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Chop off their heads and I bet they'll talk.
I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
By Matthew Alexander
Sunday, November 30, 2008; Page B01
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.
I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.
Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi's forces (members of Iraq's Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq's majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.
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.
I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. 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.
Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our at udes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.
Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.
Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.
But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its at ude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.
I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. 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."
Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.
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.
After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material -- including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.
My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war -- one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can't force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I'll say to them, "Which one?"
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Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress -- at considerable personal risk.
We're told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations -- and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.
I'm actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But 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.
[email protected]
Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq." He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.
Chop off their heads and I bet they'll talk.
Sounds like he's the greatest interrogator ever. Sucks how the greatest never get credit for being the greatest. Instead of promotions the poor guy has to go write a book about how much smarter he is than everyone else. Such an unfair world, but at least he's optimistic that Obama will change everything.
"I'm also thinking about getting a gun, and dealing crack. Being a crack dealer. Not like a mean crack dealer, but like... like a nice one. Kinda friendly like, 'hey, what's up guys? Want some crack?'"
That torture doesn't work has been known a long time.
The assholes in dubya's Exec didn't care. They are just less sadists, as are the "good (US) Germans" in the CIA and military who actually do torturing.
Those ers would turn on the gas in Nazi death camps if ordered to.
Give people power/permission from the state, and they ALWAYS use it and abuse it.
A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. 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."
Never, never, never underestimate the power of simple moral authority.
The morons who advocate bull like Gitmo and torture do not realize that moral authority is the single greatest weapon in a war of ideas like the "war on terror".
You cannot shoot an idea no matter how many bullets you have.
You CAN discredit it, and this offers some pretty convincing first-hand evidence of that.
You know what? I don't care if torture worked. I still wouldn't approve. America was premised on the idea that humans have certain rights. With those rights comes a sense of dignity. Even if the person is not worthy of dignity, we should still treat them with a modi of respect for the fact that they are a person. Torture breaks down the psyche, and any sense of self-worth in a person. It reduces them to less than a person. I don't want to live in a country that not only ok's that idea, but also actively encourages it.
There's a reason General Washington took great pains to ensure that captured British soldiers would be treated fairly. It's because he knew how important it was for America to be RIGHT, and not just victorious.
And yet, you continue to torture us with your profanity-riddled, hate-filled Republican bashing.
lol. Ideas blah blah blah, America blah blah blah
All fluffly bull to make Amerikans still feel like knight in shining armor good guys.
Do what you gotta do, by any means possible.
You're right, America was run on great ideas. You all disagree with torture then support the crooks in office who on America.
Is torture bad? Sure. Is torture reliable? No, it's not very reliable.
Can torture be effective sometimes? yes, if you know the guy knows something. That's the trick. If you don't know that he knows anything, then torture is very unreliable. But if you know for sure that he knows something important, torture can be a very effective method for extracting that information. Don't you think?
Equally clear to me is the difficulty of discussing this issue when torture itself is so poorly understood. What cons utes torture? Is waterboarding torture? Is light deprivation torture? Is solitary confinement torture? Is peeing on the Qur'an in front of detainees torture?
Jack Bauer shot some guy in his knee because he knew something important. The guy ended up telling Jack everything he wanted to know. I saw it on TV. True story.
that might be the funniest line from taht movie. that and when his wife says "if we had wanted us some sissies, we would have named them dr quinn and medicine woman"
hwoever i dont know from experience but i would think torture does work. i mean if some guy was about to stick somethign up my wang or yank off my fingernails i'd start talking. but i could also see people just saying what the interogator wants to hear. im mixed on the whole idea but i would have to lean more towards allowing it as an option then baning it as a whole. and if anyone really thinks that the american govt or other govt's dont use torture, get off your moms and welcome to the real world
Yes it does.
Good questions. I don't think peeing on the Qur'an falls into the 'torture' category, but I don't think it should be approved. I think that by being humane, we will be able to convince them to share information more effectively.
By legalizing torture, we make it far too easy to use that in cases where it will be ineffective. Better to keep it illegal, and if a CIA agent thinks it's necessary, then he should take the risk. He will be tried in a court of law, and the American public will determine if he crossed a line or not.
He is not the first interogator to say in no uncertain terms that torture does not work.
It just doesnt. I'd tell you anything, literally anything, you want to hear to make you stop.
"hate-filled Republican bashing"
It's a nasty, filth-saturated job, but the Repugs deserve it, and somebody's got to do it.
Unlike a torture victim, you can put my "torture" on IGNORE, but you know my posts are too damn valuable, articulate, and accurate.
btw, Go Yourself (you deserve it)
Right you are, LnGrrrR.
Yes sir. Articulation at its best right there
I'm sorry for teasing you, boutons. I forgot you lost your sense of humor during the war.
Last edited by desflood; 12-03-2008 at 11:22 PM.
id tell them anything if they had a fine ass chick laid out for me...or alot of money
or if they were pumping you full of drugs and beatings the out of you
Nor is his opinion on the matter definitive. Just ask the waterboarded weasel that gave up Khalid Shaihk Mohammed and other actionable intelligence that saved lives.
Sure it works. And, you're right, you'd tell me anything to make it stop, including the truth if you know it. And, it works best on those who actually have information you need.
Aside for the aforementioned case of scrote sac Abu Zubayda giving up Khalid and other valuable information, there are historical examples of it working. (See, for example, some of the successful uses of torture by the French in Algeria, as recounted in Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace).
Unfortunately for you idiots, your argument against torture is only reasonable if you can claim it never works.
maybe if the fine ass chick was pumping me full of drugs and beating the out of meor if they were pumping you full of drugs and beatings the out of you
Thats very American of you. Thanks for the name-calling.
You're welcome.
So you disagree with the interrogation expert then?
Torture costs more lives in the long run than it saves. It is purely an hetical to the cause of making people believe you aren't an evil superpower.
You can claim otherwise, but the simple fact is that by being ethical enough not to torture, you gain more than you lose.
Cost to benefit is not some pansy, fluffy concept, it is really the ONLY way to really evaluate any tactic.
If modern "conservatives" are incapable of realistically assessing cost to benefit then they will continue to think that people like Palin are the solution.
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