CIA is getting better and better at making content from its inhouse journal, Studies in Intelligence, available. This is an insightful report, for several reasons. It identifies that torture was a response of frustration by the South Vietnamese, and yes, it did get a specific fact -- and then shut down the individual completely. The more interactive US interrogations, but under difficult conditions, got more information.

I can't give you the exact date of this article, but from references in it, it's obviously recent. I'll give some background references for it, although they are books.

The document is a quarterly, with classified and unclassified versions, and there is a good deal of declassification of the classified. I'm exchanging some email with their library to try to understand how to match volume number with year; it's not obvious.

I was surprised to read it; I had read Snepp's account and others, and I indeed thought that Nguyen Tai had been killed by the South Vietnamese. This is an insightful report, for several reasons. It identifies that torture was a response of frustration by the South Vietnamese, and yes, it did get a specific fact -- and then shut down the individual completely.

US interrogators, even with the context of the "white room", which I think was a SVN interview, got more information from a conversational dialogue. It's also worth noting that US capabilities were limited by the lack of trustworthy linguists -- I'm working on some human intelligence material for Wikipedia, and will be writing on the challenges to using non-US linguists. A teenage friend has just decided on her tentative college major, which will be languages, with Arabic at the core. I'm not particularly talented in languages, but I see the impact of being able to say even a few phrases in Arabic, or exchange courtesies and maybe order dinner in Japaese.

There's a lot of food for thought here. The article is best read if you've also read Frank Snepp's In Search of Enemies and Sedgwick Tourison's Conversations with Victor Charlie. I hope to have my extracts from some current interrogation and linguist relations guides done in the next few days.