When youre staring at an ironclad complicity rap from a

general public and liberal base looking for some sign that you
stood athwart the black site gates and shouted, Stop! yet no
such evidence exists or is forthcoming.
When youre putting the final touches on a report that
somehow cost the taxpayers 40 million dollars, the content of
which you characterize as shocking, brutal, and un-American,
while looking for a way to extricate yourself and your
colleagues from the role of enabler for that which will
undoubtedly shock, albeit with intent.
When your unanimous and full-throated opposition to the
program you once supported hinges upon the notion that it
was not only immoral, but ineffective because how can you
explain shutting down a program, however objectionable,
which was effective at pulling actionable intelligence out of
high value Al Qaeda leadership detainees?
When the President who signed the executive order shutting
down the program, having actually seen the intelligence after
being inaugurated and spoken with the leadership at CIA,
changes his campaign trail characterization from It didnt
work; people will say anything to make it stop to Even if it
did produce some information, we dont know if we could have
gotten that information using standard techniques.
When the famously Democratic former director of the CIA,
Leon Panetta, states that the program provided valuable
information used against Al Qaeda terrorists but is compelled
to attach the Obama administration caveat that he also doesnt
know whether we could have gotten the same information
using different techniques.

When the only viable narrative remaining is that it was

approved by Democrats briefed on the program, it had the full
support of briefed Democrats until it (and the notion of their
support) became public, those same Democrats then
characterized it as ineffective and immoral, yet significant
doubt remains after credible claims that information gathered
in the program led to Bin Laden.
When faced with all of that, what do you do?
It all hinges on complicity, doesnt it? Your only possible
recourse is to claim that your approval was based on faulty
briefings that you were lied to by the CIA, and that the
program you approved, supported, and paid for was vastly
different than what was actually carried out in those black
sites. Then, to tie up the pesky effectiveness issue, youve got
to attack the information find a way to accentuate the
negative and minimize the positive.
But youre going to need some help. You can count on the
media and various pundits to advance your position in an
incurious and uncritical manner, but youre savvy enough to
understand that the media has been on board since 2005, yet
you still find yourself in a relatively delicate position.
So first, youve got to count on the silence of the briefers
youve got to hope that they are either still in the CIA employ
and legally bound to remain silent, or at least more silent than
you (whose silence is equally bound, yet unequally enforced).
If they do find an avenue to challenge your claims of ignorance,
you can then turn to the media to shut that down (Of course
theyre going to say that their reputation is on the line.
Theyll say anything.). Same thing goes for former

Directors attack the messenger, assassinate the character,

question the motive, and let the media do the rest.
Next, youve got to do some leaking. Activate the Staff-Int
channel to the media, get the story you want out there and let it
ride. Leak the portions of the classified report you find most
damaging to the program and beneficial to you. Get all of
those former military interrogators and FBI agents out there
fired up and ready to go and count on the media to not
scratch too deeply the surface of their actual experience or
motivation, or to ponder for a moment the notion that a former
interrogator who has never employed enhanced interrogation
techniques but has a book to sell would be an appropriate
arbiter of the truth an expert from whom to report the
truth about torture.
What are they to do, these Democratic politicians facing the
dilemma of damning a program they fostered in the secretive
darkness of a top-secret post-9/11 briefing room, only to claim
ignorance and dismay in the harsh light of the post-2005
Washington Post expose? How can they pull it off?
In this case, they were presented a gift a life raft on which to
float their conspiracy theories, half-truths and cherry-picked
condemnations of a successful program they now have no
choice but to destroy. They got their hands on millions of
pages of top-secret cables, internal memos, emails and briefing
documents from the beginning to the end of the program.
Every word put to paper; every email argument over tactics
and techniques; every mistake laid bare, examined, and
rectified in official traffic; every doubt shared with colleagues;
every poorly-worded interrogation report; every disproven
analysis of current intelligence; every start and stop along the

interrogation and debriefing spectrum of each detainee. In

short, everything ever put on paper regarding the
deliberations and day-to-day administration of a top secret,
clandestine program involving the interrogation of Al Qaeda
terrorists.
So indulge me for a moment and briefly strip yourselves of any
ideological or political bias here step away from any
preconception or belief you may hold regarding the program,
and give me your honest impression of what you would
anticipate, faced with the above-described dilemma, the
Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee staff may do with
the entirety of CIA records and communications throughout
the disputed interrogation program.
Theyre going to produce something shocking, brutal, and unAmerican, arent they?
The staffers themselves will tell you that you can take the
entirety of internal communications belonging to any
government program in the history of government programs,
flip a coin to predetermine a positive or negative outcome, and
find enough supporting evidence to produce a convincing
report characterizing the program as either the most or least
productive and effective in all of government, depending on
which side the coin landed.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------. And I can guarantee with absolute certainty that it
would take a lot less than 40 million dollars and five years for
me to be able to dive into that document dump and come out
with as convincing a positive narrative of the program as

Dianne Feinstein and her staff have apparently produced a

negative one.
I would lead with the contemporaneous memorandum for
record describing the 2002 briefing of Nancy Pelosi and others
on the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. XXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXX and its one of thousands routinely
produced by the note-taker in every encounter with congress.
Im not allowed to describe it any further other than to say that
it is compellingly at odds with the former Speakers claims of
ignorance, but if I were on a committee trying to write the
definitive history of the interrogation program I would
certainly consider this to be of principle import, as it speaks to
the crux of the issue of which party is telling the truth about
congressional support for the program in its early days.
Whether or not this document, or a summary of it, is in the
declassified SSCI report will say a lot about which side the coin
landed on prior to this investigation.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would interview each debriefer who deployed to a

black site and questioned the detainees before, during, and
after EITs were employed, and would publish each of their
unedited opinions on the effectiveness of EITs.

I would examine the early days of the program and highlight

the mistakes and hasty decisions made during that chaotic
period, but would interview those involved to ascertain the
reasons for, and lessons learned from, those mistakes. I would
not allow those issues to be presented without context and
follow-up.
And I would clearly differentiate between the early days of the
program, when the training and infrastructure was in its infant
stages when the demand outpaced supply and the system
raced to catch up to the challenge of implementing a multifaceted special access program on the fly and the mid-tolatter stages, ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ill wager that there is little to be found in the
Senate report from 2004 onwards another test of which way
the coin landed.
I would produce an entire section on the -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- deliberative process of the
efficacy of interrogation using enhanced measures. I would do
so for personal reasons, because on a personal level, while I
have no quarrel with reporters or cable TV pundits and hosts
reporting or commenting negatively on the program (their
job is to sell their paper or their program torture sells), I do
take issue with former intelligence officers or interrogators
professing expert knowledge of techniques they have never
used, and which most of whom have never witnessed.
They entered the arena to sell themselves, or their books, or
both, and during the process they made any number of
statements regarding the notion that -------------------------------------- was putting the lives of Americans, and American military
personnel in particular, in danger. As they presented

themselves as experts, their words held meaning to those

who hosted them on their programs or helped them sell their
books, and they are as aware as I am that they are no such
thing. They are opportunists who, almost uniformly, spent a
relatively small portion of their professional lives engaged in
standard interrogation be it criminal or intelligence-related
and they bundled their manufactured credibility and their
personal opinion into a nice little self-righteous quote package,
for sale to the highest bidder. I have no problem with the
buyers thats business. I do have a problem with the sellers,
and thats personal.
I know one or two of them an Air Force Colonel often quoted
on his opposition to, and disgust with, the techniques ------------------------------------ A former FBI agent widely recognized as
the whistle-blower who was so offended and disturbed by
what he saw at a black site that he informed his higher
headquarters and took the next plane out of there.
I worked with the Air Force Colonel when he was a Captain
hed remember me if he saw me because he and I spent a good
deal of time sharing an operations tent in the Hafr Al Batin
desert of Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. I read in his
biography that he was Chief of a joint/combined interrogation
team during that war and have heard him describe his
interrogations of Iraqis as an example of the effectiveness of
Army Field Manual interrogations. If we met again, it wouldnt
surprise him to hear that I was puzzled by that part of his bio,
as I remember his role at JIF West a bit differently than does
he. Perhaps Joint Fusion Analysis Team would ring a bell.
I would ask him to remind me of one occasion in which he, I, or
any other interrogator encountered an Iraqi prisoner unwilling
to provide whatever information we desired. He may

remember that I used to joke that it would be a more efficient

use of our time to give them all a list of the top 10 Priority
Intelligence Requirements and a tape recorder all we would
have to do is interpret and transcribe the tapes. Or maybe he
wouldnt remember it that way in fact, I would ask him to
describe each of the interrogations he conducted at JIF West.
One would expect such passion and certainty regarding the
singular effectiveness of interrogation with Army Field Manual
techniques to be a consequence of tried and true operational
experience in the field certainly if the speaker is prone to cite
this experience as validation of his testimony. So, yes, I would
ask the good Colonel to remind me how many Iraqi prisoners
he interrogated during this apparently seminal period in the
development of his current role as an interrogation expert.
His answer would say a lot about his memory.
I met the FBI agent in an embassy and subsequently a bar in
the Middle East. I found him to be a great storyteller and an
interesting guy. I later learned of his ill-fated engagement with
the CIA team interrogating Abu Zubaydah and have heard both
sides of the story his on television and in his book, and the
others through ----------------------- personal conversations with
people who worked with him on site.
While I find his story compelling, I always go back to that
passage in the Department of Justice IG report on FBI
participation in Al Qaeda interrogations (its online begins on
page 67) in which his partner states that he remained at the
black site and participated in the interrogations with the CIA
after the agent left, because hed been through similar at the
SERE course and because he could see that the CIA
interrogators were acting professionally and acquiring
valuable information. That didnt make it into his book, at

least not in the clear language included in the IG report, but it

should have. I have often wondered how such a uniquely
gifted American treasure could bear to leave the FBI and
intelligence community and take his talents to the corporate
world, when he must have known how badly he was needed on
the battlefield.
I saw his testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary
Subcommittee one particular statement stands out. He said
that he found it ridiculous that CIA interrogators could claim
that their program was designed to obtain critical and timely
intelligence when they put the detainee in sleep deprivation for
days without engaging and attempting to gather information.
That was all I needed to hear from this particular witness to
understand that his expertise was overstated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In other words, while it may be
obvious to some, I would point out to the FBI agent that sitting
in front of an interrogator answering questions from morning
to night is accomplished while the detainee is awake.
As these experts can tell you, a good interrogator looks for the
first lie and spends some time assessing the context of the lie.
Does it minimize or exaggerate? Does it protect inward or
outward? Is it selfish and self-serving, or is it noble and
protective of colleagues? Is it uttered under stress, or freely,
with little prompting? Is it a mistake that he attempts to
correct, or is it something hes thought about and plans to hold
onto? What, exactly, did he believe he had to gain by telling
that lie? Was it to hide, to avoid, or to misdirect? Was it
believable and delivered with conviction, or was it more hamhanded more obvious?

The answers to these questions help build a resistance

snapshot of the subject (as well as a credibility benchmark)
and help guide the interrogator in determining how to exploit
that lie to gain advantage over the subject to obtain a clearer
understanding of what that individual is trying to protect.
With or without EITs, how it is handled is crucial to the
conduct of the interrogation, so getting the right answer about
the motivation behind that lie is a studied, careful,
collaborative task.
I would ask those interrogation experts to reflect on their
own bios, their descriptions of their own particular
interrogation experience and expertise, their public
descriptions of their knowledge of the effectiveness of EIT
interrogations, and the motivation behind any inconsistencies,
omissions, or exaggerations in all above.
I think that you would find that the tendency amongst this
group is to exaggerate their experience and expertise, a trait
generally borne of insecurity, self-preservation, and ambition.
I would next be interested in determining why such an
individual would find it necessary to exaggerate or lie. While
most people exaggerate their access or experience to convince
others of their worth and stature, others simply do so out of
habit. In all cases, though, the act of exaggeration or deception
is uniformly self-serving the lie is offered to advance a
positive perception of the subject and his or her actions or
opinions. The mere existence of the lie suggests that such a
perception is unwarranted it is the interrogators job to
discover why.
Its always the first lie, though. After the first lie, a good
interrogator knows where and when to look for the truth.
Perhaps a good journalist should take a harder look as well.

With the aid of testimony from experts such as these, the

committee is going to report that a program, -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- was, at best, an abject failure. At
worst, a criminal enterprise run by the CIA and the Bush
administration, with support from a corrupt Justice
Department. It will not find that the Democratic members of
the intelligence committees and congressional leadership who
were briefed on the program had any hand in aiding and
abetting the enterprise.
To the contrary, it will find that any Democrat who supported
the program only did so because they were misled and lied to
by CIA briefers and management, and that those techniques to
which they may admit approving were not administered in the
manner in which they were briefed. Finally, they will find that,
despite all evidence to the contrary, the program was either
completely ineffective, or that any information actually
produced under the auspices of the program was collected
despite, or in lieu of, the use of enhanced interrogation
techniques.
Thats the only possible finding that will allow the Senate
Intelligence Committee to trash the work of hundreds of CIA
officers and contractors over a period of five years, which
produced volumes of actionable intelligence from resistant Al
Qaeda leadership detainees, and which operated under the full
approval and consent of the congressional committees charged
with oversight of such programs. It must be ineffective, it must
be incorrectly administered, it must include lying by CIA
briefers, and it must suggest (though not necessarily conclude
remember, they approved it) that the techniques used
constituted torture.

Any other result any other result whatsoever will be

unacceptable to the liberal base of the party compiling the
report, and will be equally unacceptable to the politicians who
have staked their reputations and their excuses for providing
support and funding to the program - on every conclusion
listed above. Anything less would be a failure, and failure is
apparently not an option, based on the selective leaking
witnessed thus far.
We got to this point because a group of radical Muslims
convinced themselves that their religion allowed for, and in
some cases mandated, the murder and maiming of others to
purify the world of non-believers. It became their daily bread,
their lifes calling, and the measure of their manhood. The
most powerful country in the world reacted by making it our
mission to kill or capture every like-minded human being
walking the same earth, and by all accounts we took that
mission seriously.
To help facilitate that decision to put names and faces on bad
guys, to gain an understanding of their leadership, planning,
logistics, tactics, and management, to collect every scrap of
information available ------------- to track them down and kill
or capture them the CIA proposed that interrogators begin
using enhanced techniques to draw out that information. The
President agreed, and the heads of the Senate and
Congressional Intelligence committees agreed as well.
No matter how many times the last part of that sentence is
stated and ignored, it is still a fact.
The CIA interrogation program operated in secrecy for close to
three years, during which time it became the principal source

of information used to kill and capture Al Qaeda leadership and

operational personnel, as well as the principal source of
information on attack plans, both active and aspirational.
The intelligence community (both domestic and international)
was happy to receive, evaluate, assess, and make use of that
information. The intelligence committees were supportive and
satisfied with the results, and the means used to obtain those
results. The terrorists knew nothing whatsoever about the
program they had no idea where their colleagues had been
taken, nor were they aware whether or not, or how, they were
being interrogated. The program was working, the consumers
were happy, and the overseers were in full accord with the
program managers.
Then the 2005 Washington Post article hit the press, and
everything changed. It became predictably, heartbreakingly
political. The politicians formerly in support of the program
made the political calculation that explaining their support for
enhanced interrogation was more damaging to their
reputation than lying about it and relying on the inability of
those they once supported to publicly reveal their private, and
official, surrogacy.
They counted on the media and their own public relations
shops to develop strategies to counter any versions of the truth
that might leak out, and they dug in. Interrogations were
suspended, the program was opened up for redesign-bycommittee, and the inexorable slide into ineffectiveness and
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Let me attempt to put this in perspective. If you are so set in

your beliefs that you cannot consider for a moment the
possibility that you may not have all of the information
necessary to make an informed decision, stop reading now
because nothing I write will change your mind. If not, consider
the following:
I have been an interrogator for over half of my life ----------years as an active, engaged interrogator and I have worked at
the highest operational level almost every step along the way.
I speak Arabic and Persian Farsi. I was a Senior Interrogator in
the principle, theater-level interrogation facility during the
first Gulf War, then ran interrogation operations in Mogadishu,
Somalia during the Black Hawk Down days I was on the last
plane out of Mogadishu in March 1994. I then spent 7 years
posted at embassies in the Middle East, debriefing everything
from visa applicants to walk-in sources to defectors, scientists,
suspected terrorists, and any other potentially-valuable source
that popped up in the Middle East during my tenure. In the
Iraq war, I ran interrogation and debriefing operations on the
Iraqi High Value Detainees (the Deck of Cards government,
military, intelligence and scientific personnel captured during
the war). I debriefed and debunked two separate Ahmed
Chalabi-inspired provocateurs, and was the first to brief
General Franks on the absence of WMD in Iraq while standing
in my operations center at Baghdad International Airport in
early-May 2003 after years of absolute certainty that Iraq
was in possession of, and hiding, WMD throughout the country.
At no time in my career have I ever cared a whit about what I
was going to discover during an interrogation or debriefing
my job was to use whatever skills I possessed to assess the
subject and the information on its merits, and to accurately
communicate whatever intelligence information I collected,

regardless of how it may impact or affect anyone or anything

militarily, personally, politically, or professionally.
I was good at what I did as a result of years of practical and
real-time application of every aspect of the
interrogation/debriefing protocol. There is no magic to a
professional debriefing or interrogation it is a matter of
preparation, tactical flexibility, thorough questioning, and
consistent follow-up. I learned what I found to be most
effective on dozens of disparate source profiles through trial
and error, and then through repetition. I conducted thousands
of mundane, intricate debriefings on any variety of subjects,
and hundreds of more consequential interrogations and
debriefings of detainees and prisoners during wars and
conflicts throughout the years.
During my 20 years in the military, I never so much as raised
my voice during the conduct of thousands of
interrogations/debriefings. I ran my operations by the book,
and taught those who worked for me that there was absolutely
zero wiggle room in the Geneva Conventions or the Army Field
Manual.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------In the case of the thousands of debriefings and interrogations I

conducted during my time in the military, the military
interrogation options I had available to me at the time were
sufficient to get the job done. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------There is simply no comparison. Not by the FBI guy who tells us
that establishing rapport and finding common ground is the
key to opening up the KSMs of the world. Not by the Air Force
interrogator who tells us that the informed interrogation
approach, showing the detainee that you understand him and
are knowledgeable of his religion and his personal situation
are the magic that will make all of our interrogation wishes
come true. Not by the CIA desk officer who decided that his
inability to gather intelligence from his detainee using the
standard techniques proved that the detainee held no

intelligence value. Not by any of those otherwise intelligent

individuals who somehow became experts in the use of
techniques theyd never employed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I have often read and heard over the last few years that the
conduct of the CIA interrogation program served as a principle
recruitment tool for Al Qaeda and, more specifically, put
American troops in danger of mistreatment and torture upon
capture. Putting aside the fact that the program was secret
until 2005 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- it is the second
accusation which defies all intellectual reason.

First, all of our enemies over the last several decades routinely
torture, kill, or maim their prisoners as a matter of course. Its
simply what they do. Our more recent enemy, Al Qaeda, the
Taliban, and their associated brethren, have proven
themselves to be amongst the most brutal captors in the
history of captivity. (The majority of this piece was written in
early 2014, before the name ISIS was known to anyone
outside of the intelligence community). They tortured and
beheaded captives before the interrogation program was
initiated, while it was being secretly carried out, and after it
was revealed publicly. There was no strategy shift upon
revelation of the CIA interrogation program to switch tactics
from establishing rapport and bonding with their captive to
sawing off his head. It was always about the sawing off of
heads. It still is.
That said, some have suggested that our use of enhanced
techniques put our country in the delicate position of
demanding fair treatment of our prisoners while at the same
time using harsh techniques on Al Qaeda detainees. They
wonder whats to stop our enemies from using the same tactics
we used, and what right we would have to ask them to stop.
I would submit that the immediate adoption of the entire CIA
interrogation program by every combatant entity currently
engaged in any war or battle in any corner of the world would
be the greatest thing that ever happened to modern detention
and prisoner/hostage/detainee well being. Were the
Secretary-General of the United Nations to propose and
enforce the adoption of the CIA interrogation program and
conditions of confinement on every battlefield on earth, the
number of lives improved and saved would qualify him for a
Nobel Peace Prize. There would be no more torture yes, I
mean actual torture. No detainee would ever be subjected to

any treatment more severe than that we inflict on our own

American servicemen every month in SERE training. All
prisoners and detainees would be adequately fed, clothed,
housed, and given health and dental care. There would be no
beheadings, no beatings, no cutting off of hands, fingers, ears,
or noses. No starvation of prisoners. No slow deaths from
disease and dysentery. No snuff films, or propaganda videos
featuring staged confessions or abuse. No beating of the
undersides of feet, or genital mutilation. There would be no
rape, no sexual abuse, and no blackmail of families.
So I would ask those who express concern that the rest of the
world will follow our lead especially those who are rolling
their eyes at my suggestion above - to consider the facts about
the standard tactics being carried out by warring factions all
over the world today, and ask themselves which protocol they
would rather be in place were they to become the captive
ours or theirs?
Speaking as a retired soldier who was considered high risk
and trained in the SERE course, I would welcome the
implementation of the CIA interrogation protocols by any
enemy I may encounter, because I would know that whatever
they did to me would be monitored, measured, and carried out
over a finite period of time. I would know that they would
never cause me severe injury or death. I dont know that about
any of our current enemies, so I would gladly accept the CIA
interrogation protocol as the world standard.
At present, due to the shuttering of the program and the
subsequent spotlight put on any and all interrogations carried
out by US interrogators anywhere in the world, the safest place
on earth for a terrorist to be is in the hands of the US military,
FBI, justice department, or intelligence services. Along with

three hots and a cot, the modern terrorist captive is also

afforded the assurance that he has no obligation or expectation
whatsoever to answer questions posed by the interrogators.
He enters the interrogation room comfortable with the
knowledge that his secrets are safe within him, as long as he
can avoid falling under the spell of a rapport-building
interrogator exploiting their common interests, comparing
their higher-level educational aspirations for their children,
and showing the appropriate level of understanding and
compassion to convince him that giving up those secrets is just
the righteous thing to do. Absent the embracement of that
bonding exercise, he is fully authorized to sit in complete
silence, or tell the interrogator to go fuck himself, without
consequence.
This, my friends, is why we kill people with drones. We have
nowhere to hold them, no way to compel them to give up
information, and no desire to repeatedly highlight our
newfound inadequacies by capturing high value terrorists and
quite publicly failing to obtain any information from them. So
we kill them, and their secrets die with them.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would wonder aloud if the American
people believed that KSM, or Abu Faraj Al Libi, or Ramsi Bin Al
Shib had the right to not give up information on terrorist
programs, personnel, and attacks. If we as a country believed
that a terrorist has that right that an acceptable conclusion to
an interrogation could be zero information, regardless of the
circumstances or the expected value of the information
retained by that terrorist then we did the right thing by
shutting down the program, because such a conclusion was
unacceptable in our program.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------But we need to own that determination. We need the

politicians responsible for codifying that right to make it clear
to their constituents that the interrogation program produced
information that will no longer be available to the intelligence
community, but that this state of play is acceptable to them
because they consider enhanced interrogation to be immoral
and un-American. Not ineffective but in their minds immoral
and un-American.
Not only will that never happen, but the Senate Intelligence
Committee report will find a way to pick apart the program
probably by focusing on missteps in the early stages to the
extent that they will render any information gained through
enhanced interrogations to be inconsequential or of no interest
to the intelligence community. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- they will surely
do everything they can to minimize the successes and focus on
the failures, because any conclusion which suggests any degree
of effectiveness will ruin their narrative theyll then have to
own it.
We then need to shut down the US military SERE program, as
the same immoral and un-American tactics used in the CIA
program are used on American service-members every day.
Regardless of how often that fact is stated and ignored, it is as
true today as it will be tomorrow we use the same techniques
on each other. If Senator Feinstein and her colleagues are to be
believed, we are torturing soldiers every day at SERE.

I learned a lot at SERE, both as a student and as a temporaryduty interrogator. As a student, I learned that I could resist,
and occasionally manipulate, a talented interrogator during my
numerous soft-sell interrogations the rapport-building, weknow-all, pride-and-ego up/down, do-the-right-thing
approaches. I had my story relatively straight, and I simply
stuck to it, regardless of how ridiculous or implausible the
interrogator made it sound. He wasnt doing anything to me
there was no consequence to my lies, no matter how
transparent.
I then learned the difference between soft-sell and hardsell by way of a large interrogator who applied enhanced
techniques promptly upon the uttering of my first lie. I learned
that it was infinitely more difficult for me to remember my lies
and keep my story straight under pressure. I learned that it
became difficult to repeat a lie if I received immediate and
uncomfortable consequences for each iteration. It made me
have to make snap decisions under intense pressure in real
time and fumble and stumble through rapid-fire follow-up
questions designed to poke massive holes in my story.
I learned that I needed to practically live my lie if I were to be
questioned under duress, as the unrehearsed details are the
wild-cards that bite you in the ass. I learned that I would
rather sit across from the most talented interrogator on earth
doing a soft-sell than any interrogator on earth doing a hardsell the information I had would be safer because the only
consequences to my lies come in the form of words. I could
handle words. Anyone could.
Ask any SERE Level C graduate which method was more
effective on him or her their answer should tell you
something about the effectiveness of enhanced techniques,

whether you agree with them or not. In my case, I learned that

enhanced techniques made me want to tell the truth to make it
stop not to compound my situation with more lies.
The only thing that kept me from telling the truth was the
knowledge that at some point it had to end - that there were
more students to interrogate and only so many hours in a day.
Absent that knowledge, I would have caved. That said, I was
not very proud of the mistakes I made which brought me to the
brink of caving. I realized that those mistakes, in a real-world
situation, would have opened a number of doors I would have
prefered remain shut.
As a TDY interrogator in the SERE course, I learned that the
toughest, meanest, most professional special operations
soldiers on earth had a breaking point. Every one of them.
And of all the soldiers I interrogated, all of the significant
breaks came during hard-sell interrogations using as many
enhanced techniques as necessary to convince the soldier that
continuing to lie would result in immediate consequences. It
worked time and again, it worked.
I did have some success during the soft-cell interrogations,
but those came only as a result of tricks, ruses, or lies I was
able to gain some short-term advantage as a result of these
tactics, but by doing so had burned any credibility I may have
had with that particular subject. Consequently, other than my
initial breakthrough, my clever manipulation had effectively
poisoned any subsequent engagement with the subject. The
lesson I learned was that whatever I hoped to gain from
leading with a lie, it had better include the mother lode,
because I wasnt likely to get another realistic shot at it after
pulling the rug out from under the subject.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- In
the SERE course, it was our job to show them that they would
all break, and to teach them how best to resist, delay, manage,
and recover from that inevitable occurrence. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------One of the most prevalent criticisms of the efficacy of the
program which is expressed time and again by individuals
opposed to the use of EITs is that people will say anything to
make it stop. Each time I hear that phrase glibly tossed about
by the politicians, pundits, and experts describing their
opposition to EITs, I am left with the same thought: Only if you
let them. I wonder if it is truly that drastic an intellectual leap
to consider for a moment the notion that the professional
interrogators employing those techniques would be acutely
aware of that possibility, and prepared to counter it? If every
former-interrogator, FBI agent, politician, administration
official, columnist and man on the street opposed to EIT
interrogation can cite this notion as a central tenet of their
ineffectiveness argument, can we not reasonably conclude that
a CIA interrogator actually employing those techniques would
be equally attuned to signs of such behavior?
I realize that much of this criticism stems from the revelation
that one of the early detainees in the program lied about his

knowledge of Iraqi government links to Al Qaeda and

subsequently admitted that he did so to make it stop.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Entire Page Redacted

Entire Page Redacted

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Critics suggest that their success in retaining that information

proves that using enhanced techniques was ineffective. To
some extent, they are correct. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Entire Page Redacted

Entire Page Redacted

Entire Page Redacted

In order to take an objective look at the use and purpose of

EITs, you have to accept some uncomfortable truths: first,
every aspect of our lives are guided in a large part by the
concept of consequences we obey traffic and other laws
not simply out of a sense of communal decency, but out of
fear of consequences. The absence of consequences renders
any law unenforceable, and ultimately unheeded. Many of
the critics of the program have described various cases
wherein they have been able to convince an otherwise
resistant subject to provide information but they then go
on to explain how they either tricked or deceived the
subject, or offered to work with the subject to improve their
situation. Perhaps they offered a lesser charge, or a good
word to the prosecutor, or immunity for one or more of the
lesser charges, or transfer to a better cell, or a better facility,
or to a different country. Perhaps they implied or allowed a
subject to believe that their participation would be
rewarded with release from confinement. There is always
an incentive, either real or implied, for whatever level of
compliance gained by the interrogator. Any interrogator
who tells you any different is a liar.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------That high-level detainee would no more have voluntarily sat

down across from a debriefer and provided his list of Al Qaeda
couriers without having been conditioned to do so than he
would have walked ---------------------------------- and asked to
speak to the CIA debriefer. It simply would not have happened
without incentive, and his incentive was to not go back to
enhanced techniques. Period. Love it or hate it, thats the way
it worked.
Go back and take a look at the difference between Candidate
Obamas characterizations of the efficacy of the interrogation
program versus President Obamas version. Candidate Obama
repeatedly stated that enhanced interrogation was not only
immoral and un-American, but it didnt work. People will say
anything to make it stop. Every leading interrogator and
intelligence professional will tell you that torture never
works it produces bad intelligence. That was Candidate
Obama.

President Obama told a slightly different story. During his

100-day press conference in April 2009, President Obama used
an entirely different construct when responding to a question
about shutting down the interrogation program: I am
absolutely convinced it was the right thing to do -- not because
there might not have been information that was yielded by these
various detainees who were subjected to this treatment, but
because we could have gotten this information in other ways,
in ways that were consistent with our values, in ways that
were consistent with who we are.
He went on to say, But here's what I can tell you -- that the
public reports and the public justifications for these techniques
-- which is that we got information from these individuals that
were subjected to these techniques -- doesn't answer the core
question, which is: Could we have gotten that same information
without resorting to these techniques? And it doesn't answer
the broader question: Are we safer as a consequence of having
used these techniques?
Finally, this: And so I will do whatever is required to keep the
American people safe, but I am absolutely convinced that the
best way I can do that is to make sure that we are not taking
shortcuts that undermine who we are.
Note the difference its important. After being briefed by
serious people using actual intelligence information gained
from the EIT interrogation program, President Obama knew
that he could not continue with the it never works campaign
rhetoric as President to do so would have been insulting and
objectionable to the national security team who briefed him,
and would be a lie. Sowe dont know if we could have
collected the same information using standard techniques

became the talking point for every administration official on

the subject of EITs.
I know. I know that we couldnt have collected the same
information using standard techniques because I was an expert
in using standard techniques I used them thousands of times
over two decades and the notion that I could have convinced
the detainees -------------------------------------- to provide closelyheld information without the use of EITs is laughable. There is
zero chance. Zero.
But lets indulge those who use the same construct as the
President (we dont know..) for a moment. Lets assume that
to be the truth that we really dont know if we could have
collected the same information using standard techniques.
Were that to be the standard for assessment of the viability or
effectiveness of the program, or of any venture, than the
following must be similarly considered:
Although we may have gained some benefit by dropping
atomic bombs on Japan to bring about the end of WWII,
we dont know that we couldnt have saved the world
using different tactics, so history should show that this
was a mistake. We understand that those who developed
and implemented the plan were under enormous
pressure we didnt know at the time if we were going to
be able to win the war but, in retrospect, it was
unnecessary and un-American. We should have
continued to fight using conventional warfare. The
character of our country has to be measured in part not
by what we do when things are easy but what we do
when things are hard.

 While the operation by the Navy Seals to kill Bin Laden

was a success, we dont know that the Pakistanis
wouldnt have conducted an equally successful raid with
less risk to our forces, so, in retrospect, it was probably a
bad call to violate the sovereign borders of another
country to accomplish our objective. Consequently, were
discontinuing the use of the Navy Seals in such
operations, and well let the Pakistanis take care of
raiding High Value targets from now on.
While we deployed our Air Force to attack targets in
Libya in response to Qaddafis threat to attack civilians in
Ben Ghazi, we dont know that he would have actually
done so, nor do we know that NATO couldnt have
accomplished the mission on their own, so, in retrospect,
conducting military air strikes on a sovereign country
without the approval of congress was probably a bad call.
The hard way would have been to go to congress and
obtain their consent.
I realize that at least half of the people reading above will
immediately point out that the alternatives noted dont
include actions as controversial and, in their minds,
immoral, as the interrogation program, but the fact remains
that no matter how you look at it, it was legal as legal as
each of the operations described above. If it werent, the
President would have included that rather substantial
marker in his explanation for closing it down it was
immoral, maybe occasionally effective, but illegal, so Im
shutting it down.
He never said that although he and the Attorney General
both stated that they believed water boarding to be torture.
Yet they never charged anyone or passed a law banning

water boarding or any of the other techniques when they

had control of all three branches of government. Why not?
Either because they didnt have a case, or because they
didnt want to either way it would have been a hard choice.
The easy choice was to simply call it torture, declare it
ineffective, and count on the media and the public to simply
believe it.
They waited until March of 2008 to pass a bill banning the
techniques, fully aware that President Bush would veto such
a bill. Which he did. Consequently, the program has never
been declared illegal by either a US court of law or through
congressional legislation signed into law by a president.
Rather, the program was shut down through President
Obamas executive order in January 2009 an order that the
next President could rescind with the stroke of a pen.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------So in lieu of bringing charges or holding court proceedings
to officially determine the legality of actions taken by
anyone associated with the program, which they were
aware that they would lose, they decided that the
appropriate venue for criminal allegations and indictments
of character and honor was through official statements and

public denunciations of the despicable nature of these unAmerican acts, and those immoral un-Americans who
carried them out.
Its easy to call enhanced interrogation torture without
having to prove it, and easier still to attack the character and
competence of those who used them, particularly when
secure in the knowledge that they cannot publicly defend
themselves. Not because those un-American torturers dont
want to defend themselves, but because those un-American
torturers are not allowed to defend themselves.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Entire Page Redacted

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Someone should ask that FBI interrogator if he would fall for

his own approach techniques if he were a detainee. If his
answer is no, what are we prepared to risk in the hopes that
anyone else would?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------