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