Blue Fish in a Dark Sea

Randall Wilson

• Publisher: University of Buckingham Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781789551402
• Topic: Diritto
• Subtopic: Teoria e pratica del diritto

The guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.

Mao Tse-Tung claimed in On Guerilla Warfare that the guerrilla move seamlessly amongst the people. If the guerrilla are the fish and the people the sea, then police intelligence are the blue fish which live and hunt in that sea alongside them.

All modern counterinsurgency theories rely on separating the people from the insurgent. But Randall Wilson's Blue Fish In A Dark Sea contends that the use of police intelligence will allow for a different approach; of separating the insurgent head from the insurgent body so that the body is seen by people as an infection, ridding it of a protective camouflage.

The existence of police intelligence and its unique, but all too often marginalised capacity for uncovering and destroying the prime movers of an insurgency must be re-examined. It is by no means a panacea for civil strife but, as an integral component of a combined counterinsurgency strategy, it provides a weapon which is more feared by insurgents than any other. Knowing who they are and where they're hiding renders the insurgent visible and touchable.

In Blue Fish In A Dark Sea: Police Intelligence in a Counterinsurgency, Wilson explores and discusses the various elements of police intelligence ubiquitous to the trade, and presents the most efficacious means of employing this skill set in the environment of a counterinsurgency.

Interrogation

An example from the field

THE suspect sat quietly in a folding metal chair. The room was small, rectangular and brightly lit. Despite the fact that the United Nations was now in effect running the province of Kosovo, the suspect shivered as the only door into the room opened.

Shortly thereafter the suspect found himself engaged in conversation with an American police officer and a British army officer. The American spoke quietly with the suspect for some time, learning of his background, family history and other innocuous subjects which gradually led to the suspect’s attitude changing from one of fearful anticipation to cautious participation.

Once his posture and tone were indicative of this change, the American officer leaned forward and began to calmly state the case against him. He outlined the stop of the suspect’s vehicle by a British military patrol, the discovery in his vehicle of a hidden compartment containing explosives and the penalties for possessing these as part of an insurgent organization. The suspect hastily interrupted to deny his affiliation and knowledge. The officer calmly spoke over this denial, again repeating the evidence and assuring the suspect of his guilt. His demeanor still friendly, the officer suggested that perhaps the suspect had merely been pressured into joining since the area where he lived was a stronghold of the extremist group. The suspect gladly accepted this as an excuse and agreed this was so. The suspect was a member of the Ushtria Clirimtare e Presheves, Medvegjes dhe Bujanovcit (UCPMB), an insurgent organization then still active in both Kosovo and Serbia.

The officer then noted that although he knew the suspect to be guilty, he felt he was a victim as well. The officer wished to help him but needed some additional detail to understand how the suspect had been involved.

His manner and confidence were outside the experience of the suspect who, having partially admitted his guilt, now was led carefully though a discussion of his activities on behalf of the organization. The officer played upon a number of themes during this discussion, offering rationales for cooperation which, when combined with the unusual treatment he was receiving, induced the suspect to provide a wealth of information.

Eventually, after two hours, the interrogation came to a close. There would be additional sessions in other locations but for now, the initial effort had resulted in both a confession and additional intelligence information.¹

A controversial topic

The act of interrogation is fraught with pitfalls ethical, moral and tactical. Indeed, there are few areas of police intelligence activity which garner more attention and polarize viewpoints as solidly as does this topic. Interrogation is a sub-set of human intelligence collection efforts² but given the controversy surrounding its use as well as the complex technical nature of various interrogation methods, it is the intention of this chapter to conduct a separate examination of the utility of interrogation in police intelligence operations in a counterinsurgency. Whilst it is recognized that this chapter merely scratches the surface of this topic (one worthy of further extensive exploration) the focus will remain on the practical aspects of the uses of interrogation by police intelligence in counterinsurgency efforts.

In order to determine the best practices of police in counterinsurgency interrogation, it will be necessary to examine the alternative methods provided in the past and, indeed, the present for their effectiveness and suitability. Contentious questions of moral value and legality will be left aside for the more easily determined ones of utility. While such considerations are entirely appropriate, they can rapidly distort the narrow focus of this work beyond the examination of best practice in police intelligence. Instead, I will content myself with noting those areas where moral concerns and practicality overlap to recommend or proscribe a given course of action.

Guilt by association

Any mention of interrogation tends to quickly conjure up images of dank basements complete with wooden chairs, truncheons, bright lights and heavily built men of untender disposition. It is, in the mind of the general public, so closely associated with torture that the two terms are virtually synonymous in common use. Countless works of fiction and film play upon this interrogation as torture theme while the debate on the use by American officials and foreign client states of what are somewhat disingenuously termed harsh interrogation methods has only increased the mental linkage.³ The truth however, is that proper interrogation is quite far removed from the gratuitous application of force in order to elicit information.⁴

This is not to say that coercive methods of interrogation are not used by police in counterinsurgency to say nothing of during ordinary investigation efforts. Poorly trained police who are used to relying on force to obtain compliance tend to regard brutal interrogation methods and outright torture as an acceptable way of doing business. It is equally true that proper interrogation of captured or surrendered insurgents and suspected supporters is one of the most valuable human intelligence tools in the police counterinsurgency toolkit.⁵ What is at stake is the determination of the best methods for extracting this information without compromising other essential elements of counterinsurgency operations, the most obvious being the winning of the proverbial hearts and minds of the people. In examining this contentious practice it will be helpful to begin by looking at what interrogation is, what it is meant to achieve and where it fits within the realm of intelligence collection.

Interrogation Defined

Interrogation has existed from the dawn of recorded history. Although opinions differ as to its ancient purpose,⁶ in modern times interrogation has been seen primarily as a means of extracting information from hostile subjects rather than as a way to punish or provide a means of atonement to the subject. It is, at its heart, the art and science of obtaining accurate information from subjects who are unwilling to provide it.⁷

Methods of conducting interrogations run along a continuum with simple polite discussion at one end and extreme savagery at the other. If the subject is willing to provide information and is motivated to be as accurate as possible, the conversation is generally termed an interview or debriefing. The use of the term interrogation implies the use of various techniques to overcome a covert or overt intent to conceal the information desired or to otherwise distort it into a form useless to the interrogator.⁸ The interrogator is intent on obtaining information from his interlocutor, information the subject is motivated to deny him or to mix with untruth to his own benefit.

When one considers that in counterinsurgency the police interrogator is most likely to be questioning a suspect who is known or reasonably believed to have information regarding the insurgents’ plans, identities and locations, the similarity between military and police interrogation is greatly increased.

Indeed, it is this specific area, the provision by American government experts of interrogation training to police and security forces of frequently repressive governments during the 1970s and 1980s, which created a firestorm of debate regarding the limits of permissible interrogation techniques by the forces of a liberal democracy.⁹ This controversy has recently been revisited due to the use of a system of harsh interrogation techniques becoming prevalent in the interrogations of suspects involved with Islamic terrorism.¹⁰

While the focus of this recent international discussion has been upon the specific methods which may legally be used in an interrogation in support of the “Global War on Terror”, the purpose of interrogation itself does not change with the circumstances in which it is employed. The ways and means used to advance the interrogator’s cause shift and alter based upon the situation at the time but the essential point of interrogation, the extraction of accurate information from an uncooperative subject, remains constant.

Extracting the truth

General police interrogation is usually narrow in focus. That is to say, it is designed to obtain information and/or a confession in regards to a specific case.¹¹ Police interrogation is generally conducted by the officers charged with investigating a given case and suspects are often never interrogated by anyone seeking to acquire a wider degree of knowledge of criminal activity, organization and networking. This is much less true when one enters the world of organized crime and counter gang investigations.¹² Here police interrogations tend to include questions regarding larger issues such as social networks, structures and locations used for storage, sanctuary and transshipment points.

The difference is largely one of focus as all police interrogations are designed to obtain information upon which actions may reasonably be taken. While in the more commonly encountered case specific sense the action to be taken is criminal prosecution, in the more intelligence driven environment it is often simply the discovery of individual data points and the linkages between them which will itself enable future operations to counter the network thus displayed. Criminal prosecution, assisted by a confession or other incriminating statements obtained during interrogation, is merely one type of action made possible by proper interrogation techniques. In a counterinsurgency environment, it tends to take a back seat to the more important task of uncovering the hidden insurgent network in order to permit decisive engagement. Statements of prosecutorial interest made during such interrogations are a positive side effect rather than the purpose of the activity itself.¹³ The focus in counterinsurgency is thus less on criminal evidence collection than on actionable intelligence collection.

This brings us to the question of how, exactly, do police conduct an interrogation and what if any changes are required if the focus changes from primarily criminal prosecution to network discovery.

There are several primary methods of interrogation taught to police professionals in liberal democracies. All are informed to a significant degree by the rules imposed upon the police regarding the collection and presentation of evidence, the conduct of trials and various rights of the accused. While the specifics in each area vary it is generally accepted that all liberal democracies aver the right of an accused person to competent legal counsel during questioning, the right against forced self-incrimination, the presumption of innocence in a legal sense and the total prohibition on the use of force to compel answers.¹⁴

This being the case, interrogation by police is generally an effort to obtain useful, which translates to incriminating, information from an unwilling subject while not running afoul of the locally specific legal aspects of the primary rights enumerated above. As may be imagined, this requires a great deal of caution on the part of the police and no little amount of frustration. Proper interrogation techniques are designed to give the police a sense of empowerment in an endeavor where the deck is seemingly stacked against them. They are very limited in their design due to the intent to produce legally admissible evidence in court. They are also based upon careful observation of human behavior patt...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Orientation
• Human Intelligence
• Interrogation
• Surveillance
• Analysis
• Pseudo Operations
• The Counterterror Conundrum
• Police Intelligence in a Counterinsurgency
• Bibliography