Former military interrogator says torture cost hundreds ‘if not thousands’ of American lives
Published: May 26, 2009
Updated 6 months ago
A 14-year military interrogator has undercut one of the key arguments posited by Vice President Dick Cheney in favor of the Bush Administration’s torture techniques and alleged that the use of torture has cost “hundreds if not thousands” of American lives.
The interrogator, who uses the name “Matthew Alexander,” says he oversaw more than 1,000 interrogations, conducting more than 300 in Iraq personally. His statements are captured in a new video by Brave New Films (below).
“Torture does not save lives,” Alexander said in his interview. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”
Moreover, Alexander avers that many — as many as 90 percent — of those captured in Iraq said they joined the fight against the United States because of the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
“At the prison where I conducted interrogations,” Alexander said, “we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib.”
“Cheney,’ said Alexander, ‘fundamentally misunderstands the way America is viewed around the world,” a reporter who reviewed the video wrote Tuesday. “The American principles of freedom and democracy are cherished in the Muslim world and the idea, at least, of America is still a seductive one. But it is the behavior of the Bush administration at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and secret prisons around the globe that undercuts that image, allowing Al Qaeda to make the argument that America isn’t what it stands for.”
“One of Al Qaeda’s goals, it’s not just to attack the United States, it’s to prove that we’re hypocrites, that we don’t live up to American principles,” Alexander said. “So when we use torture and abuse, we’re playing directly into one of their stated goals.”
Vice President Cheney spoke out in defense of his administration’s so called “enhanced interrogation techniques” last week, including the waterboarding of key al Qaeda suspects.
“The point that is most absent is that our greatest success in this conflict was achieved without torture or abuse,” Alexander wrote in a blog post Sunday. “My interrogation team found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq and murderer of tens of thousands. We did this using relationship-building approaches and non-coercive law enforcement techniques. These worked to great effect on the most hardened members of Al Qaida — spiritual leaders who had been behind the waves of suicide bombers and, hence, the sectarian violence that swept across Iraq. We convinced them to cooperate by applying our intellect. In essence, we worked smarter, not harsher.”
“The former vice president is confusing harshness with effectiveness,” he added. “An effective interrogation is one that yields useful, accurate intelligence, not one that is harsh. It speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of interrogations, the goal of which is not to coerce information from a prisoner, but to convince a prisoner to cooperate.”
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“One of Al Qaeda’s goals, it’s not just to attack the United States, it’s to prove that we’re hypocrites, that we don’t live up to American principles,”
Well, they won.
But facts, logic and results mean NOTHING TO SOME. As ususal they ARE WRONG… CAN’T AND WON’T ADMIT IT AND THEREFORE WILL NOT DO WHAT IS RIGHT TO CHANGE IT.
They live a life of lies - with blinders on - heads in the sand - and no matter what PROOF is visable around them - not to mention the BIG FAT ELEPHANT in the room… THEY WILL NOT BUDGE.
So the fact that it cost hundreds ‘if not thousands’ of lives (it wouldn’t matter if it was FIVE live involved) - THEY ARE TOO SELFISH TO ADMIT THEIR WRONG AND in doing so… they are AFRAID to STAND UP and do the right thing… EVEN THOUGH THEY KNOW WHAT THE RIGHT THING IS!
But that’s the way it is sometimes… you can’t change ANYONE and if you try - with all the LOGIC in the world and PROOF via the unfortunate results that can be seen around them… they are so AFRAID OF being classified as WRONG - that they allow it to remain - regardless of the unfavorable results. In essence… they are VERY SELFISH.
Your attitude adds to the cause of Al-Qaida, if it is not the kind that gave rise to it. Your English grammar is also poor. This is something you have in common with several members of Al-Qaida.
I think that lifeistooshort was making the point that Cheney and his ilk will never admit that they were wrong. Everything he says, including the big fat elephant, points right at the wingnuts.
I was trying to make the point that tempering one’s ego is an honorable thing, especially since we are all wrong at times. People that commit violence and terrorist acts, or insist on writing in CAPS! are impoverished in this regard. If more people took pause and checked their ego, there would be more peace, kindness, and diplomacy.
Make no mistake: I am not a supporter of Dick Cheney, his policies, counsel, or secrecy. Nor do I like that he has not yet been prosecuted. He has devil horns invisible to many, but he also has Constitutional protections. Isn’t it lovely that we can practice ours in this forum?
Yes you are correct “texasaggie”; thanks for helping “seaqueue” out with ‘blog’ reading comprehension.
And “seaqueue”… my English grammar is not poor - this is a blog - I am blogging as I would speak.
My dot, dot, dots represent a pause.
My caps represent a twinge of sarcasm.
And my ( ) is a subliminal message to another blogger.
Perhaps you would like to re-read YOUR first sentence because it does NOT make sense to me.
Also… you must not be a Democrat. You know how I know? Because you are insulting; when you and others like you cannot admit your WRONG - you resort to personal bashing. But it’s okay… we know how you operate. It’s not intentional… it’s the years of brainwashing you’ve been subjected to - just like your peers.
Here’s something you can try… if you don’t have something nice to say to a person… don’t say it.
To be fair: it could be true that if more people were more angry, Bush-Cheney and their ilk would have been stopped sooner, and Cheney would be making the rounds on major networks. At least he hasn’t sullied PBS with his dishonest, desperate pablum.
It is just that anger for too large a fraction of people has a tendency to manifest in a violent manner. Although I do not believe in war, violence, and revenge killings, I am not convinced we can kill with kindness those bent on killing with RPGs and roadside bombs.
How could Jeffery Dahmer been prevented? I don’t know. (I saw his dead body come into the VA Hospital, but despite his crimes, I did not want to throw confetti. Death is always unfortunate.)
One of the “great” accomplishments/successes for the Republicans/Corporations and the far-right “God-for-profit and as a weapon” club, has been to turn every issue into either a political or theocratic (moral) arguement…dividing, brainwashing, misinforming and dumbing down of the people.. (an evil marriage of convinience Corporations+”Christians”+GOP+Blue dog Democrats) have some how convinced the average person that corporate welfare, (bail-outs) tax evasion (off-shore banking, tax cuts and government subsidies and favorable legislation) “socialism”…are well deserved and good for corporations….while bad for the working class and the average taxpayers…you can thank the Heritage Foundation (and many other “right-wing think tanks”) for that destructive mind-set and thought manipulation
The lives cost of those who signed a piece of paper saying they were willing to give theirs does not outweigh the lives of the innocent victims of the troops by any stretch. Killing civilians is murder. The torture is over, the murderes continue.
Honestly, I fail to see how the lives of every soldier we’ve lost can even be construed as being more of a loss than eveon one innocent life. The troops joined because they want to murder people, you can ask them yourself.
Fuck the troops, fuck this interrogator, he’s a fucking retard.
The idea that it was the rough interrogation methods that motivated the fighters, and not the bombing of thousands and thousands of innocents, along with their homes, schools, sewage treatment plants, bridges, and everything else is a sickening joke, especially since it still continues. Bombing the shit out of civilians since Jan 17, 1991 isn’t the reason they fought our troops?
This interrogator is a fucking moron.
“Matthew Alexander,” says he oversaw more than 1,000 interrogations, conducting more than 300 in Iraq personally. - Good for you Mathew, you deserve to die, but don’t think for a second that your 1000 interrogations were worse than dropping thousands upon thousands of bombs on hundreds of thousands of people. Typical former soldier: total cunt.
‘These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”’ - Oh yeah? where’d they come from, your ass? The war started 10 years before 9/11, who does this idiot think he’s kidding? Everyone knows Al Qaeda in Iraq isn’t Al Qaeda as well.
“One of Al Qaeda’s goals, it’s not just to attack the United States, it’s to prove that we’re hypocrites, that we don’t live up to American principles,” - That’s neat moron, but we all know there’s about 500x as many Jehova’s Witness’s we have to deal with here in the states, and they’re more annoying than Al Qaeda in Iraq (which isn’t Al Qaeda at all) is a threat to Americans.
Crappy article.
Good points, except that the torture is probably not over. Pres. Obama has outsourced most of it, and it’s probably still happening at places like Guantanamo.
Right, and we didn’t drop a bomb on 90 kids last month either…
While the MSM continues to rant and rave about torture and says nothing about the deaths of innocent civilians, the same media that did nothing, not one little thing to prevent the obvious b.s. that led us to re-escalate the war in Iraq, the war will continue.
With good professional interrogation, actions can be gleaned from a perp without torture if he is indeed guilty of an act. If he is not, and in fact may not even be aware of the alleged act, then torture is necessary. By using torture, a confession can be extracted from almost anyone for any act.
Torture therefor was needed to force confessions from “suspected” terrorists after 9/11. Isn’t right right, Dicky.
If the U.S. Government wasn’t afraid of itself, it wouldn’t even need a confession from you to establish your guilt of that horrible act, and the motive of it… but the forest is hidden by the trees…for now.
It is so sad though, that you had so many accomplices plus the best propaganda machine (msm) to cover your rotten rectum.
Notice how the “liberal media” turned into DICKNEWT TV, and the opposing torture point, the real liberal one, has to be put out in BraveNewFilms on the internet?
The bigger picture is: the media isn’t liberal. When is everyone going to get that?
The TV has turned into DICKNEWT TV-o-rama! Two Republicans who HOLD NO OFFICE! And are in the extreme minority after the elections.
If this guy has been involved in interrogations for 14 years, why is he just now speaking out? Why didn’t he come forward and say these things 6 years ago? We might not be in the predicament we are in if brave people had followed their consciences and come forward a long time ago.
The degree of damage that Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda attacks inflicted on America and Americans on 9/11 was significantly exceeded by the GREATER DEGREE OF DAMAGE that George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney inflected on America and Americans in invading Iraq and CHOOSING TO EMPLOY ILLEGAL TORTURE!!! In other words, Osama bin Laden got MUCH, MUCH MORE from attacking America than he could have every hoped for or dreamed of thanks to the lies, incompetence and corruption of George W. Bush and Richard B. Cheney.
The cure was more deadly and costly than the disease.
I’ve got 1700 years of evidence proving that Christians just plain love to torture people. The story of the torture of their sky fairy is, probably what is responsible for the growth of this cult. It attracts all of the sadists who love torture. You’ve noticed that all Christians are perverts down in the very bottoms of their evil souls.
Alexander avers that many — as many as 90 percent — of those captured in Iraq said they joined the fight against the United States because of the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
——————————————————–
Well, duh, ya think? If I was tortured or one of my family members was tortured by some power hungry idiot when I know I am innocent, I am going to fight back too. We are causing more terrorism by torturing innocent people.
Thank you sir for speaking out..The thing about torture is when our kids are captured why would they not torture them if they know we do it to their guys..WW2 people came home because their were rules .Countries didnt do it and if they did, like japen waterboarding our guys they were hanged..America cannot call themselves civilized if they torture.
Lookup books on torture and totalitarism in your local library. Many of these book were written after the Korean war. They say the only things torture “works” for is either indoctrination or extraction of confessions for propaganda purposes. Given the Bush track record, I am confident they knew what what they wanted out of using torture, and it wasn’t the truth.
Our reputation all over the world has been severely damaged,possibly beyond all repair,by the incompetence and criminal behavior of the Bush/Cheney regime.There are ways to belatedly attempt to undo some of the awful damage that has been done-but is the Justice Dept. up to it?…..
“Cheney,’ said Alexander, ‘fundamentally misunderstands the way America is viewed around the world,” a reporter who reviewed the video wrote Tuesday.
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Did you really write that? This is a great story and all, but quoting another reporter who was quoting the video? Maybe this is why the mainstream media thinks bloggers are sloppy journalists.
“The CIA forced me to allow terrorists into the US.”
http://visasforterrorists.blogspot.com/
By J. Michael Springmann, former US Consulate Visa Officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
Between 1987 and 1989, I had been assigned to what I call the CIA’s Consulate General at Jeddah, principal city of the Hejaz, Saudi Arabia’s western province. While nominally the officer in charge of the consulate’s visa section, I found that, out of some 20 Americans at the consulate, there were only three people (including myself) whom I knew for a certainty to have no ties, professional or familial, to any of the US intelligence services (chiefly, the National Security Agency (NSA) – the communications-intercepting and cipher-breaking arm of the US government – and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – the American organization whose covert operations include spying on and overthrowing lawfully elected governments or, if need be, assassinating their leaders at the behest of US politicians).
The CIA’s Consulate General in Jeddah
Before leaving Washington, I had met with the then-US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Walter Cutler, who spent nearly 45 minutes telling me about all the problems my predecessor had caused him in refusing visas to various applicants. An administrative official in the Near East Bureau, Ellen Goff, also mentioned that there were odd issues involving visas at Jeddah. However, the State Department Desk Officer for Saudi Arabia, in response to my query about these strange statements, said he had no idea of what they were talking about, opining only that Cutler himself was a peculiar duck.
Upon arrival in Jeddah in September 1987, I learned the truth about the situation – very quickly and very unpleasantly. I was bombarded with demands (not requests) by the American Consul General (Jay Philip Freres), the Political Officer and his successor, a Commercial Officer and the head of the Political/Economic Section, to issue visas to people who had no ties (either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country) strong enough to cause them to return to Jeddah or their homeland once they had arrived in America.
“Torture does not save lives,” Alexander said in his interview. “And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool…These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse….literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives.”
Ok, so how do we get President Obama to allow Attorney General Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor for the Bush Torturer’s?
How will we put pressure on Obama and Holder?
SIGN THE PETITION To Prosecute Them For Torture
http://ANGRYVOTERS.ORG
Over 250,000 have signed
Join them and call yourself a Patriot
.
I will just say this: I’ve lived and worked in the Middle East — the Arabian Gulf to be precise — since the early 80s. I teach. Okay, when I first came, I would often have students come to me for help in finding them a college or university in the U.S. where they could continue their studies. Some students would also query me about which degrees and which job categories might make it easier for them to stay and live in the US. Well, after the rep of the US was destroyed by the previous regime, I have had no further such questions. None. Zilch. Zip. In fact, very few students from here — I’m in the Sultanate of Oman — even talk of studying in the U.S. any more at all. They’re heading for Canada or Australia or the UK.
Another sign of the times: here in the Gulf there are organizations that advertise in the English media offering to help expat workers in the region with immigration procedures to Australia, Canada, and the UK. They used to include the US, but no longer. The reason? According to a lawyer I know here who is a partner in one of these organizations, “Nobody wants to go to the US any more. It’s viewed as anti-Muslim and just too dangerous, so we’ve stopped offering the service.”