COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

This journal of the early days of the captivity and interrogation of the 20th highjacker makes for interesting reading, not least because of the combination of techniques applied to encourage this scumbag to start yapping.

I remember back in the summer of 2003, I was making regular runs from Ramadi to Al Asad air base (FOB Webster) to drop off truckloads of detainees with the 3rd Armored Cavalry detention facility.

I had a pretty good relationship and rapport with the staff there, and it was good to get news from all over the Al Anbar province, and compare notes with what I knew from Ramadi, and what they were finding out.

It also gave me a chance to practice German and Russian with the linguists who were working there, as well, and learn a few Arabic terms.

We talked at length about the treatment of prisoners and what was legal and what was not legal, and what measures we could take to cause them to talk. Their interrogators were annoyed that we would let the detainees sleep, but I was never convinced of the legality of extended sleep deprivation, and my primary concern, really, was just getting everyone there safely. I would often have ten prisoners in the back of a truck with just two guards, and they had to concentrate on external security as well as the prisoners, and I honestly didn't care if the prisoners grabbed a catnap.

At any rate, we were discussing the "ego down" strategy of dealing with detainees, and there was never any shortage of ideas about how to do it. The sleep dep protocol was one strategy, and there was another strategy which involved a lot of humiliation.

One idea they were thinking about: Have a woman shave their heads and beards. A shaven head is a very powerful humiliation for a Muslim. And to be shaven by a woman, in the mind of a Muslim man, is doubly unthinkable.

And I remember saying, "Ok, but what's the research behind it? Are there studies that suggest that this is effective? Because I can imagine this just increasing resentment against the US and increasing the determination to remain silent and not talk with us at all."

And the chief warrant running the detention facility was not aware of any studies or any other academic foundation undergirding the effectiveness of the Power and Ego Down strategy. It was sort of something everyone accepted.

Ok, it was a hell of a lot more fun, sure. But at times it seemed to me more rooted in childish sadism and glee in power than in any sound psychological practice.

At the time, I was vaguely aware of the work of Hans Joachim Scharff, a German interrogator who was tremendously effective at getting information from Allied flyers during WWII.

And he didn't do it with intimidation. He didn't do it with torture. He didn't do it with humiliation. He did it with rapport building, trust, and an incredible memory for detail.

I'm convinced in my own mind that the most effective interrogators, for most rank and file prisoners, is someone that the detainee genuinely likes, and wants to please. Someone who knows how to play on the detainee's ego, and get him do demonstrate how much he knows. They all claim to be goat herders. But once the lie is exposed, they have egos which can be exploited by a skillful interrogator.

That said, if ANYONE can point me to research that quantifies, in an objective manner, the effectiveness of "power-down" techniques vs. rapport-based techniques, I'd love to see them. If it's truly effective, I have no problem with humiliating the crap out of Al Qaeda operatives. They can be reduced to quivering, snivelling blobs of partially hydrogenated pondscum, for all I care, if that's what gets them to sell out their comrades and allows us to roll up their organization.

But if there IS no objective foundation for making idiots of ourselves humiliating prisoners, as per the idiotic "softening up" the clowns at Abu Ghraib claimed they were ordered to perform, then what the f*** are we doing? Because these revelations are coming back to bite us in the ass.

When will we get some adult supervision into the process?

So hey, intel community: Where's the beef? How are your techniques an improvement over Scharff's?