Another voice in the choir
Dec. 2nd, 2008 07:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumI've been saying, for a long time, that good questioning methods will get information from anyone who is going to talk. I've also been saying that torture (even under the sanitizing euphemism, "enhanced questioning techniques") is counter -productive.
Well, guess what? One more person, who's actually done the work, agrees with me.
I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
He's wrong, his methods weren't unique. As he says, they are simply the application of the tried and true methods in the FM. The stuff we put together in the course of 60 years of applying the art. David Drake used them, I used them. "Chris Mackey" used them.
All of us adapted them to the situations before us. In "Matthew Alexander's" case one of the needed adaptations was to deal with his being in an environment which was more law enforcement, than war zone (which is the thing I've been saying about the "War on Terror" along with people more widely known, and respected, like Bruce Schneier). Because he was using the tools that work, he could adapt.
Torture is a hammer, and everything starts to look like a nail.
You meet him, buy him a drink for me, he's earned it.
Well, guess what? One more person, who's actually done the work, agrees with me.
I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
He's wrong, his methods weren't unique. As he says, they are simply the application of the tried and true methods in the FM. The stuff we put together in the course of 60 years of applying the art. David Drake used them, I used them. "Chris Mackey" used them.
All of us adapted them to the situations before us. In "Matthew Alexander's" case one of the needed adaptations was to deal with his being in an environment which was more law enforcement, than war zone (which is the thing I've been saying about the "War on Terror" along with people more widely known, and respected, like Bruce Schneier). Because he was using the tools that work, he could adapt.
Torture is a hammer, and everything starts to look like a nail.
You meet him, buy him a drink for me, he's earned it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 07:40 am (UTC)The fallacy is not so much the "everything looks like a nail" one as the belief that if you're powerful enough, you can bully everyone into going along with you.