Lectures on "aggressive policies" for detention and interrogation

I've linked previously to a bunch of lectures from the Cybersecurity and Homeland Security course I attended last quarter, but I haven't yet linked to a couple of the most important and disturbing. On November 30, the course organizers persuaded speakers from the U.S. Dept. of Defense to speak. The two principal lecturers were an historian in the employ of the Pentagon and a U.S. Army interrogator respectively.

Lecture links (as usual, you'll want WebViewer for an optimal experience, but you can also page through the slides manually):

Brian Del Monte, "Detention Operations Policy & the Global War on Terrorism":

PowerPoint slides, Windows Media video, streaming WebViewer, downloadable WebViewer archive

Christina Filarowski Sheaks, "Interrogation Policy & the Global War on Terrorism":

PowerPoint slides, Windows Media video, streaming WebViewer, downloadable WebViewer archive

By and large, the first lecture's infuriating, and the second lecture's chilling and surreal, a quality that is not mitigated by the fact that Ms. Sheaks, the United States Army field interrogator, is a soft-spoken woman wearing a low-cut dress.

I don't have a whole lot more to say --- the lectures almost speak for themselves --- except that it's worth noting how careful the speakers are to emphasize that they're speaking for the Department of Defense only, and (in Ms. Sheaks's case) addressing interrogation policy only. This leaves two elephants in the room. First, most of the recent "aggressive interrogation" incidents were allegedly performed by the CIA, which isn't part of the DoD. Second, the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not, in fact, performed as part of interrogation procedures --- they were performed, as far as we can tell, for no purpose at all.