A First Hand Account of Interrogation

The Journalist and the Murderer: "First of all, as a novelist I’ve written about what it’s like to be interrogated. I understood that it’s a psychologically daunting experience, but you really can’t have any conception of what it’s like to be strongly interrogated until you undergo it. It’s a humiliating experience. You have no power. And it’s especially difficult in a foreign language. In order to speak well and to be convincing you have to have tremendous command of the language. And when you don’t you sound like a liar even when you’re not. I remember in this interrogation thinking, “My God, I sound like a liar. If I were Mignini, I wouldn’t believe me, stumbling, stuttering, and sweating, and using the wrong words, and backtracking, and saying things two or three times, and trying to explain what I meant.” I was thinking, “They’re going to take me from this room and put me in jail, and I’m not going to see my wife and kids again, or at least for a while.” I was terrified that I was not going to see the outside world again. Because of course the crimes they were accusing me of were very serious."