How To Debrief Terrorists

#373 How To Debrief Terrorists

All this stuff about holding terrorists in jail? Denying them lawyers? Not leveling formal charges? Not telling anyone we have them? Sending them to Egypt where there are no anti-torture laws? Totally ineffective.

Waterboarding? Inhumane and ineffective.

Getting women to canoodle with them? Nah. Total waste.

Here's how to get the answers.

Lock them up in a craft store.

Michaels. JoAnn's. Pearl Paint. Craft Warehouse. Crafts-R-Us. One of those. Or any independent retailer of similar ilk.

Twenty minutes in one of those and they'll break down into tears and spill every datum they know, even ones they don't know they know.

If you're a craft person, you won't understand this, because these stores are Craft Paradise (minus the 70 odd virgins.)

Put a youthful male suspect in one of these and in five minutes, he'll start choking. In ten minutes every inch of his skin will be itchy. In 15 minutes he'll be half way to a major migraine. And in 20 minutes, he'll be begging for mercy.

But you have to be crafty about how you do it. After all, you don't want to risk complete culture shock and have the guy turn into a vegetable before you learn what he can tell you.

Here's how. Start at the entrance. Usually, that's where they keep the artificial flowers. You'd think you can't get an allergic reaction to paper, but you're wrong. These flowers give off something that takes all the oxygen out of the area. The colors are blinding. Psychedelic flashback is a risk for subject and interrogator alike. Then, move along to the make-your-own jewelry aisles. Same color problems, but smaller stuff. Force them to examine every bead, every beading tool. Just don't let them at the wire cutters or linoleum knives.

By now, they're fading. Take them over to the unfinished furniture kits. Make them open and smell the bottles of primer and finish. Make them examine the brushes and rollers.

If they're still not ready to talk (they will be, trust me,) take them to the custom framing counter and make them listen to explanations of how the frames are put together.

And finally, bring them into the classroom where they'll have to listen to and watch all the wonderful things you can do with paint-on-velvet kits.

And if there's STILL no response, there's always the sewing machine and fabric departments. At the former, they can examine machinery that's so complicated, it makes their weapons of mass destruction and strap on explosives look like kid stuff. And the fabrics? Less air than among the flowers.

Our Homeland Security Department has it all wrong. We don't need waterboards. We don't need obvious means of torture. We need forced embroidery sessions, paint by numbers kits, calligraphy pen sets, bolts of rayon and acres of fake flowers.

If they don't knuckle under and spill the beans after a session like this, there were no beans to spill.

I'm Wes "The Interrogator" Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®
©WJR 2008