Torture is Illegal, Immoral, and does not work...l

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112802242.html

By Matthew Alexander

Sunday, November 30, 2008

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.

..."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."  www.WritingResource.info/
tortureupdate;html

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.

...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.

howtobreak...@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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