Or does it elicit the truth, it just elicits answers just to make the pain stop then you dont have to move on to the complicated moral arguments. You say fit doesnt work we can skip the moral argument. Beyond that i think if you do move on to the moral argument, we cant set the bar as we have has a nation for generations to be the street cop on the world stage that enforces the standard for human rights that says to other governments you shall not torture, you shall not hold prisoners in communicado. Where does our moral high ground go when we engage in those same practices we ask others not to do because its convenient or we consider it urgent. Rose move the movie argo tarring and directed by ben affleck is how the canadian ambassador somehow helped some americans during the time of t iranian hostage taking to survive and get out. We talked to the actual ambassador ken taylor the form canadian ambassador to iran. Our thought was yes they were canadians, that was our fundamental starting point. We didnt quite care what they did in tehran. The movie team that we thought would work, canadians movie team. Sympathetic to the revolution, whereas the u. S. Of course couldnt send the movie team. And then at the u. S. , there was no moon in the United States at the time to be sympathetic to the revolution. That format in our minds would be effective in influencing the iranians to quickly pass them through and do what they could to help. Rose torture the movie, zero dark 30, the ambassador and the movie argo when we continue. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose the debate over the legitimacy of torture is in the high lines surrounding the new film, zero dark 30. The film has generated much controversy and will figure promptly in hollywoods award season that culminates with the oscars on february 24th. Heres what general Stanley Mcchrystal said to me yesterday. I think the ambiguity of the movie, im not arguing whether the movie is true or not but it forces the debate. It actually shows both sides of it. It shows the horror of torture, the cruelty of it but it also shows the underlying rationale for somebody who might argue for it. So it sort of puts it right in front of us that says how do you feel about this and how would you feel about this in the future. Its also easy to feel about it this way. If we go back to 9 11 rose and you hear the voices. Its different. But you have to set yourself a moral compass because long term i believe, my personal position, if you start down that path, we wont be who we need to be and we wont be internal to ourselves and we wont be perceived who we must be perceived to be. Rose the National Conversation is sparked by the film comes at the time of leadership changes at the c. I. A. State dent and pentagon. From washington peter bergen Cnn National Security analyst and author of man hunt, the ten year search of bin laden from 9 11 and from new york delaware mark bowden he is author of the finish and the killing of Osama Bin Laden. I want to talk large before we get to specifics. Ill start with you peter bergen. What do you believe about torture as a way to get information thats vital to the United StatesNational Security interest at the moment or longer. Generally speak its unethical and counterproductive. Ill give you how torture got us involved in the iraq war to a large degree. A guy was tortured by the Egyptian Security service and told them a bunch of baloney about alqaeda being trained by saddam hussein. That edged up as a key part of Colin Powells to the iraq war. Its not only unethical and counterproductive, it can produce misinformation and in this case costly misinformation. Rose therefore under no circumstances should it be used . Yes. I mean its sort of a principle lesson in civilization for some period now. Rose mark bowden. I think it has been a principle of western civilization much arneed in the breach. I do think that torture is something that ought to be banned because if you try to authorize it in any way, i think it inevitably leads to large scale abuses. Nevertheless, i do think that in certain rare circumstances, it is the, its the right thing to do. Although i do believe that anyone who take that step, ought to have to break the rules to do it. And then be in a position of having to depend themselves for taking that action. Rose whats the right give me an easy case for a right circumstance and a more difficult for an easy case didnt involve National Security but it came up a few years ago when a kidnapper in germany kidnapped a ten year old boy and he buried the child in a container alive. And went to pick up his ransom. He was captured when he picked up his random and he refuse to tell the police where he buried the child. There was a limited amount of time that that child had to live. The German Police chief threatened to torture the kidnapper who promptly confessed where he put the kid. In this case the police chief lost his job because theyre very strict in their rules against torture for obvious reasons in germany. Nevertheless i would argue that if i had been, i believe if i was that police chief i would have made the same call. Rose whats a more harder case . Well i think its more difficult when you are rose you dont know right. It isnt as clear cut as that. Thats why these instances are very rare. When we talk about the movie, zero dark 30 they present a very compelling moment where interrogators might well be justified in trying to coerce intelligence out of a captive. Rose john, in general. I think thats two key questions here. And one can sums out the other. Lets be cold and clinical because the question has a bunch nuances and complications and opinions. Start with the practice question. A, does it work. B, does it work better or faster or more accurately than conventional interrogation techniques. If the answer to question one is no it doesnt work any better or faster, or no its not effect it was or doesnt elicit the truth, it just elicits answers just to make the pain stop then you dont have to move on to the complicated moral arguments. You can say fit doesnt work we can skip the moral argument. Beyond that, i think if you do move on to the moral argument, we cant set the bar as we have as a nation for generations to be the street cop on the world stage that enforces the standard for human rights, that says to other governments, you shall not torture, you shall not hold prisoners incommunicado or do those things. Where does our moral high ground go when we engage in those same practices that we ask others not to do because its convenient or we consider it urgent. Rose do you believe its effective . As a reporter, and as a former National Security official and intelligence officer, i know f. B. I. Agents who say it is the opposite of effective. It elicits bad information, and skilled interrogators can get more faster through other techniques without having to touch anybody. I also had the opportunity to work with some of the very c. I. A. Officers who are depicted in the interrogation scenes in the movie who say we didnt know what was going to happen. We needed to get information right away. And you cant say it doesnt work because we got information after using these enhanced techniques as they call them clinically that we werent getting before. Now we have nothing to compare it to. We didnt kind of do the control tests where we tortured them for one set of information and interrogated them for another and able to cancel that out scientifically. Theres no proof it works any better than anything else and the moral question is so messy that frankly, charlie at the end of all that with all the National Peak i think the American People have kind of speaken on it. They dont have a taste for it. Rose what was it peter, after 9 11 because cheney and others said lets take the gloves off so to speak. Well the climate as know charlie, i mean it changed dramatically and the c. I. A. And others use some of these techniques. But just to pick up on something that john miller said. One of his former colleagues at the f. B. I. In fact derived one of most important pieces of information after 9 11 ought to be the most in the course of conventional interrogation, he elicited the name of mohamed from an alqaeda detainee which was really the key to finding out how the 9 11 operation was actually controlled. Rose how did he do that. Thats only such an interesting point. Yes. The guy that he was talking to, he used his childhood nickname. The agent im talking about is he chose the detainee i know a lot but. I know your childhood nickname. He treated him with respect although he didnt respect them personally but thats a useful tool in interrogation. This guy this detainee was brought aboard three times and none of that produced any information of any real particular use. He did fill in some gaps but it wasnt like this critical pace of information that came from the conventional interrogation. Rose what do cia agents people that you know within the cia say about what they got from water boarding during those years and all of those dark places they had around the world. Well as johns pointed out, there are plenty of people at the agency who say this was pretty helpful. None of them say by the way that any plots were averted. People ive spoken to on the record, Robert Richard who ran detail vision of the cia told me we didnt avert any plots. It was more about filling in particular holes. Described sort of a almost like a scrabble board where a particular detainee interrogation might get you a triple score because you had all this other form of information pocket litter that helps you get something and helps you get a triple score as it were on the scrabble board. But that is very far cry from we found this on bin laden through these types of techniques. Now the Senate IntelligenceCommittee Said theres no evidence of this. In fact the information came from other sources contrary from the impression you might get from watching zero dark 30. Rose well come to zero dark 30 in a moment. When did the country change its position on water boarding or was there a position to be changed . In the days after 9 11 and to be fair, it was the general assumption across the Intelligence Community and the fbi that there was another attack, that it was shrouded in secrecy, that it was coming soon and that it could be as bad or worse than 9 11 and there certainly were and this is documented other plots that were in the works. And the idea was we have to get ahead of this because we cant have another 1500 or thousand or god forbid again 3,000 People Killed on a single day not while we have a government standing that is supposed to protect the people. So there were these conversations that started, but when you get down to the ground zero of this story, it was a couple of former air force contractors that were working for the cia that were in the business of developing the tactics for American Special forces people who are captured behind enemy lines and how to resist interrogation and enhanced interrogation or torture and they said what if we turn this inside out and use the very techniques we teach our people to resist on those were trying to question. They sent a lot of memorandum to the office of Whitehouse Council and the Bush Administration and down to the Justice Department and they got a lot of opinions saying to a certain exat any time some of these things could be legal. Once they had that sign off a stack of legal memos saying they wouldnt be committing a crime the c. I. A. Started doing these things. Rose is there difference what the Bush Administration did and what the Obama Administration does. Obama administration does not enhance in interrogation techniques or the it ended during the Bush Administration. The Obama Administration has other stories. They engage in drone attacks. But torture has been a nogo. Rose raising some questions about what drone attacks are. It is called the killing of so is ma bin laden. Did torture play a role in finding Osama Bin Laden and killing him. Yes, it did. It played a role, it didnt play a key role but definitely speaking specifically, the fact that there was this fellow called ahmed from kuwait surfaced in a number of the early coercive interrogations. At the time the interrogators and the c. I. A. Didnt know who that was in particular so i would have to say the most important piece of information, and i dont know how we obtained it exactly was connecting that from kuwait to a real person ahmed. That was really the key. So i think those who argue that the hunt for bin laden really gained traction when we attach that name to a person can argue i think fairly that from that point and including that point there was no torture involved. But the fact that we were interested in this ahmed came from a number of interviews that are actually fairly notorious. Rose peter same question. Well look, the Senate Intelligence committee has spent three years investigating this question. Theyve written a 6,000 page report which unfortunately has not been made public yet and they basically say thats not the case at all what mark bowden has just said. They said the critical information did not come from a coercive interrogation. Both mark and you and i watching this program are disadvantage here because obviously we dont have access to the classified record. Whats available in the Public Record suggests that certainly somebody who did give up a key piece of information was coercively interrogated but it was the intelligence committees assessment and i dont think its a group of people prone to make false statements, that the information did not come at a coercive interrogation. Its also by the way acting director of the c. I. A. Mike moral released a Public Statement saying that is the not the case. I think what happens here is once you take the world of facts and really happens and you inject the world of politics into it everything gets blurry. People have said and its true that one of the people who was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques is one of the people who gave up the name of the bin laden courier. But the Senate Report points out that he gave that name up before he was subject to these water boarding sessions. So yes, both statements are true but you have to Pay Attention to the detail. Rose let me turn to the movie. Youve seen the movie. Yes. Rose so what does the movie say . Well, the movie has been kind of miscast by people on both sides of the argument. Theres a movie about torture or its not. Its a movie about a ten year hunt for Osama Bin Laden. So people who watch the movie, charlie, have taken from it what they want to extract from it in support of their argument. It movie shows people resisting torture and giving bad information. One of the iranianic turns in the ironic turn is theres a seen where hes so incoherent he gives up blurry information he cant make heads of tails of. Rose they asked for a date and he said monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday. He probably wont remember that and they trick him into thinking that he gave them information. That right there argues for if youre actually a skilled interrogation and you can trick people why do you need anything else. One of the big problems charlie is, at the end of 9 11 there were three principle groups, the c. I. A. Which spent most of its time since 1947 recruiting people by figuring out what their problems were or giving them money. The military which spent most of its time fighting wars and the f. B. I. Which had 12,000 agents who from the day they come into the f. B. I. Academy became professional interrogators and interviewers. And somehow they elected to let the intelligence people and the military people take the lead on the interviews, which they worked very hard at and tried very hard at. But wasnt their core skill set. And you know i think if we had life to live over again that would be something to reconsider. Rose did you ever engage in teaching at all or instructing at all in which you used the battle of algiers as a kind of explanation. When i used to teach terrorism courses back in los angeles with the joint Terrorism Task force, i would always start with the battle of algiers because as a historical document, it showed that the terrorists used terror to turn the people against their government because the government couldnt protect them. And the government went to such lengths to put the terrorists down that they became the other terrorists and the people turned on them. When you start a terrorism discussion you got to remember one of the goals of terrorism is to destabilize government and one of the risks is government will over react and destabilize itself. Rose peter did you advise the movie makers at any point. They asked me to come and look at the early cut of the movie. I advised them as an unpaid adviser i advised them the torture scenes they had in there were basically way over the top. And mark the screen writer told me subsequently that based on that critique and somebody else in the room who made the same critique they kind of toned those scenes down. But that said when we saw the film in october, you know, a film that was deep in post production. And the first 45 minutes of the film as you know charlie youve seen it half an hour of which are taken up and pretty intense torture scenes. Those of course make for much better film making where an analyst says i found something in a file and its really the key to finding bin laden. At the end of the day the emotional weight of this movie are the torture scenes and thats i think what most film goers are going t