Refreshing Common Sense from Army Colonel Stuart Herrington

Various money quotes:

I think the first piece of advice for anyone who really wants to understand interrogation is to zero out and ignore virtually everything that they’ve ever seen on either television or in Hollywood movies, because that’s not interrogation as we know it, as professional interrogators, at all.

So much for "24" and the incredibly overworked Ticking Bomb scenario.

HH: Does the United States military torture people?

SH: Well, I think if you ask the question has it happened, or have things taken place that are wrong, and that went well over the line, I think the answer is yes, regrettably. Was it a controlled policy, i.e. that what they were doing was something that was sanctioned from on high, my own personal opinion is that some of it was, especially the things that the task force was doing in Iraq with respect to the top fifty of Saddam’s henchmen that they caught, and al Qaeda types. And in some cases, it was just stupid young people with bad leadership and bad skills essentially behaving in an extremely counterproductive and undisciplined fashion, and that’s more what applies to Abu Ghraib.

He is, of course, speaking of the military here, before the Pentagon tightened the regs in response to Administration pressure that sought to make it *easier* to order our troops to torture. The military guys behaved honorably in the face of the Administration's despicable machinations and should be praised for it. The CIA is still torturing people at the behest of the Administration.
The interview continues in a funny vein as Hewitt does his level best to play the "Yes, yes, but is it *torture*?" game with a man who is a) not interested in word games and b) actually knows what interrogation is supposed to entail. Varieties of answers include this common refrain:

SH: No, I don’t think that’s torture. I don’t think that’s torture, but I think it’s stupid.

SH: I never did it, never had to do it. I realize that it’s in the “repertoire” of a lot of people who fancy themselves interrogators in that it breaks down the defenses, the physical and they hope the psychological defenses of a subject. But again, I never had to resort to that stuff in Vietnam, Panama or the Desert.

SH: I don’t think it’s torture, not in the sense of torture as commonly understood, i.e. water boarding, pulling out fingernails, electric shock, and stuff like that. I just think it’s counterproductive and stupid.

SH: I think that’s stupid as well.

SH: Depends on how loud, I guess. I mean, I could conceive of a level of decibels in a speaker right next to someone’s ear which is causing…

SH: …physical pain, and possibly irreversible damage, and I certainly wouldn’t go there.

SH: Cruel and stupid.

He gives a clean bill of health to Gitmo (something the FBI might dispute, but I think he's obviously an honest man).

His main point is found here:

HH: Can we talk a bit about humane exploitation, Col. Herrington?

SH: Sure.

HH: What’s it look like?

SH: Well, you know, it doesn’t look like Abu Ghraib, I can tell you that.

HH: Well, sure, but I think we agree with that. I mean, I don’t think I know of anyone who has endorsed that, and it’s…

SH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically, when a guy is captured, he’s stressed, he is frightened, and he’s probably expecting to be mistreated, because in most societies in the world, that’s the way it works. Disarming him psychologically, by treating him in a manner the opposite of what he expects, extending decent, humane treatment to him, showing concern for himself, his needs, being nimble in assessing and evaluating the person, and recognizing that getting information from someone is developmental, i.e. you won’t get information from someone, generally speaking, just by saying okay, I’m the captor, you’re the prisoner, tell me what you know. You earn it. I like to say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed probably didn’t give up a lot of the information that he gave up because somebody started water boarding him and beating him up. Instead, they used a very clever approach, and played to his ego and his psychological need to be recognized as the architect of 9/11, and the guy talked. In all of the successful interrogation projects that I’ve ever had anything to do with, extending fundamentally decent treatment to the detainees, we even used to call them guests. And you know, the guards would salute a prisoner if he was an officer, and we give them good food, and we would tell them it was unconditional, regardless of whether they chose to talk with us or not. And that type of an approach has a very high batting average.

Perhaps the biggest "gulf between two worlds" moment takes place in this exchange:

HH: Col., I’m getting a couple of standard questions. Number one, from pilots who have gone through water boarding training in their survival courses, why do you consider it torture?

SH: Well, water boarding is very much like another technique that was used during the Vietnam War by the Vietnamese, where they put a poncho over the head of the person, and then poured water through the poncho into the mouth, simulating drowning. It’s an inhumane…it’s inhumane treatment, it’s the kind of treatment that is essentially trying to extract information from someone by creating a fear of imminent death, not unlike and analogous to mock executions. We will have made progress in this arena when people realize that the way you get information from someone is to outsmart them, and use guile and stealth and chicanery to trick them into information, or secondarily, and the best way, is to persuade the person that it’s the right thing to do to talk.

HH: Is it effective? Is water boarding effective?

SH: Boy, you know what? I can’t tell you that. I’ve never practiced it. I consider it to be abhorrent, a practice that shouldn’t be practiced by any professional interrogator, and you’re going to have to ask someone other than me. But I, generally speaking, know from experience that when you levy brutality against a person in order to get that person to talk, even if the person hasn’t got anything to say, or doesn’t know what it is that you want, they’ll come up with something to say just to get you to quit doing it.

Would that this man (and not this despicable and brutal man who jovially acquiesces to calling waterboarding by the sunny euphemism "dunking") were Vice President.

The whole interview is worth reading. Essentially, it's somebody who knows what he is talking about trying to educate people out of all the "24" agitprop they've seen which has convinced them they know everything there is to know about interrogation.

Bottom line: It turns out the Church is right. Treat prisoners humanely and you will get the intelligence you need as a general rule.

UPDATE: Further reasons to admire Col. Herrington.