The Scientists Persuading Terrorists to Spill Their Secrets
Expert interrogators know torture doesn’t work – but until recently nobody could prove it. By analyzing hundreds of top-secret interviews with terror suspects, two British scientists have revolutionized the art of extracting the truth.
In 1943, Major Sherwood Moran, of the US Marines, published a memorandum on the interrogation of enemy prisoners of war, and distributed it to troops throughout the Pacific theatre. Moran was a missionary who had raised a family in Tokyo before the war. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was 56, and living in Boston. Realising that his fluency in Japanese language and culture might be helpful to the American war effort, he joined the Marines. Moran soon became known as an unusually effective interrogator of Japanese soldiers, who were famously resistant interviewees. Like Islamist terrorists today, the Japanese were fanatically, suicidally committed...