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“Dramatized training film. The crew of a downed American bomber quickly yield to the clever interrogation techniques of their Nazi captors. Starring Arthur Kennedy, Mel Torme, Lloyd Nolan, Craig Stevens and Peter Van Eyck.”
USAAF Training Film TF1-3383 1hr 6min
Public domain film from the Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
Interrogation (also called questioning) is interviewing as commonly employed by officers of the police, military, and intelligence agencies with the goal of eliciting useful information. Interrogation may involve a diverse array of techniques, ranging from developing a rapport with the subject, to outright torture…
There are multiple techniques employed in interrogation including deception, torture, increasing suggestibility, and the use of mind-altering drugs.
Suggestibility
A person’s suggestibility is how willing they are to accept and act on suggestions by others. Interrogators seek to increase a subject’s suggestibility. Methods used to increase suggestibility may include moderate sleep deprivation, exposure to constant white noise, and using GABAergic drugs such as sodium amytal or sodium thiopental. It should be noted that attempting to increase a subject’s suggestibility through these methods may violate local and national laws concerning the treatment of detainees, and in some areas may be considered torture. Sleep deprivation, exposure to white noise, and the use of drugs may greatly inhibit a detainee’s ability to provide truthful and accurate information.
Deception
Deception can form an important part of effective interrogation. In the United States, there is no law or regulation that forbids the interrogator from lying about the strength of their case, from making misleading statements or from implying that the interviewee has already been implicated in the crime by someone else…
Good cop/bad cop
Good cop/bad cop is an interrogation technique in which the officers take different sides. The ‘bad cop’ takes a negative stance on the subject. This allows for the ‘good cop’ to sympathize with and defend the subject. The idea is to get the subject to trust the ‘good cop’ and provide him with the information they are looking for.
Pride-and-ego down
Pride-and-ego down is a US Army term that refers to techniques used by captors in interrogating prisoners to encourage cooperation, usually consisting of “attacking the source’s sense of personal worth” and in an “attempt to redeem his pride, the source will usually involuntarily provide pertinent information in attempting to vindicate himself.”
Reid technique
The Reid technique is a trademarked interrogation technique widely used by law enforcement agencies in North America. The technique (which requires interrogators to watch the body language of suspects to detect deceit) has been criticized for being difficult to apply across cultures and eliciting false confessions from innocent people.
The history of the state use of torture in interrogations extends over more than 2,000 years in Europe—though it was recognized early on as the Roman imperial jurist Ulpian in the third century A.D. cautioned, that information extracted under duress was deceptive and untrustworthy. There is “no means of obtaining the truth” from those who have the strength to resist says Ulpian, while others unable to withstand the pain “will tell any lie rather than suffer it.”
The use of torture as an investigative technique waned with the rise of Christianity since it was considered “antithetical to Christ’s teachings,” and in 866 Pope Nicholas I banned the practice. But after the 13th century many European states such as Germany, Italy, and Spain began to return to physical abuse for religious inquisition, and for secular investigations. By the 18th century the spreading influence of the Enlightenment led European nations to abandon officially state-sanctioned interrogation by torture. By 1874 Victor Hugo could plausibly claim that “torture has ceased to exist.” Yet in the 20th century authoritarian states such as Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, Hitler’s Third Reich, and Lenin’s and Stalin’s Soviet Union once again resumed the practice, and on a massive scale.
The most recent and most prominent instance of the use of torture in interrogation is that of the American CIA…
