"Soon after the Afghanistan fighting began, Army interrogators realized that their part in the war on terror was not going according to script. Pentagon doctrine, honed in the Cold War, held that 95% of prisoners would break upon straightforward questioning. But virtually no al Qaeda and Taliban detainee was giving up information -- not in response to direct questioning, and not in response to army-approved psychological gambits for prisoners of war.
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Some al Qaeda fighters had received resistance training, which taught that Americans were strictly limited in how they could question prisoners. Failure to cooperate, they had learned, carried no penalties and certainly no risk of torture -- a sign, al Qaeda said, of American weakness. Even if a prisoner had not previously studied U.S. detention policies, he soon figured them out. "It became very clear very early on to the detainees that the Americans were just going to have them sit there," explains an Afghanistan interrogator. "They realized: 'The Americans will give us our Holy Book, they'll draw lines on the floor showing us where to pray, we'll get three meals a day with fresh fruit . . . we can wait them out.'" Traditional appeals to a prisoner's emotions, such as playing on his love of family or life, had little effect. "The jihadists would tell you, 'I've divorced this life, I don't care about my family,'" recalls an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Frustrated interrogators across the globe concluded that their best hope for getting information was to recreate the "shock of capture" -- that vulnerable mental state when a prisoner is most uncertain and most likely to respond to questioning. Many argued for a calibrated use of "stress techniques" -- prolonged questioning that would cut into a detainee's sleep schedule, for example, or making a prisoner kneel or stand. A crack interrogator from Afghanistan explains the psychological effect of stress: "Let's say a detainee comes into the interrogation booth and he's had resistance training. He knows that I'm completely handcuffed and that I can't do anything to him. If I throw a temper tantrum, lift him onto his knees, and walk out, you can feel his uncertainty level rise dramatically. He's been told: 'They won't physically touch you,' and now you have. The point is not to beat him up but to introduce the reality into his mind that he doesn't know where your limit is." Grabbing someone by the top of the collar has had a more profound effect on the outcome of questioning than any actual torture could have, this Army reservist maintains. "The guy knows: You just broke your own rules, and that's scary."
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