Ali Soufan Battled the System to End Torture. He’s Finally Winning.

The Huffington Post

By: Dennis Miller

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Ali Soufan is a former FBI agent who’s spent a decade speaking out against torture. He helped expose CIA “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and left the Bureau partly because of the agency’s excessive use of it.

While the details in the Senate torture report elicited an international gasp of horror, Soufan’s activism says a lot about America, which I hope we’ll appreciate in the months to come…

During his FBI tenure, Soufan interrogated numerous terrorist suspects. He did it by getting to know them, talking about their families, their country, and religion. He’s described his technique as a “mental poker game,” where he systematically weakens their resistance with a carefully orchestrated barrage of circumstantial evidence and facts. “You attract more flies with sugar than vinegar,” he’s said often.

He was in the middle of interrogating Abu Zubadayah and getting good information, when the CIA contractors, without invitation, took over. Enhanced interrogation techniques were introduced.
Soufan resigned in 2005, partly in protest of the torture, partly just weary. He had spent years combating three forces: al-Qaeda, the CIA and the Bush administration.

In 2008, Soufan formed the Soufan Group which “provides strategic security intelligence services to governments and multinational corporations. A year later he went public with his insistence that enhanced interrogation techniques are useless, inhumane, un-American, and play directly into our enemy’s narrative and playbook. He was asked to testify on the Senate Judicial Committee hearing on torture, forcing the subject into the national dialogue. His 2011 book, The Black Banners, details his investigative work against Al Qaeda and furthers his calls to ban torture…

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