Good morning everyone. Welcome to the american enterprise. My name is mark and thank you for being here today. Were 15 years after the attack of September September 11, 2001. For those of us who live through it feels like yesterday. I think everyone of us remembers where they were on september 11, 2001 and how stunned our nation was at the ability of terrorists to penetrator defenses and reeked distraction. What do they want, most important like, what else are they planning. Today we take for granted the fact that we know the answers. We know they were attacked and taken out by al qaeda and Osama Bin Laden and in the early days after 9 11 we didnt know that. We knew nothing about the enemy who hit us. For the operational commanding or who the accomplishes were. On pronounced us there is to terror there that were waiting wavearry out the second way. There is the case im not work and then the humbling network which was a network of Southeast Asia terrorists who was recruited because they could look out for arab men. On 9 11 we do not know any of kn that. Beginning in 2002 we began to capture senior leaders. These captured terrorists gave us information that allowed the cia to round up all key members of the network and dismantle the stop the attack they had planned. Today we are honored to havepla. Inte us the man who went interrogated these and those that save so Many American lives. So doctor james mitchell. In the 15 year sense 9 11 no one has heard from caps on hes been isolated from the world. Of hou doctor mitchell has spent thousands of hours with cancer and other operatives. Hes looked directly to the face of evil and he has come to understand the terrorist mind what drives and motivates them better than anyone because the v terrorist told him what drives them. For the first time, doctor mitchell sharing what cason told him including his thoughts on bushs response and plans for new attacks in my why ultimately thinks they will prevail. His new book, enhanced interrogation offers a an account of the terrorist Interrogation Program and with the men who plan to the worst terrorist attack in history and people who would do it again if they had the chance. This is the first time he is speaking in public at a form and we are honored that you chose to join us. N public thank you. The details of enhanced interrogation have been discussed and debated. Im sure we get to the q a will get into the questions. I want to focus on what you have learned from these terrorists. Two people understand the conversations that you are describing were not happened while he was strapped to a watee board. Can you explain the difference between enhanced interrogation, debriefing and what you call how you do visits. These enhancement interrogations that i was a part of only dealt with about 14 of the top folks. I didnt have anything to do with mid or lowlevel folks. Most of these interrogations took place over about two weeks. K sms took about three weeks. After that there is no enhanced interrogation. None at all. So our goal in doing enhanced interrogations was to get them to be willing to engage in the questions instead of enchanting and doing things that previously been doing. Her sort once they started doing that we switch to social influence stuff. We know the real way to get the cooperation you want. I coursing it out of him its by getting them to provide information in a way they dont feel pressured to do it. We had to be very careful when were doing enhanced interrogations, we werents. Interested in confessions. Ive dealt with 13 or 14 of the worst ones. K sm, [inaudible] ive dealt with a lot. None of them would refuse to identify what they had done. We were looking for confessions because that doesnt stop attacks. What stops the taxes intelligence. S actual the way that you would get the intelligence dealt with is getting through the enhanced isy interrogations as you can usee social influence after that. So what we did was we moved quickly to debriefing. The way that worked for the cia interrogation was questioning the person who is deliberately trying to withhold information and was hostile about providing it. It usually involves a possibility of some like youht might be authorized to do eips for 15 days but we would not dot it. As soon as they started working thth us we moved away from it. T. After that we would bring the subject Matter Experts and because im not the guy to ask the questions. You want the expert on whatever the question is they have. We would bring in the person who brought the president s daily daily briefs because he had questions to ask. Were bringing other people and said in there with a and help them without corporation asked the questions there hoping to get. Once they were willing to engage with the debris for we got out of it. We step back. We might monitor or see how things are going but you needurr your experts asking about certain things. Jim mitchell is not the guy to be making up intelligence requirements. Thats done by experts who are experts in the field. Irrele they would give me briefings on who these people were and was expected before we did it. Interrogations took two weeks and then the entire time there with the cia they were never subjected to them again. Never. So k so k sm had three weeks of eaps and the never again. Not even when they are trying to find out the location of bin laden. Or when theyre trying to provide information to allow us to identify the courier. We did not use ents because they wouldve been used to stop catastrophic attacks. If it wasnt an attack they werent interested in doing it. Since i work from them theyy werent interested in doing it either. They dont want to be people to find out where someone is hiding. Where so then they were debriefings where dealt with intelligencehort. Requirements. He a friday of other meetings with the detainees. In my book i call the maintenance visits becausee thats what the cia called them. Theyre getting sour because ofd isolation. They would stop by and play board games with them or go to the Basketball Court and play basketball you and think thatal from listening we did a lot of that. K sm was one of those guys, like yoda. Like yoda. Di likes to sit there and talk. You might play basketball but you went to that with case them, he wants to tell you things heas has two kinds of things he did he had one of those dry erase boards and he loved to lecture. O we are listen to him lecture so hed have something to do and occasionally something useful came out of that. Her thin the other thing you like to do is he would like to sit andan talked about was on his mind. He like to tell you about his religion i take all of the things they told me over the years from the beginning and bring them all together into one place and talk about it in one setting. G and i the things i read about in the book are not one session where we sit down and have someone on award of bork asking to tell us about the religion. That wouldve worked a mess not what we did. So thats to take people from the state a resistance to cooperation. Ly, so they never fully cooperated. They always had secrets they would protect. Coere is nothing they could have done to get us to tell us that month location. Pr but he told us inadvertently by. Line. Theres been a lot of people who opid it had nothing to do with they resisted and misled you. You get nothing of value and it was other means that got to bin. Laden. It is true that k sm lied to us. What is not true is that we did not know what that meant. It is true that lied to us. But it isnt true that we did note that meant. K a semmes nephew, after eits were done done were in the ksbriefing stage tells us that well [speaking in native language] told us so now are interested. So if he delivered a letter, we believe that they dont know where he was because in 2002 he doesnt even use electronics. Here we have a guy who is saying there was a courier using his jihad the name who delivered. So the cost said ksm says no, that guy used to work for me hes a protege of mine but he retired in 2000. He doesnt notice talking abouts we go back to the nephew and his nephew said hes fine. Hes lying to you. And so we think i wonder why ksm is lying. Most people dont know is they had established a secret way to communicate with each other, the detainees had. So ksm could get messages out to the troops. T messag but what they do know is that we knew it but we left it because we want to see what he was b saying to the troops. So he puts in a secret message, whatever you do dont tell him about the courier. So what we were thinking is that guy has to be important. Are thi here is a relatively cooperative guy who some people would say probably experienced the worst that you could experience in terms of eits, who is willing to risk going back to that to protect the identity of this one courier. Eventually they got the guy who got the letter. He said i never heard of that guy. I dont youre talking about. Theres not a guy like that. But we had been asking all these other detainees about him. So before eit [inaudible] was a man who worked with the highlevel facilitator worked with k sm. Facilita he says there could be two, three maybe more people working, with bin laden. Rk he is small group of people, could be him. Ays its after eits comments him, he does he does this he moves letters he works for him. Admit a this other stuff was a smokescreen. We had a detainee who said one of bin ladens wives gave abu a letter to give to bin laden. So you have to be thinking i wont give him a letter to give to my wife if i dont know who he is. R so all of these little clues fell into place. Then the brilliant men and women at the cia who are analysts and target is put it together. There is a partial true name for the courier that was already in the database. We did not know how important that was or how to find them. I interrogated, less than ten minutes a guy by the name of abu jan sir. After that he said this guy that you are interested in has a speech impediment. When he talks he talks in arabic and passed in. The agency was able to find out where that guy who spoke like that lived. The question is, because we knew he was living are likely to be living with bin laden. Essentially he had no outside contact. So then they try to find out whether or not bin laden was stained with the sky. And thats thats the process that happened. It wasnt the case simplysthe e hands were taped to a Steering Wheel and someone was cut their fingers a. It was hard work done from the cia. Some of the intelligence becomes actionable only when its placed in the greater context of what you know from everybody. Y. You already have the name of the guy who got it from someone who was in the program i we wouldve gotten it without this program anyway. E gone t the problem is when you roll up a detainee in the beginning there is a tell us everyone you think bin laden knows theres nothing about a single name that highlights the importance. Its like like picking up a phone book and say because your name is in the phone book that the guy whos gonna wrap the gas station. You need something to take you to that piece of information to highlight the importance. Unless im confusing this, its clear my book the guy who gave him his name thought he was dead. Who gi the thought he was dead. It was a smart clever work by the cia analyst who determined this guy was confusing him with his brother and the guy heg himi identified with was still alive. In hindsight this like doing a labyrinth puzzle backwards. Its easy because you know where theyre at. Im telling you the people who put this thing together not the interrogators but the analyst were brilliant. To get back into the intelligence database and review everything and piece together the matrix was amazing. On mike hayden is like putting together a puzzle with thousands of pieces by you dont have the cover of the box. Cover i may provided the picture on the box. The only two detainees that were denied muppercaseletter in the rest were providing bits and pieces of information. So most of us nobody has heard from cass some since 911, weve never seen an interview after his picked up. What was he like . In the book i call him a devil and a diva. In the beginning he was belligerent. Heres what you need to know about k sm. For two or three days he was w held in pakistan and he was a question to be debriefed by cia officers. In the standard nine coercive and they tried respectful conversation and one dressed upr in pakistani dress and spokeokef perfect. And that guy he described later as a calm. Most of the time k sm rocked and prayed and quoted the quran and acted belligerently. And theres a lesson here for today. Some people are saying you can get more out of these highlevel detainees with food and drink but that did not work for ksi. He told her, im not can you turn on my god for a handful of dates. What are you thinking. Because thats when he was describing the behavior of another person. Then he went into a place when he was treated badly there. Then he came to us. In each case he had not per two and a before the eits to answer the question with no correlation, just provide information. The way it works is we would do a neutral assessment in the beginning. I will commit a talk and say this is the information we want. So i went and said we need information to stop operations. We think you have some of it. We have reason to suspect that you have other operations of the work. He looked at me and told me youu might hear from you when i get to washington d. C. And meet the cowboy george bush and talk to my lord. And i said thats not going toho happen. So i asked several different a ways and then he looks at mrs. Soon youll know. Ll soon youll know. Then i go into great detail inea the book because i dont want to waste your time. But i had a spiel that we used which i would say in every mans life there are moments of opportunity. There are times when the decision you make forever changes your future and you cannot go back. I want you to be sure that this is one of those time. You have until i work out of this room to work with us. We know you dont knowit everything and that you might not know everybody is but you might know something. So the next time you see one of us things will get rougher but before that happens youll be given the opportunity to answer this question. Pp so then the next time he comes up before eit starts we ask thei the question is called the bridging question. The whole point is to give him a chance to think about it. Says belligerent and resistant and once he went to a state of cooperation what was he like . Charming. It was like visiting a master. Everybody thinks hes pure evil and he is pure evil. But what i used to tell the folks that would come after the eits were over i would say sometimes you rub the devils belly and sometimes you poke him in the eye. Were in the belly rub and stage. Not that they would really do i poking. But they would think they would need to be perry mason were some tough debris for. None of that is necessary. Unless you get sideways with them. Ry. If you get sideways with them heaven help you. Ive not seen this much raw brainpower in one place. Its probably the brightest person i have ever seen in myri life and ive seen some brightht people. He was very charming. That is often how evil looks. If evil looks to evil you can push back against it. If its charming they then you bring people into the fall. S a you get them to act. He thinks hes a jedi master and that these people out there who hes recruiting are jedi warriors. Tell me i am and a long line, what you dont understand is you have already lost. In all of the timeline the world is already under strict sharia law. I am a wire standing in my place. When i fall another will come j up. You have already lost. Fascinated with a think about it. They tell us about the time where he said go get the lady who writes the notes i have something important to tell you. Okay i need to be careful about the skins i dont want to give you the full story. L not do we were pressing him pass the eits we had a w md expert ine i their and were trying to figure out if al qaeda had nuclear material. On that, the reason for that and the reason the beginning it was as rough as a bus. Nn we had credible intelligence that ubl had met with the pakistanis that were distributing to the rogue states our outsourcing terror. The pakistani said the hardest part is to get the nuclearor. Material. And ubl said, what if we already have it. And ub so, the wmd expert, tim and bruce were sitting in hes probably been out of eits for a month or month and a half. Shes asking questions and shes done and she leaves away do this thing a call fireside chat. Sometimes when you take people out of one situation and put them in a new one the dynamicspu will pull them to act in certain ways. So we the interrogation is over. Lets talk about how that work for you. For you. Members who is empathetic and who can some like to better because he had some in case them had some and i dont. Bruce bruce says i notice you are uncomfortable at times. Sometimes when the lady would ask questions you seem like youre going to Say Something but then hold back. We had a couple of those like what wereen you thinking about that and he and go get the lady who takes the notes. It was actually exiting the questions. But the she had a islamist does something much of women. Go get the lady who takes the notes. We bring her back. He describes killing daniel pearl. He describes it cutting his head off and dismembering him and baring him in a hole. Cribes c i dont care recall if its me or bruce we asked was that difficult for you to do thinking emotionally that had to be hard. He said oh no. I had 12 knives the toughest part was getting to the bone. In the was sort of happy and it was creepy. That was when you asked what it was like the evil shines through. Es throu he referred to daniel pearl as daniel. In that tone of voice. What you have to understand isug that k is some thought that what he was doing to daniel pearl showed his god, k smc god, god god of islamist not the god of islam but the god of islamist is showing his gun how much he loved his god. Because taken the life with someone who is helpless toho ise prevent it they qc see isis doing when they burn someone who is in cages or crucified children. Taking someones life whos helpless to prevent it shows his glory. Its almost like an act of worship to him. G about so he is talking about daniel pearl like they had an intimate moment. After it is over were walking back to the cell one of the guards theres a lot of guards there said to me, that guy needs to die. And he didnt mean that wee should kill him, he just meant that the world would be a better place if that particular monster was gone. Tt lets talk a little bit about islam. We often hear that terrorist attacks have nothing to do with islam. Cass m told you about his views of islam and said islam is a religion of peace. I will answer that but i want to make one point first. Wants to cast them is an islamist. In my mind thats a person who wants to impose sharia law on the whole world. If youre muslim and not islamist im not talkina about you. When people talk about the ku klux klan i dont get insulted because im not a member of the ku klux klan clan despite what some media would like to believe. So dont say or dont take what im saying out of context. Im saying these islamist who want to destroy our world way of life have a set of beliefs that make them incredibly dangerous. Et what did he tell you about these beliefs . He he said islam is a religion of peace. One of the conversations i had was you guys are telling us islam is a religion of peace was that about . And he said that it is. When sharia law is imposed on the whole world we are rich. Legend piece because we are trying to impose sharia law on the whole world. Its not a piece because you have all these different groups. He said that western democracy and true sharia law could not coexist because we foolishly believe that we get to vote and how we live. That we can decide what our fashions are. E can de that we can decide the laws that need to be enforced. In his mind, how we are supposed to live was established 1400 years ago in the corolla and inl the perfect words and deeds of therprofits. I said how can you say that this freedom of choice in your version of islam and he said well i am free. The perfect words of the prophet mohammed and the koran tells me everything i need to do in my life so i dont have to make choices. I so i am free to do whatever is allowed. Its the exact opposite of the way i think. He told us that americans didnt have the moral courage to do will be necessary in order to prevent them from prevailing. He told me a bruce that on this is a conversation not what is being interrogated trying to get intel, he told us that our civil liberties, our willingness to be tolerant of other people, our openness, those were all flaws that all i had put into our character to ensure that islamist could win. Because they will continue to do what they do while we make excuses for them. 21. Is a cloaking device so they can operate in the open without being confronted. And that has, he said to me, that al qaeda. Remember when he did 9 11 he for of bringing down america with catastrophic attacks. The real way to bring down america was with low attacks because it isnt our capability, its the minds of the americans. He said we dont have to defeat you. We only have to persist long enough for you to beat yourself. I talked to a military commander that is a lot of attacks against americans and i was asking how he stages and bushes about why they didnt stay longer to try to kill more people and he said we only have to kill one in two americans because its not the americans we are trying to kill. If we kill enough of them they will want you to turn tail and run and when you do we will be able to take over. Thats the way they think. They think that our they think theyve been given a special position by their god and their right to dominion over the world. And im talking that theto domin islamists, not islam in general. They think theyve been appointed by their god to determine what your childsod t future is. And if they dont do that, this is what is so hard for people to understand, if they dont do that, then they will suffer. They will be judged and whether or not they participate in jihad and continue to do that in spite of all of the difficulties will be part of what happens when at the end of their lives there is this accountability. The piece that i come away knowing that i didnt know then is first off, the depth of their belief. I dont think most americans understand. They really do believe that there is a purpose. They believe they will end up with 72 spiritual beings and that they will be treated like rock stars. Never have to want for anything. They believe this stuff. It sounds ridiculous but they believe it. The point that i would make is the people that say 9 11 had nothing to do with islam, i would say i bet you in the worl9 trade center, there were people that fought the attack on the cole had nothing to do with islam but that isnt what the guy that drove the plane into the building thought. It had everything to do with islam and what we are doing that is incorrect im the one thats interested in finding them and killing them because i cant imagine a situation in which someone who has crucified a child were said to someone on fire in a cage or threw people off buildings or mail people to trees, i cant imagine a situation in which i would say to that person heres how it really is, we would like for you to like us and he would say ia didnt think of it that way now that you put it like that im going to quit doing these horrible things. They dont think like that. I say to them we want to get along, you know, we wouldve liked to get along with you there is no reason to fight the first thing they think is that as a weakness, thats something to do in your head so i can manipulate you, thats what he thinks. So we have to start thinking about terrorists the way they think about themselves and not how the victims think. Before i get caught up in these cia interrogation things, i used to do forensic evaluations for portable people, rapists, murderers, child molesters, and what the victim thought about why the perpetrator was attacking them had nothing to do. It mattered at the perpetrator thought. It doesnt matter what i think. Whether i think it has anything to do with islam or not is completely irrelevant. They told you it doesnt matter if we are in a religious war within. They said what you dontt realize is we are in a battle oo civilizations. You dont have the moral fortitude to recognize this for what it is. You may not be in a religious war with me that im in a religious war with you and we are going to win because you do not acknowledge that. Thats what he thinks. And if you think that, it doesnt matter that we would like to live with them and get along and all that. It makes no difference at all because they will continue to press forward. We heard a lot of voices on both the left and right as theal rise of isis has come up. They wanted to charge us into at quagmire in afghanistan. They want to draw us in and tell us their. They told you something very different about what would be the response to the attack. T toa this was years after theywn y were over. We go in and say what were you thinking. We sit with him and said what were you thinking, what did you think we were going to do when you knock down the buildings and attacked the pentagon and the wanted to take out the Capitol Building what did you think americans were going to do . First off, they were surprised the World Trade Center fell. He said i thought it was a sign that it was time to rise up and the muslims around the world that share the same mindset would rise up and attack america. Then i was lucky enough to survive the night. He said i thought you would do what you always do, turn tail and run. In 1983, the Marine Barracks in beirut is blown up. To us a in 2000, the cole was blown up. They make it an fbi issue. Was lk 98, two embassies were blown up u. S. Embassies, turned over to w the fbi, nothing happened. He said so what i thought was turned over to the fbi and there will be a long investigation. You ask them to extradite us and we would have time to pull offbp another attack. Then he looks down and goes how would i have known that cowboy george bush would say he wantedl us dead or alive and invade afghanistan to get us. He was befuddled. He couldnt imagine it. This ought to be a lawy enforcement issue. Apparently he was the only one who didnt know you dont mess with texas and its because of the attitude of the people that live in texas. He was startled by it and in fact they made steps to ensure the taliban wouldnt allow them to be turned over. They helped them kill the Northern Alliance theatre in an agreement that if they helped him kill that guy they wouldnt allow him to be extradited. He told us that he had been funding to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ars. Already had people lined up and i dont remember whether they were already in Flight School where they were on their way but if we had handled it as aas a lawenforcement matter, he would have had time to launch the attack and that there would be smoking guns in los angeles. What he said is the swiftness of the response initially they were just fleeing for their livesthee just trying to stay alive and it got them off balance. They couldnt communicate with people overseas that were frightened to do anything. Then when they started getting it on track again because it was disrupted or delayed initially we had captured people. What ended up happening is the people that were involved in that up being captured an of bee whole thing was disrupted. I dont know about you guys but im grateful president bush did what he did. Know, that every time they would call him that cowboy in that tone of voice. They thought that he was playing unfair that we didnt follow what the public before. And there is a lesson to be learned. This is a lesson going forward. They base how vulnerable we are by what we have done in the past few years. Look at what we have done in the last eight years and ask yourself what are they thinking now. I just dont think we can treat im going to make a comment that might anger people. We are seeing these attacks because we have been trying to manage it like a problem. We could quit trying to find people and find a way to live with them in our midst but that isnt going to work for these guys. So it might work for 99 of every w other. I wouldnt have an issue with you, good luck. But if you think the way is to crash a plane into the Capitol Building and kill all of our legislators i have a problem with it. I dont want to see that happend thats the problem. He told you a lot of ideas that could be carried out. Can you give us a flavor of thi kind of thinking and also how dangerous would it be if he were able to communicate and the outside world . It would be absolutely horrified. Al qaeda dreams of thesehe si largescale attacks but he got fascinated by the sniper i think they killed 17 people in and around here. He was fascinated by that and spent hours talking about it. Then he would talk about the economy of scale and what that means for planning attacks because thats what hes always doing he gets up everyday to figure out how to kill morey americans. Ning att and what he said was al qaeda is dreaming about these largescale catastrophic attacks and that would be great. But that isnt all thatrgescal practical. The target isnt our buildings were tanks were military. Its our mind. Its not going to be won with blood and bullets its going to be one in our heads and so what he said is we need lots of bubbles, he didnt call it that, he called it a single markers who would go into the American Culture and pull off attacks. With enough of those like happened with the beltway shooter it would cripple ameri america. I cant go into the attack. But he said what he can expect iwe can expectis what we will sf because likeminded brothers are were going to immigrate to the United States. Hes not saying that al qaeda is going to deliberately send people over although they have done that in the past. What he is saying is that other islamists are going to migrate to the United States, wrap themselves in our civil rights to protect themselves, live offt of our welfare system, spread their message and then when the time is up, rise up and overthrow us from within. He was pretty good at predicting the future. He said that to me in 2004. He was just a philosophizing. He held a lot of ideas on these attacks. They wanted to put them in federal prison. Prison. How dangerous would it be to put someone like him in a federal prison if you know there are networks from prison and a drug cartels are run out of prison, able to communicate in the outside world from federal prison while would that mean for our security . Nobody would even consider giving him access to the outside world. That would be crazy. Ld i have mixed feelings i have to tell you. I dont want him on u. S. Soil but ive seen a maximumsecurity prison. He would be worse off here. I wish we could build another guantanamo outside of the country. Country. Y 23 hours a day in isolation and one hour out in the yard and he is not allowed with anybody else. That would be a form of justice for him that i dont think it would have been that way. Let me tell you my reaction to having his confessions aside. Asn told me he was ready to be a martyr, meaning he was ready for the u. S. To execute him. When he got to guantanamo, he laid out a long list of things he had done, 28 of them, and he pled guilty in front of the military commission and then the Obama Administration said that aside because they wanted to try him in new york. Let me tell you what that littln monster thought. He thought this is a sign from god that im not supposed to martyr myself now but instead, im to continue the jihad in spite of the court system. As soon as i saw him do that i thought she is going to be the most obstructionist defendant probably in the history of the commissions and if you look at all the things hes done to disrupt that, you will see what im talking about. He is a master at that sort of stuff and he thinks god has commanded him to drag this out as long as he can because he believes that it will pull more likeminded jihad is typical. Some of the plots that he had conceived came out and people kind of poohpoohed them over there and said its ridiculous how much would you need. When you told him that he was actually offended. I went back to him except what is this business of poisoning reservoirs. Folks in the United States are saying that sounds crazy. He said of course it is crazy. I have an engineering degree from the North Carolina university and i was the chief engineer at the Water Treatment plant in i dont want to say the country but he was the engineer at a Water Treatment plant. He said i would try to poison the reservoir. That is a crazy thing to do. He said i would do this, then he described what he would do too the water as it left the reservoir. I dont have to kil have to teli just have to make people sick and if i do that, you wont trust the system. The point is to get into our heads not necessarily to kill us all. And he said the same thing with the gas stations. He bought a gas station in pakistan so he can figure out how to build a bomb that they can slide down into the gas tanks of gas stations all up and down the east coast and one of the operatives that he had had a gas route driving gas trucks up and down the east coast filling up gas stations. If we had done anything other than treat this like an act of war he would have been able to finish developing the system. I used to be a bomb squad guy. First six years of my life. I know one of the problems with building a device that use lighs on the tank is you get a lot of liquid so you dont get quite the burst the would like to have if thats what your intention is. T he is working on that. They have a gas station where they are practicing. The Brooklyn Bridge was the same thing. The guy was down here trying to figure out how to cut down theb. Brooklyn bridge. But again, a bomb disposal guy we knew how to cut. There were devices for cuttingb those cables on bridges. Explosive devices. He could have done it and he didnt get to because the president and the cia and the brave men and women in the military and the Intelligence Community did what was necessary to disrupt those attacks. But when he thought it was going to be in Law Enforcement was to do a little small attacks across the country to disorient us and send us chasing those things while he was planning for the library attack. Heres what they think if i use with fewer resources than thats jihad. So if im planning a great big attack and youre sending the fbi after me and i have multiple smaller attacks all over the country, you have fewer resources to send my way so that gives me some cover to do that. N brilliant man. Is that during the campaign, donald trump said we are going to bring back waterboarding and then after meeting with the general he said he told me thate never really worked for him and we are going to use cigarettes and beer to convince. I dont know that that wasnt taken out of context. You know how things get taken out of context when somebody says something thats a good soundbite. I want to give him the benefit of the doubt but im perfectly willing to address that. We know that it didnt work because he had two days ofto conversations and t. All he did is rock and pray and talk to the interrogators so there was plenty of opportunity. Would you do something that would get americans killed or captured by isis or al qaeda. Asn would do that either. Somewhere between waterboarding and worse i than whats in the Army Field Manual i think there needs to be some form of legal coercion to move them along so you can start using socialal influence to get them talking again because heres the way. Have you ever known anybody with a dental phobia . When do they try their hardest to get out of the dentist, when they are reaching for the door they are looking for any kind of excuse not to go inside so what we found because of the way we put the program together is when they were likely to give upwas information was before the next. Session started remember i told you we would ask them if urgg question we might ask where he got his tie. When its over i say to him go back and think about this that doesnt have to happen this way. Next time you come out im going to ask you where you got that tie and if you tell us it wont happen. We dont want to do this. The next time they bring him out and pull th pulled the hood offd first thing we asked him, where did you get that tie into peoples us, none. Its like a dental phobia in the sense where we got this actionable stuff there was never a case we were waterboarding and someone saiinto someones have s about the rest of the pack. What we told him is we know you have something that can help us. We know you dont have everything but as yo has you are laying there you were thinking of something. Thats what we want to know. More often than not when you ask them the question we could switch to the social influence stuff. There is a phenomena i dont know if any of you have heard of it. Most of us have experienced this we make a commitment to ourselves to never, ever again have a hostess ding dong. Not going to do it. I draw a line in the sand, then somehow accidentally i end up with a bag of dingdongs and i eat the first one i dont put the bag down or sped out of my mouth. I. E. The rest because once you get past this thing you said you were never going to do, your resistance collapses and its the same thing with those people that are hardcore about withholding information. The other thing in terms of social influence, theres a phenomena called the anchoring effect if i want you to think the price im asking you i getut you to think about a number that is a lot higher than that because then you will see thatea doesnt sound like that much. It doesnt have to be related to the dollar or whatever youre talking about. It can be the temperature of the sun can you tell them you want 1,500 it wouldnt sound like very much. Sometimes when youre dealinguc with theyou are dealingwith thee moving, they resist different questions to different levels. They dont have the same level of resistance to every intelligence requirement so we might ask them and intelligence requirement they didnt want to talk about so they put up some resistance and get apprehensive about it and dread whats going to happen next and then we askex them a Real Intelligence requirement and they experience relief when they get a chance to talk about it because we are off this other topic. All we are doing is tricking their learning system so they begin to experience relief. Its much more sophisticated than what some people in the cia and everybody in the press box hurts them until they tell you what you want to hear and to change their story. Im not saying that didnt happen. Id some people that were not trained and did thing things the not supposed to give those kind of things. But the cia when the leaders found out about it they were referred to the Justice Department and have accountability boards and they did what they were supposed to do. With a more responsible organizations should do. But in the official highvalue i detainee program, we had no interest. In my book i talk about the preacher. The preacher didnt want to do that because if you did that sort of stuff i might be able to get you to call me where you got that tie one time by doing this sort of thing i described but i dont want you to tell me just where you bought the tide. I want you to help me interpret this letter and tell me who gave that 500,000. I want you to tell me things beyond the simple question because one of the things that happened that we noticed early on i feel like im rambling but i will share this with you. Once things start to is a sin in their religion in the way that that version of islam that they have is they send. As i said before, told the story hed gone to it and went to a state of resistance and he said we dont want to do this. We didnt like doing thatat stuff and in fact, you should never have anybody doing stuff like that who looks forward to it because it is just a horror thing. It was more like a surgical suite, we had all these guards. Anyone could stop the interrogations anytime they wanted to, at least the ones we were involved in. So he moves out and had been working with us for months. It is the cole bomber that gets caught. I go on a rendition and we do the neutral assessment of the places and we come back and no we have to use them on him because hes unwilling to provide a piece of information. He is willing to tell us everything about the attack butt we are not there to get aa confession. I wasnt sent there to be a Law Enforcement officer or to be a Mental Health worker. I was sent to you is what i know about psychology as a weapono against people that are trying to destroy us by getting them to talk to us. So we went and said we dont want to do this. We dont want to use the eit. You have to help us. Tell us how we can get aroundan this. He said you have to do this for all. Literally im thinking what. He said if they help you it is a sin and they will suffer the torment. So you have to do this for all. He said not more, just enough. If you use more than is required, he will know that and punish you and if you use less than is required and he gives up the information, he will punish you. He doesnt expect me to pick up thmountains because he knows i cant do it or to carry a burden that is too great to bear. So the brother has to be pushed to the point that he is right with his god so that he can not suffer the torment. So when he says you need to do this to everybody, im starting to not like it. He said some brothers cantt sd stand anything. Its not because i necessarily think it was. Ful. He said no hard times for them. They already know they cantt hold out and it would be a sin and he would punish you if you do bad things. For the other brothers to do something you could do to get them to talk. No way something physical could get them to talk. They know that and if you try and hurt those people, then he will punish you. Theres all these people who need to resist to the best of their ability and then when the burden is great they can send it down and freely talk to you without worrying about the torment. It helped me to shift my perspective. It got me focusing on what is in their head and how are they interpreting wha what we are dog and for example, this burden that is too great to bear, i wanted a way to suggest to him he didnt have to continue to use. So i used what they told me. I stopped and said i dont know about your god but mine knows at some point im going to put it down. Im not telling him what islam w thinks. Did i answer the question . Likby dont we take some questis over here, yes. I want to go back to a point that he made earlier. Can you describe what you received from the American Psychological association let me respond to the American Psychological association thing. Those people are not part of my life and i dont care what they think. It was full ofmi mischaracterizations at the suggestion somehow that they colluded with the psychologicala association to justify enhanced interrogation has had zero impact. Second question i think the American Public needs to have a debate. What are you going to do when you have credible evidence of another pending catastrophic attack where we didnt know any better that could involve Nuclear Weapons and the person t you are interrogating him andin isnt respondinand isntrespond. There are people in the is government say we expect the cia interrogators the do the rightol thing. We would think that intonto consideration. What ive said before is at some point if this upsets the Political Correctness continues we will be standing on the moral high ground it used to beat several blocks in los angeles. In the past we turned them to other countries. Its been used more often that its used its meaning. If it was torture they wouldnt have to have a law passed. At the highest justicent department in the land one time after i personally water boarded an assistant attorney general before he made the decision three or four days later so when the attorney general got off the water board would have been anan excellent time to tell them. He didnt say that at the time. I water boarded almost as many. I need one and i can get that off my bucket list overlaid with the willing to do more than one. It sucks but if it is done properly, im not advocating waterboarding, i didnt like it. Waterboarding was stopped by the cia it was the interrogators that wanted to stop it. T we said that the person thats working with us there is no point to it. I had two thoughts and then i got off on a rant. I have a concealed carry permit, my house has more stingers, i m shop thousands of shards. My entire military career was spent learning how to defend myself its not my future they are coming for. A the American Public has to decide what they want. What are they going to do when d they get credible intelligence but it doesnt work, they donti care. If lawenforcement techniques would have been working the would have never been there. The worst of the worst thatus there needs to be some sort of t strategy to think it through. I am a fulbright fellow and my question is even though yous differentiated, it offers an area to recruit. At the number of people have been recruited to these main groups. That is a complex question. Let me give you the answer. We we used to have a thing called to this think tank. We captured somebody and could go to each one of them one after another so i could show the surveillance photo and he would say this is so and so. Weve been training him to go to the United States and the thing that we lost when they were transferred to guantanamo is the think tank where we could ask how would we go about doing that because obviously that is how we should have been able to answer the question but its not how we can. Thank you for coming. Can you tell me the process as i understand that lead your company to be selected . The company existed in 2005. It was an opening bid using the contracting walls. Its evaluated the same way. We expect it to be an open bid for the companys. They want to know what the decisionmaking process is. I dont know that the ceo of the Company Needs to speak the language everybody else does. The most brilliant interrogator that ive seen is the man that wrote the oped in the weekly standard. He speaks fluent arabic. Please keep an open mind about why people do what they do. I think for my perspective it seems like its more of an issue of prevention and management than just winning. All they are going to do is retreat. You you have to treat the vectors and the source. Instead of confronting them, wet try to get them to like us enough they wont attack us and all that does is convey to them we are weak and they put in our mind this thing. Somebody said it doesnt represent a threat to the United States. Ive been right at the point off the spear. They cannot kill enough americans to bring down the government that the government doesnt exist to presen presents demise. I understand why you do what you do and i would do this myself to protect the country and the ideology. But your country is going to turn on you. The American People will turn on you. They will portray the war against islam as too difficult to when he and the American People will turn on you and all that will do is bring joy to the hearts because the people see ys weak and divided. S they crawl back out from under t the rock. We were to walk right up to the line and we depended on the department of justice to tell us what that was and they had four or five chance to send each time they told us the same thing. It wasnt part of the official program and when the leaders of the cia found that those things out, they took the appropriate action. 40 said sometimes i am not for illegally torturing anybody. If it is torture, dont do it. If our government believes the death of 3,000 people because you want to use the Army Field Manual is the way to go its not an Access Control threats to the people that live around this ths area. I would expect the American People wouldnt put up withith that. Im advocating that we have a debate about this because one of the underlying assumptions is they have the right to remain silent and these people have taken up arms against us have the right to so they can tell us. They couldnt do anything to stop them. They could stop the instant they said i will answer that questi question. They would have gone away than they did as quick as we could. I have four kids. Because of what you did on behalf of millions, thank you for keeping the country safe and for joining us today. [applause] the book is about me that i wasnt the only one there. I by no means deserve the bulk of the credit. The men and the women can keep us safe from our enemies but not from ourselves. Jim will be signing copies outside if you are interested. An audible conversations [inaudible conversations] the new jersey senator has a book club that moderates the conversation about a book that he is reading. Recently on his Facebook Page he hosted a question and answer session with elizabeth whose book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015