Steven Kleinman
Steven Kleinman is a retired United States Air Force colonel and an expert in human intelligence, special operations, and survival training. He served almost 30 years in active and reserve duty and worked at top military and joint commands.
His deployments included Just Cause, Desert Shield/Storm, Iraqi Freedom, and the Global War on Terror. He held senior intelligence roles, including Director of Intelligence at the Personnel Recovery Academy (part of JPRA, the DoD group that handles SERE training) and, in the reserves, senior intelligence posts at Air Force Special Operations Command and CENTCOM.
In 2003, Kleinman led a JPRA team helping a task force questioning Iraqi insurgents. He saw the use of coercive interrogation tactics and spoke out against them. A 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee report praised him as the only officer who acted to stop those tactics, and he became the first military officer to publicly oppose torture, arguing it has no place in American intelligence. He has spent years trying to change how interrogations are done, based on moral, legal, and practical reasons.
Kleinman pointed out problems with the Army Field Manual on interrogation, saying it did not prove that the methods it described actually worked. After the Bush administration updated the manual in 2006, he argued that there still wasn’t enough testing of how effective the techniques were. He testified before Congress in 2007, describing how some interrogation methods used in Iraq went beyond what was legal and proper, including practices like forced nudity, sleep deprivation, and harsh shackling. He told lawmakers that these actions were abusive and illegal.
He also served as a senior advisor for a major study on interrogation for the Intelligence Science Board (under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) and helped write chapters for the final report. The study said that the harsh techniques used after 9/11 were outdated and unreliable. Kleinman has repeatedly noted that the United States has spent a lot on high-tech surveillance but not enough on studying how to interrogate effectively and ethically.
In 2013, he received the Practitioner Excellence award from the International Investigative Interviewing Research Group for his work in ethical investigative interviewing and his opposition to torture. Since 2003, he has advocated for an evidence-based, human-rights–based approach to interrogation and called for a full review of the Army Field Manual. He supported the McCain-Feinstein amendment to the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, which would require a complete manual review and allow access to detainees for Red Cross review.
In 2014, Human Rights First named Kleinman one of Nine Heroes Who Stood Up Against Torture.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 11:53 (CET).