So interrogations not based on torture led to Zarqawi? I guess so:Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators' bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules -- and often break them. I don't have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology -- one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they're listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of "ruses and trickery"). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war's biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi's associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader's location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.But here's the sad part. Torture makes things worse for the American troops fighting in Iraq:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.But the last gasp Bush Administration is saying that "We did not torture." But considering the last 8 years, why should we believe anything coming out of such a criminal enterprise?
Somebody wrote to me and said, very graciously, that he now knows how people felt when Albert Jay Nock passed away. While that’s all very flattering, I am not fit to fill Nock’s pen, let alone be an heir to his astonishing legacy of thoughtful, philosophical and intellectual discourse. And I suspect that, like Nock, my writings will fade into obscurity, with only occasional memories thereof that might linger in the consciousness of a small few.Oh, we couldn't let that happen. Here:
I dunno. Some people are going to say (not in exculpation, but in explanation) that my fascination for bodacious tatas stems from my early adolescence, which, as it happens took place in the 1960s, at the precise moment when women decided that they were going to Burn Their Bras And Let It All Hang Out, Baby. The ghastly coincidence of the arrival of metric tons of teenage hormones along with universally-apparent boobs should not be downplayed.
And I admit that I do sometimes feel ashamed of myself. Really—it’s not some PC-inspired mea culpa here, I genuinely want to beat myself over the head when I discover that my glance has shot unerringly towards, say, someone’s maiden aunt’s topside. The age of the owner, as you may gather, doesn’t seem to matter to my eyeballs (or, more correctly, to my brain’s simian impulse which directs the gaze).
Hell, ”simian” used in that sense is an insult to apes, because they don’t spend most of their waking hours gawking at the herd’s females’ upper danglies.
