There has been, and will continue to be, debate about torture. Its proponents argue that the greater good demands that no tool, no matter how unscrupulous, should be kept out of the hands of a nation's security guards. If the lives of many can be saved by the torment of the few, then the act must be righteous. Its opponents, meanwhile, eagerly point out the slippery slope inherent to such logic. If the torturer is willing to renounce his morality for the greater good, then all that is required to manipulate him into depravity is to take the greater good hostage. Principles should not be so swiftly and unequivocally sacrificed, not if one wishes to maintain some semblance of ethical behavior.
For the most part, this debate takes place on university campuses and in lecture halls, cocoons far from the bloody frontlines of counter-terrorism where the temptation to deploy torture is keenest. This real-world reality is what grants The Interrogator its power. For here, torture is no academic discussion. It is the stuff of life and death
In The Interrogator, Mr. Carl, a veteran of the CIA, describes, within the strictures of CIA censorship, an event which profoundly altered his life. After devoting some 20 years to the agency, believing in its mission to defend the United States from foreign threats by acquiring actionable intelligence regarding its enemies, he was asked, not long after the onset of the War on Terror, to interrogate a man known here as Captus. Like many of the men captured by the United States' spy agencies after 9/11, Captus was thought to be a member of Al-Qaeda, a man with some operational control over this terrorist organization which, since 1998, has killed thousands in its various attacks, the most spectacular of which coming on September 11th, 2001. Eager to serve his country, Mr. Carl interviews Captus, pressing him for information on Al-Qaeda and its plans. But after weeks of relentless quizzing, the author concludes that, far from a first-class, Al-Qaeda asset, Captus was a reluctant participant at the periphery of the organization and that he has told his captors all that he knows.
Dissatisfied with their officer's conclusions, Mr. Carl's superiors have Captus rendered to another black site where he can be properly interrogated with what the CIA has euphemistically called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques which include, but are not limited to, deafening white noise, blinding white light, desecration of religious objects, sensory deprivation and waterboarding. Powerless, Mr. Carl returns home, shaken by what he has seen at the bleeding edge of the War on Terror.
The Interrogator is a fascinating and frustrating work. While Mr. Carl has a great deal to say on the nature of torture, much of it is scissored out of his account by censorship from the CIA. The spy agency, here, has not only redacted the names of the work's major actors, they have spitefully washed out, with oceans of black ink, most of the interrogations of Captus arund which this work revolves. In this, they have done a splendid job of hobbling a revelatory piece of thoughtful journalism, blinding the reader to many of the worthwhile facts Mr. Carl intended to share with the world.
However, despite this overeager hatchet job, Mr. Carl salvages much of his account by consolidating his tattered narrative around a clear and powerful premise. Torture is not only morally wrong, it is foolish. If torture could grant the State valuable intelligence about so-called Ticking Timebomb scenarios, perhaps it could, under certain circumstances, be justified. But these scenarios are vastly outnumbered by the case described here, men kidnapped from the streets of their homelands, rendered to secret black sites, disassociated from everyone they know, denied any contact with the outside world, and deprived of any anchor by which to hold onto their sanity. They can be held for years. It's no wonder, then, that by the time they are plied with so-called Enhanced Interrogation, they are shattered men, willing to spill any truths their captors wish to know so long as it will improve their plight. In other words, torture does not just hinder the effort to extract actionable intelligence, it corrodes the morality of the interrogator and it thoroughly destroys the asset, ruining him for any future work. This is stupidity of the first order.
The Interrogator is a difficult book. The CIA censorship has cut out so much of the core story that the reader is left adrift in Mr. Carl's guilty introspections. Such ruminations left me somewhat repulsed by the author's navel-gazing. However, it is hard to see what else Mr. Carl could have done under the circumstances. For all its challenges, however, this is a must-read for any advocate of torture. For only the most calloused mind can read these pages and come away unmoved by the argument for ending state-sponsored torture and restoring not only our humanity but our honor. (3/5 Stars)
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