US military interrogator decries torture — worse than useless

Democracy Now! interviews Matthew Alexander, author of How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. Alexander is a former US military interrogator who deplores the use of torture in interrogation as ineffective at extracting intelligence — and he argues that it's very effective at outraging potential enemies and turning them into murderous extremists.

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.

US Interrogator in Iraq Says Torture Policy Has Led to Deaths of Thousands of American Soldiers,

How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq on Amazon

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