We Have Ways of Making You Talk: From Hanns Scharff to Jack Bauer

"Much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists."

- Vladimir Bukovsky, a former Soviet dissident imprisoned for over a decade (and often tortured himself), in 18 December 2005 Washington Post

When Bukovsky wrote that torture is "the professional disease of any investigative machinery," we might be inclined to say: this is just sour grapes from someone who enjoyed a few too many "Chekist handshakes." But it seems that people from the other side of the interrogation table are inclined to agree. Former CIA station chief (and excellent novelist) Milt Bearden argued in the LA Times on 23 May 2004 that torture is "as futile as it is brutal."

In works of fiction like Jean Larteguy's Les Centurions, on television shows like 24, and in the minds of many US interrogators and conservative commentators, however, torture is a brutal but sometimes necessary element of intelligence gathering. Gillo Pontecorvo's ostensibly anti-war Battle of Algiers similarly suggests that torture yields useful information; hence its popularity in private Pentagon screenings. (A flyer for a 2003 Department of Defense screening of the film said that the French "have a plan" that "succeeds tactically, but fails strategically." In other words, the problem was not that torture took place - it worked well, didn't it? - but rather that it radicalized the friends, families, and societies of those being tortured.)

Finding What You're Looking For, and the Logic of Perpetual Emergency

In one popular joke, the CIA is impressed at how many terrorists the Tunisian secret police have captured. Some case officers fly to Tunis to learn more. The CIA team arrives and compliments the Tunisians on their abilities. A Tunisian officer smiles and produces a rabbit. "Look at this rabbit," he says. "We'll release him and he will vanish. Just try and find him. If you can't do it in 24 hours, we'll show you how." He lets the rabbit go. The CIA team puts a trained dog on the rabbit's scent, but 24 hours pass without success. The Tunisian team then takes the dog and puts it in a basement. They suspend it in the air, pull out its claws, burn it with cigarettes, and beat it senseless. "Where's the rabbit?" demands the Tunisian interrogator. "I don't know," the dog sobs faintly. The Tunisian takes two electric wires and crosses them. They crackle, spitting sparks. He then presses the exposed wires onto opposite sides of the dog's body, which convulses wildly. The wires are removed and the dog howls in agony. "Where's the rabbit?" the Tunisian asks again. The dog yelps: "I am the rabbit!"

Torture is an excellent tool to extract confessions. Anyone can be tortured until he admits that he shot JFK or that he was Osama bin Laden's personal barber. But meaningful facts and operational details are different. You cannot torture someone into giving you my bank account PIN. Worse, even if he knows my PIN, he can give you a false one, buying me enough time to withdraw my money.

In his article, Bearden described how "the ticking-bomb scenario" has become many interrogators' North Star. Lives may be on the line; to get actionable information, then, the interrogator must do, as a popular television character often says, "Whatever it takes." Bearden describes the result: "every detainee became a 'high-value' subject, and...every intelligence question became a 'ticking bomb' case." Consequently, torture becomes the norm, rather than the exception.

Pain and death do not deter a committed ideologue. The Romans asked early Christians to recant or die; thousands chose to be crucified, burned at the stake, and fed to the wild animals of the Coliseum rather than betray their principles. Many others - from Jeanne D'Arc to William Wallace - similarly refused to make concessions to their torturers until the end. Though not all criminals are so self-righteous, the ones who join al-Qaeda-inspired organizations tend to be.

Interrogation Alternatives

Many professional interrogators argue that violence can be counter-productive, that "patience and cunning" could be more effective. Nazi interrogator Hanns Scharff is frequently held up as a model, since he had a well-deserved reputation for always getting actionable intelligence from his prisoners. To Sharff, intelligence was a like a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle. An investigator had to know the outline and some of the details and leverage them to fill in the rest. Sharff's "interrogations" would often consist of a friendly dinner, a philosophical conversation, or a walk through the woods. Sharff would profile his subjects and manipulate them into revealing information in the course of seemingly insignificant small talk. Many never realized that they had betrayed sensitive information to the Nazis until much later. For a long time, recounts a former interrogator, "the interrogation course at the US Army Intelligence Center and School...[was] based on the techniques that Sharff developed...All that seems to have gone out the window in favor of torture now." When the Pentagon invited Scharff to the US for a lecture tour (comparisons to Werner von Braun come to mind), the OC Weekly reports that "Scharff told his military audiences that camaraderie, fair treatment and respect are the indispensable keys to extracting information from the enemy." The contrast is stark between "Scharff's wine-with-dinner technique" - which got results - and "Lynndie England gleefully forcing Iraqi prisoners to masturbate while screwing her Army buddies in front of them" - which did not.

An anecdote from contemporary Iraq is also suggestive:

"Faced with finding the exact location of a minefield in an approximate area, U.S. servicemen lined up some 100 Iraqis next to the field. Off in the distance was a playground of children. 'You may think it’s U.S. soldiers who will die because you won’t tell us where the field is,' Nelson [the interrogator] recalls his colleague saying. 'But it’s the children over there who will die if you don’t tell us where it is.' Six of the 100 stepped forward to locate the mines. 'You actually get better, more accurate intelligence information when you comply with the law,' Nelson reiterates."

A similar methodology known as The Reid Technique was popularized for US law enforcement interrogators. The interrogator is asked to present plausible rationales for a suspect's alleged crime, drawing out confessions through non-leading questions and appeals to an alleged criminal's sense of self-righteousness.

Most criminals feels that their crimes are justified. For example, a criminal may say to himself: It wasn't arson - I just wanted to prove that the fire department's response time is too slow, to cause smoke damage to my rude neighbor's house, or perhaps simply to see how my he would react. It wasn't child abuse - I was toughening him up so that bullies wouldn't hurt him when he was older, or I touched her there to show my love and affection. I didn't kill anyone - I put her out of her misery, I only shook the child to get him to stop crying, I only intended to cut her slightly with the knife. And so forth. Most people firmly believe: "I didn't do anything wrong." This distortion of reality occurs because people do not want to experience guilt and anxiety. The suspect is then led to confess to a self-justifying version of events - that is, a more socially acceptable but equally prosecutable version of his crime.

Interestingly , torturers exhibit tendencies similar to other kinds of criminals. As presented in the Washington Post ("The Psychology of Torture", 11 May 2004), "torturers usually feel that they are carrying out the will of their societies...the torturers were not sadists, but perfectly normal people." As in the infamous Stanford prison experiment, you can "put good people into a bad barrel and they come out bad apples."

More to the point, however, is the fact that Reid and Sharff used psychological measures to get results. Their methodologies do not involve violence. On the contrary, they demand a keen rapport between interviewer and subject. An interrogation is a conversation. Torture is anything but.

Reid, in fact, shares much with the famed Lieutenant Columbo, whose technique, as Changing Minds puts it, was to: "(a) Get them talking, and (b) Slip in the real question." Once a subject is relaxed, Columbo

slips in a question about what he really wants to know. One of the tricks he uses is to phrase the question indirectly. If he wants to know whether a person drives a red car, he picks up something red and talks about a car he used to have that was the same shade of red. The conversation might go something like this:

Columbo: "This is a nice clock. You know, I used to have a car exactly the same color as this. Chevvy, it was."
Suspect: "Hey, I've got a red Chevvy!"
Columbo: "Have you? Well, you know mine was a pretty good one."
Suspect: "Well mine's a '56. Special convertible!"
Columbo: "There aren't too many of those around."
Suspect: "Yeah, I got it from a guy down on 52nd Street."

Columbo now has a vital clue. His informant, like Sharff's prisoners, does not even realize that he is informing.

Sharff, incidentally, shifted from mosaics of military intelligence to literal mosaics. Some of his works are on display at Cinderella Castle in Disney World as well as the floor of California's capitol building in Sacramento.