**I Was Kidnapped by Idiots**

It's a phrase that would have been unthinkable in the world of espionage fiction, but for me, it became a harsh reality on March 21, 2023. I was violently snatched from the outskirts of Baghdad, where I had been conducting fieldwork for my Ph.D. at Princeton University. The kidnappers, four men wearing dark civilian clothes and balaclavas, seemed convinced that I was a spy, and they set out to extract as much information from me as possible.

At first, the interrogations were comically inept. They searched my mouth for implanted tracking devices, despite my assurance that such things existed only in movies. When they asked if I had fillings, I confessed, thinking it might be a clever ploy to extract something from me. But they couldn't find any glint of silver, and their confusion was palpable.

It wasn't until a month after my capture that the kidnappers discovered my true nationality: Israeli. Suddenly, the torture began in earnest. I was subjected to "the Scorpion," a method that involved handcuffing my arms crisscrossed behind my back, causing immense pain in the shoulders that lasts for weeks.

As I lay on the floor, battered and bruised, I couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of it all. My captors were convinced that I was a Mossad spy, working alongside the CIA to subvert Iraq's government. They showed me screenshots from Facebook of foreign visitors to Iraq, insisting that I knew these individuals and could identify them.

But here's the thing: my torturers didn't even know how to use their own technology. They brought smartphones into the chamber where I would be screaming, despite knowing that Israel has the ability to hack such devices and turn them into listening and recording devices.

The Colonel, one of my primary interrogators, was convinced that Masons and Zionists ran the world. But later on, he declared that Israel had been established by Saudi Arabia, Iran's chief regional rival. It was a dizzying web of conspiracy theories, and I tried to match my fables to theirs, making up a Mossad-CIA training program that spanned two weeks.

As the months passed, I began to realize that my captors were not only inept but also incompetent in basic aspects of tradecraft. They would often contradict each other, and their lack of insight into their adversaries' intelligence capability made them demonstrably ineffective at halting intelligence breaches.

In the end, it was their ignorance that proved to be their undoing. When I was finally transferred out of the torture prison, I dared to tell an Iranian officer the truth: that all my confessions had been lies produced under torture. And when he asked how I knew that Mossad training took two weeks, I replied simply, "I knew I could make up anything."

It's a sad commentary on the state of our world that such regimes still exist, born of marginalized, typically rural, victims of prior rulers who take power and exact revenge against the previous elites. But it's also a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, and the determination to expose the truth, no matter how absurd or laughable it may seem.

**The Cost of Ignorance**

As I reflect on my experience, I am struck by the cost of ignorance. My captors were proficient in cruelty but inept in intelligence gathering. They relied on physical abuse to extract information, but this only produced false confessions and bad intelligence.

The history of regimes born from marginalized victims is a long one, from Maoist China to Khmer Rouge Cambodia. In each case, the state uses indiscriminate barbarity to instill constant terror in the population. But it's precisely this arbitrary violence that can stem from unreliable information produced by ignorant interrogators.

It's a cycle that must be broken, and one that requires a fundamental shift in our understanding of intelligence gathering and interrogation techniques. We must recognize that physical abuse only produces false confessions and bad intelligence, and that the only knowledge it provides is confirmation bias – information about threats facing the regime that aligns with the worldview of the torturers.

My experience was a stark reminder of the dangers of relying on ignorance and brutality in the name of security. But it also showed me the power of resilience and determination, and the importance of exposing the truth, no matter how absurd or laughable it may seem.