NEW YORK: During my tour in Iraq as an interrogator, I often found myself face-to-face in the interrogation booth, a cramped plywood-walled room, with men who were in the upper-echelon of Al Qaeda. I conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000.
Most of these men had supported in some fashion Abu Musab Al Zarqawi s campaign of suicide bombings that pushed Iraq into a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia. In fact, one such man, a Sunni imam named Abu Ali, told me, If I had a knife, I d cut your throat.
Three days later, Abu Ali was telling me the location of an Al Qaeda safe house used for suicide operations. There, we picked up the man who led us to Zarqawi who was eventually killed by US forces in June 2006. Why the sudden change?
Interrogation, I found, puts a spotlight on the fundamentals of the human condition.
It is in that cramped plywood-walled room that words become giants, tears flow like rivers and emotions rage like wild fires. This is partially because the stakes of an interrogation are extremely high – lives are in the balance. But also, there is a deep connection that occurs between the detainee and the interrogator. These are, after all, two human beings, both needing something from the other. The interrogator controls the freedom of the detainee. The detainee controls information.
What was it that convinced Abu Ali to change course from the cause that he had served just 72 hours prior? His son.
For three days my partner and I strove to understand Abu Ali as an individual. This was, after all, a man with a family: a man who had joined Al Qaeda out of a need for protection from the Shi a militia that had killed his best friend and forced him from his home.
During those three long days of interrogations, I came to understand Abu Ali as a man filled with hate, but also filled with hope. He hated America for having put him in the situation where he had to choose Al Qaeda, but he also maintained a hope that America would eventually reverse its path and reach out to Sunnis.
I repeatedly reminded Abu Ali that the future of Iraq lay in the hands of its sons and daughters. To achieve peace, the next generation would have to find a path towards reconciliation. I said to him, Look, we Americans made plenty of mistakes. but that doesn t mean we can t work together to fix it now.
When asked if he wanted his son to grow up in this cycle of violence, he responded,
I want my son to grow up in peace.
It was then that he made the decision to reject Zarqawi s extreme ideology of intolerance.
This tactical episode points to a larger strategy that should be pursued by American policymakers. In the words of Fredrick Kagan, a military history professor at the US Military Academy, Unfortunately, our current military doctrine is moving very much in the direction of seeing all potential enemies as target sets, and not seeing them as collections of human beings with weapons, where what really matters is your interaction with the human beings.
This attitude has resulted in frequent cases of torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq. The United States must change its approach towards interrogations from one based on fear and control to one based on negotiation and compromise.
Torture and harsh techniques are counterproductive to preventing terrorist attacks as they often lead to false information – a detainee will say anything to stop the pain. These techniques are also in direct contradiction to the basic American principles of liberty, justice and freedom.
Many members of Al Qaeda have joined the group for reasons that have little to do with ideology and it is only by approaching our enemies in a spirit of cooperation and negotiation that we will be able to achieve a peaceful end to this conflict.
President Barack Obama has promised to outlaw torture across the entire US government and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. We have a unique window of opportunity to change our course.
Matthew Alexanderis a Bronze Star Medal awardee who served 14 years in the US Air Force, and the author of How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. This article originally appeared in The Guardian and was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).
