Original subtitles

In the days after 9 -11, we didn't know enough.

Everybody in America, from the president on down, wanted to know who al -Qaeda

was, and we didn't know.

And we needed answers, we needed intelligence, and we needed it quickly.

We were going to find these people wherever they were.

We didn't know when the next attack was, and we thought some of these people

could help us answer that question.

U .S. officials say Mohammed is being interrogated with, quote, all

pressure. We knew we had to do something different.

Al -Qaeda operatives have been waterboarded more than 260 times.

So when our government says that no value came of it, I was shocked. I was

surprised. The attorney general is launching an investigation into

that the CIA tortured terror suspects.

I was really disturbed by what we grew to know.

serving our country, at the direction of our country.

Today I'll be calling for an official investigation of whether there was

destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice in the destruction of these

videotapes. And in the end, we were thrown to the wolves.

I did not think about going to jail, and perhaps I should have.

My wife and I had just returned from my last assignment.

I was chief of station Mexico City.

We got back in time for the kids to go to school, and on 11th of September,

my wife and I were unpacking our things, and a friend of ours called

to tell us about the first airplane that went into the build.

Everybody understood.

The magnitude of the hit that our nation took, losing 3 ,000 of your countrymen

in your home, your country, was something that I don't think we had

since the Japanese hit Hawaii.

And I figured, this is war.

We're going to war.

My name is Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., and I was at the Central Intelligence Agency

for 31 years.

In the days after 9 -11, a lot of the agency came together.

People wanted to come out of retirement and serve.

People would show up at the front gate saying, put me in, I'll do whatever.

I remember calling back to the deputy director and saying, I don't know what

this is, I don't know what's going to happen, but I want in.

My name is Philip Mudd. I was second in charge of the Global Counterterrorism

Operations and Analysis.

I think the hardest thing to capture for Americans looking at this today is

going to be the mindset problem.

The intensity was not only can it never happen again, but it's on you to make

sure it doesn't happen again.

So you go home and you say, what if I miss something today? What if it does

happen again tomorrow?

What if we say we had that person in a database?

What do you say? Do you say, sorry, we missed again? Your dad doesn't come

The sense of responsibility and urgency was daily.

And it was intense.

We had intelligence that al -Qaeda was planning three additional and

devastating attacks.

The first threat was a second wave of airplanes.

Where's it going to come from? Who's next? What city's next?

I remember turning on local radio, and there was a report about a small plane

around the White House. Immediately, light bulb goes on.

We missed one.

I blew it. It's on us. I blew it. Every single day. In retrospect, it was just a

plane that had violated White House airspace, somebody who didn't know the

rules.

The sense of urgency is very difficult to overstate.

My name is Benjamin Wittes.

I'm a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.

I have spent most of my career writing about the law of national security.

They all believed that the next attack was happening tomorrow.

And they really believed this. And by the way, so did everybody else.

Second, we were extremely concerned with the possibility that al -Qaeda was

going to launch some type of anthrax attack against us.

We are still undergoing final tests to determine absolutely if these two deaths

were related to anthrax exposure.

I was a young editorial writer for the Washington Post.

And in the immediate aftermath of 9 -11, there were anthrax attacks.

Our mailroom was shut down. And we all assumed for a while

that that was an al -Qaeda thing.

We knew that al -Qaeda was interested in developing some type of nuclear

or radiological bomb.

We had actually found the schematics of a nuclear weapon that was delivered

to al -Qaeda.

We were facing a ticking time bomb. The president was putting pressure on us.

The Congress was putting pressure on us. Even the media was saying, don't allow

an attack to happen.

This was the emergency of our time.

I've directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement

communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice.

The president wanted a response to the attacks.

He became...

His number one priority.

And the counterterrorism center became the pointy end of the spear.

In May of 2002, I was assigned as the new director of the counterterrorism

center. And I was surprised because usually someone assigned to that job

from a division that takes care of the Middle East or North Africa, not someone

from Latin America, which is what my experience was with.

I was born in Puerto Rico.

But I grew up in South America. My father was working for agents for

international development. So we had a connection to the U .S. embassies

overseas. I went to the University of Florida, got a law degree.

And when I finished college, I wanted to do something that would get me back to

going overseas.

So I applied to the Central Intelligence Agency.

I didn't know exactly what I was getting into because you don't really know the

agency until you get into it.

But I landed exactly where I wanted to be, which is the director of operations.

They do intelligence collection and covert action.

He did not have a background in counterterrorism, but Jose was the right

the job because he had some characteristics, I think, that made him

Aggressive, willing to take risks.

Jose embodied that.

So while we know they were coming at us with different threats, we didn't have

the specific information to stop an attack.

And we were very concerned about that.

We didn't know enough.

We didn't know enough.

First question we were trying to answer, believe it or not, was pretty basic.

Who's the adversary?

Our understanding of al -Qaeda was extremely limited. I didn't say limited.

said extremely limited.

Fortunately, a couple months before 9 -11, we had been tracking this

and his name was Abu Zubaydah.

I don't think there's any doubt, but a man named Abu Zubaydah is a close

associate of UBL's, and if not the number two, very close to the number two

person in the organization.

Abu Zubaydah was an orchestrator, sort of a facilitator for al -Qaeda. She had

come across her screen after he dispatched a terrorist to blow up LAX.

Rassam was put in jail, and he told us that Abu Zubaydah had sent him. So we

knew. that Abu Zubaydah had access to that al -Qaeda leadership core and that

could provide us with the intelligence that we needed to deal with these

threats. So we started to work very hard to find him.

We knew that the senior people, like Abu Zubaydah, had to communicate.

And in communicating, we had discovered some technical information that gave us

an idea of where in Pakistan he was. We had 16 different sites where we had

suspicions that he would be at, but we weren't sure.

There were multiple raids that night, and at one of those locations, it was an

empty lot.

But we saw that there were communication cables going to this one house.

So the Pakistanis went in, and there was a gunfight.

Abu Zubaydah tried to escape, and he was shot in the process and captured and

confirmed that it was him.

He was captured by Pakistani police, CIA, and FBI agents at a house in

Faisalabad, south of Islamabad.

I remember that night.

Everybody wanted to know everything, all the time, every day. The questions

were, hey, CIA.

This is the biggest answer we've faced in many years of national security since

World War II.

What's the answer?

What did he know? What's the next attack? When is it going to happen? We

know now.

After Abu Javed was captured, we didn't want to leave him in Pakistan because we

didn't know if he was going to be let go or if his buddies were going to come in

and try to get him out. So the decision had to be made as to what are we going

to do now.

If you send him to the United States, the U .S. legal system, he's going to

what's called lawyer up.

The lawyer is going to say, don't ever say anything about anything.

And there were a lot of meetings up in the CIA director's office.

How do we deal with Abu Zubaydah?

Very quickly, people start to say, well, maybe we should talk to this guy

ourselves.

And if we do that, we have to have it outside the United States so we can't

lawyer up.

Let's find someplace we can do this. That was the origin of the first black

site.

A black site is a location that is a secret location where we take an al

terrorist so we can interrogate him without any pressure

from anyone else.

The objective is to gain intelligence that we can disseminate and understand

better what's going on with al -Qaeda and their plans and intentions.

We would not do anything illegal. We were not going to do that.

But we were going to push the envelope in terms of what we could do.

Back then, the question was, do you have a vision that says how quickly and how

aggressively can we take out the target? And do you have the courage to say,

look, I know decades down the road, people are going to say, we don't like

you did. They won't maybe remember the tenor of the times.

But his attitude was, I understand that.

I'll live with that.

Let's go.

In the immediate aftermath of 9 -11, we did some things that were wrong.

We did a whole lot of things that were right.

But we tortured some folks.

Good evening. The Senate is about to release a controversial report on the

interrogation techniques used by the CIA.

It is the very graphic descriptions of the so -called enhanced interrogations

that will stand out in this report.

I want to be careful about the way I talk about the Senate report because I

really do think that in many ways it made an enormous contribution.

The lion's share of what we know about the program

comes from that report and the responses to it. It also has a number of, I

think, quite deep flaws.

It really quite unapologetically does not put itself in the shoes

of the people in real time with the direction and guidance that they

were getting, including from Congress.

But I refuse to have an argument about the word torture. I think we should

the brutality of the program in the face, honestly.

Pablo Zubeda was severely wounded during capture.

We wanted to save his life, of course.

The CIA flies in a medical team to keep him alive.

They make an extraordinary set of interventions in order to interrogate

We hadn't been in the business of grabbing people in the past, prior to

I'm Mike Rogers, former chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

What we believed at the time, and certainly the intelligence services, the

believed at the time, was they would be able to give us information to stop

another terrorist attack.

There's a reason why we have a CIA, and there's a reason why presidents

throughout history have relied on the CIA to do this kind of work.

You know, we accept as a country that, you know, having a secret intelligence

service is important for national security and that those people will

laws of foreign countries. Right.

But act in accordance with American law because they're getting approval by the

president. I don't think that there's a dispute about that.

My name is Mark Mazzetti.

I'm a correspondent for the New York Times. I covered the intelligence world

specifically the CIA for the New York Times for a decade. And I think that

history has also shown that more often than not, the CIA is not a rogue actor.

In this new war, the most important source of information on where the

terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves.

We started to ask Abu Zubaydah questions as he was recovering.

Abu Zubaydah told us that Mukhtar, Mukhtar means the brain in Arabic,

that Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and confirmed for us then that Khalid

Sheikh Mohammed was the chief of operations of al -Qaeda, the brain

-11 attacks.

When al -Qaeda referenced the brain, who the brain was,

Believe it or not, we didn't know.

That shows you how little we knew about the organization and how valuable it

was, not just to have threat information from a detainee, but who is Mukhtar?

That's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Oh, okay.

We need that guy, not only now, but yesterday. He's got to go down.

But after Zubaydah healed from his wounds, he stopped talking.

Basically, he just blew us off.

And the president, again, was asking us every day, what's the story? What are

you doing about this threat? What's happening?

And we weren't getting any answers from him.

So we put Abu Subeda in isolation, and I brought everybody back to headquarters

so we could talk about what could we do to get him to talk to us.

The enhanced interrogation program is a program to put somebody under duress so

that they think there's no way out except to cooperate.

There was the intensity of the time and the basic question of, if we don't

squeeze them, why would they ever talk to us?

At the center of the enhanced interrogation program were 10 techniques

wanted to get approval for.

You sought permission for all of those techniques, correct?

Correct. The attention grasp?

Walling, facial hold, facial slap, cramp confinement, wall standing,

stress positions,

sleep deprivation, waterboard, use of diapers, insects,

and mock burial.

And we went to Justice Department and said, these are the techniques we wanted

to use against al -Qaeda. You need to give us...

a reading on whether they are legal or not.

And they did. They gave us a binding legal opinion in writing.

With that in hand, we went to the president and his national security and

you need to direct us from a policy perspective to go do this.

And once we had all these approvals and agreements, then we proceeded to

implement them with Abu Zubaydah.

And so the results are a series of Justice Department memos that are

permissive. This is why they tell you everything we did was legal.

And then we went...

To the Congress, the leadership of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

and the House, the permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

We briefed them, and they agreed.

Senator Rockefeller, should the U .S. torture this guy? We do not sanction

torture, but there are psychological and other means that can accomplish most of

what we want.

And I can understand the whole issue with morality.

All of us had to make up our minds whether we wanted to participate.

Or not.

In my case, and maybe I'm a simple -minded guy, but when I was told it was

legal, when I recognized the threat that we were under, pretty quickly,

for me, I knew I wanted to do this.

Before the attacks, nobody would have not only executed this, nobody would

conceived of this.

It became reality after the attacks, but that's only because people had seen

those images and lived through the sort of searing moments where you see people

jump from a building and said, I don't care what it takes. If you need to

these guys, if you need to waterboard them, that's okay.

That started to change in 03, 04, 05, and beyond, but 01, 02, 03?

No. Do it. And do it now.

At the request of our psychologists, we started to videotape Abu Zubaira and

then other prisoners later on because they wanted insight into how they were

acting during interrogation and after when they were in their jail cells.

And a number of people felt it would help us write our reporting if we had

tapes.

I was shocked and nauseated by the details of the program.

Some of the lesser ones included loud music and light. And then there was sort

of elevated up from that, there was putting people in diapers and with a

rectal feeding so that they get enough nutrition, but they don't eat.

And then the summit was waterboarding. And I have no problem calling that

torture. There's always going to be someone.

who disagrees with the policy.

The thing about it is these people asked for it, you know.

They were the ones that came in here, and they would have come again and again

and again had we not stopped them.

Once they went through the enhanced interrogation process, Abu Zubaydah

to talk.

It was probably the most extravagant,

aggressive,

abusive set of CIA activities that have happened in the last 25 years.

And eventually, when this stuff became public, the civil liberties and human

rights communities said, oh, my God, they did what?

Tonight, CIA interrogators allegedly threatened to kill the children of one

terror suspect and threatened another with a gun and a power drill. Now the

Justice Department is opening a criminal investigation.

I didn't know the consequences, frankly, maybe naively.

I knew that it would be a difficult period.

I did not think about going to jail or anything like that.

And perhaps I should have.

Abu Zubaydah, he gave us very important intelligence, which we used to capture

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

chief of operations of al -Qaeda. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested along with

two other men Saturday in Pakistan.

U .S. officials say Mohammed is being interrogated with, quote, all

pressure at an undisclosed location outside the U .S. and outside Pakistan.

When you say we are holding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

in an undisclosed location where we are interrogating him.

Everybody kind of knows that there's something ugly going on there.

He came to school here.

He went to North Carolina University. He was a mechanical engineer.

So he studied us. He knew us.

Smart.

Really smart.

I don't know what IQ he had, but, you know, way up there.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the toughest of all the detainees.

He could be waterboarded all day long. He didn't have a problem with it.

Pretty quickly, he surmised that, you know, it would last 10 seconds and he

would let us know with his hands, you know, 10 seconds have gone by. You need

stop this, you know.

Eventually, sleep deprivation, and I think the cumulative effect of

eventually led to surrender.

But when they surrender, they will then tell us many things.

As a result, you got really good stuff. But what really good stuff means is tiny

pieces of a giant mosaic.

Think of this as a kaleidoscope. As you get more and more detainees and combine

that with information you get from other security services and intercepted

communications, you start to pull a kaleidoscope together. Pick up 72 ,000

pieces of information in a kaleidoscope and slowly watch them come into focus.

KSM was critical along with the other 100 plus detainees because they gave us

little tiny snippets that to the naked eye were insignificant.

It was only because you had hundreds of analysts trying to put together those

fragments of information, those shattered pieces of glass to say this is

the glass looks like.

That's what was valuable.

And that gave us an incredible understanding of Al Qaeda, their

their tactics and capability.

As the clock ticked from 02 to 03, 04, more and more members of Al Qaeda went

down, the leadership organization, at a level that they couldn't replace. Think

of this as shark's teeth.

If you take one out every six months, the shark will replace that tooth. We

started to take them out faster and faster and faster. And over time, with

intelligence mix of all those pieces of intelligence, we're starting to destroy

the organization.

So the impact that the enhanced interrogation had on our ability to

destroy the al -Qaeda operation that attacked us on 9 -11, it was a huge

accomplishment that I'm very proud of. It is very clear to me that they got

stuff in this program.

It is not clear to me at all that they got good stuff specifically because of

the application of these techniques.

There is no way to know the answer to that question.

I remember people consistently saying, there's going to be payback.

There's going to be payback for what you did. There's going to be questions

about harsh interrogation techniques.

It was interesting. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told us that eventually your

government will come after you because of this.

And he was right.

In 2004, things were starting to come out about the secret operations of the

post -9 -11 period. The first big shockwave on the issue of interrogation

detention was the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq in 2004.

That scandal really did create a lot of anger, I think, in the public because

generally this view that, you know, this is not how we're supposed to treat

people.

The Abu Ghraib story breaks, and that was real

torture for sadism and pleasure's sake.

I mean, I'm comfortable using the word torture to describe what happened in the

CIA program, but it was torture for a noble purpose, right? I mean, these

were actually trying to get information to stop terrorist attacks. The stuff

that was happening at Abu Ghraib is simple sadism.

Although we had nothing to do with it, I knew that the media would not

differentiate between a legally authorized program like ours and the Abu

Ghraib scandal that involved low -level military police abusing prisoners.

Shortly after Abu Ghraib, there were the first stories about detainees in CIA

custody and some of the interrogation methods that were used.

The controversial declassification and release of the CIA torture memos. They

disclosed that three al -Qaeda operatives had been waterboarded more

times. Everybody refers to them as the torture memos. It's a justification for

use of the enhanced interrogation program.

When it leaked to the newspapers, I remember the change in the attitude by

politicians. I was really disturbed by what I was reading and what we grew to

know.

By 2005, al -Qaeda were down and out.

And the reason is because of the intelligence that was obtained.

But we knew that the time had changed and that slowly but surely we were

support in the Congress.

You don't need to break our laws and debase ourselves to get the good

intelligence. That's not who we are as Americans.

Congress was briefed about it the whole way along and was comfortable with this.

Then it becomes public and everybody's view changed.

We came under attack by the media and by the politicians going into the 2004

elections. And that opposition to what we were doing and condemnation of what

were doing continued on until the end of 2005 when they removed the legal

protection. that we had obtained from the Justice Department.

They took it out. They took it away.

And the director of CIA at the time, Porter Goss, decided, well, that's it.

cannot do this anymore.

I mean, we cannot put people's careers in jeopardy, their livelihoods in

jeopardy, if they don't have the protection of our government.

By 2006, the whole enhanced interrogation program was dead.

But a year later, the decision that I made had come back to haunt me.

In November of 2002, the location of the black site where we

began implementing the enhanced interrogation program was blown.

It had leaked to the media.

When it became clear that we would have to abandon the location and go somewhere

else,

We figured that 92 tapes, you know, we just couldn't be taking them all over

place and that we had not gained any psychological insights and we didn't

them anymore.

So the black site asked for approval to destroy the tapes.

We coordinated our response with the Office of General Counsel to destroy the

tapes.

And he says, well, we want to investigate.

It took a year.

That's now 2004.

And in the end, the conclusion was it's up to senior agency management to decide

what to do with the tapes.

John Rizzo would go to the White House, talk to Harriet Myers, the president's

lawyer.

She would say, well, no, hold on. He would go see Gonzalez over at the

general. Well, nobody would make a decision.

Time passed.

And then you had the Abu Ghraib scandal involving low -level military police.

And I kept thinking, the tapes are going to leak.

And I got all these people whose faces are on those tapes.

How long do I wait?

We all knew that if a person's face showed up on a tape, That person would

vilified forever, maybe subject to some legal action. Maybe people would sue

them. Maybe people overseas would identify them and come after them.

And I think Jose's attitude was pretty basic. This is not about a cover -up.

It's about being the head of operations and saying, I will not allow my people

to be vilified for something that they were authorized to do a few years ago. I

won't let it happen.

One weekend at my house, it suddenly became clear.

Nobody is going to make the decision.

Nobody is going to make this decision.

So on Monday, I went to my office and I called my senior staff and lawyers

and asked them two questions.

Is it legal to destroy the tapes?

And do I have the authority to do this?

When the answer I got was yes and yes, I went ahead.

and ordered the destruction of the tapes.

In the course of conversations I have with different sources, I learned

that there had been tapes of interrogations that were destroyed.

Destruction of tapes resonates in Washington's scandal, so I start perking

and I start trying to learn more about what happened.

I had a vague understanding that Jose Rodriguez had ordered the tapes

in late 2005 as the pressure was mounting inside CIA and upon CIA

about its detention interrogation program.

So I write the story and I was not thinking in my head, this is going to be

blockbuster. They didn't have any sense of sort of what would happen.

I'm getting ready to retire.

My wife, Patty and I.

Usually have a martini in the evening and watch the evening news.

And all of a sudden my official agency photograph and my full name flashed up

on the TV screen.

You can't imagine the shock that it was for someone like me who had been there

for 30 plus years, who had been undercover all those years, and who was

weeks away from retirement to all of a sudden find myself.

accused of potential wrongdoing on national TV.

Rodriguez had his own reasons for destroying the tapes. But from a

Democrat perspective, you learn that the Bush administration

has... done these things and has authorized the CIA to do these things.

learn that Abu Ghraib has happened, and then you learn that there are tapes and

they've been destroyed by the person who was responsible for overseeing the

program. Major scandals have been made of much less than that.

The day after my story, the Justice Department launched a full criminal

investigation into the destruction of the tapes.

Well -known politicians at the time proclaimed that I was involved in a

-up, so I expect both the Intelligence Committee and the Attorney General of

United States to investigate aggressively the answers to questions

this cover -up.

And sure enough, a special prosecutor was assigned to investigate.

Initially,

Kind of naively, I said, well, okay. I mean, everything's by the book. You

I discussed it with my lawyers. They said I had the authority to do this, and

was legal.

And perhaps it'll take three months.

Well, it was three years.

They subpoena every memo, every document, every cable.

They interview everybody who worked with me.

And then came the press reporting, which was incessant and explosive.

and suggested that I had destroyed evidence of torture.

Many believed there was criminality here because the act of destroying the tapes

in late 2005 comes amid this growing scandal in Washington

about the CIA detention and interrogation.

And the belief was that the CIA realized that they were never going to keep this

quiet. This was going to be a scandal at some point. And that there were other

motives, which was that we can never have these tapes go to Congress, go

elsewhere, because they're going to be bad.

You know, I only watched one little segment that was sent to me at one time.

And, yes, I think that you would probably say that it was tough to watch

most people, yeah?

This is not for the faint of heart, you know?

This is real.

This is our world.

It was the right decision for the right reason, and the reason was to protect

the people who vote for me.

And in the end, Durham comes out in 2010 and basically says that he was not

going to charge me.

And I was cleared.

Unfortunately, the attacks by the media and by the politicians continued on.

Then you had the Senate Intelligence Committee launch its own investigation

started with the destruction of the tapes, which ultimately sort of spiraled

grew into its own report on the entire detention interrogation process.

Battle on Capitol Hill over an explosive Senate report on the use of torture.

There were tens of millions of documents made available to the Intelligence

Committee for purposes of this investigation, and they actually went

Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats claim the agency brutalized terror

suspects, misled Congress and the White House.

I find it hard to understand how somebody could say that, in retrospect,

the CIA didn't keep the Congress informed. I was among those at the CIA

down to Congress and said, this is a hand slap.

This is sleep deprivation. I talked to members of the Senate and members of the

Congress who said either nothing or that's okay. Now, if they want to know

waterboarded someone 20 times instead of 30, I'd say, okay, mea culpa.

But if the question is, did you have black sites and what was done at those

black sites?

I'm just, I don't know what to say. I told them. I told them.

I'm sure that the CIA did some degree of whitewashing. For example, the phrase

stress position.

It's a very antiseptic phrase, right? The phrase hanging from your arms with

very little weight on the floor conveys something very different.

And so there may have been questions that were never asked, that should have

been asked in these briefings. There may have been things that were said that

were not heard.

Some of the other members of the Congress, Nancy Pelosi included, were

supportive at the beginning and, of course, turned against us as well.

At every step of the way, the administration was misleading the

that is the issue. And that is why we need a truth commission to look into

All of a sudden, we had gone from being the good guys to being the bad guys.

The report seemed to suggest that the CIA misled the effectiveness of the

program, what was gleaned from the program, whether or not actionable

intelligence came from that.

Judging us about the ethics of things like harsh interrogations and

waterboarding, yes, we were said, got it.

But judging us to say what you acquired wasn't useful, that's crazy.

It's so wrong, the thousands of intelligence reporting that we got that

us on al -Qaeda's strategy, their tactics, their capabilities, their

of finances, logistics.

training, methods of attack, plans and intentions of attacks.

All of that came from the enhanced interrogation program.

I do think there's a lot that the report contributed, but one thing you don't

think of is the immense accomplishments the CIA made in this period,

which really did involve...

The destruction of al -Qaeda as an operational force. And this was an

thing that they did. And nobody talks about it. And the reason is this.

And when people become uncomfortable with the ugly things that they were once

comfortable with, they blame you.

We should have told more people and we should have documented it.

We're only serving our country at the direction of our country.

And in the end, we were thrown to the wolves.

The truth of our country's descent into torture is not precious.

It is noxious. It is sordid.

Torture and illegality have no place in America.

These interrogation techniques were not legal.

The politicians, they don't know the damage that it causes to peoples and

families. I mean, we had wives come to my house crying.

Because their husbands had been investigated during the Bush

then new investigations started during the Obama administration. They had to

into their college funds for their kids to pay for the lawyers.

And the uncertainty of it all. My parents are elderly.

I mean, you know, for a while they all thought I was going to jail. You know, I

mean, it's hard.

I've had people look at me and say, how could you do what you did?

And my answer is, who do you think we are?

I played Little League.

I grew up fishing.

I grew up in a Catholic school. I spent my life from grades one to eight

diagramping sentences with the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

We are you.

Did we make good choices?

Maybe not.

But in the tenor of the times and the threats we faced, I'm not sure how good

the options were.

Believe me, I've heard the argument,

well, you don't know what it was like at the time, and we thought there was

going to be another tax. But what has been made brutally clear in the years

since that period is that The United States went down a path

that was against its values as a country, our values as Americans.

In some cases, not all, but in some cases, there is almost universal

that what the CIA did was what we would call torture if it was carried out by

any other country.

I think most of us would look back and say the mission we had.

was to make sure it didn't happen again.

And we were given broad latitude to do that, and not only given broad latitude,

but told, don't ever let this happen again.

And it did.

I can sleep with that.

I did what I had to do.

It was the right thing.

Protected a lot of people.

Protected the country.

So like I said, no regrets.