Should torture be part of the U.S.’s counterterrorism approach?
The following piece was co-written by Matthew Alexander, Joe Navarro and Lieutenant General Robert Gard (USA-Ret.) They are pictured from left to right.
Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a special operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.” He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.
Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence and counterterrorism expert, is an adjunct faculty member at the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division.
Lt. Gen. Robert G. Gard, Jr. (USA-Ret.) is president emeritus at the Monterey Institute for International Studies and a senior military fellow at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. The views expressed are their own.
President Obama decided not to release a new group of detainee abuse photographs because he believes they would inflame our enemies and threaten American troops. Indeed, the shocking photos from Abu Ghraib have served as a powerful recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and have sparked outrage across the world.
It is not the release of the photos, however, that would elicit horror and anger. It is their brutal content and the misguided policies they reflect. The controversy surrounding the photos and the president’s release of four Department of Justice memos have brought into sharp focus a debate that has been in the shadows of public discourse for several years: Should the U.S. include torture and cruelty in its counterterrorism arsenal?
Food for thought here, perhaps we should reevaluate our treatment of U.S. civilians held in state prisons. We should also examine procedures for admitting evidence. Quite often following court rules interferes with the quest for presenting evidence that can exculpate a charged suspect. I suspect state prosecutors behave no better than the Federal Prosecutors.
We still have way to much violent crime and way to many people locked up. Lawsuits abound where police conspire to frame innocent people. I would submit they are only the few that were caught. There may be several hundred thousand Americans in prison for crimes they did not commit. What ever happened to “Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent man lose his liberty”.