Institute hosts this 90 minute of that. Good morning. Welcome to this mornings panel. Separating fact from fiction. I am a member of a task force on detention and interrogation policy. Captain bigelows recent film sparked controversy. Recentryn bigelows film sparked controvery. Its graphic depiction of eight torture. For the most part, the outrage has come from the left. You are a conservative like me, when you see the washington left with the hollywood left, your temptation is to sit back and destroyed a fight. And enoy the fight. That is why many of the cia and defenders and supporters stayed out of this debate. I interrupt while the progressives are fighting it out. But the fact is, culture matters. Many americans will form their opinions based on what they see on the silver screen. It is important for those who know the truth to set the record straight and separate fact from fiction. Today, we have a distinguished panel to help us do that. Three veterans. There were directly involved in the cia integration and Detention Program. Also the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. Mike is the former director of the National Security agency and the director of the intelligence agency. I got to know him back in 2006, when i was asked to write the president s speech revealing the existence of the Interrogation Program. He was very kind to give me access to all the intelligence and introduced me to the men and women who conducted the interrogation. But he is not only one of the smartest people i know. He is one of the most compelling witnesses. When he came into the office, the program had been suspended. He was not involved in its initial creation. He conducted a partial assessment. He gathered all the information and had to advise the president whether or not to restart it. He concluded he could not advise the president not to have an Interrogation Program. We will ask him to explain why that is. Jose rodriguez is the former director of the cia service. He was an undercover officer, becoming the head of the cias counterterrorism center. Including the Interrogation Program defected in this film. He is the author on what i considered the best book on this topic. He is in my view an american hero. John is the former chief legal officer of the cia. He spent 34 years in a cia office of general counsel. He has been called the most influential career lawyer in the cia history. In his memoir, a former director wrote, you do not call in the tough guys in a crisis. Call lawyers. Get the information they needed while staying well inbounds of the law. He sacrificed personally. Before we begin the discussion, lets show a trailer of the film. Can i be honest with you . I have bad news. I am not your friend. I will not help you. I will break you. Any questions . I want to make something absolutely clear. A working group coming to a rescue. I want you to know you are wrong. There is nobody else. There is just us. We are failing. Do you really believe this story . Osama bin laden . The whole world will want to know this. [indiscernible] all right. So, the progressives complaint is, the detection of torture is accurate, and their role in finding Osama Bin Laden is not accurate. I want to ask a real simple question. It has been quite an experience going to the Movie Theater and seeing something you all worked so closely on in your lives. What did you think of the movie . I like it. On balance, i am glad it was made. We will talk about that is not quite right and so on. On balance, i am very happy the story was made. Frankly, i am very happy because i read the oped in a post this morning. We will discuss the accuracy, artistic and historical, inside the film. I think it does a masterful job at suggesting that in the real world, there are no right angles and no easy answers to very difficult situations and that was a great service. I also like the movies. Very entertaining. It is a movie and there are some things i really like and things i did not like. I did not like the portrayal of the enhanced interrogation techniques. I did not like the fact that it made a false link between torture and intelligence successes. I also think torture does not work. Our Program Works because it was not torture. There were other things i like about the movie. I like the fact that it conveyed it was a 10 years. And that the agency was the focus of the effort and that it succeeded because of the commitment, dedication, and tenacity of its people. I like the fact that it showed the enhance Interrogation Program had something to do with the capture of bin laden. Human operations, analysis, technical operations, imagery. I also liked it showed the strong working relationship between agency and the military. It is a mixed bag. It is entertainment and i like it as entertainment. I agree. It was a terrific action flick, about 20 minutes too long. [laughter] the final takedown was done in real time. Riveting. And how the technique came to be and the safeguards we put on them. All the monitoring by medical personnel during the course of the interrogation, is a movie. The character in the marvy, the interrogator, making stuff up as he went along, not talking, bring on the water, get a bucket. People ask me about the box. Most of you know one of the techniques was a box, putting a detainee in a box for a limited duration. The box in the movie is not the kind of box used. When i say all this, i do not want to downplay or leave any impression that the actual water boarding was tame or benign. It was a very aggressive technique, as were all the others. I went into it telling myself it will be a movie. I was relieved there were no lawyers involved in the movie. [laughter] i would expand the next four years at a Cocktail Party explaining why i was not that lawyer. On the whole, it was a mixed bag but a terrific movie. I think it did really taking no sides. I think there were complicated moral questions, especially in the first few scary months after the 9 11 attacks. You were the chief legal officer at the time. Would you have authorize the interrogation techniques as they were depicted . Do they just throw someone on a mat and pour water on their heads . No. The interrogators were not allowed to ad lib. There were certain specific memos. There was a meticulous procedure to undertake. Before use of the water board, they will confirm this, the interrogators at the site would have to come back in riding and explain why they thought the water boarding was necessary. It would be approved at headquarters. It took the cia director to approve the use. The box is not pleasant. There was a big box authorized you could stand in and a smaller box. It did not appear to me to be quite as small as what was depicted in the movie. But yes, there was a box technique. Everyone can look at it a different light. I had the impression in this seen the guy was ad libbing as he went along. That was far from the reality. One of the scenes, the interrogator throws the detainee down and pours water in his face and shouted, when is the last time you saw bin laden . There is a difference between interrogation and debriefing. The purpose of interrogation, we do not ask questions we do not know the answer to. Hollywood has got to compress everything. There are no lawyers depicted in the film. One station chief for 10 years. [laughter] things are bad decompressed. Reality may have just been too long a story. I am almost willing to make an absolute statement that we never asked anybody anything we did not know the answer to while they were undergoing the enhanced interrogation techniques. The techniques were not designed to elicit truth in the moment, tell me this or i will hurt you more, i am not your friend. Two thirds of our detainees, it was not necessary. I am willing to admit the existence of the option may have influenced the two thirds who said, lets talk. For about onethird, techniques were used. Not to elicit information in a moment, but to take someone who had come into our custody, absolutely defiant, and move them into a zone of cooperation whereby, you recall the scene in the movie after the detainee is cleaned up and they are having this lengthy conversation. For the rest of the detention, it is a conversation. It is a debriefing. It is a going back and forth. A lot of people reflexively say they will say anything to make you stop. That may be true. That is why we did not ask them questions while this was going on. Again, john said, these things were not kind. But the impact psychologically, you are no longer in control of your destiny. You are in our hands. That movement into the zone of cooperation, as opposed to the zone of compliance. Usually, the Interrogation Program lasted a few days, and in the case of some, a few weeks. It was a finite amount of time. The justifications for the use of the techniques said that we could not go beyond 30 days. They had very specific information regarding how long it could be and how long we could pour water. It was very well controlled. Pretty quickly, he recognized within 10 seconds, we would stop pouring water. It was figured out any started to come up with his fingers up to 10. He would let us know the time was up. Tell the story you have in your book about what was said to our interrogators after being water boarded. It was interesting. It gave us the explanation. The explanation was the brothers needed religious reasons to talk. Once they felt they were there, they would then become compliant and provide information. He basically recommended to us we needed to submit the brothers to this type of procedure if we wanted them to cooperate. To help them reach the level where they would become compliant. To do so without sin. This narrative was my summer of 2006 trying to make judgments on the overall effectiveness of the program in the past and what would be a legitimate Program Going for it. Program Going Forward. Circumstances had changed. This story was important for my own soulsearching on this because, in other words, i was not trying to prove the point that what we were doing was universally applicable. It was well suited to this group. Whose believe was founded on metaphysical principles. Obedience to the will of god. This story told about creating allah expects us to obey him, but he will not send a burden bigger than we can handle. I can speak to you without fear of hell. On the outside, some tried to expand the debate. To suggest we are trying to suggest some kind of metaphysical macro principle applied to all time. That may be true but i was not interested in that. I was focused on what was happening here in this world. They reached the point where they felt they could talk. Once they reached that point, these are very egomaniacs people. They have a big huge egos and they cannot wait to tell you how evil they are. They just started talking. They would not stop. That philosophy started. If you read the looming tower, he was tortured and gave up one of his close confidants. The person came to him and said, you are ok. You resisted. He resisted as far as you could. No one could have undergone it. You did the right thing by giving me up. He was one of the people who trained them in towner interrogation techniques. This is the philosophy spread throughout the group. But we see in the movie that how many went under went water boarded . He told the red cross it was five times. No one seems to believe him. Could you expand on that . He was never waterboarded. He was the last detainee who was subjected to it before we had to suspend the program. It stopped midstream. It earned him a footnote in history, i suppose. This issue of numbers, how many times, how many times they were they waterboarded, this arose in 2004. It was by the Obama Administration when he came into office. It depends on the way you count them. The actual applications lasted matter of seconds. If you think he was left at 83 sessions, i do not want to say that what these guys went through was not very aggressive. It simply, those numbers are just way out of bounds and had been misinterpreted in subsequent years to as to the particular organizations. One of the startling statistics is that there are journalists who have submitted to waterboarding to show how bad it is rather than terrorists. For the record, that was not me. I was not that into my legal research. Tens of thousands of american servicemen have been waterboarded. Right now the only people we still waterboard are American People, americans in uniform. Waterboarding continues, it is not the terrorists. Lets turn to the question of the role that detainees played in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. If you can walk through the role and how it affected it. We are anchored on the movie. Is the movie a lot more subtle than those who have not seen the movie . Feel free to comment. After reading commentary about the movie, i expected this nonstop linear short line between an interrogation session and boots on the ground. There is an awful lot of complex intelligence work that is shown in the movie, for which i do not think the movie gets credit. I do want to make that point. When i was first briefed, and i think it was late 2007. It may have been very early 2008. The team came to me and said we think were onto something here. What we think weve portrayed correctly was the obsession people tracking down Osama Bin Laden. This is a very broad team. These folks have been on one or another different hypothesis. They came to me and said couriers. We think this is going to be a very positive line of inquiry. We have some information. We know we are communicating. Were confident it is not electronically giving the other means. We would have detected that. It must be facetoface. We have leads on couriers. They laid out a whole series of paths they were following. One was information derived from cia detainees. It was just mentioned in passing. We were not trying to prove a principal or refute an argument or anticipate the script of a future Academy Award nominated movie. It was just part of the flow. That is what i tried to suggest to you. It is almost impossible for me to imagine anything like that happening without making use of this costcolike storehouse of intelligence information that we gained over the years through detainees. And the ability to go back to the detainees and challenge their information or to prompt them with new information. Let me suggest one other thing. In an attempt to create the argument of a linear connection, very often stuff you have in your possession takes meaning only from information later discovered. That kind of costco warehouse, something last seen from raiders of the last arc starts to glow. It is something you have learned in 2007 or 2008. You have to treat this as a tapestry. That is the only way to consider it. One of the things you told me was that intelligence is like putting together the puzzle without the box. It is like putting together a puzzle that there are no edge pieces and you do not get to see the cover on a box. There are a whole bunch of puzzle pieces that do not belong to this puzzle. If you can talk to someone who has glimpsed the cover of the box, and that is the detainee, it eliminates an awful lot of things you may already possess but cannot quite fit into the pattern. In this case, the man who drew the cover of the box. The movie is about the information to get Osama Bin Laden. Theres a lot more to this story. That is the destruction of al qaeda. The enhanced Interrogation Program was key in destroying al qaeda. Osama bin laden came 10 years later. We had a number of terrorists coming after us with plots. We were able to capture them, kill them, destroy the plot, wrap them up because of this program. We can go into detail in terms of everything that happened, but enhanced Interrogation Programs were the key to that. A follow up. Take us back to september 1, 2001. There is smoke in the ground in new york. The pentagon is broken. What do we know about al qaeda . Did we know that members of this network, all this information we take for granted now . We did not know that much. We did not know who was responsible for 9 11. We had a few assets that provided us some peripheral information. We did not know very much. It took a long time for us to be in a position to really learn what was going on. In march of 2002, we captured al zabeta. We recognized that we had to do something different. Contrary to what some people are saying, he initially provided a couple of pieces of information. Then he shut down. We knew they were coming after us in the second wave of attacks. We knew that they had a nuclear program. They had a biological weapons program. We thought we needed to do something different. That is when the enhanced Interrogation Program came into existence. He went through the program, started in august of 2002 for 20 days or so. A few weeks later we captured a major player. He was a gobetween. This was the key to all of that. We forget that it was not just Osama Bin Laden 10 years later. It was al qaeda coming with us with plots and plots that allowed us to take down. One of the points you made to me was after 9 11 we had a Legal Program to get the people who had done this to us. We also had a program to get some of these people alive and find out what we know. In this situation it is not optimal. You want to kill terrorists but it is not always optimal. It seems to me our policy is to vaporize all the intelligence with drones. Is that an optimal situation . Certainly in the wake of the aftermath of the 9 11 attacks where we were trying to pull together a program that would elicit the information that our experts were convinced were keeping from us, i can tell you. I was there from the beginning through the end of the program. The cia is an intelligence collection organization, first and foremost. It is in agencies dna to want to collect intelligence from all sorts of means, especially human intelligence. You cannot collect human intelligence from a dead guy. The absolute priority was to thwart the next terrorist attack, which in 2002 everyone, including the people at the cia, thought was only a matter of time. The priority from the beginning with the others was to take them alive. He was captured in a firefight in which he was seriously wounded. The agency sent doctors over to bring him back. It was not out of compassion but he was no good to us dead.