Torture? It probably killed more Americans than 9/11

A US major reveals the inside story of military interrogation in Iraq. By Patrick Cockburn, winner of the 2009 Orwell Prize for journalism

Sunday, 26 April 2009

The use of torture by the US has proved so counter-productive that it may have led to the death of as many US soldiers as civilians killed in 9/11, says the leader of a crack US interrogation team in Iraq.

"The reason why foreign fighters joined al-Qa'ida in Iraq was overwhelmingly because of abuses at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib and not Islamic ideology," says Major Matthew Alexander, who personally conducted 300 interrogations of prisoners in Iraq. It was the team led by Major Alexander [a named assumed for security reasons] that obtained the information that led to the US military being able to locate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. Zarqawi was then killed by bombs dropped by two US aircraft on the farm where he was hiding outside Baghdad on 7 June 2006. Major Alexander said that he learnt where Zarqawi was during a six-hour interrogation of a prisoner with whom he established relations of trust.

Major Alexander's attitude to torture by the US is a combination of moral outrage and professional contempt. "It plays into the hands of al-Qa'ida in Iraq because it shows us up as hypocrites when we talk about human rights," he says. An eloquent and highly intelligent man with experience as a criminal investigator within the US military, he says that torture is ineffective, as well as counter-productive. "People will only tell you the minimum to make the pain stop," he says. "They might tell you the location of a house used by insurgents but not that it is booby-trapped."

meanwhile:

US interpreter who witnessed torture in Iraq shot herself with service rifle

By David Randall

It is possible that one of the victims of the United States' torture policy is a young, devout Mormon woman from Arizona called Alyssa Peterson. She was a soldier who not only saw the rough interrogation methods that the US military used on Iraqi prisoners, but was deeply troubled by them. Some weeks after formally protesting about them to her superiors, and asking to be reassigned, she took her gun and killed herself. The cause of her death was kept secret for two years, and the mystery of what Peterson witnessed, and the content of the notes she made, still goes on.

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see toon at top.

From the WP

During his first days in detention, senior al-Qaeda operative Khalid Sheik Mohammed was stripped of his clothes, beaten, given a forced enema and shackled with his arms chained above his head, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. It was then, a Red Cross report says, that his American captors told him to prepare for "a hard time."

Over the next 25 days, beginning on March 6, 2003, Mohammed was put through a routine in which he was deprived of sleep, doused with cold water and had his head repeatedly slammed into a plywood wall, according to the report. The interrogation also included days of extensive waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning.

Sometime during those early weeks, Mohammed started talking, providing information that supporters of harsh interrogations would later cite in defending the practices. Former vice president Richard B. Cheney has justified such interrogations by saying that intelligence gained from Mohammed resulted in the takedown of al-Qaeda plots.

But whether harsh tactics were decisive in Mohammed's interrogation may never be conclusively known, in large part because the CIA appears not to have tried traditional tactics for much time, if at all. According to the agency's own accounting, Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times during his first four weeks in a CIA secret prison.

The effectiveness of the Bush administration's use of harsh interrogation techniques has emerged as a key point of dispute in a burgeoning political and public debate sparked by the release this month of Justice Department memorandums authorizing the CIA to use such methods.

Six years after Mohammed was captured, the scrutiny of the agency's approach seems unfair to some intelligence veterans, who argue that the interrogation program cannot be separated from the atmosphere of the day, when further attacks seemed imminent. At the time, there was little or no dissent, including from congressional Democrats who were briefed on the program, according to former intelligence officials.

Two former high-ranking officials with access to secret information said the interrogations yielded details of al-Qaeda's operations that resulted in the identification of previously unknown suspects, preventing future attacks.

"The detainee-supplied data permitted us to round them up as they were being trained, rather than just before they came ashore," said one former intelligence official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the cases are classified. "Not headline stuff, but the bread and butter of successful counterterrorism. And something that few people understand."

Other officials, including former high-ranking members of the Bush administration, argue that judging the program by whether it yielded information misses the point.

"The systematic, calculated infliction of this scale of prolonged torment is immoral, debasing the perpetrators and the captives," said Philip D. Zelikow, a political counselor to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who reviewed secret Bush administration reports about the program in 2005. "Second, forfeiting our high ground, the practices also alienate needed allies in the common fight, even allies within our own government. Third, the gains are dubious when the alternatives are searchingly compared. And then, after all, there is still the law."

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Gus: It has been proved many times over and over that torture only reaps what the torturer wants to hear not what the torturer needs to know... Thus the gains are mostly "dubious" and even if some of the information is "correct", its currency is often outdated when garnered...

As well, it has been shown that the use of torture is never secret, unless people are "fully" disappeared but families of these disappeared people, who know their members are clean, know there is some funny business going on. Thus most of the family members will join any opposing organisation to fight the system that took their family member away, eventually increasing the possibility of far more damage to a situation...