Full Black - Brad Thor [15]
The Old Man made the resources available and turned Harvath loose with a simple three-word mandate—find, fix, finish. His job was to identify terrorist leaders, track them to a fixed location, and then capture or kill them as necessary, using any information gleaned from the assignment to plan the next operation. The goal was to apply constant pressure on the terrorists and pound them so hard and so relentlessly that they were permanently rocked back on the defensive, if not ground into dust.
In addition to direct-action assignments, Harvath was allowed to stage psychological operations to eat away at the terrorist networks from within, sowing doubt, fear, distrust, and paranoia throughout their ranks. It was everything the United States government should have been doing, but wasn’t. At least, it hadn’t been until the Carlton Group came on board.
Looking at his watch, Harvath decided Mansoor Aleem had been marinating long enough. It was time to begin the interrogation.
CHAPTER 8
The best interrogators knew that the most effective tool at their disposal was time. Left alone long enough, a prisoner’s mind would do half an interrogator’s work for him, if not more. No matter what horrors you could conceive of inflicting on a prisoner, the prisoner himself would always conceive of much worse. That was why Harvath liked to leave his interrogation subjects isolated and alone for as long as possible.
Interrogation was a delicate art. The key was getting the subject to tell you what you wanted to know, not what he thought you wanted to hear. A good interrogator operated like a surgeon; he wielded a scalpel, not a machete.
Only amateurs and the incredibly desperate actually resorted to true torture. And true torture was not turning up the air-conditioning, putting a subject in a stress posture, shaking him by his shirtfront, or giving him an open-handed slap across the face. Those were harsh interrogation techniques. They were not torture. Harvath knew the difference. He had used harsh interrogation techniques. He had also used torture.
And while he had never taken pleasure in it, it wasn’t something he had a moral problem with.
Torture was something he had used only as an absolute last resort. He loved to hear TV pundits and others cite the Geneva and Hague conventions. Putting aside the fact that most of them had never read any of those treaties, the key fact that they all missed was that America’s Islamist enemies were not a party to these agreements. What’s more, the conventions strictly forbade combatants from hiding and attacking from within civilian populations. Lawful combatants were also required to appear on the battlefield wearing something, whether a uniform or even just an armband, identifying them as combatants—overgrown beards and high-water pants didn’t count.
The long and short of it was that if one party refused to sign on and follow the rules, it couldn’t expect any sort of protection from those rules. And as far as Harvath was concerned, those who championed the extension of Geneva and Hague to Islamic terrorists were uninformed at best and apologists for terrorists at worst. Believing his country to be made up of good, reasonable people, he preferred to put the terrorist protectors in the former category.
Harvath never allowed himself to underestimate the capabilities or determination of America’s enemies. He had looked directly into the eyes of some of the most capable warriors Islam had dispatched, and he saw not only the depth of their conviction, but also the depth of their hate for the West and everything it stood for. There would be no truce with Islam. And while there were indeed good, decent Muslim people around the world, there were not enough of them. They lacked the collective will and desire to not only stand up to the violence being carried out in their name, but to reform the very tenets of their religion that called for that violence.
This was not how Harvath wished the world to be,