I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I’m still alarmed about that today.
The quote is from former interrogator Matthew Alexander’s piece in the Washington Post last November, “I’m Still Tortured By What I Saw in Iraq.”
Mr. Alexander is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Burtality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq” and we’ve recently confirmed that he’ll be one of several speakers at Amnesty International USA’s Annual General Meeting, March 27 – 29, in Boston.
Hope to see you there.