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Michael Otterman is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, as well as an award-winning journalist and filmmaker.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Exposing the Obvious
What have we learned about interrogation over the past 800 years? According to the Intelligence Science Board (ISB), an interdisciplinary advisory panel of the Defense Department, not very much. The ISB recently unveiled Educing Information, a 374-page survey on the current state of interrogation scholarship and its application to US policy. The report was launched amid "concerns about recent U.S. interrogation activities, subsequent investigations, and the efficacy of contemporary tactics, techniques, and procedures." The survey's chief finding: torture doesn't work.
The report cites one 13th century jurist writing at the time of the Inquisition:
Not much has changed. "Why, in the 21st century, with all our accumulated knowledge about how human beings think and interact and function, are we still repeating costly medieval mistakes?" askes John A Wahlquist, an ISB panelist and former Deputy Director of Intelligence for US Southern Command. One problem, according to ISB member Steven M Kleinman, is that US interrogation doctrine is "adulterated by the principles of coercive interrogation drawn from studies of Communist methodologies." As a result, "evidence of the employment of coercive methods by U.S. interrogators has appeared with alarming frequency."
As noted in an earlier post and thoroughly discussed in American Torture, Soviet methods hinged on pain, disorientation and fear are successful at securing confessions, but not the truth. But why does the pro-pain myth persist? The answer, they found, is two-fold. One one hand, there is very little hard scientific evidence about what works and what doesn't work during interrogation. “We do not really know what we think we know. Overall, knowledge of behavioral indicators that might assist in the detection of deception is very limited," said Dr. Gary Hazlett, an expert on the effects of stress on the human body. Secondly, interrogators and their superiors are influenced by popular depictions of torture on shows like NYPD and 24. According to law professor Robert A. Destro: "Prime time television is not just entertainment. It is 'adult education.' We should not be surprised when the public (and many otherwise law-abiding lawyers) applaud when an actor threatens the 'hostile du jour' with pain or mayhem unless he or she answers a few, pointed questions before the end of the episode. The writers craft the script using 'extreme' measures because they assume, as our own government has, that police-state tactics studied for defensive purposes can be 'reverse engineered' and morphed into cost-effective, 'offensive' measures. Though eminently understandable, such reactions are incredibly short-sighted and profoundly unethical."
According to Col. Steven M. Kleinman, a senior Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) official with first-hand experience with Soviet methods, "The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information." Another contributor, Dr. Pauletta Otis, of the US Marine Center for Advanced Operational Cultural Learning, put it bluntly: "[M]ost professionals believe that pain, coercion, and threats are counterproductive to the elicitation of good information."
The full report is available here.
The report cites one 13th century jurist writing at the time of the Inquisition:
Some of these cells are dark and airless, so that those lodged there cannot tell if it is day or night…. In other cells there are kept miserable wretches laden with shackles…. These cannot move, but defecate and urinate on themselves. Nor can they lie down except on the frigid ground…. And thus coerced they say that what is false is true, choosing to die once rather than to endure more torture. As a result of these false and coerced confessions not only do those making confessions perish, but so do the innocent people named by them…. [M]any of those who are newly cited to appear [before the inquisitors], hearing of the torments and trials of those who are detained…assert that what is false is true; in which assertions they accuse not only themselves but other innocent people, that they may avoid the above mentioned pains…. Those who thus confess afterward reveal to their close friends that those things that they said to the inquisitors are not true, but rather false, and they confessed out of imminent danger.
Not much has changed. "Why, in the 21st century, with all our accumulated knowledge about how human beings think and interact and function, are we still repeating costly medieval mistakes?" askes John A Wahlquist, an ISB panelist and former Deputy Director of Intelligence for US Southern Command. One problem, according to ISB member Steven M Kleinman, is that US interrogation doctrine is "adulterated by the principles of coercive interrogation drawn from studies of Communist methodologies." As a result, "evidence of the employment of coercive methods by U.S. interrogators has appeared with alarming frequency."
As noted in an earlier post and thoroughly discussed in American Torture, Soviet methods hinged on pain, disorientation and fear are successful at securing confessions, but not the truth. But why does the pro-pain myth persist? The answer, they found, is two-fold. One one hand, there is very little hard scientific evidence about what works and what doesn't work during interrogation. “We do not really know what we think we know. Overall, knowledge of behavioral indicators that might assist in the detection of deception is very limited," said Dr. Gary Hazlett, an expert on the effects of stress on the human body. Secondly, interrogators and their superiors are influenced by popular depictions of torture on shows like NYPD and 24. According to law professor Robert A. Destro: "Prime time television is not just entertainment. It is 'adult education.' We should not be surprised when the public (and many otherwise law-abiding lawyers) applaud when an actor threatens the 'hostile du jour' with pain or mayhem unless he or she answers a few, pointed questions before the end of the episode. The writers craft the script using 'extreme' measures because they assume, as our own government has, that police-state tactics studied for defensive purposes can be 'reverse engineered' and morphed into cost-effective, 'offensive' measures. Though eminently understandable, such reactions are incredibly short-sighted and profoundly unethical."
According to Col. Steven M. Kleinman, a senior Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) official with first-hand experience with Soviet methods, "The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information." Another contributor, Dr. Pauletta Otis, of the US Marine Center for Advanced Operational Cultural Learning, put it bluntly: "[M]ost professionals believe that pain, coercion, and threats are counterproductive to the elicitation of good information."
The full report is available here.