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Former interrogator slams torture: Torture has cost nearly as
many lives as 9/11
Think
Progress
Monday, Dec 01, 2008
In a Washington Post op-ed today, a former Special
Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq in 2006 sharply criticizes
American torture techniques as ineffective and dangerous. “Torture
and abuse cost American lives,” he writes:
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. … It’s no exaggeration
to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that
country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the
fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of
U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will
never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is
close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone
can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me —
unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
The writer, who used a pseudonym for the article, adds that when
he switched his team’s techniques to a rapport-building
method, they found enormous success. One detainee told the author,
“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.”
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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