> US war crimes : how troops tortured Iraqi prisoners
2 May 2004, 19:12
As a former Army interrogator who was due to leave today for Baghdad (to interrogate as a civilian contractor for the government), I can tell you with certainty that no competent US interrogator would condone, request, direct, allow, or ignore the conduct you see reflected in the pictures and related stories. You may be against the US involvement - that is fully understandable - but US interrogation methodology does not involve torture, most simply because it does not work. In fact, torture works against the interrogator’s mission which is to obtain accurate information in the shortest amount of time. Torture has been proven in history to elicit unreliable information and is morally repugnant.
This being said, there are always ’bad apples’ in any organization and they must be reported, and tried as the criminals that they are. The photos appear (to me) to be a military police idea of a prank, given the expressions of the MP’s, the fact that they took the pictures in the first place, and the sheer stupidity of the behavior. They bring discredit on all of us.
As a former Army interrogator who was due to leave today for Baghdad (to interrogate as a civilian contractor for the government), I can tell you with certainty that no competent US interrogator would condone, request, direct, allow, or ignore the conduct you see reflected in the pictures and related stories. You may be against the US involvement - that is fully understandable - but US interrogation methodology does not involve torture, most simply because it does not work. In fact, torture works against the interrogator’s mission which is to obtain accurate information in the shortest amount of time. Torture has been proven in history to elicit unreliable information and is morally repugnant.
This being said, there are always ’bad apples’ in any organization and they must be reported, and tried as the criminals that they are. The photos appear (to me) to be a military police idea of a prank, given the expressions of the MP’s, the fact that they took the pictures in the first place, and the sheer stupidity of the behavior. They bring discredit on all of us.