And it is very interesting but it is those questions the very few people are asking. Ask me anything. That negative feedback is usually because they think it is sexist. The other thing is what they dont realize with that narrative they dont not like me or the book but i would have peaked est flashbacks. To hear the bullets then they are there again. Because that reminded me so the insiders lovett because they have the Beautiful Image when how they buy that narrative fallacy for that execution and it is wonderful. But that is not how it is. And so dated so almost all the negative feedback i have yet to be serious. Have you read accidental empire . No precocious by . Been should i quit. We aeronaut on speaking terms anyway. One person was responding little defensive. No. I should not probably say this but it turns out it is like Insider Trading with hate speech. They cover a document at the time that is what it covers. And if anything is known it means that in some way nobody knows about it. By the way of any Company Partner knows about bad then it is also not confidential. Also for all the problems the country may have truth is always a defense because we have weak light bill lies fortunately. Unless it is under subpoena somebody could say yes he said that. Is a lot more than you think actually. Only those who knew my name that ran a slightly compromise position but i did not want that to be public. And never told anybody because it would be he said she said but but they were both pool ive let the know they were going to be mentioned. I would like to know why there isnt a scene like miami quick. It is funny i was there a few years ago. Is used to be the most hideous in the world. But look at mountain view. Were living in the elizabethan era of our time. Does this seem like and a culture that invested architecture . No. Of course, not. Every public building is named after some rich douchebag. Nobody has ever walked into the google hospital. But the notion of giving back but it is not like Carnegie Building a library. Some of the most beautiful libraries youll ever see. That educated a whole generation so to invest in the city just nobody cares. If you look around it does not seem like the 15th century. [laughter] of course,. [inaudible] obviously there are exceptions. We have five minutes left. I did work with a blend unnamed source. But things have gotten more political when facebook went from a crazy start up to be very political and this source said it would become a microsoft. From any other questions . [applause] thanks for coming tonight and for having me. So appreciated. [applause]. About why you decided to write this book. Guest . Its part of the book i wish i could put away the. For nearly ten years a its some of the same values for the things that motivated me to share that original experience. The operation to continue in some longer form essays, and then eventually the creation of the book. Host so the oped in the Washington Post gives a flavor for the theme of that and how that fit in with him. The narrative of what had gone on in iraq and other places. I saw the narrative switch and i saw people talk as if it is an isolated incident. For those of us that are there again had a duty to speak out. So the original hadnt used the word torture but the idea to enhance interrogation in these abusive tactics that have an impact on me and my own experience i was struggling with, so i felt it was a discussion that the American People needed to have and eventually evolved to the point i recognized now it is an enhand interrogation. But i didnt want to do is more importantly i told my story and splayed my role in these things and justified on some level to condemn them completely for the other people involved but to be as honest as i possibly could. Host i want to dig more into that as your role as interrogator but before we get there maybe start a little bit with your upbringing. One of the things that was interesting for me in the book is how motivated you were by your religious upbringing growing up in a town in pennsylvania. So talk about that and the relationship that may or may not have had with your decision to go into Law Enforcement and join the military. Guest it was an old traditional Presbyterian Church that focused on things like humility and being quiet and new sort of large displays of affection or appreciation. But more importantly, it was a place where i was surrounded by very important men in world war ii, worked at places like the steel mill and people were kind. People knew my name. Older men called me by my first name and we all sort of dressed up and it was a safe, wonderful place. It was also a place that installed some important values that our thoughts are to be with the people around us and we are to spend far more energy to focus on the needs of others. So it was a beautiful kind of institution. Now there were a lot of veterans in the institution as well. So the idea was a strong one. This was the 1990s by the time i decided to join. But when i looked into the military i found some of the same things i found with the idea of taking care of each other in a place of protection and a place that quite frankly did think of others first. It is so incredibly familiar to the way that ive grown up. You enlisted in the army in 1995. Your life in the army, tell us about that in your experience and how that would shape your career as the work to make your way to iraq. Guest to talk about feeling protected in the church and that is kind of thing i wantethe thing iwanted to do iss from the church and then in a general nature i wanted to be a Police Officer in the presbyterian sense of calling. So i enlisted in 1995 after four years of college and spent five years on what was essentially a peacetime army. There were operations at this point it was largely a war fought from the air in the idea that armies would be engaged on in large land battles was kind of thing in the pas past and ify would engage in the end of Ground Combat with people suggesting every future war would be fought from the air. So i spent most of my time in training. They send me out t sent me out y california tonight joined the next three or four years in places like tennessee, louisiana and north carolina. So when 2000 came up there didnt seem to be the need for enlisting at that point, and it was getting boring and i so felt that in Law Enforcement so i came back and get did a job asa Police Officer. This is about one of your training exercises. I have highlighted for you. If you want to read that and talk about how thats one of the first entry points that you had in interrogation that would be one of the subjects of your book. Guest i never thought of the exercises available, and one of them is in the position as part of the team the idea to be captured we were more likely to be captured. Host it was essentially a Training Program to help you deal with the verifications while evading. Guest youve are behind enemy lines and how do you escape and resist. It has been suggested to the interrogation of a foreign entity and hopefully you are able to escape. This section comes to the middle but then you are captured so they are taken to a detention facility and they pretend to be interrogators. They have the personnel files. If they fit in the families by name in that night they played loud music. The guard brings in a recording and place it over and over and also please be opening a portion of Ozzy Osbourne crazy train and they would stand up in the cold, army doctors take your pulse. During interrogation we are promised warm meals and beds if we cooperate. They see everyone breaks down. The torture works and always has and always well. Will. It just takes time. Host for this to be the first entry point in the interrogation as a soldier that was sort of shaping your view on interrogation but also later on in the describe how it would come to be held as a valid experience point to lead you down the path of being in interrogator in iraq. The other section of the book was knowing in retrospect in the cia enhanced Interrogation Program that essentially those techniques from waterboarding down were engineered from the program which was essentially designed to help our soldiers resist torture. Guest they reinforced that we were in essentially the good guys and we would be captured by the bad guys and this is how the essentially would be treated. There wasnt a whole lot they could teach you in terms of what it was going to be like it if it was still a stressful kind of training environment, and there were people that did sort of breakdown and have difficulty emotionally dealing with it. At the end of the school cummings you arent liberated by the force and they raised the flag and play the starspangled banner and its an Emotional Experience because it reinforces the idea of if you are part of this sort of noble undertaking of the american military. So the idea then and now in the wake of 9 11, there was a lot of talk. Dick cheney went on meet the press after 9 11 and a large portion found things like the dark side and how we have to work in the shadows and the idea that where the enemy works in these dark places the only way for us to infiltrate or sort of join them in this place and i would like to be able to say i thought about the school and that isnt who w is and who we t i didnt think i tied its like Many Americans i was in agreement many of them like tim russert that i have respect for and even in that interview he didnt confront in that kind of evolved from there that once the administration and wants all of us i think said it out loud and took it for a test drive that maybe we could do these things and we didnt object then it was implemented. I am familiar with the idea that they navigated on the school to places like the cia and the enhanced Interrogation Program. I dont have any direct experience of that. I think it could be true but the intention was to essentially work on this dark side or the shadows and there didnt need to come from this years school or any outside influence. History is ripe with example of how to torture and abuse and it could be incredibly creative in those terms. The valuable discussion of where they came from but in my own narrative story, i dont know that it would have mattered if it had come from some other place. Host lets get back to the narrative. You leave the army and 2009 and back to join the Police Department. So, tell us about how that transition in your life from pennsylvania into iraq. Guest this idea of calling on Law Enforcement, i applied at a number of federal Law Enforcement put my own hometown was one of the first to bring me on, and i found that i loved the job in Law Enforcement and in many ways you could almost treat it like a ministry engaged with people in the absolute worst moments in their lives. Whether it was a car accident or a Health Crisis or an assault and how you respond to people in that moment could change the direction if you responded with a stead sticky form of compassid authority, they could very quickly compound the situation would turn out much differently than it otherwise could. But you knew if you had officers coming back, you know the officer that might come and make things worse and they start yelling or screaming and some of them almost enjoyed a getting people by older. People riled up. The Police Officers i worked for over incredibly compassionate and it was a perfect job. I was eventually diagnosed with a heart condition, perfectly healthy. Applied to a lawenforcement position and they required a physical but discovered a heart murmur that led to further testing and it turned out i had a very severe cardiomyopathy that ended my lawenforcement career. So i was devastated and all those things i had in this sense of having been in the military is very similar was suddenly kind of wiped away and there was no way back in and this was post9 11 and the invasion already have been at this point so there was a war in iraq and i had no way to get involved. I couldnt reenlist with a heart condition. At this point as it started to grow there was a recognitio rece didnt have enough soldiers to accomplish the task into subcontracting companies which have always been there for task now is filling in the sort of empty spaces, and one of those was interrogation. With Language Training and ironically enough, having been to the school goes for the kind of things that allowed the contractor to qualify me in that position so they are required to submit paperwork to the army saying here is why its a specific individual is qualified. It happened very fast. I wanted to get there as fast as i could. Saddam hussein was captured in 2003 and we thought that the war would end in a matter of weeks or months, so we wanted to get there quickly. I arrived in january, 2004. Host tell us about the contractor that you signed up with, and maybe also im interested in the role of the contractor in relation to the military on the ground and in iraq. I was struck by sort of how haphazard the reporting lines of authority were as you described in the book. But at the same time it seemed very integrated in the sense that it was hard to tell if you were a contractor or if you remember the military. So talk about for those that might not be as familiar. Guest weber and enormous contract to her in the military for years mainly in terms of electronic intelligence. That has been most of the contracts, but there were others at the time being asked to find a new Division Within their own companies of human intelligence for interior, so that the time they were bringing over interrogators and intelligence analysts and screeners that would meet with the prisoners first and then add them onto the interrogators. I remember in basic training the relationship between civilians and military contractors and the training we were out raking leaves one day as we often were in a car full of civilians pulled up and wanted directions and so they were talking to them and i remember the drill sergeant sliding across the grass screaming at us to get away. He didnt want us to have any contact with the outside world but then we watched from a distance. They stood at the parade rest and spoke respectfully to the civilians. They gave them directions and made sure they knew and helped them anywa any way they could at was a shock to us. Here was this drill sergeant that we thought would rule the world but then we realized he was an underling and one of the values drilled into your head is the leadership you burn your chain of command and all the way up the Battalion Commander at the top of the command is always a photo of the president of the United States and he or she is in civilian clothes, so you recognize civilians essentially are in charge. So this was a complication in iraq. The military viewed this kind of outside of the chain of command and they were not quite sure how to deal with us. We still thought of ourselves within the chain of command coming in we knew where we fit. Whether it was a sergeant or specialist even though we were out of uniform, all of us still found ourselves acting the way we had before. Listening to the staff sergeants so it was a bizarre kind of interaction between the two and im not sure anyone to this day knowtheyknows how it was suppos. Host so you are a contractor specialist and arrive in baghdad and make your way to the prison. Tell us about abu and the signs that things were not the way they should be. Guest im asked this question a lot about the first impressions, and i try to think about i remember the image of pulling into the prison in who i was with and what i was wearing. But it was such a large complex more than i thought and a lot of us had the impression of an vast number of prisoners most of whom were in outdoor camps, and you could sort of see them standing there and this is not what i thought of as interrogation and my image was still of the first gulf war with thousands of iraqis surrendering and heading back behind the enemy lines and being processed. But, here we were out in what was essentially one of the most dangerous parts of iraq at the time. Essentially halfway between falluja and baghdad. More rounds came in, and this wasnt my impression of how a prisoner of war camp was run. You didnt interrogate prisoners in combat. You removed them from the zone and more importantly for the safety of the actual prisoners. So, in terms of when i knew something wasnt quite right even before i thought about the issue of interrogation most of us were sort of confused by why it had been arranged this way. Host interesting. Do tell a story in the book about receiving these prisoners for interrogation, and getting little to nothing about them in terms of intelligence implied they were picked up engaged in anticoalition activities. What does it mean to be engaged in the anticoalition activities . Guest it was an Impossible Task. Most of these prisoners were ground up by young infantry soldiers on this Impossible Mission and in those cases, they didnt think that they were going to be sent back to prison. It was just such a confusing place. They would go to a house where someone had shot at them and wound up everyone in the house and they would deny having done it. Then they had to move onto the next mission. Then they would end up abu grave and have paperwork but as you mentioned, the good number even maybe the majority had this phrase detainee expected that the anticoalition activity. The other praise, detainee seen running from an explosion. And if you run from that, you are somehow potentially involved. We had a sort of standing joke that the best way to not be captured in iraq was not run from the scene of an explosion. Either run towards it or stand. An Impossible Task for the guys out there. Its also a breakdown in what was going to happen. They were not just being sent back to a safe place to be held until the end of the conflict which is how they thought of it. They were being sent back to these prisons are the fault was the would gather intelligence from people that had no connection to any kind of valuable information. Host so your job is to sit down with these detainees, talk to them and figure out what their involvement may or may not have been in anticoalition activities and you talk about in the book how the first few weeks are fruitful and you have this sad story about recommending detainees is not being a threat to the forces and tell us a little bit about that experience. Guest it was a part of the insurgency and that they had access to the information that we needed to get, but there were many others into there was no way to determine why. Or others have been brought in. One gentleman in particular said his son is suspected of being part of an anticoalition. His father, his family wont give up his location so until they do fo undertaking the fath. They would say even if i am going to give up my son which im not, how could i possibly know where he is . You tell me where he is. So a lot of these initial reports i would write a prisoner, the detainee i use the word detainee that since they were prisoners detainees not a threat to the forces and my impression is that they were not going to insert a riot. Buthey were to be sent for relee and so on most all of the initial interrogations i recommend it for release in we were told this is what was happening. Again my connection to this mission believing in it so strong i didnt want it to seem as the week guide running for release, so they changed it to a. Its a potential threat to the coalition forces. In the traditional line of the interrogation when did the interrogation starts to cross the line in your mind and i know this has been shifting even as you look back over the years but am curious to kind of what you saw. There were no discussions on the interrogations they were correct i spoke arabic and the and theyl needed a translator in the beginning. Once they realized they spoke the language, they were desperate to talk to me about the conditions in the prison, and i could hold a long conversation. But all around me, i was aware that this technique, which are torture and i still use the phrase enhanced interrogation in that iranian torture is an enhanced interrogation. You could hear it in the sort of what i assumed were chairs and tabletables and you get your plr plastic crashing up against the walls. They were talking about stress positions, sleep deprivation, when do i have to let them sleep, they were talking about food and isolation and deprivation and now its behind closed doors as if we were huddled together and somebody walked by bees were open conversations, so i was well aware that these techniques were being used and it wasnt something that i considered. But the longer i stayed in prison i still thought i was part of that mission and i was obligated to try some of these techniques. Host as a lawyer we are always thinking about where the lines are in you talk about at one point in the book they talk abouthe linesin the interrogatin about the lawyers. Talk about that and how that guest there is a field manual for everything in the military, cleaning the weapon, putting the uniform on the right way, fixing a humvee or helicopter. So they would have what are called motor pool mondays and everyone would have to go and check the humvee. There was someone there with a field manual in hand to say we all hated him and it just wasnt the way that the army kind of worked. So in this discussion about the Army Field Manual the vast majority of us were. We dont operate by field manual. We operate by giving the Mission Accomplished into doing essentially what we are told and what is necessary. While there were some discussions about recognizing that there are certain the field manual sets of surface features a there is discussion that you need to be created and that is the story here i was hearing about a nazi interrogator that have been successful through the reporter Building Techniques with the message was again at the insurgency continued to grow the message was that we need information that you need essentially find a way. Im not going to sit here and say that it was to view the stress position or sleep deprivation as my narrative, these are my mistakes and i own them. But it also wasnt done in isolation. I wasnt available and we were not doing this behind closed doors. Host the techniques are across the line. Was that in the consciousness . Guest there wer guest there were questions of what could be done. One of the things you were not about to do is threaten the life of a prisoner. You couldnt say if you dont talk we will shoot. But there were questions about can i do things that would frighten the prisoner or make them afraid for her life without saying if you dont cooperate with us, we are going to send you to egypt or a country where they know you may be executed so if you dont cooperate with us we will send you and i see that only to illustrate that we absolutely were thinking even within this world of enhanced interrogation, these were thinking about when its to the limits. Its not as if it were open season and you could do anything you want. In retrospect we know that there were places and it was open season. I would like to think if i had seen some of the thing is recorded like waterboarding or something called the disco room that had been reported in the use of dogs and people being put on hot exhaust pipes and burn i would like to say at that point no, but because of my own actions and where i ended up going into i in terms of thingse sleep deprivation and stress positions, i dont know that i would have been able to stand. Host utility story of being pulled out in the middle of the night. Tell us about that and what you experienced. Guest the vast majority were held in camps and was a basic prison facility with cells and an open day. It is the highvalue target for people that have been highranking members of this anonymous regime were respected. Still, knowing something about chemical weapons, because we were still thinking there were chemical weapons in iraq, or attached somehow to terrorism. With my highlevel security clearances i had in the army from my Law Enforcement experience, i was thought of as someone who could assist in these interrogations. Many didnt speak arabic and it was important to have the conversations with a translator that spoke a different dialect and you were never sure if you forgetting the full conversation. I would overhear these and say yes hes getting it right or he missed this whole section. So it was essentially to overhear the translators but then i saw something that changed the way that i thought about what we were doing. I knew that i was now involved in something that i was going to spend probably the rest of my life dealing with. Not violating any of these techniques were going too far but seeing them implemented was morally troubling. There was a great deal of men tied to their cells with their hands between her legs force foo standing which was an enhanced technique. Donald rumsfeld at some point said he stands at his desk all day, why cant i can see someone in a forced position has nothing to do with a standing desk, which it was torture. Again at the time coming up is hard to come to grips with the fact i was involved in this and i didnt want to violate the trust i had with my friend is certainly now after years of processing, there is no way to deny what was going on. Host so you were eventually shipped off to falluja. I want to invite you to read from an interrogation that you witnessed in falluja before i think he called the mayor of falluja at the time. Guest he claimed to be the mayor of falluja but it turned out that in fact he was. He had been involved in an attack on the local Police Departmentdepartment which a nuf Police Officers were murdered. So there was some suspicion of attack or have they got them inside and smuggled uniforms. So we interrogated initially, and it was a very direct interrogation. But then he was passed on to another interrogator who was placed in this palestinian chair. Where the name came from, there were rumors that theyve been trained in israel. I dont know if that is true because we as americans did this and we need to be sure that we are focusing on what we do as a nation. So being interrogated in this chair i had to walk by the interrogation. A flimsy sheet of plywood is blown open and outside your bound to the palestinian chair with his hand tight his ankles they force him to lean forward forcing all of his weight as if hed been trapped in the act kneeling down to pray. His knees frozen above the floor, hes blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest and he gasps for air. There is a pool before his feet and he moans too tired to drive too much pain. Host in this horrifying scene, one of the things interesting to me is how much of the public conversation about torture focuses on the waterboarding technique which is basically stripping someone down onto the board forcing water into the lungs and creating a sense of International Experience of drowning, the sensation of it. Indys positions, sleep deprivation you put that in the category as well and my question is there a psychological component to deal with the physical team that is comprised of the position and is the sort of what informs your view of torture. This package is the only component that is involved in torture. Torture. The physical nature of torture is just to get you to that psychological point. You dont have to lay a hand on the prisoner oa prisoner of ware them and we can talk about the terms of sleep deprivation. But if there were some people brought in th the pits done horrific things, i at times was tempted to put someone in the chair and use it. It didnt seem strange chair was a device and maybe that was an alarm bell. I thought i should try this and see what it felt like and another interrogator agreed. It was incredible. But what mattered more was the fear of knowing that you wouldnt be able to get away from that pain and 50 were not sure how much worse it could g get. Within a minute or two certainly it hurt but it was that momentary sense if my friend is ready to take me out of this thing when im done then i dont know where im going and that is incredibly frightening and i know that having seen his pain and discomfort wa there was the sense that what was going on and what was being created inside his own will and his own mind is what constituted torture. I think thi that makes me complt in its use but i showed up for an interrogation one night and another had been speaking during the day and wanted me t to ask might so add myso i did some paa few hours and woke him up and realized immediately that was an assault on this individual. That wa was the point of my involvement and any interrogation happened. Theres been a lot of talk about the idea going through law school or medical school were basic training is the equivalent and thats just insane and ridiculous and intellectually lazy. Sleep deprivation can be accomplished in a matter of hours. Within a matter of three or four hours that individual has no idea how long theyve been alive. And if you like four or five days and if they lose as you mentioned all control and rocket eyes they no longer have control over their lives and you can instantly stripped them of hope. Thats sleep deprivation. You dont need weeks or months us are hours befor hours beforee someone. Host one thing beyond the moral discussions of this for the interrogators and the idea that creating this sense of confusion and disorientation as sort of disrupting functions in this way how can that be the best way to actually gather information from someone and its interesting to you talk about some examples where you get quite a lot of information. One of the most successful is having cake with a guy in this book. Why do you think it is so focused on whether it works or not . How did you arrive at the narrative in your book . Guest because the world is so frightening and scary and some of the things we face now scare us is that there is a loss of a sense of control. The same thing you try to do to a prisoner to lose that sense of control is how we feel they face in this complicated world which quite frankly is no more complicated than the world has ever been. So the idea that you can force control on this person, the idea that you can force them to essentially cooperate with comforting in some ways because now you suddenly regain control. So instead of accepting that the world is so complicated and that the issues in the compassion and humanitys you resort to things like torture. This person is bad, they have information. I will get the information. And it is simplistic. And i dont mean to be demeaning. Ive been there and thats what i thought. Thats what we lacked was any kind of a voice that says this is the effectiveness of the technique and the ability to control another person has nothing to do with who we are as a nation. If all we are is a nation that says the best way to get this done then weve lost our way into things like the constitution and bill of rights. As a soldier i could swear on oath to protect the homeland or to protect the citizens of the United States. I swore him out to the constitution and two ideals. We have an obligation to not only defend the values of the constitution. But like enhanced interrogation violateand violates that in thet way possible. In the wake of some of these horrifying attacks, we absolutely need to do better. Host it occurred to me reading the book as you go through abu ghraib and falluja iimages of these identifications that your faith is tested and carries through this entire period of time and you really so youve come out later to talk about this as a sort of torture aspect of exercise, you knew that it was wrong at the time. I guess the natural question is why did you do that and why did you extract ourselves from the situation . Guest we talk about how similar they can be and the values that are found in the church so the army is an incredibly attractive organization in general and it was a very difficult to kind of extract myself and recognize that when i was doing was violating my own faith into so i was able to say yes while i see these as a san ascend and as moy wrong i might still have an obligation to be part of that. For anyone that hasnt served it is kind of ridiculous and ludicrous, but thats what we do when we put on the uniform of this phrase has become Something Better than yourself and that can mean Different Things but for me, it meant that even though there was a pull towards Something Like my face for the family values that have been taught or things i learned when i was younger in the Police Department that have to in some ways separate so from these things because this is what we were doing to prosecute the war again, processing that as they moved on but was a horrible moral failure in my part and on the part of those that were with me and did these things. But letting go the other question i get asked is why didnt i quit right away. You saw it coming you didnt like it, you could have quit at any point. The pull towards the community was so strong and the idea that it would was just kind of revolting. We worked as hard as we possibly could to justify what we were doing. But once i got home, it was in terms of being able to say that no, this is okay and now i can move on but i simply couldnt do it. Host and you resorted to drinking into the heart condition got worse and you were literally on your deathbed. Talk about that experience and how that may have kind of factored into or not your decision to go public. Guest it would have either stayed with the Police Department or with Law Enforcement. I may never have gone to iraq. Guest this isnt a book about addiction and there are some excellent books about the subject speak far more eloquently about it than i do. Anyone recovering from trauma find a way to self medicate and for me, it was alcohol. But the condition continued to worsen and as cardiologists to me that it would, i essentially faced my deathbed and now at this point i had already started writing about iraq and of my involvement in these things but there is no denial that im aware now the clock is essentially taking as a transplant recipient as healthy as i am now, retirement age is what it is about, so at some point i have a certain expanse. But there is an after sense may be to hurry up and be as honest as i can about these things. Host you are pretty careful in the book to avoid politics so it is a very personal story about your experience, but you came to dc last year and worked with us on an antitorture measure passed in congress and youve responded to some of the comments made in the president ial campaign returning to waterboarding and enhanced interrogation techniques. Talk about how to factore the fo your thinking about your kind of life story and why you decided to speak out. Guest seven Washington Post, my colleagues may not necessarily respond well. I did think some would support me and that would be behind me. But essentially all of them broke contact with me, and i havent heard from any of the missing. That is a difficult thing and there were people essentially saying you can do right thing. But the voices that mattered i have served with him i felt like i violated the trust and i have broken bonds of. A few years later the organization did reach out and said we are gathering these professional interrogators to speak about these issues down on the hill and i responded by saying i dont think that is a good idea. I dont think that they are places like the fbi or the air force i dont think they are going to want me around. I think my voice is malleable on my own and i have an obligation but they continued to push and i was there with open arms and it was an eyeopener for me. In all different places in the intelligence communities that were speaking out strongly against these practices and i remember sitting down with the Lieutenant General from the agency being incredibly intimidated knowing what i had done and sitting here at the dinner table. He was gracious enough to spend an hour or two speaking with me as a friend and showed the kind of affection and support for what id done and no combination, there were