The Road to the Horizon: torture

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.

The Washington Post published a summary under the title "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq":

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. (Full)

Picture courtesy Imagination Manifesto

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Fact: US President Bush vetoed a bill that would have banned the CIA from "waterboarding" or "simulated drowning", and other coercive interrogation methods, to gain information from suspected terrorists. (link)

Fact: The bill would have limited the CIA to 19 interrogation techniques that are used by the military and spelled out in the Army Field Manual. In a recent speech, Bush said he vetoed the measure because it is important for the CIA to have a separate and classified interrogation program for suspected terrorists who possess critical information about possible plots against the United States. (link)

Fact: Waterboarding (picture) involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his/her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years to the Spanish Inquisition and is condemned by nations around the world and human rights organizations as torture. (link)

Fact: The CIA admits the use of waterboarding as one of its interrogation techniques. (link)

Fact: The UN Human Rights Commission has condemned waterboarding (as used by the United States) as torture. Violators of the U.N. Convention against Torture are to be prosecuted under the principle of "universal jurisdiction", allowing allowing countries to put accused war criminals from other nations on trial. (link)

Thus: What is the logical conclusion and the legal course of action?

Picture courtesy Amnesty International. Source The Road Daily