Scott Horton
Harper’s
December 9, 2008
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
According to a special operations intelligence officer, the answer is a number north of three thousand–not counting the tens of thousands maimed or seriously wounded, the destruction of the nation’s reputation as a moral leader, or the damage done to our Constitution. In a stunning op-ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post, a special operations intelligence officer details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006—long after the Pentagon had forsworn them, but while Donald Rumsfeld was still running the shop.
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and 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.
The Pentagon’s claims that it had returned to interrogations based on the venerable Field Manual, was, it seems, conscious disinformation. But the officer offers an assessment. The torture techniques consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence, he said. But the old techniques—which rest on confidence building—consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to information that saved lives. Moreover, the strategies employed to effect later were used as a much broader tactic, accentuating differences between native Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters, in what came to be known as the “Sunni Awakening.”
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