How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq
Categories: Biographies & Memoirs, Politics & Social Sciences
Writing under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, an Air Force criminal investigator describes leading a handpicked team of interrogators in Iraq in 2006 and rejecting the fear and control methods in use at the time. His team relied instead on rapport, cultural understanding, negotiation and lawful deception to win the cooperation of captured insurgents. Their interrogations produced the intelligence that led American forces to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the insurgent leader killed in a June 2006 airstrike. Alexander conducted over three hundred interrogations himself.
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- Ryan Holiday: “The story and the author's new techniques for interrogation are fascinating and impressive. They find relevance far beyond military or police personal - for that matter, building trust and reciprocity with friends and adversaries would do almost all of us a lot of good.”