The Science of Interrogation
How to find out anything from anyone
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.”
- See more at: http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
The Science of Interrogation
How to find out anything from anyone
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.”
- See more at: http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
The Science of Interrogation
How to find out anything from anyone
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.”
- See more at: http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
The Science of Interrogation
How to find out anything from anyone
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.”
- See more at: http://businessweekme.com/Bloomberg/newsmid/190/newsid/579#cnttop
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
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
Dear Reader. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog. We are following this case.
I
have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses
several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of
the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this
powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and
myself get more out of the site.
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:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-charles-smith-award-presented-to_28.html
I look forward to hearing from readers at:
hlevy15@gmail.com.
Harold Levy; Publisher; The Charles Smith Blog;
