Haunted by Abu Ghraib- Anti-torture whistleblower blacklisted

[Rose Siding]

by Jason Vest

Having helped reveal abuse at the notorious prison, former interrogator Torin Nelson opens up about why it happened and how it has wrecked his career.
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Nelson's position is that a well-trained, well-disciplined interrogator doesn't need to lay a finger on anyone. Rather, interrogators must hone approaches grounded in patience and cunning. Like many professional interrogators, Nelson is a serious student of interrogation history. Like many pros, he worships at the altar of Hanns Joachim Scharff, a German corporal whose highly effective methods of extracting information from captured Allied pilots in World War II included such techniques as having protracted philosophical discussions with his subjects while strolling through the woods. "He'd get little bits of information each day, so small the prisoners didn't even realize what they'd given up," Nelson says.....

For today's professional interrogator, says Nelson, popular culture is as much an enemy as terrorists. "I'd say that Holly- wood is partially to blame for some of the bad stuff that's happened in interrogations since 9/11," he says. "At Fort Huachuca, there's a number of kids whose only frame of reference for interrogation is 24. They see someone getting slammed into a wall on TV and it works. But in real life, it doesn't."
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When veteran national security correspondent David Martin recently proposed a piece on Nelson for the CBS Evening News, the producers turned it down. Martin did, however, discuss the unproduced story on a CBS blog. "I think part of the reason ," he wrote "was not the news value, but the fact that nobody wants to put those awful pictures on television again."

On March 16, Nelson filed as a Democratic candidate for Congress, in Utah's 3rd District, for the seat now held by Republican Christopher Cannon.

http://www.govexec.com/features/0406-01/0406-01s3.htm