By Heather Lockwood

(AXcess News) Washington - A former senior military interrogator-turned-author says torturing prisoners is "morally wrong" and that showing respect is a better way of getting information.

Former senior Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander's team located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qaida in Iraq. The author of "How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq," spoke Monday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

"Torture is morally wrong in every scenario," he said. "We have all the tools we need to conduct successful interrogations without torture and abuse."

Alexander, who writes under a pseudonym to protect his family, is in the U.S. Air Force Reserves and has been in the Air Force or the Reserves since 1993.

He said he is "cautiously hopeful" that the U.S. military will adopt police investigative methods, based on cultural understanding, mutual respect and relationship development.

"There's no evidence anywhere that torture is effective," he said. "People who think you just waterboard somebody and they give you the information in five minutes are sorely mistaken."

Alexander said interrogation techniques such as the relationship-building approach used in criminal investigations are legal, ethical and more effective than many of the techniques taught by the U.S. Army handbook.

Alexander said he often began interrogations by apologizing for U.S. mistakes.

"I could in 30 seconds walk into an interrogation booth with my copy of the Koran, hold it respectfully, discuss it with the detainee, quote a line from it and gain more respect in under a minute than other interrogators could do in a matter of days," he said. "Understanding culture is key, but it's got to be much deeper and we've got to be much more proficient than being able to repeat facts off a power point slide."

His book, published last year and written with coauthor John R. Bruning, detailed how he and his team of interrogators used police investigative techniques to locate al-Zarqawi. In a in a Nov. 30, 2008, Washington Post opinion article, "I'm Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq," he called  al-Zarqawi "one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation."

Alexander started his 14-year career with the U.S. Air Force as a special operations pilot. Before volunteering to work as a senior interrogator in Iraq, he saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo and was an Air Force counterintelligence agent.

Alexander, who appeared on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Dec. 8 to talk about his book, conducted more than 300 interrogations himself and supervised another 1,000.

"When I first arrived in Iraq, the success of my interrogation team was maybe somewhere around 20 to 30 percent in getting people to provide any information whatsoever. By the time I had left ... I would venture to say we were up around 70 to 80 percent in getting people to cooperate," Alexander said. "I think that change can be attributed to the differences in the way we approached interrogations."

Alexander relied on a "simple formula" of motivations and incentives. "Find out what motivates somebody and apply the proper incentive to convince them to cooperate."

Creating false documents, offering deals or the possibilities of deals, also are effective techniques, he said.

Alexander said people torture for two reasons: retaliation and prejudice.

"There were more than a few bad apples who would torture if left unsupervised and that concerns me," Alexander said. "Why do we have people in the U.S. military who would torture?"

Source: Scripps Howard Foundation Wire