Title: short clip of the full Dr. Phil ep
Show: The Dr. Phil Podcast
Date: 2025-04-27
URL: https://youtu.be/1K5-zKDaDV8
Duration: 15:00

---

[00:00] When was the first time you became aware of and had a problem with I guess we'll call them enhanced interrogation techniques. I had an inkling when I was still in Pakistan. Uh we we captured so many al-Qaeda fighters on the night of the Abu Zvea capture that we had to bring them into our safe house for interrogation in shifts in a patty wagon. And the first group of 10 came out of the patty wagon and they were all

[00:31] wearing hoods. And I said to one of the one of my colleagues, he was working for me. I said, 'Wh why are they hooded? And he said, "We don't want them to see our faces." And I I got angry and I said, "Are you seriously telling me that you have never read the Geneva Convention? It is a war crime to put hoods on them. Take the hoods off." And he said, "Stop. don't take the hoods off. And I said, I'm gonna report you to to headquarters. And he said, I'm gonna report you to

[01:02] headquarters. I said, fine. And I took the hoods off. And we reported each other to headquarters. And I was reprimanded. So I thought, "Wow, well, the Geneva Convention is crystal clear that hooding a prisoner is a war crime. I guess it's a new world. I'm going to have to get used to it." But then I got back from Pakistan in May of 2002 and I was standing in the in the sandwich line at the CIA cafeteria and a senior officer walked up to me very casually

[01:33] and he said, "Hey, I'm glad I ran into you. Would you be interested in being trained in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques?" I had never heard that term before. And I said, "Enhanced interrogation techniques? What's that mean?" And he said very seriously, he said, 'We going to start getting rough with these guys. And I said, 'Well, what does that mean? And he described these 10 techniques. And I said, 'Th that sounds like a torture program. And he said, no, it's not torture. The Justice Department approved

[02:03] it and the president signed off on it. I said, uh, give me an hour. I I need an hour to think about it. So I I just walked out of the cafeteria. I went up to the seventh floor of the CIA, which was the executive floor. There was an extraordinarily senior officer up there for whom I had worked in the Middle East 10 years earlier. And I knocked on his door and I said, I said, 'Hey, I need some advice. Uh, I was just asked if I want to be trained in these enhanced interrogation techniques. What do you think of that? And he said, first of

[02:34] all, let's call a spade a spade. He said, this is a torture program, and torture is a slippery slope, and you know how these guys are. Somebody's going to go overboard, and they're going to kill a prisoner. And when that happens, there's going to be a congressional investigation and there's going to be a Justice Department investigation and somebody's going to go to prison. Do you want to go to prison? And I said, "No, I don't want to go to prison." So, I went back downstairs and I said, "Look, I have an ethical and moral problem with this and I think it's illegal. I'm not interested." And I'm

[03:04] sorry to tell you that of the 14 people that were approached, I was the only one who said no. And so I I had a friend in the counterterrorism center who he happens to be a psychiatrist and a brigadier general and we go to the same church. We're in the same men's group and he came up to me uh a few days later and he said, "You know they're calling you the human rights guy behind your back." I said, "Yeah, I know. I've heard it." And he said, "You know that's not a compliment, right?" And I said, "Steve,

[03:35] I don't care. I'm on the right side of this and they are not and I'm sticking with my guns. What were some of the 10 on the list? Well, it started off with a few that were very mild. I I would not consider to be uh torture where, you know, you grab somebody by the lapels and give them a shake and say, "Answer my questions, dog on you." Um, and then it graduated to a smack on the belly. It was called an attention slap cuz it leaves a handprint. It makes a loud cracking sound. Then it was a slap in

[04:07] the face, but but it graduated to things like um water boarding where the prisoner is strapped down uh on a board. His feet are elevated compared to his his head. U cloth is put in his mouth and then water is poured on his face and it's supposed to induce a feeling of of drowning. In fact, in the case of Abu Zabeda, he did drown and had to be revived uh because too much water had gotten down his throat and his heart

[04:37] stopped beating. But then there were a couple of other things that I believed were worse than uh water boarding. One was called the cold cell where a prisoner was stripped naked. He was chained to an eyebolt in the ceiling like this. His cell was chilled to 50° F. And then every hour a CIA officer would go into the cell and throw a bucket of ice water on him. And we we murdered several prisoners that way. Uh they they died of hypothermia. There was

[05:10] another one um that sounds like it's no big deal, but it was sleep deprivation. So again, you're stripped naked, chained to that eyebolt in the ceiling, so you can't kneel or lay or get comfortable in any way. um loud acid rock music is is uh is uh pumped into the cell. These industrial strength lights are on 24 hours a day. Well, we know that this is according to the American Psychological Association, the APA, that people begin to lose their

[05:42] minds around day seven with no sleep. They begin to die around day nine, die of organ failure. But the CIA was authorized to keep people awake for up to 12 days and people died because of that uh that technique as well. So I said, "Listen, you know, this this is so clearly illegal." I had done some research on my own. We we have a law in this country called the Federal Torture Act of 1946, which specifically outlawed exactly those techniques that the CIA

[06:14] was now using. And in fact, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American PS during the Second World War. Furthermore, in January of 1968, the Washington Post ran a front page photograph of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the day that that picture was published, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamera ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested. He was convicted of torture and

[06:45] sentenced to 20 years at Levvenworth and then like magic in 2002 all these things are suddenly legal. Well, we never we never amended the law. The law never changed. We changed. We took on this this air of victimhood that because we were the good guys and we lost 3,000 civilians on September 11th that it was okay for us to do this because we had to stop this existential threat that al-Qaeda had become. Let's cut to the

[07:18] chase. Your savings could be in serious trouble. When Elon Musk is out here warning us to brace for temporary hardship, you might want to listen. I trust Preserve Gold to safeguard my accounts and I urge you to do the same. They're the only precious metals company I recommend. Are you going to sit back and hope for the best or take control of your financial future? Text Dr. Phil to 5050 to get your free precious metals

[07:49] guide from Preserve Gold. With gold prices recently breaking records and analysts predicting this trend to continue through 2025, you cannot afford to wait. As a bonus, you can get up to $15,000 with a qualified purchase from Preserve Gold. So don't wait. Text Dr. Phil to 5050. That's Dr. Phill55 today. Once you became aware of all this going on, how did you become a

[08:22] whistleblower? How did you actually do it? Only very reluctantly. And I'll tell you, I wish that I could tell you that I stood up and I told them, you know, that's not the way it happened at all. This was clearly illegal in my view. So I waited for somebody who was directly involved in the torture uh to come forward and go public. I actually got promoted on the strength of the Abu Zubeta capture and I I was promoted to

[08:52] become the uh executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations. So in that position, it's such a stressful position that you can only do it for a year. You know, you're in the office at 3:45 a.m. You're briefing the deputy director at 6:00. You brief the director at 7. So, it's it's tough. Uh, but it also gave me access to literally everything that the CIA was doing around the world for that one year. And so, I'm following this enhanced interrogation situation at a secret prison overseas.

[09:24] And um, I kept waiting for somebody to to come uh forward and and blow the whistle on it because people were writing in classified channels, hey, I'm a I'm a medical doctor. I took a hypocratic oath. this is not what I signed up for. I'm not doing this. I quit. I want to come back to headquarters. So, there were, you know, dozens of people objecting to this program. I thought certainly somebody's going to say something and nobody did. Finally, I resigned

[09:55] um to go into the the private sector. I wasn't making enough money to put five kids through college. So, I had to I had to do something different. And two and a half years after I resigned, I got a call from Brian Ross at ABC News. I had never spoken to a journalist before. So I didn't know about these journalist tricks. But he said that he had a source who said that I had uh I had tortured Abu Zuba. I said absolutely untrue. I was the only person

[10:27] who was kind to Abu Zubeda. I said I never laid a hand on Abu Zubeda or on any other prisoner. your your source is either grossly misinformed or he's a liar. And like I said, I didn't know these reporters tricks. And Brian Ross said, "Well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself." I said, "Uh, yeah, I'll think about it." A couple of days later, President George W. Bush is giving a press conference. And he looked right in the camera and he said, "We do not torture like that." And

[10:58] I said to my wife, who was also a senior CIA officer, I said, "He is looking the American people in the eye and he's lying to them." And then two days later, it was a Friday and the president had walked out of the South Portico of the White House. He was walking to the helicopter to go to uh Camp David and a reporter shouted a question about torture. And the president stopped and turned and said, "Well, if there is torture, it's becau it's because of a rogue CIA officer." And I told my wife,

[11:31] "Brian Ross's source is at the White House and they're going to try to pin this on me." So I called Brian Ross and I said, "I'll do your show." And I decided in the four or five days, you know, between that call and the show that no matter what he asked me, I was going to tell the truth and let the cards fall where they may. And that's how it happened. So you went on ABC News interview. You said what you said about

[12:01] what was going on and clearly stated you didn't involve yourself in torture. You were recruited. You were asked to do it, declined. Correct. But you didn't deny that it was going on. Correct. I said three things that that that caused the controversy. I said that the CIA was torturing its prisoners. I said that prisoners were um that um I'm sorry, CIA was torturing its prisoners. That that torture was

[12:32] official US government policy. There was no rogue CIA officer. and I said that the policy had been personally approved by the president. And here's where it gets weird. A, as you might expect, the the CIA uh filed what's called a crimes report against me with the FBI, saying that I had revealed classified information to the public. So, the FBI investigated me from December of 2007 to December of 2008. And then in December of 2008, they they sent my attorneys a

[13:03] declination letter declining to prosecute me. They said that Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Committee of the Red Cross, Red Cross had all published papers saying that the CIA was torturing its prisoners, that it was the worst kept secret in Washington. So, they declined to prosecute. My wife and I actually went out to dinner that night to celebrate. And then three weeks later, Barack Obama becomes president and he names John Brennan as the deputy national security

[13:35] adviser for counterterrorism. John and I always disliked each other. I never trusted him. I never liked him. And he was one of the godfathers of the torture program. All of a sudden, he's pretending to be whatever he is, a Democrat. I don't know. I had no idea that within days of Obama's inauguration, John Brennan asked the Justice Department to secretly reopen the case against me. And so for

[14:05] the next three years, my phones were tapped, my emails were intercepted, and teams of FBI agents um followed me everywhere I went, even into church. We learn later we we received 15,000 pages of discovery after I was charged. I was charged in January of of 2012 with five felonies including three counts of espionage. And remember espionage can be a death penalty charge and I had three

[14:36] counts. So, we we learned in Discovery that Brennan had written a memo to Eric Holder, the attorney general, and he said, "Charge him with espionage." And Eric Holder wrote back and said, "My people don't think he committed espionage." And then Brennan wrote back and said, "Charge him anyway and make him defend himself." And so they did. And then 10 months later, I went bankrupt under the weight of $1.15

[15:06] million in legal fees. And as soon as I went bankrupt, they dropped the espionage charges.
