Posted on 12/07/2006 8:17:40 PM PST by SandRat
This is the first in a series following a media event at the Intelligence Center on Fort Huachuca on Wednesday.
By Bill Hess
Herald/ Review FORT HUACHUCA — In small buildings human intelligence collector trainees are getting a taste of what they will face when they deploy to Iraq.
More realistic training for interrogators, as human intelligence collectors are called, is a fact of life at the Intelligence Center on this southern Arizona Army post.
And that realism means Arabic is a major part of the graduation test — a 10-day field training exercise.
Staff Sgt. Rami Elsouhag said interrogators need to understand Arab culture to be able to do their job.
“There is a better understanding of what they face when an interpreter is used,” Elsouhag said.
Born in Michigan to Egyptian parents, the soldier has spent 10 years in the Army and done three tours in Iraq as an interrogator, where his language and culture skills make him one of a few GIs able to work with Iraqi Arabs one-on-one.
American soldier interrogators usually do not know the language and need an interpreter.
Elsouhag is now an instructor at the Intelligence Center, who keeps the importance of cultural awareness, including language nuances, in the forefront of training.
Waiting for a soldier to arrive in Iraq before having an understanding of how to work with an interpreter is not good, Elsouhag said.
Sgt. Drew Clarke agreed.
Looking forward to graduation on Dec. 14, Clarke said being a person who asks questions to retrieve intelligence information is made more realistic when he has to use a go-between — an interpreter.
The process may be slower when compared to the beginning of the training, when students like him question detainees who are instructors in English, said Clarke, who has served in the Army for four years.
He will attend Arabic language training at the Defense Language Institute in California next month, but he said he probably will need the help of interpreters even after 18 months of instruction.
He is no stranger to hearing Iraqi Arabic, having returned from an eight-month tour in June, where he was a human resources specialist.
But hearing a language and understanding it are not the same, said the 23-year-old soldier from St. Petersburg, Fla.
As he spoke while sitting at a table under a tree, fellow soldiers in his class went through one of their times in “the booth,” a building where they would question a detainee with help from an interpreter.
Arabic could be heard coming from a mock village, this time designated as a farming community made up of a few structures.
Not far away, other soldiers manned a traffic control point where on-spot interrogations of indigenous people were conducted.
Both additional scenarios had native Arabic speakers, many of whom are soldiers who deploy to Iraq from the fort, provide interpreting services.
Because of the sensitivity of their work, their identities are not allowed.
For Clarke, becoming a human intelligence collector was a chance to do something different and “get out from behind a desk.”
Saying he wanted to broaden his horizons and have better opportunities for promotion, the soldier said his previous Army job and work he did while a civilian will help him as an interpreter.
Part of being a good human intelligence collector is having the ability to listen.
“If you are good at customer service, it can be used as a human intelligence collector,” Clarke said. “It helps a lot dealing with people on a daily basis.”
Good interrogators apply the knowledge they’ve learned, he added. Collecting intelligence from people is another way “to interact with people.”
But the interrogation interaction is critical to obtaining information that will save lives, the soldier said.
Part of the instruction each human intelligence collector receives is that the system has 16 authorized approaches and three others that have to be approved by senior officers.
None of the approaches allow abuse of a detainee or any person being questioned, Clarke said.
His favorite approach is the love of family as an emotional approach that allows the person being questioned to open up about who they love and miss, which can be used to create a bond to obtain important intelligence information.
The interrogator and interpreter team has to work together, he and others said during a media day set up by Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast, commander of the Intelligence Center, and her senior staff.
“Nine-11 was a wake-up call for everyone,” Fast said.
The Army’s intelligence community is facing a multi-layer of problems of insurgents, terrorists and criminals in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, she said.
Active-duty soldiers, National Guard and Reserves, have to be tactically and strategically efficient when it comes to intelligence matters, Fast said.
The training at the intelligence schoolhouse continues to be revised to incorporate lessons learned coming out of places such as Iraq.
With the increased need for interrogators, having soldier students better prepared cannot be ignored, Fast said. Gone are the days when the human intelligence collectors did everything in English during a field training exercise, which many times did not include what was happening at the time in the world.
When realism is part of a training scenario, soldiers have a better understanding what is waiting for them once they graduate, the general said.
When soldiers arrive at the Intelligence Center, the responsibility of everyone at the schoolhouse — military, civil service and contractors — is to strengthen the students on what she called a level playing field.
“We provide the basic (intelligence) building blocks to all soldiers,” Fast said.
HERALD/REVIEW senior reporter Bill Hess can be reached at 515-4615 or by e-mail at bill.hess@svherald.com.
I went to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey to learn North Vietnamese and I was always rated at the top of the rating scale throughout school and my service time.
Nonetheless, I never felt like I began to approach fluency until I went to VN 25 years later to live and work and subsequently to have an apartment with my VN girlfriend. She and I only spoke in VN. After a few years, I began to dream in VN and even to think in VN; still I have never made it to fluency, in my opinion.
Hoping to be fluent in an interrogation situation pre-supposes that the interrogator is up to speed on the current street slang -- fat chance.
Gary
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