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 . Kleinman also served as the Director of Intelligence at the Personnel Recovery Academy , a unit of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency that serves as Department of Defense agency responsible for overseeing Survival , Evasion , Resistance , and Escape ( SERE ) training for U . S . military personnel . 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 the systematic employment of a coercive interrogation strategy that formerly had only been used in the SERE program to train U . S . military personnel to resist interrogation . These methods had been routinely used by Soviet and Chinese interrogators during the Cold War to compel prisoners to produce propaganda . A Senate Armed Services report released in 2008 cited then Lieutenant Colonel Kleinman as the only officer who took action to stop the use of these techniques . Kleinman was one of the first experienced interrogators , and the first military officer , to offer a strong public case against the use of coercive interrogation practices . Carefully avoiding the politics surrounding this issue , he offered a systematic argument — based on moral , legal , and operational considerations — that torture had no place in American intelligence doctrine . 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 : In July 2013 , Colonel Kleinman was awarded the 2013 " Practitioner Excellence " award by the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group ( iIIRG ) during that organization ' s conference held in Maastricht , the Netherlands . This award recognized both his " outstanding achievements to the area of ethical investigative interviewing " and his emphatic public stance against torture and coercion .