Malcolm Nance

As a general rule, interrogations without clearly defined legal limits are brutal. Particularly when they have an imperative to get information out of a captive immediately.

SERE is a classified program, but every person informed of it is 'read in' to the details of the program. Even the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which administers SERE, starts its PowerPoint presentation with a slide outlining the agency's origins.

I know waterboarding is torture because I have been on the giving and receiving end of the practice.

I come from an African-American family that is predominantly Muslim. I have had to covertly operate in parts of the Middle East and Africa. I've lived a Muslim life and prayed in Mosques, Husseiniyahs, and shrines where needed. One must respect Islam to understand Islam. I've read the Quran through and through a half dozen times.

The attacks of September 11 were made possible, in part, by the fact that U.S. law enforcement had a bias that 'rich Saudis are safe Arabs.' Al Qaeda understood that bias and relied on it to operate freely in the United States for years, even when the terrorists were engaged in activities that the authorities considered suspicious.

Al Qaeda has dominated the battlefield of the soul among the disaffected, disenfranchised, and dissatisfied. It promises action instead of discussion.

Waterboarding should never be used as an interrogation tool. It is beneath our values.

Al Qaeda is a racially diverse organization that is well aware of its dependence on a labor pool dominated by Arab Muslim men. It also has an adaptable and fluid counterintelligence mind-set.

Yes, ISIL is a terror-based insurgent army that seeks to establish a Caliphate, but the group's actual end goal is far from political: ISIL believes that, through jihad, it will bring about the Day of Judgment. This is not true Islam.

Hamas and Hezbollah operate within geopolitical norms. They can be negotiated and reasoned with. ISIL is a different animal altogether - a religious cult an order of magnitude more extreme than even the most extreme Islamic groups of the past.

Referring to ISIL as a destructive religious cult rather than a legitimate theo-political 'radical Islamic' group is not just more accurate, it also exposes ISIL's corrupt religious narrative.

The global jihad movement ideology is a destructive religious cult. It is so un-Islamic that it is virtually anti-Islamic.