Author Dominic Streatfeild interviewed many trained military, intelligence and police interrogators for his book Brainwash and I’ve just realised he’s put the full text of the interviews online.

They’re in equal measures fascinating, disturbing and sometimes worryingly relevant, as the ‘war on terror’ still relies on many of the same physical coercion techniques used in conflicts past.

The interviewees discuss their experiences of being interrogated to being interrogators and range from being captured in the Korean War, to counter-insurgency in Yemen, to The Troubles in Northern Ireland, to the ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan.

[Interrogation subjects in the world of intelligence tend to construct series of cover stories, like the skins of an onion. Interrogators have to] go through these stories, peeling the onion, trying to get to the core. And eventually, people run out of stories.

The interviews are:

Interview with British Interrogator #1

Interview with British Interrogator #2

Interview with British Interrogator #3

Interview with SAS NCO Trained Interrogator

Interview with Senior Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) officer

Interview with US Army Interrogator #1