Had a great conversation last night with a very informed friend about torture, whether waterboarding is or not, how useful it is, etc. First thing I see this morning is a great essay by Matthew Alexander on the subject. Alexander is a 14 year Air Force vet and interrogator. I’ll let him make my argument – he does a much better job.
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.
It’s a good read, and thoughtfully done. Here is a list of other editorials that I have kept over time. I stopped collecting them some time around the summer when the volume became too much to keep track of.
- My favorite, a 30 year vet in interrogation: Two problems with torture
- A prominent Catholic viewpoint: Be Not Afraid II
- Tom Rick’s, another Army intel vet
- Malcom Nance, a SERE instructor who teaches the technique, is pretty adamant about the subject.
- Here is the unequivocal view of a Commandant of the Marine Corps and Commander of US Central Command.
- The story of Yukio Asano, sentenced to 15 years hard labor for waterboarding (among other torture techniques) American soldiers during WWII.
- A Natiional Guard JAG discusses the criminality of waterboarding
- And the now-famous CIA officer Kiriakou who admits that it is torture, but equivocates on the necessity of it.
- Some helpful sourcing of the phrase “Verschärfte Vernehmung“, i.e. enhanced interrogation, and how some of the practices of convicted WWII war criminals are precursors to what has happened at the hands of US interrogators.
- Lieutenant General John (“Jeff”) Kimmons, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs, explaining that: “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tell us that.”
- 5 myths about torture and truth. Darius Rejali, a political science professor, has studied the issue in a clinical manner and gets to the heart of some details. Bottom line: it doesn’t work. Here’s a key quote from a WWII era Japanese field manual: “the clumsiest possible method of gathering intelligence.”
