Modern Interrogation is Built on Psychology - Not Torture
One last post on interrogation and then I’ll get off my soapbox and back to being a trial lawyer and running a trial practice. Hans Scharf, a German PFC, is the father of modern interrogation. He was the son of a South African manufacturer visiting family in Germany when World War II broke out and was conscripted into the German Luftwaffe. He was assigned to question U.S. Airforce and British RAF pilots. He always got his information. How did he do it?
The key is to get the prisoner talking. And it doesn’t have to be about military topics, or sensitive information. You just want them talking. Once they’re talking, you can steer the conversation around to other issues, toss in a few innocent questions here and there and you’re on your way. (It’s not quite that easy, but that’s the main point).
A conversation with Hans would go like this “You’re not going to make me talk.” and Hans would reply “That’s fine, I don’t need to make you talk.” “Oh.” A favorite tactic of Hans would be to leave the immediate compound and walk through the woods with the prisoner and just make small talk with them. Halfway through the woods, there was an anthill. Hans would cover up the holes in the anthill with a handkerchief and they would watch the ants scurry around to create new ways into the anthill. He would then talk to the prisoner on the difference between the goals of socialism working together and capitalism where it’s every man for himself, using the ants as an example. He could almost always toss a question or two in when he got in a heated political discussion.
Another key is that with the information and organizational structure that the Germans had, Hans only needed one or two pieces of information from each prisoner, thus making it nearly impossible for the captured pilot to know when he was giving away military information.
For example, in doing strategic debriefings one of our daily high priorities was finding out how many inches apart the bars were on a wrought iron fence in a public park in a major city of a Warsaw Pact country. Hmm…. distance between bars on a public park fence. That doesn’t sound like overly sensitive information does it? Well it appears that our military had a picture of a brand new tank that they had never seen before. It was taken from the other side of the fence, but they had no idea how far away the tank was, so were unable to tell whether it was an extremely small tank or an extremely large tank. By knowing the distance between the bars, they could mathematically determine the distance and size of the tank. Oftentimes in interrogation, it’s the little pieces that fill in the puzzle.
The interrogation course at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School in Fort Huachuca, Arizona was (at the time I was teaching there) based on the techniques that Hans Scharf developed. Using psychology, we taught the rules of the Geneva Conventions (there were quite a number of them, being updated after each major conflict) and the Hague Laws of Land Warfare. We made certain that the interrogation students had copies of these documents.
All that seems to have gone out the window in favor of torture now. We taught that torture was likely to get you lots of information, but that people would tell you anything to stop the pain. As human intelligence specialists, we did not want tons of information, we wanted factually accurate information. We were proud of the fact that in Vietnam, interrogators provided 5% of the intelligence, but 95% of the factual, accurate, actionable intelligence. (To be honest, I don’t know where that statistic came from, but that’s what I was told when I went through the course, and what we taught when I was an instructor there).
The rules of torture were changed by people that weren’t in the military, don’t know about the Geneva Convention, and apparently don’t feel that the United States should follow international law. If you want to read about Hans Scharf, he wrote a book: The Interrogator: The Story of Hanns Joachim Scharff: Master Interrogator of the Luftwaffe. There’s a bit of fluffing on Hans part, but if you’re interested in interrogation, it’s a fascinating account of how modern interrogation was born. I looked for this book for 14 years in every used bookstore in every city I travelled in during that time period. The book was out of print, nearly every used bookseller knew about the book, but noone had a copy of it. Thank God for Amazon and the internet.
Dear Friends and Colleagues:
The Ignacio Mart??n-Bar?? Fund for Mental Health has been publicizing and spear-heading a petition campaign about the growing evidence that psychologists and other mental health workers have been directly involved in interrogations, and in some cases torture, of detainees at Guant?°namo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. The Fund a public forum in November 2005 in Boston, Massachusetts. The Fund has also launched a two-pronged petition campaign calling on both Congress and the American Psychological Association to commission independent investigations of this situation, and to take concrete action to put an end to these practices.
We hope that you will join us in expressing your concern.
You can navigate to both petitions from the Fund's home page: www.martinbarofund.org and from the petitions to the signature page. If you prefer to go directly to the petitions, the URLs for those are below:
Petition to Congress: http://www.martinbarofund.org/contact/petition-USA.htm
Petition to APA: http://www.martinbarofund.org/contact/petition-APA.htm
Signature page for both petittions: http://www.martinbarofund.org/contact/petition.htm
We are seeking support not only from those who are professionally involved in mental health issues, but from everyone who is concerned about these issues. You need not be a psychologist or a member of the American Psychological Association to sign the APA, although if you are a member -- and want to let the APA know -- you can include this information in the "Affiliations" field of the response form.
in solidarity...
Cathy Mooney
The Ignacio Martin-Baro Fund
for Mental Health and Human Rights
P.S. If you would like some background information on this issue, the Martin-Baro Fund website has links to the video documentaries shown at our recent event (both can be viewed online) as well as to some of the most important background documents. Go to: http://www.martinbarofund.org/events/Event%20Links%20-%2005.htm
I hope you are not permanently off your soapbox on this issue. It seems it is going to keep coming up and voices like yours are very important.
I am a former Marine Corps Interrogator. I also trained at Fort Huachuca. I found that the program there prepared me well for the "real world." Over the years I experienced a number of situations that clearly demonstrated to me the lack of need for anything approaching real torture (stress positions and discomforting situations are not torture, but that is a whole other discussion). In fact, good interrogation is really the ultimate sales job. Any good salesperson knows that high pressure is really not effective, but that every potential customer must be approached differently. If the salesperson can figure out what that button is and push it, the customer will gladly buy. It is exactly the same thing and I use Fort Huachuca techniques every day in my current job in sales. Funny, none of my customers has ever figured out that they were being interrogated!
