This podcast, it's a Costerton Touchstone production.

When I got to Pakistan in late January 2002 and we started to interrogate people,

our marching orders were pretty straightforward, where the handling of prisoners was concerned.

We understood that regardless of anything else, we were operating within a context of rules

established by the Geneva

conventions and the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice. This meant that we were not allowed to hit

anyone. We weren't allowed to threaten them, and we certainly weren't allowed to torture them.

But 9-11 changed everything. The rules of war were written by warring governments to keep each

other's worst impulses at bay. Unfortunately for America, the combatant facing us this time

wasn't part of any recognized or uniformed army at war. These were true believers in a radical

cause who considered death as a religious martyr a career

move.

It got them paradise and respect.

This made dealing with them extraordinarily challenging both in terms of getting useful

information from them and in just dealing with them.

There were constant temptations to get overly physical with their belligerence,

and some of us did come close on various occasions. But as far as I knew, out in the battlefield,

at least, we followed the law. Back in Washington, D.C., however, various players in the George

W. Bush administration were beginning to think differently, about the battlefield,

about the law, and about torture. Their deeply cynical thinking and cavalier attitude toward

words and their meanings, as captured in a series of communications called the torture memos,

was pure Alice in Wonderland right through the looking glass, and I don't mean that in a good way.

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