Coming This Fall, TSI: Washington

Obama's kinder, gentler Warren Terrah involves finding a replacement for the torture squad techniques he's outlawed. Like it or not, we're still going to have to at some point have measures in place to interrogate people that are trying to harm Americans. Siobhan Gorman at the WSJ reports on the new season of Terrorist Special Interrogations.

The Obama administration is considering overhauling the way terror suspects are interrogated by creating a small team of professionals drawn from across the government, according to people familiar with a proposal that will be submitted to the White House.

The new unit, comprising members of spy services and law-enforcement agencies, would be used for so-called high-value detainees, they said. In a switch from Bush-era efforts, it wouldn't be run by the Central Intelligence Agency, though who might be in charge isn't specified.

One of the team's tasks would likely be to devise a new set of interrogation methods, according to one person familiar with the proposal. Those techniques could be drawn from sources ranging from scientific studies to the psychology behind television ads.

It does sound like a TV show or a Tom Clancy novel, doesn't it? Unfortunately, while a "professional" series of interrogators certainly sounds better than the military contractors we were using, several points in the article strike me as saying we should be expecting more reruns from the Bush days of the program.

In addition, the team would be asked to devise noncoercive procedures that may differ from the 19 permitted in the Army Field Manual, which include providing rewards for information and playing on a detainee's anxiety or other emotions. That document has emerged as a favored standard among many lawmakers and some human-rights groups.

Mr. Obama shut the network of secret CIA prisons on his second full day in office and launched two reviews -- one of interrogation practices and the other of the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The interrogation proposal, written by a Justice Department-led task force, is being finalized and neither review will be completed by a Tuesday deadline.

There is general support within the Obama administration for a professional interrogation team from multiple agencies, said one person familiar with the task force recommendations. The debate is over the details of how to do it: who should be in charge, where it should be housed within the government, and what its composition will be.

It isn't clear whether Congress would have any special oversight role beyond its regular duties.

A Justice spokesman referred questions to the White House. White House spokesman Benjamin LaBolt said the president hasn't yet reviewed the proposal.

Ahh, the same old questions from last season's cliffhanger: who's in charge, where's the oversight, and what constitutes a "non-coercive technique outside the ones permitted in the Army Field Manual." While again, we are going to have to have some procedure in place for dealing with captured terrorists, one would think these questions -- being by far the most important questions given the dark history of programs like these -- should be answered first before we start worrying about which agency is stepping on which set of toes and which nasty little surprises we have in store for those we capture.

In fact, I would honestly think job one would be to actively determine if the people we have captured are indeed guilty of anything before we go heading back into such black waters. I would also think that Congress would at this point demand complete and total oversight on this replacement program considering the amount of lawbreaking involved in the most recent efforts. In fact, the faster and more completely we can investigate what went wrong, the better the resulting replacement program will be, yes?

Trust these guys? I don't think so.