging criminal investigation into the Bush administration’s use of torture against “war on terror” detainees and are urging Congress to launch a separate probe to review how the policies that lead to torture were created.

Jack Cloonan, a former FBI security and counterterrorism expert who was assigned to the agency’s elite Bin Laden Unit, Col. Steve Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the Defense Department’s most prolific interrogators, and Matthew Alexander, a senior interrogator for a special operations task force in Iraq whose team captured down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, said ignoring clear-cut evidence of interrogation-related crimes would only lead to further law breaking in the future. Alexander uses a pseudonym for security reasons

In an interview, Cloonan and Kleinman, both of who conducted interrogations of terror suspects after 9/11, also sharply disputed recent claims by former CIA Director Michael Hayden and Republican lawmakers that a criminal investigation would have a grave impact on intelligence gathering and may lead to another 9/11-type attack on the homeland.

A day earlier, nine Republican senators sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder saying a criminal investigation into the CIA’s interrogation practices would jeopardize the “security for all Americans, “chill future intelligence activities,” and could “leave us more vulnerable to attack.”

Cloonan and Kleinman said Hayden and the GOP senators were sounding “false alarms” in an effort to keep serious crimes from being exposed and prosecuted. Cloonan, who retired in 2002 after more than 25 years in the FBI, said neither he nor the intelligence community believes that an investigation into torture will result in a threat to national security.

“What this is really about is cover your ass,” Cloonan said about the senators’ letter. “To suggest [intelligence gathering] will come to a screeching halt if there were an investigation is not accurate.”
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