Welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos in Austin, ChaosRadioAustin.org and AntiWar.com and I hope everyone saw this in the Washington Post by Matthew Alexander, a pseudonym.
I'm still tortured by what I saw in Iraq.
He's got a new book, How to Break a Terrorist, The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.
Welcome to the show, Matthew.
Thanks for having me.
And why is it that you have the pseudonym there?
It's for security and basic precautions because Al-Qaeda, they promised reprisals for the death of Zarqawi after his death, although surprisingly enough, really the response after his death wasn't as strong as I expected, showing that a lot of people, even within his own organization, never really approved of his methods.
And is this something that you're really worried about or it's just sort of an army technicality here?
No, it definitely is something I'm worried about.
Al-Qaeda has proven that they will target individuals.
They did so in the case of the Danish cartoons and in terms of other publicated works.
They've gone after publishers and authors.
Yeah, killed CIA guys at the red light that one time too, right?
I believe they killed numerous individuals in our government.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I mean, yeah, actually they're in Virginia, right?
Wasn't there a thing where it was just...
Yeah, there was an attack once, I believe, at the CIA headquarters.
I'm not that familiar with it, actually.
Yeah, I'm not either.
I just sort of rang a bell when you said that.
But, okay, anyway, I accept that.
That's fair enough.
Okay, so I guess, tell us your background.
First of all, how long you've been in the armed forces, your rank and experience leading up to your going to Iraq in 2006.
Yeah, I was in the Air Force for 14 years.
I was a major and I was a criminal investigator by trade.
I'd been doing that for a number of years, about six years before I went to Iraq.
I went to Iraq because the Army has been severely overstretched, obviously, for personnel.
And they reached out requesting other services to help.
And I volunteered to help them out, to go there as an interrogator, because I had been, you know, I've done criminal interrogations.
And intelligence interrogations are in the same realm, if you will.
And so myself and several other Air Force criminal investigators went to assist the Army in interrogations and in trying to find Zarqawi.
And it actually was a tip that you got out of a guy that led you to the house where he was eventually killed.
Yes, that's true.
It's a little bit more complicated than that.
Okay.
I try not to simplify it down to it was me, because there's a whole organization involved in this process.
There's interrogators, there's analysts, there's intelligence officers, there's the actual soldiers who have the riskiest part of the job.
They have to go out and actually capture or kill the people that we locate.
But I happen to be in the position and have the opportunity to be part of the final link of that chain that located Zarqawi.
And now, if I remember the reports correctly, I guess I should have gone back to double-check this morning, but if memory serves, there were innocent people killed in that bombing that got Zarqawi.
Does that bother you?
Yeah, of course it bothers me.
I think, ideally, in every operation that we run, we would not have any civilian casualties.
The war has taken a tremendous toll on Iraqi people.
At the beginning of my book, I dedicate my book partially to the Iraqi civilians who have died in this war.
There were innocent civilians that were killed in that house when it was bombed.
I think that's something that I'll have to live with.
I'll always carry that on my conscience.
I can't say, however, that I don't think we should have bombed the house.
I think it's a very difficult decision that had to be made.
Our commander made that decision.
I don't double-guess him for having made it.
We had to weigh the number of people that Zarqawi was responsible for killing on a daily basis versus the casualties that would occur with his death.
I think it's one of those unanswerable ethical questions and shows the difficulty of fighting a counterinsurgency.
Yeah, well, and the difficulty of the situation overall.
I mean, after all, he wasn't even officially a part of al-Qaeda until the end of 2004, and the real civil war fighting between the various Iraqi factions didn't really start until the beginning of 2006.
Actually, he had started his suicide bombing campaign, the initial strategy, as early as fall of 2005.
He had set up in Iraq prior to our invasion.
He set up his own organization.
Actually, the real reason he had never joined al-Qaeda is because Osama bin Laden did not approve of him.
Zarqawi was fairly uneducated.
He was illiterate until recently.
I think he became illiterate while he was doing his second jail term in Jordan.
But Osama bin Laden saw him as a thug, and it wasn't until Zarqawi showed that he was tactically legitimate by conducting a number of high-profile terrorist attacks against the United Nations building in Baghdad and others that Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were forced to basically accept him.
Right, and really at that point, al-Qaeda in Iraq is a matter of branding.
Basically, that was, I guess, shorthand for the foreign fighters who came to Iraq to take on the Americans.
Yeah, you know, it's interesting.
One of the things I talk about in my book, At Great Length, in fact, this is one of the things that you can only read in my book, you won't get anywhere else, is the voice of Iraqis and why they joined the insurgency, why they joined al-Qaeda.
You should see the great movie by Steve Connors and Molly Bingham.
They were embedded reporters, embedded themselves with the Iraqi insurgency, with the Sunni insurgency at the very beginning.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so yours is the second place though, that's really good.
Okay.
But I think there's no other place where you're going to hear these people in an interrogation booth.
Oh, that's certainly the case.
And where you're going to hear them fill out the cause.
Right.
Okay, so tell us about that.
Tell us about who it was you were interrogating.
Were they mostly Iraqis or were they foreign fighters?
And what were the different things that you got from interrogating each kind of captain there?
Well, yeah, we interrogated both Iraqis and foreign fighters.
There's a tremendous difference.
There's a difference between every single individual that we interrogated.
You know, we tend to broad stroke label the members of al-Qaeda as all extremists.
But in the case of Iraqis, Sunni Iraqis, they're actually moderates.
And, you know, they had joined this insurgency and they had joined al-Qaeda for a lot of reasons.
Some of them were economic.
Some of them were because of tribal affiliation.
And some of them were because of there was a few who were ideologists and believed in the al-Qaeda ideologists, but they were a very small minority.
There were a lot that joined for protection from the Shia militias that had been running around Iraq, committing reprisal killings during the chaos that we allowed to occur because of our mismanagement in the initial post-invasion.
Well, and that really was the start of the civil war.
People say it was Zarqawi and the Samaritan Mosque, but it was Rumsfeld and the Badr Corps that they were using against the Sunni resistance originally to kind of turn it into a religious war like that, isn't it?
I think that's a good point.
However, I think nobody's going to ever pick a date and say this is when the civil war began.
I think there's a threshold.
And certainly after Saddam, prior to Zarqawi's coming to power, there was a lot of violence committed by Shia militias.
It wasn't just the Badr Corps.
It was the Ahmadi army as well.
And the Shia had suffered years of persecution under Saddam, and many of those groups took out revenge for what they had suffered in the ensuing lack of law enforcement or military to keep order.
But the one event that threw everything into chaos that took the civil war to a new level was the bombing of the Golden Mosque in February of 2006 because this is basically the Sistine Chapel, if you will, of Shia Islam.
This is a very important holy site, and this is what caused Sunnis to start carrying out numerous suicide attacks against Shia civilians.
And so I arrived in Iraq just after the bombing of the Golden Mosque, and things were, at that time, at their most intense.
Well, and this is when our government was telling us that the insurgency, basically, were all terrorists and all Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and any fighting that the Sunni insurgents were doing were attributed to Zarqawi.
Yes, you know, there was a lot of different groups and a lot of different loyalties within the insurgency.
I think the important thing to realize is that when I would sit down— By the way, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but do you know for a fact who bombed that mosque in Samar?
Because it sort of just seemed like, well, Zarqawi must have done it.
It was all we ever heard about it.
Yes, I do.
I know that it was somebody that was loyal to Zarqawi.
We actually captured somebody at one point who had been involved in the bombing, who explained the whole situation.
There was a guy—it's actually a chapter that's not in the book, but there was a guy that I spoke to, that I interrogated, who eventually explained the plot to me.
And there was another guy who had actually been part of the attack, who had—one of our interrogators had done a great job of getting him to confess exactly who was behind that bombing.
The thing is, there's stories in my book that I talk about.
I just want to give you one example about how buried this insurgency was.
One of the first guys that I talk about interrogating in the book is a man named Abu Ali, and he was an imam, a Sunni imam.
And he had no intention of joining the insurgency after the invasion, had a very good view of Americans prior to the invasion, and wasn't even unhappy about the removal of Saddam.
However, after the invasion, he woke up one morning to find a death note on his door from the Battle Corps.
And he decided he was going to ignore it, except for the fact that the next day, one of his best friends, who was also an imam, was assassinated by the Battle Corps.
And so he was forced to pick up his family and to leave everything and move.
He ended up going to a mosque back in his hometown where he was recruited into Al-Qaeda.
And he eventually ended up blessing suicide bombers for operations against Shia civilians.
And we went through weeks of interrogations.
And I think in the book I describe another interrogator I worked with by the name of Bobby who just pulled off an incredible, incredible performance in getting Abu Ali to cooperate with us, and one of Abu Ali's friends also who was captured, another imam.
But Abu Ali at the end said to me something that I'll never forget.
And let me point this out.
In the first interrogation he said to me, if I had a knife right now, I would cut your throat.
In the last interrogation he said to me, he said, you know, I don't really believe that it's right to bomb Shia civilians because my mother is Shia.
But you Americans, you gave us no choice.
We had nowhere else to turn to protect ourselves from the Shia militias.
It was very powerful, his words.
Right.
Well, and at this point we can get back to whether anything could have been done once the decision was made to overthrow the Ba'ath Party from power, that that was pretty much the way it was going to be.
But I guess we don't want to take this argument that far back.
But certainly we're dealing with a lot of cause and effect there.
Something that struck me in your article for the Washington Post was that, you know, apparently you and your team really set yourselves apart as a group of interrogators who did not abuse the prisoners.
And yet, as you just told me, you got there right after the bombing of the Samar Mosque in 2006, which was almost two years after the release of the Abu Ghraib pictures.
There was still abuse going on in Iraqi prisons after that?
You know, there was – it's a good question about what constitutes torture and abuse and what's unethical.
And depending on who you talk to, those lines are going to be drawn in different places.
I mean we're all familiar with the very narrow definition that John Woo gave of torture, which was severe damage, permanent severe damage, which I completely reject.
That's not what Geneva Convention says.
And I believe that there's techniques that are being used that are based on fear and control that violate Geneva Conventions because, one, you're not allowed to threaten prisoners.
You're not allowed to directly threaten prisoners, and you're not allowed to humiliate them.
And when you use approaches that are based on fear and control, you do those things.
On the other hand, if you look at the American criminal justice system and what detectives and criminal investigators are allowed to do in criminal interrogations, there's things that they probably – that probably would be considered torture under Geneva Conventions.
The good example of that is good cop, bad cop.
I mean good cop, bad cop is used every day by detectives in the United States.
However, for a long time it was outlawed as an illegal technique that would have been considered torture.
So the lines are very gray in many cases.
And I think the bottom line is that as an interrogator, you know what American principles are.
You've been taught those.
You've been raised in them.
And when you're in the interrogation booth, if you're doing something and it doesn't feel right, it's not something that you would want the enemy to do to one of our troops, then you know you shouldn't be doing it.
And this goes back to a mentality about how we fight the war.
If we fight the war and our goal is to dominate and to annihilate, then these tactics are a logical consequence of that.
If we fight this war in a spirit of negotiation, compromise, and middle ground, then the type of tactics we'll use will be consistent with that.
And so interrogations really – we need to change our mentality.
It's not about converting.
It's not about dominating.
It's about negotiating and compromising.
And the best successes we had in Iraq interrogating were when we used that type of mentality.
I'll just give you one example.
I remember one guy that I interrogated, and this story is in the book.
He had fully expected that we would torture him, but he was very surprised that we were treating him nice and respectful.
This is a guy who had built bombs for al-Qaeda.
He built suicide vests.
He had done this because he had two wives, and he had one that he couldn't support.
Over a period of time, I was able to get him to the point where he, I think, realized that he had made some mistakes, that he should not have joined al-Qaeda.
But he also knew that if he confessed to making bombs, that it would send him to the noose.
I ultimately convinced him, using a ruse, that he could divorce his second wife, which he wanted to do, if he cooperated with us.
What I was using there were techniques that were based on relationship building, rapport building.
Although there's deception involved, these deceptions are permissible within interrogations.
In the end, the technique that's working best there is good old American ingenuity and not fear and control.
It sounds like you sort of, I don't know what they told you going into it, but at least you realized pretty quickly that you weren't dealing with people who, each and every one of them was a foaming at the mouth, ideological, jihadist terrorist.
These were regular Iraqi people.
You called them moderates a few minutes ago.
Regular people, individuals that you could actually just deal with if you only treated them as such.
I'm very against any type of labeling of people.
Iraqi Sunnis are moderates.
They believe in a very moderate form of Islam.
There are a few at the top within the Al-Qaeda echelon who have been converted to the very extreme views of Al-Qaeda.
But the large majority of Sunnis are moderates.
To label them as bloodthirsty or what we used to call them was Kool-Aid drinking fanatics, it would be like saying all Americans are fundamental radicals because of the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib and that we're all the same as the soldiers who committed the acts there.
And so we have to be very careful about making that distinction.
One of the best things, I think the best success stories of the entire war is General Petraeus' reaching out to the Sunnis because it shows that not only are we willing to work with the Sunnis but we're willing to forgive past aggressions on both sides.
We ask for their forgiveness for the mistakes that we've made and we forgive them for the attacks that they've made against us.
Well, you know, I think our government has had this narrative that the reason that anybody would attack America or even resist an occupation in their country would be because of their religious extremism, et cetera, et cetera.
So this really cuts to the question of why they fight.
And as you were explaining in the anecdote about the Sunni imam, it was not religious reasons at all.
It was very human reasons.
He was forced out of his neighborhood.
Yes, and in my book, almost every interrogation, I think it's kind of fascinating for people to read it because they feel like they're in the interrogation booth with me and it's very intense.
You sit down and you know that the stakes are very high in the interrogation.
You're talking about somebody, what they say could lead to their own death or to the death of other people.
And so every time you go in there, the stakes are very high.
And in my book, I describe these situations, the very intense confrontational attitude or atmosphere that's in the interrogation booth.
But you also learn through the stories that I tell that these are humans.
I mean, these are people who have been through amazing ordeals and that they've had to make extraordinary choices.
Now, I don't in any way condone the tactics that many members of Al-Qaeda have resorted to, which is the targeting of civilian targets with suicide bombings.
But I do sympathize with the predicament of Sunni Iraqis that they were in at the time that I was in Iraq.
Well, and how different is it now?
I mean, you point out the Sons of Iraq program and Petraeus arming and paying the Sunni militias.
But do you believe, well, you know, what do I know?
I guess anything's possible.
Is it your belief that this is going to work out, that somehow these Sunni militias will really be integrated into the Iraqi government as opposed to remaining a separate force just biding their time before they go back to war for Baghdad?
You know, I don't know who can predict that.
I think, you know, my personal opinion, aside from my service, but my personal opinion is that there's a certain part of me that just wants to say, you know, it's an Iraqi issue at this point to self-determination.
But at the same time, I realize that we have a responsibility because we created this.
However, for how long does that responsibility go?
For five years, for 10 years, for 20 years?
I mean, look at Bosnia.
We're still in Bosnia.
I was in Bosnia when the Serbs served during the time that the Serbs were bombing Sarajevo.
And that was 2000, I'm sorry, that was 95.
And we're still in Bosnia to this day.
So how long is our obligation to Iraq?
I think ultimately Iraqis have to decide that, and we can't.
And what we've done is we've shifted the balance of power from Sunni to Shia.
But I'm not sure how that's made America safer.
Considering the fact that the majority of terrorist attacks prior to 9-11 were carried out, sponsored or in some way assisted by Hezbollah, which is sponsored by Iran, I'm not so sure that we've made America any safer by putting Shias, who are sympathetic towards Iran, in power in Iraq.
Okay, now a couple of questions back to, say, the 2006-2007 era, there in the worst part of the civil war in Iraq.
If you define them as, you know, if you just say the insurgency was the Iraqi Sunnis and al-Qaeda was defined as the actual foreign fighters who came to fight, what percentage of the insurgency was al-Qaeda?
Because, of course, our government tried to make it sound like the whole thing was.
And yet there would be reports at various times, and I guess generals would sort of seem to be forced to admit at press conferences, that really the actual, you know, so-called terrorist jihadist types were really only the smallest part of the resistance at that time.
Well, I think, first of all, to answer that question, you have to kind of look at Arabic culture and look at the way that the tribes have traditionally fought for power.
They've worked in small groups, or any of those larger tribes, but mostly you've got these segmented groups who are all competing for power, and they're constantly juggling loyalties and making alliances and breaking those.
I mean, this was the Brit experience, right, during the colonial period.
And also you can see that this is part of Iraqi culture.
And so at any one time, I think even in 2006, to try and say like, okay, this many people are in al-Qaeda and this many people are outside, the Iraqis didn't even know it a lot of times.
A good example of that is a guy by the name of Haitham al-Badri, who was in the Republican Guard, and he worked in the Samarra area, and he had his own group, and he was aligned with al-Qaeda, but he would never swear bayat or allegiance to Zarqawi.
He was too proud to swear allegiance to a foreigner, and a lot of Iraqis felt that way.
However, he needed money and arms.
And so they would always have these shifting and tenuous relationships.
But definitely to say that everyone in the insurgency was a Kool-Aid-drinking al-Qaeda fanatic is incorrect.
Well, now we've got Jim Jones running the National Security Council, so I'm sure everything will be fine.
Sorry, a bad Guiana joke there.
Okay, so let me tell you this, and I guess this is the big question.
If I did this show, structured it around the soundbite, I guess this is the one I should have gone for at the beginning.
You've blamed the aggressive interrogation policies, call them torture policies in most cases or many cases, and the way they were carried out, the pictures of Abu Ghraib, the stories of Guantanamo Bay and the black sites, for many, or I think you even said up to half of the deaths of Americans in Iraq are basically directly attributable to the torture policies provoking people to join the fight against the American occupation.
Right, and I think you have to look at the evidence.
The evidence says that I know for a fact that the majority of foreign fighters who had come to Iraq cited Abu Ghraib as the number one reason why they come and because of Guantanamo Bay and because of abuses.
And we know for a fact that the large majority of suicide bombings are carried out by those foreigners, and we know that they obviously regularly participate in the attacks on coalition forces.
So I don't think there's any doubt that our torture policy and that the numerous times that abuse has taken place has contributed to the deaths of U.S. soldiers.
Now, that said, I think it doesn't do us any good, I think, to focus on the past.
As a military officer, I wasn't trained to point out broken wheels.
I was trained to fix them.
And so in my book I describe, okay, we know torture doesn't work, but how do we still get information from Taney to stop terrorist attacks without torture?
And what I describe in the book is how we decided to come up with new and better methods of interrogation that blended criminal investigative techniques that we've been using for years with the knowledge of Arab culture and with the best parts of American society and principles, things like tolerance and compassion and a spirit of compromise.
And ingenuity.
But I think a lot of people are focusing from my article, obviously, on the past, which is what torture, where it has put us.
And it has damaged our reputation.
But I'm more optimistic that we're going to change the policy, I think, with the new administration.
And I think we're going to ultimately improve our methods of interrogation and return to the American principles that we've all sworn to uphold in service.
All right, everybody.
The pseudonym is Matthew Alexander.
His editorial in the Washington Post is called I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.
The book is How to Break a Terrorist, the U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Men in Iraq.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
We'll be right back.
