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: I want to go to some larger issues, this very important point that you make that you believe that more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers were killed in Iraq -- I mean, this is a huge number -- because of torture, because of U.S. practices of torture. Explain what you mean.

MA: Well, you know, when I was in Iraq, we routinely handled foreign fighters, who we would capture. Many of -- several of them had been scheduled to be suicide bombers, and we had captured them before they carried out their missions.

AG: Coming from where?

MA: They came from all over the area. They came from Yemen. They came from northern Africa. They came from Saudi. All over the place. And the No. 1 reason these foreign fighters gave for coming to Iraq was routinely because of Abu Ghraib, because of Guantanamo Bay, because of torture practices.

In their eyes, they see us as not living up to the ideals that we have prescribed to. You know, we say that we represent freedom, liberty and justice. But when we torture people, we're not living up to those ideals. And it's a huge incentive for them to join al-Qaida.

You also have to kind of put this in the context of Arab culture and Muslim culture and how important shame, the role of shame is in that culture. And when we torture people, we bring a tremendous amount of shame on them. And so, it is a huge motivator for these people to join al-Qaida and come to Iraq.

AG: So, talk about the pressure, I guess you could say the peer pressure, for you to torture and how you decided to follow the approach you did.

MA: Yeah, you know, torture, it's so narrowly or broadly defined depending on who you're talking to these days. I would say torture, to me, is just unethical behavior. And you can do things that are legal, within the rules, that are unethical. And so, I just know, me, by my gut feeling, based on the principles that I was raised on, you know, that my parents gave to me, that there's things I'll never do, because I know it feels wrong and it is wrong. And so, you know, others felt comfortable either pushing all the way up to the limits and doing things that were unethical, but were legal, or breaking the rules. I felt that was not something I was ever going to do, and I wasn't going to allow my team to do.

I think what's more important at this point is we know that torture has cost us American lives. We know that it's ineffective. And we know that it's wrong, and it's damaged our image. I think, you know, for me as a military officer, my job isn't to identify broken wheels, it's to fix them. And so, the approach that I took and that I talk about in the book is, how do we move forward? You know, we're given this choice of either terrorist attacks or torture. But maybe there's a third way. Maybe there's a better way to do interrogations that has nothing to do with torture. And in the book, I describe the process of coming up with these new ways and how my team, together, we were able to come up with the new methods.

AG: We have to break, but we're going to come back to this discussion and also talk with Scott Horton and who should be held responsible for the torture practices the government has been involved with, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and beyond. Matthew Alexander is our guest. It's not his name, but it's the name he's chosen. It is the name on his book, How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

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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