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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.'"
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.
Diesel Therapy - moving people around in stress positions with no sleep, food, meds... lost in the system with your lawyer making calls. ... no refunds. ... welcome to the mystery that could be "indefinite" and a new type of legal team. i.e. "You Don't Get a Lawyer"
Moving people around the jail system in cold, un cleaned cells for a few days- make a fuss and you get restraints and meds.
Mix in some pain compliance along the way and lost more paper work...
You are then found, re united with your family, good legal team and then get a one time offer to sign away years and inform...
Mix in state and federal, get bail form your state and a face federal case as you walk out
Can you still afford that fancy lawyer? Risk a federal court with a 85%+++ conviction rate?
Now the laws for the "duration of the armed conflict" set in
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
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.
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.
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
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.