Military Interrogators Research Articles

Repeated interrogations of sources of human intelligence using the Scharff technique

ABSTRACT Human Intelligence (HUMINT) sources may be questioned multiple times. However, criminal and military interrogation research focuses on single-instance interrogations. The current study employed a role-playing paradigm to examine the effect of interrogation approach on various elicitation-relevant outcomes and information gain across repeated questioning sessions using a direct approach and the Scharff Technique. In the study scenario, participants (N = 68) were given information on an extremist group planning a bombing, were given an information management dilemma, and were subsequently questioned. Participants in the Scharff Technique condition were questioned using the Scharff Technique at Time 1 and direct questioning at Time 2. Direct Approach condition participants received direct questioning at both times. All participants provided a greater information contribution at Time 2 compared to Time 1, regardless of assigned condition. Compared to participants in the Direct Approach condition, participants in the Scharff Technique condition perceived Time 1 interrogators as more knowledgeable and Time 2 interrogators as less knowledgeable. This suggests a backfire effect when switching from the Scharff technique to direct questioning. Interrogators should carefully consider the decision to employ the Scharff technique if it may be followed up with more traditional questioning approaches.

Tracing the career arc of Joost A. M. Meerloo: Prominence, fading, and premonitions of menticide

This article traces the career arc of Dutch psychoanalyst Joost A. M. Meerloo by examining his biography and his psychology of interrogation and confession. His life story, particularly his experiences during the German occupation of the Netherlands and his escape to England during World War II, shaped his views on these issues, as well as his rise to prominence as an expert on these topics in the United States. His psychoanalytic perspectives on interrogation and confession, including false confession, reflected the zeitgeist of the First Wave of Cold War interrogation tactics and related scholarship. His career as a scholar of interrogation faded with the study of distinct interrogation tactics used by communists during the Korean War, the emergence of experimental social psychology, and a growing cohort of scholars who rejected his psychoanalytic views in favor of more contemporary approaches. For these reasons, his work remains undervalued, increasing the risks that today’s scholars will fail to recognize his larger contributions and his warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations. The article reviews the rise and fall of the career of Joost A. M. Meerloo as a scholar of Cold War interrogation, including his contributions and his unheeded warnings about vulnerability and psychologists’ roles in military interrogations.

Through the wringer: Mass interrogation and United States air force targeting intelligence in the early cold war

Mass interrogation systems are recurrent features of US military action. They are technopolitical apparatuses, disclosing their own spatial practices, choreographic repertoires, persistent technical features, and political effects. They are often large-scale, sophisticated arrangements of expertise, technologies, and scriptural processes. Their design features therefore matter. This paper examines how, in the early cold war, mass interrogation was the chief means by which geographical knowledge of the communist world was gathered by the US Air Force. Project Wringer was one of the largest systematic interrogation programmes undertaken during this period, involving over 300 000 subjects, mostly German and Japanese ex-servicemen recently returned from the Soviet Union. Before the advent of systematic aerial reconnaissance, an assemblage of intelligence and interrogation instruments, agencies, and rationalities were was brought together, drawing in human subjects, compiling their knowledge, testimonies, and memories, transforming them into abstract intelligence for broader circulation. It seemed to permit sight in the cold war ‘darkness’ and was critical to production of the Bombing Encyclopedia, an enormous aggregation of industrial, economic, and urban geography. The paper pulls this apparatus apart, focusing on its informational settings and productivist rationalities. By economically recording, disarticulating, layering, and recombining many oral accounts, interrogation materials were pushed through a ‘wringer’ that scrubbed them of subjectivity. Blurry remembered responses became solid, mobile, paper products with objective, cartographic power, a key abstractive process in the development of numerical target codes. The Project Wringer-Bombing Encyclopedia system signals that the spatialising function of military interrogation has been underexamined.

From the Editor

From the Editor Brian Lennon We imagined this issue within a series titled “Thinking with the Sciences.” Such phrasing suggests a scarcity best understood as artificial—meaning not illusory, but manufactured. It demands polyliteracy: not the same as polyglottery, but no less worthy. It also imagines reconciliation. This is more troublesome, if we also accept that the party tasked with reconciliation isn’t the party who produced the schism. And can we call it reconciliation when one party is too merely busy (in Heidegger’s sense) to notice? I began asking myself: Who needs to think with whom? Is it possible to do any thinking, let alone thinking-with, when one party is a source of such unrelenting noise? What dialogue the humanities do have with the sciences, at least in the United States (but very unlikely only there), is for the most part an exchange of shouts with whispers. I refer to the shouting about “STEM” that we hear from edupreneurial CEOs and technocrats of all stripes—which most of us can’t bring ourselves to interrupt, in any way that matters, and over which the furtive objections of a few teachers and scholars of other acronyms can barely be heard. Don’t think for a moment that professional thinkers are immune to terror. The way some of us babble about present history, one might think the humanities disciplines are on the verge of extinction because of our truculence, rather than our timidity. Neither (extinction, truculence) is true. But we are either desperately seeking science, or berating each other for not seeking science desperately enough. There’s no time left for finding science, for examining science, much less evaluating science. Not to speak of accomplishing science! As worthy a goal as believing in God, if done with good reason, and freely. This is a recent development, driven by economics. Like anything else, it ends. It has already begun ending. STEM faculty may not have been its source, but they have been its beneficiaries, and most were too busy to consider the costs (which far exceed STEM’s own, differently configured labor precarities). As I write this, the American Psychological Association has formally resolved to bar its members from participating in military interrogations. Too late! Meanwhile, some of the University of Illinois’s dirtiest laundry is being aired. It includes an email written by a physicist who sees the “two cultures on campus” as divided by humanities faculty who maintain the bizarre belief that “the campus can operate almost completely as a democracy.”1 I could go on, but I won’t go on. I’ve come to read the work in this issue not as work that obeys an injunction to think with the sciences, on pain of some consequence or other, but as work by scholars capable of such thought, who serve us better by thinking about the sciences as well—or even against them, instead. Footnotes 1. See “Want to Be My Provost or Chancellor? Quote a Poem I Don’t Already Know by Heart,” The Good Enough Professor (blog), August 8, 2015, http://goodenoughprofessor.blogspot.com/2015/08/when-i-first-started-blogging-about.html. Copyright © 2015 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Consequences Today of the United States' Brutal Post-9/11 Interrogation Techniques

Commentators and researchers have written on the harsh and unlawful tactics that military interrogators employed to obtain actionable intelligence from suspected terrorists following the attacks on September 11, 2001. However, no one has painted the picture of these interrogations through the words of identified and named interrogators. This article does that, by focusing on the words and unique stories of five interrogators. The article then explores the unintended consequences that are still with us today because of the military's enhanced interrogation techniques. Much of the information in this article is not found to this detail anywhere else in the literature, even after the publication of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in December 2014.One interrogator, known as the King of Torture, worked for the Department of Defense (DoD) in Bagram, Afghanistan in 2002. A second also worked for the DoD in Bagram, and was the interrogator for Dilawar, one of the two Afghans who died in the Bagram detention center from brutal treatment and torture. Two other interrogators were military interrogators in Guantanamo (one, a woman, holds a Ph.D from Yale). The fifth was an interrogator for the FBI. In speaking to the Witness to Guantanamo project, these four men and one woman tell a remarkable story of the evolution of interrogations beginning after the attacks on September 11, 2001 through 2003.Tensions during this time period existed between experienced federal law enforcement agents, who focused on a rapport-based method to obtain admissible evidence, and the DoD leadership, whose focus was on actionable intelligence. The DoD leadership instructed young and inexperienced military soldiers and reservists to engage in enhanced interrogation techniques comparable to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and torture. Although many of the military interrogators did not have the proper training to interrogate alleged terrorist prisoners, they were given wide latitude, and were only limited by their imagination. Their often untested and helter-skelter interrogation techniques led to the unintended consequences set out in this article.In a nutshell, the article reviews the military's brutal interrogation techniques, that included torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) and compares and contrasts the tactics to the rapport building interrogation techniques promoted and conducted by law enforcement. It then outlines the unintended consequences that are with us today as a result of the military's brutal treatment committed more than a decade ago. The article closes with suggestions on how the U.S. can again be seen by many as the beacon of human rights and the rule of law.The Witness to Guantanamo project has filmed interviews with 132 people, including 49 former detainees, who have lived or worked at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The author is the founder and director of the Witness to Guantanamo project.

Empire’s Babel: US Military Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War

The US military interrogation room has often been the site of controversy, but it has seldom been the object of scrutiny. Faced with photos from Abu Ghraib and reports from Gitmo, the public has primarily honed its outrage on the practice of torture within these interrogation rooms. While the debate about torture escalated over the White House paper trail that provided a legal framework for coercive techniques, the interrogation room itself remained relatively untouched. It was the excessive behavior within the interrogation room that received all the attention. I want to argue that the interrogation room has, in fact, played a pivotal—if little noticed—role in the mainstream discourse of war, law, and violence. Both critics and defenders of torture practices have relied upon a surprisingly similar assumption: that the interrogation room itself can be a rational space for the production of information. For liberal critics, torture is a behavior that exceeds the rational—and thus, moral—bounds of the interrogation room. It is an argument that relies upon the idealized potential of the US military interrogation room as a site of regulated and willing exchange between the interrogator and the interrogated prisoner. In other words, the idea that the interrogation room can be a site for an encounter that is objective, rational, and compassionate in producing information provides the moral horizon for much of the current debate over the use of torture during interrogation. The supporters of coercive techniques frame their arguments along much the same lines, either casting torture techniques as an extension of the objective interrogation process or bracketing the regulated interrogation room as a sort of liberal privilege, one that must be denied to undeserving “enemy combatants” who have already placed themselves outside the bounds of international humanitarian law. For critics and supporters alike, information itself is an unquestioned, self-evident good, and it is a product whose quality reflects

Human Rights Violations and Standard 1.02: Intersections with Human Rights Law and Applications in Juvenile Capital Cases

Intense controversy regarding the role of psychologists in military and national security interrogations led to amendment in 2010 of Standard 1.02 (Conflicts Between Ethics and Law, Regulations or ...

The Baha Mousa Tragedy: British Army Detention and Interrogation from Iraq to Afghanistan

Research Highlights and Abstract Describes the conduct and findings of a public inquiry into the death of an Iraqi civilian in British Army custody in 2003. Assesses the development of British military detention and interrogation policy in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars since 2003. Argues that serious failings in policy, doctrine and training led to the death of Baha Mousa in 2003. Finds that judicial intervention has been necessary to push reform and ensure military compliance with international law. Baha Mousa died in September 2003 in British Army custody in Basra. A public inquiry reported in September 2011, and allows for the first assessment of British military detention and interrogation policy in the War on Terror. This article explains the Inquiry's remit and findings, showing how the failure to institutionalise a ban on interrogation methods in 1972 led to them re-appearing in 2003. Poor policy, doctrine and training meant soldiers were ill prepared for dealing with detainees when Iraq was invaded in 2003. The article assesses the army's efforts to learn from the mistakes of Iraq, including reforms to policy, doctrine and training on interrogation and detention. The article's final part assesses the limitations to these reforms in practice in Afghanistan, arguing that there are still important areas demanding improvement to prevent future abuses.

Learning From History: An Interview With Robert Jay Lifton

On April 10, 2008, Rachael Peltz conducted an interview with psycho-historian, psychiatrist, and political activist Robert Jay Lifton. Dr. Lifton is best known for his creative and profound studies of both the extreme and ordinary psychological effects of the rapid, destabilizing, the sometimes catastrophic social changes of our times—including Chinese thought reform, the Nazi concentration camps, the atomic bombing of Japan, Japanese cult groups, the Vietnam War, and recently, the war in Iraq. All of these offer invaluable conceptual tools for clinicians to approach the inner effects of traumatic historical events in everyday life as well as in those who have suffered extraordinary duress. Here, Lifton discusses the positions of the American Psychological Association regarding the role of psychologists in military interrogations and detention sites. The interview also offers a strong introduction to many of his specific concepts, including “atrocity-producing situations,” “the Protean self,” “symbolic immortality,” and many others. Taken together, these offer an exemplary model to understand the interweaving of history and the psyche.

Military interrogation: What did we learn?

This concluding statement reflects on the November 2006 meeting of four senior military interrogators and seven research psychologists. This article discusses (a) the extent to which the psychologists provide analyses that further the interrogators' goal of convincing authorities that abusive interrogation must cease; and (b) a series of implications for the field of psychology as well as its theory, research, and practice.

Psychologists and military interrogators rethink the psychology of torture.

Torture interrogation does not yield reliable information. The popular belief that “torture works” conflicts with effective non-abusive methodologies of interrogation and with fundamental tenets of psychology. These were the conclusions reached at a meeting of recently retired, senior U.S. Army interrogators and research psychologists who met to rethink the psychology of torture. This article introduces the military interrogators, the psychologists, and the themes explored. In the process, this article explains why competent interrogators do not require a definition of torture, discredits the “ticking bomb scenario,” and outlines the studies that comprise the meeting report, Torture is for Amateurs.

Endorsement by the seminar military interrogators.

The issue of torture as an interrogation tool is a hot-button topic, from barrooms to the highest seats of power in the U.S. government. What has largely been missing from the discussion is the voi...

Erroneous assumptions: Popular belief in the effectiveness of torture interrogation.

People generally believe that torture is effective despite strong counterclaims by experienced military interrogators and intelligence experts. This article challenges us to reexamine some of our basic assumptions about torture by presenting four psychological factors—primarily errors and biases in human judgment—that help account for this mistaken popular belief.

Toward a social psychology of professional military interrogation.

The essence of successful interrogation is the relationship between interrogator and source. This relationship does not need to be friendly, but it does need to provide something of value for both interrogator and source. This article reviews elements of theory and research in social psychology that can illuminate the nature of the exchange, including the human costs to the interrogator in developing and using an intense human connection.

Physician Involvement in Hostile Interrogations

Military conflicts inevitably lead to the detention and interrogation of adversaries (or perceived adversaries), and American military action in Afghanistan and Iraq has resulted in the protracted and scrutinized detention and interrogation of varied personnel. Detention and interrogation, in turn, inevitably lead to moral and legal questions, and these questions have been especially poignant during and following the aforementioned campaigns. Controversially, the Bush administration did not afford Geneva Convention protections to so-called enemy combatants; these protections would have increased the standard of care (e.g., legally, medically) afforded to detainees and would have limited the interrogation options available to military personnel. Also controversially, reports have alleged that military interrogators have practiced “stress and duress” tactics that include “sleep management” (i.e., sleep deprivation), “dietary manipulation” (i.e., food withholding), “environmental manipulation” (e.g., exposure to extreme temperatures, presence of dogs), forced maintenance of uncomfortable positions for extended periods of time, isolation (sometimes for longer than 30 days), hooding, and so forth.1 Whether these tactics are tantamount to torture is debatable. They are certainly unpleasant but, in my view, fall short of archetypical instances of torture. Although the invocation of “torture” might seem merely semantic, it has substantial rhetorical force that has been often been carelessly and uncritically employed. For this reason, I propose to label interrogations that incorporate these tactics as hostile (which they clearly are) as opposed to torturous (which they arguably are not).2 To be sure, many of the arguments of this paper are as applicable to torture as they are to hostile interrogations. However, it is important to preserve the distinction so as to reflect current allegations. Before turning to a moral evaluation of physician involvement in hostile interrogations, it might be useful to briefly consider the morality of the interrogations themselves. If the interrogations are immoral, then physician contributions to their efficacy are presumably immoral a fortiori.3 So, if someone wanted to defend the morality of physician involvement in these interro-

APA Closer on Policy for Military Interrogations

APA Closer on Policy for Military Interrogations

Medical Ethics and the Detainees At Guantanamo Bay

Medical Ethics and the Detainees At Guantanamo Bay

Doctors and Interrogators at Guantanamo Bay

Dr. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan Marks write that mounting evidence from many sources, including Pentagon documents, indicates that military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay have used aggressive counter-resistance measures in systematic fashion to pressure detainees to cooperate.

Plasma neuropeptide-Y concentrations in humans exposed to military survival training

Background: Neuropeptide-Y (NPY) is present in extensive neuronal systems of the brain and is present in high concentrations in cell bodies and terminals in the amygdala. Preclinical studies have shown that injections of NPY into the central nucleus of the amygdala function as a central anxiolytic and buffer against the effects of stress. The objective of this study was to assess plasma NPY immunoreactivity in healthy soldiers participating in high intensity military training at the U.S. Army survival school. The Army survival school provides a means of observing individuals under high levels of physical, environmental, and psychological stress, and consequently is considered a reasonable analogue to stress incurred as a result of war or other catastrophic experiences. Methods: Plasma levels of NPY were assessed at baseline (prior to initiation of training), and 24 hours after the conclusion of survival training in 49 subjects, and at baseline and during the Prisoner of War (P.O.W.) experience (immediately after exposure to a military interrogation) in 21 additional subjects. Results: Plasma NPY levels were significantly increased compared to baseline following interrogations and were significantly higher in Special Forces soldiers, compared to non-Special Forces soldiers. NPY elicited by interrogation stress was significantly correlated to the subjects’ behavior during interrogations and tended to be negatively correlated to symptoms of reported dissociation. Twenty-four hours after the conclusion of survival training, NPY had returned to baseline in Special Forces soldiers, but remained significantly lower than baseline values in non–Special Forces soldiers. NPY was positively correlated with both cortisol and behavioral performance under stress. NPY was negatively related to psychological symptoms of dissociation. Conclusions: These results provide evidence that uncontrollable stress significantly increases plasma NPY in humans, and when extended, produces a significant depletion of plasma NPY. Stress-induced alterations of plasma NPY were significantly different in Special Forces soldiers compared to non–Special Forces soldiers. These data support the idea that NPY may be involved in the enhanced stress resilience seen in humans.

Mexican-Guatemalan Imbroglio: Fishery Rights and National Honor

At seven o'clock on the morning of December 31,1958, President Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes of Guatemala ordered his Air Force to bombard and sink vessels manned by Mexican nationals fishing clandestinely in his country's territorial waters. Simultaneously, his message was transmitted to Mexican and United States authorities in Guatemala. Ninety minutes later, after warning the fishermen through loudspeakers to proceed to the Guatemalan port of Champerico — announcements which brought only grimaces, lewd gestures, and attempted escape — the pilots strafed the flagless fishing boats, forcing one aground and two, the Elizabeth and the San Diego, to Champerico. Although the remainder of the fishing fleet was escorted by the Mexican Coast Guard to the Oaxacan port of Salina Cruz, seventeen casualties — three dead and fourteen wounded — resulted from the incident. While some of the injured Mexicans were hospitalized, ten of the survivors captured by Guatemalan authorities were incarcerated and subjected to military interrogation. Another of the progressively increasing number of inter-American fishing disputes was inexorably under way.