Friday, April 10, 2009

Why They Fight

This paragraph from the article by Patrick Cockburn was very revealing and new to me:

The chief US interrogator in Iraq, Major Mathew Alexander, who is credited with finding out the location of the al-Qa'ida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, says that during 1,300 interrogations he supervised, he came across only one true [Islamist] ideologue. He is quoted as saying that "I listened time and time again to foreign fighters, and Sunni Iraqis, state that the No 1 reason they had decided to pick up arms and join al-Qa'ida was the abuses at Abu Ghraib and the authorized torture and abuse at Guantanamo Bay."

If you ever wanted a strategic argument against torture and mistreatment of detainees, here it is.

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