Former U.S. Interrogator: Torture Policy Has Led to More Deaths than 9/11 Attacks

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted December 5, 2008.

AG: He was from Iraq.

MA: He was from Iraq. He was an Iraqi. He had worked in the government prior to our arrival in Iraq, and he had lost his job. And this is another thing that you can get out of my book that you're not going to hear anywhere else, is you're going to hear the voice of Iraqis, the Sunnis who joined al-Qaida, and you can hear the reasons why they joined, which you can't read anywhere else. You know, our government tells you that -- or we have said in the past -- that all the Sunnis that were joining the insurgency were extremists. And that's not the case. You can hear the voices of Iraqi Sunnis talking about the variety of reasons why they joined. Some were economic. Some were social. Some were tribal affiliation. A large number of Sunni Iraqis joined the insurgency because they needed protection from the Shia militias that we had allowed to run loose when we disbanded the government.

AG: And their feelings about Saddam Hussein?

MA: You know, the Sunni Iraqis that I interrogated had no love for Saddam. They despised him. A lot of them were Baath Party members simply because you had to be a Baath Party member to have a job in Iraq under Saddam. And they were glad to see him gone. But at the same time, they were very concerned about their access to future oil and wealth and how were they going to feed their families. And so, many of them had joined al-Qaida in an effort to try and establish some type of Sunni power in Iraq, post-Saddam.

AG: And what did they say about Zarqawi?

MA: Well, you know, a lot of them, although they had even -- many of them had participated or in some way influenced or helped Zarqawi with his campaign of suicide bombings -- the large majority of them did not believe in his ideology. Let me give you the case of one of the guys that I interrogated early on. His name was Abu Ali, and he was an imam. And he had joined the insurgency because one of his best friends had been killed by a Shia militia, and he turned to al-Qaida for protection. He, at one point, even blessed suicide bombers. But, you know, in the end, he told me, he said, "Matthew, I don't believe in this, in bombing Shia civilians. My mother is Shia. Iraqis have a long history of intermarriage between Sunni and Shia. But we've been forced in this situation because of the Shia militias. And so, we have to do this to protect ourselves."

AG: So, how you extracted the actual information for where Zarqawi was? Bush believed that Zarqawi was responsible for the U.N. bombing also?

MA: He was. Zarqawi was responsible for a number of bombings. Even when he wasn't directly planning things, he obviously was directing or inspiring others to exact his campaign of targeting civilians. The man who ultimately led us to Zarqawi, Abu Hadir, he ultimately turned on Zarqawi because he rejected his ideology of extremism, and also because I promised him a new way ahead, a way in which Americans could work together with Sunni Iraqis, we could find middle ground to negotiate, to compromise and work together to battle against these types of extremists. And Abu Hadir ultimately rejected Zarqawi and decided that it was best for the future of Iraq if Zarqawi was dead.

AG: How long did this take?

MA: Well, the interrogation -- he was scheduled to leave the prison where I was at, and I had about six hours to sit down with him and convince him to give us some information. And it wasn't until the last 30 minutes before he was supposed to get on a helicopter that I was able to convince him to work together with us and to sell out his cause.

AG: Where were they going to take him?

MA: He would have been transferred to another prison, either Abu Ghraib or one of the other prisons.

AG: Where were you?

MA: I can't say the exact location where I was.

AG: And so, in that last 30 minutes, well, then he had more time with you?

MA: Yeah, you know, I tell in the story, the book, of this last 30 minutes, because, you know, I could hear the clock ticking in my head, and I knew this man could lead us to Zarqawi.

AG: How did you know that?

MA: I knew it, because I had been watching him, monitoring his interrogations for a few weeks. And I guess it was a gut feeling. You know, it was intuition to know that...

AG: Where had he been picked up?

MA: He had been picked up in a house with suicide bombers during a raid. There was five men captured in the house, and my team interrogated those five men. And the suicide bombers had been killed in the house by our soldiers during a very exciting, daring raid, I should say. And he had pretended for a long time that he was there accidentally. He was supposed to have come to film a wedding, which obviously was a lie. But it was obvious to me from watching him over a period of weeks that this was a very important person and that he had to have been very close to the higher echelons of al-Qaida.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, torture, u.s. military, interrogations, abu musab al-zarqawi, how to break a terrorist, al-qaeda in iraq

Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program, Democracy Now!

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