"Torture. . . inconsistent with American principles"

Updates Below (Tuesday, November 2)

When those first Abu Ghraib pictures were released, I was horrified. As an American citizen, I am strongly against torture. Nothing I have read convinces me that torture is a successful device in war (even short-term "success" has negative long-term consequences), and everything that is moral convinces me that it is wrong. As the war in Iraq wore on, we learned that leaders in the Bush administration discussed torture and justified its use. Now military personnel are telling their stories. The Washington Post published today an editorial by Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym used for security reasons), a senior interrogator in Iraq and former Air Force Special Operations pilot. Alexander led a team of interrogators in Iraq; his Washington Post article is titled "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," and his book is titled How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators who Used Brains, not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

Alexander describes how his team's interrogation methods convinced one of the associates of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to give up the location of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. (Zarqawi's followers blew up the golden-domed Shiite mosque in Samarra, an act that "unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed" and bloody reprisals in 2006.) That intelligence led to Zarqawi's death. The interrogation methods Alexander's team used? Not torture, but rapport and smarts:

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.

Not only did the interrogation methods lead to the death of a man responsible for horrible terrorist attacks, but those methods also led to a greater understanding of the men who were taking arms and money from 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.

The Anbar Awakening is cited over and over again by pundits on the right and the center-left as crucial in the resultant diminishing violence in Iraq. Now, in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, it behooves us to listen to men such as Matthew Alexander. We cannot defeat terrorism with military power alone; we have to understand the roots of terror, the people who become terrorists, the causes that inspire them to turn to murder. Alexander writes:

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Alexander reminds us, as have so many other writers, that the detainee abuse inflamed many foreigners who flocked to Iraq and escalated the violence there. Abu Ghraib became a recruiting tool for Al-Qaeda.

As a new administration takes office in January, Americans should stand with brave military officers such as Matthew Alexander "to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them."

Update:Since writing this post, I've read other bloggers' responses to Matthew Alexander's op-ed. Here are links to a couple of those:

• Scott Horton, at Harper's Magazine: "How Many Americans Died Because of Bush's Torture Program?"--posted December 2, 2008.
• Steve Benen, at Washington Monthly: "Torture Doesn't Work Redux," posted December 1, 2008.