booth bad "butt"

First of all, my most sincerest apologies for the lack of blogs. I've been without internet for the last couple weeks... and so much has happened. So it was kind of an unfortunate time for my internet to fail me.

Now that I've made a formal apology, let me just give you a quick recap over the last couple of days. I have officially started booth iterations. AKA death every other day. Or a bettter explanation would be that I am actually conducting interrogations. Me. By myself. There are a ton of steps and a lot of time involved in the process... and I'll try not to bore you guys with the details... but typically nerdy me is really excited about all of this. So I'll probably bore you anyways.

So the first step is called planning and prep. We spend time basically researching and gathering any information we can on the detainee that we will be interrogating so we can find his or her weakness to make them break and spill the beans. We right a couple of reports before we can move on. Basically laying out how we can best smush this person to smithereens.

The next step is the actual interrogation. I'm the first group to go in... and every other day I head in at 8:30 in the morning my time. I set up my booth and I always make sure to pray before the whistle (this is the sound of doom. when the whistle sounds, the torture begins. for both me and the detainee) blows.

The next step is I hear a knock on the door. My heart immediately starts to race. My hands start shaking. I probably look mighty foolish, not that foolishness doesn't come naturally to me anyways.

Then I begin my approaches. Typically, I botch these horribly. You use approaches like love of family or pride and ego down... which probably doesn't mean anything. Think of it as weaknesses. My weakness is my family. Hence the love of family. The person I interrogated today's weakness was his wife. When he was detained, he had her medicine for diabetes on him. So I said things like "Your actions ultimately put your wife in danger. You had her medicine that she desperately needed, and you made the choice to engage in the Samarra Cell. She's probably not very happy with you. But I understand. You were trying to do what you thought was best at the time for you and your family. I respect your intentions. I'm going to try to contact the Red Crescent and see if we can get her that medicine. In turn, I need you to cooperate with me."

Today was a wonderful day to be Jacki. I said all the right things and broke (they started giving me the information I needed my detainee almost instantly. I've never mastered the art of the approaches. Today, I was an approach rockstar.

The next step is the questioning. I have a HUGE book of questions I need to cover (see picture). All within the span of 3 hours. Granted, the stories are probably catered to fit that time frame and when I am in Iraq I could spend days questioning my detainee. But still... so much to cover and so little time.

Then it's time for termination. Which, I usually do pretty good at. You just have to reiterate the approaches you used and the incentives you promised and a bunch of other nonsense. After termination, you go over the "dipr." This is when you find out from the detainee, who has magically switched back to a normal person, what you can improve on and what your overall score is. I think there is 9 different sections you need to pass and you need to get at least 80% of the information. Your not expected to pass until the 5th iteration... I actually passed everything today with flying colors and I'm only on my 2nd interation and I got 89% of the information. I am officially a booth bad "butt". I will except pats on the back at a later time or something cooler.

Then, you right reports. And they are boring. Horrifyingly boring. Fall asleep and hit your head on the key board boring. That bad. It takes about 3 hours of actively fighting sleep to get all of the reports done.

And then... it starts all over. I think my mom used to say "same shit different day." I've never found a more true example...