From the Dept. of You Can’t Make This Shit Up, the following headline from the Life section of this morning’s Detroit Free Press:
“Try these CIA interrogation tactics in personal situations at home, office”
The Freep’s online version of the article, originally from the Chicago Tribune, has a slightly less horrifying though no less astonishing headline: “CIA interrogation tactics that can be used at home.”
The article is plugging a new book, Get the Truth: Former CIA Officers Teach You How to Persuade Anyone to Tell All written by former CIA interrogator Paul Houston and co-authors Michael Floyd and Susan Carnicero. In the book:
Houston … isn’t suggesting that you treat your nearest and dearest like threats to national security. But he does say that a modified version of the approach he honed at the CIA can be highly effective.
I’m wondering if Houston and his co-authors mean the kind of tried-and-true methods culled by The Washington Post from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program:
- Rectal feeding and rectal rehydration for uncooperative subjects;
- Threatening to harm loved ones, including telling one subject that his mother’s throat would be cut if he failed to provide information;
- Locking a subject in a coffin-sized confinement box for 266 straight hours;
- Waterboarding a single subject 183 times;
- Stripping subjects naked, shackling them in a standing position for as much as 72 straight hours, and dousing them with cold water.
What an invaluable resource for home and office. Is your teenager hesitant to tell you where he and his buddies went last night? Try rectal rehydration! Do you have a subordinate at the office who can’t explain why he keeps missing his sales quotas? The confinement box works wonders!
Just imagine the bestselling advice book these guys could have written with Adolf Eichmann …