How will we get information if we can't torture people?
Warning Signals
Could the Iraqi Prisoner Abuse Scandal Hamper Future Intelligence-Gathering?
By Andrew Chang
…The powers that interrogators have to elicit information have long been as subtle and shadowy as the techniques of a secretive martial arts school, but their practices are coming under extreme scrutiny in the wake of torture and abuse allegations at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at several other sites across the country.
The alleged abuse could be defended as a necessary element of interrogation: Because many of the Iraq prisoners had already been exposed to the brutality of the previous regime, U.S. interrogators had to resort to harsher and more unusual treatment.
Some former interrogators are now worried that the outrage generated by the photographs from Abu Ghraib — in which U.S. military police are seen smiling as they subject Iraqi prisoners to abuses — could lead to new restrictions on interrogation procedures, hampering U.S. intelligence-gathering in the fight against insurgents in Iraq and terrorist groups around the world.
Hartley, the professional interrogator, says his job is as much of an art as it is a science.
Now a consultant at Team Delta, a Pennsylvania-based program that runs interrogation workshops for law enforcement officers, he says: "It will curtail and rail in everything."
