Quote Originally Posted by rborum View Post
....Regarding the use of coercive techniques, the FM sets the ground rules for now. Those techniques do not appear to have a promising future in US interrogation policy. I did a recent book chapter with a couple of colleagues on recent trends in US interrogation policy and practice which I have on my SelectedWorks, if you're interested: http://works.bepress.com/randy_borum/ (I hope providing this link does not violate the forum's ROE. If so, let me know and I will remove it. I was just trying to be responsive to the RFI)
Randy - many of the board members have their own websites and blogs, and the board admins and moderators do not have an issue with any of them discussing/linking their own material in the context of an ongoing discussion or in response to an RFI. It is only when someone comes to the board and their only participation is to throw up links to their own stuff that it is considered equivalent to spam.

Back to the discussion, your point that interrogators should develop a plan to determine what kind of approaches might be more or less successful with a particular detainee, from whom you are seeking particular kinds of information, in a particular context, is very important. Interrogation is all about nuance and fine specifics; any general one-size-fits-all approach that is claimed to be effective is a gross misrepresentation of the case. Of course, human beings being what they are, even interrogators trained to understand nuance and fine specifics can get lazy over time and end up approaching every source with their preferred method, ignoring indicators that it won't succeed. That is why in most of my discussions of the subject I continually stress the necessity of leadership involvement, continual professional development and sustained mentoring for the development of an effective core interrogation capability.

Looking at your website, I just realized that the paper Interviewing Al-Qaeda-related subjects: A law enforcement perspective is a slightly modified version of the NCIS paper Interviewing & Interrogating Militant Islamists: A Law Enforcement Perspective - by the same authors, of course. A bit over two years ago I wrote a rambling, informal review of the latter piece here.

Ted