The Washington Post ran an op-ed piece about torture and interrogations written by someone who knows the subject well.
Matthew Alexander, the pseudonym for an Air Force pilot turned counterintelligence agent turned senior interrogator, writes that torture not only is ineffective, but is actually very dangerous for American soldiers in the line of fire.
Excerpts and analysis, after the jump.
It was Matthew Alexander's group who apparently gathered the intelligence that enabled US Forces to pinpoint the location of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq. In this case, the intelligence gathered was absolutely correct, and the terrorist group lost a key figure responsible for causing so much devastation in Iraq.
How did his group gather the intelligence necessary to find this man?
His group could have gone with the Gitmo-style harsh interrogation tactics that had become so tragically ubiquitous. He most likely wouldn't have gotten in any trouble had he led his group this way, but he chose against it.
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
Instead, he chose to push his group to keep things, quite literally, by the book.
I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
Imagine that. Trying to understand the people they were interrogating humanized both sides. More importantly, it helped to actually provide some enlightenment about the complex cultural struggles. They started to understand that these Iraqis hated al Qeada in Iraq and could be a valuable asset in helping to hunt them down.
Sounds like it worked, and we didn't even have to deal with the expense of our standing in the world, or more importantly, perhaps, the standing of the American soldiers in harm's way. This career military man was deeply troubled by the increased danger facing the soldiers because of America's reputation for torture.
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.
That's an incredibly staggering thing to consider. The Abu Ghraib horror became propaganda for recruiters of extremists. And while our own government might have white-washed it and gave the ol' "a few spoiled apples" routine, it was nonetheless widely considered among Iraqis and outside extremists to be the rule, rather than the exception.
This is illustrated in perfect detail when we learn that while giving a certain interview, a prisoner was surprised by the legal and just way in which he was handled.
One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."
The evidence keeps mounting up as to why torture is a bad idea. Clearly, the practice of torture or "enhanced interrogation" was putting American soldiers much more at risk. And we have pretty compelling evidence that doing it the legal way can be quite effective.
But that leaves one part out of the equation, a piece not nearly as tangible, but even more important. Who are we? Are we a nation that condones this? Is this really the road we want to walk down as a nation?
For better or worse, through much of our nation's history, we've tried to be a leader. We haven't always lived up to this, but whenever we've fallen, we've been able to get up and do the right thing. Sometimes it takes awhile, and sometimes it looks like we're no longer the nation that values freedom, equality, and justice. But we've done it in the past, and we can do it again.
I will leave you with this:
Until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We're better than that. We're smarter, too.