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FBI Wants To "Advance the Science of Interrogation"
coondoggie writes "From deep in the Department of Creepy today I give this item: The FBI this week put out a call for new research 'to advance the science and practice of intelligence interviewing and interrogation.' The part of the FBI that is requesting the new research isn't out in the public light very often: the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which according to the FBI was chartered in 2009 by the National Security Council and includes members of the CIA and Department of Defense, to 'deploy the nation's best available interrogation resources against detainees identified as having information regarding terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies.'"
Hey guys I heard the ministry of love in 1984 had some pretty sweet ideas on interrogation. Perhaps you guys can take a look at those for inspiration.
Yes, I'm sure that those people tortured back then really did practice black magic with the Devil.
Or maybe torture just gets confessions whether they're factual or not.
"against detainees identified as having information regarding terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies."
or
"against hacker"
or
"against protestors"
or
"against any person we deem not conforming for normal standards"
Torture is a good way to get people to say what you want them to say. The FBI should be good at finding out what they know- hopefully this is a step towards that. From all accounts they were very good at it pre-war on terror, and they didn't need to resort to water boarding.
If your interrogation program includes torture, you've already failed.
Effective, but not for getting information on which to act. It's very effective for scaring the hell out of the tortured and creating at least one more generation of enemies.
People don't forget when you torture their family members. And you know what? I think I would rather have a religious fanatic as an enemy than someone who has sworn a blood oath to avenge the death of his father. A religious fanatic, after all, is irrational by definition. There is no one more rational than someone who has grown up with the knowledge that you are the guy who tortured his father. He's got all those adolescent years to think about how to kill you, and I can tell you from personal experience that adolescence is a great time for coming up with creative ways to kill people.
I've spent a fair amount of time in the Balkans, in Serbia, Bosnia, etc. And I can tell you based on observation that when someone gets tortured, you create much worse trouble.
And then, there's what torture does to the people who torture. Assuming there's a time when the war ends, these are not people who are going to go home and teach high school.
Torture is ineffective and diminishes the society that condones torture. I still think that the stories that came out last decade are a big part of why American society is so psychotic today. And if someone wants to disagree with me that American society is psychotic, step right up.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Exactly. Research has shown that people under torture become prone to fantasy, and are no longer able to distinguish between memory and imagination.
"Uh, we know what we want to do isn't legal and isn't morally acceptable in a civilized society,...
Interrogation and intelligence interviews certainly are legal and morally acceptable in a civilized society. Do you think we're supposed to catch bad guys and then say "you sit over there, we aren't going to ask you anything about what your friends are planning because someone told us it wasn't morally acceptable to interview you"? Do you think that other civilized societies don't interrogate anyone?
What isn't legal or acceptable is torture, and if you read the fine article you'd notice that nothing at all was said about coming up with new and better torture methods, only evaluation existing interrogation methods to see how those could be improved.
Classifying this as "department of creepy" displays the author's bias. That it comes from NetworkWorld makes as much sense as the Zimmerman story that appeared in slashdot recently. Neither one has any special relevance to nerds or networks.
And that is one of the problems with it. If you ask any question in the right way you can get any answer.
So basically it's about the method of interrogation that determines the result. So if they want someone to admit to being a terrorist they could get 99% of people to admit that if they used the right interrogation methods. This is the problem with "enhanced" interrogation. It's asking someone a question while in the backround applying coercion tactics so they answer it the way you want them to.
So the question stands why do we need to have this capability in the first place? Who exactly is it for? Every human is going to break under interrogation, and that break will be psychological, physical, or both, so whats the point?
If the goal is just to break people then why help them advance the science of destroying people?
No, no. That's old school. They want new, advanced techniques. Perhaps they can start using a fuel cell in place of a car battery . . .
My point still stands...if you are interrogated for information that, if revealed, would tend to incriminate you, the 5th amendment applies.
Which is why they grant immunity.
And please, "winning the war" being used as an excuse to undermine one's civil rights is complete bullshit. Particularly in a war of aggression that we started in the first place.
Indeed, and this is something we can progress in without recreating incidents that gave us little intelligence but cost us a great deal of goodwill.
An example of the more recent advances in interrogation used by the US -- still actively taught today, actually -- came from studying how American POWs in WWII were interrogated by the Luftwaffe's master interrogator, Hanns Joachim Scharff. Sort of like the Erwin Rommel of interrogation.
I'm sure the image that most people have about Germans interrogating US POWs in WWII is like an ill-tempered Jack Bauer, but that wasn't the case at all, at least for Scharff.
Scharff's techniques were purely psychological, and did not rely on causing physical or (much) psychological distress. I'll try to briefly summarize what I recall reading quite a while ago. Scharff would treat prisoners well, and engage them in conversation, even giving them leave to walk with him outside the base. He would take note of what they said, at first without prying that much, and then in later conversation where they felt more comfortable around him, interject those things learned earlier in ways that the prisoner would elaborate on a topic that they would not normally divulge, perhaps even under torture... usually without even realizing they had given him the intel he wanted.
It required extreme attention to detail, patience, interpersonal skills, and getting to know and understand who he was interrogating. Much more difficult than torture, but it produced consistently good results.
I don't know what advances can be made in interrogation in the future, but as Hanns Scharff proved, they need not all be brutal to be effective.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp19qiash2U
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
From the accounts I've heard, the FBI aren't big supporters of torture. In the early days of interrogating prisoners from Afghanistan, there were FBI agents involved. CIA contractors asked for permission to get rough, against FBI recommendations and experience. When permission was granted, the FBI yanked their people from the interrogations. Things went steadily downhill after that.
At least that's what I've read and heard. If someone can clarify or correct this, I'd appreciate it.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
As others have pointed out, torture generally does not lead to useful intelligence. It leads to hearing exactly what the torture victim thinks you want to hear.
The FBI is obviously working on advancing the state of the art of educing information. Effective educing generally does not include torture. A detailed examination of various techniqure is here (pdf).
Anarchists never rule
It's funny, but I don't recall that the NKVD, KGB, SMERSH, or other secret police organs of Soviet Power in the USSR worried about blood feuds from torture, or any of that. They simply tortured and killed in staggering numbers.
The KGB prison in Vilnius at The Museum of Genocide Victims
solitary confinement cell, KGB style.
Surprise!
And the Gulags?
What Were Their Crimes? Living in the Gulag Stalin World - Lithuania
The Great Terror: A Reassessment
- - - - -
Torture is ineffective and diminishes the society that condones torture. I still think that the stories that came out last decade are a big part of why American society is so psychotic today.
Some small segments of American society did become unhinged, yes, but not anything close to all of American society.
Keep in perspective that: Only Three Have Been Waterboarded by CIA The most recent of which was about 9 years ago.
Many people are also mistaken regarding what went on at Abu Ghraib. The Army put a stop to abuse by a handful of rogue soldiers who were abusing prisoners, court martialed them, and sent them to jail. All the news media really did was report the news of the Army investigation, and what had gone on. Of course it is more profitable, poltically and financially, to spin dark conspiracy theories when the reality is closer to Jackass: The Movie.
Iraq abuse photos were `just for fun'
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Your interpretation of what happened at Abu Ghraib is flawed at best. It is true that the enlisted people probably did do some things on their own initiative and "for fun" but most of the torture practiced there was doctrine being pushed from the White House and Pentagon. It was happening in Gitmo and Afghanistan too which completely defeats your contention that it was just a few rogue enlisted people in Iraq.
The use of attack dogs and sexual humiliation were part of Pentagon and CIA directed interrogation techniques. It is fairly predictable that when you order low paid, untrained, poorly supervised, enlisted people, working in a hell hole, to torture and humiliate prisoners in certain ways that they would quickly lose their moral compass and start engaging in progressively more abusive forms of torture and humiliation until you reach the photos from Abu Ghraib. Only way for this abuse to not happen would be to either not allow any of it in the first place which should have been the case or failing that to only have highly trained, disciplined people under strict chain of command doing it who knew exactly where the lines were that they could approach but not cross.
There were officers who were directing many of the abusive practices at Abu Ghraib who got off scott free because they were doing what they were ordered to do. The Army had to nail someone once the photos hit the news and nailing expendable enlisted soldiers was incredibly easy.
Officers usually dont take these falls unless they've done something to go off the reservation and to invite the wrath of their superiors like shoot their mouth off to the press. As long as they keep quite and are doing what they were ordered to do they can almost literally get away with murder.
@de_machina
And how does the interrogator tell the difference between withholding information and ignorance?
They don't, of course. So they apply increasing amounts of pain until they get the answer they want. And you're right back to square one, with the victim saying whatever he things his captors want to hear.
war on terror, war on the devil, war on teen pregnancies, war on drugs, war on jaywalking...there's a war on everything always. that's the problem with that.
if the interrogation is for a military objective you don't even need 5th amendment. international rules apply, you pretty much only need to state your id and get treated as POW.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Back in world war II Britain found out and proved torture technics DO NOT work. They tried this on German Officers and solders only to find out either they knew nothing or were pissed off at the way they were treated and flat out lied to watch Britain waste there time and efforts to supply false recon or intelligence to there own troops. They realized this was not working. and figured out something different. They offered them immunity and placed them in a government building which looks more or less like a mansion, wired the building for eavesdropping on there talks, they gave them the luxuries like cigars, alcohol, ect... Allowed them to parade around or dress in there uniforms. Sure enough they started mouthing off over positions of there troops, what ammo, artillery, tanks ect.. each group had. They did this in a much shorter time, or quicker then the info they got from torture. You see these same tactics used by police officers, detectives, and the FBI to get a suspect to open up and talk, they even watch what words they use, and act like they are sympathetic to the suspects upbringing. They also do simple things like ask his side of the story or ask if they know this or that person, leave the room for an extended time (on purpose) then come back and say, this person knows you and you lied about not knowing them. This same person claimed you were talking about that night, or they know you were involved, BLA BLA you see a pattern.. They also watch body gestures, eye movement, there posture, this however really does not prove or show anything, they could be nervous or they could be involved with something else, IE be in a gang and by them just getting arrested they will have to answer for to the gang, or it something else illegal and not related to the crime they are being interrogated for.
While we're at it, we should also mention MI6's method for high-valued prisoners. They rented a villa as accommodation for German POWs. It appeared to be an improvised makeshift housing, but was very luxurious. The Germans were mostly left alone, playing pool billiard and drinking scotch, and soon got rather bored. They even received an English newspaper. However, the newspaper was fake and reported great successes of English troops. The German officers became so concerned over the bad news that they started discussing them amongst themselves, trying to discern propaganda from reality and so on. Of course, the whole house was bugged and they freely gave away information that they would likely have kept to themselves even under torture.
I guess nowadays this wouldn't work, but it's nice to know that it seems to have worked.
And by doing so they turned pretty much everyone against the state, thus leading to the fall of the Soviet Union. So maybe they should had worried about blood feuds a bit more after all.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
LEO's in suspect interrogation often use a method called the Reid Technique. It usually starts with several hours of questioning and rapport building to wear down a suspect (fatigue plays a HUGE factor in our ability to deceive). At some point the interrogator will begin moving to a "help us out here, we want to understand" kind of attitude.
One facet of the technique is to identify the individuals values and priorities (kids, job, etc) and offering up potential explanations of the crime that implies they are a bad father, husband, employee etc. If the person is sufficiently fatigued and has built some kind of rapport with the interrogator, the idea is that they will offer up a full confession as a means of explaining why what they did makes them a good father, husband, employee, etc.
Military interrogation is more about general information gathering. Like you describe, a lot of that experience comes out of WWII where we would collect simply vast amounts of information from POWS that individually is largely meaningless, but in aggregate is informative.
Current research with body language, eye tracking, etc indicates most of that is junk. An increase in activity can identify when an individual is nervous about something, but it doesn't necessarily indicate deception and is incredibly sensitive to gender, culture, and (interestingly) language background. The literature talks about these kinds of things as Pinnochio's Nose; some behavior that manifest only when the person is lying, and every time the person is lying. Unfortunately this singular diagnostic behavior doesn't exist.
Source: Worked for a couple of years as a deception researcher, exploring various methods of deception detection.