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00:19In the days after 9-11, we didn't know enough.
00:24Everybody in America, from the present on down,
00:26wanted to know who al-Qaeda was, and we didn't know.
00:31And we needed answers, we needed intelligence, and we needed it quickly.
00:38We were going to find these people wherever they were.
00:42We didn't know when the next attack was,
00:44and we thought some of these people could help us answer that question.
00:47U.S. officials say Muhammad is being interrogated with, quote,
00:50all appropriate pressure.
00:52We knew we had to do something different.
00:55Al-Qaeda operatives have been waterboarded more than 260 times.
01:00So when our government says that no value came of it, I was shocked.
01:05I was surprised.
01:05The attorney general is launching an investigation into allegations that the CIA tortured terror suspects.
01:12I was really disturbed by what we grew to know.
01:15We're only serving our country at the direction of our country.
01:20Today I'll be calling for an official investigation
01:22of whether there was destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice
01:26in the destruction of these videotapes.
01:29And in the end, we were thrown to the wolves.
01:34I did not think about going to jail, and perhaps I should have.
01:57My wife and I had just returned from my last assignment.
02:01I was chief of station in Mexico City.
02:04We got back in time for the kids to go to school.
02:08And on 11th of September, my wife and I were unpacking our things,
02:14and a friend of ours called to tell us about the first airplane that went into the building.
02:24Everybody understood the magnitude of the hit that our nation took.
02:29Losing 3,000 of your countrymen in your home, your country,
02:34was something that I don't think we had experienced since the Japanese hit Hawaii.
02:39And I figured, this is war. We're going to war.
02:46My name is Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., and I was at the Central Intelligence Agency for 31 years.
02:53In the days after 9-11, a lot of the agency came together.
02:57People wanted to come out of retirement and serve.
03:00People would show up at the front gate saying, put me in. I'll do whatever.
03:07I remember calling back to the deputy director and saying,
03:10I don't know what this is. I don't know what's going to happen.
03:13But I want in.
03:16My name is Philip Mudd.
03:18I was second in charge of the Global Counterterrorism Operations and Analysis.
03:23I think the hardest thing to capture for Americans looking at this today is going to be the mindset problem.
03:29The intensity was, not only can it never happen again, but it's on you to make sure it doesn't happen
03:34again.
03:35So you go home and you say, what if I miss something today?
03:38What if it does happen again tomorrow?
03:39What if we say we had that person in a database?
03:42What do you say?
03:43Do you say, sorry, we missed again?
03:45Your dad doesn't come home?
03:47The sense of responsibility and urgency was daily, and it was intense.
03:56We had intelligence that al-Qaeda was planning three additional and potentially devastating attacks.
04:05The first threat was a second wave of airplanes.
04:09Where's it going to come from?
04:11Who's next?
04:11What city's next?
04:12I remember turning on local radio, and there was a report about a small plane around the White House.
04:18Immediately, light bulb goes on.
04:21We missed one.
04:22I blew it.
04:23It's on us.
04:24I blew it.
04:25Every single day.
04:27In retrospect, it was just a plane that had violated White House airspace, somebody who didn't know the rules.
04:33The sense of urgency is very difficult to overstate.
04:40My name is Benjamin Wittes.
04:42I'm a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
04:47I have spent most of my career writing about the law of national security.
04:53They all believed that the next attack was happening tomorrow.
04:59And they really believed this.
05:02And by the way, so did everybody else.
05:06Second, we were extremely concerned with the possibility that al-Qaeda was going to launch some type of anthrax attacks
05:15against us.
05:16We are still undergoing final tests to determine absolutely if these two deaths were related to anthrax exposure.
05:24I was a young editorial writer for the Washington Post.
05:27And in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, there were anthrax attacks.
05:35Our mailroom was shut down.
05:37And we all assumed for a while that that was an al-Qaeda thing.
05:44The third threat was a nuclear threat.
05:47We knew that al-Qaeda was interested in developing some type of nuclear or radiological bomb.
05:57We had actually found the schematics of a nuclear weapon that was delivered to al-Qaeda.
06:05And we were facing a ticking time bomb.
06:09The president was putting pressure on us.
06:11The Congress was putting pressure on us.
06:13Even the media was saying, don't allow an attack to happen.
06:17This was the emergency of our time.
06:21I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them
06:29to justice.
06:29The president wanted a response to the attacks.
06:33It became his number one priority.
06:36And the Counterterrorism Center became the pointing end of this spear.
06:42In May of 2002, I was assigned as the new director of the Counterterrorism Center.
06:48And I was surprised because usually someone assigned to that job comes from a division that takes care of the
06:55Middle East or North Africa.
06:57Not someone from Latin America, which is what my experience was with.
07:02I was born in Puerto Rico, but I grew up in South America.
07:06My father was working for an agency for international development, so we had a connection to the U.S. embassies
07:12overseas.
07:13I went to the University of Florida, got a law degree.
07:16And when I finished college, I wanted to do something that would get me back to going overseas.
07:23So I applied to the Central Intelligence Agency.
07:28I didn't know exactly what I was getting into because you don't really know the agency until you get into
07:33it.
07:33But I landed exactly where I wanted to be, which is the director of operations.
07:38They do intelligence collection and covert action.
07:42He did not have a background in counterterrorism, but Jose was a right guy for the job because he had
07:47some characteristics, I think, that made him stand out.
07:50Aggressive, willing to take risks.
07:54Jose embodied that.
07:55So while we know they were coming at us with these different threats, we didn't have the specific information to
08:01stop an attack.
08:03And we were very concerned about that.
08:05We didn't know enough.
08:07We didn't know enough.
08:09First question we're trying to answer, believe it or not, was pretty basic.
08:12Who's the adversary?
08:13Our understanding of Al Qaeda was extremely limited.
08:17I didn't say limited.
08:18I said extremely limited.
08:20Fortunately, a couple of months before 9-11, we had been tracking this individual and his name was Abu Zubaydah.
08:29I don't think there's any doubt, but a man named Abu Zubaydah is a close associate of UBLs.
08:36And if not the number two, very close to the number two person in the organization.
08:42Abu Zubaydah was an orchestrator, sort of a facilitator for Al Qaeda.
08:46He had come across her screen after he dispatched a terrorist to blow up LAX.
08:52Rassam was put in jail and he told us that Abu Zubaydah had sent him.
08:56So we knew that Abu Zubaydah had access to that Al Qaeda leadership core and that he could provide us
09:04with the intelligence
09:05that we needed to deal with these threats.
09:07So we started to work very hard to find him.
09:13We knew that the senior people like Abu Zubaydah had to communicate.
09:19And in communicating, we had discovered some technical information that gave us an idea of where in Pakistan he was.
09:28We had 16 different sites where we had suspicions that he would be at, but we weren't sure.
09:36There were multiple raids that night.
09:39And at one of those locations, it was an empty lot.
09:43But we saw that there were communication cables going to this one house.
09:49So the Pakistanis went in.
09:51There was a gunfight.
09:53Abu Zubaydah tried to escape and he was shot in the process and captured and confirmed that it was him.
09:59He was captured by Pakistani police, CIA and FBI agents at a house in Fasalabad, south of Islamabad.
10:06I remember that night, everybody wanted to know everything all the time, every day.
10:12The questions were, hey CIA, this is the biggest answer we've faced in many years of national security since World
10:19War II.
10:20What's the answer?
10:21What does he know?
10:22What's the next attack?
10:23When's it going to happen?
10:24We want to know now.
10:27After Abu Zubaydah was captured, we didn't want to leave him in Pakistan because we didn't know if he was
10:34going to be let go or if his buddies were going to come in and try to get him out.
10:38So the decision had to be made as to what are we going to do now?
10:42If you send him to the United States to the U.S. legal system, he's going to what's called lawyer
10:46up.
10:47Belur is going to say, don't ever say anything about anything.
10:50There were a lot of meetings up in the CIA director's office.
10:53How do we deal with Abu Zubaydah?
10:55Very quickly, people start to say, well, maybe we should talk to this guy ourselves.
10:59And if we do that, we have to have it outside the United States so we can't lawyer up.
11:04Let's find some place we can do this.
11:06That was the origin of the first black site.
11:09A black site is a location that is a secret location where we take an Al Qaeda terrorist so we
11:17can interrogate him without any pressure from anyone else.
11:24The objective is to gain intelligence that we can disseminate and understand better what's going on with Al Qaeda and
11:32their plans and intentions.
11:34We would not do anything illegal. We were not going to do that.
11:38But we were going to push the envelope in terms of what we could do.
11:44Back then, the question was, do you have a vision that says how quickly and how aggressively can we take
11:50out the target?
11:51And do you have the courage to say, look, I know decades down the road, people are going to say,
11:55we don't like what you did.
11:57They won't maybe remember the ten or the times.
11:59But his attitude was, I understand that. I'll live with that. Let's go.
12:16In the immediate aftermath of 9-11, we did some things that were wrong.
12:21We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks.
12:29Good evening. The Senate is about to release a controversial report on the harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA.
12:37It is the very graphic descriptions of the so-called enhanced interrogations that will stand out in this report.
12:43I want to be careful about the way I talk about the Senate report because I really do think that
12:49in many ways it made an enormous contribution.
12:53The lion's share of what we know about the program comes from that report and the responses to it.
13:03It also has a number of, I think, quite deep flaws.
13:09It really quite unapologetically does not put itself in the shoes of the people in real time with the direction
13:21and guidance that they were getting, including from Congress.
13:25But I refuse to have an argument about the word torture.
13:30I think we should stare the brutality of the program in the face, honestly.
13:40Pablo Zubita was severely wounded during capture.
13:45We wanted to save his life, of course.
13:47The CIA flies in a medical team to keep them alive.
13:52They make an extraordinary set of interventions in order to interrogate him.
14:00We hadn't been in the business of grabbing people in the past prior to that.
14:06I'm Mike Rogers, former chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.
14:12What we believed at the time, and certainly the intelligence services the CIA believed at the time, was they would
14:19be able to give us information to stop another terrorist attack.
14:25There's a reason why we have a CIA, and there's a reason why presidents throughout history have relied on the
14:32CIA to do this kind of work.
14:35You know, we accept as a country that, you know, having a secret intelligence service is important for national security
14:41and that those people will break the laws of foreign countries, right, but act in accordance with American law because
14:48they're getting approval by the president.
14:50I don't think that there's a dispute about that.
14:53My name is Mark Mazzetti. I'm a correspondent for The New York Times.
14:56I covered the intelligence world and specifically the CIA for The New York Times for a decade.
15:02And I think that history has also shown that more often than not, the CIA is not a rogue actor.
15:09In this new war, the most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are
15:18planning is the terrorists themselves.
15:22We started to ask Abu Zubaydah questions as he was recovering.
15:28Abu Zubaydah told us that Mukhtar, Mukhtar means the brain in Arabic, that Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and confirmed
15:38for us then that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the chief of operations of Al Qaeda, the brain behind the 9
15:45-11 attacks.
15:48When Al Qaeda referenced the brain, who the brain was, believe it or not, we didn't know.
15:54That shows you how little we knew about the organization and how valuable it was, not just to have threat
16:00information from a detainee, but who is Mukhtar?
16:02That's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
16:04Oh, OK. We need that guy. Not only now, but yesterday. He's got to go down.
16:12But after Zubaydah heals from his wounds, he stopped stalking.
16:20Basically, it just blew us off.
16:22And the president, again, was asking us every day, what's the story? What are you doing about these threats? What's
16:30happening?
16:30And we weren't getting any answers from him.
16:34So we put Abu Zubaydah in isolation and I brought everybody back to headquarters so we could talk about what
16:41could we do to get them to talk to us.
16:45The enhanced interrogation program is a program to put somebody under duress so that they think there's no way out
16:50except to cooperate.
16:51There was the intensity of the time and the basic question of, if we don't squeeze them, why would they
16:56ever talk to us?
16:57At the center of the enhanced interrogation program were 10 techniques that we wanted to get approval for.
17:07You sought permission for all of those techniques, correct?
17:12Correct.
17:13The attention grasp, walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramped confinement, wall standing, stress positions, sleep deprivation, water board, use of
17:29diapers, insects and mock burial.
17:32And we went to justice department and said, these are the techniques we wanted to use against Al Qaeda.
17:40You need to give us a reading on whether they are legal or not.
17:47And they did. They gave us a binding legal opinion in writing.
17:55With that in hand, we went to the president and his national security and said, you need to direct us
18:04from a policy perspective to go do this.
18:09And once we had all these approvals and agreements, then we proceeded to implement them with Abu Zubaydah.
18:23And so the result are a series of Justice Department memos that are extremely permissive.
18:30This is why they tell you everything we did was legal.
18:37And then we went to the Congress, the leadership of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House of
18:44Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
18:46We briefed them and they agreed.
18:49Senator Rockefeller, should the U.S. torture this guy?
18:52We do not sanction torture, but there are psychological and other means that can accomplish most of what we want.
19:01And I can understand the whole issue with morality.
19:04All of us had to make up our minds whether we wanted to participate in this or not.
19:09In my case, and maybe I'm a simple-minded guy, but when I was told it was legal, when I
19:18recognized the threats that we were under, pretty quickly, for me, I knew I wanted to do this.
19:30Before the attacks, nobody would have not only executed this, nobody would have conceived of this.
19:36It became reality after the attacks, but that's only because people had seen those images
19:40and lived through the sort of searing moments where you see people jump from a building and said,
19:45I don't care what it takes, if you need to detain these guys, if you need to waterboard them, that's
19:49okay.
19:50That started to change in 03, 04, 05 and beyond, but 01, 02, 03? No, do it. And do it
19:58now.
20:05At the request of our psychologists, we started to videotape Abu Zubaydah and then other prisoners later on
20:12because they wanted insight into how they were acting during interrogation and after when they were in their jail cells.
20:20And a number of people felt it would help us write our reporting if we had the tapes.
20:36I was shocked and nauseated by the details of the program.
20:40Some of the lesser ones included loud music and lights.
20:45And then there was sort of elevated up from that.
20:47There was putting people in diapers and with a kind of rectal feeding so that they get enough nutrition, but
20:54they don't eat.
20:55And then the summit was waterboarding and I have no problem calling that torture.
21:01There's always going to be someone who disagrees with the policy.
21:07The thing about it is these people asked for the, you know, they were the ones that came in here
21:12and they would have come again and again and again,
21:14had we not stopped them.
21:18Once they went through the enhanced interrogation process, Abu Zubaydah started to talk.
21:23It was probably the most extravagant, aggressive, abusive set of CIA activities that have happened in the last 25 years.
21:41And eventually when this stuff became public, the civil liberties and human rights communities said,
21:47Oh my God, they did what?
21:50Tonight, CIA interrogators allegedly threatened to kill the children of one terror suspect and threatened another with a gun and
21:58a power drill.
21:59Now the Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation.
22:03I didn't know the consequences, frankly, maybe naively.
22:08I knew that it would be a difficult period.
22:12I did not think about going to jail or anything like that.
22:20And perhaps I should have.
22:25Abu Zubaydah, he gave us very important intelligence, which we used to capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, chief of operations of
22:34Al Qaeda.
22:35Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested along with two other men Saturday in Pakistan.
22:40U.S. officials say Mohammed is being interrogated with, quote,
22:43all appropriate pressure at an undisclosed location outside the U.S. and outside Pakistan.
22:48When you say we are holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in an undisclosed location where we are interrogating him,
22:58everybody kind of knows that there's something ugly going on there.
23:03He came to school here.
23:05He went to North Carolina University.
23:07He was a mechanical engineer.
23:09So he studied us.
23:11He knew us.
23:13Smart.
23:14Really smart.
23:16I don't know what IQ he had, but, you know, way up there.
23:20Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the toughest of all the detainees.
23:24He could be waterboard all day long.
23:26He didn't have a problem with it.
23:28Pretty quickly, he surmised that, you know, it would last 10 seconds and he would let us know with his
23:33hands, you know,
23:3410 seconds have gone by.
23:35You need to stop this, you know.
23:38Eventually, sleep deprivation, and I think the cumulative effect of everything eventually led to surrender.
23:45But when they surrender, they will then tell us many things.
23:50As a result, you got really good stuff.
23:54But what really good stuff means is tiny pieces of a giant mosaic.
24:01Think of this as a kaleidoscope.
24:03As you get more and more detainees and combine that with information you get from other security services and intercepted
24:08communications, you start to pull a kaleidoscope together.
24:12Pick up 72,000 pieces of information in a kaleidoscope and slowly watch them come into focus.
24:19KSM was critical along with the other 100 plus detainees because they gave us little tiny snippets that to the
24:26naked eye were insignificant.
24:28It was only because you had hundreds of analysts trying to put together those fragments of information, those shattered pieces
24:35of glass to say this is what the glass looks like.
24:37That's what was valuable.
24:40And that gave us an incredible understanding of Al Qaeda, their strategy and their tactics and capabilities.
24:49As the clock ticked from 02 to 03, 04, more and more members of Al Qaeda went down, the leadership
24:55organization, at a level that they couldn't replace.
24:58Think of this as shark's teeth.
24:59If you take one out every six months, the shark will replace that tooth.
25:02We started to take them out faster and faster and faster.
25:05And over time, it was that intelligence mix of all those pieces of intelligence were starting to destroy the organization.
25:14So, the impact that the enhanced interrogation had on our ability to destroy the Al Qaeda operation that attacked us
25:23on 9-11, it was a huge accomplishment that I'm very proud of.
25:29It is very clear to me that they got good stuff in this program.
25:33It is not clear to me at all that they got good stuff specifically because of the application of these
25:42techniques.
25:43There is no way to know the answer to that question.
25:47I remember people consistently saying, there's going to be payback.
25:53There's going to be payback for what you did.
25:56There's going to be questions about harsh interrogation techniques.
26:03It was interesting. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told us that eventually your own government will come after you because of this.
26:12And he was right.
26:16In 2004, things were starting to come out about the secret operations of the post-9-11 period.
26:22The first big shockwave on the issue of interrogation and detention was the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq in 2004.
26:33That scandal really did create a lot of anger, I think in the public, because this, generally this view that,
26:41you know, this is not how we're supposed to treat people.
26:43The Abu Ghraib story breaks and that was real torture for sadism and pleasure's sake.
26:55I mean, I'm comfortable using the word torture to describe what happened in the CIA program.
27:00But it was torture for a noble purpose, right?
27:03I mean, these people were actually trying to get information to stop terrorist attacks.
27:07The stuff that was happening at Abu Ghraib is simple sadism.
27:12Although we had nothing to do with it, I knew that the media would not differentiate between a legally authorized
27:21program like ours
27:23and the Abu Ghraib scandal that involved low-level military police abusing prisoners.
27:30Shortly after Abu Ghraib, there were the first stories about detainees in CIA custody
27:36and some of the interrogation methods that were used.
27:41The controversial declassification and release of the CIA torture memos.
27:46They disclosed that three Al-Qaeda operatives had been waterboarded more than 260 times.
27:52Everybody refers to them as the torture memos.
27:54It's the justification for use of the enhanced interrogation program when it leaked to the newspapers.
28:00I remember the change in the attitude by many politicians.
28:04I was really disturbed by what I was reading and what we grew to know.
28:12By 2005, Al-Qaeda were down and out.
28:16And the reason is because of the intelligence that was obtained.
28:22But we knew that the time had changed and that slowly but surely we were losing support in the Congress.
28:32You don't need to break our laws and debase ourselves to get the good intelligence.
28:37That's not who we are as Americans.
28:39Congress was briefed about it the whole way along and was comfortable with this.
28:45Then it becomes public and everybody's view changed.
28:50We came under attack by the media and by the politicians going into the 2004 elections.
28:56And that opposition to what we were doing and condemnation of what we were doing continued on until the end
29:04of 2005.
29:05When they removed the legal protection that we had obtained from the Justice Department.
29:12They took it out. They took it away.
29:14And the director of CIA at the time, Porter Goss decided, well, that's it. We cannot do this anymore.
29:20I mean, we cannot put people's careers in jeopardy, their livelihoods in jeopardy if they don't have the protection of
29:25our government.
29:27By 2006, the whole Enhanced Interrogation Program was dead.
29:33But a year later, the decision that I made had come back to haunt me.
29:42In November of 2002, the location of the black site where we began implementing the Enhanced Interrogation Program was blown.
29:53It had leaked into the media.
29:56When it became clear that we would have to abandon the location and go somewhere else,
30:02we figured that 92 tapes, you know, we just couldn't be taking them all over the place.
30:08And that we had not gained any psychological insights and we didn't need them anymore.
30:13So the black site asked for approval to destroy the tapes.
30:19We coordinated our response with the Office of General Counsel to destroy the tapes.
30:26And he says, well, we want to investigate.
30:30It took a year.
30:32That's now 2004.
30:34And in the end, the conclusion was it's up to senior agency management to decide what to do with the
30:42tapes.
30:44John Rizzo would go to the White House, talk to Harriet Myers, the president's lawyer.
30:50She would say, well, no, hold on.
30:54He will go see Gonzales over at the attorney general.
30:57Well, nobody would make a decision.
31:01Time passed.
31:03And then you had the Abu Garib scandal involving low-level military police.
31:12And I kept thinking, the tapes are going to leak.
31:17And I got all these people whose faces are on those tapes.
31:23How long do I wait?
31:25We all knew that if a person's face showed up on a tape, that person would be vilified forever, maybe
31:32subject to some legal action.
31:34Maybe people would sue them.
31:35Maybe people overseas would identify them and come after them.
31:39And I think Jose's attitude was pretty basic.
31:42This is not about a cover-up.
31:43It's about being the head of operations and saying, I will not allow my people to be vilified for something
31:49that they were authorized to do a few years ago.
31:51I won't let it happen.
31:54One weekend at my house, it suddenly became clear.
32:01Nobody's going to make the decision, okay?
32:04Nobody is going to make this decision.
32:07So, on Monday, I went to my office and I called my senior staff and lawyers and asked them two
32:15questions.
32:16Is it legal to destroy the tapes?
32:19And do I have the authority to do this?
32:23When the answer I got was yes and yes, I went ahead and ordered the destruction of the tapes.
32:34In the course of conversations I have with different sources, I learned that there had been tapes of interrogations that
32:45were destroyed.
32:47Destruction of tapes resonates in Washington's scandal.
32:50So, I start perking up and I start, you know, trying to learn more about what happened.
32:57I had a vague understanding that Jose Rodriguez had ordered the tapes destroyed in late 2005 as the pressure was
33:05mounting inside CIA and upon CIA about its detention interrogation program.
33:11So, I write the story and I was not thinking in my head, this is going to be a blockbuster.
33:17They didn't have any sense of sort of what would happen.
33:23I'm getting ready to retire.
33:25My wife Patty and I usually have a martini in the evening and watch the evening news.
33:31And all of a sudden, my official agency photograph and my full name flashed up on the TV screen.
33:39You can't imagine the shock that it was for someone like me who had been there for 30 plus years,
33:47who had been undercover all those years and who was three weeks away from retirement to all of a sudden
33:52find myself accused of potential wrongdoing on national TV.
34:00Rodriguez had his own reasons for destroying the tapes, but from a congressional Democrat perspective, you learn that the Bush
34:12administration has done these things and has authorized the CIA to do these things.
34:18You learn that Abu Ghraib has happened and then you learn that there are tapes and they've been destroyed by
34:25the person who was responsible for overseeing the program.
34:29Major scandals have been made of much less than that.
34:35The day after my story, the Justice Department launched in a full criminal investigation into the destruction of the tapes.
34:44Well known politicians at the time proclaimed that I was involved in a cover up.
34:50So I expect both the Intelligence Committee and the Attorney General of the United States to investigate aggressively the answers
34:58to questions regarding this cover up.
35:04And sure enough, a special prosecutor was assigned to investigate.
35:13Initially, kind of naively, I said, well, OK, I mean, it's everything's by the book.
35:17You know, I discussed it with my lawyers.
35:19They said I had the authority to do this and it was legal and perhaps it'll take three months.
35:25Well, it was three years.
35:27They subpoena every memo, every document, every cable.
35:33They interviewed everybody who worked with me and then came the press reporting, which was incessant and explosive and suggested
35:43that I had destroyed evidence of torture.
35:48Many believed there was criminality here because the act of destroying the tapes in late 2005 comes amid this growing
35:59scandal in Washington about the CIA detention and interrogation.
36:05And the belief was that the CIA realized that they were never going to keep this quiet.
36:11This was going to be a scandal at some point and that there were other motives, which was that we
36:17can never have these tapes go to Congress, go elsewhere because they're going to be bad.
36:23You know, I only watched one little segment that was sent to me at one time.
36:29And yes, I think that you would probably say that it was tough to watch for most people.
36:34Yeah, this is not for the faint of heart.
36:37You know, this is this is real.
36:40This is our world.
36:44It was the right decision for the right reason.
36:47And the reason was to protect the people who work for me.
36:50And in the end, Durham comes out in 2010 and basically says that he was not going to charge me.
36:58And I was cleared.
37:01Unfortunately, the attacks by the media, by the politicians, continued on.
37:06Then you had the Senate Intelligence Committee launch its own investigation that started with the destruction of the tapes, which
37:16ultimately sort of spiraled and grew into its own report on the entire detention interrogation.
37:23Battle on Capitol Hill over an explosive Senate report on the use of torture.
37:28There were tens of millions of documents made available to the Intelligence Committee for purposes of this investigation.
37:36And they actually went through it.
37:38Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats claimed the agency brutalized terror suspects, misled Congress and the White House.
37:45I find it hard to understand how somebody could say that in retrospect that the CIA didn't keep the Congress
37:51informed.
37:51I was among those at the CIA who went down to Congress and said, this is a hand slap.
37:57This is sleep deprivation.
37:58I talked to members of the Senate and members of the Congress who said either nothing or that's OK.
38:04Now, if they want to know you waterboarded someone 20 times instead of 30, I'd say, OK, mea culpa.
38:09But if the question is, did you have black sites and what was done at those black sites?
38:13I'm just I don't know what to say.
38:15I told them.
38:15I told them.
38:16I am sure that the CIA did some degree of whitewashing.
38:21For example, the phrase stress position is a very antiseptic phrase, right?
38:27The phrase hanging from your arms with very little weight on the floor conveys something very different.
38:34And so there may have been questions that were never asked that should have been asked in these briefings.
38:40There may have been things that were said that were not heard.
38:45Some of the other members of the Congress, Nancy Pelosi included, were supportive at the beginning and, of course, turned
38:53against us as well.
38:55At every step of the way, the administration was misleading the Congress.
38:59And that is the issue.
39:00And that is why we need a truth commission to look into that.
39:05All of a sudden, we had gone from being the good guys to being the bad guys.
39:11The report seemed to suggest that the CIA misled the effectiveness of the program, what was gleaned from the program,
39:19whether or not actionable intelligence came from that.
39:21Judging us about the ethics of things like harsh interrogations and waterboarding, yes, we were said, got it.
39:29But judging us to say what you acquired wasn't useful, that's crazy.
39:35It's so wrong, the thousands of intelligence reporting that we got that informed us on al-Qaeda's strategy, their tactics,
39:46their capabilities, their leadership, their finances, logistics, training, methods of attack, plans and intentions of attacks.
39:55All of that came from the enhanced interrogation program.
40:00I do think there's a lot that the report contributed, but one thing you don't think of is the immense
40:07accomplishments the CIA made in this period, which really did involve the destruction of al-Qaeda as an operational force.
40:18And this was an incredible thing that they did, and nobody talks about it, and the reason is this.
40:25And when people become uncomfortable with the ugly things that they were once comfortable with, they blame you.
40:31We should have told more people, and we should have documented it.
40:35We're only serving our country at the direction of our country.
40:40And in the end, we were thrown to the wolves.
40:45The truth of our country's descent into torture is not precious.
40:49It is noxious. It is sordid.
40:53Torture and illegality have no place in America.
40:58These interrogation techniques were not legal.
41:01The politicians, they don't know the damage that it causes to peoples and their families.
41:07I mean, we had wives come to buy house crying because their husbands had been investigated during the Bush administration,
41:15and then new investigations started during the Obama administration.
41:19They had to dip into their college funds for their kids to pay for the lawyers, and the uncertainty of
41:26it all.
41:27My parents are elderly.
41:29I mean, you know, for a while, they all thought I was going to jail.
41:32You know, I mean, it's hard.
41:40Sorry.
41:42I've had people look at me and say, how could you do what you did?
41:46And my answer is, who do you think we are?
41:50I played Little League.
41:52I grew up fishing.
41:53I grew up in a Catholic school.
41:55I spent my life from grades one to eight diagramping sentences with the sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
42:04We are you.
42:07Did we make good choices?
42:09Maybe not.
42:10But in the tenor of the times and the threats we faced, I'm not sure how good the options were.
42:16They put your family through a lot.
42:21A lot of hard times.
42:26Believe me, I've heard the arguments.
42:28Well, you don't know what it was like at the time.
42:30And we thought there was going to be another tax.
42:32But what has been made brutally clear in the years since that period
42:38is that the United States went down a path that was against its values as a country, our values as
42:49Americans.
42:49In some cases, not all, but in some cases, there is almost universal acceptance that what the CIA did was
42:58what we would call torture if it was carried out by any other country.
43:03I think most of us would look back and say, the mission we had was to make sure it didn't
43:10happen again.
43:12And we were given broad latitude to do that.
43:14And not only given broad latitude, but told, don't ever let this happen again.
43:19And it didn't.
43:20I can sleep with that.
43:22I did what I had to do.
43:23It was the right thing.
43:25Protected a lot of people.
43:27Protected the country.
43:29So like I said, no regrets.
43:32that's that makes a cut and hard toemics, cat agents.
43:35So we have gone crazy.
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