GET THE TRUTH
BY PHILIP HOUSTON, MICHAEL FLOYD AND SUSAN CARNICERO
ICON BOOKS
London - Ever wanted to know the best way of extracting a confession?
Me neither, but here’s an unexpectedly fascinating book that shows how to do just that.
Not only will you learn how to have the guilty singing like canaries, this book also comes up with some genuinely important insights about the interrogation process.
Ah, interrogation. Such an unfortunate term, with such regrettable connotations. Torture, screaming agony, electrodes, waterboarding - those kind of connotations.
Yes, but it needn’t be like that, say the authors, former CIA officers who are painfully aware of what ‘CIA interrogation’ is taken to mean - torture, screaming agony, electrodes, waterboarding - and who are appalled by that reputation.
I think the authors are also against torture and pain on ethical grounds, but the nature of their disgust is partly professional. Because it turns out that interrogation-by-torment is ineffective, as the CIA’s skilled specialists have known for some time.
Only rank amateurs would ever try to extract confessions and information by upping the voltage or giving the thumbscrews another turn.
The only approach that has any chance of success, state the authors, is exactly the opposite.
Professionals who really know what they’re doing try to take all traces of violence or confrontation out of an interrogation, turning it instead into an interview based on chummy sympathy and understanding.
Good interrogators will lower their voice, talk slowly, claim empathy with their suspects and then - well, and then just keep on talking lowly and slowly seems to be the gist.
Because what appears to work best is an interrogator who chats on and on, quietly, reassuringly, understandingly, often repetitively.
‘We all make mistakes, Brian. Nobody’s saying we don’t make mistakes because, you know, Brian, we all make mistakes,’ and so on and on and on.
The comforting drone of the interrogator’s monologue may sound mindless, but it is carefully created and should contain five key features.
These are rationalising the action (you needed the money); projecting the blame (it was their fault for not paying you enough); minimising the seriousness (we’ve all nicked Post-it notes); socialising the situation (this kind of thing happens a lot, it’s nothing we haven’t seen a million times); and emphasising the truth (if you could explain what happened when you took the money, that would be great and would help us all move on).
Acts of terrible violence, gross betrayals, fraud, theft, murder - the skilled interrogator will mimic thorough understanding of the worst crimes to keep up the pretence of being on the suspect’s side. At the same time, the interrogator will be intent on keeping that suspect locked into a mode of short-term thinking - keeping the focus on particulars and specifics, trying like crazy to stop the suspect considering the long-term consequences of telling an implicating truth and being found guilty.
It is a process that has had enormous success, claim the authors, though this is a success that is anecdotal.
But the anecdotes are pretty convincing. Take the example of Abu Zubaydah, one of the first Al Qaeda leaders to be captured, who was being successfully won over by the pretend empathy approach until a hardliner applied torture instead - and found his victim clammed up.
The book consists mainly of such case studies from the authors’ interrogating careers, supplemented weirdly with 70-odd pages of commentary by a lawyer type who adds his own legal anecdotes to make the same points.
Presumably, this book is meant to show how the CIA’s interrogation techniques can be applied in the normal world.
But it struck me that here was an opportunity missed, since there isn’t any effective attempt to transfer the professionals’ methods to everyday situations: how to winkle out the truth about which child broke the kitchen window, how to get your partner to fess up about what really happened at the office party.
But though it misses that trick, this book does find itself making, I think to its own surprise, a genuine and important contribution to the ongoing debate, particularly in the US, about the use of torture such as waterboarding during interrogations of terrorists.
Forget any ethical argument, say the authors - any form of physical coercion, far less torture, just doesn’t work.
Daily Mail