What happens when you get a bunch of spooks, lawmakers, gadget geeks, and military interrogators together in a hotel conference room and ask them to talk - on the record? Well, more is let out of the bag than may be imagined, as documented in this piece in the Boston Globe.

The event was INTELCON, an attempt to bring together representatives from all facets of American government intelligence (an oxymoron if ever I heard one) organisations as well as from the private sector. The fact that journalists were invited would seem to suggest that one of the purposes of the conference was to demonstrate the open cross-fertilisation of ideas between intelligence and security professionals in the new post 9/11 era. This display of openness was perhaps meant to allay the fears of the general public, but I have to admit that the testimonies in this article had entirely the opposite effect on me, particularly those of Bill Tierney, an interrogator recently returned from Iraq:-

''The Brits came up with an expression - wog,'' Tierney said. ''That stands for Wily Oriental Gentleman. There's a lot of wiliness in that part of the world.'' And when it comes to interrogating wily insurgents, Tierney explained, he favors ''smarts over smack.''

''It's the amateur who resorts to violence,'' he said. ''There's always a mental lever to get them to do what you want them to do.''
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''I tried to be nuanced and culturally aware. But the suspects didn't break.''

Suddenly Tierney's temper rose. ''They did not break!'' he shouted. ''I'm here to win. I'm here so our civilization beats theirs! Now what are you willing to do to win?'' he asked, pointing to a woman in the front row. ''You are the interrogators, you are the ones who have to get the information from the Iraqis. What do you do? That word 'torture'. You immediately think, 'That's not me.' But are we litigating this war or fighting it?''

Some listeners murmured in assent; others sat in rapt attention. In all the recent debates about the Bush administration's stance on torture, this voice, the voice of the interrogators themselves, has been almost entirely absent.

Asked about Abu Ghraib, Tierney said that for an interrogator, ''sadism is always right over the hill. You have to admit it. Don't fool yourself - there is a part of you that will say, 'This is fun.'''

It is that part, he continued, that a successful interrogator has to learn to identify and control. ''Right now the Army wants to get interrogators right out of high school,'' he said. ''A high school grad does not have the maturity to handle this job. There was a 19-year-old with me in Baghdad. What's going on in her head is what kind of fingernail polish she's going to wear. And she's sitting across from a guy from Yemen....'' His voice trailed off.

Indeed, a certain bitterness pervaded the conference, a palpable feeling that America's spies are being hobbled by the civil libertarian protests of precisely those people they are trying to protect. In a lunch talk, James Woolsey, CIA director in the first Clinton administration, invoked Justice Robert Jackson's famous suggestion that ''the Constitution is not a suicide pact.''

This notion was given starker expression by a former Marine Corps officer on a panel about military intelligence collection within the United States. When queried about interrogation techniques, he replied simply, ''I'm a fan of 220 volts,'' and was greeted with scattered applause.