The Interrogator's Dilemma: Abuse, Accountability, and the Myth of the "Ticking Time Bomb"

Former US Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander is a leading advocate for noncoercive methods of interrogation and a forceful critic of the use of torture against detainees. As an Open Society Fellow, Alexander, who conducted or supervised nearly 1,300 interrogations in Iraq, wrote a supplement to the interrogation manual to complement the Army Field Manual and monitored the Obama administration’s detainee policy. The supplement he wrote outlines effective interrogation techniques used to build a relationship of trust with a detainee, the most vital element of cooperation.

Alexander is a fellow at UCLA's Burkle Center for International Relations. He is the author of Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious al-Qaeda Terrorist (St. Martin’s, 2011), and How to Break a Terrorist: The US Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq (Free Press, 2008). He has written for the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times, among other publications. He is a regular guest on TV news shows and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, CNN, Fox News, and the CBS Evening News.

Nancy Chang is the manager for the Open Society Institute National Security and Human Rights Campaign, which supports initiatives to restore human rights and promote a progressive national security policy. Between 2005 and 2008, Chang served as the program officer for OSI U.S. Programs' Gideon Project, which supports the fair administration of criminal justice, including repeal and reform of the death penalty, indigent defense reform for adults and juveniles, and measures to end racial profiling in law enforcement.

Before joining the Open Society Institute, Chang was the senior litigation attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. While at the center, her docket focused on the protection of First Amendment rights for political activists, due process rights of non-citizens held in immigration detention, and institutional reforms to end racial profiling by the New York City Police Department. In January 2004, Chang successfully represented the Humanitarian Law Project in obtaining the first court ruling to find a portion of the USA PATRIOT Act unconstitutional.

Previously, Chang was a supervising attorney at South Brooklyn Legal Services, where she engaged in both direct representation and impact litigation on behalf of low-income Brooklyn residents. She is a graduate of the New York University School of Law and the author of Silencing Political Dissent: How Post-September 11 Anti-Terrorism Measures Threaten our Civil Liberties (Seven Stories Press 2002); "How Democracy Dies: The War on Our Civil Liberties," published in Lost Liberties: Ashcroft and the Assault on Personal Freedom (New Press 2003); and "The War on Dissent," published in The Nation (September 13, 2004).