What do you do instead?

[nancylebov]

Over at The Teeming Brain, I was starting to reply to a post which was anti-torture, but had the unhappy question: "What do you do instead?" when I realized that I'd seen general descriptions of no-torture careful interrogation by professionials like pecunium, but I didn't have a clear idea of the method myself, and I couldn't find a good link for it either.

Any recommendations?

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I can't point you to any sources but I think it's a bit of a non question. Police interrogate thousands of criminal suspects every day. Intelligence officers are trained to interrogate POWs who have full Geneva protection. I don't need to know how to interrogate without torture to know that it can be and is done every day by the competent professionals. I don't need to be able to tell you exactly how to drive a bus to know that driving it off a cliff is not appropriate.

[redbird]

If "ask your local police department for advice" isn't sufficient, there's been some good discussion on Making Light, including by James MacDonald and at least one poster (whose name escapes me at the instant, alas) who is in fact a U.S. military officer who does this stuff professionally and has talked about what methods work.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Staff Sergeant Terry Karney. I second redbird's recommendation of his lucid discussions.

(it is unfortunate that "Making Light's" feature for "show all postings by this author" has stopped working. One can get similar answers by Googling on Terry's name, keywords such as "interrogation", and the string "makinglight.")

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

As a piece of trivia, SSG Karney is me.

TK

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Ah. I had not realized you had a Livejournal account. I have enjoyed reading your writings on Making Light. (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/)

[madfilkentist]

Local police departments probably wouldn't be very good at interrogating terror suspects. One needs to understand a mindset is totally different from the typical Western mindset (including the typical Western criminal) and somehow break through its resistance. Fear is probably much less effective with terrorist types than with normal criminals. Creating doubts about their certainty that they're on an infallible mission from God seems like an essential step to me. Just how one does that, though, I don't know.

[redbird]

Okay, ask my local police department. They've been studying the matter for a while, and one thing they've found is that the techniques for getting information from people who've been arrested actually don't differ all that much depending on what information you think they have. They've also learned, slowly, that terrorizing them works equally poorly if you're interrogating someone who think is going to blow up the Holland Tunnel, or someone you think raped a jogger in Central Park.

What works is old-fashioned police work: infiltrating organizations, interviewing lots of people, looking at physical evidence, that sort of thing.

Also, there isn't one "Western mindset," nor yet one "terrorist mindset," nor even a "non-Western terrorist mindset." (Does the name McVeigh sound familiar?)

[redbird]

That should read "someone who you think is going to blow up…"

My local police department isn't perfect, but they know some stuff about dealing with possible terrorists. Including "don't panic."

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Totally different from the Western Mindset? The one shared by Mcveigh, or Eric Rudolph, Ted Kaczinski, The Weathermen, and all the other homegrown terrorists we've had in the US?

TK

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

One thing to keep in mind is that torture is not proven as a very effective way to get accurate, timely intelligence. The whole question of "what to do *instead*" is predicated on assuming that torture does things you need done, i.e., get information about your enemy. It's sure good at intimidating people; and it make the questioners feel like they're doing something: He's not talking? Keep hitting/cutting/drowning.

Spying is a time-honored way to get intelligence; it did prove problematic when there was a big gap in local-looking and -speaking people, I guess. Likewise the military uses many distributed sensors (satellites, strategically placed microphones to listen not just for conversation but for vehicles, actual troops in the area, etc., etc.) to gather info, along with predictive modeling of their opponents' actions and capabilities. Actually nabbing someone and asking them questions is among the most perilous and least reliable of means of getting info, because you have not only an unreliable witness but an actively hostile and deceptive one.

[crazysoph.livejournal.com]

Whenever I encounter other arguments in favor of torture, I keep this comment (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007974.html#142336) of pecunium's as a touchstone, mainly because of the books he mentions, and his own Google search on his name leading to other areas where he's posted on the topic. Hope this helps.

Crazy(and frequently still hiding under the covers)Soph

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I'd sort of forgotten that post (lost in the background noise of the campaign, one small skirmish of many).

I was pissed, just this side of incoherent. I ought to bookmark it, so I can use it to point people at when they want links.

The funny thing is, I was talking with Steven Barnes about this last night. I think I'll send him this link.

Thanks.

TK

[osewalrus.livejournal.com]

A critical argument against torture is that it is ineffective. The person tortured will say anything he or she believes the interogator wishes to hear. The problem is aggravated when torture is used to develop initial intelligence, which becomes the basis for subsequent intelligence.

If torture is ineffective, what you do instead is something effective. Or, barring that, nothing. Because replacing something ineffective that produces bad data with something that produces no results is actually a step up.