G. Frink's

Use of the Qur'an as an instrument of torture is a Guantánamo mistake that may do us harm for generations, warns Michael Peppard in the upcoming issue of the Catholic magazine Commonweal.

He writes:

Qur'an from the British Museum

Lord Harris
Some Rights Reserved

Religious torture generates determined resistance and long-lasting resentments. What has been a mere footnote for us may be the main story for the Muslim world.

The U.S. military knows that desecration of the Qur'an leads to hunger strikes and suicide attempts, that playing "The Star-Spangled Banner" over the call to prayer is demoralizing. But they seem not to have considered the long-term effects of such tactics.

Principal among those long-term effects is creation of a stream if new enemies.

The effect is the same, even if the torture does not involve disrespect of the Qur'an.

In the Washington Post today, a former Special Operations interrogator who worked in Iraq in 2006 warms that American torture techniques are costing a lot of American lives.

He writes:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me -- unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

Worth repeating until it is heard and acted upon, the warning is not new.

In June, former Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora told[.pdf] a Senate committee:

[T]here are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq -- as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat -- are, respectively the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Torture and the places which have become emblematic of it not only aid the enemy, they work less well than the legal, honorable interrogation techniques which preceded them. The anonymous (for security reasons) author of today's Post op-ed piece wrote that his team succeeded by turning away from the new brutality. Even with the hard cases:

I know the counter-argument well -- that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that's not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate."

Fortunately for all of us, outlawing torture is a clearly stated priority of President-elect Barack Obama.

Watch as he takes that stand Nov. 17 on 60 Minutes: