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Skriven 2009-03-18 09:34:00 av Dave Drum (1:124/311)
Ärende: Torture - A reasoned view
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Try a Little Tenderness

By STEVEN KLEINMAN and MATTHEW ALEXANDER
Published: March 10, 2009

ON Jan. 22, President Obama signed an executive order banning torture and
establishing a panel to examine America’s interrogation methods. The ban on
torture is a major step toward reclaiming our heritage as a nation of laws and
a people of character. And it will enhance the country’s security by
undermining Al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting theme — its portrayal of the
United States as a dishonorable superpower that sanctions the type of abuses so
graphically captured in the images from Abu Ghraib.

The challenge now for the panel is to reconsider the ancient practice of
interrogation and bring it into the modern age. That will require making an
effort to objectively assess which strategies are actually effective.

One might think that any interrogation method considered legal must also be
effective. But many techniques that have been deemed lawful by lawyers at the
Justice Department, the Defense Department and even the White House have never
been tested for how well they elicit information from people who resist
providing it. In fact, none of the methods contained in the current Army manual
on interrogation have ever been scientifically tested for effectiveness.

As military interrogators, each of us has questioned hundreds of prisoners of
war, terrorists and insurgents in the Middle East, Latin America and Asia —
during both Iraq wars and the 1989 invasion of Panama — and we have supervised
thousands of other interrogations. While we speak only for ourselves, we have
seen firsthand that many standard approaches are rarely useful in eliciting
reliable intelligence, and often serve only to harden a detainee’s resistance.
Widely employed tactics like “fear-up harsh,ö which is meant to scare a person
into answering questions, or “pride and ego down,ö which uses humiliation to
try to overcome a person’s resistance, are actually counterproductive in
establishing the kind of relationship — one based on trust — that is almost
always necessary to win a detainee’s cooperation.

The most effective strategies for relationship building are the kind that
interrogators used to extract critical information from high-level Japanese and
German prisoners during World War II. Interrogators who were familiar with the
detainees’ language and culture, and who exhaustively studied each prisoner’s
case, used charisma and empathy to patiently elicit vital intelligence.
Similarly, it was a relationship-building approach that we used to persuade a
detainee to give us information on the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the
former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — information that led to his being
located and killed in 2006.

Interrogation is likely to remain critical to waging the global war on
terrorism and other future wars. Unfortunately, though, we have not yet taken a
scientific approach to improving the way we practice it. While other forms of
intelligence-gathering have benefited from research and technological advances
— intelligence officers can intercept telephone and Internet communications or
use satellite images to find people — interrogation has suffered from a lack of
innovation. And our military lacks an elite unit of highly trained
interrogators to call upon when high-level people in terrorist organizations
are captured. Too often, the questioning is left to whoever is closest at hand.

The president’s new panel has a fresh opportunity to solve these problems. The
group should include experienced interrogators and policymakers who recognize
the need to examine longstanding interrogation methods objectively. The panel
should consider creating a research center devoted to gathering and analyzing
the valuable lessons that interrogators have learned in the course of our
current conflicts, establishing a clear and stringent standard of conduct and
ethics and building a cadre of skilled interrogators. Researchers at such a
center could also evaluate all strategies now used in questioning and identify
other methods that are both effective and consistent with our legal and moral
traditions.

Interrogation is both art and science; like any profession, it is a dynamic
endeavor with potential for continual improvement. Learning to be really good
at handling and questioning detainees is prelude to becoming truly great as a
nation.

Steven Kleinman has been an intelligence officer and an interrogator in the Air
Force for 25 years and is a colonel in the Air Force Reserve. Matthew
Alexander, who also worked as an interrogator in the military, is the author of
“How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not
Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.ö

http://tinyurl.com/painfulasking

... "Anyone can make history. Only a great man can write it." - Oscar Wilde
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