The price we paid for torture

last updated 8 January 2015

Matthew Alexander (pseudonym)

The Washington Post

People who advocate torture often say it’s the only way to break hardened terrorists, said “Matthew Alexander,” a former U.S. military interrogator in Iraq. But after personally conducting 300 interrogations and supervising more than 1,000, I can tell you it just isn’t true. “I’m not some ivory-tower type,” but when I got to Iraq in 2006, I was shocked to see some of my fellow interrogators use “fear and control” in a manner that crossed the line into “torture and abuse.” I found this brutality “inconsistent with American principles,’’ and sought instead to get information by building “rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding, and using good old-fashioned brainpower.” It worked extremely well; among my team’s accomplishments was getting a captured terrorist to reveal the hiding place of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaida in Iraq. In Iraq, I also saw firsthand that “torture costs American lives.” The major reason foreign fighters flocked to Iraq was to avenge “the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.” Revenge they got: These foreign jihadists were responsible for at least half of the thousands of U.S. soldiers killed or maimed in Iraq. “How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me—unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.”