Centerfield

A New Way to Interrogate

This is a fascinating article in The Atlantic relating to the interrogation of prisoners. About six months before the Abu Gharib stuff broke, a group of Marine offices posted a document from a WW II interrogator on how to get information from POWs, in this case Japanese. His advice was contrary to the standard get-tough approach and apparently achieved very good results.

Marine Major Sherwood F. Moran, the report's author, noted that despite the complexities and difficulties of dealing with an enemy from such a hostile and alien culture, some American interrogators consistently managed to extract useful information from prisoners. The successful interrogators all had one thing in common in the way they approached their subjects. They were nice to them.

According to the article, Moran was able to obtain the Japanese order of battle during the Saipan invasion, an extremely valuable piece of information, by treating his prisoners as people rather than using the harsh tactics common to such interrorgations.

The point of this, obviously, was to contrast this with the interrogation tactics used at Abu Gharib. According to the article, a lot of the professional military interrogators were very critical of the use of civilians who did not speak the language and did not know what they were doing. These people think that the Abu Gharib tactics are, in general, counterproductive. What is interesting to me is a point they make and that I have read elsewhere. People tend to think of torture as being most effective in the "24" (TV show) "ticking bomb" scenario. However, aside from the fact that the ticking bomb scenario is highly unlikely in the first place, the idea is that information extracted under torture is likely to be unreliable anyway. In this regard, I have always wondered about the information that we supposedly obtained about terrorist attacks from the captives at Guantanamo and elsewhere. This was trumpeted as proof that our interrogation tactics were effective, but I always wondered how much of what we got was simply disinformation.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that it makes sense to simply abjure more harsh interrogation. I doubt that "being nice" is a panacea, especially since Major Moran was not exactly the typical interrogator.

Moran spoke fluent Japanese, but more important, he was thoroughly familiar with Japanese culture, having spent forty years in Japan as a missionary. He used this knowledge for one of his standard gambits: making a prisoner homesick

Moran's approach seems to have been effective, at least in part, because of his knowledge and background in Japanese culture. He was probably pretty exceptional then and there probably aren't a lot of people available today with that much knowledge about Iraqi or Middle Eastern culture. We don't have a draft; we can't just pull people out of thin air to help interrogate prisoners. In addition, it seems to me the context is significantly different. The Pacific War was a conventional, if especially brutal, war. The Japanese prisoners were soldiers and not terrorists. And while the Japanese soldiers had been indoctrinated with how evil Americans were, for the most part, they were just ordinary guys forced to fight in a war, however much they may have accepted it as their duty to fight for the emperor. Plus, I suspect that their feelings toward Americans, especially as prisoners, was fear more than hate. The insurgents are, I suspect, different. These are people totally committed to the cause and ideology and they hate the very existence of the Americans. The very fact that these people are willing to to become insurgents makes it likely that they would be much more committed than would the ordinary Japanese soldier. So, I'm not sure that "being nice" would have the same effect on an insurgent as it did on a terrified Japanese prisoner. (I should also point out that several months ago, The Atlantic ran an article based on interviews with experienced interrogators, that sort of took the opposite view: while actual physical torture was counterproductive, effective interrogators should use tactics that put the captive under some physical or emotional stress.)

Still, I think the article makes some interesting points. For one thing, it points out the lack of trained interrogators.

In contrast, in late 2002 the military's Southern Command had so few interrogators and interpreters that it was forced to employ inexperienced and untrained civilian contractors to perform these jobs at Guantánamo. The officer in charge of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib had no interrogation experience himself and no skilled interrogators or interpreters working underneath him. He, too, turned to civilian contractors.

In fairness, it would be hard to expect the military to anticipate every contingency and to have as many trained interrogators as we had during WW II, when the entire nation was mobilized for war and we had a draft. And, let's face it, there was a lot less scrutiny in WW II than there is now. If some reported had written a story about this Moran "being nice" to the heinous Japanese soldiers, I suspect there would have been an outcry for his head. Today, it would probably be even worse because this isn't just military information they are trying to get, but, in some cases, information about terrorist attacks. Can you imagine what Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity would say if we had an interrogator whose technique was to "be nice" to the sworn enemies of America? Still, it seems to me that we could profitably examine our tactics and strategies, not just with respect to Iraq but with regard to the WOT more generally. It seems much of what we do is rather shortsighted.