Just found this interesting top-10 list of books written about the failure of torture to provide useful information, written by U.S. army lieutenant-colonel Douglas Pryer, who is in military intelligence.
Pryer's list consists mostly of real-life war-time accounts of interrogators who used respect and brains to bring around captives, instead of brutality.
Such accounts aren't just valuable as an indictment of torture and the media that supports it in various movies and TV shows.
They also present techniques of information gathering useful to a journalist dealing with reluctant sources (including those in the security and police community whose experiences are recounted in the books).
Pryer is also author of Fight for the High Ground: The U.S. Army and Interrogation During Operation Iraqi Freedom, May 2003-April 2004.
Astute readers may recall an earlier post I wrote on the same topic back in 2010. It was about a 203-page study of "intelligence interviewing" produced by the U.S. Intelligence Board, which answers to the CIA director.
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