Title: Inside CIA's Highly Controversial Enhanced Interrogation Program
Show: Dalton Fischer Podcast
Date: 2023-11-26
URL: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oy1T6iJH61g
Duration: 16:01

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[00:00] first of all let's call a spade a spade this is a torture program waterboarding was supposed to be the ultimate technique but there were a couple that were that were clearly worse than waterboarding you went to Guantanamo in 2002 can you say what you were doing there so at what point do you find out about the enan interrogation program well I was back at headquarters in uh

[00:31] May of 2002 and I was in the cafeteria and a a friend of mine from the counterterrorism center came up to me and said very offhandedly hey I'm so glad I ran into you I meant to ask do you want to be certified in the use of enhanced interrogation techniques and I had never heard that term before I said what's that mean he goes we're going to start getting rough with these guys and I said well what does thatan mean and he said well we're going

[01:02] to do and he listed these 10 techniques water boarding and sleep deprivation and you know smack in the face and all these different kinds of things I said that sounds like a torture program to me and he goes no it's not torture the president approved it and the justice department approved it and we're gonna we're going to start on it I said I I don't know I I think I have a problem with that let me think about it for an hour so I went back up to the seventh floor there was a very senior CI officer up there who I had

[01:32] worked for 10 years earlier and I said hey I just got approached and asked if I wanted to be certified in these enhanced interrogation techniques what do you think of that and he said first of all let's call a spade a spade this is a this is a torture program and you know how these guys are he says somebody's going to go overboard and they're going to kill a prisoner and when that happens there's going to be a a congressional investigation and then a Justice Department investigation and somebody's

[02:03] going to go to prison you want to go to prison and I said no I don't want to go to prison so I went back downstairs I said this is a torture program I want nothing to do with it so they asked 14 people and I'm sorry to say that I was the only one who said no two of us said no in the beginning and then one changed his mind but I was the only one in the end that said no I'm glad I did in retrospect I was right they were wrong but uh but things got much much worse

[02:34] before they got any better how so well they started torturing OB on the 2nd of of August 2002 and it was a slippery slope um they did many many many things not just to abuaba but to to most if not all of our high value uh prisoners that were never authorized by the justice department or by the president you know you can't force hummus up someone's rectum for example right you can't play Russian

[03:07] roulette with them you can't you know they learned abua had an irrational fear of insects and so they put them in a coffin and they dumped a box of cockroaches in there with him and then closed the coffin and they left him in there for 10 days just with a diaper you can't do that nobody told you you had permission to do something like that you know and waterboarding was supposed to be the ultimate technique but there were a couple that

[03:38] were that were clearly worse than waterboarding uh sleep deprivation right we know from the American Psychological Association which has done studies on this kind of thing that people begin to go insane at seven days with no sleep they begin to die of organ failure with 99 days without sleep the CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for 12

[04:09] days people died from sleep deprivation another one was something called the cold cell where they strip a prisoner naked they chain you to an eyebolt in the ceiling so that you can't sit or lay or get comfortable in any way they chill your cell to 50° fahren and then every hour somebody goes in and throws a bucket of ice water on you we murdered two prisoners with that technique that was never approved as a technique you

[04:41] know so we did all kinds of stuff there was another thing a technique that was that was considered to be kind of a mild no big deal kind of thing called Walling where they they roll up a towel and put it around your neck and then they shove you into a wall right well the wall it's a what do you call it fiber board piece of plywood piece of plywood whatever there's there's a little bit of give and they have the towel so that you don't get

[05:13] Whiplash but they never used a towel they never used anything around the neck and it wasn't a plywood wall it was a concrete block wall and now we have for example Muhammad atar the nephew of khik Muhammad who was slammed so mercilessly against the wall that he's now brain damaged to the point where he can't participate in his own defense they gave him permanent lifelong brain damage where does it say you were authorized to do

[05:43] that so it really was a slippery slope and nobody was ever punished nobody will ever be called to account um just uh just recently we're filming this in in early September um the last week of August of 2023 uh the defense department admitted that they cannot try Ramsey B aib one of the the 911 uh co-conspirators they cannot try him because he's insane he's clinically insane why is he insane

[06:16] because of sleep deprivation do you think that's [ __ ] though no because this is the pentagon's psychiatrist who's saying he's insane not his defense attorneys huh yeah now guess it goes back to your point before about you know you Consulting the your higher up at at the agency and he said you know listen somebody's going to go overboard um and yeah I read I read uh Jim Mitchell's book who was the Air Force psychologist that with Bruce jesson designed correct the AIT program and I

[06:48] and I guess the towel around the neck uh was supposed to be some sort of pavlovian conditioning where just the feel of the towel going around the neck much of it was supposed to be pevo yes it they called it learned helplessness that's what it was learned helplessness so all they would have to do is roll up the towel and the Prisoner would just crumple yeah so I guess it's worth just um

[07:19] giving some context to The Listener as to why these things were even done in the first place right so the reason why they were done is something called the ticking Time Bomb scenario the ticking Time Bomb scenario is you've just captured let's say Abu Zeda and you know that Al-Qaeda is planning something big because Osama Bin Laden said he was planning something that would dwarf 911 right and you've

[07:52] got to get the information before the bomb goes off so you say hey I was a beta give me the information he's like [ __ ] you I'm not going to give you the information so what do you do do you waterboard him do you sleep deprive him do you put him in a cold cell do you beat him do you put cockroaches on him do you put hummus up his ass what do you do now the problems with that are severalfold first of all all of it's illegal secondly there really is no such thing as the ticking Time Bomb that's

[08:23] only in the movies it's never happened in real life it just doesn't besides even if it did happen when you're torturing somebody they give you everything they think you want to hear just to get you to stop torturing them and so then it's going to take six months for the analyst to sort through it to figure out what's true and what's [ __ ] you know and by then the bomb's gone off anyway and again we're either going to

[08:54] be the international you know shining Beacon of Hope for human rights and civil rights and civil liberties or we're not yeah but we we can't have it both ways uh I mentioned a few minutes ago uh Ramsey been a ship being declared insane even if he had been declared sane nothing that he said can be used against him at trial because the CIA tortured it out of him nothing that KH shik Muhammad said nothing that Abu zubeda said or that or that ABD manesar

[09:28] said none of it can be used against them in trial so what do we do we continue to hold them illegally without charge or we let him go the bottom line here is the CIA royally [ __ ] this up and that's why every time the CIA would start to torture prisoners every time Mitchell and jessen were put in charge of the interrogation sessions at the black sites every FBI FBI person in

[09:58] the country would leave the FBI didn't even want to be in the same country where this torture was taking place yeah you know like I say it kills me to compliment the FBI but they were right and the CIA was wrong and here we are 22 years after 911 literally no one has been prosecuted for that crime no one yeah nor will anyone be prosecuted because the CIA ensured that no prosecutions could be carried out

[10:30] ironically you're the only one that went to prison for I'm the only one that went to prison yeah so last thing on this and I'm just playing a little bit of Devil's Advocate here because I think it's important to listen to All arguments like I would I would like to have you in here just as I would like to have Jim mitel in here Jose Rodriguez sure and decide for myself and I hope the listeners do the same I agree and I'm just I I I can't help but think about September 12th man and I there's a quote in tenant's book where he says something along the lines of all major

[11:02] foreign policy decisions after 911 were viewed through the prism of smoke from the World Trade Center in the Pentagon absolutely true so when I think about the intent of Jose Rodriguez of Jim Mitchell of Bruce jessen um I think about hindsight being 2020 the ticking Time Bomb situation frantically trying to save American lives when everybody was running around like a [ __ ] chicken with their head cut off when you look back and you think about the enhanced interrogation program what role does intent play for

[11:33] you I I believe that all of the people that you mentioned um had good intentions I think that this points to a bigger problem at the CIA where you put sociopaths in positions of authority where they come to believe that they're Above the Law and that because they're the good guys they can and should do anything that they want to do but I I'm

[12:04] confident that Jose Rodriguez thinks he's the good guy and that James Mitchell and Bruce jessen think they're the good guys no doubt in my mind um at the same time when there's a program that is as controversial and as potentially dangerous as the EIT program you need some way to put the breakes on it we already know that the Congressional oversight system doesn't work it just it

[12:36] just doesn't you can't have 12 staffers on Capitol Hill overseeing an agency of 25 or 30,000 people you just can't it doesn't work um at the same time the the oversight committees have been Have Become nothing but cheerleaders for the CIA rather than than the breaks on outof control CIA policies MH and you know when it comes to things like open criminal investigations the CIA needed to swallow its pride and defer to the FBI and they

[13:08] just wouldn't they wouldn't do it and a lot of that was because of of a guilty conscience of having fallen asleep at the switch and allowed night11 to take place in the first place but you know the torture program nothing good came out of it literally nothing um you went to Guantanamo in 2002 can you say what you were doing there it was an interim

[13:40] assignment um I was a big star after I was beta one of the Mony mucks came up and said listen we've got a an underlap uh do you want to be Chief in Guantanamo for for a little while and I said I've never been to Cuba I'd love to go to Cuba so it's summertime it's pretty hot I said okay I'll go so I went just filled in for for somebody until a permanent uh Chief was named what was that like being over there hot yeah and one of the things that that's striking about Guantanamo

[14:12] and I would I would guess that this is probably still the case is no one has any idea of what the the other guy is doing right like I'm used to working with people from a whole bunch of different age he like hey FBI guy how you doing buddy hey DEA guy keep up the good work oh you're the ATF guy we should have a beer sometime you know that's what that's how it is in every Embassy like Guantanamo you're walking past somebody

[14:43] you put your head down like who's he I don't know and I'm not telling him who I am and all that guy knows is those buildings over there don't go over there that's what do they call it OG another government uh other government agency they don't even like to say the letters CIA they just say OG yeah don't go over to that side and then like you can hear people screaming over there yeah it's not

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