I am reading Matthew Alexander’s (pseudonym) account of his work on the interrogation team that got the intelligence that was used to take out Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, then the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. He and his team got the intelligence the old-fashioned way: by establishing trust and rapport with the detainees they questioned, not by terrorizing and torturing them. The book is called How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, To Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.

A few data points from the book:

• Most of the Iraqis that Alexander and his team questioned had joined Al Qaeda for reasons that had nothing to do with ideology. Al Qaeda offered them protection from the Shia death squads that were terrorizing, torturing, and murdering Sunnis all over Baghdad and Anbar Province. And Al Qaeda also was the only way that most of these recruits could support their families, since there were no jobs and they were desperate for some way to physically survive.
• Love of family and fear of what awaited them at Abu Ghraib were two powerful motivators that Alexander and his team used to get the information they needed. In one case, Alexander promised a detainee that he would help him get home to his family if he told him the name of his contact in Al Qaeda, and when he did, Alexander made sure to put a note in his file stating how helpful the man had been to the Americans, and strongly recommending a reduced sentence at Abu Ghraib. Somehow that worked much more effectively than waterboarding him or threatening to rape or execute his female relatives.
• Instead of using religion and culture against detainees, to shame and humiliate them, Alexander’s team used religion and culture to gain detainees’ cooperation; it worked so much better.

When American fighter pilots dropped two 500-pound bombs on the house that al-Zarqawi was in at the time, and killed him, that news was trumpeted on the front pages of every paper in this country — and justifiably so. What was not mentioned, of course, was how those pilots got the intelligence that allowed them to know that al-Zarqawi was in that house that their bombs destroyed. And how the Americans who did the interrogating got the information that enabled those pilots to take out the most sadistic, brutal, and dangerous (second only to Osama bin Laden himself) man in the Al Qaeda in Iraq operation: by remembering that the enemy in front of them was just as human as they themselves, and by sticking like glue to the Geneva Conventions.

They are heroes in MY book.

Kathy Kattenburg

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