The History Channel: The Dark Art of Interrogation

[Vaevictis]

... They called it "Monstering" which is as sinister a name as they could come up with. What they really meant was "sleep deprivation."

... The rules were, the interrogator could keep questioning a prisoner for as long as he could stay up, no swapping out...

A compound had been raided, and a poison found. Two suspicous kind of vats had been found... and they brought prisoners back to Baghram...

... and we decided this would be a good candidate to practice this kind of interrogation on...

... and they question the prisoner for 36 straight hours...

... it was just a battle between these two people to see who could stay up longer...

... at about the 23 hour mark, the interrogator came out and said to me "He thinks he sees lobsters on the wall." I said, "That's incredible! He must really be fatigued." He said, "Yeah, the problem is, I see them too."

Finally, the prisoner yields, and says the stuff is Ricin, which is a poison which is fairly devastating and fairly easy to brew...

We asked him some time after that, "Why did you cooperate? And he said, 'When I realized that this was the worst you were going to do, I realized I was probably on the wrong side.'"

Good documentary overall. I thought that the above section was pretty telling.

[Vaevictis]

Still watching.


When my unit first arrived, we had very strict rules; no stress positions, no sleep deprivation... by the time we left, we had relaxed those rules.

By the time the next unit arrived, that was their starting point. By the time they left, they had taken things further still.

And then when that unit redeployed to Iraq, they started there, and they continued to escalate, and they ended up being the unit that was sent on to Abu Grahib, and they were in charge of the facility when the abuses occured.


This was not a pyramid of high value targets that was being softened up for further interrogation.

... You had prison guards who were exposed to interrogation techniques who then felt the right to then use those techniques.

The goal of interrogation is to reduce the number of enemies we have out there, and if other nations see us using these brutal techniques, you're increasing the number of enemies we have out there.

... Abu Grahib is going to be a recruiting poster for Al-Qaeda for generations to come.

[Vaevictis]

The solution is, you ban the use of any kind of coersion or torture... but in certain circumstances where you have an individual in custody who has information that can save lives, you are faced as the interrogator with a moral dilemma.

You can obey the law and innocent people may die because of it, or you can take upon yourself the responsibility of breaking the law and thereby expose yourself to prosecution and punishment for breaking the law...

And I come and say, "These are the facts I had at my disposal, this is what I knew at the time, and this is what I felt necessary to do. and then I invoke the defense of necessity, and then the court decides if it was reasonable that I broke the law in order to avert this catastrophe... but it has to be that I broke the law, it can't be that there is some a priori license for me to abuse people for the sake of averting catastrophes."

You have to accept the consequences of your actions. If you are going to break your compact with the Army and with the American people, you had better have a good reason to do it.

It is important to place that responsibility on the shoulders of individual interrogators. If they choose to break the law and use these coersive techniques, they have to have a damned good reason, and the reason has to be strong enough that they feel that they can justify the action in order to prevent them losing their careers and being put in prison for their actions. I think it's the only way to control it, and I think it's the appropriate way to deal with the problem.

(that's basically been my argument all along -- parts are "academic" experts, parts are actual military interrogators)

[Vaevictis]

Finished. Final comment:


If you don't use these coersion techniques, what you have is a silent prisoner...

At the end of the day, there is a price for a silent prisoner, and we pay that price in blood.

[Tear Down This Wall]

Make 'em listen to 10 seconds of a Yoko Ono record. No one can keep silent through that.

http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/images/2003/10/30/1ae.yoko.picA.jpg

[Vaevictis]

Yeah, but a prisoner who has gone insane and can only muster totally incoherent babbling is useless.

[Tear Down This Wall]

Dadgum, V...the board must be on valium today. Usually, torture and U.S. and Iraq and all that is a pretty hot topic. :D

[Vaevictis]

I think you killed this thread. Nobody advocates forcing anyone to listen to Yoko Ono. Nobody.

It's just inhuman.

[stoopified]

You want someone to talk,tie 'em to a chair in GIA and force them to stare at that ungodly eye-piercing sea of neon orange.That would open me up.