Nice overview of better-than-waterboarding approaches

FEATURE: "How To Make Terrorists Talk," by Bobby Ghosh, Time (still an actual news magazine with actual reporting, can you believe it?), 8 June 2009.

Just like in the real world, the soft-kill of connecting beats the hard-kill of kinetics.

Beat the shit out of somebody and you just get more resistance.

But make the target see you as human beings, and he'll start talking instead of lecturing, as one American interrogator put it.

My favorite bit: the diabetic given sugarless cookies then caves in and spills all manner of beans.

Yes, we can all adhere to the holy grail scenario of the ticking nuke in Times Square, but for the other 99.999999999999999999% of reality, we can do better.

You know how the Saudis prefer to do it? They bring in the mothers--no kinetics required.

Comments

[Mark Fragale]

Tom,

Good Cop / Bad Cop. It still works. Been talking to bad guys for almost 20 years. "Kill 'em with kindness" was the first lesson I learned about interview and interrogation.Waterboarding is torture. Ok. Great . Fine. Peachy. If it works and its only used when NOTHING else works and the information required from the bad guy is critical then use it. Sparingly and with great circumspection.Any confession obtained under the laws of the US (Miranda, 4th Amendment, etc) is almost always questioned in court and is said to be given under duress. When you bring your in custody video of said interview and confession showing the bad guy eating pizza and being treated politely, its amazing how fast the other side wants to deal.

Or we could give the tough ones over to my wife....she worked child sex crimes for six + years w/ a very high confession rate. All w/o waterboarding!

[dan Hare]

With the media attention on waterboarding as an 'enhanced tool', I got the feeling it was done frequently and commonly. Then to find out it was on only 3 subjects (although continuously), is the criticism fair to Bush/Cheney?

I think the intel should be declassified to give some balance and perspective to the debate.

However, it was a great story for ad revenues for the media.The sensationalism got lots of attention.

[Jimmy J.]

Anyone who has been through Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) School has been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques up to and including waterboarding. If these techniques are torture, then we've been torturing our aircrews for the last 46 years.

Anyone who has a strong survival instinct (and that's most of us) can be cracked with proper application of enhanced interrogation techniques. That said, there are some humans who will die rather than give up information to the enemy. (No survival instinct or just fundamental commitment? I don't know.) Good interrogators have many tricks in their bag and usually know within a short time what type individual they're dealing with. With the luxury of time (no ticking bomb), good cop/bad cop and many other psychological approaches can produce superior results. In the case of interrogations of illegal combatants for military intelligence, rules of evidence are not a big factor. These guys are illegal combatants not criminals with the rights of citizens. They can be legally held until the cessation of hostilities. Our approach to this matter has been over legalized and over hyped. The desire of a few anti-Bush zealots to criminalize policy decisions is a big mistake. If they had issues with Bush's policies they should have drawn up articles of impeachment. That is where we deal with over reaching by the Executive, not in criminal courts. Why will they not charge all those still living Presidents (Carter, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton) that allowed the "torture" of our military aircrews all these years?

[Louis Heberlein]

The real story, strategy and consequences are more likely to emerge in a future TV show, but we may have to pay for extra channel.

[hof1991]

Well, noting that someone committed war crimes is a valid criticism. War crimes don't have a statute of limitations. Waterboarding is a new term for what used to be called water torture. The US just sent a WWII prison guard back to Europe for trial. This is not something to be decided by the next mid-term.