Wired has an excellent article that tracks the development of police interrogation techniques from the dark days of physical violence, to the largely hand-me-down techniques depicted in classic cop shows, to a new era of interrogation developed and researched in secret.
It’s probably one of the best pieces you’ll read on interrogation psychology for, well, a very long time, because they don’t come around very often. This one is brilliantly written.
One key part tracks the influence of still-secret interrogation techniques from the US Government’s High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group or HIG as they have filtered through from the ‘war on terror’ to civilian law enforcement.
In 2010, to make good on a campaign promise that he would end the use of torture in US terror investigations, President Obama announced the formation of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a joint effort of the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon. In place of the waterboarding and coercion that took place at facilities like Abu Ghraib during the Bush years, the HIG was created to conduct noncoercive interrogations. Much of that work is top secret. HIG-trained interrogators, for instance, are said to have questioned would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad and convicted Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The public knows nothing about how those interrogations, or the dozen or so others the HIG is said to have conducted, unfolded. Even the specific training methods the HIG employs—and that it has introduced to investigators in the Air Force, Navy, and elsewhere—have never been divulged.
At the same time, however, the HIG has become one of the most powerful funders of public research on interrogations in America.
A fascinating and compelling read.
Linked to Wired article on the new wave of interrogation.
Mind Hacks 