Torture Creates Terrorists

On November 30, 2008, the Washington Post published an article by Matthew Alexander, a pseudonym for a military officer who led an interrogation team in Iraq in 2006. In the article Alexander talks about "the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. Military conducts interrogations in Iraq."

Alexander is a 14-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force serving as a pilot, counterintelligence agent, and an interrogator. In Iraq in February of 2006, he was part of a team trying to locate Zarqawi. He found that the Army was conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model, which he defines as the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, but often bending and breaking the rules. He said, "These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse."

Matthew Alexander refused to use those techniques and taught his team another approach that built rapport with suspects, was culturally sensitive, and used "good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information." Their efforts were successful and led to the death of Zarqawi.

Despite Alexander's team's success, the military continued to use the old methods -- cruelty, hatred and fear. Alexander knows the justification that says, "we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases...." Yet he recounts an incident in which his new techniques prompted one captive to say, "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."

Perhaps the most emotionally wrenching and intellectually compelling statement made by Matthew Alexander was this one:

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 cried as he went on to show how the torture created more terrorists with a stronger will who killed more American soldiers. And I couldn't help but place the blame directly at the feet of Cheney and Bush. Here is a military man who figured out a better way, a more morally correct way, to gather information and at the same time to reach out to the enemy in a humane way.

But out leaders, both civilian and military, were too set on their course, too ignorant, too calloused, too devoid of morals and ethics, to even listen to Matthew Alexander, to even consider a better way, to rise above evil and seek a more just way. Alexander says 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." He rightly calls the torture and abuses a stain on our national honor.

Damn you Dick Cheney! Damn you George W. Bush! 

I call on the next administration to charge Cheney and Bush with the war crimes that they have committed. That is the only way to restore our national honor, to reinstate moral and ethical treatment for all and to reset our course based on our founding principles.