Notes from an Interrogator

I’ve been speaking publicly since 2007 about my time as an interrogator. I’m often asked when was the first time I knew I had gone too far? When did I know I had crossed a line? I’ve offered conflicting accounts in response to this question over the last decade. For a time, I said I had crossed the line when I participated in the sleep deprivation of a prisoner in Falluja. But I’ve also wondered if I didn’t cross the line the first time I was in the “hard site” at Abu Ghraib, or the first time I used a stress position, or the first time I told an Iraqi prisoner that he’d never see his family again. Maybe I crossed the line the minute I decided to be an interrogator in Iraq. I change the answers not out of a desire to deceive, but out of an inability to make sense of just how easy it was to become an American torturer.

When Donald Trump and Ted Cruz suggested that waterboarding and other abhorrent interrogation tactics should not be considered illegal, I was tempted to exonerate myself. I did not waterboard anyone in Iraq. I’d like to think that’s a line I would never cross. But I have no right to think that way. My behavior in Iraq forces me to confess that if I’d been asked to waterboard someone at Abu Ghraib in early 2004, I most likely would not have hesitated.

If I had the opportunity to speak to other interrogators and intelligence professionals, I would warn them about men like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. I would warn them that they’ll be told to cross lines by men who would never be asked to do it themselves, and they’ll cross those lines long before they consider anything like waterboarding. And I would warn them that once they do cross the line, those men will not be there to help them find their way back.

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As an interrogator, torture forced me to set aside my humanity when I went to work. It’s something I’ve never been able to fully pick back up again. And it’s something we must never ask another American to do.

  Eric Fair (NYTimes Opinion)