The Interrogators: Inside the Secret War Against al Qaeda - Hardcover

Mackey, Chris; Miller, Greg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316871125 ISBN 13: 9780316871129

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 2004

Synopsis

Shares the inside stories of five American interrogators at the front lines of the war against terror, revealing the mental and psychological battles waged between interrogation soldiers and their Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners of war. 60,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Chris Mackey joined the army at seventeen and was assigned to the intelligence corps as an interrogator. After 9/11, he was recalled to the United States, assigned to Task Force 500, and subsequently sent to Kandahar, Afghanistan. He ultimately supervised all military interrogations conducted at the theatre-wide detention facility at Bagram airfield.

Greg Miller is a national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times.

Reviews

This fascinating memoir reports from one of the most crucial and controversial fronts in the war on terror. The pseudonymous Mackey was an interrogator at military prisons in Afghanistan, tasked with sussing out the secrets of suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda members. He and journalist Miller take readers inside the prison cells and interrogation rooms, where interrogators choreograph elaborate mind games and fight epic battles of will with their often formidable captives. Their account's full of the engrossing lore and procedure of interrogation, the thrust and parry of baited queries and cagey half-truths, and the occasional dramatic breakthrough when a prisoner cracks. But it also reveals the squalor and drudgery of the prison camps, the exhaustion, bad temper and frequent ineptitude of the interrogators and the many lapses in the American intelligence effort, especially by the CIA, which Mackey regards as an arrogant, secretive and incompetent organization. Mackey deplores the Abu Ghraib abuses and insists that his unit never violated the Geneva Conventions. They flirted, he acknowledges, with stress positions and sleep deprivation, but this was nothing, he claims, beyond what army recruits and the interrogators themselves routinely endured; their main weapons seem to have been veiled threats to return Arab prisoners to their homelands, where they would face real torture. The book, which was vetted by the Pentagon, will not settle the questions surrounding American treatment of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere. But it does give a vivid, gritty look at the pressures and compromises attendant on this unconventional war.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316871125
• ISBN 13: 9780316871129
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 512