I hate writing book reviews, but since this one was written by Tony Camerino (aka Matthew Alexander), I felt a responsibility to keep you updated, since I’m the guy who tracked him down and came up with his real name. So Camerino wrote another book under his alias, Matthew Alexander entitled Kill or Capture: How a Special Operations Task Force Took Down a Notorious al Qaeda Terrorist about his two months in Kirkuk tracking a Syrian named Muhammed.
Of course, the theme of this book follows the theme of his first “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq” – the story of how Zarqawi was located. As I mentioned in my review of his first book, no one was able to verify that Camerino was the guy who broke the guy who gave the interrogators information leading to Zarkawi’s demise. Camerino claims that everyone hated him so he had to interview the detainee off of the books, so there is no record of Camerino getting the information using his techniques (which, by the way, weren’t his techniques because he admits that he learned the techniques at the “schoolhouse” at Fort Huachuca).
From what I’ve learned, everybody does hate him, so that much is true. But not because he’s some guru of everything OSI (the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations). He’s a dick and when everyone at the OSI convention last year found out who he is (somehow), no one even wanted to talk to him. Especially when they learned he was living on Soros Foundation money.
Well, as soon as you open his second book, you begin to hate him as he tells us how he shaved his sandy blond hair and hung up his surf board to answer his country’s call. I hate those guys. As near as I can tell from his military records, after several months of training, he spent four months in Iraq and from those four months, came two books on what a special expert he is on interrogating Iraqis and al Qaeda. Four months. There are interrogators who have that much time in the shitter in Iraq.
But, anyway, let’s get to the story. It’s a simple story, really; The Stryker platoon he’s with captures a guy. The guy claims he doesn’t know anything, but if Camerino let’s him go, the guy will find out stuff for him. So Camerino recommends to his commander that they let him go, so on that recommendation, the commander releases the guy. Then they lose track of him, then they catch another guy who tells them that the first guy was their target Muhammed so they spend the rest of the book trying to recapture the guy that Camerino recommended that they release. So much for Camerino’s new methods of interrogation, huh?
Throughout the story, he interjects innuendo and hints that Abu Garaib and Guantanamo rumors make his job so difficult. No proof, just blather. At one point, an infantry captain grabs a detainee by throat with one hand and briefly cuts off the detainee’s air in front of Camerino. That’s it – that’s all of the detainee abuse Camerino sees. And he doesn’t report it, so, if it happened, Camerino must not have thought it was very important at the time. He doesn’t even mention the Captain’s name, so how do we check to see if it happened?
Through out the book, he tries to convince us that his life is harder than an infantryman’s life. That’s just immature and he tries too damn hard. Like that commercial the Air Force did last year claiming AF basic training was tougher than the Marines.
And, as most of you know, I’m a professional editor and little shit bothered the piss out of me. For example, in one part of the book, he tells us that something “peaked” his interest. It’s “piqued”, damn it! How did an editor not catch that? Well, besides me. And also, throughout the book, in referring to the various branches of the armed services, every service was all lower case letters, like “the army”, “the air force”, “the marines”. I don’t know if it was intentional or not but it bugged the shit out of me.
One telling feature of the new book is that it wasn’t published by the same publisher as the first. That’s because he never even made his advance back on the first book and the first publisher wasn’t willing to get burned again. The first book wasn’t that bad, but he sold it in televised interviews as an anti-Bush book instead of letting it stand it’s own merit, and everyone knows that the anti-Bush crowd can’t read past the title and have no money. Most of his interviews about the book were on the defunct Olbermann Show, so I don’t see him on a book tour these days. Maybe he is, I didn’t look, really.
The back of his new book has his testimony to Congress on torture based on his four months of experience in Iraq. And the very last part is an ad for “Open Society”. If you Google the Open Society Foundation, you’ll see it sits on soros.org’s servers. What else do you need to know?
Hmm.Longest post I’ve written in a while.
