MetaFilter posts tagged with Interrogation

One of my poems goes: The next one and a half pages are redacted.

jaduncan — Wed, 01 May 2013 03:04:22 -0800

The Guantánamo Memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi For nearly 11 years, Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been a prisoner in Guantánamo. In 2005, he began to write his memoirs of his time in captivity. His handwritten 466-page manuscript is a harrowing account of his detention, interrogation, and abuse. Although his abuse has been corroborated by U.S. government officials, declassified documents, and independent investigators, Slahi tells his story with the detail and perspective that could only be known by himself and the people who have kept him captive. It is impossible for us to meet with him or independently verify his account. Until now, it has been impossible for him to tell his story. [ht homunculus]

Central Park Five

likeatoaster — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:42:11 -0800

Remember the Central Park jogger case from 1990? Here's a (lengthy, fascinating) New York Magazine article discussing the case just around the time of the 2002 exoneration of the initial five accused, four of whom had previously confessed to the crime. 24 years after the attack, a group of filmmakers, together with the five wrongly convicted men, have created a documentary telling the tale: The Central Park Five. Criminal reform activists everywhere are hoping the story might change a few minds. Previously

"U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes"

grobstein — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 08:11:03 -0800

Years after the first hints of "harsh interrogation practices" in the US war on terror, years after Obama's decision to "look forward, not back" and not investigate or pursue official torture by the CIA and other agencies, the 577-page Report of the Task Force on Detainee Treatment that was released today is, "[i]n many respects, . . . the examination of the treatment of suspected terrorists that official Washington has been reluctant to conduct." The New York Times' Scott Shane reports. Like the official commissions it seeks to emulate, the Task Force on Detainee Treatment is bipartisan and made up of high-profile Republican and Democratic insiders who have served in state and federal executive and legislative branches and the military, and distinguished lawyers and intellectuals. This is a group with all the credentials of the political mainstream. It is staffed by members of the nonprofit Constitution Project. The headline conclusions of the Report:

US forces tortured detainees on many occasions; and
Top US officials are responsible for torture because of decisions and policies made in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The Report's 24 numbered Findings make for bracing (although not surprising) reading and can be found here. The report website includes the full document and various ways into it, as well as tools for exploring some of the evidence the Task Force looked at. There is a lot to dig into here. The Constitution Project has been publicizing the document on Twitter this morning.

“The tea was really bitter”

telstar — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 20:52:31 -0800

Nine Tips for “Drinking Tea” With Chinese Police Tips gleaned from Oiwan Lam at globalvoicesonline.org

"We Just Witnessed a War Crime"

Pirate-Bartender-Zombie-Monkey — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 14:33:02 -0800

The first thing we learned about war re-enactment is that it's fucking terrifying having guns fired at you, even ones loaded with blanks. The second thing we learned is a common re-enactor's dilemma called "The G.I. Effect", which is basically that people playing Americans don't like to die. So sometimes they just don't.

It's Like Vietnam All Over Again, pt 1. Part 2

Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty"

Egg Shen — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:52:30 -0800

Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty has been named the best film of 2012 by the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Board of Review. Does it endorse torture? The film includes wrenching scenes of a terrorist suspect being waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture by C.I.A. operatives; the suspect eventually surrenders information that helps lead to bin Laden. Bigelow maintains that everything in the film is based on first-hand accounts, but the waterboarding scene, which is likely to stir up controversy, appears to have strayed from real life. According to several official sources, including Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, the identity of bin Laden’s courier, whose trail led the C.I.A. to the hideout in Pakistan, was not discovered through waterboarding. “It’s a movie, not a documentary,” [screenwriter Mark] Boal said. “We’re trying to make the point that waterboarding and other harsh tactics were part of the C.I.A. program.” Still, Bigelow said, “the film doesn’t have an agenda, and it doesn’t judge."

"You can cause a lot of discomfort and some people will talk but interrogation is not about talking. It’s about the search for the truth."

univac — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 22:05:30 -0800

"But the technique that all of us in Aden listened to agape was a method that had been developed allegedly very recently, which was to suspend the prisoner in a tank of liquid gelatine which was at 94.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Naked. With your arms and legs tied and your head encased in a sort of diver’s helmet, through which you were breathing. You were hung into this tank, so all you could hear was the [breathing noise] of your own breath. And in theory you would go bonkers. Because you didn’t know which way was up, you had no sense." -Interview with British Interrogator #1 "In the end the guy talks because he wants to... ...Mental damage is what the law and society tells us we can do. …You also have to note that there is a blurring between controlling prisoners and conditioning them." -Interview with British Interrogator #2 "He is being handled by people who don’t speak their language, doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him, doesn’t know when he’s going to see his family again, doesn’t know when he’s going to get his next meal, or his next drink. All he knows is that he is in the hands of the enemy. That’s all he knows. And it is frankly a very upsetting experience. It really is. And that is shown in a thing called The Shock of Capture." -Interview with British Army Interrogator #3 "Can you imagine killing these people for 2-3 days – you’d been told what to do about them – and you shot them, and you kept shooting them, and they kept coming! Eventually, it turned out, you gave up – to one of them, in my case." -Interview with SAS NCO Trained Interrogator "They were hooded. They were in a helicopter. The helicopter took off, then bounced about and came down to a couple of feet again, you know, so that the people were so disoriented that they didn’t know where they were. Then they threw them out as if they were throwing them out from a height." -Interview with Senior Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer on interrogation "I said ‘This shackling and hooding prisoners is inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions, Colonel, and isn’t that what we’re supposed to be abiding by. I haven’t heard anything else.’ That got an official response …the response was, and one that I accepted, that prisoners have responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions, too. ‘Two soldiers have been seriously wounded and one killed by prisoners after they have surrendered, so this is a security measure that is provided for in the conventions. For security purposes you can do this.’ I read the Conventions a little differently." -Interview with US Army Interrogator #1 UK Journalist Dominic Streatfeild interviews five interrogators from the UK armed forces and one from the US about their training, tactics and experiences - both as interrogators and as subjects. Via.

"There's nothing more aggravating in the world than the midnight sniffling of the person you've decided to hate." ― Shannon Hale, Book of a Thousand Days

jaduncan — Sun, 02 Sep 2012 15:56:45 -0800

The DoJ drops all remaining investigation and prosecution of US War on Terror deaths/murders through harsh tactics/torture: "No Charges Filed on Harsh Tactics Used by the C.I.A." [NYT] Glenn Greenwald reacts and describes the cases that just got dropped. [Guardian] Second link is arguably a violence trigger, but is better and bothers to do things like talk to the ALCU.

Seriously? Shit.

Phire — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 06:30:36 -0800

Who's your favourite? (SL-interrogation-of-cute-babies-YT.)

Battle-field Interpretation

Doktor Zed — Tue, 03 May 2011 12:54:38 -0800

With the death of Osama Bin Laden having re-opened the debate over the intelligence value of "enhanced interrogation" techniques, it's worthwhile revisiting the wartime lessons of Sherwood Moran, missionary, Marine, and decorated POW interrogator (he preferred he term "interviewer"). Working on the front lines of battle - even under aerial bombing and artillery shelling - he combined "deep human sympathy" with a "ruthlessly persistent approach" to extracting information from a supposedly unbreakable captured enemy. After skilfully drawing out actionable intelligence from battle-hardened Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen during the bloody fight for Guadalcanal, Moran was transferred back to Washington, D.C. to write up his unusually successful techniques for general dissemination. The result was his now-classic memo, "Suggestions for Japanese Interpreters Based on Work in the Field" (PDF), and its lessons have not lost their relevance:

To emphasize that we are enemies, to emphasize that he is in the presence of his conqueror, etc., puts him psychologically in the position of being on the defensive, and that because he is talking to a most-patient enemy and conqueror he has no right and desire to tell anything. {...} I consider a prisoner (i.e. a man who has been captured and disarmed and in a perfectly safe place) as out of the war, out of the picture, and thus, in a way, not an enemy. {...} Then forget, as it were, the "enemy" stuff, and the "prisoner" stuff. I tell them to forget it, telling them I am talking as a human being to a human being, (ningen to shite). And they respond to this.

Military historian James Corum sums up Moran's approach: "Know their language, know their culture, and treat the captured enemy as a human being." Moran called it "enlightened hard-boiled-ness".

Detainee 063

chunking express — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 14:23:43 -0800

Detainee 063. This is the interrogation log of Mohammed al-Qahtani. It is being published in real time: each entry will appear exactly seven years after it was first recorded. The interrogation took place at Guantanamo Bay.

Borderline Human Experimentation

scrutiny — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 05:06:33 -0800

PHR (Physicians for Human Rights) have released a new report (pdf) that details the extent to which doctors were involved in monitoring and recording data on detainees subjected to waterboarding and other techniques [via] From the article:

A team of PHR doctors authored the white paper, which details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods. Physicians for Human Rights is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation and calls for more investigation on this point. If confirmed, the development of a research protocol to assess and refine the use of the waterboard or other techniques would likely constitute a new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists.

Federal prosecutors to investigate abusive interrogation cases

grobstein — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:57:07 -0800

Big Newsfilter: US Attorney General Holder appoints a prosecutor to investigate abusive CIA interrogations in the War on Terror. Obama was reluctant to investigate Bush admin wrongdoing, and he still insists "he thinks that we should be looking forward, not backward" (per his deputy press secretary). But Holder managed to get the go-ahead. Previously.

Voices from the Black Sites

shoesfullofdust — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 16:38:59 -0800

Interrogation techniques used by the CIA on al-Qaeda suspects "constituted torture", according to a report by the International Red Cross.

Growing Up In Guantánamo.

ageispolis — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:14:14 -0800

"Six days after the inauguration of President Obama, the U.S. is scheduled to begin the first trial of a child soldier accused of war crimes since World War II." via ACLU Edited video of Omar Khadr's interrogation. (from CBC)

APA bars participation in military interrogations

homunculus — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 15:21:22 -0800

Psychology Group Changes Policy on Interrogations. The American Psychological Association has adopted a measure prohibiting its members from participating in interrogations of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay and other military prisons where detainees have been tortured (previously). [Via Paper Chase]

The Torture Playlist

monospace — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:09:06 -0800

Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, "prolong capture shock," disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.

Torture is a blunt instrument

Kirth Gerson — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 10:37:18 -0800

Five myths about torture In a Washington Post column, Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy, explains why five beliefs about torture are wrong. In a Harper's interview, he answers six questions. "Yes, torture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century." "The historical record is clear. Waterboarding is torture, and yes focusing on just waterboarding is a distraction. Waterboarding is serious, but only the tip of the iceberg. There have only been three documented cases of waterboarding, but the CIA has subjected at least 30 others to “enhanced interrogation” as Director Hayden says, so there are other kinds of techniques as well. And there are unaccounted prisoners last seen in US custody as well as secret prisons out there where these things continue to happen."

Psychologists Protest APA's Position On Interrogations

Rykey — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 11:21:13 -0800

Citing the organization's "sharp shift in values and direction," Ken Pope, prominent member of the American Psychological Association (and a former chair of its Ethics Committee), resigned his membership on February 6. He's the latest of a growing number of professional psychologists who have quit APA in protest of its position on the use of psychologists in government interrogations in the "War on Terror."

WWII Interogators

homunculus — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:26:14 -0800

Fort Hunt's Quiet Men Break Silence on WWII. After 60 years of silence, the World War II veterans who interrogated Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt are telling their story. [Via The Reality-Based Community.]

"We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture," said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. "During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone," said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. "We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I'm proud to say I never compromised my humanity."

Secret authorization of severe interrogation methods

russilwvong — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:00:47 -0800

Secret U. S. Endorsement of Severe Interrogations. The New York Times has a 4000-word report today on secret Justice Department opinions--never previously disclosed--authorizing severe interrogation methods. Congress has outlawed cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; in response, Justice declared that the CIA's most extreme interrogation methods are not cruel, inhuman, and degrading. These secret opinions, issued in 2005, are still in effect. Most lawmakers did not know they existed. White House response: "This country does not torture."

Torture Teachers

homunculus — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 13:05:26 -0800

Rorschach and Awe. "America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques. The spread of these tactics was fueled by a myth about a critical 'black site' operation."

I stand for 8-10 hours a day - why is standing limited to 4 hours?

puddleglum — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 10:10:35 -0800

The Interrogation Documents - a collection of available records relating to U.S. interrogation policies. (via) (previously)

"Verschärfte Vernehmung"

delmoi — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:00:47 -0800

Looks like the phrase "Enhanced Interrogation" has a History.

Beating the Rap

John of Michigan — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 18:40:23 -0800

The Reid Technique In Homicide, David Simon writes of the homicide detective: "He becomes a salesman, a huckster as thieving and silver-tongued as any man who ever moved used cars or aluminum siding---more so, in fact, when you consider that he's selling long prison terms to customers who have no genuine need for the product." But how does that detective do it? How can someone get you to willingly confess to something you did--or didn't--do? The Reid Technique. Developed by John Reid, (who kindly shares with us the tricks detectives use) the technique lets an interviewer look at every aspect of a suspect's behavior, sometimes giving them enough rope to hang themselves. Forewarned, however, is forearmed. Can you beat the rap if you know what's facing you, once you get in the box? (Hint: Watch your eyeballs!)