“Former Interrogator Rebukes Cheney For Torture Speech (VIDEO)”
At the Huffington Post, via Memeorandum:
A former top interrogator is responding forcefully to the case Dick Cheney made on Thursday in favor of torture (what the former VP and his allies refer to as “enhanced interrogation methods.”)
Brave New Films released a short video Tuesday of Matthew Alexander taking apart Cheney’s argument piece by piece.
Alexander says he was a military interrogator for 14 years, including leading a task force in Iraq that successfully tracked down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
I say he “says” he was, because Matthew Alexander isn’t his real name. He uses a pseudonym for “security purposes.”
“Security purposes.” What, exactly, would those be? If he were breaching military or national security, he’d have been arrested already. His own personal security? He’s giving out too many details of who he is, what he did, and oh yeah: he’s showing his face in the video (at the link).
If he really was a 14-year member of the military, then a lot of military people know him. A lot of military people are going to see that video and know who he is. It’s debatable whether anyone in the world is interested in getting some payback on the guys who helped nail al-Zarqawi, but if so, they’ve got plenty to go on now.
A member of military intelligence ought to know: if you want to keep a secret, don’t tell anybody. His identity is not secret. Not in any meaningful way.
So what gives?
And: is it beyond the pale to ask for some confirmation? Some proof that he is who and what he says? Some explanation about why he’ll appear in a video on the World Wide Web (not to mention The Daily Show), but won’t use his real name?
Maybe he’s telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. If so, fine. But this wouldn’t be the first time someone has been suckered by a guy lying about his service.
His odd anonymity aside, he has a certain point. I attended an Army interrogation school in 1993. We were taught to never, ever use torture. Not because it makes the bad guys hate you more, but because torture gets you bad information.
Those impromptu interrogations using physical duress you see on “24” are a bunch of crap. Most of the info they produce is going to be bad. It’s going to be wrong, and it’s going to cause the good guys to lose.
Imagine yourself to be a prisoner of war. I’m asking you where your brigade command post is. Show me on the map! And if you don’t, I’m going to cut off your finger. And if you still don’t, I’m going to cut off another finger.
The problem is, you’re just a private. A conscript, probably. You might not even know what a brigade command post is, much less where it is.
And guess what you’ll probably do: lie, just to prevent me from cutting off your finger. And I’ll pass that lie on. And a couple of levels up the chain of command, they’re suddenly getting six, eight, a dozen different stories about where that command post is.
Is that helpful? No, it isn’t. In a battlefield situation, wasting resources like that is very, very bad.
Now: that’s what they taught us at the lowest possible rung on the battlefield intelligence ladder. There is probably a lot more to it. In fact, I know there is.
While we were taught never to use outright torture, we also were taught to make the prisoners uncomfortable. Afraid. At least, until we had a chance to talk with them, one on one.
Here’s a story they told us. During the Falklands conflict, Britain vs. Argentina, the Brits took a lot of prisoners. Those prisoners were kept segregated from one another as much as possible (you don’t want them keeping each other’s spirits up).
One by one, those prisoners were taken to a debriefing room. One by one, they came back out, carrying a Red Cross care package.
All the other prisoners saw that, and man, they couldn’t wait to get into that debriefing room.
Here’s the thing: they didn’t have to answer questions in order to get the care package. The Brits were required to hand them out. Every prisoner was going to get one.
But the Brits didn’t have to tell the prisoners that.
Keep them segregated, silent, scared. When they get into the debriefing room (we were taught never to use the word “interrogation”), when they get somebody talking to them, giving them water, cigarettes, whatever, they’re that much more likely to cooperate.
It’s entirely possible that this will work on a higher level. Keeping a prisoner uncomfortable through temperature; lack of amenities; blaring music; confinement; removal from human contact. Maybe, over time, it’s possible to create a negative baseline for a prisoner, then gain that prisoner’s cooperation with a higher baseline.
Maybe something like waterboarding – something that simulates physical harm without actually causing any – could be part of that. I don’t know.
But that would all have to be in non-battlefield situations, where the need for information isn’t absolutely immediate. On the battlefield, you want the information now. You don’t have time to corroborate everybody’s stories. In longer-term intelligence-gathering situations, you do have time for it.
Regardless, the idea was to gather reliable information, not to worry about whether or not our enemies hated us.
Newsflash: if we’re at war with them, then they already hate us. By definition. They can’t possibly hate us more.
I’ll reserve judgment on “Matthew Alexander’s” story, simply because I don’t know that he’s lying or exaggerating (ironically, the very fact that his story would be so easy to check leads me to believe he is, at least in the basic facts, telling the truth).
Still, I’m unconvinced by his argument. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, prisoner abuse made radical Islamist terrorists hate us more? Those things turned otherwise peaceful Jordanian and Pakistani fathers and upright citizens into suicide bombers, willing to detonate explosives in marketplaces full of women and children?
Please. At worst, I say: good. Let’s bring all such people – suicide bombers, murderers of children, people who behead their own civilian prisoners – into close contact with our infantrymen. That sounds like the absolute best place for them to be, at least for the short time they’ll be there.
One more thing: let me make sure that I point this out. If “Matthew Alexander” is who he says he is, and has done the things he says he’s done, then he is vastly more experienced than I am. My Army anecdotes are intended to support his point to one degree, but also to show that his arguments are incomplete, liberal-ish utopianism. He seems to think that there’s something we can do to stop these people from hating us. That, I think, is naive.
UPDATE – Linked at Clever S. Logan, who has the simple common sense to use the phrase “sex, lies, and videotape.”
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