Effective Interrogation
Does not require torture, according to veteran interrogators.
One might think that any interrogation method considered legal must also be effective. But many techniques that have been deemed lawful by lawyers at the Justice Department, the Defense Department and even the White House have never been tested for how well they elicit information from people who resist providing it. In fact, none of the methods contained in the current Army manual on interrogation have ever been scientifically tested for effectiveness.
As military interrogators, each of us has questioned hundreds of prisoners of war, terrorists and insurgents in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia — during both Iraq wars and the 1989 invasion of Panama — and we have supervised thousands of other interrogations. While we speak only for ourselves, we have seen firsthand that many standard approaches are rarely useful in eliciting reliable intelligence, and often serve only to harden a detainee’s resistance. Widely employed tactics like “fear-up harsh,” which is meant to scare a person into answering questions, or “pride and ego down,” which uses humiliation to try to overcome a person’s resistance, are actually counterproductive in establishing the kind of relationship — one based on trust — that is almost always necessary to win a detainee’s cooperation.
The most effective strategies for relationship building are the kind that interrogators used to extract critical information from high-level Japanese and German prisoners during World War II. Interrogators who were familiar with the detainees’ language and culture, and who exhaustively studied each prisoner’s case, used charisma and empathy to patiently elicit vital intelligence. Similarly, it was a relationship-building approach that we used to persuade a detainee to give us information on the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — information that led to his being located and killed in 2006.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Wow the NYtimes found a ‘veteran interrogator’ that supports the NYTimes position that torture is not necessary for effective interrogation. The other day FOXNews had a segment with a ‘veteran interrogator’ that claimed that in some instances torture was necessary for an effective interrogation. What do we do now?
Its almost like neither news organization is reporting news but instead pushing their agenda while masquerading it as news. I know its not, but it really seems like that’s what they are doing.
March 11th, 2009 at 3:38 pm
It seems reasonable to me that we err on the side of not torturing.
March 11th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
It seems reasonable to me that we err on the side of torturing.
March 12th, 2009 at 12:49 am
Steve, you’re the best libertarian ever.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Thank you.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:16 am
Perhaps you would agree with torturing domestically, to get confessions from suspects who we’re pretty sure committed murder. I mean, if torturing is so effective, why not use it more often?
March 12th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
I’m not keen on torturing domestically. As a libertarian I believe its absolutely imperative to implement as many safeguards as possible to protect a citizen from the state. I view giving the state the right to torture citizen’s problematic because it would be ripe for abuse.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
So, under your thoughts, I suppose domestic terrorists (they do exist) can not be tortured? Even if the knowledge they might have might be at least as important if not way more important that the info gathered from an international terrorist?
March 12th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
Why isn’t giving the state the power to torture noncitizens also ripe for abuse?
Are you concerned that this opens up the possibility for a slippery slope where once torture is considered acceptable, it is applied to felons and illegal immigrants, then other unpopular groups…
March 12th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Jamie brings up a good point. When it comes to domestic terrorists I really have to go with erring on the side of caution and not endorsing torture. I can come up with some extreme instances where it might be acceptable, but those conditions are so extreme we would all agree that its acceptable. Otherwise, torturing domestic terrorists is a no go. Citizens rights should protect against torture almost absolutely.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Dan,
Nope. Not worried.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:38 pm
Yeah, we would never do anything unconstitutional to citizens because of paranoia and fear, like lock them up in internment camps based on ethnicity or prosecute them based on political affiliation or shoot at them for protesting a war or anything. There’s no reason to worry about that stuff.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
I hear you about making mistakes regarding the constitution. For example extending habeus corpus to non-citizens.
March 12th, 2009 at 6:16 pm
Are you at all worried about the fact that the government gets to decide who is or isn’t a citizen? If we grant the governments all types of additional liberties when dealing with non-citizens, we present a fairly powerful incentive to deny/revoke citizenship.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
The constitution makes that determination not the ‘the government’.
March 13th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Our government does unconstitutional stuff all the time, that’s what we have the supreme court for. By putting in place the “infrastructure” for a torture pipeline, we leave open the possibility for the government to use it in ways that it was not intended.
When have you known the government to say “No” to more power?
March 13th, 2009 at 10:12 am
This argument you guys are making is terrible. Arguing that a nuanced policy position is problematic because it could cause a slippery slope to an outcome no one likes is applicable to many many different policy positions. However, many of these other policy positions you might support so you will downplay the likelihood that it could cause a downward slip to an outcome no one supports.
Actually show evidence how polices allowing torture of non-citizens in extraordinary situations will lead to widespread systematic torture by the state onto it’s citizenry.
And if you are Dan don’t waste my time with Despots and other non modern democratic governments as proof.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Jamie already produced the example of the citizen domestic terrorist. Sure, you personally might not want to torture him, but what if the NSA gets intel from warrantless wiretaps, enough that the CIA sees fit to scoop this person up, fly them to another country, and have them tortured to give up information.
According to Wikipedia, “transfer of anyone to anywhere for the purpose of torture is a violation of U.S. law,” so the CIA is already breaking the law with normal exraordinary rendition. A citizen could easily be detained without trial and whisked off to a CIA black site.
Why do you insist on giving the government more money and power? Worst libertarian ever.
March 13th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
I categorically reject rendition of any US citizen. Non-citizens for the most part I don’t really care provided the practice does not get out of hand.
March 14th, 2009 at 12:48 am
Do you think we should torture illegal immigrants before deporting them, to discourage future offenders?
March 14th, 2009 at 10:42 am
“Actually show evidence how polices allowing torture of non-citizens in extraordinary situations will lead to widespread systematic torture by the state onto it’s citizenry.”
There was a terrorist attack on the German parliament building in 1933. Soviet spies were believed to be responsible. The Nazis put in place a number of policies that were justified as necessary for dealing with communists but had the side-effect of giving the government a whole lot more power that it could use against other groups later on.
This is a clear example of policies being extended in what had (before 1933) been a Democratic government.
March 16th, 2009 at 9:32 am
Okay, so the NSA picks up word that domestic terrorists are planning a major attack on an American landmark…. A member, with knowledge of the operation is apprehended…. Even though torture is the best way to get information (supposedly), we aren’t allowed to do this, even if it will save thousands of lives? Wuss.
March 17th, 2009 at 11:23 am
If the agents on the scene truly believe that torture is the only way to save those lives, they can do it, make all the details public, and then go to jail for it, and they should be glad to go to jail in exchange for saving all those people. Making it legal and secret leads to unnaceptable risks of abuse and gives the state an unnaceptable power in all the other real-situations which aren’t cartoonishly simplified, black and white hypothetical scenarios.
March 17th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
I agree. I have no problem making the process in which torture is done more open and transparent. I think building in safeguards for torturing is reasonable and smart. If agents on the field torture non-citizens and an open and transparent system find such action to be inappropriate then I would have no problem sending those agents to prison.
What I do have a problem is taking torture off the board completely. Those that are in put in charge of protecting our country from those that would harm us should have access to all the tools that may be necessary to do their job. They should be held accountable for how and why these use those tools.
As for torturing citizens, the cost for torturing citizens should be prison even if that information leads to saving lives. The state cost for torturing citizens should be very high because we want to insure it’s never abused. Agents should be faced with the very real problem of going to jail for saving lives. Those certain that many many lives will be saved will be willing to serve jail to time to get the information necessary to save lives. Instances where the agent does not think jail time justifies the lives of other citizens which leads to their deaths is an acceptable noise in insuring that the state does no abuse torture.
Whats odd is that some of you you guys are willing to accept this noise, but you refuse to accept the noise of gun death via the right to bear arms. Both instances can be used in slippery slope arguments with the end conclusion of tyranny. However, with torture, that will clearly lead to a tyrannical government, but if the government were to forcibly remove all the weapons, well that’s just saving lives.
March 17th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
I’m willing to accept a world in which we do not torture, even if that puts us at greater risk from Islamic terrorism.
March 17th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
Steve- the issue si that in the signal to noise calculations relateing to gun control, making us safer is the noise and innocents being killed is the signal. You’re whatever large number of times more likely to shoot yourself or a loved one with your own gun than to defend yourself from a criminal- if torture had an equally crappy well-documented track record, I’d have the same reaction to it.
You’re currently able to make a compelling argument using a hypothetical situation in which torture saves lives, becaese we don’t have enough information to say how likely that hypothetical situation actually is, or how often torture would be misused. We do have that information on guns, we know the situation where they save people is very uncommon in comparison to the number of times they’re misused, so that same hypothetical argument doesn’t hold up for guns.
March 17th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
So torture shouldn’t be taken off the board when dealing with non-citizens, but should be punished with jail time with citizens, even if the saving of lives is equal in both cases?
So in one case you are arguing “torture” is effective. However even though it is effective it can’t be used against citizens…. Even those that plan to harm other citizens.
Seems to me that if you take the position that torture is a good tool for protecting citizens, it should be implimented against all evil-doers.