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Zero dark thirty one of the most buzzed about movies of this awards season. Red carpet premiere for zero dark thirty. Film critics are raving about a new movie, zero dark thirty. The film gets its california premiere tonight. Tonight, the stars of zero dark thirty are out for the l. A. Premiere. Its getting a lot of oscar buzz. Narrator it was bound to be a blockbuster. Oscarwinning director Kathryn Bigelows story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden. Well, i think its one of those great mysteries of our time, i think its one of the Great Stories of our time, and these stories come along maybe once, twice a millennium so its a pretty compelling story. Narrator behind the scenes the details of the story were secretly provided to the filmmakers by the Central Intelligence agency. The cias business is seduction, basically. And to seduce hollywood producers, i mean, they are easy marks compared to some of the people that the cia has to go after. Narrator according to internal cia documents, the movies producers were given exclusive access to the cia version of history. It makes sense to get behind the winning horse. Mark and kathryns movie is going to be the first and the biggest. Its got the most money behind it, and two oscar winners on board. A lot of other people who covered the beat like i did in that search for bin laden we didnt get close to that kind of cooperation from the agency on telling the inside story. Narrator inside the theater, a raw portrayal of the brutal interrogations the cia said were crucial to the success of the raid. This is a dog collar. No the message was, you need to torture people in order to get the information that will lead you to your main target. When you lie to me, i hurt you. Where was the last time you saw bin laden . Where was the last time you saw bin laden, huh . The movie left the American People with the impression that torture worked and that without it, we would never have been able to trace the trail back to abbottabad and to find bin laden. Give me the information i need. You and i are gonna talk about some of the guys in training camp. I walked out of zero dark thirty candidly. We were having a showing, and i got into it about 15, 20 minutes and left. I couldnt handle it. Because its so false. Narrator california senator Dianne Feinstein was the powerful chairman of the Senate Intelligence committee. For years, feinstein and other democrats have told a different version of the story, one at odds with the cia. Its a form of propaganda so that the general public believes this is what happened when in fact, the facts dont prove that to be the case. Narrator the senators had access to something no one else did. In a secret cia location Senate Staffers had been authorized to examine a trove of highly classified documents. Dianne feinstein set the committee on this path to do this massive investigation. That was her objective to evaluate that question, were these methods that important . Did torture work . Narrator for years, Senate Investigators had been digging into one of the cias most secret programs to find the answer. Theyd given up six years of their lives in many respects to comb through all that material, six million documents, millions and millions of footnotes. Narrator the six million pages of internal cia documents tell the history of what happened. Theyre about the program. Theyre about all the prisoners that had been in cia custody. They are about the cables back and forth between headquarters and the field. They are internal memos about what was gleaned from the interrogation sessions. Its basically the cias own internal raw history of its program. Caught up between the senate and the cia. Narrator once the report was written, a bitter political fight broke out over making it public. The battle over making public a Senate Report on the cias interrogation methods. Narrator by december of 2014, feinstein prevailed. The report was at the printers. The report is from democrats on the Senate Intelligence. A report detailing harsh interrogation tactics. Narrator now both histories can be examined. While in cia custody. Narrator the senate document. How the coerced interrogation worked. Narrator . Versus the cias insiders. The headline is cia interrogations work. Narrator what the cia did. It was a good program. It was a legal program. It was not torture. Narrator . And whether it was necessary. The cia has lied to its overseers, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence. Narrator secrets, politics, and torture. Narrator almost 500 pages long with thousands of footnotes. It cost them 50 million to put it together, and it will include. Narrator the report is sharply critical of what the cia did. This is the executive summary, this is the declassified version and its pretty thick. And i got this in a recent meeting with the people who put this together, and i sort of jokingly asked, well, wheres the rest . Cant i take the full thing . And they said, to do that you would need a wheelbarrow. Narrator at the cia, they take great exception to the report. One mans name appears more than 200 times top cia lawyer john rizzo. This thing was put together reached conclusions, made accusations without ever. Any of its drafters having the courtesy to talk to any of us, to give us our chance. Its a hit job on most of us. Narrator john rizzos story and the story of that Senate Report both begin on the same day. phone ringing people screaming help Fire Department 408, where is the fire . This is another call in regards to world trade center. I was sitting in my office on that tuesday morning, on the top floor of cia headquarters. Im going to die, arent i . No, no, no, no, no. Im gonna die. Maam, maam, say your prayers. Police operator wheres your emergency . Trying to focus on this most terrible of days, i scribbled down words capture, detain, and interrogate. Were not ready to die. Oh, god fast busy signal beeping narrator capture, detain, interrogate. Rizzo says the cia hadnt done it for decades. I think the only word i would add to john rizzos capture detain, and interrogate would be the word learn. We had a lot to learn at this point. Narrator John Mclaughlin was the Deputy Director of the cia and john rizzos boss. The sense of dread against the many unknowns was enormous. And we felt we had a singular responsibility in the u. S. Government to stand between the United States and these terrorists. The massive investigation into last weeks attacks. Narrator in less than a week, the notes on rizzos pad would be transformed into one of the most sweeping covert authorizations in american history. The president signed a covert action granting the cia unprecedented counterterrorism authorities. It basically empowers the cia to take an almost unlimited role in the war on terror. A step up from where its been in the past in terms of dark operations and carrying them out. We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world. We have to work toward the dark side, if you will. Weve got to spend time in the shadows. All you need to know is that there was a before 9 11 and there was an after 9 11. Where did it all begin . Narrator at the cia, at 5 00 most afternoons, officers from the Counterterrorism Center came to the seventh floor to brief the top brass. As they try to understand how ten hijackers. Narrator they were worried about a second attack. It was tense, it was tense. The special activities paramilitary folks, all of the analysts would sit and brief senior leadership. And it was an increasing increasing drum beat of danger and foreboding. Narrator and in the months after 9 11, rizzo kept hearing the name of one particular suspect the cia was targeting. The Senate Report tells the story. Abu zubaydah was assessed to possess detailed knowledge of alqaeda terrorist attack plans. His name kept popping up at the meeting. Abu zubaydah was a committed, remorseless, psychopathic personality. He was widely thought to be, universally thought to be a key, key figure in the alqaeda hierarchy. Narrator in march of 2002, they found abu zubaydah hiding near the Indian Border in faisalabad, pakistan. They learned he was at this house. As they surrounded it, a firefight broke out. rapid gunfire then he almost died in the capture, he was shot in the gut. And you know, part of me is saying, well, i wish he had died, of course, but part of me is saying, well, thank god hes alive, we can talk to him get something out of him. Narrator abu zubaydah would never be seen in public again. He was secretly taken to a black site in thailand. Cia had no prisons. No one else, including the military, wanted these high level prisoners. We had to put them somewhere and we had to do it quickly. And thats how black sites came about. Narrator they kept him hidden on the edges of bangkok desperately hoping they could get him to talk about the next attack. We had never, certainly in my career, held people against their will. This was actually a new thing for cia to do. Narrator they knew the fbi did have interrogators, so they reluctantly turned to one of them ali soufan. Its about building a rapport with an individual. Its about building that chemistry. Its about building a trust a little bit, because if hes going to tell you something, he needs to have some sense of trust about you. Ali soufan is a muslim and knows the quran, and hes an fbi special agent. And hes able to go into a room and speak arabic and identify with the hot buttons that the person hes interrogating has. Narrator soufan worked to build Abu Zubaydahs trust. And practically the first words out of Abu Zubaydahs mouth were, im here to cooperate. Narrator soufan showed him the fbis wanted photos on a pda. Then a stunning breakthrough zubaydah pointed to this man. Abu zubaydah revealed to the fbi officers that an individual named mukhtar was the alqaeda mastermind of the 9 11 attacks. Narrator mukhtar was the fugitive terrorist Khalid Sheikh mohammed. We did not know that Khalid Sheikh mohammad was a member of alqaeda. That was a huge development. Narrator but in washington rizzo says he was told fbi agent soufan should have been getting even more. He was going too easy on abu zubaydah. Our people were convinced that the kinds of fbi examination techniques, their traditional techniques were not going to work with a pathological, remorseless, canny operative like zubaydah, so that we had to try something else, something more aggressive. Narrator it was clear to rizzo they needed to find someone special to handle these interrogations. Someone in the building has heard theres this psychologist who knows something about torture, and hes been doing some kind of contract work for the agency, and they said, try calling him. A psychologist, Grayson Swigert, be used by ctc to overcome Abu Zubaydahs resistance to interrogation. Narrator in the Senate Report, Grayson Swigert was the official pseudonym for this man James Mitchell. Mitchell and his partner bruce jessen were former air force psychologists. My guys were convinced that these were experts and that they had a very good feel and sense for these kinds of techniques and what they could accomplish against an intransigent personality like abu zubaydah. Theyve been running a program called sere for the air force, which stands for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. Its a program to train american soldiers on how they might be able to survive if theyre ever captured and tortured. Narrator the sere program mitchell and jessen wanted to reverseengineer had begun at the end of the korean war. Volunteers are subjected to the same brainwashing techniques employed by the chinese reds. Mitchell and jessen had created interrogation methods inspired by things the North Koreans and chinese had done in the 1950s. Absurd brainwashing efforts that we had always regarded as emblems of tyranny. The arsenal of psychological weapons confinement in the hole for hours. The interrogation phase. Here, the prisoner is subjected sometimes for hours to machine gun questioning. It was such a dubious venture from the start, but they didnt think twice. They were desperate, and they wanted someone who had the answers, and James Mitchell and bruce jessen said they had them. Narrator abu zubaydah had been in thailand for two weeks when James Mitchell arrived. It was time to get tough. His life will start becoming bad, you know . Nudity, music, loud music, sleep deprivation. loud rock music playing narrator in Abu Zubaydahs cell, fbi agent soufan watched as the cia theory was put into practice. Soufan saw the temperature manipulations, the slapping, the hitting. And then he sees this confinement box which theyre going to throw abu zubaydah into, and he gets furious. He said, you cant do this kind of thing. And i was really frustrated because i think that this is not going to lead us anywhere. I mean, this guy admitted that he never interrogated a person in his life, he doesnt know anything about islamic extremists, and here he is trying to call the shots. And at one point, soufan gets so upset, he calls back on a secure phone to fbi headquarters and says, im going to arrest these guys. He means the cia folks who are doing this, not the alqaeda guy they are interrogating. Narrator fbi headquarters didnt want any part of it. They removed soufan. Mitchell and the cia were on their own. Now they wanted to push abu zubaydah even harder. They drew up a wish list and sent it to washington. It made its way to rizzo on the seventh floor. I immediately recognized that this had bigtime trouble for cia written all over it. I didnt know when, i didnt know how. Narrator they called them enhanced interrogation techniques, or eits. Rizzo later wrote that the name was deceptively bland. Swigert mitchell provided a list for possible use by the cia. One, the attention grasp; two, walling; three, facial hold. It includes sleep deprivation, it includes waterboarding, being strapped to a board and doused with water to make you feel like youre drowning, and a host of other excruciating methods. Narrator after the 5 00 meeting, director george tenet was shown the list. George tenets first reaction was to turn to me, as was his wont, and say, is any of this stuff legal . So that was his focus. I do not recall him expressing revulsion or enthusiasm about doing this. As i say, his first reaction was to turn to me and say, can we do this legally . Narrator rizzo faced a daunting challenge. Theres an International Treaty that prohibits torture and any other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The law clearly says you cannot subject people to waterboarding, ten days straight of sleep deprivation, slamming them into walls and the like. Narrator but inside the cia bureaucracy, it was rizzos job to get them authorized. I fully realized that either way, someday, somehow we would be screwed. And the morality of it . Honestly, honestly, my main focus was to attempt to ascertain, to clarify with certainty whether or not any or all of these techniques crossed that legal line into torture. That was my primary focus at that point. The morality of it, sure i had views about that, but i did not view that as my primary role. The cia faced a real dilemma here. On the one hand, we knew this program would be contentious. On the other hand, we asked ourselves, wouldnt it be equally immoral if we failed to get this information and thousands of americans died . There was another 9 11 how immoral would that be . Thats the dilemma we were up against. And we felt a moral commitment to protect the United States. A stark reminder of the new terror climate in america. Plots against u. S. Shopping centers, banks, the statue of liberty. Narrator rizzo headed to washington to sell the program. He began with the department of justice, repeating what had become the cias talking points that the enhanced interrogation techniques were essential. The cia issued a new terror warning today. Narrator that abu zubaydah was a senior alqaeda leader. Alqaeda is attempting to get dirty nukes to set off here. Narrator and that they were certain he was withholding information. Today, the government issues a warning. Narrator lawyers at the Justice Department decided that the techniques would not inflict severe mental and physical pain, and therefore were legal. Although the subject may experience the fear or panic associated with the feeling of drowning, the waterboard does not inflict physical pain. Narrator the eits were approved. The final stop signoff from the white house. I did not want the cia to go this alone. I wanted to get, and george tenet wanted to get, a definitive yes or no from a policy perspective, from a moral perspective, from the white house. Narrator