HOW TO BREAK A TERRORIST...."Matthew Alexander," an interrogator who rejected torture in favor of "showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information," and managed to bag the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in the process, writes about his experience:

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....How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material — including passages copied verbatim from the Army's unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army's own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don't even want the public to hear them.

Alexander's book, How to Break a Terrorist, hits bookstores tomorrow. Sounds like a good read.

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Kevin Drum

Political Blogger

Kevin Drum is a political blogger for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, click here. RSS | Twitter