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Chapter 8
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Talking to Strangers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Default to Truth
Limitations of Transparency
Coupling Theory and Context
Self vs. Stranger
Summary
Analysis
1. James Mitchell recalls the first time he saw the captive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, a senior Al Qaeda official. Mitchell is a trained psychologist whom the CIA recruited to aid in interrogations after 9/11. Over the next decade, Mitchell and his colleague, Jenson, would interview many terrorists, but KSM, whom Mitchell describes as “brilliant,” was by far “the biggest prize.” Had KSM not been captured, it’s likely that many subsequent attacks would have followed 9/11.
Chapter Nine presents a new variation on the stranger encounter. In this scenario, the stranger we are trying to understand is a terrorist trained to reveal nothing to his interrogators. The language Mitchell employs in his description of KSM lends additional insight into the way he approached this stranger encounter. By referring to KSM as “the biggest prize,” he construes the act of interrogation as a game, and the prospect of a confession, the prize. There’s a fierce desire for certainty embedded in Mitchell’s language. Obviously, there are high-stakes political reasons for wanting to force information from a captured terrorist. But introducing interrogation—coercing information from another person—raises broader questions about how our desperate attempts to know things about a stranger compromise our ability to truly understand and relate to them.
Themes
While KSM eventually disturbed his interrogators with lurid accounts of violence he had committed, he was not always so forthcoming. When he was first captured in March 2003, in fact, he refused to talk. Interrogators who tried to get KSM to open up by being friendly were unsuccessful. Later efforts to get through to KSM by forcing him into physically uncomfortable “stress” positions, too, failed.
Gladwell analyzes the CIA’s interrogation of KSM to explore the consequences of forcing a stranger to make themselves familiar to us. But is coercion an effective means of eliciting information from a stranger? And, even if coercion does give us the information we desire, is this a meaningful way to engage with strangers?
Themes
When the CIA recruited Mitchell and Jessen to interrogate KSM, they employed highly controversial techniques called “enhanced interrogation techniques,” or EITs, which critics refer to as torture. Ethical ramifications aside, Gladwell argues that the interrogation of KSM is an apt example of “the most extreme version of the talking-to-strangers problem,” where the stranger is a terrorist who will do anything to withhold his secrets.
After 9/11, the Bush Administration allowed interrogators to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) on detainees. These techniques involve the application of physical and psychological torture, such as waterboarding or sleep deprivation, in an effort to force a confession. Gladwell explores the CIA’s use of EITs to pose broader questions about how we ought to approach the issue of uncertainty as it relates to strangers.
Themes
2. Prior to their involvement with the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen worked as psychologists for the Air Force’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program, which trains military personnel in how to respond to being captured by enemy forces. The typical training exercise involved local police arriving unannounced and transporting soldiers to mock prisoner-of-war (POW) camps. There, they would be led through a series of trials meant to simulate the experience of being subjected to torture and interrogation.
SERE was founded after World War II. While initially a program designed to teach survival skills to military personnel, SERE later shifted its emphasis to resistance training, or training to resist interrogation. So far, most of the scenarios Gladwell has presented feature two people who want to, but fail to understand each other. In this chapter, he introduces a new variation on the stranger problem: understanding someone who is determined not to be understood.
Themes
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Mitchell was in charge of designing the SERE program and sometimes had to participate in training procedures himself. One such procedure involved the interrogator threatening the captured subject’s colleague. According to Mitchell, men are more likely to fold in this situation, whereas women remain silent. When Mitchell was paired with a woman in this SERE exercise, she refused to talk, and Mitchell was placed in a fifty-five-gallon drum. The drum was sealed, placed in the ground, and covered in dirt. A hose attached to the drum emitted water that slowly filled the barrel. When Mitchell was removed an hour later, the water had risen to his nose. Mitchell notes that many trainees were placed in the barrel, which was then a part of SERE’s standard course.
Mitchell’s descriptive account of the barrel procedure—which, Mitchell specifies, was only part of the standard course— emphasizes the psychological rigor involved in resistance training. The extreme lengths we’re willing to go to to extract information from unwilling subjects and withhold information from others raises philosophical concerns about our relationship to truth and certainty. Gladwell implies that we believe that if we push hard enough, there is no aspect of a stranger that is beyond our ability to understand. But is this true? Can we force the issue of confession, and should we?
Themes
3. The training exercises Mitchell and Jessen designed for SERE formed the basis of the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program. Asked to assemble a list of the most effective interrogation techniques, the men placed waterboarding, wailing, and sleep deprivation as the most effective measures for getting people to talk. Waterboarding is a technique where the detainee is placed on a hospital gurney that is tilted 45 degrees, with the detainee’s head lower than their body. A cloth is placed over the face, and water is poured into the mouth and nose, which mimics the sensation of drowning.
The CIA hired Mitchell and Jessen to develop the SERE program despite the fact that neither man had an intelligence background or experience in conducting a formal interrogation. Additionally, the CIA later discovered that Mitchell and Jessen did not have the waterboarding expertise they claimed to have had, and their claims of its effectiveness and safety were therefore subject to debate.
Themes
In their interrogations, Mitchell and Jessen strive for compliance—for detainees to volunteer information of their own volition. KSM was a complicated case, Mitchell recalls, since the severity of his crimes meant he would never leave prison and, thus, had no incentive to share information. It took three weeks of heightened interrogation techniques for KSM to break. However, this would only be the beginning of Mitchell and Jessen’s troubles with KSM.
The question of what constitutes volunteered information is relevant here. For instance, is an action really voluntary if it comes as a response to coercion? This conflict and the detail about KSM’s lack of incentive to share information hint at the idea that Mitchell and Jessen’s techniques weren’t as effective as they were supposed to be.
Themes
4. Gladwell shifts focus to a psychiatrist named Charles Morgan’s research on PTSD. Morgan was interested in learning why some veterans develop the illness and others do not. He went to a SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina to conduct his research. As Morgan observed the trainees being interrogated, he was shocked to see them respond to their pretend interrogations as thought they were real. One man even broke down in tears. Morgan realized that what was so troubling to the soldiers “was the uncertainty of their situation.” Knowing this, Morgan instructed the soldiers to take the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure drawing test, which assesses participants’ ability to reproduce a particular image from memory. SERE students excelled at the test before their interrogations but failed afterward, which suggested that the trauma of the interrogation caused their prefrontal cortex to shut down.
Morgan’s research at Fort Bragg suggests that Mitchell and Jessen’s interrogation techniques likely weren’t as effective as they had purported them to be. In the extreme state of duress experienced by people who are subjected to torture, the brain shuts down instead of opening up. Morgan’s findings also further explore humanity’s relationship to uncertainty. Morgan identifies “the uncertainty of [SERE students’] situation” as a primary cause of their psychological duress. This shows that people are fundamentally uncomfortable with uncertainty.
Themes
Morgan’s findings were troubling, since the purpose of interrogation was to get the subject to open up, not shut down. Another troubling finding was that post-interrogation SERE students had trouble with facial recognition. In one test, 20 out of 52 students misidentified the man who ran the training camp and ordered their punishments. After 9/11, Morgan began working for the CIA. He tried to impress upon his colleagues the significance of his findings, which suggested that information that detainees shared under stressful circumstances could be misleading and downright deceptive. When Morgan heard about Mitchell and Jessen’s methods, therefore, he was understandably concerned.
Morgan’s research suggests major flaws in the CIA’s new methods of interrogation. At a broader level, too, seeing how the CIA’s desire for certainty led them to pursue disreputable, unsafe methods of interrogation suggests that striving for certainty is misguided and harmful. Gladwell presents this chapter on the ineffectiveness of Enhanced Interrogation techniques to suggest that uncertainty is unavoidable, and perhaps the sooner we abandon the false conviction that we can know everything about a stranger, the better chance we stand to communicate effectively with them.
Themes
5. KSM’s first public confession occurred on March 10, 2007, during a hearing held at Guantánamo Bay. KSM confessed to serving as Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the 9/11 operation. He continued in this manner, confessing to each Al Qaeda operation in which he’d been involved. The confession was a victory for Mitchell and Jessen. Yet, the question remained: just how much of KSM’s confession was actually true? As Morgan’s study of the cognitive effects of trauma in SERE students suggests, the torture to which KSM’s interrogators had subjected him could have compromised his ability to be objective and accurate. There didn’t seem to be a terrorist plot that KSM didn’t confess to, and officials suspected he was lying to exaggerate his status as an accomplished terrorist.
At the beginning of Chapter Eleven, Gladwell quotes Mitchell as describing KSM as “the biggest prize,” after which Gladwell guides his audience through a detailed account of the horrific efforts Mitchell and Jessen undertook in an effort to claim their coveted prize of KSM’s coerced confession. Now, at the end of the chapter, Gladwell invites us to reconsider whether the psychologists “winning” a prize at all. In addition to the fact that Enhanced Interrogation techniques are ethically dubious and illegal under U.S. and international law, Morgan’s findings suggest that torture isn’t even an effective means of opening up the brain. Ultimately, the saga of KSM’s interrogation shows that the harder the CIA pushed for certainty, the more certainty eluded them.
Themes
Gladwell concludes the chapter with a meditation on the fragility of truth. Learning strangers’ secrets—and talking to strangers in a broader sense—is a complicated task that people must approach “with caution and humility.” Gladwell wonders how many of the conflicts he has covered thus far might have been avoided had the people involved heeded this advice.
Gladwell presents the CIA’s methods for learning strangers’ secrets—through brute force—to demonstrate how not to talk to strangers. Ultimately, the only definitive answer that came of the CIA’s interrogation of KSM was that we cannot evade uncertainty, and any attempts to do so will be in vain. As Gladwell has shown in previous examples, our overconfidence in our ability to understand strangers inevitably becomes our downfall. If we truly want to understand strangers, Gladwell suggests, we must instead abandon this unearned confidence and approach strangers “with caution and humility.”
Themes
