The Network Read Online Free PDF

‘In that case, I must caution you under Section 52 of the Armed Forces Act, “whereby a charge may be heard summarily if the accused is an officer below the rank of lieutenant colonel, and if the accused is subject to service law”. Which you are , Taverner. Offences that may be dealt with at a summary hearing include any offence under Section 13, Contravention to Standing Orders, Section 30, Allowing Unlawful Release of Prisoners, and Section 42, Criminal Conduct. I remind you also that a court martial has jurisdiction to try any service offence under Section 328, Giving False Answer During Enlistment in a Regular Force. And in case you want to drag things out in the hope that someone’s going to swoop from the heavens to rescue you, I remind you also that any review of custody may be postponed if the person in service custody is being questioned and the commanding officer is satisfied that an interruption of the question would prejudice the investigation. In your case, the first review of your custody here will be in ninety-six hours. Are you with me, Taverner? Ninety-six hours can be a long time.’
    Now, for the first time, I am beginning to feel uncertain as to the true purpose of our encounter. It is paradoxical that this unextraordinary-looking man with his precise gestures and his even tones evokes more distress in me than any of the threats of violence from his more theatrical subordinates. But that is the interrogator’s art. I have seen a few of them. The best never have to lay a finger on their charges to bring about a state of total compliance, a fact of which I am now reminded.
    The colonel looks down at the file again, as if disappointed. His lips are pursed and he’s nodding to himself. I wonder how much of the material is genuine, or whether the pages really belong to someone else’s file. I recognise the interrogator’s ‘file and dossier approach’, used to convince a prisoner that everything about him is known and recorded.
    ‘Allow me to take you back nine years to Kuwait.’ He has my attention, such as I can summon. ‘You were detailed with confinement of Cat 1 PW number,’ he looks down, ‘LBN428571, better known as Elias Rashid Gemayel, were you not? I know, you can’t answer the question. So let me answer it for you. You’re E2 ops officer with the Joint Forward Interrogation Team tasked with assessing said internee’s IP and drafting relevant TIRs. Coming back to you?’
    ‘I can’t answer that question.’
    ‘Can’t answer it, sir .’
    I have forgotten the army’s obsession with acronyms and abbreviations. It’s another language. E2 is my function as an extra-regimentally employed officer with the JFIT, IP is the prisoner’s intelligence potential, and a tactical interrogation report is what an ops officer, on occasion, is tasked to write up after an interrogation has taken place.
    ‘Would you like to describe for me your relationship with Gemayel? You gave him a high co-operation level, low potential intelligence rating. Which is strange, don’t you think? Did you imagine all the effort that went into finding him was just for fun?’ He allows himself a pause, during which he takes a sip of coffee. ‘You liked him, didn’t you? Your words, not mine,’ he remonstrates, as if I’ve challenged him on the point.
    There had been no reason to dislike him. He had been scooped up in Kuwait City by 14 Int after a tip-off. It was near the end of hostilities, and he’d been brought to the EPW facility for priority processing. We’d rained so much high explosive onto the length and breadth of Iraq that the war was about to end with spectacular speed, and technically Gemayel hadn’t been an enemy prisoner of war at all. He was later classed as a civilian internee and given private but secure quarters. Despite the circumstances, our sessions were friendly. Gemayel was a Lebanese Arab, whose mother had been Christian before her marriage. He was pushing fifty, an educated and