[1] During his nearly 30 years of active and Reserve military service, he became widely recognized as one of the most accomplished human intelligence officers in the Department of Defense (DoD) with expertise and experience that spanned the scope of the discipline.

During his deployment to Iraq in 2003, when the Iraqi insurgency was growing and the Pentagon demanded better intelligence, he witnessed firsthand how the system began to promote "brutal and humiliating measures."

Kleinman has argued that a central reason for the push beyond previous legal and moral boundaries stems from the critical shortcomings in the Army Field Manual on interrogation.

This, he has noted, is in spite of the fact that there is a broad consensus that interrogation might be the best source of information on an elusive, low-tech, stateless foe like Al Qaeda.

While the latest version published in 2006 placed restrictions on abuse, he asserts "there was no effort to objectively test the efficacy of the approaches [interrogaton strategies]."

He supported passage of the McCain-Feinstein amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act in June 2015, which includes provisions that require a complete review of the Army Field Manual on interrogation and ensures representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross have access to all detainees in U.S. custody, because ″passing strongly worded legislation that would stand as a bulwark against torture is the single most important step we must take.″.