Interrogation Study

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.

The Unseen War in Iraq: Insurgents in the Shadows

The Unseen War in Iraq: Insurgents in the Shadows is a book that seemed to fly under the radar when it was published in 2008. The book, written by a career counterintelligence officer who now teaches at St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania, provides an important perspective on counterintelligence in general and intelligence interrogations in particular. The author, Richard Saccone, devotes an important part of the book to interrogation techniques, torture and coercion in the HUMINT context. Dr. Saccone draws an important distinction between coercion and torture and argues that coercion is a necessary tool when interrogating hardened terrorists who have been trained to resist rapport-building and other non-coercive techniques. Dr. Saccone also believes that under supervision and with reasonable guidelines and limitations, coercion will not violate U.S. or international law. In the chapter Interrogation, Saccone offers an anecdote about using non-rapport building techniques to elicit information from a subject.

According to the author, a "suspect" was resisting "conventional means of interrogation" and interrogators needed to try alternative methods. They hood the subject and tell him he is being transported to an interrogation setting that will be less-than-friendly. When the suspect arrives at the make-shift interrogation booth, the interrogator excuses himself and goes to a room next door. In this room, the interrogator and an Arabic interpreter stage a mock interrogation. The interrogator connects two live wires from time to time and the interpreter screams in Arabic to stop. They even arrange for the lights to dim when the live wires are connected. When the interpreter pretends to confess, the interrogator returns to the room with the suspect, who now appears "sufficiently frightened." The interrogator tells the suspect that he does not want to use these methods but he will if the suspect does not cooperate. At this point the prisoner begins to reveal intelligence.

In an e-mail to me Dr. Saccone provided these insights about intelligence interrogations:

"Hardened terrorists are trained to resist interrogation so they expect much more than Coercive methods. Some of them have actually been tortured in other countries or by Iraqis, Pesh Merga or Taliban. Terrorists are created predominantly from religious reasons, the other excuses of US foreign policy, our relation with Israel and how we treat terrorists etc. is a smoke screen. I explain some if that in my book. If you think how we treat KSM would make him stop wanting to terrorize America you are mistaken. His ilk have fundamental religious and cultural differences with our way of life. They saw peoples heads off and intentionally kill thousands of innocents to achieve their goals."

Many interrogators make this mistake. "'If I am successful using one technique then it must work on everything.' It reminds me of the saying that "A fool is one who, upon observing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes it will also make better soup." There is a time and place for rapport building and good interrogators know when to use it. The reason so many fall into this trap is because by the time FBI or prison interrogators receive prisoners the urgency is likely gone. They have much more time to use rapport building and that may be appropriate. Battlefield interrogations present a different circumstance which includes urgency."

"Depending on the individual, terrorists can respond to coercion almost immediately. For those hardened terrorists it may take longer but that time will still be a fraction of the time it would take to use rapport building on that person. I have seen what I define as coercion work in as little as a few minutes or over several days. Remember, not everyone picked up on the battlefield is a hardened terrorist. As I explain in my book some are simple shepherds manipulated into the movement. Rapport building can sometimes work quickly on these people. The bottom line remains, because one technique works sometimes (or even a lot of the time) is no reason to discard other techniques completely."

"The definition of torture should remain as it has always been, techniques that do long-lasting or permanent physical harm such as maiming, burning, amputation and a few others. Everything else is coercion. So for example, sleep deprivation is not torture unless it is used to the extent that long-lasting physical harm is done to the prisoner. That could be different depending on the health of a prisoner. Each case must be dealt with separately. However, policy guidelines are needed to help interrogators stay within reasonable limits."

"24 & The Efficacy of Torture" from the Journal of Criminal Justice & Popular Culture

The CIA's interrogation methods during the "War on Terrorism" have focused attention on a once obscure, out of print book called the "Manipulation of Human Behavior." The book, which some have dubbed the CIA's "torture bible," was a series of articles in book form that reviewed the state of interrogation research at the time of its publication, 1961. The furor over this book and its use by the CIA has deflected attention from another highly influential book that influenced the agency's offensive interrogation of research.

Joost Meerloo, a lecturer at Columbia University, published a book, The Rape of the Mind, in 1956 that reviewed mind control techniques and explored why people falsely confess. The book was inspired, in part, by numerous "false confessions" cases both inside and outside of the American military.

American soldiers were not the only subjects who had been reportedly “brainwashed” by the communists. Others, including a Hungarian cardinal, an ITT executive, and a number of journalists, offered public admissions to espionage charges after being “brainwashed.” Michael Otterman, in his book American Torture discusses the mind control" hysteria generated in part by the rise of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China.

A 1954 story in the New York Times by Meerloo posed this lurid headline: "Pavlov’s Dog and Communist Brainwashers…totalitarians seek to enslave the human mind.” In the Times article Meerloo, a psychiatrist, describes in detail the techniques used by the Soviet Union to elicit confessions.

In stage one, the prisoner is dulled by rapid, continual questioning, forced to stand, denied access to showers, and exposed to cold, among other things. During this stage, as questioning continues, new interrogators confront the subject with errors in his statements and the subject is reduced to "an animal."

In stage two, “reconditioning” begins. For each act of compliance, his captors award the prisoner a small privilege, such as a shower, a warm cell, or a restful sleep. At this point, Meerloo writes, the victim enters a “hypnotic state” and is “ready to confess.” The interrogator can prompt the subject to "confess" to almost anything because of the breakdown in the subject's will and humanity.

Interrogation Study

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.

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.