Monday, December 01, 2008

Killing Americans

Speaking of things that kill Americans, perhaps Justice Scalia should read this piece by an American military interrogator about the fruits of American torture (H/T):
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.

I'd say duh, but that would be too kind to the conservative enablers of this immoral and ultimately lethal regime.

Indeed, in the author's experience, torture isn't just dangerous, it's unnecessary:
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."

Once again, folks could have figured this out from World War II.

The author (writing under a pseudonym for security purposes) is a 14-year military veteran with a background in special forces and counterintelligence. He'll freely tell you that torture is wrong. But it also is unnecessary, and gets Americans killed. Every day we allow this blot upon our constitution to continue, we dishonor his service.

3 comments:

Tempest said...

I'm not going to respond to everything in this article, as all that would do is get me really pissed off, but I'll hit on a few key points.
"I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000."..."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."..."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."
Completely, and totally wrong. Though it could be true that most fighters come to the country because of the detainee abuse, he does not know that for a fact (which he admits when stating he was personally involved in only 1300 interrogations). Stating it to be a fact is more than just misleading it - its bordering on straight up lying.
"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."
There's the huge qualifier - "that's not always true". In other words, there are cases where torture works where his techniques did not.
"How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans."
Well, I am definitely American, but since I signed up to fight this war, I don't really mind when I or my brothers and sisters die. Sad, yes, but not distraught. Also, can someone please tell me how many Americans have died from terrorist attacks on American soil after Sept. 11? Oh wait, its 0? That's what I thought.

As I said, I could go on, but I don't feel like nitpicking the article to death. All of that being said - I don't necessarily disagree with him. Are there ways besides torture to get information out of people? Yes, of course. And our interrogators are doing that (I know, since I have a few close friends who do that). Should torture be used as often as it is? Well, I'm not there so I can't really make a real claim, but my guess is probably not. Was Abu Ghraib a terrible thing? Most assuredly. You have no idea how mad the rest of the army is with the people involved in that - it makes us all look like scumbags.
But most of all, I question the Washington Post's choices in spokesman for this issue. Here's a man not willing to divulge his identity - purportedly for "security reasons", but he's willing to write and sell a book? Let's not forget the bone he has to pick with the military for basically blackballing his book. Would anyone here not feel upset over something like that? I'm sure it looks like its the evil American military trying to protect itself (that's certainly how he paints it), but the military strikes down lots of stuff because they divulge too much information. He's using the public's lack of understanding about military language to make it look like something its not. Just because something isn't classified does not mean the public has access to it. Field manuals, such as the interrogations one he copies "verbatim" from are labeled as limited distribution, meaning they are supposed to go to government agencies or contractors working for those agencies. Copying "verbatim" from one of those is completely against regulations. Were I to give a field manual to a friend or family member, I could (and would) get an article 15 for that.
Like I said, he does bring up some vaild points. But don't swallow what this man says as the gospel truth, because its pretty far from that.

PG said...

I'd be cautious of swallowing Tempest's claims as "gospel truth," either. For example, he says, "Field manuals, such as the interrogations one he copies 'verbatim' from are labeled as limited distribution, meaning they are supposed to go to government agencies or contractors working for those agencies."

Really? You might want to inform whoever runs the government's websites of that, because at the moment they have field manuals up, with text on the front saying: "DISTRIBUTION RESTRICTION: Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited." The website globalsecurity.org has collected them all together on this page.

Also, Tempest assumes that the author relies only on personal experience for the claim that most fighters come to the country because of the detainee abuse. How does he know that the author hasn't talked to his fellow interrogators about this? (Indeed, it would be strange if the author hadn't; best practices in almost any organization require sharing information in order to improve techniques.) Moreover, the author may consider the interrogations he conducted and supervised to be a reasonable reprsentative sample of the foreign fighters who come to Iraq, in much the same way that a law school study might declare that the No. 1 reason students miss class is that they have not prepared and don't want to be called on. Even if the study authors didn't personally interview every law student in the nation, if their sample is fairly representative of the law student population and the sample is large enough, the study will be taken as a useful data point.

Also, can someone please tell me how many Americans have died from terrorist attacks on American soil after Sept. 11? Oh wait, its 0? That's what I thought.

How beautifully irrelevant to the question of whether insurgents in Iraq ought to be tortured.

David Schraub said...

Also, the number isn't 0. Those poor anthrax victims -- always ignored and forgotten.