The Science of Interrogation
Drake Bennett |
| USA |
In August 2003, six months after the US invasion of Iraq and four months into the bloody insurgency that followed, Steve Kleinman, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, arrived in the country as part of a special operations task force based out of Baghdad International Airport. A lean man with an angular face and a faintly Californian cadence, Kleinman had been an intelligence officer for almost two decades. He had questioned high-level prisoners of war during the 1989 invasion of Panama and Iraqi generals during Operation Desert Storm, and he’d run the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course. At the Baghdad airport, however, he witnessed techniques he hadn’t seen in the field. In one of the plywood-walled interrogation rooms he saw a detainee slapped in the face each time he answered a question. Outside another room was a taped-up sheet of paper with the words “1 hour sleep, 3 hrs. awake, ½ hr. on knees, ½ sitting down, 1 hr. standing, ½ hr. knees” written on it. At the bottom it read, “Repeat.” “
This was a year before Abu Ghraib. It was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo,” Kleinman says. “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.” Kleinman didn’t think of himself as soft, though, just empirical. In his free time he was an avid consumer of behavioural science research papers, and over the years he’d experimented, in an ad hoc way, with the ideas he found there.
“People thought I was coddling terrorists”One afternoon a team of Army Rangers brought in a man in his late 30s suspected of selling weapons to the insurgents. By the time Kleinman heard about it, the man had been in custody for three days, enduring hooded stress positions and harsh interrogations, but maintaining a defiant equanimity. “He had these really dark, penetrating eyes. I remember it was almost disconcerting,” Kleinman says. He decided to take over the interrogation himself, and the two men, seated on folding chairs, spoke for three hours. The arms dealer had two young daughters, and he worried for their safety growing up in a violent city. Kleinman pretended that he, too, had two girls, and talked about his worries for them.
After the man grew comfortable, Kleinman tried a thought experiment with him. What if insurgents shot at American soldiers with some of the Kalashnikovs he had sold them and accidentally killed an Iraqi child? Did the arms dealer deserve any blame for the bloodshed that so concerned him as a father? For a long moment the man just stared at Kleinman. “I thought, OK, this hasn’t worked at all,” he remembers. Then, to his surprise, the man dropped his head into his hands. He’d never thought about it like that, he said. “He told us where his guns were stored. He told us where the guns of his competitors were stored,” Kleinman says. He told them about his neighbour, a chauffeur for two former Ba’ath party leaders, a fact Kleinman hadn’t even known to ask for.
In intelligence, as in the most mundane office setting, some of the most valuable information still comes from face-to-face conversations across a table. In police work, a successful interrogation can be the difference between a closed case and a cold one. Yet officers today are taught techniques that have never been tested in a scientific setting. For the most part, interrogators rely on nothing more than intuition, experience, and a grab bag of passed-down methods.
“Most police officers can tell you how many feet per second a bullet travels. They know about ballistics and cavity expansion with a hollow-point round,” says Mark Fallon, a former Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who led the investigation into the USS Cole attack and was assistant director of the federal government’s main law enforcement training facility. “What as a community we have not yet embraced as effectively is the behavioural sciences.”
The Science of Interrogation
Drake Bennett |
| USA |
In August 2003, six months after the US invasion of Iraq and four months into the bloody insurgency that followed, Steve Kleinman, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, arrived in the country as part of a special operations task force based out of Baghdad International Airport. A lean man with an angular face and a faintly Californian cadence, Kleinman had been an intelligence officer for almost two decades. He had questioned high-level prisoners of war during the 1989 invasion of Panama and Iraqi generals during Operation Desert Storm, and he’d run the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course. At the Baghdad airport, however, he witnessed techniques he hadn’t seen in the field. In one of the plywood-walled interrogation rooms he saw a detainee slapped in the face each time he answered a question. Outside another room was a taped-up sheet of paper with the words “1 hour sleep, 3 hrs. awake, ½ hr. on knees, ½ sitting down, 1 hr. standing, ½ hr. knees” written on it. At the bottom it read, “Repeat.” “
This was a year before Abu Ghraib. It was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo,” Kleinman says. “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.” Kleinman didn’t think of himself as soft, though, just empirical. In his free time he was an avid consumer of behavioural science research papers, and over the years he’d experimented, in an ad hoc way, with the ideas he found there.
“People thought I was coddling terrorists”One afternoon a team of Army Rangers brought in a man in his late 30s suspected of selling weapons to the insurgents. By the time Kleinman heard about it, the man had been in custody for three days, enduring hooded stress positions and harsh interrogations, but maintaining a defiant equanimity. “He had these really dark, penetrating eyes. I remember it was almost disconcerting,” Kleinman says. He decided to take over the interrogation himself, and the two men, seated on folding chairs, spoke for three hours. The arms dealer had two young daughters, and he worried for their safety growing up in a violent city. Kleinman pretended that he, too, had two girls, and talked about his worries for them.
After the man grew comfortable, Kleinman tried a thought experiment with him. What if insurgents shot at American soldiers with some of the Kalashnikovs he had sold them and accidentally killed an Iraqi child? Did the arms dealer deserve any blame for the bloodshed that so concerned him as a father? For a long moment the man just stared at Kleinman. “I thought, OK, this hasn’t worked at all,” he remembers. Then, to his surprise, the man dropped his head into his hands. He’d never thought about it like that, he said. “He told us where his guns were stored. He told us where the guns of his competitors were stored,” Kleinman says. He told them about his neighbour, a chauffeur for two former Ba’ath party leaders, a fact Kleinman hadn’t even known to ask for.
In intelligence, as in the most mundane office setting, some of the most valuable information still comes from face-to-face conversations across a table. In police work, a successful interrogation can be the difference between a closed case and a cold one. Yet officers today are taught techniques that have never been tested in a scientific setting. For the most part, interrogators rely on nothing more than intuition, experience, and a grab bag of passed-down methods.
“Most police officers can tell you how many feet per second a bullet travels. They know about ballistics and cavity expansion with a hollow-point round,” says Mark Fallon, a former Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who led the investigation into the USS Cole attack and was assistant director of the federal government’s main law enforcement training facility. “What as a community we have not yet embraced as effectively is the behavioural sciences.”
The Science of Interrogation
Drake Bennett |
| USA |
In August 2003, six months after the US invasion of Iraq and four months into the bloody insurgency that followed, Steve Kleinman, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, arrived in the country as part of a special operations task force based out of Baghdad International Airport. A lean man with an angular face and a faintly Californian cadence, Kleinman had been an intelligence officer for almost two decades. He had questioned high-level prisoners of war during the 1989 invasion of Panama and Iraqi generals during Operation Desert Storm, and he’d run the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course. At the Baghdad airport, however, he witnessed techniques he hadn’t seen in the field. In one of the plywood-walled interrogation rooms he saw a detainee slapped in the face each time he answered a question. Outside another room was a taped-up sheet of paper with the words “1 hour sleep, 3 hrs. awake, ½ hr. on knees, ½ sitting down, 1 hr. standing, ½ hr. knees” written on it. At the bottom it read, “Repeat.” “
This was a year before Abu Ghraib. It was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo,” Kleinman says. “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.” Kleinman didn’t think of himself as soft, though, just empirical. In his free time he was an avid consumer of behavioural science research papers, and over the years he’d experimented, in an ad hoc way, with the ideas he found there.
“People thought I was coddling terrorists”One afternoon a team of Army Rangers brought in a man in his late 30s suspected of selling weapons to the insurgents. By the time Kleinman heard about it, the man had been in custody for three days, enduring hooded stress positions and harsh interrogations, but maintaining a defiant equanimity. “He had these really dark, penetrating eyes. I remember it was almost disconcerting,” Kleinman says. He decided to take over the interrogation himself, and the two men, seated on folding chairs, spoke for three hours. The arms dealer had two young daughters, and he worried for their safety growing up in a violent city. Kleinman pretended that he, too, had two girls, and talked about his worries for them.
After the man grew comfortable, Kleinman tried a thought experiment with him. What if insurgents shot at American soldiers with some of the Kalashnikovs he had sold them and accidentally killed an Iraqi child? Did the arms dealer deserve any blame for the bloodshed that so concerned him as a father? For a long moment the man just stared at Kleinman. “I thought, OK, this hasn’t worked at all,” he remembers. Then, to his surprise, the man dropped his head into his hands. He’d never thought about it like that, he said. “He told us where his guns were stored. He told us where the guns of his competitors were stored,” Kleinman says. He told them about his neighbour, a chauffeur for two former Ba’ath party leaders, a fact Kleinman hadn’t even known to ask for.
In intelligence, as in the most mundane office setting, some of the most valuable information still comes from face-to-face conversations across a table. In police work, a successful interrogation can be the difference between a closed case and a cold one. Yet officers today are taught techniques that have never been tested in a scientific setting. For the most part, interrogators rely on nothing more than intuition, experience, and a grab bag of passed-down methods.
“Most police officers can tell you how many feet per second a bullet travels. They know about ballistics and cavity expansion with a hollow-point round,” says Mark Fallon, a former Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who led the investigation into the USS Cole attack and was assistant director of the federal government’s main law enforcement training facility. “What as a community we have not yet embraced as effectively is the behavioural sciences.”
The Science of Interrogation
Drake Bennett |
| USA |
In August 2003, six months after the US invasion of Iraq and four months into the bloody insurgency that followed, Steve Kleinman, an Air Force lieutenant colonel, arrived in the country as part of a special operations task force based out of Baghdad International Airport. A lean man with an angular face and a faintly Californian cadence, Kleinman had been an intelligence officer for almost two decades. He had questioned high-level prisoners of war during the 1989 invasion of Panama and Iraqi generals during Operation Desert Storm, and he’d run the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course. At the Baghdad airport, however, he witnessed techniques he hadn’t seen in the field. In one of the plywood-walled interrogation rooms he saw a detainee slapped in the face each time he answered a question. Outside another room was a taped-up sheet of paper with the words “1 hour sleep, 3 hrs. awake, ½ hr. on knees, ½ sitting down, 1 hr. standing, ½ hr. knees” written on it. At the bottom it read, “Repeat.” “
This was a year before Abu Ghraib. It was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of course at Guantanamo,” Kleinman says. “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.” Kleinman didn’t think of himself as soft, though, just empirical. In his free time he was an avid consumer of behavioural science research papers, and over the years he’d experimented, in an ad hoc way, with the ideas he found there.
“People thought I was coddling terrorists”One afternoon a team of Army Rangers brought in a man in his late 30s suspected of selling weapons to the insurgents. By the time Kleinman heard about it, the man had been in custody for three days, enduring hooded stress positions and harsh interrogations, but maintaining a defiant equanimity. “He had these really dark, penetrating eyes. I remember it was almost disconcerting,” Kleinman says. He decided to take over the interrogation himself, and the two men, seated on folding chairs, spoke for three hours. The arms dealer had two young daughters, and he worried for their safety growing up in a violent city. Kleinman pretended that he, too, had two girls, and talked about his worries for them.
After the man grew comfortable, Kleinman tried a thought experiment with him. What if insurgents shot at American soldiers with some of the Kalashnikovs he had sold them and accidentally killed an Iraqi child? Did the arms dealer deserve any blame for the bloodshed that so concerned him as a father? For a long moment the man just stared at Kleinman. “I thought, OK, this hasn’t worked at all,” he remembers. Then, to his surprise, the man dropped his head into his hands. He’d never thought about it like that, he said. “He told us where his guns were stored. He told us where the guns of his competitors were stored,” Kleinman says. He told them about his neighbour, a chauffeur for two former Ba’ath party leaders, a fact Kleinman hadn’t even known to ask for.
In intelligence, as in the most mundane office setting, some of the most valuable information still comes from face-to-face conversations across a table. In police work, a successful interrogation can be the difference between a closed case and a cold one. Yet officers today are taught techniques that have never been tested in a scientific setting. For the most part, interrogators rely on nothing more than intuition, experience, and a grab bag of passed-down methods.
“Most police officers can tell you how many feet per second a bullet travels. They know about ballistics and cavity expansion with a hollow-point round,” says Mark Fallon, a former Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent who led the investigation into the USS Cole attack and was assistant director of the federal government’s main law enforcement training facility. “What as a community we have not yet embraced as effectively is the behavioural sciences.”
In
August 2003, six months after the US invasion of Iraq and four months
into the bloody insurgency that followed, Steve Kleinman, an Air Force
lieutenant colonel, arrived in the country as part of a special
operations task force based out of Baghdad International Airport. A lean
man with an angular face and a faintly Californian cadence, Kleinman
had been an intelligence officer for almost two decades. He had
questioned high-level prisoners of war during the 1989 invasion of
Panama and Iraqi generals during Operation Desert Storm, and he’d run
the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course. At the Baghdad airport,
however, he witnessed techniques he hadn’t seen in the field. In one of
the plywood-walled interrogation rooms he saw a detainee slapped in the
face each time he answered a question. Outside another room was a
taped-up sheet of paper with the words “1 hour sleep, 3 hrs. awake, ½
hr. on knees, ½ sitting down, 1 hr. standing, ½ hr. knees” written on
it. At the bottom it read, “Repeat.” “ - See more at:
http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
ARTICLE: "The science of interrogation, by Drake Bennett, published by Bloomberg Businessweek on April 27, 2015;
GIST: "A decade ago, Russano, a professor at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, set out to design a study that would replicate the social and emotional dynamics of a real interrogation in the lab, where conditions could be controlled. And where, unlike in the messy world of actual cases, the truthfulness of confessions could be easily evaluated. Her study had subjects take a cognitive ability test in a room with another student. Half the time the second student, who was actually working for Russano, would ask for help. The test subjects knew it was against the rules, but most would willingly share their answers. Later, after the test administrator had ostensibly looked over some of the results, he would come back, say there was a potential issue, and leave the subject to stew alone in a room for five minutes. Then some version of the interaction above, taken from a video of one subject, would unfold. Russano was interested in testing what have long been the twin poles of interrogation styles: “minimization” and “maximization.” They’re forms of coercion that correspond, roughly, to “good cop, bad cop.” Minimization plays down the significance of the crime and offers potential excuses for it—“you just meant to scare her” or “anyone in your situation would have done the same thing.” Maximization plays it up, confrontationally presenting incriminating evidence and refusing to allow any response except a confession. The two are the most widely used tools in the American police interrogator toolkit. ........Chicago-based John E. Reid & Associates is the biggest interrogation trainer in the world, teaching thousands of police officers, intelligence operatives, and private investigators every year. Its techniques are based on the experience of the company’s founders, interviews with suspects after interrogations, and what would appear to be common sense. “In sex crimes, it is also helpful for the investigator to state that he has heard many persons tell about sexual activities far worse than any the suspect himself may relate,” the Reid manual Criminal Interrogation and Confessions advises. “This will serve to encourage the suspect to admit a particularly ‘shameful’ kind of sexual act.” These techniques do indeed produce confessions. What Russano found, though, was that those confessions are often unreliable. “Guilty people are more likely to confess” when minimization and maximization are used, she says. “The problem is, so are innocent people.” Minimization alone nearly doubled the number of cheaters who confessed in her studies. But it tripled the number of noncheaters who falsely confessed. The videos of those false confessions make for fascinating viewing. Some are angry, some resigned. One young woman keeps her composure until the test administrator leaves the room with her signed confession, then dissolves into tears. These techniques are a long way from torture—university researchers aren’t likely to run a waterboarding study. They’re also a long way from the sorts of interrogations that have unfolded in precinct houses and desert prisons; after all, as Joseph Buckley, president of John E. Reid & Associates, points out, compared with actual criminals, college students are easy marks. What Russano’s work shows, however, is that even gentler forms of coercion can implicate the innocent and produce misinformation."
Researchers
are even moving beyond conversation entirely. In 2012, Maria Hartwig
started looking at the role that environment played in investigative
interviewing. Hartwig, 34, is a former student of the University of
Gothenburg’s Granhag and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal
Justice in New York, where she keeps a small Pinocchio figurine in her
office. The basis for her work is a theory called “embodied cognition,”
which holds that because our brains first evolved to move our bodies
through the world—and only later became capable of higher-level
thinking—body and brain still influence each other in elemental,
unconscious ways. Some of the best-known work has found that being
physically warm makes people more generous toward others and that being
excluded socially can lower someone’s estimate of the room temperature.
If the embodied cognition literature was correct, 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. The Philadelphia Police Department has
expressed interest in the idea, and Hartwig and her collaborators are
trying to figure out how exactly they will redecorate interrogation
rooms. - See more at:
http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
Researchers
are even moving beyond conversation entirely. In 2012, Maria Hartwig
started looking at the role that environment played in investigative
interviewing. Hartwig, 34, is a former student of the University of
Gothenburg’s Granhag and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal
Justice in New York, where she keeps a small Pinocchio figurine in her
office. The basis for her work is a theory called “embodied cognition,”
which holds that because our brains first evolved to move our bodies
through the world—and only later became capable of higher-level
thinking—body and brain still influence each other in elemental,
unconscious ways. Some of the best-known work has found that being
physically warm makes people more generous toward others and that being
excluded socially can lower someone’s estimate of the room temperature.
If the embodied cognition literature was correct, 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. The Philadelphia Police Department has
expressed interest in the idea, and Hartwig and her collaborators are
trying to figure out how exactly they will redecorate interrogation
rooms. - See more at:
http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
Researchers
are even moving beyond conversation entirely. In 2012, Maria Hartwig
started looking at the role that environment played in investigative
interviewing. Hartwig, 34, is a former student of the University of
Gothenburg’s Granhag and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal
Justice in New York, where she keeps a small Pinocchio figurine in her
office. The basis for her work is a theory called “embodied cognition,”
which holds that because our brains first evolved to move our bodies
through the world—and only later became capable of higher-level
thinking—body and brain still influence each other in elemental,
unconscious ways. Some of the best-known work has found that being
physically warm makes people more generous toward others and that being
excluded socially can lower someone’s estimate of the room temperature.
If the embodied cognition literature was correct, 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. The Philadelphia Police Department has
expressed interest in the idea, and Hartwig and her collaborators are
trying to figure out how exactly they will redecorate interrogation
rooms. - See more at:
http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
The entire article can be found at:
http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
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Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
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The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
