Free How to Break a Terrorist by Matthew Alexander

along a line of about thirty prisoners, bound with their hands behind their backs. They’re all men and boys, ranging in age from teens to senior citizens. All of them look utterly despondent. They sit quietly, resigned to their fate. Behind them, four insurgents pace back and forth. They’re Sunni. One of them produces a pistol.
    I want to yell at the prisoners to run.
    None of the prisoners moves. The pistol cracks. A prisoner falls over, blood gushing from the exit wound in his forehead. The insurgent steps to another prisoner and pulls the trigger. He is slow, deliberate, ritualistic. A side step, the pistol comes down until the barrel hovers inches from the back of the next victim’s head. He gives each one a few seconds of sheer terror as they wait for the bullet to end their lives. Then the pistol bucks, the report reaches the camera’s microphone. The prisoner flops into the dirt.
    The insurgent runs out of bullets. Still the remaining prisoners don’t move. Another insurgent hands him a second pistol. He uses it to finish the job. By the time he reaches the last prisoner, the field is heaped with bleeding corpses.
    The file ends and Bobby whispers, “Un-fucking-believable. How can you help but hate these people?”
    I have no answer to that.
    “Ever seen anything like that?”
    “Never,” I manage.
    In my air force career, I’ve been to almost every continent and seen my share of trauma and tragedy. In South America, during a medical deployment, I watched a desperate mother bring a child to our doctors for treatment. I saw the child, bundled in blankets, laboring to breathe. She was only a few months old, and somehow she’d contracted a flesh-eating bacteria. It was too late to treat it. There was nothing we could do. I had to tell the mother that her child was going to die. I’ll never forget watching her leave, sobbing as she carried her dying child on her chest.
    Those are things that never leave a man. I have tried to live a life of balance, relying on logic and intelligence when confronted with overwhelming emotion. It is how I got by as a criminal investigator, especially when I had an abuse case involving children. But nothing in my career has prepared me for these two scenes Bobby has shared with me.
    Treat them with sympathy.
    He hacked the helpless academic’s head off with a knife.
    Treat them with respect and be sensitive to their cultural traditions.
    Thirty men and boys lie executed in a field somewhere.
    How can I do this job and not be consumed with hate? I don’t want to become Lenny. I don’t want to dehumanize my enemy. Yet what I just watched seems like pure evil.
    I’ve never seen the world in terms of good and evil. To me that smacks of a religious overtone, a judgment call thatwe should not be making. Instead, I see the world in terms of tolerance. Ignorance versus knowledge. Fear versus understanding. These two videos are displays of hatred so fierce that it drives men to depravity. It is the hatred that I hate.
    If I don’t make a conscious choice about how to respond, my emotions will take over.
    Pure hate. Pure malice. Torture and cruelty are their tools. To fight them, should I resort to hate? To bitterness and jaded contempt? Is that what it means to be a veteran ’gator around here?
    I won’t go down that path. There is no way it can exist alongside a yearning for peace and compassion. Intolerance must be rooted out if Iraq is to have a chance. Either way you look at it, the new ways work better. Hate and contempt don’t get our prisoners talking. Yet after what I’ve seen today, I realize that it will take an Oscar-caliber performance in the interrogation booth to display the necessary respect and sympathy for my enemy.

Eight
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HOUSE
    APRIL 10, 2006
    T HE BLACK HELICOPTERS speed low across the ancient, checkerboard landscape of Yusufiyah. Stretching to the horizon is land that saw the evolution from nomad to city dweller at the heart of our