The Dark Science of Interrogation | Hacker News Reader

The Dark Science of Interrogation

bloomberg.com

52 pointsblago25 comments

The essence of the article:

"He found that the most productive interrogations in terms of information were those in which interrogators essentially acted like therapists. Investigators in Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and the United Kingdom are now trained to focus not on extracting admissions of guilt but on gathering evidence. That information can back up an innocent suspect’s story, or it can be used to nail a guilty one."

"Hartwig reasoned, the typical interrogation room—claustrophobic, locked, austere—was exactly the wrong sort of space to get someone to divulge information. In a yet unpublished study, she redesigned the space around the theme of openness: open windows, an open book on the table, open desk drawers, “a picture of open water under an open sky,” as the paper describes it. She found that subjects provided more detail when questioned in the redesigned interrogation room."

In other words, "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar". If only we had known this before Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. /s

That information can back up an innocent suspect’s story, or it can be used to nail a guilty one."

Except not that first part. That's the part prosecutors sweep under rugs.

> If only we had known this before Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. /s

Somehow I suspect they didn't really want to get more info. They wanted to punish, and to instill fear, mostly because deep down it felt good to them. Officially there was an excuse "War on terror". But it could have been done just as easily under another slogan, maybe "War on Drugs" or "War on Communism" and so on.

Going a back a step, I also believe there is a high number of psycopaths who rise to power in intelligence agencies. Even if you look at something silly like reliance on passing polygraphs, for entering and staying in the organization. Psycopaths would do much better there. After many iterations, shit like that rises to the top.

After 9/11, a lot of Americans wanted to see "the terrorists" suffer, but there may be something dangerous about a person who can bear to personally inflict the torture.

Just having people in power who are willing to order torture worries me.

More than being able to order thousands of men to storm a beach or an entire city of wood and paper to go up in a storm of fire? Being a head of a state has always required making decisions about using force in horrific ways. Torturing O(30) people is dwarfed by that.

You're assuming that information gathering is the primary purpose of the actions. Maintaining control or proviking a response are two other possibilities among others.

Polygraph is a great example. It is clearly pseudoscience, but the fact that your employees know that they can be interrogated on a broad variety of topics at will guides their behavior.

Agree that these techniques likely weren't intended to get more information.

But maybe they were deliberate instigation rather than punishment or cruelty. Possibly designed to stir up outrage, continued resistance and counterattacks? That way, the occupiers would manifestly need to keep a presence in the region... you know, to pacify the oil..er, I mean, "the crazy terrorists that hate us for our freedom".

I don't know if this theory has any merit or not, but it certainly seems likely that interested parties of many stripes semi-regularly provoke public outrage for economic reasons.

We did know this. Maybe slightly less about positively extracting information but certainly about the diminishing returns as you get rougher with people, eventually you just get bullshit from them. CIA and DoD absolutely knew this, they conducted very extensive research on it.

There are two different things we were doing and just called it interrogation or enhanced interogation to dance around various laws. 1) we were punishing people and catering to the very lowest common denominator in the defense community. 2) we were attempting to send a message to other potential terrorists that "we are mean and will fight dirty" and attempt to dissuade them from even associating with people that are our enemies. This is partially why we have traded some terrorists for prisoners, that technique works best when you let them talk about it first hand.

No idea if that stuff works and I have no idea about the cost of having the sociopaths that do that stuff free in our society but it had very little to do with extracting real intelligence

In essence it is a more hands on variant of the stuff the CIA has been training "allies" in since the 50s.

The origins of terrorism comes out of a guy that got hardened in his believes in Egypt after "sessions" with the CIA trained jailers.

Before that he was trying to give Islam a place in modern Egypt by peaceful means, afterwards he was convinced that only armed struggle was the way to go.

Shocking, more evidence confirming what we already have known for decades (at least since WWII), torture is one of the least effective methods for obtaining reliable information from suspects.

Sadly, I wish the debate about torture didn't focus as much on effectiveness instead of morality and legality (since it is neither moral nor legal).

It's bizarre.

Pretty much everyone understands that better information can be extracted by gentle methods than by harsh techniques.

That's not why the harsh techniques are used. In the second paragraph of this article it give away the real problem:

Sometimes I got to the point where I had to literally order them to stop. Even then there was surprising blowback. People thought I was coddling terrorists.

The priority of those harsh integration techniques isn't to get information. It's a form of punishment, and a threat to stop others acting against US forces.

One needs to understand that frame of thought before one can stop the techniques.

Seems to sum up the whole mentality of the US system. And i find myself wondering if it can be traced to the background of the original colonies.

No, that's not it! The bizarre thing is the reaction on HN, not the US system.

The US system functions exactly as intended, assuming you realise that it is designed to punish suspects.

But how could anyone think that punishing in itself is helpful in any way whatsoever? This is an honest question, I really don't get how the American system could have been designed the way it is.

Folks interested in an intro to the history and law surrounding interrogation should check out The Illustrated Guide to the Law, drawn by a NYC defense attorney.

Here is where the relevant section starts: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2282

It also has sections on a bunch of stuff like...

* Probable Cause and Arrest: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1789

* traffic stops, searches, and consent: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1859

* self-defense: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=864

* entrapment: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=633

* memory and eyewitness identification: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=3044

* A flowchart for the 4th amendment: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2256

* A flowchart for the 5th-amendment: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2897

For anyone interested in modern interrogation techniques, I'd recommend the book "How to Break a Terrorist."[0]

[0]How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq http://www.amazon.com/How-Break-Terrorist-Interrogators-Brut...

The dark side of the press trivialiasing an issue, opening the Overton window...

One doesn't open the Overton window, ones widens it. It's a window in the "range" sense.

But I don't think one can blame the press. There are plenty of people outside the press who believe the Geneva convention doesn't allow "sufficient flexibility". One can't blame the press for reporting that.

Well, one can still blame the press for trivializing that with articles like this.

What happened to the CRITICAL press?

It got bought long ago by the people in power?

Is there a lighter side, one wonders?

The actual title is "The dark science of interrogation", which makes rather more sense than "The dark side of interrogation" which is the current HN title.

I think the article does a good job of elaborating on legitimate, empirical, helpful, and non-harmful interrogation techniques. So I would say yes, there is, even if many organizations tend to prefer the darker side.

The title of the article is "THE DARK SCIENCE OF INTERROGATION", not "Dark Side".

Thanks, we updated the title.

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