Interrogation
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Interrogation or questioning is interviewing as commonly employed by officers of the police and military.
The interviewee is also referred to as a "source". It is used for getting information from a suspect, witness or victim after a crime has been committed.
Interviewing is not necessarily to force a confession, but rather to develop sufficient rapport as to prompt the source to disclose valuable information.
Interrogation is accusatory in nature, and the suspect is told that they committed the offense, and presented with facts to obtain a confession.
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[edit] Interrogation around the world
[edit] Britain
[edit] Ireland
[edit] USA
Cold War
War On Terror
Torture is now officially banned from use at Guantanamo Bay and all other U.S. camps for illegal combatants. Army regulations state that such treatment during interrogation crosses the boundary between acceptable methods of gaining information and torture.
US Air Force General Jack L. Rives (Deputy Judge Advocate General) advised a US government task force that many of the extreme methods of interrogation would leave service personnel open to legal sanction in the US and foreign countries.
US officers were previously allowed interrogation techniques classified as torture including:
- sleep deprivation
- waterboarding
- exposure to extremes of cold and heat
- placing prisoners in "stress positions" for long periods of time
See also How to Break a Terrorist: Veteran FBI interrogator Jack Cloonan has broken some of al Qaeda’s toughest operatives. In this special interview with FP, he shares some of his methods for making a terrorist tell all. Foreign Policy Television (FPTV) video.
[edit] Nazi Germany
[edit] Inquisition
[edit] Japan
[edit] Resistance training
Resistance training is often a prerequisite for some personnel since prisoners of war (POWs) routinely undergo military interrogation.
[edit] Interrogation techniques
There are multiple possible methods of interrogation including deception, torture, increasing suggestibility, and using mind-altering drugs.
[edit] Suggestibility
The methods used to increase suggestibility are moderate sleep deprivation, exposure to constant white noise, and using GABAergic drugs such as sodium amytal.
[edit] Reid
One notable interrogation technique is the Reid technique. However, the Reid technique (which requires interrogators to watch the body language of suspects to detect deceit) has been criticized [1] for being too difficult to apply across cultures and is impracticable for many law enforcement officers.
[edit] Deception
Deception can form an important part of effective interrogation. In the United States, there is no law or regulation that forbids the interrogator from lying, from making misleading statements or from implying that the interviewee has already been implicated in the crime by someone else.
[edit] Torture
Interrogations may involve torture. When torture is employed in interrogation, the first thing the interrogator typically does is to speculate on the type of information s/he would like to extract from the subject. This assists the interrogator in creating a benchmark that the subject must meet in order to end the painful or uncomfortable conditions that occur in torture.
The process of using torture to extract this targeted information may have three possible outcomes. The first is that the subject knows nothing and provides made-up information or a false confession in order to cause the torture to stop; the second is that the subject has the information that the interrogator seeks but is able to "hold out" or divert the interrogators attention with false information (which can be misconstrued for the previous outcome mentioned); and the third is that the subject capitulates under torture and offers the interrogator truthful information. Interrogation has yielded all three results. However, much controversy surrounds the process of torture because of both its human rights implications and the fact that it remains possible that an innocent person can be tortured. When the subject of torture doesn't actually have information or is innocent, the subject may provide a false confession. If not, that individual must bear with the procedures with the knowledge that s/he cannot stop it. Many human rights organizations and political figures have spotlighted these facts. They have pointed out that torture carries the possibility of being ineffective in extracting accurate information. However, this is true of all interrogation techniques.
The debate over these advantages and disadvantages of torture continues to this day. Nonetheless, clarity has been made in the torture debate over the differences between instances of torture that are used in different contexts. To this end, Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has argued, "If torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used—and will be used—to obtain the information. ... no one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility."[1][2]
[edit] Other
[edit] Movement for increased recording of interrogations in the US
Currently, there is a movement for mandatory electronic recording of all custodial interrogations in the United States. [2] "Electronic Recording" describes the process of recording interrogations from start to finish. This is in contrast to a "taped" or "recorded confession," which typically only includes the final statement of the suspect. "Taped interrogation" is the traditional term for this process; however, as analog is becoming less and less common, statutes and scholars are referring to the process as "electronically recording" interviews or interrogations. Alaska, [3] Illinois, [4] Maine, [5], Minnesota, [6] and Wisconsin [7] are the only states to require taped interrogation. New Jersey’s taping requirement started on January 1, 2006. [8] [9] Massachusetts allows jury instructions that state that the courts prefer taped interrogations. See Commonwealth v. DiGiambattista, 813 N.E.2d 516, 533-34 (Mass. 2004). Commander Neil Nelson of the St. Paul Police Department, an expert in taped interrogation, [10] has described taped interrogation in Minnesota as the "best thing ever rammed down our throats." [11]
[edit] See also
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Look up interrogation in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
[edit] External links and sources
- Interrogation techniques from GlobalSecurity.org
- Limits to Interrogation - The Man In The Snow White Cell, how Nguyen Tai resisted interrogation and torture for years.
[edit] References
- ^ Michael Slackman What's Wrong With Torturing a Qaeda Higher-Up?, New York Times 16 May 2004
- ^ Philip Hensher Hollywood is helping us learn to love torture, The Independent, 26 June 2007
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