Thread: How to Interrogate Terrorists

The Mongols got a real nasty and well deserved reputation. However, for the only time in all of human history can a man travel by donkey full of gold from Poland to China without getting robbed.

Fear can yield results if the prisoner is weak. It could also make the prisoner give 'info' which he thinks you want to hear.

Real Interrogation is much more sophisticated than that.

All the rough stuff that one speaks about is what they have learnt from the movies.

I personally won't allow any third degree since it ruins the prisoner (he learns what you want to know) for real interrogation.

Application of the third degree is an indication of frustration. And anyone who is frustrated is on the first step to failure.

As far as the British goes, even when they left India after many years of horrid subjugation of the native population, yet very few really criticised them with venom. Oh sure, they condemned the attrocities some Britishers committed (it take all types to make a race) , nobody relly hated them.

Much to learn from this nation of shopkeepers as Napoleon said of the British.

Watch them in Iraq. Slick customers but with a stiff upper lip.

I was tempted to write 'chest out, bums out' since we had a pucca British Indian joe as our instructor who was known so. He was all that fair play, gentlemen first and officers later and pip pip type.

Pink gin in the afternoon, a round of golf, a quick shower, dinner jacket and then shake a leg at night!

It's a lot easier to make someone like you once you've defeated them. Ex: Germany, Japan, and Italy.

I wonder.

Don't go by the govts. Ask the common man and remind them that you defeated them.

Then give your comment.

I base my comment on the fact that All men were born free. All men have self esteem. Defeat or being crushed is humiliation. I am yet to see anyone so shameless as to welocme humiliation and defeat.

Originally Posted by Ray

I wonder.

Don't go by the govts. Ask the common man and remind them that you defeated them.

Then give your comment.

I base my comment on the fact that All men were born free. All men have self esteem. Defeat or being crushed is humiliation. I am yet to see anyone so shameless as to welocme humiliation and defeat.

You don't have to remind them they have been defeated. You could give them a helping hand once they're been defeated and guide them along the correct path. I agree that you are going to win by shoving peoples faces in the dirt, but you haven't defeated an enemy if he still thinks he can beat you.

Originally Posted by Ray

Fear can yield results if the prisoner is weak. It could also make the prisoner give 'info' which he thinks you want to hear.

Real Interrogation is much more sophisticated than that.

All the rough stuff that one speaks about is what they have learnt from the movies.

If you read the article, you'll see that torture is not what is being proposed. Obviously if you put somebody under intolerable pain, they will tell you anything. So what good is it, but that is not what we're doing.

These people aren't going to respond to simple talk but no action. If they now how far you can go, why would they talk?

The interrogation debate first broke out on the frigid plains of Afghanistan. Marines and other special forces would dump planeloads of al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners into a ramshackle detention facility outside the Kandahar airport; waiting interrogators were then supposed to extract information to be fed immediately back into the battlefield—whether a particular mountain pass was booby-trapped, say, or where an arms cache lay. That “tactical” debriefing accomplished, the Kandahar interrogation crew would determine which prisoners were significant enough to be shipped on to the Guantánamo naval base in Cuba for high-level interrogation.

Army doctrine gives interrogators 16 “approaches” to induce prisoners of war to divulge critical information. Sporting names like “Pride and Ego Down” and “Fear Up Harsh,” these approaches aim to exploit a detainee’s self-love, allegiance to or resentment of comrades, or sense of futility. Applied in the right combination, they will work on nearly everyone, the intelligence soldiers had learned in their training.

But the Kandahar prisoners were not playing by the army rule book. They divulged nothing. “Prisoners overcame the [traditional] model almost effortlessly,” writes Chris Mackey in The Interrogators, his gripping account of his interrogation service in Afghanistan. The prisoners confounded their captors “not with clever cover stories but with simple refusal to cooperate. They offered lame stories, pretended not to remember even the most basic of details, and then waited for consequences that never really came.”
[...]
Even if a prisoner had not previously studied American detention policies before arriving at Kandahar, he soon figured them out. “It became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to have them sit there,” recalls interrogator Joe Martin (a pseudonym). “They realized: ‘The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they’ll draw lines on the floor showing us where to pray, we’ll get three meals a day with fresh fruit, do Jazzercise with the guards, . . . we can wait them out.’ ”

Even more challenging was that these detainees bore little resemblance to traditional prisoners of war. The army’s interrogation manual presumed adversaries who were essentially the mirror image of their captors, motivated by emotions that all soldiers share. A senior intelligence official who debriefed prisoners in the 1989 U.S. operation in Panama contrasts the battlefield then and now: “There were no martyrs down there, believe me,” he chuckles. “The Panamanian forces were more understandable people for us. Interrogation was pretty straightforward: ‘Love of Family’ [an army-manual approach, promising, say, contact with wife or children in exchange for cooperation] or, ‘Here’s how you get out of here as fast as you can.’ ”

“Love of family” often had little purchase among the terrorists, however—as did love of life. “The jihadists would tell you, ‘I’ve divorced this life, I don’t care about my family,’ ” recalls an interrogator at Guantánamo. “You couldn’t shame them.” The fierce hatred that the captives bore their captors heightened their resistance. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan reported in January 2002 that prisoners in Kandahar would “shout epithets at their captors, including threats against the female relatives of the soldiers guarding them, knee marines in the groin, and say that they will escape and kill ‘more Americans and Jews.’ ” Such animosity continued in Guantánamo.

We still need the information. So what do we do?

Joe Martin—a crack interrogator who discovered that a top al-Qaida leader, whom Pakistan claimed to have in custody, was still at large and directing the Afghani resistance—explains the psychological effect of stress: “Let’s say a detainee comes into the interrogation booth and he’s had resistance training. He knows that I’m completely handcuffed and that I can’t do anything to him. If I throw a temper tantrum, lift him onto his knees, and walk out, you can feel his uncertainty level rise dramatically. He’s been told: ‘They won’t physically touch you,’ and now you have. The point is not to beat him up but to introduce the reality into his mind that he doesn’t know where your limit is.” Grabbing someone by the top of the collar has had a more profound effect on the outcome of questioning than any actual torture could have, Martin maintains. “The guy knows: You just broke your own rules, and that’s scary. He might demand to talk to my supervisor. I’ll respond: ‘There are no supervisors here,’ and give him a maniacal smile.”
[...]
The soldiers used stress techniques to reinforce the traditional psychological approaches. Jeff (a pseudonym), an interrogator in Afghanistan, had been assigned a cocky English Muslim, who justified the 9/11 attacks because women had been working in the World Trade Center. The British citizen deflected all further questioning. Jeff questioned him for a day and a half, without letting him sleep and playing on his religious loyalties. “I broke him on his belief in Islam,” Jeff recounts. “He realized he had messed up, because his Muslim brothers and sisters were also in the building.” The Brit broke down and cried, then disclosed the mission that al-Qaida had put him on before capture. But once the prisoner was allowed to sleep for six hours, he again “clammed up.”
[...]
After Rumsfeld cleared the 24 methods, interrogators approached Kahtani once again. They relied almost exclusively on isolation and lengthy interrogations. They also used some “psy-ops” (psychological operations). Ten or so interrogators would gather and sing the Rolling Stones’ “Time Is on My Side” outside Kahtani’s cell. Sometimes they would play a recording of “Enter Sandman” by the heavy-metal group Metallica, which brought Kahtani to tears, because he thought (not implausibly) he was hearing the sound of Satan.

Finally, at 4 am—after an 18-hour, occasionally loud, interrogation, during which Kahtani head-butted his interrogators—he started giving up information, convinced that he was being sold out by his buddies. The entire process had been conducted under the watchful eyes of a medic, a psychiatrist, and lawyers, to make sure that no harm was done. Kahtani provided detailed information on his meetings with Usama bin Ladin, on Jose Padilla and Richard Reid, and on Adnan El Shukrijumah, one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists, believed to be wandering between South and North America.

These methods work. It would be unwise not to use them to save the lives of the innocent.

There are subtle ways to tell you call the shots.

Though my example would not be nice, but when you train a dog, if you beat it with a stick all the time, it won't get trained.

However, if you give a biscuit every time it does a correct trick, it will know what is to be done to a command!

Originally Posted by dave angel

we found this in pretty much every counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism campaign we (the brits) fought in, if you treat people badly, you look bad. doesn't matter what they did, you're the one trying make friends and influence people, you have to look good and play by the rules.

These torture techniques were not used against own people (i.e Kashmiri militants), but against the Afghani and Pakistani terrorists. For own chaps a visit from his kids or wife was motivation enough for him to be thankfull to be alive, and he would spill the beans.

Originally Posted by Ray

There are subtle ways to tell you call the shots.

Though my example would not be nice, but when you train a dog, if you beat it with a stick all the time, it won't get trained.

However, if you give a biscuit every time it does a correct trick, it will know what is to be done to a command!

Your approach is also being utilized.

Originally Posted by Officer of Engineers

The Mongols got a real nasty and well deserved reputation. However, for the only time in all of human history can a man travel by donkey full of gold from Poland to China without getting robbed.

But his bag will be considerably lighter at the end, after paying, er umm, "tolls" and "protection fees".

Originally Posted by Blademaster

But his bag will be considerably lighter at the end, after paying, er umm, "tolls" and "protection fees".

I can already tell you're going to be a very good lawyer.