Pathways from September 11th to January 6th

Today’s focus is…

…on Matthew Alexander, a lead interrogator who wrote in 2009 a powerful
letter against torture from his station in Iraq to the Congress against
the Enhanced Interrogation program. He had the courage to obey his conscience:
to ignore the new precedent of “Enhanced Interrogation.” He followed instead,
and to great success, the traditional procedures grounded in lessons already
well-learned by the men and women of history. Lessons which, in our tragic
9/11 era, are once again ripe for the re-learning against the tide of anger
and retribution universally inherent in negative power.

“…I witnessed with my own eyes, while supervising over a thousand interrogations,
a majority of foreign fighters state that the number one reason they came to Iraq to
fight was because of our policy that allowed torture and abuse to occur at Abu Ghraib
and Guantanamo Bay.”
–from Matthew Alexander’s Letter from Iraq