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Effective interrogation without torture 101
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Effective interrogation without torture 101 from retired Army Colonel Stuart Herrington
Hugh Hewitt Show ^ | 2/13/07 | Colonel Stuart Herrington / Hugh
HH: And Colonel, how many interrogations have you conducted?
SH: I couldn’t begin to count, but between my service in Vietnam, my interrogation centers that I ran in Panama, another one in Desert Storm, and my current job where I do a lot of interrogation and debriefing, it’s in the thousands.
HH: And how did they do that?
SH: Well, there became a notion of what, and I think part of it was because of official policy emanating from the Department of Defense, and then part of it was just that plus osmosis plus the influence of television and the overall pop culture, that interrogators are inquisitors, and that the best way to get information out of people is to “take off the gloves.” And that’s the wrong turn that we took, and it’s a very serious wrong turn, because for a whole variety of reasons, torture and brutality in interrogations is counterproductive.
HH: Does the United States military torture people?
SH: Well, I think if you ask the question has it happened, or have things taken place that are wrong, and that went well over the line, I think the answer is yes, regrettably. Was it a controlled policy, i.e. that what they were doing was something that was sanctioned from on high, my own personal opinion is that some of it was, especially the things that the task force was doing in Iraq with respect to the top fifty of Saddam’s henchmen that they caught, and al Qaeda types. And in some cases, it was just stupid young people with bad leadership and bad skills essentially behaving in an extremely counterproductive and undisciplined fashion, and that’s more what applies to Abu Ghraib.
HH: Now specificity matters a lot when we’re talking about terms like this, so I’d like to run down some of the “interrogation techniques” that people have debated, people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and get your opinions on them.
SH: Okay.
HH: Prolonged periods of standing.
SH: Generally speaking, stupid, as are virtually all techniques that involve making a person, you know, trying to get information from a person by making the person physically in a hurt.
HH: Do you consider that, as a professional, torture?
SH: No, I don’t think that’s torture. I don’t think that’s torture, but I think it’s stupid.
HH: How about sleep deprivation?
SH: I never did it, never had to do it. I realize that it’s in the “repertoire” of a lot of people who fancy themselves interrogators in that it breaks down the defenses, the physical and they hope the psychological defenses of a subject. But again, I never had to resort to that stuff in Vietnam, Panama or the Desert.
SH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, when a guy is captured, he’s stressed, he is frightened, and he’s probably expecting to be mistreated, because in most societies in the world, that’s the way it works. Disarming him psychologically, by treating him in a manner the opposite of what he expects, extending decent, humane treatment to him, showing concern for himself, his needs, being nimble in assessing and evaluating the person, and recognizing that getting information from someone is developmental, i.e. you won’t get information from someone, generally speaking, just by saying okay, I’m the captor, you’re the prisoner, tell me what you know. You earn it. I like to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed probably didn’t give up a lot of the information that he gave up because somebody started water boarding him and beating him up. Instead, they used a very clever approach, and played to his ego and his psychological need to be recognized as the architect of 9/11, and the guy talked. In all of the successful interrogation projects that I’ve ever had anything to do with, extending fundamentally decent treatment to the detainees, we even used to call them guests. And you know, the guards would salute a prisoner if he was an officer, and we give them good food, and we would tell them it was unconditional, regardless of whether they chose to talk with us or not. And that type of an approach has a very high batting average.
HH: Is it effective? Is water boarding effective?
SH: Boy, you know what? I can’t tell you that. I’ve never practiced it. I consider it to be abhorrent, a practice that shouldn’t be practiced by any professional interrogator, and you’re going to have to ask someone other than me. But I, generally speaking, know from experience that when you levy brutality against a person in order to get that person to talk, even if the person hasn’t got anything to say, or doesn’t know what it is that you want, they’ll come up with something to say just to get you to quit doing it.
SH: I’d like to add something here……to your e-mailer who talked about the seeming idealism of what I’ve said.Listeners shouldn’t get the impression that this is one giant love fest, and that you set up this resort facility and bring these people in, and you know, treat them unconditionally well for nothing. It’s a very cleverly constructed approach to essentially deal with people in a fashion that enables you to evaluate and assess them, and then go for the weak points. It could be, for example, an Iraqi general who’s captured, and he’s humiliated, and he’s a very hard core Saddamist, and you might just spend some time showing him photographs of the scope of the catastrophe that Saddam’s 42 divisions just met, and direct his anger not at the United States or the coalition, but at Saddam……at which point in time he starts to talk. So there’s a lot of very, very specialized effort to turn a person by showing the person information that causes the person’s frustrations and anxieties and anger to be directed against his leader, his country, instead of against the interrogator or the capturing powers.
SH: You know, I’ve also heard about that book, and I’ve heard that the techniques of the then-MGB were surprisingly psychological versus brutal. It doesn’t surprise me, though. All professional interrogation organizations have somebody who sees the best way to do it. The Germans who interrogated our pilots at Oberursel, Germany, during World War II, had an interrogator named Hans Scharf who treated them so well that even though they all spilled their guts, he was a member of their club after World War II, came to the States, became a citizen, and a beloved member of their veteran’s association.
Hugh Hewitt Show ^ | 2/13/07 | Colonel Stuart Herrington / Hugh
HH: And Colonel, how many interrogations have you conducted?
SH: I couldn’t begin to count, but between my service in Vietnam, my interrogation centers that I ran in Panama, another one in Desert Storm, and my current job where I do a lot of interrogation and debriefing, it’s in the thousands.
HH: And how did they do that?
SH: Well, there became a notion of what, and I think part of it was because of official policy emanating from the Department of Defense, and then part of it was just that plus osmosis plus the influence of television and the overall pop culture, that interrogators are inquisitors, and that the best way to get information out of people is to “take off the gloves.” And that’s the wrong turn that we took, and it’s a very serious wrong turn, because for a whole variety of reasons, torture and brutality in interrogations is counterproductive.
HH: Does the United States military torture people?
SH: Well, I think if you ask the question has it happened, or have things taken place that are wrong, and that went well over the line, I think the answer is yes, regrettably. Was it a controlled policy, i.e. that what they were doing was something that was sanctioned from on high, my own personal opinion is that some of it was, especially the things that the task force was doing in Iraq with respect to the top fifty of Saddam’s henchmen that they caught, and al Qaeda types. And in some cases, it was just stupid young people with bad leadership and bad skills essentially behaving in an extremely counterproductive and undisciplined fashion, and that’s more what applies to Abu Ghraib.
HH: Now specificity matters a lot when we’re talking about terms like this, so I’d like to run down some of the “interrogation techniques” that people have debated, people who don’t know what they’re talking about, and get your opinions on them.
SH: Okay.
HH: Prolonged periods of standing.
SH: Generally speaking, stupid, as are virtually all techniques that involve making a person, you know, trying to get information from a person by making the person physically in a hurt.
HH: Do you consider that, as a professional, torture?
SH: No, I don’t think that’s torture. I don’t think that’s torture, but I think it’s stupid.
HH: How about sleep deprivation?
SH: I never did it, never had to do it. I realize that it’s in the “repertoire” of a lot of people who fancy themselves interrogators in that it breaks down the defenses, the physical and they hope the psychological defenses of a subject. But again, I never had to resort to that stuff in Vietnam, Panama or the Desert.
SH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, when a guy is captured, he’s stressed, he is frightened, and he’s probably expecting to be mistreated, because in most societies in the world, that’s the way it works. Disarming him psychologically, by treating him in a manner the opposite of what he expects, extending decent, humane treatment to him, showing concern for himself, his needs, being nimble in assessing and evaluating the person, and recognizing that getting information from someone is developmental, i.e. you won’t get information from someone, generally speaking, just by saying okay, I’m the captor, you’re the prisoner, tell me what you know. You earn it. I like to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed probably didn’t give up a lot of the information that he gave up because somebody started water boarding him and beating him up. Instead, they used a very clever approach, and played to his ego and his psychological need to be recognized as the architect of 9/11, and the guy talked. In all of the successful interrogation projects that I’ve ever had anything to do with, extending fundamentally decent treatment to the detainees, we even used to call them guests. And you know, the guards would salute a prisoner if he was an officer, and we give them good food, and we would tell them it was unconditional, regardless of whether they chose to talk with us or not. And that type of an approach has a very high batting average.
HH: Is it effective? Is water boarding effective?
SH: Boy, you know what? I can’t tell you that. I’ve never practiced it. I consider it to be abhorrent, a practice that shouldn’t be practiced by any professional interrogator, and you’re going to have to ask someone other than me. But I, generally speaking, know from experience that when you levy brutality against a person in order to get that person to talk, even if the person hasn’t got anything to say, or doesn’t know what it is that you want, they’ll come up with something to say just to get you to quit doing it.
SH: I’d like to add something here……to your e-mailer who talked about the seeming idealism of what I’ve said.Listeners shouldn’t get the impression that this is one giant love fest, and that you set up this resort facility and bring these people in, and you know, treat them unconditionally well for nothing. It’s a very cleverly constructed approach to essentially deal with people in a fashion that enables you to evaluate and assess them, and then go for the weak points. It could be, for example, an Iraqi general who’s captured, and he’s humiliated, and he’s a very hard core Saddamist, and you might just spend some time showing him photographs of the scope of the catastrophe that Saddam’s 42 divisions just met, and direct his anger not at the United States or the coalition, but at Saddam……at which point in time he starts to talk. So there’s a lot of very, very specialized effort to turn a person by showing the person information that causes the person’s frustrations and anxieties and anger to be directed against his leader, his country, instead of against the interrogator or the capturing powers.
SH: You know, I’ve also heard about that book, and I’ve heard that the techniques of the then-MGB were surprisingly psychological versus brutal. It doesn’t surprise me, though. All professional interrogation organizations have somebody who sees the best way to do it. The Germans who interrogated our pilots at Oberursel, Germany, during World War II, had an interrogator named Hans Scharf who treated them so well that even though they all spilled their guts, he was a member of their club after World War II, came to the States, became a citizen, and a beloved member of their veteran’s association.
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