The notorious private military firm Blackwater was hired by the CIA to transfer prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to secret prisons in Asia for interrogation, informs the German newspaper Der Spiegel.

The newspaper says it has obtained a memo from two ex-Blackwater employees which writes that the CIA employed “Blackwater and its subsidiaries” to transfer detainees from Guantanamo Bay to “secret detention camps in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan for interrogation.”

A war cannot be won without solid intelligence, no war ever was. The US and most countries are involved in a new type of warfare, one that is not conventional in any way. The battlefields are now placed within the daily lives of countless people, battles are fought near their streets and homes and even more, the enemy now literarily takes refuge inside communities of which support they strongly depend.

As wars no longer witness regular armies with conventional weapons, the role of the intelligence service reaches sky high levels of importance. The Obama administration clearly understands this aspect of the forth generation warfare. As the public was shocked with the interrogation methods applied within the walls of Guantanamo, the intelligence service has to come up with new techniques and methods of obtaining information without being characterized as barbarian.

According to a recent AP news story, the US is considering a new unit of professional interrogators “to handle high-value terror suspects.” The unit’s “primary purpose would be intelligence-gathering, rather than building criminal cases for prosecution.”

No information is available on the way they will operate, and probably it will never be. But one question still remains: how do you convince an individual who has absolutely no doubts that what his organization does is far from being terrorism and he believes that this is what his religion requires, betray all that and offer valuable and reliable information?

Torture is not an option.

Some of us think that under immense physical pressure and incredible pain many Taliban or Al Qaida fighters will crack and start offering reliable information. This assumption is unrealistic. When an individual joins Al Qaida, he offers his life for the group’s cause; he would gladly endure pain or voluntarily sacrifice his life for any small and apparently unimportant benefit to the group.

To successfully extract information from such individuals, one has to completely understand the way they think, what makes them tick and what vulnerabilities do they present. This will be a very difficult task for the future special unit of interrogation.