Resistance to interrogation, RTI or R2I is a type of military training to soldiers to prepare them, after capture by the enemy, to resist

interrogation Interrogation (also called questioning) is interviewing as commonly employed by law enforcement officers, military personnel, intelligence agencies, organized crime syndicates, and terrorist organizations with the goal of eliciting useful informa ...

techniques such as

humiliation Humiliation is the abasement of pride, which creates mortification or leads to a state of being Humility, humbled or reduced to lowliness or submission. It is an emotion felt by a person whose social status, either by force or willingly, has ...

and

torture Torture is the deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person for reasons including corporal punishment, punishment, forced confession, extracting a confession, interrogational torture, interrogation for information, or intimid ...

. The trainees undergo practices such as hooding,

sleep deprivation Sleep deprivation, also known as sleep insufficiency or sleeplessness, is the condition of not having adequate duration and/or quality of sleep to support decent alertness, performance, and health. It can be either Chronic (medicine), chronic ...

, time disorientation, prolonged

nakedness Nudity is the state of being in which a human is without clothing. While estimates vary, for the first 90,000 years of pre-history, anatomically modern humans were naked, having lost their body hair, living in hospitable climates, and not ...

, sexual humiliation and deprivation of warmth, water and food. Many of these techniques are against international law if used in interrogations. In such interrogation sessions, the subjects must maintain dead silence regardless of the practice being inflicted on them except when asked for one or more pieces of information that are in accordance with Article 17 of the

Third Geneva Convention The Third Geneva Convention, relative to the treatment of prisoners of war, is one of the four treaties of the Geneva Conventions. The Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War was first adopted in 1929, but significantl ...

. Under that protocol four pieces of information have to be provided whenever requested: name, rank, serial number and date of birth. Both the subjects and the practitioner have a right to insist on a return to unit every hour. Standard RTI for most special military branches of American and European governments covers both tortures that are condemned by the

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

and interrogation techniques that are considered legitimate, usually presented along a sliding scale. For instance, a soldier would be subjected to slight discomforts before being subjected to more torturous techniques. The People's Liberation Army Rocket Force Special Operations Regiment includes RTI in their selection. ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' has reported that according to a former British

special forces Special forces or special operations forces (SOF) are military units trained to conduct special operations. NATO has defined special operations as "military activities conducted by specially designated, organized, selected, trained and equip ...

officer, the acts committed by

U.S. Army The United States Army (USA) is the primary land service branch of the United States Department of Defense. It is designated as the Army of the United States in the United States Constitution.Article II, section 2, clause 1 of the United Stat ...

soldiers who committed torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib resembled the techniques used in RTI training.

References

Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse Interrogation techniques Psychological warfare techniques Interrogations Iraq War terminology {{Mil-stub

See also

References