Robinson believes an educated 18-year-old "should be able to respond to gentle interrogation and not worry when they get to the point of not knowing, relish it even because they can explore and find out more".
The nuance, one feels, is not what they came prepared to give, but what they have been pressured by an oh-so-gentle interrogation to produce.
And it often seemed that this post-Paxman style of gentler interrogation might work better on paper than on screen; Cameron easily overrode the first attempted interruption and, before long, the men were talking over each other, with the presenter not-quite-shouting that the Iraqi security services are "a joke, a joke!", and accusing the premier of "banging on" about Europe.
In mounting a gentle but firm interrogation into such matters, The Pattern in the Carpet turns out to be full not so much of last things as late things - a mature overview of a lifetime spent fitting objects together in various ways before breaking them up and beginning all over again.
Even though this man was an old-fashioned P.O.W., someone in Vice's orbit reportedly suggested that the interrogations were too gentle and that waterboarding might elicit information about the fantasized connection between Osama and Saddam.
As Allen Kay, the chairman of the agency, Korey Kay & Partners, described the process, it sounded like a gentle domestic form of wartime interrogation, in which two dozen riders were recruited at Grand Central Terminal and other stations.
It was Ms. Harman, whom the book portrays as gentle but fascinated with death, who started photographing detainees at Abu Ghraib, including one who didn't survive his interrogation.
Ruthless interrogations begin.
Mr. Obama banned brutal interrogations.
Interrogations at gunpoint.
