One stop interrogation & interviewing resource

[SWJED]

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.

... 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...