 Good afternoon. Welcome to the New America Foundation. I'm Peter Berger and I run this security national security program here. We've got an absolutely stellar lineup to discuss the art of effective and efficacious interrogation. On your right, Mark Farron, who is the director of the wonderfully named club fed, who has had a distinguished career in many, involved in many cases, the USS Cole case, the shake, the shake out of our Abdul Rakhman case, the blind shake case. He was also the deputy commander of special agent and charge of department defense criminal investigation task force responsible for the investigation of terrorists who might go before the military commissions at Guantanamo. He's been forward deployed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. Next to him is Colonel Steve Kleinman, who is retired officer US Air Force. He was the former head of the Air Force strategic interrogation program. He's also been an instructor in the Air Force, survival, evasion, resistance and escape training, the SEA training that we're all familiar with. He also served as a senior advisor to the intelligence science board in that 374 page study, reducing information, which is sort of the gold standard on this issue. Dr. Christian Meisner, next to Colonel Kleinman, is a professor of psychology at Iowa State. He holds a PhD in cognitive and behavioral science and he has published widely and been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Academy of Sciences and many other places. And then finally, Dr. Melissa Rossano is a professor of criminal justice at Roger Williams University. She's got a PhD in legal psychology. And so each of the out of distinguished panelists is going to talk for about 10 minutes or so and give some opening remarks and then we'll have a discussion with the audience. So to start with you, Mark. Well, thank you, Peter. Thank you for the introduction and thanks to New America for having us and honored to be here with you and the other panelists. And thank you everyone for coming today to hear what we have to say. Really what I want to talk about is kind of the profound impact that September 11th had on all of us. And on that day, certainly our history changed and it affect each of us differently. It affect our policies and it changed the course of history for us as a country and for many of us as individuals. Following those attacks, there were a few critical decisions that the country made to protect itself. The National Command Authority, the president, the commander chief made some decisions right in the aftermath based on fear, future attacks based on worries of second waves of attacks to try to protect us, our citizens and our country. And there were a few kind of very interesting policy decisions that impacted certainly me at the time and some of us in the room. And that was on the 14th of September. There was a presidential proclamation. And in that proclamation, President Bush actually stated that there is a state of national emergency and we're going to have to do things a little bit differently. And there were some cascading effects of that and some presidential decision directives and other things. And the results was the creation of what's called the CIA RDI program, Rendition Detention Interrogation Program. And the goal of that program was to give the Central Intelligence Agency some authorities and some responsibilities that weren't really a core competency, was not a core mission for the Central Intelligence Agency. And that was to render to set up detention operations and interrogation operations, which is something that they generally did not do as a core skill. Also, less than a month later, just short of a month later, on the 13th of November 2001, another very impacting order was issued. President Bush issued a military order on that date that actually established that the Department of Defense would be responsible for the investigation of Al Qaeda terrorist network for trials before military commission. Both very kind of historic decisions, certainly in my lifetime, because I had worked for years on those cases, Peter mentioned with the FBI, working cases that were going to be tried for the Department of Justice. So it was a very unique responsibility I thought for the Department of Defense to get and for the CIA to get. And I was honored to have been chosen to be the deputy commander of that task force and with a team of 200 some odd people were investing in Al Qaeda for trials for military commission. History will judge whether either those decisions were sound ones, if they did in fact help protect our national security, or maybe further jeopardize it. Not here to talk about that today, but but certainly there were two kind of core issues that I think are germane to to our discussions here today. The role psychologists played in the formulation of each of those missions. Psychologists played a major role in the creation of the CIA's RDI program. And psychologists played a major role assisting and supporting the CITF when we designed our interrogation training programs. I would certainly argue that one was for the better, one might be for the worst. But they were two that was one unique aspect. The other unique aspect about it, which is germane again today, is the role that research played or lack of research played in the formulation of those policies and in the aftermath of that. And that's the historic perspective. Fast forward now to six weeks ago or so on the ninth of December. And a remarkable event occurred that day when Diane Feinstein, the chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence stood on the Senate floor and basically released what has become known as the torture report. A remarkable document, 500 to some odd pages. It's kind of a misnomer. It's actually the executive summary of a 6,000 page torture report. That was the result of the culmination of about five years of investigation that looked at over 6 million pieces of documentary evidence of what occurred that helped formulate those decisions, that helped create the course of history that was charted based on those decision directives that were made. And I want to just read something that a quote from Senator Feinstein, because I think it really is rather remarkable. Senator Feinstein said on the floor of the Senate on the ninth of December, specifically, the report provides examples where interrogators had sufficient information to confront detainees with facts and know when the detainees were lying and where they applied rapport building techniques developed and honed by the U.S. military, the FBI, and more recently the interagency high value detainee interrogation group called the HIG that these techniques produced good intelligence. She would on to say that the CIA had not researched effective interrogation techniques or developed a legal basis for the use of interrogation techniques outside the rapport building techniques that were the official CIA policy until that time. And that's what a lot of people don't realize. The CIA's policy up until that time was only to use rapport-based interrogation techniques. And I know some people who interrogated for the CIA who only used those. And so that's really why we're here today. That was that this HIG, this high value detainee interrogation group that was established as a result of an executive order by President Obama shortly after he took office, I believe the second day, that actually established an interagency task force to look at how to best elicit accurate and reliable information to protect our national security and did a few remarkable things there. One was it was kind of unique that they created a unique unit to actually do these interrogations. In my experience, if the HIG disappeared, there would be other people who actually could do those interrogations and probably do them very effectively. What was very, very unique about it is the fact that they created a capacity to do research, evidence-based research in how best use science to help inform the operational community how to best conduct interrogations. And what is interesting is that it has been more than 50 years since the US government has sponsored any research to actually look at how to best interrogate someone. So for years as a career federal law enforcement officer encounter intelligence operator, we have been training and using techniques that are based on a lot of great experience, but it has not been helped along or informed by science. And so that's what we're going to hopefully discuss a little bit today is what the science is actually telling us so that we're actually merging the art of interrogations with the science interrogation so that we can artfully apply the science within the operational community. So let me just go over a few things. I want to make sure that I don't miss about the research program. It's pretty interesting that the research program is all unclassified. It's actually being conducted globally. Broad agency announcements, advertise and solicit people to come in, scientists to come in, and there is research that's been underway for years in Australia and the United Kingdom and Sweden and the United States. So for years, research scientists have been looking at how to best do our jobs as operators and elicit accurate reliable information through lawful means. And so we have with us people who were both involved in the research program doing research from my alma mater, Roger Williams. It's great to see my former college involved in these things. And certainly Chris is the chief investigator and the chief scientist overseeing these programs. It's a remarkable opportunity to kind of hear what they have to say. I've been rather amazed that people are not clamoring for this information now. The studies are published in peer journals. Just recently, I think around November, the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology published a special edition actually publishing the results of these studies to the community. The HIG conducts an annual research symposium where research scientists from around the world, the foremost experts in the science of interrogation come here to DC and actually present their findings. And that's when the idea to come here germinated. Peter was at our last one and was our keynote speaker at lunch. And we talked about how we needed to get this information out. So I'm grateful that he took that and brought us here today. But there's a body of work, a body of science that is going on. And actually, we're starting to see now, which is very encouraging for me because I've also been involved quite a bit in some training programs, is the fact that we're now seeing federal law enforcement training programs actually merging some of the science with the art of interrogation. And I hope we get to talk a little bit about that. I just want to close with two things. If you're in this business, I mean, if you're looking at how to elicit reliable information, I would suggest to you that what is known as the torture report, that 500 page booklet is a wealth of knowledge. It is a lesson learned historically about what went right, what went wrong, and why it went right and why it went wrong, that anyone who's a national security professional ought to be reading. You know, if I was within NCIS still, I would make that mandatory reading for anyone working in my department. It is that it is that critical to understand why we got to where we are today. And I'll just close. I've read the entire torture report word by word. I actually read it twice. I wanted to make sure I didn't miss anything. And I just want to quote from a very powerful email that I found in that torture report. And it's a 2005 email from the CIA Inspector General to the CIA Director, Porter Goss. And this is after he looked at kind of what was coming off the rails in the CIA with respect to interrogation. And what the IGB said to the CIA Director was, we have found that the agency over the decades has continued to get itself in messes related to interrogation programs for one overriding reason. We do not document and learn from our experience. Each generation of new officers is left to improvise anew with problematic results for our officers as individuals and for our agency. So those of you here who represent agencies, you know, I would encourage you to learn those lessons from that torture report, learn from our mistakes so that we can improve our profession and so that we become better interrogation professionals because I believe our national security depends upon it. Thank you, Mark, for that really excellent setup. Colonel Kleinman, or you want to go next? Okay, sorry. I'll go next. And thank you for having us here. I'm honored to be here on the part of this panel. And what I'm going to do is talk to you a little bit about some of the earlier research in the HIG program. The HIG research program is in its fifth year now. And one of the first early efforts was to establish baseline knowledge to assess what we already knew, which leads off of what the quote Mark was just reading to you, which is this notion of there is expertise out there. There are people on the ground for years who've been conducting interrogations. So one of the earlier efforts, the aims of the HIG research program was to assess that systematically. So myself, along with a number of people on the panel, other researchers started by doing interviews, structured interviews and surveys of interrogators with expertise. So highly experienced military, law enforcement, counter terrorism, interrogators to find out what they thought works and doesn't work based on their knowledge and their experience. So in the study that I led, for example, we sat down with a group of about 42 interrogators, and we asked them questions like, what types of techniques lead to eliciting reliable information? What's most effective? And what's least effective? And what makes a good interrogator in the first place? So I'm going to walk you some of the highlights through that, and Chris will then take you through some of the more recent research that the HIG has been conducted. So in terms of what interrogators tell us, what makes a good interrogator, are there certain characteristics? Obviously, this is an important issue, right? Because we have new interrogators that need to be trained, and the skills that they talk about the most are interpersonal skills. So having good oral communication skills, being able to make a connection with a person, and also being behaviorally adaptable and flexible. So this has also been looked at, this notion of a core interrogator competency model. Are there certain skills that interrogators need to have? Has been examined by others funded by the HIG, Gonzalo Ferraro, for example, and that's something that comes up a lot as well, behavioral flexibility. An interrogator needs to be able to adapt to the particular interrogation and to the particular target that they're working to, as well as having those excellent interpersonal communication skills, being able to build trust with the person they're talking to. In terms of what interrogators, and these are, again, the ones with experience, and about half of our sample had high value target experience, what do they say is most effective at eliciting reliable information? It's relationship and rapport building skills. Building a connection, understanding who they're talking to, developing mutual respect and trust, those are the things that they say elicit, ultimately will elicit, reliable information from people. What do they say doesn't work? Confrontational and competitive approaches. So expressing anger and impatience and frustration, threatening the suspect with non-compliance, or the consequences of non-compliance or non-cooperation. They say that's counterproductive. A number of our interrogators talked specifically about enhanced interrogation, and while none of them said that those techniques were most effective, a good portion of them specifically said that they were least effective at eliciting reliable information. Now, the study I'm talking to you about happened to be structured interviews, but there have been a number of other studies funded by the HIG to address these issues through surveys, not only in the US, but internationally, and we get a very consistent message across these studies, which is it is rapport and relationship building that underlies a successful interrogation. In terms of the issue of rapport, so everybody appears to agree that rapport is important, but it becomes even more interesting when you ask people to define what does rapport mean, and things get murkier there, so that even though we all agree apparently that it's important, we can't quite agree on what it is, and so you get different definitions. One common definition is that it's a working relationship in which progress can be made between the interrogator and the target. Other people will define it as the personal talk to me, simply talk to me. Others talk about it in terms of liking and mutual respect, so it's a bit elusive, it's an elusive concept that later studies that Chris will probably touch upon have worked at developing metrics for rapport, but we agree, the science agrees that it is important, and we started to look at how to develop it, so Jane Goodman Delahunty has conducted a study with high value interrogators who have interrogated high value targets, specifically asking how do you develop rapport with high value targets? How do you do that? And what she finds is they use strategies that are basic social psychological persuasion principles, like liking. If you want to develop rapport with someone, one of the best strategies to use according to interrogators is to get them to like you. How do you get them to like you? Well, you're nice to them for starters. You treat them with respect. You find commonalities, similarities, use humor. These are the strategies that interrogators tell us they use and work with high value targets as well as non-high value targets. In the process of conducting these studies, I for one quickly found out after talking to a number of operators that interrogation is not just a target and an interrogator in a room. It's especially in the intelligence world. It's often a team approach. So for example, there's often an interpreter in the room. There's an intelligence analyst who's playing a role. And so we started to realize that we shouldn't just survey interrogators, that we really need to broaden our knowledge base to other interrogation professionals. And so in my lab and with my colleagues, we conducted surveys and interviews of highly experienced analysts and highly experienced interpreters. Again, a good portion of whom or all of whom had high value target experience. And we asked them many of the same questions that we asked our interrogators, but germane to this particular discussion, what is most effective? What is least effective? Remember, these are people who participated in interrogations or watched them firsthand. And again, the message has become very clear. What they think is most effective is relationship and rapport building. What they think is least effective is confrontational competitive approaches. Since that baseline, since those earlier studies where we were looking at really just assessing our knowledge base of what interrogation professionals think work, the HIG has now moved on and started to fund a number of studies or have funded a number of studies that took the next step to peer into the booth, so to speak, into the interrogation room and find out whether certain techniques are associated with key outcomes. So does the use of rapport and relationship building actually produce more reliable information and more confessions in the law enforcement realm? And the answer appears to be from that research, yes. So for example, we have studies by Jane Goodman-Delahunty, by Allison Redlich and our colleagues, by Lawrence Allison that look at actual interrogations, videotaped or audiotaped interrogations to see whether rapport and relationship building techniques or contrast that with those other types of techniques, confrontational techniques, what the outcomes are and we find that rapport and relationship building techniques are associated with eliciting more reliable information, more confessions, and they do it faster earlier in the interview. In addition, Lawrence Allison's work in particular, he coded interrogations of actual terrorists who had been interrogated and he found that promoting a suspect or targets autonomy in the interrogation room, recognizing the fact that it is their choice whether or not to cooperate, building rapport and trust with them is associated with eliciting more cooperation and then therefore more information gain. So we've really moved from just establishing what we thought we knew and being able to assess those perceptions to moving it along to look at what the actual relationship is between these techniques and others. And I think I'm going to let Chris move us on to the next step because I'm running out of time. Thank you Dr. Rossano, that was a very good, by the way just for the audience, so when we say high value target, I mean let's define the term, but give it because it's kind of, what do you, Chris would do or I don't want to. I think I'll let one of our operators. It's one of those definitions, but primarily it literally means a terrorist, a senior terrorist, you know, somebody with depth of access to information. Or there's someone who was suspected to be one. Right, right. But I mean so we're talking about several dozen people in the world or a hundred, I mean what's the, I would be potentially hundreds. Right, okay. I can say that well we asked our interrogators to define high value target as well and again this isn't necessarily something that everybody agrees on the definition and it can vary by agency, but certainly someone with higher level strategic information that or potentially has higher level strategic information that could affect policy or could affect operations on the ground. Okay. Dr. Meissner. Great, and again Peter thank you for for having us and I'll just take a few minutes and sketch out a number of the studies that have been conducted by the by the Hague over the past four four and a half years now. Melissa touched on some of those kind of base level studies where we really wanted to understand what operators believed was most effective and and also to kind of peer into the booth as she said to understand what actually is effective and to develop metrics for not only the use of certain techniques but how do you measure those outcomes and how do you measure the observation of rapport in that context. At the same time that we're looking at the in the real world and with the operators we're also conducting studies in the laboratories and we're working with scientists as was mentioned all over the world to conduct studies in very controlled experimental conditions. Again you know as a scientist double-blind controlled experiments are the gold standard it's where we learn the causal mechanisms that underlie many of these things but I think you can probably all appreciate the challenges of trying to understand interrogation in a laboratory paradigm right. So certainly the the challenges of transposing that process into the laboratory are great but we can begin to do that in I think very relevant ways and so our scientists have been interested really in kind of three fundamental processes one having to do with how do you develop cooperation in a competitive or adversarial context right number one. Number two how do you elicit a memory from an individual who is initially adversarial and is now cooperative and I am you don't hear I challenge you to kind of look into interrogation training programs and to find a place where they talk about memory it doesn't often happen in fact interrogation training programs are really focused on the two other processes the one being you know this adversarial to cooperation move and the other being how do I assess credibility in that interplay right and so while our program is focused on certainly those two fundamental processes that all interrogation professionals are interested in talk to folks like Steve Kleinman and Mark Fallin and you'll quickly learn that memory is at the heart of any interrogation any information that you're going to get out of someone has to do with their ability to represent recall that information with integrity with accuracy and hopefully with with volume think about particularly I think in the intelligence context and I think Steve Steve can probably elaborate on this but intelligence interrogators are interested not just in getting somebody to confess that they committed an act they're interested in who that person knows who that person has spoke with who they've encountered where they've been all kinds of information that by the way I challenge you to think back six months ago to a series of meetings that you had with individuals in your office and to then allow me to question you about the details of those interactions those conversations and the outcomes of those it's a it's a very challenging task that you're actually asking a detainee to do and you're doing this again in the context of a of a highly adversarial system for process in which the individual is likely reticent to cooperate initially so the studies that have been conducted by the HIG have really focused on those three processes first understanding cooperation understanding rapport what is meant by rapport and certainly taking from relevant other literatures right so in the medical domains in the clinical domains they they've begun to understand rapport to develop some metrics behind rapport and we've begun to take some of those metrics and bring them over into into the interview interrogation context we've developed some some ways of measuring rapport by observation also by interview we've also begun to take those measurements of rapport and to look at whether they actually predict the elicitation of information in initially adversarial context we've also looked at the conditions that facilitate or promote rapport so let me give you a couple of examples positive versus negative emotional context which do you believe are more likely to facilitate rapport many interrogations actually involve kind of negative emotional approaches that are meant to you know provoking anxiety to create some uncertainty and to try to leverage that in terms of information exchange it turns out those approaches are actually counterproductive to the facilitation of reports positive emotional approaches and positive emotional contexts that are that are highly important to the development and predict the development of rapport the way that you communicate with an individual the nonverbals that you use it turns out are very important to the development of rapport showing of respect openness of posture the active posture of leaning in and and showing interest in the person turn out to be very important to the development of rapport and then of course as as melissa mentioned these principles of social influence bob chaldini and others in social psychology for years decades have sought to understand social influence principles and how we convince individuals that are initially uncooperative to become cooperative and to concede to requests that we might have it turns out these principles are very important in the development of rapport liking was talked about similarities talked about reciprocity Steve climbing can offer some I think very vivid examples of those in the in the interrogation context we've studied those not only I think you've mentioned Jane Goodman Dale Huntie's work at looking that those in kind of real interrogation context we've also sought to experimentally manipulate the use of those those principles of rapport and in an interview interrogation context and look at whether that leads to cooperation and elicitation of information in fact it does so that's the cooperation edge of it very quickly the memory edge of it which which again incredibly important there have been decades of research on memory how memory operates when memory fails interview techniques that are likely to lead to misinformation or false memories and interview protocols that are likely to facilitate the collection of information and we've focused on all of those but really have peed in on research by Ron Fisher Ed Geiselman and others looking at what's called the cognitive interview a few years ago some colleagues and I did a meta-analysis of that literature it's over three decades of research now on the cognitive interview showing very robust consistent effects of eliciting additional information the cognitive interview works not only by an understanding of the proper communication with an individual and development of cooperation the giving over of autonomy to the person who who's providing you the information but then relies most importantly I think on principles of memory and the mnemonics that can enhance recall of information you can't good by the way you can't do a cognitive interview with a non-cooperative individual it's not not really going to work you need somebody who's responding to you so so any use of a cognitive interview comes at the point in which you've developed cooperation you have an individual who's willing now to engage with you in some exchange we've done a number of studies with Ron and other colleagues on on the cognitive interview and by the way I should mention here not only laboratory studies but once these studies once these techniques have been kind of honed developed replicated we show robustness of the technique we actually work with the training academies and that's one of the great things about the HIG project I think is that they've they've connected us up with the federal training facilities that are very interested in and kind of vetting and understanding the science as it develops those training academies that have actually offered us an opportunity to bring the science-based methods to the training academy and to conduct experiments at the training academy that pit the science based method against existing practice we've done this now a handful of times and in each of the cases the science method beats the existing practice and let me just give you the example of the cognitive interview the cognitive interview was put up against what what federal law enforcement training center calls their five step method I think of as a bit of a dance but it's it's a very good interview protocol that's trained to to all kind of federal investigators the cognitive interview and these experiments doubled the amount of information elicited from the source compared with the five step method again the science based methods are very robust and rely on this understanding of how memory works finally detecting deception this is what actually every law enforcement investigator or intelligence interrogators are very interested in so in the context of of an interview how do I assess credibility of information that's excuse me coming coming to me the the very unscientific folklore is to look at nonverbals right avoiding eye contact nervousness fidgeting those types of things in fact now a great deal of research looking at those cues to deception consistently demonstrating that nonverbals generally unreliable and predictive of truth or false information deceit so what does predict veracity it turns out that the some of the best predictors of veracity have to do with how people tell their stories how they convey information and how memory operates in that context and I think one of the neat findings that we've had is the relationship between the way that you interview to elicit information from memory having these corollary benefits on magnifying the differences between liars and truth tellers by the way this has been looked at not only in the context of the HIG but there's a very prominent study just published in JEP general in which one of our major transportation agencies did a trial looking at these techniques for distinguishing liars and truth tellers attempting to pass through a screening environment here again showing that these strategic questioning techniques better separate liars and truth tellers because of the way that they tell their stories let me just give you a couple of examples very quickly lying is difficult I don't know if you've ever lied before in your life but it turns out that lying is cognitively challenging I try not to lie because I just am not good at it and keeping everything straight is quite a challenging task so think about what you do when you lie you are first of all suppressing the truth and trying not to leak the truth at the same time you've created now a lie that you're attempting to keep straight and there may be certain strategies associated with that you may try to keep it as simple as possible you may try to rely on some existing knowledge but you've got to maintain that lie in a way that you remember what you've said so that you don't contradict yourself at the same time if you're in an interview context you're also monitoring the person that you're talking to to assess whether they're believing you right and at the same time that you're doing that you're also monitoring your own behaviors because you don't want to leak those behaviors that you believe are indicative of lying lying is cognitively challenging and so our researchers Alder Rye, Paranthas, Gronkhag, Maria Hartwig have been leveraging that kind of social and cognitive psychological understanding of lying and turning it on its head in terms of strategic interviewing approaches how can we tax the system of the liar in ways that magnify the differences between liars and truth tellers one more example evidence it turns out if you look at studies on on interrogation and what yields confessions evidence is a very important predictor of somebody's likelihood of confessing their perception of the evidence against them how do we use evidence in law enforcement and military interrogations well oftentimes interrogators will leverage evidence as a way of kind of maximizing a suspect's perception that they the case is essentially closed and they have to cooperate and they'll present evidence very early in an interrogation what what Maria Hartwig and Paranthas Gronkhag and others have found is that it's actually much more effective if you hold your cards so to speak and that you if you can kind of get the individual talking develop some report elicit a narrative from them all the while holding your cards not revealing necessarily what you know the information that you have and then once you've kind of locked them into a narrative locked them into a story then begin to very strategically excuse me use that evidence not to not to lay it out all at once but to kind of leak it very strategically and in ways that begin to test the subject's account and to identify those contradictions and and you can imagine just the the analogy of kind of painting them into a corner subjects after two or three rounds of this in which evidence is presented and they have to kind of change their story modify their narrative to account for this they quickly learned that this is going to be a long and fruitless account and that I might as well okay I I see that you have more information that you let on initially and and now I need to change my approach so as I mentioned we've we've conducted quite a bit of research I don't want to leave you though with the impression that we've solved all of the problems this is a this has been a four and a half five year effort and any of you know anything about science you don't solve problems in five years right we're beginning to understand we're beginning to identify those processes and techniques that show promise we're also exploring some other areas like the effects of interpreters as as Melissa mentioned and the effect of context so just one last example the room the interrogation room the kind of stereotype of the interrogation room cold closed dimly lit hard chair hard table locked door all of those things psychologically actually signaled a lower likelihood of sharing information right in fact it's a warm environment a comfortable environment an open environment that facilitates disclosure so even now conducting studies in which we look at the environments itself and the cues that are offered and how that might begin to facilitate disclosure communication and openness so I think I'll stop there thank you sir general timon yeah Peter it's an honor to be with you here and really thankful to new america for affordiness this opportunity it's always a pleasure and honor to be with my colleagues here we are 2015 and there should be a celebration commemorative stamps should be issued by the post office the congress should should lay down a proclamation honoring a platinum anniversary the 70th anniversary of the army field manual it established in 1945 as 3015 re-established in 1987 as 30 3254 and then in 2006 as 22-2.3 70 years of tradition absolutely unhampered by progress which is quite a thing to say you know we have two uh preeminent behavioral scientists before you who have witnessed in their own careers and and in the generations that came before them just over let's say the same 70 years the dramatic leaps in our understanding of behavioral science they've taught us so much about how people think how they reason how they weigh evidence how they make judgments the psychologists have taught us about how people interact with their environment and how the the environment directly interacts or influences their decisions none of that information none of that information has found its way into the army field manual now that's regrettable because we are still in the middle of a global one tear and interrogation has still remained a very important part of the intelligence uh effort but it is informed in large part by the army field manual now that in and of itself would be problematic but it's it's worsened by the fact you know forgive me for portraying it in that that way but on his second day in office president obama signed into assigned executive order 13 491 ensuring lawful interrogations which you can tell by the title is an extremely well-intentioned effort the problem my professional view was it established the army field manual as the standard to be used by anybody representing the united states government in an armed conflict now as i've mentioned the model of interrogation approximately 19 approaches depending on how you count them uh are unchanged in fact in 2006 the only difference was they added they added a false flag where we could pretend to be from another country or isolation which is definitely problematic and they added back mutton jeff you know which you all know as a good cop bad cop that was that was taking 70 years of behavioral science research and moving forward into the into this century in the global war and tear in this asymmetric environment we've talked about high value to targets what type of individuals are we encountering let's take khalid shake mohammed as a good example somebody who has an advanced technical degree speaks multiple languages is moves fairly gracefully across cultural lines knows far more about american culture than the average american terrogator knows about his culture so who's at the advantage and then if we're again if we're our hands are bound by what we know from the army field manual which was designed i mean might add for conventional military and military uh a conflict where essentially you have young military interrogators interrogating young uh infantry officers from the red army as the soviet army moved through the full the gap back in the cold war era it's not adaptive not ready to move forward into the 21st century now if i were to look back and i think mark will will share this this this view from our experience i think i speak for mark it's we've probably learned three things hopefully mark probably many more but i've learned three things number one interrogation remains absolutely relevant in today's environment a lot of people didn't think it would because we have an unsurpassed capability and technical intelligence but interrogation in this new era is just as important as the interrogation in the old era and the old era can be traced back to antiquity it's one of the oldest methods of collective intelligence secondly technical intelligence is absolutely necessary but also absolutely insufficient to get the information we need to inform an adaptive foreign policy going forward and the third thing i learned is that if we were simply left to draw on our own conclusions form causal relationships by looking at my own experience i'm going to make lots and lots of errors i've had the wonderful experience in the last decade of working with researchers such as my colleagues here and i've described it to them as kind of like being in a minor car wreck it takes a while for your head to clear because i've realized a lot of things that i thought were true were simply not or the connections i made were more correlation than than causation but now i've almost become the other side where i embrace science so deeply i'm perhaps too quick to say it's the answers but what chris has taught me very clearly is what what science can do is no it's not going to offer certainties it can't do that but what it will do is is incrementally systematically and continuously increase the the probability it's a probabilistic equation that if we take certain actions we have a higher and higher probability of achieving very specific outcomes now that is a lot better than 70 years of going nowhere and but but the key is this research effort it's not a linear process it's not you know there's definitely a beginning and we're very close to it still but there's no in-state it is a cycle and the way this cycle unfolds is as melissa talked about in her remarks it begins with applied i'm excuse me basic research because even though the then research going on in the law enforcement context learning more about how it applies in intelligence context is very new in terms of interrogation so science is still we're kind of near the the beginning point but we've gone through a basic now we're getting to apply taking those theoretical ideas those conclusions and beginning to test them under more real and more real conditions to the point where we're field testing the certain amount of operational vetting experiments done properly do replicate the real world but there's always that question will it transfer and so rather than taking that in and what we call training it i love the term that's that's emerged research to practice they've taken what research has demonstrated and what field testing has demonstrated to be probabilistic in terms of of useful methods and now are are using that are training new groups of people new law enforcement intelligence agencies that are turning around and using that immediately the feedback sets far i mean i will i want to give out the kudos to the air force office of special investigations they have really taken the lead in a very bold and a very 21st century way they have lot they have decades of experience just like other law enforcement intelligence agencies but they've said science can answer more questions can we get better at what we do and so they've embraced it other agencies have been interested in several large major politics and police departments have reached out to us to ask us can you refine our approach and and i think we i think we can the feedback we get so so far has been very gratifying and not just here in the united states also in some of our allied nations it comes in variations of these themes number one is oh i wish i would have known this 20 years ago or i can't wait to use this on a case i'm working with or for the first time somebody has told me how things work why they work rather than just tell me to use them because now i can adapt that to a wider range of challenges and i can more effectively train that next generation of of professionals so let me end my my comments with a little bit of science i've learned so much about how i see the world sometimes is not necessarily the correct one in terms of an accurate portrayal of it so there's heuristics there's there's these these shortcuts mental shortcuts that we take one's called the availability heuristic and when we're thinking about making a decision we think about examples and the ones that are immediately available to us mostly those that are recent or have some dramatic impact will shape our view and how this applies is when when the average person thinks about interrogation or more importantly how policymakers think about interrogation they are less influenced by Dr. Meisner or Dr. Rossano or Dr the other colleagues that we have but more by television shows you know you have 24 i don't know if there's anybody who hasn't seen an interrogation a fictional portrayal of an interrogation written by screenwriters who have never seen a real interrogation but it's ubiquitous you know it's the tyranny of the ubiquity on this and that they cannot help but escape that's what shapes their perspective and so i would argue that national security and the role that interrogation plays in it we cannot we cannot rely on something designed for entertainment we need to look towards science which is designed for enlightenment and i think that's where we get to the next the next place well those were four really brilliant expositions and you know you raise i think a very good point because i think i it's completely unscientific when i'm gonna say but i think that movies actually influenced the way that the cia program was constructed because what is the what was the commonality of everybody who made a decision whether it was in the white house or at the agency none of them had ever done an interrogation none of them have it ever been federal prosecutors none of them have been in the FBI right they just had no idea and so they as you said they sort of if you want to get information you're going to discomfort somebody and that's the way to do it so i think it's been a very powerful and of course we had zero of dark 30 which kind of you know made that connection and i think in a kind of very unfair way in terms of you know the torture of this guy led to bin Laden i think the cia report basically puts that to rest and i think i mark i agree completely with about the report i mean i think that historians you know the 9-11 commission was an amazing work of history and and i think this is also a very useful piece of history because you can sort of critique it and say well we didn't talk to the cia officers involved i think that's a slightly unfair critique for the following reason first for documents don't lie they can be misleading in some ways but people's members of something that happened 10 years ago are less effective than the actual documents and and secondly the they did have access to the ig who interviewed about 100 of the cia officers and around it more in the contemporary time frame so i think historians will be using this for you know for a long time particularly the footnotes are very rich but let me ask you some just for questions before i throw it over to the audience one is the question you know it's always i mean this is perhaps for the professional interrogators to start with so obviously respect is a very useful trait in an interview but you're interviewing people that who for whom you fundamentally have no respect for if it's let's say how the shake mohammed or so how do you i mean is it a form of acting or what how or do you is or is it if you have the right level of empathy you can put yourself in that place or how do you get to that point where you respect somebody in an interrogation you fundamentally you think is a you know threat to our national security sure i mean i'll i'll take it to start with you do it as a professional i mean it's your job you know through through my career i've had to interview and interrogate pedophiles rapists murderers people who've committed espionage so what you do is as a professional you understand that your job is to elicit accurate and reliable information and and you do what you can lawfully to ensure that you can elicit that information for your case for your investigation for your operation to gather some type of communication from an individual that will be useful to apply to whether it's intelligence or for evidence evidentiary purposes so but but it i mean you have to take a couple breaths sometimes and and and forget about the why i ought us and go in there and your goal is to elicit uh information and i think this is important in the larger scope uh mark is absolutely correct about professionalism there's been a lot of discussion about okay we need to remember especially in light of the release of the senate report we need to remember the zeitgeist at the moment the fear the anger the desire for revenge that was all real absolutely but people like mark fallon is not paid to have an emotion or an opinion about the person sitting across from other than a professional assessment it's okay for the citizenry to be fearful and to want revenge but they are that citizenry also pays us to to be very very professional to thoughtfully approach this and sit across from anybody under any circumstances and use science and operate operationally vetted technologies to elicit useful information so it's uh it's respecting the challenge as opposed to respecting the individual can't ask you another one one thing that i think i was sort of surprised you didn't necessarily talk about it because i i used to find um you know talks about knowledge i mean so when he encountered somebody in al-qaeda i mean he knew like you know he i mean you you obviously worked with him at some point and um so he knew probably more about al-qaeda than the person sitting across from him so to what extent that's a little bit different than having the evidence that you're going to bring in later it's that's a slightly different issue so what well how does that play yeah i yeah the the the there's a lot of people out there who talk about detecting deception and and what what looking up your eyes to the right mean or to the left mean and other things the most useful way to detect deception is either a checkable fact or prior knowledge it's knowledge it's your ability this so what what alisa find it and bob McFad and other folks who've interrogated for years did is is they use their knowledge they use their wits to actually outsmart the individual they were interrogating so it does come into play and that's why preparation is key it's understanding your target it's understanding the individual it's understanding your subject matter so you know when to throw the bs flag and you strategically use it to your advantage sometimes you might let them wrap around themselves sometimes you might challenge them a little bit but but it's that prior knowledge that helps you and that's what helped ali and others that i know be very successful because because they could throw the bs now both ali and bob McFad and speak arabic correct right so that's a so how does and you mentioned the interpreter is being sort of a so i mean obviously if you if you don't have an interpreter that's a plus is it or that's an interesting question i think ideally if you're speaking fluently the same language as the person most interrogators would probably prefer that however i've a number of the interrogators that i've had the pleasure of speaking with who spoke arabic chose to use an interpreter strategically so i don't know that it's even bob McFadden would yeah i don't know that it's one size to the cultural nuance coming out of an individual so he would never want to even and interpreters can be used in your favor as well there are ways to leverage the use of an interpreter their subject matter experts in the culture that you raise a very interesting point which is like in a very like let's look at the interrogation of saddam who's saying george piero spoke arabic um you know as far as saddam was concerned there was this one guy he thought that george piero was like you know talking to george bush every day and he didn't understand that he was actually an fbi sort of you know he but but behind george piero there was a huge group of people that were also participating in the interrogation in some way right so what how does that sort of affect things and i mean you've done some you mentioned you kind of who are the people behind that when they've got the one guy in the booth and the subject doesn't really understand that there are a lot of other people out there who may be supplying questions or well i think when you're in the context of an intelligence uh interrogation there are there it is a team um that the analyst as i mentioned earlier um are critical for to support the interrogator and in terms of providing subject matter expertise about that particular target that particular culture that the target's from the group that they're from and they are working hopefully hand in hand with the interrogator to supply the the information that the interrogator needs in order to be prepared and to be able to kind of fact check on the scene so um it very much is a team effort and again the interpreter if there is one in the room i think depending on the comfort level of the interrogator and the interpreter they can also be used um for that for that type of information as well let me just add that because even in the law enforcement context i mean in the c itf interviews and interrogations at guantanamo it was always done by a team you would have folks who would be observing who might be behavioral scientists would be analysts might be lawyers but but there was always a support team it's never as the movie depicts as the you know the one guy with the lamp in the shadows kind of kind of talking to somebody it's most effective when you have a team because there's also a thing called cognitive load and and so cognitive cognitive load it's your ability to process information that's the problem i have with with some of these techniques we're asking an interrogator to do because it's placing cognitive load on the individual who should be listening and should be developing his own strategy to go against the individual rather than i'll just use the eyes right or left example or whatever whatever your your magic bullet of deception might be so what often i find and i still help train interrogators is those folks observing will be able to point out things that that interrogator doesn't realize because you are so focused on the list of the information that that support team when you come out says did you realize you did that by the way speaking which uh you know if we have an al-qaeda somebody from al-qaeda who's been interrogated is it effective to have a female interrogator or not effective or it doesn't or it's sort of a boss yeah actually my view on that has changed when when uh i was first assigned to the citf and the director of ncis allowed me to to kind of help pick who was coming to help from ncis the task force and i actually thought that it would be a disadvantage to some of the females and it might put them at a position uh where they might fail and i was absolutely wrong we brought some on board and actually some of our our veteran interrogators were women and so so my opinion changed 180 it did it were all human beings and certainly even that culture has a high degree of respect for the maternal image and things like that and so i have found uh that women are can be very effective how about sociopaths who because you mentioned lying is something that you're trying to detect i mean that sociopaths can lie without um they don't have the same cognitive problems that you mentioned right about forming a lie perhaps or am i getting this wrong they're going to be under some of the same cognitive load issues that that we talked about that they probably are more likely to have convinced themselves of certainty of certain things and they tend to be better liars we know there's there's data on that there are certainly challenges in that context and i don't think we've got great data in terms of the um the detection rates on on sociopaths right i think that raises an issue too a lot of uh detection deception research and certainly the practice is based on on an anxiety based model and so people have these moral qualms about lying and so it's going to be exhibited through various uh nonverbal behaviors when in fact as we've already expressed here really it's more an information uh assessment game the quality of information the timing of information the comprehensive nature of it so as chris just mentioned even if somebody who had absolutely no you know beyond a sociopath somebody who feels it's their duty to lie to you therefore would have no moral and therefore no anxiety that produced from it they're still going to have problems from a strategic or tactical level being able to lie effectively when you're a normal life you've both of you spent decades interrogating people do you notice when people are lying to you just when there's a normal interactions in a way that it would be hard for a sort of civilian to do so in social setting yeah i'm horrible at that okay okay wait for them mike and we'll take the taramara first question at the back that was fascinating i have a quick question touching upon the last few points that you made so you've spoken a lot about the subject's ability to lie or things that might give it away and the ability of the interrogator to be trained but i mean you touched on it with with the women point that you just made there are innate qualities that might be innate in certain people for different reasons varying on age or gender and there was specific tests there was a recent article in the New York Times by an MIT study showing what made teams smarter and it showed that certain types of teams actually with women had the ability to have a higher theory of mind scores which is the ability to detect subtle emotional cues and facial readings that they might not even know they have because they weren't tested for before so i was wondering if you could speak to innate qualities that might make someone prime to be a better interrogator and if we screen and try to tap those people to be interrogators pre-train many sort of training i'd like i'd like to start that um probably i think the single most important quality of the best interrogators i've either known or i've studied an historical example it's a quality that surprised the average person that is empathy and you've you've touched on that the ability the ability not to say gosh how would i respond if i was in these circumstances that's not empathy you know that's just projection but empathy is saying if i was born in Basra and i had been brought up in a despotic political system that suddenly anarchy reigns be able to get all the detail how would i see this person from america ask me questions so and i'm really probably on thin ice here but my understanding is just as you've said going back to gender issues maybe maybe it's learned maybe it's it's cultural maybe it's innate brain structure but they can address that but but the higher levels of empathy which i think we do associate more often with females and males i think is it a really advantageous quality to have does the science have anything to say well i'll just i'll just say this is a question that that the HIG has been asked a lot and that we've continued to explore we have teams that have been working on competency models and selection metrics that could be used by training facilities and interrogation teams to begin to select for those qualities i i don't know that we have great evidence to kind of support the innate characteristics being great predictors of successful interrogators in fact you could argue that empathy can be trained at some level there's some there's some evidence there so you know i i think it's an ongoing question i don't think it's a settled question but it's a question we get a lot and that the HIG's still investing resources and trying to understand that certainly many of the training facilities are keen in on that question Hugh grindstaff does it change in operational and situational environments in other words if you're on the battlefield your interrogation might be a little bit more intense or you because you don't know you don't you haven't had time to study the person that you you're trying to interrogate well Steve is probably more familiar with that than i am on the battlefield like that but but i mean as we studied how we should approach our interrogations at the CITF we did look at the phenomenon called capture shock and in those first moments what what might come out of someone after a certain amount of period it dissipates rather quickly to the point generally if it's an NCIS agent or a CITF agent who is going to be talking to somebody it's generally a little bit of time after that initial capture by the time that they would get to us but Steve you've been out there more than this and i yeah yeah capture shock i think is a double edged sword because people often are less guarded about what they say but they also say things that are just not true i mean out of the deep anxiety over having been captured by a foreign enemy and i i think your point though sir in a larger context is so critical and it speaks to about torture as if that's that's a in case of fire you break glass pull the lever you know so torture works you shouldn't use it but if you need to it's there there's a there's a time element of interrogation that is just unavoidable it's a systematic strategically patient approach where the principles apply whether it's on the battlefield or whether it's down in guantanamo or whether it's at a police station there are certain things that simply cannot be rushed now you mentioned the good point and mark emphasized having more and more information puts you at advantage so you're really operating with a blank slate so you're more to more easily duped you're falling for a lie how do you how do you connect with this person and that's where it goes to some maybe perhaps innate qualities where people are able to establish report quickly sir would work no i would i can't imagine any circumstance it might get you bad information more quickly yeah right at the same time adam zaggering i think the nature of the kind of scientific approach that you have is that uh it it it leads to the development of best practices and and for training and so forth and what works and what doesn't but the debate in this country and including the political debate is that there's a number of any number of people including very high former office holders who have taken a somewhat different position and one of the arguments that they make or that might be made is that well so these are best practices but of course there's outliers and exceptions which is just a given and then they use that argument and we remember the old argument of you know the bomb in new york city and you have 20 minutes and what are you going to do and they've extrapolated from that into a whole variety of justifications for uh reprehensible practices uh not to say possibly illegal ones but so so what about uh when best practices are not working uh because and i say this not to justify other techniques but this is inherent in a conversation that seems to still be going on today including reactions to uh the torture report where people made all sorts of comments and basically said the report is full of it and so on and so forth so um how do we deal with that piece of argumentation you know can i just add to that because you're telling us that the science is all going in one direction and yet if you look at public appalling data in the united states support for torture has actually gone up at the same time that the evidence-based approach to this issue has actually produced more evidence showing an alternative approach actually works so why is that well the the other thing that i will tell you that i am telling you is not just the science tells us that but but so do the practitioners right right and and so that that's some of the people that adam and it's nice to finally kind of meet you i know we've we've spoken on the phone in the past um you know many of them are uninformed and and if a best practice is not working i would suggest not to gravitate to a worst practice you know and and and so and this time this time element i always kind of laugh at this ticking time bomb theory on nno steve grovels about a little bit if you look at the the e it's or the torture and it was torture that they did and obviously not a political figure and and and so i won't couch those words it was torture and we did torture people but but if you look at abu sabeda we spent weeks with nobody talking to him where he was in complete isolation how is that quicker than developing a rapport getting information what what the research would tell us is that about 30 of the people are predisposed to give you information when captured so the first point is don't screw it up you know don't do something that's going to derail them and if you read the torture report you will see that detainee after detainee was actually abused right off the bat and and and so right right away you have now shut off almost one third of the people who might be there to actually tell you information and and and it also details those who were actually talking and then they started getting abusive with them and aggressive with them and then they stopped talking so i have yet to see anything that would lead me to conclude that applying that type of pressure or abuse or torture would actually result in the elicitation of accurate reliable information it will get you corrupted information and and and we saw that would even shake the liby i mean he was in a mirror of al-qaeda training camp and under pressure and duress he had said there was al-qaeda in iraq and colon paul went for the united nations and used that information to bring us to war so it is not just ineffective we've lost lives i mean we justified a war based on fabricating information that a detainee later said yeah i said that i made it up so that the pain would stop could khalil shake power he was in egyptian prison at the time right it wasn't we went i don't know what's classified or not class well yeah we did yeah yeah he was but he was being held by a yeah yeah because we turned him over so but yeah he's also he's also dead now yeah so we can't talk to him anymore let me let me just add to this so there's about a third that are going to walk into the booth and they're actually going to cooperate off the bat there's another segment that are going to be continually resistant likely no matter what you do right and so let me just let let's just ask the operator steve what do you do in that situation i have a formula for that it's like science it's it's called uh it's called sw cubed and some will some won't so what next you know and and that's true any anybody with real experience who's going to be honest about it will tell you that not everybody under any circumstances no matter what you do will be able to answer questions accurately in a timely fashion in a comprehensive nature and that's what we're after yeah yes you can make people talk but maybe it's about intelligence maybe it's corrupt as mark said and that's the key to remember is any intelligence gathering uh technology or strategy has limits and to push past it is an unsophisticated immature and unprofessional approach to your craft so to say that you know if this doesn't work we push for the same thing with signals intelligence you know imagery you can take photos from geosynchronous orbit works great but if we walked into putans office and we're taking snapshots might not work so well they might detect what's going on so i mean there's limits to every every intelligence method this gentleman in front well you know what one of my favorite parts of the cia reporters ksm said there was a cell an african-american muslim cell in montana that was part of al qaeda so i mean look at the resources we wasted tracking down those false leads folks that could have been applied to actually investing in al qaeda hi i'm pat pew um something that you said uh when uh mr berger was defining high value target struck me is that the uh the sample is maybe in the hundreds and that would strike me as being more of a qualitative um study rather than a you know a quantitative study um did the hig consider looking at um state and local uh law enforcement interviewers interrogators and i think there is from my my background there is a separation between interview and interrogation um maybe uh there's a distinction between the folks that you're interviewing where you know they're not interested in you know once they're captured in getting their release their interest is in operational security versus you know maybe a street level uh criminal who is uh you know interested in you know convincing you of his interest or his innocence um but uh you know i would think that you know gang intelligence investigators folks that are doing organized crime you know where you're doing link analysis and you know targeting work you know have something to uh contribute to that type of study address i'll start uh if you don't mind so the beauty of the hig program is that we've been able to coordinate and to look at many levels of and types of interrogation so not only the high value context but but certainly the state local federal law enforcement context and i think you bring up a great point there there at the end um the the relationship between kind of gang link analysis um investigations and intelligence interrogations very clear to to us there there certainly are some um maybe distinct typologies of interrogations that can be conducted conducted that might be separated by crime type but one thing i'll just kind of leave you with and i'll let others respond many of the techniques that we see um operating successfully in one sector and with one uh type of subject operate as effectively in the in the other context so so while the investigations may be different um while the the type of information you're after may be different a lot of the fundamental processes that are effective here transcend those those typologies yeah well i'll add to that as well that you know when i started um doing these systematic interviews with interrogators who had varied experience so some were former law enforcement FBI and CIS um but also army intelligence and and whatnot you know a lot of people told me up front you know there's a big difference between a law enforcement interrogation intelligence interrogation we're after different things the law enforcement context or after a confession whereas we're we don't care about that a lot of times we just want information we're not worried about prosecution and so they started out a lot of them started out by telling me that and then i quickly learned though that the techniques that they use how to actually elicit information are really not that different they may think it's different they might talk about it in different terms but the underlying strategies of what's most effective transcend the context of the the nature of the offense so to speak so um but yes we have tapped into those resources and continue to tap into those resources the lady right in the back um thank you this is a wonderful panel i'm diane pearlman at the school for conflict and analysis and resolution at george mason also a clinical psychologist and have close friends and colleagues who were involved in this work and there's a journal peace and conflict issue on this from a few years ago so um a question in your experience or knowledge do you have experience something a phenomenon similar to like the stock home syndrome or traumatic bonding where people feel safe and you know and unload to you or have some kind of awareness about their experience or do you have or have any experiences i would call people sort of um sort of changing like anything like redemption or anything like that that's an excellent question i've had a couple very curious experiences that that have taught me to be cautious about how persuasive how persuasive persuasion can be sol caston has this this wonderful spectrum of persuasion social influence on one side you have absolute defiance and the other side you have compliance a lot of interrogators i want somebody compliant i'd say not so much i want somebody to have enough independence when i'm saying that you know the bomb is in central park tomorrow they're gonna and they know it's not they're telling me it's it's not but i've had situations we've learned a lot about the power of mimicry uh the power of uh mentioned dr chaldeany's sixth principle persuasion i've had some people in 2003 in bagdad one gentleman in particular in this then i i was a very reasonable appearing very empathetic individual in the midst of chaos and they bonded with me so deep when i ended up passing this person off they became from a from a prisoner to a recruited and run agent uh the the counterintelligence agent finally said sir can i talk to you outside for a moment i said yeah what's up you said you have to leave that's kind of rude he said no no no watch when we asked this guy a question or we give him a request he looks to you to see what he should do and i at first i thought wow that that's fascinating then i began to wonder you know was i too persuasive not because of threatening it was emotional bonding but that's that's a positive thing but also potentially negative any experience this gentleman in the back hi um phoenix from guachlan um do you see any way for the intelligence and law enforcement communities to somehow systematically integrate these scientific discoveries as they continue to happen into the methods they actually use does that seem possible or likely hope so i'd say yeah i'd say it's very it's very likely and it's happening so as i mentioned we many of these studies are done you know of real interrogations that were conducted coordinating with with prior former entire current interrogators in the laboratory but ultimately we come back to the training facilities and we kind of vet what we've learned in that that context experimentally we built these wonderful relationships with the with the training academies that they've begun to see the the benefits of the methods that are being developed again by no means are we yet to revolutionize how they train but we're beginning to see a process of kind of chipping away at some of the core assumptions that aren't supported by the science and and some changes in tactical approaches or even kind of global strategic approaches that are taught to interrogators and we've had the opportunity with the HIG as was kind of mentioned to begin to to do this kind of research to practice effort let me just describe that very briefly so that you have a sense of that the HIG brings together academics who have done the research with professionals who can have conducted interrogations and it conducts these research to practice training sessions that can last anywhere from two days to a week in which interrogators from not only the HIG but other agencies are brought in and given the opportunity to kind of learn the science and given the opportunity to actually practice in in role plays and in scenarios the use of those with feedback and coaching and we've seen this start to change the approach systematically that interrogators are using it's it's been opened the HIG has opened this to other agencies in the government and even some state state local law enforcement and we're at the point now where we're kind of doing a field validation if you will of a one week training this year in which we've put together essentially into what's the beginnings of you might say a new model of interrogation and interviewing interviewing and interrogation there is a distinction and we're beginning to not only train that but as a scientist it's really important not to just kind of take the findings that you've that you've found in the lab and maybe in the training academies and kind of throw them out there in the training environment and hope that they work we're actually following them out into the field and we're actually measuring whether interrogators are picking up these techniques actually deploying them compared to what they've done previously and again through the process here we've we've developed some measures of effectiveness and ability to code interrogations that are conducted and so this this kind of cyclical process if you will of going from the lab and the booth learning ultimately to kind of vetting and developing these techniques training them but continuing to measure their effectiveness hopefully we'll begin to cycle back too because we're going to learn things as we deploy this we're going to find some ideas that need more vetting hopefully it comes back into controlled experimental environments and we continue that cycle and I think that's why I say we're only you know four and a half years in hopefully there's there's more to this we've actually been on a campaign to try to get the word out that this research is available to the community the the last two years Chris and I spoke at the international association's chiefs of police conference telling folks that this research is free it's available this government sponsored it's out there for you to use and to apply last year we spoke at the ILETA conference international law enforcement educators and trainers association we'll go back there again in April so we are trying to get the word out to the law enforcement national security community that this government sponsored research is available to you for free so you can now start to upgrade and update your training programs with it and again I know we've mentioned I'm very very happy at the stance the Air Force OSI has taken we have some representative here today to me they're at the forefront of really trying to operationalize this in their day-to-day investigations and I'm very proud to see what they are doing as a former trainer to see how they're kind of incorporating this to actually improve their operations I'm just going to call on Zulfikar who's visiting us from Pakistan he's a senior Pakistani police official who actually ran he's one of the top police officials in Pakistan and he's applying methods like Comstat to Lahore which is a city of 10 million people I just wanted to get your thoughts because I know you've interrogated a lot of senior kind of terrorism senior terrorists in Pakistan you know I would build on the question that you had actually asked you know the biggest you know the I can empathize with the approach that you are you know kind of telling us about you know the cognitive and empathetic but you know the biggest enemy there actually is fear because when you have for example one person who is a suspect and you've had a big incident that has already happened and you don't know what's going to happen in a few days and there's a lot of stress there's a lot of pressure all of that is building up and then you have this national environment of you know a lot of tension so it's really very difficult to you know take this approach and you know tell your superiors or even the you know the political people that you know you're going to talk to them and it's going to take time because then as a senior police commander as a senior you know law enforcement official there's a lot of pressure on you as well so I was just thinking whether when you have one or two suspects even then this approach would work because in many cases what we have seen is that as you know probably a CIA resorted to that you know even to torture or those kinds of things because under that kind of environment it really becomes difficult to actually you know take this approach as you're advocating so it's a political problem if there's a great deal of fear in the political environment as there is in Pakistan right now and pressure also and then there's a lot of stress and you want to get as much information from one or two suspects you don't know what kind of you know things to expect in you know couple of days so under that kind of circumstance it's really difficult I think it's probably much more of your communication strategy getting other people to know that it's an effective strategy because right now you know a lot of people in the law enforcement community don't really understand that this approach is effective you know their gut feeling is that you know it might be right when you are talking to an academic kind of in an academic environment but you know their gut feeling is that you know you have to resort to some kind of coercion or some kinds of you know arm twisting to get information I mean that's what the you know the kind of broad kind of consensus you know inside our gut is so I just wanted to add just that yeah no we see that a lot and you know in the law enforcement community you know we my community has pretty readily accepted the physical sciences I mean our firearms instructors can tell you how many feet per second a bullet travels and what the cavity expansion is for a jacket at hollow point and we know the physical sciences well the physical science of DNA is telling us that we actually have a lot of people we've incarcerated for crimes that didn't commit and what we're also finding out is some of those same people have falsely confessed crimes that didn't commit and so I was talking to a to a colleague not too long ago and he basically said something that I used to say and I don't say anymore an innocent person wouldn't commit to it wouldn't confess to a crime that didn't commit you know what they do and so so so we need to get that out of our lexicon and you can read the torture report you can see tons of people who confessed due to some reasons but but we have innocent people in our jails who confessed the crimes didn't commit so so we have to kind of change that culture and the other piece when you're getting a confession you don't know what you didn't get if you stop the confession you don't know what you've left on the table so you don't know what's within the realm of the possible what you might have extracted if you use some more advanced techniques with an individual mm-hmm yeah it goes to also the gentleman in the question about the hope for the future but also the senior police officers observations about his experience so forth you know here we are at new america so let's propose a doctrine for american interrogation going forward and i think there's three criteria that are absolutely essential all three have to be met before any strategy any tactic would be adopted number one it has to be evidence or science-based we have to understand again that with high probability that certain actions will consistently produce certain results you're not just and you can't go by the fact that one of us sit up here and say oh i've been doing this for 30 years listen to me i've been i may have been doing it wrong for 30 years unless we have science to have those the establish those metrics secondly it needs to be operation-evented because some things are simply not practical in the real world and we need to make sure that we bring the real world into the laboratory so to speak so that so that my my science brethren can examine under the best possible circumstances so you have the first one again being a science-based operationally vetted and the third one i think is just as important because nothing takes place in a vacuum and that it needs to be human rights compliant not hewing close to it or respectful of it but compliant within the most stringent standard certainly common article three of the Geneva conventions why do i say that number one the science says we don't have to be torturers to get information number two morality tells us that that's the right thing to do but think about strategic consequences how important how vital with the information that you obtain through torture have to be to offset the fact that in some cultures that are storytelling cultures are going to talk about this senate torture report for generations and generation and generations to become to come so whatever small battle we might have won with information obtained through torture there's wars that we've already lost well i think uh you know we do hundreds of events and this was really great so thank you it was really really wonderful