All language subtitles for Inside the CIA Secrets and Spies - S01E07 - Jose Rodriguez - Trial by Fire

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.