At the end of last month The Washington Post ran a piece from a former US military interrogator who worked in Iraq. It addresses head-on the question of whether torture is needed to fight terrorism:
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.
I refused to participate in such practices … 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 … It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi …
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.” …
We’re told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations — and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.
You can read the full piece here.
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LDV: just like Reddit, but two weeks later!
Look, Ryan can only peddle the bicycle attached to the hairdryer so fast, ok? And all our bits of string keep breaking. You wouldn’t believe how many halves of squeezy bottles we’ve got through this month…
Nothing new in US intelligence figures saying torture doesn’t work. Clive Stafford Smith interviewed an Bill Cowan, an ex marine/intelligence officer (who had apparently described using electric shock torture on captured Viet Cong and drove a pick up with an “I love my AK47” bumper sticker – in short not a likely ACLU member). He said that torture only achieved results if it was done immediately upon capture. After 48 hours any information would be of limited value and abusing prisoners months after capture was simply gratuitous.
Stafford Smith also reported on an ex FBI officer who had been getting good intelligence from Ibn Sheikh al-Libi (a senior al-Qaeda figure) through developing a good rapport. The CIA didn’t think progress was quick enough and took al-Libi to Egypt.
It was there that al-Libi gave the US the information that al-Qaeda was working with Iraq to develop weapons of mass destruction – the “intelligence” subsequently used by Colin Powell at the UN.
Despite his obvious high value al-Libi isn’t currently in Guantanamo. He must have been one of the 14,000 prisoners who the US stopped holding between mid October and 6th September 2006.
Closing Guantamo will only be a partial closing of this chapter. For me it is a big test of Obama as to whether he goes further than that, fairly token, gesture and really dismantles the illegal rendition programme.
I remember sitting on a train from Paris to Nîmes in the mid-seventies, talking to a ex-paratrooper who had fought in Algeria in the 1950’s and had a pied-noir background. He told me thay had had problems with complaints about torture from the UN and had found it to be ineffective until someone had come up with the idea of taking half a dozen prisoners up in a helicopter and throwing them out, one by one, until someone talked. He said this seemed to be very effective and left no trace of torture on the body if it was found.
However, he commented that in a guerilla war, which is what they were fighting and we are fighting today in Iraq and Afghanistan, what they learnt was of little value as the knowledge of the prisoners rarely extended further than their ‘cell’ or small operational unit which had invariably been destroyed or disbanded with their capture.
The old maxim that it’s impossible to beat a guerilla army in the field is probably no longer true, but it has taken, in the case of France and now of America, great democracies into the morass of illegality that eventually brought down the Fourth Republic and has in part at least, brought Obama to power. De Gaulle, had the greatness to restore French democracy, morality and vision. I hope Obama can do the same.
There will be a certain amount of breaking cover as a new regime gets closer.
What will be interesting is if the Obama regime lift the lid on UK involvement in illegal renditions which we’ve had a glimpse of through the ghost plane flights and the small revelations about Diego Garcia