Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
By Matthew Alexander
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21384.htm

December 05. 2008 "Washington Post" -- 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
attitudes 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 attitude
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?"

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.

howtobreakaterrorist@gmail.com

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.

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