How far can you go?

The Interrogator's War: Inside the Secret War Against Al Qaeda by Chris Mackey with Greg Miller

For as long as the words Abu Ghraib reverberate around the world, this will remain a timely and important book. In a very direct sense, it is proof of one of the more engaging qualities of the American character: openness.

Indeed, such is the frankness with which Chris Mackey reveals how the US military set about trying to "break" captured prisoners during the war in Afghanistan that one can readily imagine hordes of Al Qaeda terrorists logging on to Amazon to buy a copy and brush up on their counter-interrogation techniques.

That Mackey's manuscript passed through army censors and still managed to retain highly compelling and, one would think, sensitive material, is a tribute to American transparency. It is inconceivable that Whitehall would allow a British equivalent.

That is not to say the American military does not have its own agenda here. Both the FBI and the CIA come in for a terrific roasting for their failure to cooperate with their own side.

It says very little for the boys and girls from Langley, Virginia, that military intelligence officers working at the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan preferred to co-operate with the more urbane, less condescending British Army and intelligence officers. While the Brits were given the run of the place, the CIA and FBI appear to have been regarded virtually as hostile forces.

If Mackey is a reliable source on the CIA's linguistic deficiencies - "not a single officer we encountered spoke Arabic" - it is an excoriating verdict on the intelligence capabilities of the world's sole superpower. They are going to have to do a lot better than that.

At the heart of this book lies a single, unanswered question: how far can one go when interrogating the enemy? What techniques can be justified against someone who might be withholding information that could save the lives of hundreds or thousands?

The evidence, as Mackey implicitly acknowledges, is contradictory. "One of our biggest successes in Afghanistan came when a valuable prisoner decided to co-operate not because he had been abused (he had not been), but precisely because he realised he would not be tortured," he writes in the introduction.

Yet, at the conclusion of this fascinating study of the interrogator's art, he admits: " Our experience in Afghanistan showed that the harsher the methods we used - though they never contravened the [Geneva] Conventions, let alone crossed over into torture [the fingerprint of military censors?] - the better the information we got and the sooner we got it."

He makes an equally important observation when he argues that when one group of people enjoys complete control over another in a prison, "every impulse tugs downward" in terms of the laws governing human behaviour.

In practice this meant that an initial prohibition on using stress positions in Afghanistan eased into a policy of allowing them as punishment for unruly prisoners. Within a year, "stress positions were a formally authorised interrogation technique by the command in Iraq". It probably helps when the President describes captured prisoners, unlawful combatants, call them what you will, as "evil".