Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
A military intelligence officer and interrogator has a powerful op-ed in the Washington Post recounting his experiences in Iraq. And this is a guy who knows what he's talking about:
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I'm still alarmed about that today.I'm not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me -- both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn't work.
What he has to say about what went on is not pretty:
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
And he offers evidence from his own experiences that there was a better way to do things:
I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.
Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.
Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.
But Zarqawi's death wasn't enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.
He also argues that torture and abuse of prisoners actually causes more attacks on American troops:
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 learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say 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. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.
And unsurprisingly, the Pentagon is trying to shut him up:
After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material -- including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.
He writes under a pseudonym to protect his identity.
Politics
Comments
Historically speaking, there's absolutely nothing in Anderson's article that we haven't know since at least WWII. Torture does not produce reliable intelligence, and serves mainly to feed the enemy's propaganda machine. Morality aside, it makes no practical sense.
Posted by: WScott | December 3, 2008 9:57 AM
I'm frustrated that these types of news exclusives do not have the legs one would they think they deserve. Legitimate media outlets should be spend weeks pounding this story as one of its leads; they certainly found plenty of time to cram Jeremiah Wright down our throats. If the Democrats had any hair on their balls, Congress would drive this issue which would force attention to this and other related stories, a true test for them next year.
Coming out behind the curtain recently, President Bush, members of his Administration and relevant Cabinets, and the Pentagon should be relentlessly questioned and more importantly, hounded with follow-ups on these charges.
You'd think in the Gibson interview, the first of several interviews Bush will supposedly be doing, that 9/11 happened on Clinton's watch and if it wasn't for Bush personally standing in the bulwark somewhere (NJ?), most of us would be dead via subsequent attacks, i.e., as if any other president confronted with 9/11 would have curled up in the fetal position at Camp David rather than Bush's limp-wristed approach in Afghanistsan while straining our resources and creating more enemies in Iraq. The bubble mentality displayed by Bush in the Gibson interviews is par for the course, both, Robert Draper in "Dead Certain" and Woodward's last book described Bush as operating in a bubble wiht a perspective far from reality.
I also just finished "Angler" recently, an analysis of the Cheney vice presidency; there is plenty of documented evidence along with people, including conservatives, willing and more importantly, actually going on record regarding Bush's war crimes ("Angler" is merely one of many sources all cross-validating the crimes). Yet we barely hear a peep, even from the supposedly liberal biased media outlets that have large enough audiences to influence policy; with the exception of CBS's 60 Minutes.
Given my perception that the Democratic party as a whole, represented in Congress does not have the courage to administrate such ugly incriminations, I see the Bush Administration's war crimes as President-elect Obama's initial primary leadership test. Americans remain largely supportive of Bush's war crimes or apathetic which is why this is such an enormously difficult issue for the Dems and Obama. I suspect Obama and the Dems will fail this test, though Obama keeps exceeding my expectations in other areas so I remain hopeful.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 3, 2008 10:18 AM
Michael Heath:
The current issue of Harper's has an article by Scott Horton on post-Bush war crime possibilities. It is not optimistic. The author pointed out that McCain (a torture victim himself) took the moral high ground in the first debate, while Obama rather meekly assented with McCain. See more at Horton's blog.
The first question, of course, is whether Bush is giving out blanket pre-emptive pardons or not. Horton thinks such a move would damage Republicans in 2010 and 2012, but I doubt it.
Posted by: william e emba | December 3, 2008 10:44 AM
WScott "Morality aside, it makes no practical sense."
Well, that depends. If your goal is to stretch out the fighting to benefit the arms manufacturers, then torturing enemy combatants is a great tactic. As 'Matthew Alexander' says, "It's no exaggeration to say 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".
If the interrogation regulations had been enforced, the US might already have pulled out of Iraq, to the financial detriment to Halliburton, Blackwater, et al.
Of course, Hanlon's Razor may apply, but I wouldn't put anything past Bush & Co. They certainly don't care about the troops.
Posted by: MH | December 3, 2008 11:59 AM
MH,
I would still say that stupidity is both a simpler explanation than malice, and wholly sufficient to explain the case.
Posted by: James Hanley | December 3, 2008 12:17 PM
James - I'm not sure who you are calling stupid when referring to my suggesting malice. That's because I can't find where in my statements I am referring to malice (maybe I'm deficient in reading comprehension of my own work!).
I am perceiving potential cowardliness on the Dems' part and certainly don't think malice is the reason the media isn't running this story more strongly. Could you please provide us/me with a more expansive view of your perspective? I always appreciate your point of view. . .
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 3, 2008 1:28 PM
In addition to stupidity, there is an additional reason that falls short of evil conspiracy. By torturing detainees (even though they have tried hard to avoid calling it that), the Bush administration can appear to be doing *something*. They can claim that because interrogation methods are harsher now, that the American people are therefore more safe.
But, I also feel torture has now become a convenient political wedge issue. The Republicans can conveniently claim that Democrats are naive and/or unable to effectively fight terrorism because they won't do what's necessary. And they love to throw out these absurd hypothetical scenarios where torture is the only way to save a city from nuclear annihilation to prove their point.
But this makes it all the more difficult to change our policy on torture. Because to do so would be to admit, politically, that you were wrong. Which of course we can't have because your political opponents would use it against you and you loose a rhetorical weapon to use against your opponents.
Posted by: MyPetSlug | December 3, 2008 1:34 PM
Michael Heath, I'm sure James was refering to MH's refrence to Hanlon's Razor, not your post.
Posted by: Abby Normal | December 3, 2008 1:39 PM
WScott said:
"Torture does not produce reliable intelligence, and serves mainly to feed the enemy's propaganda machine."
I know it is a popular stance these days, repeated ad infinitum, that torture does not produce reliable intelligence, but I don't think that it is true. In fact, IMHO, it strains credulity that torture would not work.
from an article on the subject in The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden) :
That said, it seems likely that the success of torture depends on who is doing it. And it seems very likely that other forms of interrogation are more effective at producing reliable results.
But the idea that torture never works is too pat to pass the smell test. Torture has been used for thousands of years most likely because it does work. And there are documented examples of it working with various degrees of success.
I think it serves us well to be honest about this. ( Not saying you are dishonest, WScott! - it is hard to find any source these days that recommends torture as effective. And you are definitely correct about its propaganda value)
Posted by: Gingerbaker | December 3, 2008 2:24 PM
...And if official and unofficial government reports are to be believed, the methods work. In report after report hard-core terrorist leaders are said to be either cooperating or, at the very least, providing some information--not just vague statements but detailed, verifiable, useful intelligence.
How do we know the information these detainees provide is accurate? Do we have reliable intel to verify what they say? And if so, do we really need torture to get information we already have? And if we don't have verifying intel, then how do we know we're getting the truth by means of torture?
And there's another question: did the detainees, when tortured, give information their interrogators didn't have and didn't expect? (And if so, how did the interrogators respond?) Or did they merely confirm what the interogators presented them, which came from the aforementioned verifying intel?
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 3, 2008 2:54 PM
Gingerbaker says:
"I know it is a popular stance these days,... that torture does not produce reliable intelligence, but I don't think that it is true. In fact, IMHO, it strains credulity that torture would not work." "Torture has been used for thousands of years most likely because it does work. "
Well, torture works to terrorize the population (from which the torturees are drawn) but not to produce reliable information.
I'd defer about this to experts, e.g.
- "...U.S. Air Force Reserve Colonel Steve Kleinman, a longtime military interrogator and intelligence officer. He said that even in the ticking bomb case, torture would be the wrong call. "'I'd say it'd be unneccesary to conduct our affairs outside the boundaries," Kleinman replied." (testimony in a 2007 House hearing,
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/11/veteran_interrogator_you_dont.php , also
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/11/veteran_interrogator_torture_t.php
"...if a detainee has his hands tied, or if a detainee shivers because a room is chilled, then "I don't know whether he's shivering because the room is cold or because my questions are penetrating," Kleinman said. That degree of abuse "takes away a lot of my tools." It's one of the clearest explanations in the public record about what torture costs professional interrogators in terms of actionable intelligence, as the debate is so often set up as what a lack of torture ends up costing national security."
- Former Instructor in the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, Malcolm Nance,
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/11/exnavy_instructor_promises_to.php
who also "relates the story of Hans Joachim Scharff, a master Luftwaffe interrogator who spurned abusive techniques used by the Gestapo (also, interestingly, termed "enhanced interrogation") in favor of rapport-building. Scharff's legendary success is still studied by U.S. interrogators."
A case in point is Abu Zubaydah
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2007/12/todays_must_read_236.php
whose presumed description of plots against random U.S. landmarks
(all he could remember) probably led to more panic (and thousands of hours of police overtime to guard them unnecessarily).
Posted by: A | December 3, 2008 4:38 PM
Hey, Gingerbaker, maybe torture truly is an effective way to get the truth out of enemy combatants, just as beating your kids might be an effective way to keep them in line. In both cases, though, we need to ask what price we're willing to pay (in terms of betraying our own ideals and principles) in order to achieve our ends. Put another way, do we really want to engage in a race to the moral bottom against an enemy that attacks civilian populations with suicide weapons? Who do you become even if you do win that sort of contest?
Posted by: Nick | December 3, 2008 5:12 PM
Torture does not work because people will say anything to stop the pain. This is how false confessions are generated and co-conspirators are manufactured. Sure some people might know some things, and sure they might be honest under torture, but there is no way for the torturer to know what is truth and what is fiction, and they end up torturing someone until he says something that confirms expectations of the torturer. So the onlyway for torture to be effective is if the torturer already knows what the prisoners know, so he can be sure he is torturing the right people.
But then what use is torture in that case?
Posted by: Reed A. Cartwright | December 3, 2008 5:26 PM
I think the argument presented in this post is a very strong one -- when the US uses torture and other very morally questionable techniques, it builds the *verifiable* reasons why we need to be fought. We paint ourselves as the bad guys, and this kind of verifiable proof of our "evil" is enough to get terrorists-to-be to swallow further, more dubious claims.
Using torture not only needs to be proven to be effective -- which seems quite unlikely in the vast majority of cases -- it also needs to be proven SO effective that it's worth this cost.
Posted by: Rob W | December 3, 2008 5:33 PM
There was a BBC TV called Spycatcher (1959-61) based on the work of a Dutch counter-intelligence officer called Lieutenant-Colonel Oreste Pinto. He was renowned as an expert interrogator who had no need to resort to torture either. In John Le Carre's sppy novels we see interrogation practiced as a form of subtle psychological manipulation used to elicit information rather than crude violence or threats thereof - the scalpel rather then the club. As has been pointed out before, this is hardly new stuff. It's not dramatic and it probably doesn't satisfy the macho posturing of some officers but it there is evidence that it does work. Can the same be said of torture?
Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | December 3, 2008 5:55 PM
"Matthew Alexander", the person who wrote the WashPost column posted here and whose "team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi", was on Keith Olberman's show tonight. He's published a book titled, "How to Break a Terrorist" http://www.amazon.com/How-Break-Terrorist-Interrogators-Brutality/dp/1416573151/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228353368&sr=1-1 .
On tonight's The O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly led off the show claiming that people that support a no-torture policy are "far left loons". He also inferred that Obama's no-torture campaign promise could cost you your life; he titled the segment, "Barack Obama and YOUR LIFE! (where Billo is pointing vigorously into the camera).
O'Reilly goes on to promise his viewers that if we followed the Army Field Manual (a false choice between torture and non-torture, we have additional options for non-military Intelligence interrogators). Billo yells "Trust me, many people are going to die right here in America". By the way, Billo goes on to describe those of us who are against the use of torture as "despicable" as well as being "far left loons".
Peter Hoekstra, a GOP Congressman from Michigan was on the show supporting O'Reilly's point. O'Reilly also had Congresswoman Anna Eshooo (D-CA) on who took the no-torture position. Eshoo is a perfect example why the Dems never won me over to their party; she had no balls and no prepared counterpoints to rebut O'Reilly's previously well-known argument. O'Reilly destroyed her arguments not because he talked over her, she got her chance, but because she was unprepared and missed the whole point of the segment. Even if O'Reilly's producers lied to her about the topic of the segment when they booked her for the show, she should have been savvy enough to prepare to talk about why we are safer not torturing people given this is a hot and repeated topic for O'Leilly.
If the Dems are going to competently govern they are going to need to control who goes on the major news shows and make sure they are able to argue like Obama, Sen. James Webb, or Rahm Emannuel. Eshoo has no business representing the party on a national news show. They will not win the country to their side putting people like Eshoo on talking about how we might have legal difficulties prosecuting suspects when Americans really care about our getting the intelligence we need to save lives, including American lives. Eshoo does not get it in so many ways.
For the last couple of years this forum has seen this ex-Republican take the side of the Dems and villify the GOP. Now it looks like I'll be taking the side of the Dems and villifying the Dem's ineptness. This is not rocket science, but it does require some message discipline. The Dems will need some support at some point from the country on this topic, they lost millions of potential supporters tonight given Eshoo's performance.
Posted by: Michael Heath | December 3, 2008 8:52 PM
Increasing the tragic nature of all this is that, historically, torture has more often been used to punish than to gain information. It isn't even a method of gathering information, yet because Bush administration officials watched one too many episodes of 24, its the strategy we pursue. Foolish, wasteful, amoral and lazy.
Posted by: Julian | December 3, 2008 11:15 PM
MyPetSlug:
I think this is a highly plausible explanation. When governments can't or won't report on achievement, either because achievement is too hard to measure or there haven't been many achievements, they tend to focus on activity instead. I can easily see a government engaging in more and harsher interrogations in order to create the impression it is accomplishing something.
Posted by: James K | December 4, 2008 2:32 AM
We've truly come a long way from "give me liberty or give me death!" to "Ok, you can torture people who may or may not be terrorists, who may or may not know anything of value, so long as you tell me there might be some chance that doing so will improve my personal safety."
Posted by: DaveL | December 4, 2008 6:00 AM
Gingerbaker:
Nobody is claiming that it never works. However, it does not work reliably, and there is no means to determine whether the information gained in a given session is accurate or not. It may work, it may not, and you can't tell which in any given instance. All you can do is keep torturing the victim until they tell you something you are already predisposed to believe. From an information-gathering point of view, it's simply an exercise in confirmation bias.
Posted by: Dunc | December 4, 2008 9:16 AM
Dunc said:
"Nobody is claiming that it never works. However, it does not work reliably, and there is no means to determine whether the information gained in a given session is accurate or not."
That seems reasonable. But, the source article I provided goes into these issues, and says that that the information procured was then verified. Or not.
In either case, the prisoner is still there for the next session.
Look, I am not trying to vindicate any Bush policy. I am merely trying to point out that there is what I perceive to be a false meme going around that torture does not provide good reliable information.
If we are going to argue against the use of torture, we need to do it using premises that are not false.
Posted by: Gingerbaker | December 4, 2008 11:12 AM
Wscott:
Depends on who you mean by "we". Check out this out: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TortureAlwaysWorks
As you can see, the naive idea that torture works, and that it is what should be done to bad people when necessary, is almost universal. I can think of only one and a half examples of TV shows in which torture yielded information that turned to be unreliable, and while I am not addicted to the boob tube I am by no means a TV virgin.
Posted by: Valhar2000 | December 4, 2008 12:50 PM
Valhar2000 hints at another good reason why torture should not be allowed or tolerated, even if it does "work" once in awhile: the whole issue of terrorist threats, interrogating people who are suspected of being evil barbarians, torturing a few to protect many, etc. is so poisoned and gummed up with implacable raw emotion that once you allow torture, then reasoned, sensible decision-making on that subject becomes virtually impossible.
For example, one could give an order saying torture is allowed in cases where an officer suspects it's necessary to save lives. But once that order comes out, EVERY officer in a war zone or dangerous area (like, say, all of Iraq outside the Green Zone) will use that order to justify any act of torture, because, after all, his troops are in danger all the time, scared, angry, stressed, desperate for real-time information, and not always able to tell enemies from civilians. And of course, no one will dare contradict such an opinion, for fear of being the one who "let 'em get away" the next time a bus is blown up or more than two soldiers are killed by an IED. And of course, we will always be torturing enemies or suspected enemies, not friends, therefore we will always tend to consider our lives more important then theirs. And civilians like us, who have no idea what torture is really about, will assess its effectiveness, not by its actual results (most of which, if any, would probably be military secrets anyway), but by our own prejudices about "the enemy:" maybe they're evil uncivilized brutes who won't respond to anything but the harshest methods, or maybe they're weaklings without moral fiber who will (unlike the good Christian martyrs of yore) cave the moment they feel any pain. I, for one, have no idea how much torture I could stand; and even if I did, that still wouldn't say much about some Arab radical or North Korean soldier on the other side of the planet whose thinking I don't understand.
No matter what qualifications we attach to a directive allowing torture, if it's allowed at all, that very allowance, in itself, will tend to attract such a thick fog of emotion that we may not even be able to figure out whether it really "works" at all.
Posted by: Raging Bee | December 5, 2008 9:57 AM
Ok... how about, what a bunch of self-serving crap for a comment. It was hard reading the full article as I was too busy bowing to the font of all knowledge, wisdom and... um... understanding, yes, that's it, understanding.
No doubt there are a lot of aspects in the chain of events that are being left out of this man's version of his single-handed brilliance.
Posted by: Rag | December 9, 2008 9:43 PM
It amazes me how gulable people are when fed this kind of unattributable "There I was.." trash.
Torture. By who?... blank. When and where?... blank. How?... answer: "I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about these interrogations based on fear and control, which often resulted in torture and abuse." How fortunate that we obviously don't feel the need to be specific when trashing the service of others.
The author is probably some lonely, unattractive person who cyclically seeks internet "fame" in the form of multiple anonymous accounts of saving the world, one seemly heroic gesture at a time. The last digital packet is barely sent before people start swallowing this and call for investigations, etc...
Posted by: Hero | December 9, 2008 11:02 PM