December 02, 2008
A U.S. MILITARY INTERROGATOR SPEAKS
Matthew Alexander in the 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.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 03:09 AM | Permalink
Comments
I'm glad he spends half the article talking about values and ethics, and it's good news that they've been trying to apply some of the methods and expertise of police interrogations and community policing to these situations. Kerry was much pilloried for talking about the terror war in those terms, but he made large amounts of sense.
As for the rest, it is a source of great comfort to me that every time we stumble upon someone from the intelligence community who wants to speak out, he affirms my deep-seated intuition that unethical implies ineffective and that furthermore unreliable implies perfectly useless, information being impossible to cross-check and validate. It is also reassuring that the cost to benefit ratio of torture in terms of security is strictly less than one, with no significant exceptions.
Surely too there must be unanimity within the intelligence community on these matters; how else would the Washington Post, in random and representative sweeps, happen upon such views exclusively? Bah.
Posted by: D | Dec 2, 2008 8:18:18 AM
Al Zaquari plunged Iraq into civil war? I think it is safe to say that the US invasion did that.
"most notorious mass murderers of our generation" that is his boss, GWB.
How can one even pretend to act morally in such an immoral endeavor as the US aggression against Iraq?
Posted by: Klausi | Dec 2, 2008 11:31:24 PM
Klausi,
I certainly agree that an entire political project can be infected by immorality, but the players on the ground are still agents making decisions. It matters that we don't take an "ah shucks, this is already so perverse that another step down the path of iniquity won't matter and is actually to be expected." It is worth encouraging people's nobler instincts even if it's through the threat of court-martial and in a just world: impeachment, resignation and prosecution.
At the point of a bayonet, or in an interrogation cell, I would certainly settle for "pretend" morality.
Posted by: Jesse | Dec 3, 2008 12:00:27 AM
Hi Jesse,
I agree that it is worth encouraging individuals to act morally even in such conditions.
I just think that it is a normal consequence of this type of enterprise (war of aggression) that people will act cruel and inhumane. These were not a few black sheep. In my eyes the author is a bit of a hypocrite by picturing himself as a "good guy" in an invasion army.
Posted by: Klausi | Dec 3, 2008 12:29:08 AM
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