Raw Story:
A 14-year military interrogator has undercut one of the key arguments posited by Vice President Dick Cheney in favor of the Bush Administration's torture techniques and alleged that the use of torture has cost "hundreds if not thousands" of American lives.
The interrogator, who uses the name "Matthew Alexander," says he oversaw more than 1,000 interrogations, conducting more than 300 in Iraq personally. His statements are captured in a new video by Brave New Films...
"Torture does not save lives," Alexander said in his interview. "And the reason why is that our enemies use it, number one, as a recruiting tool... These same foreign fighters who came to Iraq to fight because of torture and abuse... literally cost us hundreds if not thousands of American lives."
Moreover, Alexander avers that many -- as many as 90 percent -- of those captured in Iraq said they joined the fight against the United States because of the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.
"At the prison where I conducted interrogations," Alexander said, "we heard day in and day out, foreign fighters who had been captured state that the number one reason that they had come to fight in Iraq was because of torture and abuse, what had happened at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib."
It's a simple equation that any fiction writer knows -- how good the hero is is measured by how evil the villain is. The more cruel and criminal we become, the easier it is for someone to paint us as the bad guys and themselves as the good guys. To say that torture is a deterent is to assume that everyone on Earth is a coward. After all, would we expect Americans not to fight an enemy who tortured?
And people who believe they're going to be tortured do not surrender. They fight to the death. How many battles would have been won with a smaller death toll if the neocons weren't such evil and cowardly SOBs?
In related news, torture at Abu Ghraib included rape.
Really makes ya proud, doesn't it?
