I am soundly against any form of torture or dishonesty such as a torture bluff under any circumstance.
Understandable.. And I'm sure you don't/didn't spank your children, nor do/did you threaten to use physical violence against them to instill uncertainty as whether you might actually carry out your threats of discipline for non-cooperation and/or bad behavior...
However, I would be curious as to how you do/did discipline your children and achieve compliancy.. Would be an interesting book to read.
Btw, if some people kidnapped your child, and you happened to catch one or more of them before they could get away, would you be so willing to live by your high moral standards by calling the police. Would you do so knowing that time was critical and that you would have to wait for them to conduct a "proper" interrogation so they can discover the "hide-out" where your child might be, as well as the identity of the co-kidnappers?
Or would you take matters into your own hands and beat the truth out of him while he was still off kilter and afraid that you might kill him right then and there??
Internalize this example a bit and then tell me what you would do in such a scenario.. Thanks!!
Qualified interrogators know that when armed with the truth and the commitment to seek truth, they are able to engage detainees in a way that encourages them to come clean on relevant information.
Certainly.. if one has the time to spend in interrogation. But sometimes you don't have the time to wait. And the longer you wait, the more likely the detainee is to get his "alibi" figured out and build up his resistance to being questioned.
But you are right.. most of the time physical violence should not be resorted to since the quality and depth of information is greater, with less chance of "deception based upon fear".
Sometimes all it takes is applying a "human" touch and forcing the detainee to recognize the repercussions from his actions.
A soldier I knew in Iraq told me a story where some a detainee was being interrogated about a attack upon an election polling station that happened to be located in a local school. The guy was questioned verbally with no response.. He was coddled, he was yelled at.. etc, etc.. but no physical violence.
Well, he was standing guard over the guy afterward, and he asked his interpreter to question the guy about if he had children and where they went to school. Well, it turned out that they went to the same school that the polling center was located in (school was out that day)..
This soldier, incredulous at hearing this, asked him how he would have felt if someone had bombed that school while his children were there and the guy IMMEDIATELY FREAKED OUT and starting crying uncontrollably at such a thought..
They immediately took him back into the booth and he wound up confessing everything and ratted on all of his fellow insurgents.
So yeah.. it's great when that happens, and this soldier was very lucky to have found his "button" (even though he wasn't there as an interrogator) and got the guy to "break".
But this is one of the rare moments. The longer you have them in detention, the less cooperative and useful they become.
I'll be standing by to see how you would deal with the scenario I presented to you above...
Hawk |
