Theatre as Discipline: Performing Military Interrogation: An Interview with Mike Ritz

Introduction

My first encounter with Mike Ritz was on the phone in the spring of 2005—and I was scared. All I knew about him was that he had been an interrogator in the US Army and that he founded Team Delta, a group of retired military intelligence officers who give courses to civilians on how to interrogate and how to resist interrogation as a prisoner of war. I was trying to convince him to accept me as a student. I had one ostensible motive—to learn how to behave like an interrogator so I could perform that role onstage. My other motive was to try to understand how the military rationalizes what most civilians consider torture by finding my way into the mental landscape of soldier-specialists themselves. I was deeply disturbed by reports of prisoner abuse in military prisons (and still am), and even more perturbed by the paucity of public outcry against the attempts by US government officials to legitimize the use of torture as a necessary weapon in the War on Terror. I believed then, and still believe, that in the US we are being taught to accept torture through the interplay of discourses that induce fear by suggesting that terror is everywhere and that vindicate torture by glorifying law enforcers at home and abroad.

Ritz surprised me in many ways, first by accepting me and the five other women in my group as students despite his perception of us as leftists and potential critics of the military; then by allowing me to film our experience with him; and subsequently, by his willingness to continue to engage in public dialogue with academics and students about the implications of his work. During the training, he was a consummate professional, at ease fielding all sorts of questions about the ethics of interrogation and fluent in the psychological theories that inform the military's methods and assessment of character. He was also implacable and at times impenetrable, which of course frustrated many of the members of my group who wanted badly to outsmart our teacher.

The course that he gave us together with his colleague Marshall Perry lasted three days. Upon arrival at the training facility, located on personal property in the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania, we received a mission, a code, and a contact number—and this was the information we were not supposed to divulge. We knew that our experience as prisoners of war had time limits due to the nature of the course. We were also told that we could stop anything that was too much for any member of the group to handle by asking a key question. The following morning our immersive simulation experience began. We the students were ambushed, captured, strip searched, and thrown into the mock POW camp that had been set up in the basement of a house on the property. Each of us was subject to four interrogations over the course of a day. Afterwards, we were debriefed; our instructors assessed our attempts at resistance and our general performance. Then we spent two days in classroom training, learning about the tactics of interrogation that the military uses, and attempting, albeit poorly, to deploy some of those tactics in exercises in which we interrogated our teachers. So lesson number one for those in the group who secretly believed that interrogators are sadists by nature was that only highly trained professionals can actually do the job well.

The experience was fascinating and informative, and also terribly frustrating. Even though we were informed enough to understand the implications of what we were being taught, we lacked the experience needed to challenge our teachers in any significant way. It was not until I began to study the nearly 30 hours of footage that had been recorded during our encounter with Team Delta that I began to understand how Ritz and Perry worked and how my group responded to their tactics, which were designed to disorient us through various means of applying physical and psychological stress. Being able to observe the two instructors in and out of their interrogator characters also enabled me to...