Americas Television Cable companies and brought you as a Public Service by your cable or satellite provider. Next on book tvs afterwards program, former interrogator eric fair assesses his time at abu gharaib. Hes interviewed by raha wala, director of National Security advocacy for human rights about his book, consequence a memoir. So eric, were sitting downto talk about your book. Your book is a war story, a story about you as an interrogator engaged in pretty difficult circumstances in iraq. Its a story about torture but about much more than that as well. Can you maybe just start off by telling me a little bit about what the story really is about and why you decided to write this book . Guest the question about why is an interesting one and i think theres a part of me that still wishes i hadnt, written the book that i wish i could put away and its a story i wish i didnt have to tell that there was an obligation. I started writing about my experience in 1997 with the Washington Post oped, ive been at this for nearly 10 years. Some of the same commonalities ive learned about the army about integrity which motivated me to share that experience and i recognized in the oped of 800 words theres simply so much to be said so the application to continue to write and lead to more opeds and longer format and eventually the creation of the book. Host the oped in the Washington Post gives a flavor for more of that and how that fit into the format. Guest i had gone to iraq twice, the second time was 2005 so ive been out of Government Service in iraq for over a year and the narrative about what had gone on in the prisons in iraq and other places didnt match up with what ive seen and quite frankly with what ive done. I recognized that again, as a soldier i had an obligation to the truth and as i saw the narrative switch and as i saw people talk and this isolated incident in abu gharaib that was taken care of or simply hadnt happened the way we thought it did, those of us who were there again, had a duty to speak out so the original oped in the post was, i did not use the word torture. At this point i was struggling with the idea of what we were calling enhanced interrogation as atactic had an impact on me, in my own experience that i was struggling with. There was a discussion that the American People needed to happen evolved to the point where i recognized now enhanced interrogation clearly is torture, torture is an enhanced interrogation read what i didnt want to do is strike him sort of policy book that suggested where these things had come from or why it happened, i simply didnt know all those things. But i think more importantly i had an obligation to tell my story and extend my role in these things and not to justify them and not even necessarily to condemn them completely or condemn the other people involved but be as honest as i possibly could. Host i want to dig more into that and your role as an interrogator at abu gharaib and fallujah but also to start a little bit with your upbringing. One of the things that was interesting for me in this book was how motivated you were by your religious upbringing and growing up in a steel town in pennsylvania so talk about that and the interrelationship that that may or not have had with your decision to go into Law Enforcement and join the military. Guest i grew up in pennsylvania in a dying steel town and in a trip traditional Presbyterian Church which focused on things like humility and being quiet and no large displays of affection or large displays of appreciation, but far more importantly it was a place where i was surrounded by what i viewed then as an Important Group of men that were either veterans or career veterans from world war ii, worked at places like the steel mill, places like as a young boy i felt protected and felt safe and people were kind to me. And it was, people knew my name then , older men called me by my first name or they called me mister fair and i also dressed up and it was a safe, safe wonderful place and was also a place that instilled really important values in the. The idea that our thoughts should be with the people behind us, we should spend more energy and time focusing on the needs of others though in many ways it was really kind of a beautiful institution. Now, there were a lot of veterans in that institution as well so the idea certainly in places like that growing up in pennsylvania that you serve in the military was a strong one. This was the 1990s by the time i decided to go in but as i looked into the military i found many of the same things in the military i have found in the church. The idea of taking care of each other in a place of protection and a place that quite frankly did think of others first. In the military, leaders are often the ones who lead last and you are always concerned, its always about your troops and the people who serve under you and its in itself incredibly familiar. Host very interesting. You enlisted in the army in 1995 and the next five years of your life in the army, tell us a little bit about that and your experience, how that would shape the forward path for you in your career as you were to make your way to interact in the early 2000. Guest i talk about feeling protected in the church and thats a thing i wanted to do for others read first from the church but then in general nature so joining the army was for me a means to an end read i want to be a police officer. I had the presbyterian sense of calling and vocational calling so i sensed this calling for Law Enforcement and the best way to get there was through the military and veteran preference points so i joined in 1999, enlisted after four years of college and spent five years with essentially a peacetime army, there were operations in bosnia and cozumel but it was largely a war talk in the air, the idea that armies would be engaged in large land battles was kind of a thing of the past and the idea that the army would engage in anyground combat, people suggesting that every future war would be fought in the air. So i spent most of my army time in training. I learned out in Monterey California and spent the next three or four yearsin training exercises in places like tennessee and louisiana and north carolina. So when 2000 came around and my enlistment was up, there didnt seem to be much need for an era linguist in the army at that point and it was getting boring and i still felt that call to Law Enforcement so i came back to pennsylvania and did find a job as a police officer. Host i want to have you read a passage from your book. Its actually about one of your training exercises in the Spirit Program so i have here. Guest ill use your copy. Host if you want to read that and ill talk a little bit about what fear is and how thats one of the first entry points you had to interrogation which would be obviously the subject of your book. Guest as a soldier i was, i had myriad training exercises available and one was in a position i was in with spirit school, one of the team that was Forward Deployed so the idea that you were to be captured, we were more likely to be captured than the average soldier so you can qualify something. Host it was essentially Training Program to help you deal with first invading a foreign. Guest survive, exist and renovated and how you escape, resist the resist portion is where you are subjected to the interrogation of for an entity or foreign army and escape is hopefully you are able to escape so this section comes at sort of the middle of sears school where we been trying to evade but as everyone is in sears school you are captured so once captured you are taken to a detention facility. The trainers pretend to be enemy interrogators read they have our personnelfiles, they know everything about us. They families by name. At night they play loud music. One of the guards brings in a recording of his infant son crying like night and he also plays the opening of Ozzy Osbourne crazy train. We stripped naked and stand out in the cold. Army doctors take uproles. During interrogation we are promised warm meals and warm beds if we cooperate. We get slapped and shove. They say everyone breaks down under duress. They tell us torture works, it always has, it always will. It just takes time. Host a couple things are interesting about that. One is that you know, this could be sort of the first entry point to interrogation as a soldier. That it would sort of sheet your views on interrogation but that also in later on in the book you describe that fear training would come to be held out as a valid experience point for you to meet you down the path to being an interrogator in iraq. I think the other thought i had in reading the section of the book was just now knowing and rich retrospect that in the cia, the enhanced Interrogation Program, that essentially those techniques from waterboarding on down a reverse engineered from this program which was essentially designed to help our soldiers resist torture. That they were captured by enemy forces so maybe just i would invite you to respond to that. Guest sears school reinforced the idea that we as soldiers had which was that we were the good guys and we would be captured by the bad guys, that is essentially how we would be treated. There was a whole lot that sears would teach you in terms of what was going to be like and yet it was still a stressful training environment and there were people that did break down and had difficulty emotionally dealing with it and at the end of sere school youre essentially liberated by theamerican force and a raise the American Flag and play the starspangled banner andit is an Emotional Experience because the idea is that , it reinforces the idea that you are part of this noble undertaking which was the american military. And so the idea then, its now in the wake of 9 11 there was a lot of talk. Dick cheney went on meet the press just a few days after 9 11 and a large portion of that interview is about things like the darkside and how we have to work in the shadows. The idea that our enemy works in these dark, dark places and the only way for us to infiltrate or be resisted is sort of joined them in this place. And id like to be able to say i thought about sere school and i thought thats not who we should be but i didnt, i think like Many Americans that frankly iwas in agreement. Even tim russert who i had Great Respect for and did amazing things, even in the interview he didnt confront the expresident and i think it is all from there that once the administration and once all of us i think said it out loud and sort of took it for a test drive, the idea that maybe we could do things and we didnt object or protect ourselves, that it was implemented. I am familiar with the idea that these techniques were advocated from sere to places like the cia and eventually the enhanced Interrogation Program and ithink i dont have any sort of direct experience with that, it could be true but i also know that if the intention was to essentially work on this darkside or work in the shadows, it didnt necessarily mean , it didnt need to come from sere school or come from any outside influence. History is where i deal with examples on how to torture and how to abuse and the human mind can be incredibly creative in those terms so i think its a valuable discussion about where those techniques came from but from my own narrative and my own story i dont know that it would have mattered if it had come from some other place. Host lets get back to your narrative. You leave the army in 2000 area and back to bethlehem, joining the Police Department. Tell us about how that transition your life from pennsylvania back to iraq. Guest this idea of calling had been lawenforcement so i was hired area and i applied to a number of different federal Law Enforcement agencies in other cities but my home town of bethlehem was the first to bring the on and i found that i love the job lawenforcement. In many ways you could almost treat it like a ministry. You engage with people who are often in the absolute worst moments of their lives, certainly in a deep moment of crisis whether it was a car accident or Health Crisis or domestic dispute or an assault and how you respond to those people at that moment could really change the direction they were going to head in. If you responded with a steady form of almost compassion and authority, they could very quickly calm down and the situation would turn out much differently than it otherwise good but you also knew that if you have officers coming back, you knew the kind of officer that may come and make things worse and then they start by yelling or screaming or quite frankly almost enjoyed getting people riled up and you know, you would take someone who is in crisis and make it even worse but i was surrounded by the brass majority of the Police Officers i worked with were compassionate and incredibly professional and it was for me a perfect job. I eventually was diagnosed with a heart condition. I was perfectly healthy, had applied to another federal Law Enforcement position they required an extensive physical which discovered a heart murmur which led to further testing and it turned out i had a severe cardiomyopathy andinstantly it ended my lawenforcement career. So i was devastated and so all those things that i had had, this sense of having been in the military and in that community and the Law Enforcement community being similar was suddenly wiped away and there was no way back in red this was post 9 11 now and the runup to the invasion, it had already happened at this point so there was a war in iraq and i had no way to get involved, i couldnt reenlist with a heart condition. And at this point as the insurgencies started to grow, through the recognition that we did not have enough soldiers to accomplish the task in iraq so Contracting Companies which had always been there were tasks now with filling in sort of the empty spaces and one of those was interrogation. As a police officer, as the soldier with security clearance and Language Training and ironically enough having been to sere school those were the kind of things that allow the contractor to qualify me in the position of interrogator so the contractors were required to submit paperwork to the army saying here is why this pacific individual is qualified so it happened very fast area i wanted to get to iraq as quickly as i could, Saddam Hussein had been captured in 2003, we the war would end in a matter of weeks and months so we wanted to get there quickly and i did read i arrived in january 2003. Host tell us about the contractor that you signed up with. Happy and maybe also im interested in just the role of the contractor in relation to uniform military on the ground in iraq and i was struck by how sort of haphazard the reporting lines of authority were as you described in the book but at the same time it seemsvery integrated. In the sense that it was hard to tell if you were a contractor or if you are in the military so maybe talk a little bit about those who may not be familiar with the role of thecontractor. Guest i worked with tapi which we all called khaki and they were an enormous contractor and had done work with the Defense Department for years. In terms of electronic intelligence, i think that was most of their contracts but some of the other contractors were being asked to as this new Division Within their own company, was called human intelligence. They were at the time bringing over interrogators, intelligence analysts and i think what they were calling screeners. The screeners would meet with the prisoners first and then pass them on to the interrogators. I remember in basic training, it took the relationship between the billion and military and contractors. In basic training we were out raking leaves one day as we often were so carful of civilians pulled up and wanted directions so we were talking to these civilians and i remember our drill sergeant flying across the grass and screaming at us to get away from the civilians, he didnt want us to have any contact with the outside world and then we watched from a distance as this drill sergeant who had been horrible to us stood at parade rest, spoke respectfully to a civilian and said sir, man and gave them directions and made sure they knew and help them in any way that could and it was a shock to us read your was this drill sergeant who we thought sort of ruled the world was suddenly realized that in the face of civilians he was kind of an underling and one of the values that was instilled into your hand fromthe start in the military is civilian leadership. You learn your chain of command all the way up to your Battalion Commander of the top of that chain of command is always a photo of the president of the United States and he or she presumably is in civilian clothes area as a member of the military and United States you remember that civilians essentially are in charge. So this was a complication in iraq. Civilian contractors, the military viewed us kind of outside of the chain of command and they were quite sure how to deal with us and thought maybe they should defer to us but as contractors all of us with the Interrogation Program had prior military. So we still thought of ourselves as kind of win in the chain of command and we knew where we fit whether we been a sergeant in the five or six or mp4, even though we were out of uniform, all of us still found ourselves acting the way we had before where we were visiting to staff sergeants or tenant captains so it was a bizarre kind of interaction between the two and im not sure anyone, even to this day knows quite how it was supposed to go. Host so you are a contractor, interrogation specialist. You arrived in baghdad, essentially make your way to the abu gharaib prison and tell us about abu gharaib and maybe the first sign that you had that things work quite what they should be there before i still, ive asked this question a lot about First Impressions of abu gharaib and i tried to think about whats i can remember. The image of pulling into the prison and i remember who i was with its y was standing with and what i was wearing it was disorienting. It was such a large complex, larger than many of us have had the impression of and the vast number of prisoners, most of whom were in outdoor camps over behind barbed wire you can see them standing there and this was not what i thought of as interrogation or military interrogation. My image was still very much of the first gulf war and the thousands of iraqis surrendering and heading back behind enemy lines on the front lines and being processed back in the rear but here we were out in what was essentially one of the most dangerous parts of iraq. You are essentially halfway between fallujah and halfway between baghdad and mortar rounds came in and this was not my impression of how a prisoner of war camp was run area you didnt interrogate prisoners in a combat zone, you removed from that zone. The safety of interrogators and the people working but more importantly the safety of the actual prisoners so in terms of when i knew that something wasnt quite right, even before i thought about theissue of interrogation , most of us i think were sort of confused by why it had been arranged this way. Host interesting. You tell an interesting story in your book about receiving these prisoners for interrogation and getting little to nothing about them in terms of intelligence as far as why they were picked up. They had engaged in anticoalition activities. What does it mean to be engaged in anticoalition activities . Guest im still not entirely sure. Most of these prisoners were rounded up by young infantry soldiers who are out even just an Impossible Mission and in those cases they probably did not think they were going to be sent back or the infantry soldiers probably did not think these guys were going to be sent back and imprisoned at abu gharaib for months. There was such a confusing place that they would go to a house where someone had shot at them and round up everyone in the house and everyone of course would deny having done it and im sure someone said take them all and then they had to move on to next mission, their next Impossible Mission so then they would end up at abu gharaib and we would process them and they would have paperwork but as you mentioned, the good number of, maybe even a majority had this phrase of detainee spectrum of anticoalition activity. The other common phrase was detainee was seen running from the explosion, this idea that a mortar round goes in and if you run from that you are somehow potentially involved. We had a standing joke that the best way cannot be captured in iraq was do not run from the scene of an explosion which, either run towards it or stand. Again, an Impossible Task for the guys were out there but also clearly a breakdown in what was going to happen area they were just being sent back to a safe place to be held until the end of the conflict which is probably how they thought of it area they were being sent back to these prisons where they thought that we were going to gather intelligence from people who really, the vast majority had no connection to anything valuable in terms of information be on your job as an interrogator is to sit down with these detainees and essentially talk to them, tried to figure out what their involvement may or may not have been and in a particular anticoalition activity and you talk in the book about how the first few weeks are incredibly unfruitful and you sort of have this sad story about recommending detainees as not being a threat to Coalition Forces. You get called in by a superior, tell us about that experience and. Guest this is not to suggest there were people at abu gharaib who were part of an insurgency and didnt deserve to be there but had access to information we needed to get rid but there were many others who there was really no way to determine why they were there in the first place or others who had been plotting with capture reports, one gentleman in particular and this is actually a common theme, said his son was suspected as part of an anticoalition cell but his father, the family wont give up his location so until they do were taking the father. They need to talk to the father three or more for months later and he said even if i were going to give up my son, how could i possibly know where he is . Ive been in here for three months area you tell me where he is. So a lot of these initial reports i would write that the prisoner, the detainee, i used the word detainee cause thats what we were using now that they were prisoners. But detainee is not a threat to Coalition Forces and my impression was that this man, they were not going to incite a riot or try to escape and what that phrase meant was they would be set for release so almost all of my initial interrogations, i recommended these guys unknowingly for release and i was called in and told this was what was happening. Again, my connection to this mission and still believing in it so strongly i didnt want to be seen as the weak guy who was recommending everyone for release so i went on and changed it. So even men who i didnt view as threats i wrote, potentially a threat to Coalition Forces. Host your interrogations were often conversational in the traditional line of rapport based interrogations. When did the interrogations start to cross the line in your mind. I know this has been a shifting line for you even as you look back over the years but im curious as to what you saw as being the line where the interrogations crossed . Guest i didnt think about a line because there were discussions area as you mentioned, my initial interrogations were very direct and i spoke arabic and i still needed a translator in the beginning to get through some of the, i forgot the language. Once in iraq they recognize that i spoke the language they were desperate about their conditions in the prison and see their families and i could hold a long conversation. But all around me i was aware that these enhanced techniques which are torture and i still use the phrase in enhanced interrogation but i mean, torture is an enhanced interrogation but you could hear it in these interrogations, this sort of where i assumed were chairs and tables, you could hear the plastic crashing up against the wall, certainly guys were talking about stressed physicians, talking about sleep deprivation, how long can i do it . They were talking about food and isolation and sensory deprivation and not behind closed doors. It wasnt as if we were huddled together and if somebody walked by they wouldnt talk about it area these were open conversations so i was well aware. This wasnt something i considered but the longer i stayed at the prison and the more frustrating the interrogations became i felt again as a soldier eventhough i was a contractor , still feeling a part of that mission i was obligated to try some of these techniques. Host its interesting to me that you say you never really really thought about a line. A lawyer wrote about where the lines are and you talk about at one point in the book when you are brought in, they talk to you about the lines and the Army Field Manual interrogations, the Industry Standard and you talk sort of about folks joking about dereks lawyers. Tell us a little bit about that and how that. Guest everyone who wore the uniform will understand this but for those who have and it will make no sense. But there were a type of soldier who iserved in the 90s who we called barracks lawyers and had memorized field manuals by heart. There was a field manual, and fm for everything in the military from cleaning your weapon to clean your uniform to fixing the humvee or the helicopter. So if you went out, we used to have what we called motor pool mondays where everyone in the unit would have to go out and check the home of the and the air in the tires. There was a specific way to do that. And if you went out and just started by checking the oil that you didnt warm up the glow plug or fighter, there was someone there with the field manual in hands to say hey, we all hated them. Every visit made it inefficient and if this wasnt the way that the army worked in an efficient way so this discussion at abu gharaib about the Army Field Manual, the vast majority of us were, we dont operate by the field manual. We operate by getting a Mission Accomplished and doing essentially what were told and was necessary so while there were some discussions about recognizing that there are certain, the field manual sets certain procedures in which you are to glean information, there was also discussion that you also needed to be creative area there was a story upon sharp, about a interrogator who was successful and might have been successful through essentially rapport Building Techniques but the message was again, as the insurgency continue to grow the message was that we need information and you need to essentially find a way. Im not going to sit here and say i was ordered directly to use a stress position or sleep deprivation, this is neither a death and these are my mistakes, i own them but this also was not done in isolation and i was not alone will. We were not again doing this behind closed doors or it this was what we thought we were supposed to be doing. Host there were pressures to get information, get it back. Im just wondering, was it ever a conversation about listen, these kinds of techniques are out of bounds or cross the line and you know, was that in the consciousness . Guest there were absolutely conversation between interrogators about what could or couldnt be done. One of the things you were not allowed to do is threaten the life of the prisoner, you could not say if you dont talk im going to shoot you in the head, thats a clear violation but there were discussions about can i do things that would frighten the prisoner for that would make the prisoner afraid for his life without sort of saying directly, could i say to him look, if you dont cooperate with us were going to send you to egypt or send you to a country where you know they may be executed so the message being if you dont cooperate with us we will send you and we work sure. I say that only illustrate that we absolutely were thinking even within this world of enhanced interrogation, we were thinking of, we talk about lines before,its not necessarily lines but we were thinking about limits. That is the same thing, maybe it isnt but there were absolutely discussions, it was not as it was open season and you could do anything you wanted. In retrospect we know there were places where it was open season and i like to think if id seen some of the things that had been recorded, things like waterboarding or something called the distal rooms which have been reported, just blinding lights and the use of dogs and being people being put on exhaust pipes, id like to say that that point i wouldve said no but because of my own actions, because of where i ended up going in terms of things like to deprivation, i dont know that i have been able to stand up and Say Something quite. Guest at abu gharaib you tell a story about being pulled out in the middle of the night. Tell us about that andwhat you experienced there. Guest the vast majority of prisoners were held in outside camps, the facility within abu gharaib, the cells and an open bay. It was where the iron value targets were kept, people that had been highranking members of this regime for suspected of still at this pointsuspected of knowing something about chemical weapons. We were still thinking there were chemical weapons in iraq or attached counterterrorism. And as an arabic linguist with my highlevel security clearances that i had in the army, my Law Enforcement experience i was thought of as an asset, someone who could assist in these interrogations. For many interrogators who did not speak arabic was difficult to hold a conversation with the translator, the translator often spoke a different by a dialect and you werent sure if you are getting the whole conversation so the idea is that i would come in and observe the translator and overhear these conversations and say yes, hes getting this right or no, he missed this section so my introduction to the hard site was essentially to kind of overhear the translator but when i got in there i saw something that kind of changed the way i thought about what we were doing and i think, id come to this all the time when i do i cross the line but certainly walking into the hard site i knew i was involved in something that iwas going to spend probably the rest of my life dealing with. Not thinking again, we were violating any of these enhanced techniques or going too far but seeing them implemented was early troubling. There was a great deal of nudity inside the hard site and it was cold, it was december and a number of men chained to their cell doors with their hands between their legs which was essentially forced ending which was an enhanced technique. Donald rumsfeld eventually at some point said he stands at his desk all day, why cant they make them . I can tell you that seeing someone in a forced standing position has nothing to do with standing at a desk. It was torture. Again, at the time it was very hard to come to grips with the fact that i was involved in this and i didnt want to violate the trust that i had with my friends but certainly now after these years there was no way todeny what was going on in there was torture. Host so you are eventually, its off to fallujah where you see some of the worst abuses happen and i wanted to invite you to read from an interrogation that you witnessed in fallujah of what i think was called the mayor of fallujah at that time. And. Guest a prisoner hadbeen brought in and he claimed to be the mayor of fallujah which we bought was ridiculous. But it turned out that in fact he was, he had been the mayor of fallujah and involved in an attack on a local Police Department into it which a number of Police Officers were murdered and brutally. So thereas some suspicion that he had a connection or had somehow facilitated this attack and got them inside or smuggled in uniforms so i interrogated him initially and it was a very direct interrogation, i spoke with him and moved on but then he was passed on to another interrogator who placed him in this palestinian chair. Where the name the palestinian chair came from, there were rumors about that these army interrogators had been trained in israel. I dont know if any of thats true and it doesnt matter because we as americans did this, right . We needed these chairs that we were focusing on what we did is nation so while he was being interrogated in this chair i happened to walk by the interrogation room. The door to the room, a flimsy sheet of plywood has blown open in the hot desert when rated inside, ron hussein is bound to the palestinian chair. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all his weight onto his thighs area its as if hes been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray and hes frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs, hes blindfolded read his head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gas for air. Theres a pool of urine at his feet, he moans read too tired to cry but in too much pain to remain silent area. Host thats obviously incredibly horrifying. You know, one of the things thats interesting to me is how so much of the public conversation around torture focuses on the waterboarding technique which is you know, basically strapping someone down onto a board or some forcing water into their lungs, creating an Actual Experience of drowning and the sensation of it is a powerful technique. One that tends to inspire the imagination when we are talking about torture but the stress position, you know, sleep deprivation. You put that in the category of torture as well and i guess my question to you is is there a psychological component to torture in addition to the clear physical pain that is described in the stress position . Is that what informs your view of when you think about torture. Guest the psychological component is the only one thats involved in torture. The physical nature is just to get you to that psychological point. You dont ever have to lay a hand on a prisoner of war to torture them. We can talk about that in terms of sleep deprivation but in terms of this chair, in fallujah it was an incredibly violent place and there were people that brought them that had done or if things and i think even i was at times tempted to put someone in this chair and use it but i knew that it did seem strange there was a device and maybe that was on alarm bell for me so i thought i should try this chair and see what it felt like and another interrogator agreed with me so we strapped each other into the chair and the pain was searing and it was incredibly, thats enough. It was searing pain but what mattered more was not so much the pain but the fear of knowing that you wouldnt be able to get away from that pain and that you werent sure how much worse that pain could get rid. Host you had no control. Guest you had no control. So within a minute or two both of us that get me out of this thing area certainly it hurt and, but it was that momentary sense that if my friend is not standing right there and ready to take me out of this thing when im done, then i dont know where im going. I dont know whats coming and that is incredibly frightening and i know that having seen the mayor of fallujah in this chair, clearly he was in pain and clearly he wasnt discomfort but there was a sense that what was going on in his head and what was being created inside his own will and mind was what constituted torture. And i can speak about my own, i did not use the chair. I did see it and i think that makes me complicit in its use but i showed up for an interrogation one night and was asked to participate in a sleep deprivation, another interrogator had been speaking during the day and wanted me to keep them awake at night so i did paperwork for a few hours and went into his cell and woke him up and stripped him naked and i realized immediately its kind of an assault on this individual and that was the point at which my involvement in any kind of interrogation ended. Theres been a lot of talk about sleep deprivation and the idea that going through law school or medical school for basic training or Ranger School is equipment to sleep deprivation and thats just insane and its ridiculous its intellectually lazy. Sleep deprivation can be a conflict in a matter of hours. Put someone in it room with no windows, let someone speak for an hour and wake them up, they have no idea. Let them go back to sleep and do the same thing. Within a matter of three or four hours, that individual has no idea how long hes been alive. It may feel like four or five days when in fact if and only five or six hours. They lose all control and they recognize no longer have control of their lives and you can instantly strip them of hope. Thats sleep deprivation. You dont need weeks or months, you just need a few hours before you torture someone. One thing beyond the clear moral discussions of this that have always been interested in talking to interrogators is this idea that really creating this sense of confusion and disorientation and sort of trusting the brains functions in this way, how can that be the best way to actually gather information from someone like mark its interesting to me that you dont go a lot into the efficacy of torture in this book, it clearly worked in some circumstances, perhaps not in others area you talk about some examples where you get a lot of information and one of your most successful interrogations is just having cake with a guy in this book but why do you think the public conversation around torture is so focused on whether it works or not . And why do you sort of ride that narrative in your book . Guest two Different Things there. I think this reason the public is so enamored i torture and i know this because i felt this was it because the world is so frightening and so scary and because some of the things we face now eros, theres a loss of a sense of control. The same thing we tried to do to a prisoner, make them lose that sense of control is in some ways how we feel by facing this, gated world which frankly is more cognitive than the world had ever been, this enemy out there is not worse than any other, they are the same. Theres this deep fatality of war so i think torture, the idea that you can force control on this person and the idea that you can force them to cooperate is comforting in some ways because now you suddenly regain control so instead of accepting that their world is so complicated and that issues, values like compassion and humanity once ticket fix it, you resort to things like torture. This person is bad, they have information. I will control them, i will get the information and now im safe and its simplistic. I dont mean to be demeaning when i say it because ive been there and i felt that and thats what i thought but when we lack was any kind of voice that said the effectiveness of this technique and the ability to control another person has nothing to do with who we are as a nation area and thats all we are, if we all we are as a nation that says whatever the best way to get this done, just do it then weve lost our way and weve lost and like the constitution of the bill of rights. As a soldier, i did not swear and dont and i said this multiple times, i did not swear an oath to protect the homeland or protect the citizens of the United States. I swore i know to the constitution, i for an oath to ideals and i have and others in uniform have an obligation to not only in uniform defend the values of the constitution but an issue like torture, like enhanced interrogation violates that in the worst way, the worst way possible. I am as guilty as anyone having given in to that fear in the wake of some of these or applying attacks but we need to do better. Host it occurred to me reading your book as you go through abu gharaib and fallujah and these abusive interrogations that your faith is tested and carries through this entire period of mind and you, though you come out earlier and talk about this as a sort of retrospective exercise, you knew it was wrong at the time. You describe it as a sin so i guess the natural question is, why did you do it . And why didnt you extract yourself from that situation . Before we talked earlier about how similar the church and the army could be and the same values i found in the church were the same values i had in the army so the army is an incredibly attractive organization in general so it was very difficult to kind of extract myself and recognize that what i was doing was violating my own faith so while i see these things as a sin and i see them as morally wrong, i might still have an obligation to be a part of that. I think for anyone who has served or been in uniform, that sounds almost ridiculous and ludicrous but thats what we do when we put on the uniform. You essentially become something bigger than yourself. That can mean a lot of Different Things but for me it meant that even though there was this pole toward Something Like my faith or even the family values ive been taught or things i have learned when i was younger or even with the Police Department, that i had to in some ways for myself from those things because this was what we were doing to prosecute the war. Processing that as i moved on, i recognize that was a horrible moral failure on my part and the part of those that were with me and did these things to but letting go, the other question that i often get asked is why didnt i quit . I showed up at abu gharaib, it was ugly, you sought, you didnt like it. You are a contractor, you could have quit at any point. The hold for that community was so strong in the idea that you would quit community was revolting. Wed worked as hard as we possibly could to justify what we were doing but once i got home, i was impotent in terms of being able to say that no,this was okay and now i can move on. I simply couldnt do it. Host you resorted to drinking and your heart condition got worse and you are literally on your deathbed and you ended up getting a heart transplant. Talk about that experience and how that may have factored into or not your decision to go public. Guest the heart condition was the thing that had spurred on the condition in iraq. Without having lost the job with the Police Department i wouldlikely have stayed in Law Enforcement and never gone to iraq. And alcohol, i think im careful in the book, this is not an addiction, a book about addiction and there are excellent books about that kind of subject that speak far more eloquently than i do so i dont want to become a distraction in terms of how i dealt with alcohol. I think thats something that a lot of soldiers and veterans and anyonerecovering from trauma deals with, they find a way to self medicate and for me it wasalcohol. But at the heart , the heart condition continued to worsen. And as cardiologists had told me that would, i essentially face my deathbed. At this point ive already started writing about iraq and about my involvement in these things but theres no denying that im aware, i was aware then and am aware now that the clock was ticking for me even as a transplant recipient, as healthy as i am right now, retirement age is in many ways ruled out. At some point we had a circumstance so there is an extra sense, maybe to hurry up and be as honest as i can about these things. Host so you are pretty careful in your book to avoid politics in the larger policy debate, its a very potent personal story about your experience and your life but you came to dc last year, worked with the lobby on an antitorture measure which was passed in congress and had responded to some of the comments that had been made on the president ial campaign about returning to waterboarding and other socalled enhanced termination techniques. Talk about how that process factored into her thinking about your life story and why it is you came out . Guest i wrote the first oped for the Washington Post and mike all of my colleagues may not necessarily respond well. I didnt think that someone support me and would be behind me. But none of them, essentially all of them broke contact with me and i havent heard from anybody sense and that was a difficult thing and suddenly i was very isolated and there were new people that were saying essentially youve done the right thing here but the voices that matter to me were the ones i served with so i absolutely felt like id violated the trust and i had broken bonds with things and even today i still feel that. A few years later the organization did reach out to me and said we are gathering these professional interrogators to speak about these issues down the hill. Would you be interested . And i responded by saying i dont think thats a good idea. I dont think a professional interrogator in places like the fbi or the air force, theyre not going to want me around. I think my voice is valuable on my own and i have an obligation but the organization continued to push and i eventually did come down and i was welcomed with open arms and it was an eyeopener for me that this is not a conservative or liberal issue, this is not republican and democrat because there are people from all sides of the aisle and all places within the intelligence communitys that were speaking out strongly against these practices and i remember sitting down with Lieutenant General swanson who had been the director of the Defense Intelligence agency and being incredibly intimidated knowing that what i had done and here i am sitting across from him at a dinner table and he was gracious enough to spend an hour or two speaking with me as a friend and showed kind of affection and support for what i had done and no condemnation. There were certainly questions about how this had happened and, but i was essentially part of that group so i was reintroduced into, that bond was essentially reformed and i still miss what i had and i will always miss Close Friends that i had and they were always very good people that organizations like this have allowed me to recognize that im not alone and a lot of people feel very strongly about this. Host and senator mccain i think said it best when he said this is not about who they are, its about who we are and one of the narratives that i think is very frustrating is this idea that not only does this have an accountable impact on the individuals we hold inour custody who are going to suffer psychologically, physically for the rest of their lives , but it also , what does it mean for the soldiers and others working with our government when we ask our own to do this after mark to engage in torture . And what kind of impact will that have on our values, on our friends and family members will come back from war, i think thats really what your book is about. I want to ask about, this may not be the most comfortable subject but im curious what you think about it is if you had a chance to talk to some of the detainees you interacted with, prisoners who interact who were subjected to these forms of abuse, what would you say to them. Guest thats an incredibly important and difficult question and i processed that often and ive come up with an answer and i think maybe the best one is it would be obscene for me to make any suggestion as to what i would want to come out of that or how i would approach it. If Something Like that were ever to happen and i went in any other way than just quiet and open, they would essentially be another violation of their person. I dont know that that will ever happen, im not suggesting i want to, im not suggesting they wanted to. There have been moments and past history where similar types of meetings have taken place but with the war still raging in iraq and it is going on and certainly afghanistan i dont know if any of us have reached that point yet but yes, i, it would be offensive for me to suggest i would take an agenda into that kind of meeting. Host what do you think about suggestions from alternators and politicians that we should return to waterboarding . One of the things i think for enhanced interrogation, the argument for enhanced interrogation is this idea that isis and these other groups wouldnt hesitate to chop off heads and we are tying our hands in our ability to respond. We dont resort to these tactics and its a very prominent theme, even in the president ial campaign but even among a good portion of the american public, how would you respond . Guest if we talk about the donald trump, that has been played over and over about waterboarding, i was sad when i heard that but i empathize with it because ive been there. I thought those thoughts so i know where they come from and i know they come from a place of fear and i think we couldve used then was a voice that said it simply doesnt matter. I have an eightyearold son and if he comes home from school, i think hes a really strong american values, if he comes home from school with a bad grade or report about not behaving well and he says to me it doesnt matter because everyone else did worse than i did on this test, this was hard and everyone failed and i got a d so or if he comes home with badbehavior, kids were doing far worse than me. I was just talking during class, these kids were fighting. I wouldnt say to him thats fine. As long as youre not as bad as they are and continue. No, again, i would say i dont care. I dont care what your classmates are doing, i dont care what they are doing. I care about the way you are representing yourself and i care about the way you are interacting with the world and the way you are performing and thats all that matters. These are the same kind of values that were instilled in me. And i wasnt allowed to. Maybe that seems kind of an impotent analogy but i think it holds true that how could it possibly matter what our enemies or what other nations or countries or organizations are doing smart if thats the only standard that we have, as long as we are not them, as long as we are not doing this, that falls so short of the country and the nation i thought i essentially grew up in. We are the country, watching the first gulf war, one of the images that sticks with me are the thousands of iraqis rendering and running towards american troops and the idea that they knew quite frankly that they would be treated better in american custody and then they would be treated by their own units. The idea that you ran to this country for safety and thats the message we should send to even organizations like isis that yes, if we capture you or you surrender to us we may imprison you but you will be treated humanely and we will take care of you and if you want to cooperate, thats fine and whether they do or not i dont think that matters in terms of this discussion about torture. Host that resonates with me a lot and the one of the frustrating things from my perspective has been i love, all these military leaders have always been opposed. Even during the Bush Administration has these techniques where being authorized, there was an insurgency within the military and the dod to stop this and it has really been folks frankly who have not had a lot of interrogation experience, a lot of Leaders Within the military that have been pushing this interrogation agenda. We work with a group of retired generals and admirals and i think thats a message that has not gotten out there enough and my hope is that as this conversation continues among the American People that we will realize that this was a mistake. So you are heart transplant now, karen has been by your side. You have an eightyearold boy. What is next for you in terms of your conversation, your narrative on torture and your experience . Guest i am absolutely a torturer and i am someone who still feels obligated to talk about this and also heart transplant recipient and heart transplant recipients tend to think short term so the idea, this question is recurringon, whats next and i dont know right now. This is next. I still feel obligated to the book, Little League is next later in the week, we have practice on friday. Im seeing karen tonight when i drive home. Those are things i think i need to focus on but i also need to recognize that this book does not end the chapter for me and it doesnt allow me to say that i was a torturer, i have now closed that and moved on. The important part of a book like this is it identifies me as someone who is a torturer and who was able to do these things in the past and if im not careful moving forward and if i am not listening to the right voices and surrounding myself with the right people that im capable of falling into these things again and i think thats similar for the nation, the nation cannot think we did this and now we are okay. We have john brennan saying my agents will not support torture which is admirable but we cannot walk away from this suggesting thats notwho we are anymore. This is who we are, we did this is acountry, as a nation and weneed to address it as something we are capable of quite frankly doing again. Host i want to thank you for sitting down and talking with me. Guest thank you for the opportunity