01/09/15 – Tony Camerino – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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All right, our guest today is Tony Camerino.
You might know him as Matthew Alexander, who wrote the book Kill or Capture, and also How to Break, I think this was the first one, How to Break a Terrorist, the US interrogator who used brains, not brutality, to take down the deadliest man in Iraq.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Tony?
I'm good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing real good.
I don't know if you even remember.
We spoke once about, I don't know, seven or eight years ago, or whenever you originally wrote that article for the Washington Post, I believe it was.
I regret that I have not read your books, although certainly they should be on the pile of books that I need to read.
No doubt about that, but I appreciate you joining us on the show.
The reason why I have you on is because you've come up in conversation over the last few days about the motivation for terrorist attacks, and of course the narrative about the French attack is that, for example, George Packer in The New Yorker wrote a piece, and the answer is that all you need to know is Salman Rushdie.
The truth is Islam is just intolerant of free speech, and so this was an attack by Islam against free speech, and that's just about it.
And yet there's a personal history of the now-dead terrorist attackers that's being told by the French police, which seemed to indicate that perhaps they had earthly political reasons for some of the things they did, including apparently there was a documentary that profiled the older brother who was an aspiring rapper and who was clearly not a religious, pious type at all back when he was trying to go and fight in Iraq ten years ago.
And so I was just wondering, you know, what's your initial impression of what's going on here, and do you have any insight, you think, that we could learn about, you know, what this attack on this French magazine means in the context of the broader war on terrorism?
Well, it's interesting, but not surprising.
I mean, these type of attacks, I think, are going to continue, and we're going to see more of them, I believe.
And it's not surprising.
I mean, we are technically at war, you know.
We do have combat troops in both Iraq and in Afghanistan, and in all countries that are participating in those conflicts, I think, or in any way supporting them, can expect that there are going to be, you know, retaliatory attacks.
The question of what motivates these two individuals, it's hard to speculate at this point.
What I can tell you, just from my experience having interrogated in Iraq, is that individuals who decide to join extremist groups do it for a variety of reasons.
But most of those, the majority of those reasons aren't religious.
The majority of those reasons typically come down to socioeconomic reasons.
And so you see that a lot of the recruits that make it into these extremist organizations are people that were disenfranchised by their societies, by the culture in which they lived in, and for either economic reasons or social reasons, decided to go and join some of these violent groups.
All right.
Now, yeah, I guess I kind of screwed up on your introduction there.
I meant to explain for people who don't remember that you were an interrogator in the Iraq War.
It says here in your bio, you supervised over 1,300 interrogations in Iraq.
And the reason that you came public in the first place was to try to explain that in your experience, basically treating captives well was a much better way to get quality information out of them than brutalizing them.
And I believe the story goes, that's how you found the, again, the intelligence that led to the targeting, the successful targeting and killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Is that correct?
Yeah.
You know, my primary approach was to get to know people.
That was kind of my bread and butter.
Get to know people, understand what motivates them, why they joined al-Qaeda in the first place.
And then once you knew that, then you could decide on a technique, an interrogation technique, a non-coercive technique that would in some way apply an incentive that would convince them to cooperate with you and to abandon al-Qaeda.
And that incentive, you know, in 90% of cases was intangible.
It was either reaffirmation of some grievance they felt, or sometimes just straight compassion and understanding for why they had decided to join al-Qaeda.
But that was my approach.
And what I found is that a lot of interrogators were making the mistake of assuming that everybody who had joined al-Qaeda had done so for religious reasons.
That was because they hated our culture, because they believed in Osama Bin Laden's very radical beliefs, and that's why they had joined al-Qaeda.
But that was always just a facade.
There are a few cases where there are hardcore religious believers and very hardcore religious beliefs who had joined for religious reasons.
But even those guys, I believe, if you really dig back, even, for instance, Zarqawi, if you go back to his history, you'll find that it's not actually rooted in religion.
It was rooted in criminality and social injustice, as he saw it.
Yeah, very important point on him in particular.
Sorry to interrupt, but yeah, he was just a two-bit rapist, Zarqawi was, until he was tortured by America's king in Jordan.
And that was when he decided to grow up and get serious about life and decided he wanted to go to Afghanistan and see if he could get into some real trouble.
Yeah, and let's not forget, a lot of times when we look at some of these acts that are committed by members of al-Qaeda, the more gruesome ones, every organization has criminals in it, right?
I mean, some of the members of al-Qaeda certainly are just, some of them are truly psychopathic criminals and commit very heinous acts.
But we have had in the U.S. military too, and not to say that we're the same, but we do have criminals in the military who commit heinous acts, and we've seen that in Afghanistan, Iraq, and al-Qaeda does too.
But it'd be a mistake to say that everyone who commits these heinous acts in al-Qaeda represents the strong ideological religious arm of that organization.
So, for instance, in Iraq, the large majority of members of al-Qaeda were Sunnis who were moderate religiously, but had joined al-Qaeda for weapons and money.
And now, with a group like ISIS, I believe you have a very large and stronger faction at the top of religious radicals, but that religious, those religious and radical beliefs were formed in American prisons in Iraq because of torture.
Now, let me ask you this.
When you're talking about al-Qaeda in Iraq, circa, what are we talking, 05, 06 here, basically?
Well, are you talking the beginning, or when I was there?
Yeah, I mean, in your experience.
I was there in 06.
Right.
Okay, so, now, wow, you got 1,300 interrogations done just in the first half, or just in that one year?
That's a lot.
In five months.
Yeah.
So now, when we talk about AQI, how exactly did you define it?
Because sometimes that meant any foreigner who traveled to Iraq to fight, sometimes it meant the entire Sunni-based insurgency, sometimes it meant just those who actually are working for Zarqawi, and that kind of thing.
I wonder how specific you are about that, and I wonder whether you notice when the Libyans, the Syrians, the Saudis, and whoever, whatever other foreign fighters came to fight, were they any more religious, or they were just as motivated by secular politics, you know, earthly reasons, I mean, to say, not so much secular, but you know what I mean, earthly reasons as the Iraqis who were fighting with them?
You know, it really depends, it really depends on the person's background.
In Iraq, there was, you know, I think at one point, over 20 separate insurgent groups.
You know, you had, I can't even start, the 1920s Brigade, you had so many different groups that were operating there, but many of those groups were actually associated and or formed really within the tribal structure.
So if a certain tribe said, okay, we're not going to join the government because of de-Bathacation or because of the disbanding of the army or because of the Shia militias, and we're going to defend ourselves, we're going to join our group, and we're going to give it a name.
I'm sorry, I've got to interrupt you, we've got to take this break.
It's Tony Camerino, aka Matthew Alexander, Iraq War Interrogator, be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Tony Camerino, aka Matthew Alexander.
He is a fellow at the Burkle Center at UCLA.
Go Bruins!
And he's the author of How to Break a Terrorist and Kill or Capture About His Time in Iraq as an interrogator there.
So I want to get back to, well, I'm sorry, you were interrupted in the middle of what you were saying.
You remember where you were?
Yeah, I was talking about the various insurgent groups that had grown up in Iraq after our invasion and that many of them were aligned with tribes.
But when you look at al-Qaeda in Iraq, really the majority of it was groups that had decided through the Sunni tribes to join al-Qaeda really because it was a marriage of convenience.
The Sunni tribes needed weapons and money to defend themselves from the Shia militias that were being allowed to run free by the central government, in some ways sponsored by the central government, and al-Qaeda provided that.
And you also saw that when Petraeus came in and paid the tribes and gave them weapons, how quickly they disbanded from al-Qaeda, it pretty much tells you that the majority of them had no religious affiliations with al-Qaeda.
They really had joined for practical reasons.
Yeah.
And now, so when you talk about the, you said at the beginning, it seemed like the primary underwriting motivation here was socioeconomic problems by the volunteers?
Yeah, if you look at Iraq in particular, the majority of oil in Iraq is in Shia land.
It's along the border with Iran in the south, east.
And the rest is up in Kurdistan.
There's some up in Kurdistan, and there's some processing that happens in Baji and places in Sunni territory, but for the most part, there's very little oil in Sunni Iraq.
And so, you know, under Saddam, they were guaranteed some of that oil revenue, right, that would be distributed to them through the central government, but now with a Shia-led government and in a democracy that's there now, there is no guarantee that they will get any of that revenue.
And that is really truly what the conflict in Iraq comes down to, is those Sunni tribes in the north and west have to be able to feed their families, and there is very little industry outside of oil for them to be able to do that.
And as long as the central government is not going to share that oil revenue with them, they are going to turn to groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda that will allow them to try to take that revenue by force.
Well, I think that ship's already sailed by now, but that'd be a whole different direction for the conversation.
I want to get back to what you had said previously about, I guess, primarily in reference to the foreign fighters who had come to join and fight under Zarqawi or otherwise for the Sunni-based insurgency back then, that it was, according to them, in your interrogations, it was the pictures of the torture from Abu Ghraib, and the pictures of the guys in the orange jumpsuits being held without trial at Guantanamo Bay, that was what really motivated so many of these guys to go ahead and make the trip to Iraq to fight.
Yeah, and let's remember, they didn't need pictures.
I mean, the pictures certainly poured flames on everything, but there was, at least within Iraqis and for other foreigners who had been captured by U.S. forces in Iraq in the early days, they experienced the torture and word got out.
So because it wasn't just Abu Ghraib, it wasn't just one place here or there.
Remember at one point, Donald Rumsfeld had authorized enhanced interrogation techniques, aka torture and abuse, to be used by all, and even after they rescinded that permission, many units continued to use them because the justification that was given to them was, well, you can use these because it'll save lives.
So even after they rescinded, people thought, well, if it's okay to torture Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld say it's okay to torture to save lives, then, you know, why not?
They're saying it's okay.
So this widespread, and I'm not going to say that, you know, I think less, I think the number of interiors who tortured was less than a majority, I think even many interiors who were permitted or allowed to use these techniques refused to use them.
But there were enough cases that it became well known within Iraq, among the insurgents, among the foreign fighters, among Iraqis that had been captured that Americans used torture and they abused prisoners.
And that spread very quickly, and the photos from Abu Ghraib and what happened at Guantanamo Bay was just more fuel on the fire, you know?
Yeah, you know, I remember incredibly even, you know, anti-war reporters like Aaron Glantz reporting for Democracy Now!
, he had no problem saying, hey, I'm here in Tikrit, and these people, I can't lie to you, they're happy that America invaded and got Saddam for them, but they don't trust us.
And I'm talking about right after the invasion.
They don't trust us, and they're looking at us sideways, and we have a very short window of opportunity to show that we mean what we say about how much we love them.
And it seems like that window's already closing here pretty quick, and it wasn't very long before they came to really realize, well, and I think, you know, as Matthew Ho has said on the show, that even in the highest level discussions of military intelligence, whatever, the debate was still framed as it's the people of Iraq versus the terrorists.
And what you say about, well, the Sunni tribes were being cut out of the oil wealth and all this, which, I mean, that kind of analysis was being discussed on my little pirate radio show back then as well, that they wouldn't talk about stuff like that.
They really framed it just as the terrorists.
So anybody you're torturing is a terrorist, so go ahead and torture them.
And they were creating all their own enemies of this brutality from the get-go.
Yeah, I don't think we can say that, you know, America didn't create ISIS.
Zarqawi created, you know, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which later became ISIS, but we certainly added the fuel that allowed it to ignite and then prosper later in Syria and move into Iraq by using torture.
And, you know, my unit in particular, we tracked foreign fighters that we captured and did interviews, you know, and assessed why they had come to fight.
And the number one reason, they briefed every new interrogator on this, the number one reason they had come to fight was because of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.
By the way, does that count for any Europeans?
We...
I don't remember us ever capturing any Europeans.
Because, of course, the story that they're saying about the French shooter, the older brother, was that he was arrested trying to go to fight in Iraq in 2005 and told the judge he was motivated by the pictures of the torture and the abuse.
And here was a guy who was a rapper and everything but a devout religious fundamentalist who, you know, claimed then that that's what he was motivated by was American policy.
Yeah, well, this isn't a surprise, right?
Because the 9-11 hijackers had very strong ties to Europe, right?
The millennial bomber was French-Algerian, had lived in France for a number of years.
Richard Reed had passed through France and spent time there.
So, you know, there's plenty of seeds of radical Islam in Europe, and many of those are fueled by, obviously, our foreign policies, some of the awful mistakes we've made in the Middle East.
Yeah, well, you know, I guess I don't really have a very good thumb on the pulse of what things were really like in the Middle East before.
But Michael Shoyer, I guess, warned beforehand and has said since that American policy has radicalized a generation where it just didn't have to happen at all.
Well, 3,000 radicals before 9-11 and probably 50,000, 60,000 now, you know, that pretty much tells you what our policy has accomplished.
Yeah, where these guys are basically the nutcase ranting on the street corner that nobody cares about until all of a sudden things are on fire and people are dying and screaming.
And he seems prescient, because I told you this was going to happen, he says, and he has the explanation for why it happened and everything, which makes him kind of the perfect mirror image of the war party here.
They already have an explanation.
It's the Islam makes them do it so much, you know?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think you know my perspective is that it's not really about religion.
The religion is just it's just excuse.
It's really about social social conditions and economics.
I never met the guy, you know, in Iraq of all the foreign fighters that we interrogated and all the people we talked to, I never met the guy who was like, you know, woke up one day and was like, Jihad, that's the reason I'm going to Iraq to fight.
It's never it's never just religion.
Always another reason.
If we can make it a little bit more complicated, did any of them decide that that religion that their religion was so opposed to our way of life, that that was what made them go and fight, that we let our daughters wear miniskirts to junior college and to vote in primary elections and these kinds of things and R-rated movies, and this is why we had to pay?
No, no.
I mean, that just never happens, really.
I mean, even if you look at if you look at Osama bin Laden's three demands prior to 9-11, none of them had to do with really American culture.
They were US support to Israel.
They were the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia and US support for monarchies in the Middle East that he considered to be corrupt.
That none of those reasons had anything to do with culture.
Now, that's not to say he didn't dislike our culture, that, you know, some of these fundamentalists do resent our culture, and especially, you know, with regards to women's rights.
But those aren't the political reasons for why they've turned to violence.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for your time and come back on the show, Tony.
I sure hope I have a chance to get to your book sometime soon.
Yeah, give it a try.
I will.
Appreciate it.
All right.
Thank you.
All right, so that's Tony Camerino.
He formerly was known as Matthew Alexander, the pseudonymous author of How to Break a Terrorist and Kill or Capture.
And he's now a fellow at the Burkle Center at UCLA.
We'll be right back in just a sec.
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Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum, and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable, and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
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