9th
March 2015
re. Interrogation techniques
Dear Mr President,
I recently saw a news report on the demonstrations outside Homan Square in
Chicago, which
included an allegation that one of the law enforcement officers who worked
there, Detective Richard Zuley, had also worked at the detention camp at
Guantánamo Bay. The article implied that transfers of this sort were not
unusual.
I have since found out that the most
common technique used in the USA for questioning suspects, the Reid Method, prioritises obtaining a
confession rather than gathering information. I find it easy to imagine this
style of questioning degenerating into the type of abuses enumerated in the Senate
Select Committee on Intelligence ‘Study
of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program’ (1) from which I quote Dianne
Feinstein:
“It is my sincere and deep hope that through the release of these
findings (...) U.S. policy will never again allow for secret and indefinite
detention and the use of coercive interrogations”
This report states that it has been
known within the CIA for some time that non-coercive interrogation methods and
humane detainee conditions are better at eliciting accurate information. It is implied
that it was the suddenness and urgency of the situation in the immediate
aftermath of 9/11 that resulted in their being abandoned in place of coercive
ones: even, apparently, upon suspects who would have been willing to
co-operate.
I infer from this that the main
reason for the use of the wrong type of techniques was a lack of available trained
personnel.
This looks to me like an opportunity
to solve two problems at once: if civilian law-enforcers were trained in
non-coercive questioning techniques such as those found by Laurence Alison in
the UK (2) to be most effective, this would solve more conventional crimes
while also providing a ‘pool’ of ready-trained personnel who could be
transferred to interview suspected terrorists effectively and humanely should
the need suddenly arise, for example following the breaking-up of a large
terrorist cell.
It would also avoid future damage to
your country’s reputation overseas: a point made in the Senate Committee study
(point #20). This is a matter about which I, personally, know you to care: only
last week your ambassador, His Excellency Matthew Barzun, took the trouble to
visit my children’s school to discuss our two countries’ ‘special relationship’
and take questions (3).
Yours sincerely,
(the Real) Dr Verity Player
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