Interview with an interrogator
Posted by Thomas Nephew on June 19th, 2008
On Tuesday, Human Rights First held an event in downtown Washington D.C. honoring the efforts of professional military, CIA, and FBI interrogators to restore decency and respect for human rights to U.S. detainee interrogation policy. Human Rights First and these interrogators are advocating a policy of “rapport-based” interrogations — no torture and no cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment by anyone acting on behalf of the United States of America.
I had a conversation at that event with one man who is now retired from the military after extensive service as an interrogator. I wrote about our conversation here: “I want my white hat back” — military interrogators against torture.
Today I corresponded again with “Ray” — a pseudonym — about his positions on following orders to waterboard or otherwise torment a detainee, about what he thought his colleagues believe, about Abu Ghraib, and about what the future may hold.
1. If you had been ordered to waterboard someone or engage in other cruel/inhumane/degrading detainee mistreatment (e.g.., hypothermia, long time standing), what would you have done?
Refused the order. That would probably have resulted in my getting fired or re-assigned, but so be it. In addition, I would have documented the incident, and reported it to the Army’s (assuming that’s the environment I would have been working in) Criminal Investigation Division, or otherwise appropriate authorities.
2. [Excuse my ignorance here]: … what if the order was not “up to snuff” — not written, not verbally direct with witnesses, or whatever constitutes “an order that should be obeyed”?
Same answer. Refuse the order, immediately document the incident, and follow up with a report to the appropriate investigative authorities.
3. Do you believe that such orders/wishes should not be obeyed by military personnel?
This is where it gets murky. Personally, of course, I feel that they should not be obeyed. The difficulty for my collegues, especially in the military, is that we are sworn to follow “the lawful orders of the officers appointed above us”. So what’s lawful? All of us were trained in the Law of Land Warfare and the Geneva Conventions, which these “enhanced interrogation techniques” are clearly a violation of.. But Private Snuffy is confused: “didn’t the United States Attorney General, the top law enforcement official in the land, muddy the waters by saying that it was legal? And didn’t the president say that these folks don’t fall under the Geneva Conventions? So what about those rules they taught me?” We are doing our troops a great disservice by blurring the “lawful” line. So to answer your question again: me personally, I would hope that an order to carry out these techniques would be disobeyed. But I can’t really hold it against someone who carried it out, thinking that it was legal, and felt compelled to carry out a lawful order.
4. Do you feel your answers to the above three questions would be a majority opinion in the group of interrogators you were with over the past few days?
Question 1: Not just majority opinion, but unanimous.
Question 2: Same
Question 3: Certainly majority, if not unanimous. One of the retired generals in the group explicitly made the point that he did not want the authority to order these techniques carried out, for the reason listed above: it would make it a lawful order, and the soldiers serving under him would have no recourse but to carry out a lawful order, or face prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for failing to do so.
5. Do you believe that such orders/wishes should not be obeyed by any govt. personnel? (i.e., CIA or FBI — the latter seem to have drawn the line themselves, but that could change someday)
Same answer as number 3. I do not believe the order should be carried out, but it is asking a lot of these personnel to put their livelihoods and careers on the line, and we can condemn them with hindsight if we like, but the better solution is to not ask them to do it in the first place.
6. Do you feel there’s the possibility of professional opinion changing as new interrogators become accustomed to the new regime of loosened restrictions (at least within the CIA)?
I’m assuming you mean professional opinion changing for the worse. And yes, I can absolutely see that happening. Let’s say this policy stays in force. Those that would refuse the order would eventually be weeded out of the system, leaving only those that would use these techniques, and they in turn would be the only mentors to the next generations of interrogators. Those that abhor the techniques would be on the outside looking in. Basically, our group is in that same position. We are no longer in the military, or CIA, or FBI. We are on the barricades, but outside the fort, not inside. We are trying to influence the policymakers to not put those inside the fort into the position of having to compromise their core values. And we are arguing from a position of professional strength: sure, we also oppose these techniques on moral grounds, and in the belief that they dilute our nation’s image abroad (creating a breeding environment for more terrorists), etc., but mainly we are saying that from the standpoint of professional interrogators, we DO NOT NEED these techniques. We can get the job done without them.
I know that it’s important to follow orders in the military, but that’s not drilled in to me the way it is (and for 99.99% of cases, should be) for a soldier. On the other hand, I know at least one ex-military blogger who said, at the time Abu Ghraib broke, that the people involved should simply not have followed those orders (or carried out those wishes) based on code of conduct.
[I]t’s important to keep facts straight and in reasonable proportion. Abu Ghraib, for example. The abuses and resulting pictures were not an interrogation tactic, but a guard force night shift run amok. Don’t get me wrong: this was without question a horrific abuse of detainees in U.S. custody, and must be addessed and those responsible held to account. All I’m saying is that it’s a different discussion. Yes, there were comments from interrogators to “make sure he has a bad night” etc, maybe even with a nudge/wink, and those interrogators share the resulting fiasco, because they were not clear in their instructions. But I don’t think what resulted was really what the interrogators had in mind. Nevertheless, it is this nudge/wink and between the lines communication that were part of the permissive environment that ended as it did. Most of the orders leading to the abuses were not in writing, if any of them were. The only exception I can think of would be the use of “military working dogs”. That was a technique promoted by a general (who was not an intelligence officer, let alone an interrogator). Unfortunately, by virtue of his rank and position, he held authority over detainee treatment and interrogation procedures. As for the ex-military blogger you mentioned, I only say that we all see clearly in hindsight. The answer, again, lies in not putting these soldiers and other intelligence professionals into this netherworld of blurred lines and questionable legal definitions, for soldiers are conditioned to follow lawful orders. They are not lawyers, and we can not expect them to be. They must have clearly defined delineations, which were provided under the Laws of Land Warfare and the Geneva Conventions, and don’t need the waters muddied by policymakers and their lawyers, who in the end don’t know anything about interrogation beyond what they’ve seen on television.
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EDIT, 6/20: “off the record ” (conversation) removed.
Category: Post. Tags: interrogation, interview, selected, torture.
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June 20th, 2008 at 2:40 am
I’d like to know what the average age of an interrogator is, and also whether they’re enlisted or officers. I know that questioning orders is just not something the average airman I know would do. And when I was 25, I didn’t have the judgement to question the fine points of the law, and I majored in pre-law!
I also would like to know how one’s mindset changes, being in a war situation, versus living in the safety of a military base stateside. I can imagine there would be enormous pressure to stay with the program, even when the program includes morally questionable activities. (Not a whole lot different from junior high, as I recall.)
June 20th, 2008 at 7:43 am
Hi Kathy. Excellent questions, I appreciate your interest. I can only speak with authority on the subject of military interrogators, not on FBI, CIA, or any other agencies. For the Army, I’d say the average age of a person entering the field of interrogation is about 19-20. The average age of a working Army interrogator, then, is slightly higher, about in the mid-twenties, accounted for by the crusty old warrant officers throwing off the bell curve! (I was one of those). The Marine Corps has a slightly different policy: a Marine can not sign up to be an interrogator until after their first enlistment. Not a bad policy, for it allows for a more mature, seasoned person to absorb the training.
Can one’s mindset be changed while deployed, rather than being in garrison stateside? Sure it can. It doesn’t have to, but it sure can. And you’re right, the pressures can be enormous. Your commander doesn’t even have to tell you explicitly that s/he wants results; you already know s/he does, and you can be your own internal pressure cooker, not wanting to disappoint them. Yes, interrogators are trained and made aware of these issues, but we’re only human, and as such can fail like any other. Again, I want to be clear that this is a possibility, and not a foregone conclusion. However, that’s enough to warrant safeguards in the form of preventative measures and policies. But that’s another discussion.
June 20th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
We hear it all the time: professional interrogators say coercive interrogation just doesn’t work.
But should we be surprised to find that professional interrogators who actually believe otherwise would say that anyway when asked?
After all, in this environment, don’t you think they’re smart enough to see that the next question asked of them would be “well, how do you know it works?”
June 20th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
We all know despite all of the dissembling and bulls**t that torturing people is wrong. The strangest thing to me in all of this is that virtually everyone agrees it is wrong to torture animals and, indeed, Americans are jailed for it.
I’m a Vietnam Era vet. Both my parents were Korea vets. My mother’s still living and she calls the Bush administration, never mind its torturers (including “contract agents”), war criminals because that is what they are. Torture is a violation of human rights and of the civilized rules of warfare itself. We all know this.
Age is not an issue. Soldiers have always been young for obvious reasons. Americans have not always tortured prisoners, never mind going around in public actually supporting it.
No one in the military is required to obey an unlawful order and clearly torturing people is unlawful.
The officers’ oath is an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against *all* enemies, foreign or domestic.
I took the enlisted man’s oath which further required a following of orders. But that wasn’t meant to be a “good German” clause, now or ever. I consider myself still bound by my oath to protect the Constitution. I would not however defend the Bush-Cheney administration.
I spent a lot of time in Nicaragua and El Salvador in the 80s, during Reagan’s wars there. I can say this much for them: At least they tried to cover up things like torture, murder of civilians, “disappearing” people, and so forth.
Today, they’d be celebrating it.
That’s not progress.
June 20th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
edh, I’d like to address some of your well-made points.
“We hear it all the time: professional interrogators say coercive interrogation just doesn’t work.”
It goes further than that: professional interrogators do not accept these people as colleagues. I call them goons. Interrogators won’t do the dirty deed, so they bring in some goon who will. Basta.
Second: “But should we be surprised to find that professional interrogators who actually believe otherwise would say that anyway when asked?”
Again, goons, pure and simple. But I’d like to talk about the notion that “torture doesn’t work”. The ugly truth is, sometimes it does, and that’s enough to keep the torture apologists going, just as a gambler only needs a win every once in a while to keep blowing his money.
Clearly, the majority (if not all) of my colleagues will tell you that the problem with torture is that the nature of the information’s extraction taints the interrogators ability to access its truthfulness. That’s strictly the argument from a trained interrogator’s perspective. On TOP of that come all the other arguments that stem from moral cores as both human beings and as Americans. As Bruce Springsteen sings, “Your flag flyin’ over the courthouse / means certain things are set in stone / Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t.”
Go forth, edh, and you too, LaBarge, go forth and do great things. Remind your fellow citizens of the difference between patriotism and jingoism and nationalism. And LaBarge, George W. Bush took that same oath to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic… I salute you and your parents for keeping the faith.
June 21st, 2008 at 9:53 am
Thank you.
The difference between my oath and Bush’s, evidently, is that I took it in seriousness and he took it as a pro-forma ceremony. I seriously doubt that Bush has the intellectual wherewithal to understand the consequences of his decisions and those of his underlings. Cheney and others, on the other hand, do understand but don’t care. What’s right, what’s wrong, isn’t in their picture to begin with. It’s who has power and who doesn’t, for them. Thankfully, they’ll soon be done, like it or not.
June 21st, 2008 at 8:20 pm
Sorry, but I call BS on some of the statements here. It’s annoying how the only interrogators I see interviewed in the media are either anti-war activists or are long retired and have no idea how the current war is fought.
Incidentally, I am a current US Army officer, Iraqi vet, and a former interrogator. I also questioned dozens of Iraqi prisoners myself. To answer KathyF’s question, most interrogators vary in age from pretty young to retirement age. They are normally all enlisted or warrant officers. It’s very rare for an officer to conduct an interrogation - they are not trained for it. Since I was one of the few that had been previously trained, I filled in sometimes because we were so short handed, especially very early in the war.
Let me clear up some myths - the military does not, and has never (in my lifetime anyway) condoned torture. (To answer this one in advance, Waterboarding was used by the CIA, not the military, and in any case was only used on three high level Al-Qaida members.) Yes, some prisoners were abused or tortured in Iraq. But at least 99% of these incidents were NOT done by interrogators or for the purpose of interrogation - like Abu Gharaib, for example. The soldiers responsible here were military police who were doing it out of boredom, not to gain any intelligence on the enemy. There were a few other incidents, mostly unsubstantiated. If I was ordered to torture I would have said no, and I would not have lost my job or suffered for it. On the contrary, torturing is what gets you in trouble. EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Abu Gharaib defendants tried to claim they were told to torture, and that defense failed every single time. Everyone knows its wrong, and every one in the military knows that you can be prosecuted for obeying an explicity illegal order.
In one incident, my unit (the 1/1 Cavalry squadron) had an interrogation team attached to us. One of their interpreters hit a prisoner on one occasion. He was fired immediately (although he was hired by another unit later). I am not joking. That is the military that I belong to, and the one I served under in Iraq.
What never gets heard is the 99% of us who never abused prisoners. But everyone assumes that the other 1% represents the entire military as a whole, all at Rumsfeld or Bush’s direction. For a comparison of how ludicrious that is, just read your hometown newspaper of any major city for a week. It will be rare for you to not find one reported incident of police abuse or brutality. Does that mean that all police are bad? Does that mean the attorney general offically condones torture? Why don’t we hear the same amount of media hype in these cases?
The problem is that people are deliberately demonizing the military for political purposes relating to the war. If you think the war is wrong, then you should be able to demonstrate that without having to resort to hype and sweeping generalizations.
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:06 pm
[...] Nephew conducted an email “interview” with Ray. Here it is. Because the comments to that post are interesting, I include them as [...]
June 22nd, 2008 at 1:43 pm
It’s annoying how the only interrogators I see interviewed in the media are either anti-war activists or are long retired and have no idea how the current war is fought.
Since Mr. Bennett was in Iraq as well (”deck of cards” interrogator, see the prior post on the topic), I assume you’re assuming he’s an anti-war activist. I can’t say whether he is or isn’t (not sure what counts — we don’t have secret handshakes, you know), but it’s not clear to me why that would make any difference. I’m an anti-war activist — I say 2+2=4. What should pro-war activists conclude about 2+2?
The soldiers responsible here were military police who were doing it out of boredom
No, they were told to “soften up” prisoners, and were told to use military dogs as part of that process. I respectfully disagree a bit with Ray here — yes, they ran amok… but I think a situation was deliberately created where they would run amok. They thought they were doing the right thing, they didn’t think there would be consequences (other than maybe medals) — all those thumbs ups and smiles tell me so.
EVERY SINGLE ONE of the Abu Gharaib defendants tried to claim they were told to torture, and that defense failed every single time
You betcha — the proximate cause why that defense failed is because they weren’t really allowed to pursue it (HRF link, NYT link) From the latter:
So the evidence was never weighed. That’s a legalistic victory for you and Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, I guess, but it’s part of the shame of these events for many of us.
people are deliberately demonizing the military for political purposes relating to the war.
Generally speaking, I think no one is demonizing the entire military here. But the notorious Abu Ghraib case is but one episode of torture and cruel/inhumane/degrading treatment, treatment that led to over 100 deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo (I count the suicides). Like it or not — I can tell you don’t — many of those abuses occurred in the US military, and that makes them the military’s responsibility (and those who bent and broke prior policies to encourage those abuses). Let’s not let the good conduct of most soldiers turn into an alibi for bad conduct when it happens.
The blame for this treatment belongs at the top: people like Yoo who concocted legal fig leaves for it, people like William Haynes II who misled JAGs into thinking it was disapproved when the opposite was the case, people like Rumsfeld who asked “why just 4 hours? I stand for 8 hours”. And people like Bush and Cheney who pushed for waterboarding and “enhanced interrogations” going beyond the Field Manual, and monitored events to see they were getting what they wanted. Those two should have been impeached long ago, and still should be in my opinion. So no, this isn’t deliberately demonizing the military (though I assume we both wish there were more Sgt Provances and fewer Chuck Graners in it). It’s criticizing the people who pushed military into abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, Gardez, and elsewhere.
June 22nd, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Mr. Lohan, I read your post with interest, and don’t quite understand you’re “calling BS”. There’s nothing you said that I disagree with, and I don’t believe I previously made points that should have given you concern. My “mea culpa” here is perhaps that I did not make explicit the issue you raised: I agree with you that the military is not the problem when it comes to the issue of abusive interrogations. The military experiences isolated incidents, and addresses them as they arise. No one in the military waterboards anyone, and I did not make any such claim. Rather, the military is struggling to accomplish the mission while remaining true to its values, and the civilian leadership’s blurring of the lines is not helping. Consider this: our government was set up, as far as the military goes, with the notion that “war is too important to be left to the generals”. Thus we have civilian leadership in the chain of command, from the Secretary positions on up, emplaced to ensure that a “war-mongering” military would not run amok. Strange times we live in, when it is the military calling for restraint, and the civilian leadership is amok.
As to my person: I retired in 2006, hardly “long ago”, with deployments to Iraq. Let’s agree, again, that the military is not the big problem here. I’m not trying to assign blame (although inevitably some will think so), but rather trying to influence what we do from this point forward. The “blame game” can be taken up by someone else, it is not my issue.
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:35 pm
To Thomas Nephew - Yeah right - so you think Spc Lynnie England and the other Abu Gharaib idiots thought they were doing the right thing and trying to help out military intelligence? Are you for real? They were stupid, but not that stupid. Anyway, the Abu Gharaib defendants were not told to “soften up” prisoners by anyone in any authority. Plus, interrogators wouldn’t want someone else messing with their sources anyway, and I saw no evidence that any of these prisoners were believed to hold any intelligence value.
I could maybe see the value in asking Gen Sanchez to testify, but Donald Rumsfeld? Are you on crack? He was thousands of miles away and had no idea what was going on. In the United States, do we have the US attorney general testify every time a prisoner is abused in any local jail?
To Ray Bennett: I’m a little confused here. You are an interrogator also? The post above was written in the third person - so were you both the writer of the post and the interviewee? Are are you both interrogators named “Ray”?
June 22nd, 2008 at 11:17 pm
Mr. Lohan, I am (or was) indeed an interrogator, retired after 22 years of service as such in the rank of Chief Warrant Officer 4. I am the interviewee, and after the interview was published on Thomas’ blog, I have also contributed some responses to comments left here, all in the interest of addressing some of the questions that were posted. I have made no effort to obfuscate that, and I’m left to wonder if you were reading all that carefully. I’d like to know about your having been “previously trained” in interrogation, only for the sake of clarity. That statement could mean a number of things: prior enlisted or warrant officer service, or perhaps civilian service as an interrogator, whether for an intelligence, military, or law enforcement agency. To be clear: I’m not questioning your statement of service, I’m merely curious as to the nature.
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:15 am
Abuse of prisoners by U.S. military personnel was routine at Bagram in Afghanistan from November 2001 through at least 2002, and probably longer. Soldiers appeared to believe that because the people responsible for the September 2001 attacks had been based in Afghanistan at the time, that they were entitled to beat and mistreat prisoners.
This had nothing to do with anything resembling legitimate interrogation, for the most part, but some of the worst abuses, in which prisoners were beaten to death, were carried out by “interrogators”.
I’m concerned that these extreme and relatively well-reported cases blot out the extent to which the abuse that resulted in the deaths of Dilawar and Habibullah was routine for dozens, perhaps hundreds of other Bagram prisoners who did not die: beatings, being hung by the wrists from the ceiling, being held naked, exposed to freezing cold.
There’s a much deeper problem of ignorance, fear, entitlement, and impunity here than Ray or John Lohan want to acknowledge.
June 23rd, 2008 at 1:52 am
To Ray Bennet: if you were the interviewee, then who wrote the post then? I’m just curious - Im not familiar with this blog; I just stumbled on it the other day. Incidentally, when I said I was calling “BS”, I wasn’t just referring to the post but also some of the comments here. What I disagreed in the post was your assertion that refusing to torture someone probably would have gotten you reassigned or fired. In my experience, anyone torturing anyone were far more likely to be fired - but you wouldn’t know that from the media hype on the subject.
I am prior enlisted 97E interrogator (now called a 35M). In Iraq I conducted dozens of interrogations early in the war because we were so short-handed, although technicaly what I was doing was only “tactical questioning” because by regulation I wasn’t allowed to interrogate since I was not specifically assigned to that position. Still, it was a hell of a learning experience.
If you want to know more about me, you can click the link on my name and go to my blog. From there, there’s my bio and links to my photos in Iraq.
June 23rd, 2008 at 11:16 am
@John, re comment 11 and 14.
1) I wrote the post. I’m not an interrogator. Ray is. Maybe some of the confusion is due to my posts not having my name on them — this template and blog software are new for me. I’ll fix that.
2) I appreciate the improvement in tone since comment 11; no more “are you on crack” stuff, thank you.
3) Re Abu Ghraib, there’s what should have happened there and what in fact did happen there. England and Graner had reason to believe they were doing “higher”s bidding, even if they were “creative” about it. And it wasn’t just them, or the photos that they took. Provance reports a kid was mistreated so his dad would crack — utterly reprehensible stuff. Civilian contractors did worse - esp. one fellow, N. Some of this was military, some wasn’t, but it was all on Rummie’s and Cheney’s and Bush’s watch. They made it happen. My understanding of A.G. is second-hand, of course, mainly via Tara McKelvey’s book “Monstering”, and what I’ve gleaned from various news accounts.
4) To pick up on what Nell writes, and supply some links, the point isn’t just Abu Ghraib. It’s Guantanamo and Gardez and Bagram and other incidents that have left too many prisoners dead, too many abused, too many sure to hate us for the rest of their lives. (And those are just the ones we know about.) A system was built up that was designed to shirk responsibility — slow, slow investigations, whitewashes when they happened, and refusal to follow the trail up to where it should have gone.
December 4th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
[...] I’m also satisfied that I did my best to help raise the issues of Iraq, civil liberties, torture, global warming, Iran, and the rule of law during the election season, whether here on my blog or [...]