Steven Kleinman

Steven Kleinman is a career military intelligence officer and a recognized expert in the fields of human intelligence, strategic interrogation, special operations, and special survival training.

He has been widely recognized as one of the most effective and prolific interrogators in the Department of Defense. Kleinman served as an interrogator, the chief of a joint interrogation team, and as a senior advisor on interrogation to a special operations task force during Operations JUST CAUSE, DESERT SHIELD/STORM, and IRAQI FREEDOM, respectively. He was formerly the Director of the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course.

In 2003, he was chosen to lead a contingent of interrogation and resistance to interrogation advisors to assist a task force involved in the questioning of Iraqi insurgents. What he did not know until his arrival in country was that he would be witnessing an interrogation strategy that U.S. military personnel were trained to resist, in a program known as "SERE," to avoid techniques that produced bad intelligence.

Kleinman has published criticisms of the Bush administration's policy on interrogation.

Kleinman testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee of the United States Senate about the use of interrogation techniques which exceeded those allowed by law. He specifically cited the employment of harsh interrogation methods that were previously reserved for use in programs designed to train U.S. military personnel to resist interrogation if held by countries that were not signatories to the Geneva Convention. Those techniques, to include forced nudity, sleep deprivation, and painful shackling, were being used on Iraqi detainees. "It had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn't cooperate," he told the Senate panel. Discovering the use of such measures in Iraq in 2003 prompted him to order a stop to such interrogations and to warn his superiors that these interrogation practices were abusive and, in his opinion, illegal.

Kleinman was a senior advisor for a major study into interrogation commissioned by the Intelligence Science Board, a research entity under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and wrote two of the chapters that appeared in the study's final report. The findings set forth in this report described the harsh interrogation techniques used again detainees since 9/11 as "outmoded, amateurish, and unreliable.

A colonel in the Air Force reserve, Kleinman has observed that while the U.S. Government has spent billions on spy satellites, very little has been invested in a formal study of the art and science of interrogation. This, he has noted, is in spite of the fact that there is a broad consensus that interrogation might be the best source of information on an elusive, low-tech, stateless foe like Al Qaeda.

On November 8, 2007 Kleinman testified before the Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties of the US House of Representatives:

"[M]any Americans, understandably angry and seeking some manner of revenge after the vicious attacks of 9/11, have fallen prey to the proposition that excessive physical, psychological, and emotional pressures are necessary to compel terrorists or insurgents to answer an interrogator's questions. Further, this form of interrogation is too often viewed as an inevitable and appropriate means of punishment the detainees deserve for their malicious acts. Such beliefs are equally untrue... [C]oercion is decidedly ineffective. Coercive interrogation methods are wholly counterproductive in winning the hearts and minds of detainees and, I might add, the populations from which they emerge. Instead, coercive methods are almost certain to create what is perhaps the most callous form of degradation one human can inflict upon another: humiliation. Humiliation is an inevitable product of any form of torture".