Interrogation Meets T.E. Lawrence
Moderator's Note
Five threads have been merged here, some are quite old. The title is unchanged. There are a number of threads on the related debate on the use of torture (un-merged as yet).
In 2016 three small threads were merged in, notably one with 5k views on intelligence interviewing. A separate, closed thread remains on The USA and interrogation, with 162 posts and 151k views :http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...ead.php?t=3041(Ends).
At the Westhawk blog - Interrogation Meets T.E. Lawrence.
Quote:
... All in all, a good day’s work. Much of the success of this episode can be traced to the rapid delivery of Mr. Jassam’s confession. American interrogators, using the non-coercive techniques in the U.S. Army’s new field manual for interrogations, might eventually deliver equivalent results, but only after a long, drawn-out, and methodical process. The Americans’ conscience will be clean, but the information rendered by this technique will in many cases be unusable for follow-up action or moot (the bombs have already exploded). Perhaps the “ticking bomb” scenario as it relates to the justification of torture is not just hypothetical after all.
The incident described in this article is one more indicator of how the U.S. military needs to rethink how it approaches low intensity conflict. Instead of an American war in Iraq, this should have been an Iraqi war, with some American advisors assisting Iraqi allies. The deployment of American armored and mechanized infantry brigades is not sustainable in Iraq and will be a non-starter for the next low-intensity conflict the U.S. finds itself in. Conventional American ground combat formations have been culturally unsuited for the task they face in Iraq. And the legal, ethical, and moral constraints on American tactics, techniques, and procedures have resulted in the war dragging on one inconclusive month after another...
Producer of "24" New Yorker article
Here's the link:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...9fa_fact_mayer
Quote:
Each season of “24,” which has been airing on Fox since 2001, depicts a single, panic-laced day in which Jack Bauer—a heroic C.T.U. agent, played by Kiefer Sutherland—must unravel and undermine a conspiracy that imperils the nation. Terrorists are poised to set off nuclear bombs or bioweapons, or in some other way annihilate entire cities. The twisting story line forces Bauer and his colleagues to make a series of grim choices that pit liberty against security. Frequently, the dilemma is stark: a resistant suspect can either be accorded due process—allowing a terrorist plot to proceed—or be tortured in pursuit of a lead. Bauer invariably chooses coercion. With unnerving efficiency, suspects are beaten, suffocated, electrocuted, drugged, assaulted with knives, or more exotically abused; almost without fail, these suspects divulge critical secrets.
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Surnow, who has jokingly called himself a “right-wing nut job,” shares his show’s hard-line perspective. Speaking of torture, he said, “Isn’t it obvious that if there was a nuke in New York City that was about to blow—or any other city in this country—that, even if you were going to go to jail, it would be the right thing to do?”
Much more at the link. It's hard to believe the show is as popular as it is... and disheartening that many blindly agree with these arguments.
The Tortured Lives of Interrogators
Veterans of Iraq, N. Ireland and Mideast Share Stark Memories
By Laura Blumenfeld, Washington Post Staff Writer
Quote:
The American interrogator was afraid. Of what and why, he couldn't say. He was riding the L train in Chicago, and his throat was closing.
Being an interrogator, Lagouranis discovered, can be torture. At first, he was eager to try coercive techniques. In training at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., instructors stressed the Geneva Conventions, he recalled, while classmates privately admired Israeli and British methods. "The British were tough," Lagouranis said. "They seemed like real interrogators."
The world of the interrogator is largely closed. But three interrogators allowed a rare peek into their lives -- an American rookie who served with the 202nd Military Intelligence Battalion and two veteran interrogators from Britain and Israel. The veterans, whose wartime experiences stretch back decades, are more practiced at finding moral balance. They use denial, humor, indignation. Even so, these older men grapple with their own fears -- and with a clash of values.
More at the link.
Screening for Interrogation
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Jedburgh
At an even more personal level, I used to train my HUMINT'ers in the principles of indicator analysis for interrogation. The baseline of information regarding kinesics, cognition and emotion is gathered during the first phase of the interrogation (or, if the situation allows, during the first screening interview). In this case, the indicators developed are used, not for "warning" in the standard sense, but to alert the interrogator to deception, potential leads and openings for manipulation of any one or all of the three mentioned aspects of the source.
This may be off topic but it is pertinent to the above. One of the problems we used to have training interrogators was that the training used to concentrate on the face to face issues. The two areas left un-tapped and never correctly trained for where the before and after. In my opinion, these are usually more important, and denigrated at the table of cunning interrogator ego.
Circumstances of capture/detention and detailed back story were never really adequately captured in exercise briefs, and nor were "all sources" exploitation, in the aftermath. It all meant we were very likely to end up interrogating people we did not need to talk to at all. Time is and human resources are very finite.