kzt wrote:I strongly suspect that it's perfectly possible to confuse the hell out of a treecat if you know much about them. They are not mind reading. For example, techniques to make something the truth for you. Memory is very plastic and I would expect similar techniques exist to defeat skilled vigorous interrogation.
For the purposes of this thread, I'm going to argue otherwise. I'm not even in the Honorverse and I find skilled liars far easier to detect than just about any other form of "human snake".
All any treecat has to pick up is the sensation and when the person being interrogated is trying to hide something, like Alfredo did to Hongbo. Also, Pritchart fooled St. Justice and a near-full time human watcher (Fontein) for years. She didn't fool Honor; neither did Victor Cachat -- because Honor can directly read people enough to know if they are telling the truth in less than a few seconds. Honor's read also lets her effectively testify about Pritchart's integrity and Simoes sanity and emotional pain, and read Victor Cachat enough to know that he's got a suicide device in his pocket. The same Cachat who fooled St. Justice and many others, a mane who she states as "closer to a treecat in mindset" than anyone she's ever met.
Now add that Nimitz and other treecats put Honor & a tiny few other Two Leg's empathic awareness at a higher level than other humans, but still far less than their own. That's why 2nd Fleet'ers being interrogated hated having the treecats present when they were questioned, even after they realized that the 'cats couldn't directly read their minds but could tell when they were obfuscating or lying. All the interrogatee could do to stop the information flow was to clam up and say nothing at all.