An interrogator's story and the antecedents to torture

One of the things that really characterized the Bush Administration's, and in particular the Defense Department's response to 9/11 was the idea that we were going to succeed by intimidating the enemy into submission. The corollary, of course, was that it was perhaps regrettable but in the end perfectly justifiable when innocent people were caught up and harmed; that a demonstration of power would make these people less likely to aid and abet terrorists.
BP has already drawn our attention to the connection between the war on terror and a sort of worldwide counterinsurgency campaign. The trouble is that in counterinsurgency, the strategy of massive force and intimidation is utterly wrong. Time and again we have seen how it backfires.
And within that context it is harrowing to read the story of an Army interrogator in Iraq and the methods he used. It is particularly awful in light of his own argument that almost all prisoners tortured were either completely innocent or lacking in any important information.
In the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, the DOD tried to portray the problem as one of a few "bad apples". It is very obvious now that the Administration's much-vaunted "gloves off" approach led quite directly to the abuses committed on the ground. It is also excruciatingly clear that the bias towards excessive force inflamed rather than extinguished the insurgency. As we draw further from the initial stages of our response to 9/11, it is vitally important that we recognize what impulses led directly to abuses committed later, and also that we acknowledge the ideas that informed those now-bankrupt strategies.