AI Bibliography

Sun Tzu lists five factors to consider before going into battle, or an interrogation. These five factors are moral influence, weather, terrain, command and doctrine. We will often make tough decisions regarding an individual’s employment or their freedom and the morality of those decisions should always be considered. Weather can be translated to the political climate of our situation. We should consider if our current climate supports the interrogation or if we should wait for a political storm to clear. The physical location of the interrogation constitutes the terrain. Although some environments are more challenging than others we should find a location that gives us an advantage as opposed to providing an advantage to our subjects. In many cases the command consideration involves us. Are we making good legal and business decisions and are we properly training our employees to conduct interrogations? Doctrine represents the methods we use to elicit information from people. Here is where we follow any applicable laws and policies as we execute our interrogation techniques.

Once the decision has been made to conduct the interrogation the focus turns to preparation. Sometimes we have days to prepare and on other occasions we may only have a few minutes. According to Sun Tzu, whatever preparation time we have should be focused on creating advantages for ourselves. We can create advantages by researching our subject’s background, choosing the right location to conduct the conversation, reviewing the investigation or taking a few seconds to make the conversation appear spontaneous or well planned. If we look at preparation as an ongoing process we can consider Sun Tzu’s assertion that better trained armies will typically prevail.