Imagine a prison. There are three types of people in the prison: Guards, Prisoners, and Interrogators
The goal of the Interrogators is to have the Prisoners talk to them. The tools the Interrogators have at their disposal are positive and negative reinforcement.
First, the Interrogators talk to the Guards. They use positive reinforcement on the Guards. The Interrogators encourage the Guards to abuse the Prisoners by praising them when they do so.
Second, the Guards abuse the Prisoners. The more the Guards abuse the Prisoners, the more the Interrogators praise them. The more the Guards abuse the Prisoners, the more the Guards praise one another. The more creatively the Guards abuse the Prisoners, the more praise they get from both Interrogators and Guards.
Third, the Interrogators talk to the Prisoners. They use negative reinforcement on the Prisoners: if the Prisoners talk then the Interrogator will order the Guards to stop their abuse. The Interrogators even invite the Guards to "participate" in the interrogation so that the removal of the aversive stimulus can be immediate and the Interrogator's actual order to the Guard to stop is remembered by the Prisoner.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
The whole structure is built upon conditioning the Guards to behave badly. If the Interrogators find a Guard they are unable to condition, they make sure that Guard is moved elsewhere.
The Interrogators themselves need never commit an abuse, they will in fact be more successful if they don't, and they will be on record having ordered the Guards to stop the abuse.
Now imagine that there are two groups of Guards in the prison. One group is lower in the hierarchy than the other one and their jobs are contingent on pleasing the higher group. Which group is going to commit the worst abuses?
. . .
Now back to the real world where such activities remain thought experiments.
Posted by MartialGood analysis. I suppose that's what X-Ray Miller told them to do when he visited last fall.
Taguba indicated that the Guantanamo experience has provoked a sharp debate inside the military over the role of military police.
In late August and early September 2003, a team from Guantanamo overseen by Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller visited Iraq to advise U.S. prison operations there. Among its recommendations were that military police guards act as "enablers" for interrogations, Taguba reported.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4894534/
Posted by: tex on May 5, 2004 04:01 PMOf course I'm not sure that this is the precise methodology used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, though it is probably something pretty close - because the techniques work. There are additional pieces that could be added to streamline the process and to make it even more effective, but this outline should get the basic points across.
I may add another post because there is an unforunate amount of ignorance about interrogation and torture and the relationship between the two. Simply and quickly:
a) There is no information gathering component to torture because it doesn't work. The information won't be true (or, to get my war on, the intel won't be actionable).
b) Torture does however create an existential space in which other techniques become more effective (the "enabling" tex refers to above).