TYPES OF MILITARY INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES

Interrogation, also called questioning or interpellation, is commonly employed by police officers, military personnel, and intelligence agencies with an aim of extracting confession or obtaining information. The subjects, for instance, are often the suspects, victims, or witnesses of a crime. Such an interrogation procedure may implicate a different series of techniques ranging from developing a relationship with the subject to outright torture.

So far, there are multiple techniques employed in interrogation execution such as deception, torture, elevating suggestibility and the use of mind-altering drugs to some extent. A person’s suggestibility, for example, is executed according to how willing they are to acknowledge and act towards suggestions by others. In many case, interrogators seek to escalate a subject’s suggestibility by employing several methods such as moderate sleep deprivation, exposure to constant white noise, and the use of GABAergic drugs such as sodium amytal or sodium thiopental.

1^st TYPE – DECEPTION

Deception can form a central part of effective interrogation. In the United States, for instance, there is no explicit law or regulation which prohibits the interrogators from lying about the strength of their case; from making up misleading statements or implying that the interviewee has already been entangled in a crime scene by someone else. The issue of deception is regarded traditionally from the perspective of the interrogators engaging in deception towards the individual being interrogated. Recently, work completed regarding effective interview methods used to collect information from individuals who score in the medium to high range on the measures of psychopathology engaged in deception directed towards the interrogator have appeared in the literature. Whatever it is, the significance of allowing the psychopathic interviewee to tell one lie after another and not confronting until all the lies have been presented and exposed is essential, particularly when the goal is to utilize the interview process to unveil the improbable or unlikely statements made in the future court proceedings.

2^nd TYPE – THE REID TECHNIQUE

The Reid Technique is basically a trademarked interrogation technique, which is widely utilized by law enforcement agencies in North America. The technique which requires interrogators to watch the body language of suspects to detect lies has been criticized for being difficult to apply across cultures, especially when it comes to eliciting false confessions from innocent people.

3^rd TYPE – TORTURE

Such an interrogation scheme may necessitate torture if necessary. When torture is employed, the first thing that the interrogator typically does is speculating on the series of information gained that she/he would like to extract from the subject detained. As a result, this assists the interrogator in creating a benchmark which the subject must meet in order to end painful or adverse situations that occur during the torturing.

The process of carrying out torture to extract certain targeted information may incur three possible outcomes. Firstly, the subject knows nothing and provides made-up stories or a false confession in order to cease the torture. Secondly, the subject has the information which the interrogator seeks, but is able to hold out or divert the interrogator’s attention with fabrication. Thirdly, the subject yields or surrenders under torture and eventually offers the interrogator truthful information. Although interrogation can provide three possible results, however, there is still much controversy surrounding the pattern of its process due to the issue of human rights implications and the fact that it remains very likely that an innocent suspect can be tortured.