Interrogator Hall of Fame - Part I

If there were an American Interrogator Hall of Fame surely Marine Major Sherwood Moran would be an inductee. Moran, whose letter about interrogations received a lot of press after news about Abu Ghraib broke, was an interrogator from the old school. The Atlantic Monthly ran a nice piece about Moran in 2005 and Moran's family has established a website to honor his memory. Moran died in 1983.

Moran's now famous epistle, Suggestions For Japanese Interpreters Based On Work In the Field, is a primer about how to gather intelligence information from a subject without using coercion. Moran, who once lived in Japan and spoken fluent Japanese without an American accent, preferred the term interviewer over interrogator. This distinction is fundamental to understanding Moran's rapport building approach to interrogations.

Interrogator Study advertisement in the Fort Huachuca Scout.

Are you an military interrogator? Have your voice heard about military interrogation techniques. Please participate anonymously in my study which requires you to complete a 15 minute questionnaire. The study is completely anonymous and asks for no classified information. If you have questions please contact me in confidence and then you can decide whether or not to anonymously participate.

Please help.

Thanks to waterboarding.org for reminding me that the Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Teams Association has a page on their site that discusses torture and interrogations, written by Maj. Anthony F. Milavic, USMC (Ret.).

Do harsh interrogations work? Part IV

In 1957, Albert Biderman conducted a comprehensive examination of false confession cases on behalf of the United States Air Force and the CIA and he focused on one major question: what happened to U.S. personnel captured in Korea that caused them to "confess" to non-existent war crimes? (Biderman has gained renewed notoriety in the last few years as editor of "The Manipulation of Human Behavior," what some have called the "Torture Handbook.")

In accordance with the findings of other well known researchers for the CIA, Wolff and Hinkle, as well as his own work, Biderman recognized that human behavior can be "manipulated" in a "controlled" environment, such as that in which a prisoner of war may find himself. The nation that holds prisoners of war has two major goals according to Biderman: to establish compliance and, in cases where prisoners may be used for propaganda purposes, to manipulate that compliance. The North Koreans and the Chinese, like their Soviet counterparts, gained compliance by undermining the prisoner's resistance, usually without the use of physical torture. Biderman organized the Chinese methods for gaining compliance into eight categories and those eight categories include the techniques, their "effects" and "variants."

Biderman contended that of all possible techniques, isolation works best to break down resistance in prisoners. Severe isolation can achieve the same results as other methods, such as starvation and sleep deprivation and can achieve those results in a shorter period of time. When prisoners are subjected to complete or almost complete isolation, their psychological well-being rapidly deteriorates. Long term solitary confinement can eventually induce psychosis and a complete mental breakdown and isolation has an added advantage in that it leaves no marks on its victims. Biderman's findings, however, suggest that if isolation is used at all, its use must be measured and monitored. Too much isolation is not likely to produce accurate intelligence from a subject, a finding relevant to today's interrogations.

Biderman found that two other specific techniques also work well to establish compliance: threats of physical violence and the use of stress positions. Stress positions, such as sitting at attention or standing for long periods of time, are particularly effective for compliance because the prisoner himself, not the interrogator or guard, is the source of the prisoner's pain. Stress positions cause the prisoner to "exaggerate" the power of the interrogator and convince a prisoner that his captor has the ability "to do something worse to him." Stress positions also allow the interrogator to assert that physical violence never entered the interrogation room.

Regardless of the interrogation techniques used, Biderman believed that no subject could resist a determined interrogator and he supported this assertion with a review of intelligence gathering during World War II and the Korean War. The greater problem for an interrogator, according to Biderman, is evasion by a subject after he begins to talk. As a result of his findings, Biderman supported a change in the Military Code of Conduct which would allow American prisoners of war to speak to interrogators instead of simply supplying name, rank and serial number. Biderman reasoned that most subjects will eventually talk and the military is wiser to train troops to evade their interlocutors, who were generally poor at detecting evasion or deception. Biderman’s assertions are still true today and supported by law enforcement research on this subject which suggests that law enforcement officers are over-confident in their ability to detect deception.

Biderman's overall findings suggest that isolation, at least in its more extreme forms, and stress positions are not conducive to eliciting actionable intelligence during an interrogation. Training and research may be better focused on deception detection which is still subject to many myths. A search on Amazon will reveal a number of books that purport to teach the secrets of flushing out lies and liars. Most research literature to date on this subject, however, counters the view that deception is easily detected in another human being by physical cues.

Do harsh interrogation techniques work? Part III

In his book, Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War, Lewis Carlson presents an oral history of American POWs in Korea. Carlson conducted interviews with Korean POWs in part to determine if the conditions of their confinement helped produce false confessions at higher rates when compared to American prisoners in other wars. Carlson finds that the North Koreans used many of the same methods as the Soviet Union, including beatings, starvation, sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and "never-ending" interrogations. Marathon interrogation sessions can cause a subject to become so disoriented that the subject can no longer distinguish what he knows from what he does not know. These conditions, notes Carlson, caused prisoners to break down and "cooperate" with their interrogators to survive. For some, cooperation included falsely confessing to war crimes.

During the Vietnam War the North Vietnamese elicited similar false confessions under similar conditions from American prisoners of war, including Senator John McCain of Arizona. Navy pilot Mike Cronin, who spent six years at the notorious Hanoi prison known as the Hanoi Hilton, was subjected to brutal interrogations during his time in captivity. Eventually Cronin did talk but, like other POWs including McCain, Cronin provided his captors with false or unimportant information. Cronin has publically insisted however that "when you put people in this position, the information you get is not reliable."

Subsequent conflicts produced similar false confessions. At the height of the Vietnam War, North Korea seized an American Naval vessel, the U.S.S. Pueblo and held the 82-member crew captive for 11 months under severe conditions. The Koreans regularly assaulted the Americans, kept them blindfolded and questioned them over long periods of time. The commander of the ship, Captain Lloyd Bucher eventually "confessed" to war crimes after the Koreans threatened to shoot the members of his crew one-by-one while he watched. The statements elicited as a result of this threat were false.

During the Gulf War in 1991, Iraqi television displayed several downed U.S. airmen who publicly denounced the war against the "peaceful people of Iraq." Again the statements were elicited under torture and threats of death.

These events demonstrate again and again that even members of the best and most well-trained military in the world are not immune to torture and the often debilitating effects of captivity, particularly if injured when captured. But they also demonstrate that the quality of information elicited under these conditions is suspect at best and most likely fabricated. Historically, harsh techniques seem to reliably produce unreliable information.

Do harsh interrogation techniques work? Part II

Experienced interrogators know the history of their art and this history is replete with narrative accounts about the ineffectiveness of harsh techniques and torture. The historical record describes the experiences of American POWs during four major wars: World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the first Gulf War. In addition, numerous books and articles depict how American interrogators treated enemy prisoners of war and many of these accounts have been cited by journalists and others reporting about this issue, in print and on the internet.

It bears repeating here that rapport-building, like the use of harsh techniques, has not been scientifically validated. I do not intend to endorse any one interrogation technique but seek to examine the evidence that exists about the efficacy of various interrogation practices used subsequent to September 11th, 2001.

Probably the most famous World War II interrogator was a Luftwaffe officer named Hanns Scharff, the subject of a book written by Raymond Tolliver called The Interrogator. Much has been written about Scharff who used charm, wit and cunning to extract information from the mostly American airmen he interrogated and Scharff is often cited as a counter to those who advocate harsh techniques. The coda to the Scharff story is that later in life, he moved to the United States and spoke to many military audiences about his methods. The Marine Corps Interrogator Translator Teams Association includes a small tribute to Scharff on its web site.

Scharff was atypical and accounts of the treatment of U.S. POWs in World War II and the Korean War illustrate the defensive challenges of interrogation faced by prisoners. Both the Germans and the Japanese tortured Allied POWs captured over the course of the conflict and some estimate that after being tortured ten percent of American prisoners of war held by the Nazis cooperated in some way with their captors. Cooperation consisted primarily of confessions to fabricated war crimes.

During the Korean War, thirty-six American airmen confessed to a plot to bomb civilian targets after undergoing what was then called touch-less torture. These high value prisoners were isolated from all human contact but for their interrogators and at least one airman was held in solitary confinement for 10 months. The North Koreans and the Chinese subjected these prisoners to stress positions, such as standing at attention for hours, repeated beatings and prolonged interrogation sessions during which questions were repeated over and over to disorient the subject. During the winter, prisoners were marched barefoot in the snow. Guards regularly threw food at prisoners and forced them to defecate in public. After becoming exhausted and demoralized, some airmen's resistance was overcome and they eventually "confessed" to war crimes. All the confessions elicited under these conditions were false and were procured primarily for propaganda purposes.

The historical record is clear about one overall fact. The Koreans and the Chinese did not torture their American captives to elicit intelligence. They tortured U.S. soldiers in the hopes that they would convincingly confess to false charges or renounce the American political system. In some cases the soldiers did and did so plausibly, much to the shock of many Americans at home.

Do harsh interrogation techniques work?

With the release of new revelations about the Bush Administration's policy on interrogations and a pending investigation by Attorney General Eric Holder, several points have not been refuted by news reports. First, whether you agree or disagree with the Administration's policies, there appears to be no evidence, other than some anecdotal reports, that harsh interrogations produced good intelligence information.

For example, former Vice President Dick Cheney insists that harsh interrogations led to actionable intelligence. Cheney's contention is countered by experienced interrogators, some of the most prominent of whom have been two Air Force interrogators, Steve Kleinman and Matthew Alexander(a pseudonym), and former FBI special agent Ali Soufan. Recently Soufan wrote in the New York Times that supporters of harsh techniques have yet "to show that the techniques stopped even a single imminent threat of terrorism." Soufan has been a frequent critic of the Bush policy both in print and as a witness before Congress. (It should be remembered however that rapport-building techniques themselves have not been validated scientifically in the intelligence context even if the narrative and historical record overwhelmingly supports their effectiveness.)

The vice president has yet to clearly describe how harsh interrogations produced good intelligence or prevented an act of terror. Supporters have pointed to the interrogation of Khalid Sheik Mohamed as an example of extreme techniques producing good intelligence. As has been reported widely, Mohamed was water-boarded dozens of times and reportedly gave up good information. (Some have disputed the efficacy of water-boarding Mohamed including Mohamed himself. He now claims he told his interrogators what they "wanted to hear," not the truth.)

The bottom line? We don't know if torture or harsh techniques work and chances are we will never have a definitive answer. There may be cases where harsh techniques actually "work" and succeed in extracting valuable information but this does not mean that rapport building techniques are deficient in comparison.

The reverse engineering of the SERE program and the subsequent use of its techniques on detainees provides no scientific evidence of its effectiveness in producing intelligence and supporters of SERE abhor its use on prisoners.

If rapport-building techniques and harsh methods work equally well it is axiomatic that the United States not endorse methods proscribed by U.S. law or the Geneva Conventions. To do otherwise diminishes the moral standing of the U.S. and puts our troops in harm's way. This is not an endorsement of rapport-building; it is an acknowledgement that we do not have scientific evidence that validates one approach over another.

A second point seems undeniable. The Bush Administration did not ask seasoned interrogators what they believed were the most effective methods for gathering actionable intelligence. The irony in this fact is that the Administration sought the advice of so many individuals without consulting front-line, experienced interrogators. I have spoken with dozens of interrogators from the Air Force, Army and Marines and most of these experienced interrogators eschew the harsh tactics advanced by President Bush and his administration. They insist that rapport-building methods work best.