Wanted: Scientific Intelligence

Experienced interrogators Steven Kleinman and Matthew Alexander write in the New York Times that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" (i.e. torture) approved by the Bush administration have no track record for effectiveness and may even impede the search for useful counter-terrorism intelligence.

While we speak only for ourselves, we have seen firsthand that many standard approaches are rarely useful in eliciting reliable intelligence, and often serve only to harden a detainee’s resistance. Widely employed tactics like “fear-up harsh,” which is meant to scare a person into answering questions, or “pride and ego down,” which uses humiliation to try to overcome a person’s resistance, are actually counterproductive in establishing the kind of relationship — one based on trust — that is almost always necessary to win a detainee’s cooperation.

The most effective strategies for relationship building are the kind that interrogators used to extract critical information from high-level Japanese and German prisoners during World War II. Interrogators who were familiar with the detainees’ language and culture, and who exhaustively studied each prisoner’s case, used charisma and empathy to patiently elicit vital intelligence. Similarly, it was a relationship-building approach that we used to persuade a detainee to give us information on the whereabouts of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — information that led to his being located and killed in 2006.

Torture is not only illegal and immoral but, according to these and other counter-terrorism professionals, ineffective and possibly harmful to gathering useful intelligence. Kleinman and Alexander support President Obama's executive order banning torture and establishing a panel to study effective legal techniques and set our national policy accordingly.

--Ballard Burgher