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(birds chirping)
Alex Gibney: In 2002, from a secret location in Thailand,
CIA officers cabled headquarters
with details about the interrogation
of a prisoner.
Techniques to be used might cause him to die,
in which case he would be cremated
so his body would not be found.
But if he survived, there was a concern.
Would the agency give reasonable assurances
that the prisoner would remain in isolation,
possibly forever?
Headquarters reassured the team.
The detainee "will never be placed in a situation
"where he has any significant contact
"with others
"and should remain incommunicado
for the remainder of his life."
♪ ♪
Nearly 20 years later, the CIA has kept its promise.
The detainee lives in Camp 5
in Guantanamo Prison
on the southeastern tip of Cuba,
a few hundred yards from an ocean
he can hear but is not allowed to see.
(waves crashing)
He's never been charged with a crime.
He's never been permitted to challenge his detention.
He's been told that will never change.
(somber music playing)
(sirens wailing, people shouting)
(loud boom)
(rumbling)
(siren wailing)
Alberto J. Mora: There was a fear and fury
that gripped the nation after 9/11.
I was in the Pentagon the day the aircraft hit
and then worked in the Pentagon for the next four years.
There was the fear that the next attack
would come tomorrow
or that afternoon or in the next half hour.
And the fury
at the sheer inhumanity of 3,000 murders.
There was a bedrock conviction
that the individuals who had planned this attack
and executed it
had opted out of the human race.
I don't think there was an American who didn't feel
that we had to go back hard.
That was the national emotion.
And I think in the process, we lost our bearings in time.
Lawrence Wilkerson: We did some really stupid things
in those first few days based on our fear
and based on an attempt to try and secure the people.
There was this expectation
we're going to get hit again,
it's going to hit the White House
is going to hit the State Department.
I looked out my window and saw National Airport,
and I said, whoa, that's about ten seconds away.
And I didn't want to stay in my office, you know.
That's how, that's how frenetic
the atmosphere was at that time.
I think those first few days
were a struggle in the mind
for the President and the Vice President.
They had failed
to the order of Pearl Harbor.
So they were very afraid the American people
were going to throw them out.
I want you all to know this nation stands
with the good people of New York City
and New Jersey and Connecticut
as we mourn the loss
of thousands of our citizens.
Person (in crowd): George, we can't hear you!
President George W. Bush: I can hear you.
(cheering)
I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you,
and the people who knocked these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.
(cheering)
(whooping)
Crowd (chanting): USA! USA!
USA! USA!
USA! USA! USA!
Gibney: In its righteous anger, America would strike back...
with unmatched fury and force.
(explosions booming)
The invasion of Afghanistan.
Peter Jennings: If you're just tuning in for the first time
to watch another program,
it-it's hard to begin
where to tell you how much has happened today.
Gibney: Shock and awe in Iraq...
(people cheering)
...which led to ISIS.
Which led to more terror and more targeted killing.
The global war on terror has cost us
eight trillion dollars.
Nine hundred thousand people have been killed.
Thirty-eight million have been displaced.
As President Bush promised, we have made ourselves heard.
(explosion booms)
With all our money and might,
did we inspire the world with our ideals?
We retreated from Afghanistan in defeat,
leaving resentment and betrayal in our wake.
What led us to this place?
I would argue that it all started
as a failure of intelligence,
both of our intelligence agencies
and ourselves as citizens
in our refusal to listen to anything
but what we wanted to hear.
(triumphant theme playing)
Announcer: Live from Camp David,
a special edition of "Meet the Press"
with Tim Russert.
An exclusive interview with Vice President Dick Cheney.
And we are green top in the shadows
of the presidential retreat at Camp David.
Mr. Vice President, good morning and welcome.
Morning, Tim.
There have been restrictions placed
on the United States intelligence gathering,
reluctance to use unsavory characters,
those who violated human rights to assist in intelligence gathering.
Will we lift some of those restrictions?
Well, I think so. I think, uh,
if you're gonna deal only with, uh, sort of, uh...
officially approved certified good guys,
you're not going to find out what the bad guys are doing.
It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there,
and we have to operate in that arena.
Uh, I'm convinced we can do it.
We can do it successfully, but we need to make certain
that we have not tied the hands, if you will,
of our intelligence communities
in terms of accomplishing their mission.
John Rizzo: I knew based on my experience
that CIA would be directed,
be given legal authorities that it had never had.
So I was trying to think of every conceivable
and legal action we could take
on a covert basis to counter what had just happened
and also, above all, prevent
another 9/11 from happening.
Scatter, scatter, please go home.
Rizzo: I remember that morning
there was an evacuation of the CIA headquarters.
Let's go.
Rizzo: I saw my fellow employees walking,
many running, to their cars.
It quickly developed a huge gridlock.
So I thought to myself, well, to hell with it,
I'm just going to stay here.
So I closed the door of my office.
And honestly, in those first few minutes,
I started scribbling down
uh, the implications of what was happening
and what CIA might be asked to do
in the wake of these attacks.
I was literally brainstorming at that point.
Wilkerson: It was quite clear
with a threat like Al-Qaeda,
we were going to have a problem with intelligence,
especially the kind you get on the battlefield.
So people started looking around
for who could be the best
to interrogate anyone detained on that battlefield.
And lo and behold, there weren't any.
The best we could do was 12 or 13
who had done it before at the FBI.
Daniel J. Jones: I came to the Senate from spending
a number of years in the FBI doing counter-terrorism work,
specifically Al-Qaeda international operations.
And I think the CIA truly believed,
Tenet particularly, that it was their fault
for not catching 9/11.
After all, they never passed information
about the hijackers to the FBI.
So they wanted to be the individuals with the successes.
They wanted to be
the tip of the spear, so to speak, in this fight,
notwithstanding the fact that they weren't prepared.
And this wasn't something the CIA
has historically engaged in.
But six days after 9/11,
a covert action authority was signed by the President
giving different US government agencies,
particularly the CIA, special secret powers
to battle Al-Qaeda and keep the country safe.
Rizzo: Capture and detain senior Al-Qaeda officials.
These are words I wrote that first morning.
But of course, prior to 9/11,
CIA had never captured or detained anybody.
They would sometimes question people
that a foreign allied government
had captured overseas.
But we had never operated a system
where we would do the capturing
and we would do the holding and we would do the detaining.
So again, this was tabula rasa for us at that point.
It was decided CIA would be responsible
for the top echelon of Al-Qaeda.
By that point, the military had stood up
the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay.
The thought was that would be largely preserved
for lower-ranking officials
but that the CIA would take the lead
for capturing the higher-level officials.
Jones: The CIA did do research on detention
and eventually concluded it was a bad idea.
Somebody said the thought of holding someone endlessly
is incredibly scary to me.
I don't want to be called back from retirement to say,
what do I do with this guy?
And yet they begin a detention interrogation program.
Gibney: The interrogation program was designed,
in the words of the CIA, to do something different.
When publicly revealed, that difference set off
a media firestorm.
George Tenet: It's been portrayed as this--
we sat around the campfire and said,
"Oh boy, now we go get to torture people."
Well, we don't torture people.
Let me say that again to you. We don't torture people.
-Okay. -Come on, George.
-We don't torture people-- -Khalid Shaikh Mohammed?
We don't torture--
-Waterboarding? -We do not...
-It's torture. -I don't talk about techniques, and we don't torture people.
Now listen to-- No, listen to me.
I want you to listen to me.
I know that this program
has saved lives.
I know we've disrupted plots.
Gibney: For years, the CIA promoted
its new interrogation program as a success.
George Tenet was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The CIA worked closely with celebrated Hollywood filmmakers
to promote a fable
that its interrogation techniques
were tough but necessary
and were responsible for locating the hideout
of Osama Bin Laden.
It's one of the great stories of our time.
Gibney: When critics tried to sort truth from fiction,
they found alternate accounts hidden
behind the black lines of redactions
and at the bottom of shredding machines.
Finding out what really happened
would require putting together
bits and pieces of evidence that remained
along with testimony not censored by the CIA.
Rizzo: As soon as the President signed
the Presidential finding,
CIA began planning.
The way I was thinking was to just pull everything
out of the toolkit.
I mean, we were starting at square one.
We were scouting potential locations
where these Al-Qaeda officials,
if captured, would be held.
And the event that really propelled it, of course,
was when we did capture our first high-level official,
a man named Abu Zubaydah.
News Anchor: US officials tell NBC News
Zubaydah may have been nabbed just in time.
Intelligence reports indicate he was already planning
the next wave of terrorist attacks
against US targets.
Gibney: Abu Zubaydah is the forever prisoner
at the heart of this story.
His capture, detention, and interrogation by the CIA
is the origin story of America's failure of intelligence
and our retreat from the ideals
we claim to be fighting for.
For many years, it was an impossible story to tell
because the CIA prevented key witnesses from talking.
One of those was the ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan.
When he first testified in Congress,
he was behind a black screen.
When he wrote his account of interrogating Abu Zubaydah,
he was ruthlessly redacted by the CIA,
which even censored the use
of his own first person pronoun.
It's very difficult, to me, to put it out for you
when I cannot talk about the story,
the, you know what's going on.
So you can, you can see that.
You can see here the one-letter word.
Gibney: Rather than fight an endless legal battle,
Soufan chose to publish with whole pages blacked out.
It was the protest that made my interview
with Soufan very difficult.
You call this guy Boris.
-Is Boris his real name? -No.
I cannot talk about, uh, about him,
and I cannot even mention his real name.
Gibney: This is Boris.
His real name is James Mitchell.
He also wrote a book about the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
But Mitchell's book had the full cooperation of the CIA.
Because Mitchell was the inventor of EITs,
the acronym for what the CIA called
Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
and what the rest of the world called torture.
If my boss tells me it's legal,
especially if the President has approved it,
I'm not going to get into the nuances
about what some guy in the basement
or what some journalist thinks about it.
Because they're free to trade places with me
any time they think they can do a better job
of protecting Americans.
Gibney: If you hear a little bit of agitation
in Mitchell's voice,
it's on account of his own frustration
with how the CIA has portrayed his role.
So we agree to an interview.
Then I sued the CIA to get Soufan's book unredacted.
Unexpectedly, the CIA backed down.
Soufan agreed to sit down one more time,
knowing he could now tell me what really happened.
Since 9/11,
I was nonstop traveling around the world,
and finally, I came back around Easter of 2002,
and I was hoping to go with, uh, spend some Easter time
with the family in Pennsylvania.
But I got a phone call.
They said, "You're going to be going to
interview Abu Zubaydah."
They called me because I've been investigating
Al-Qaeda for a while.
I was involved in the East Africa embassy bombings,
the "USS Cole" attack,
and I had sources reporting on Abu Zubaydah.
So Abu Zubaydah wasn't
a character that came out of nowhere to me.
Abu Zubaydah was an individual,
a terrorist, an operative,
that I've been following, uh, on for a while.
And that's why, at the time, the FBI and the CIA,
they felt that I should be there
helping the CIA interrogating Abu Zubaydah.
Rizzo: Abu Zubaydah was captured
in a firefight in Pakistan,
and he was immediately whisked
to the then brand-new first CIA detention facility.
Personnel were assigned there in, literally, days.
Ali Soufan: We came with the CIA,
a couple of officers
plus a medic and two doctors.
They made it clear to us, me and Steve Gaudin
who was my partner at the time,
that we're not there to interrogate Abu Zubaydah.
We're just there to assist the CIA in the interrogation
because of the knowledge and the expertise
we have on this subject.
They basically read us these instructions of,
"Hey, listen, it's a whole 'nother ball game.
"It's a whole another world now.
"This is all about preventing the next September 11th.
This isn't about prosecution."
It changed...
the scope and nature of pretty much everything
Ali and I had probably ever done before to that day.
So we got to this location,
pretty rural area.
It wasn't like we walked into
this nice, beautiful "site," so to speak.
It was just like a house.
Next thing we know, an ambulance gets there,
and they carry Zubaydah by Ali and I
into the house.
Soufan: Abu Zubaydah was finally captured
in Faisalabad, Pakistan.
He tried to escape, and he was shot in the process.
So he required intensive medical care.
Steve Gaudin: He had been shot a number of times,
mostly abdominal and in the leg.
But, and this was very strange to both Ali and I,
the folks in charge for some reason
were starting to doubt whether or not
he was actually Abu Zubaydah.
Soufan: We went to the chief of base,
and we said, "When do you want to start the interview?"
And he said, "Look, me and my guys,
"we have no idea who the guy is.
"We don't know anything about these groups.
You know about this guy, don't you?"
We're like, "Yeah." He said, "Well, pff,
"what are you waiting for?
Go and start interrogating him."
So Steve and I, we go in.
Abu Zubaydah was handcuffed to the gurney.
He has a bag, a big bag on his, on his head.
I said, "Salaam alaikum, alaikum as-salaam,
peace be upon you." And I said, "What's your name?"
And he looked very different than the pictures.
He does not have a beard.
It seems that he had some procedure
in order to alter his, his shape.
And he had a cloudy eye.
One of his eyes was, like, getting infected,
and he was kind of looking confused,
"Who the heck is this guy who's speaking Arabic to me
and where the hell am I, right?"
So I said, "What's your name?"
And he said "Daoud,"
one of his aliases.
It means David in Arabic.
And I said, "Okay, so what if I call you Hani?
He had that, "oh, my gig is up" look on his face.
Hani is the name that his mother
nicknamed him as a child.
So he was shocked to hear that name coming from me.
Hesham Abu Zubaidah: His birth name actually is Zayn al-Abidin.
But my mother called him Hani.
And he was five or six years older than me.
He was a really great artist. He, he liked to draw.
I remember the first drawing I saw from him.
He had a hand holding a pen and drawing an eye.
And the eye had a tear coming out it.
He carried pain with him.
He used to express his feeling by drawing.
When I go through his diary,
I have so much good memory with that guy.
He was a really nice, funny older brother.
I don't remember his being religious.
He used to play piano,
he used to have a girlfriend upstairs,
you know, and he used to smoke,
go out with his friends.
Gibney: When Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan,
FBI and CIA agents thought they had nabbed
a diabolical Al-Qaeda mastermind.
They found photos of his many disguises,
a bundle of fake passports,
an address book of Al-Qaeda operatives,
and a videotape
taken from a hideout in Afghanistan.
(speaking in foreign language)
Gibney: If the video was incriminating,
there were other materials that showed evidence
of a more complex character.
There was a diary in which the young Hani spoke
to himself in the future,
hoping that that future Hani, Hani number two,
would have the wisdom to understand
the troubled life of Hani one,
a Palestinian in exile.
♪ ♪
♪ The ship is like a ghost... ♪
Gibney: After growing up in Saudi Arabia,
he left home and spent a few years traveling the world,
gliding in and out of colleges,
odd jobs, and love affairs.
His diaries are filled with hookups and romances
as he tries to reconcile his sexual desires
with the dictates of Islam.
From Bangkok to Manila to St. Louis,
he was a rootless wanderer
whose life soundtrack was the music of Chris de Burgh.
♪ Sailor ♪
♪ Can you hear me? ♪
♪ Sailor ♪
♪ Hear my call ♪
Gibney: In 1991, he found himself in India,
harboring a growing anger over Israel's treatment
of his fellow Palestinians.
That sense of injustice led him,
like so many Muslim men, to the land of jihad.
"To hell with Chris de Burgh" wrote Hani 1,
"I desire to be a martyr."
♪ Take me home ♪
(mortars firing)
Soufan: Abu Zubaydah went to Afghanistan
in the early '90s.
And during a battle against the Najibullah regime,
he was hit with a bullet, and he lost his memory.
After he recovered, he went to Al-Qaeda,
and he said he wanted to join Al-Qaeda.
But they were very hesitant
to allow somebody like him to join
because of his state of mind.
So the approval never came, and he took it personal.
(laughs)
And I don't think he ever forgave Al-Qaeda for that.
So he started to do it himself.
Gibney: He became an independent facilitator
based in Pakistan, forging passports
and arranging travel and connections.
He established a secret network
among many of the jihadis,
who wanted access to the Khalden training camp
in Afghanistan.
While many came from different groups
and for different reasons,
Khalden became a recruiting pool
of operatives for Bin Laden.
Khalden was not part of Al-Qaeda,
but many in Washington were convinced it was.
Rizzo: Abu Zubaydah, in those early days,
was deemed a very big fish in the Al-Qaeda organization.
He was one of the few names
that was certainly recognizable to me.
Prior to 9/11, the intelligence we had
on the Al-Qaeda hierarchy was woefully lacking.
Beyond Bin Laden and his deputy al-Zawahiri,
we really had picked up the identities
of very few of the more senior Al-Qaeda officials.
Abu Zubaydah was one of the few
that had actually come up on the radar screen.
And he seemed to be popping up constantly
as a facilitator,
perhaps operational commander.
Every time, seemingly, we would chase down a possible lead
to an Al-Qaeda facility
or individual,
Abu Zubaydah's name would be attached to it.
Gibney: In his pre-9/11 diaries,
Abu Zubaydah distanced himself from Bin Laden.
While he railed against America for its support of Israel,
he objected to the way that Bin Laden
was willing to kill innocents.
Still, he operated as a kind of travel agent
for all kinds of jihadis,
including Al-Qaeda foot soldiers.
That confused the CIA.
Field agents identified him as an independent.
But analysts in Washington were determined to believe
that he was the number three or four in Al-Qaeda.
It appears that they thought he was a central character
from whom they could extract all manner of intelligence
on Al-Qaeda for the one hand
and, more importantly, for intelligence
on what was coming next.
Soufan: Our main goal was to see
if there is imminent threat,
so we didn't really have time to play.
So during that conversation, we said,
"How do you think you get caught, Hani?
"What were you doing that led us to you?
What mistakes did you do?"
And all of a sudden,
he talked about an operation that he was planning to do.
There was an attack in a country friendly to the United States.
Gibney: We forced the US government
to hand over a copy of Ali Soufan's notes
from his interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
The plot revealed by Zubaydah
involved $100,000 from Saudi Arabia
for an operation to be conducted in Palestine.
Soufan: It was a pretty advanced operation.
So he thought because of all these calls
and what he was trying to do, he got caught.
We had no idea about that operation.
So we, uh, wrote it.
We sent it back to headquarters,
and we waited.
Gibney: Back at CIA headquarters,
George Tenet was thrilled that Abu Zubaydah was talking
and helping to prevent future plots.
He wanted to congratulate the CIA agents involved.
But when Tenet was told that FBI agents were responsible,
he flew into a rage.
He ordered his subordinates to find a CIA team
to take over the interrogation.
Rizzo: The FBI officials on the scene
thought that Zubaydah was cooperating
and that they were building a rapport with him.
That was not articulated to me at the time.
CIA officials were convinced
that he was withholding
far more sensitive and important stuff,
so I was not told that,
look, the FBI guys think
Zubaydah is telling everything he knows.
It's just going to take some time.
But if I had been told
and I'd relayed that to my CIA management,
I think the response would be, from CIA management,
"Well, time is the one thing we don't have."
Gibney: Time plays a strange role in this story.
There was enormous pressure to get information
out of Abu Zubaydah to prevent future attacks.
That's usually the rationale for torture.
It's called the ticking time bomb theory.
While the bomb is ticking, there's no time
to play nice with bad guys.
But strangely, the CIA wasn't ready
to take the gloves off.
The agency needed to invent a new kind of interrogation
that would not land its agents in jail,
and that would take time.
Meanwhile, in Thailand,
FBI interrogators were getting
vital information out of Abu Zubaydah
Out of the blue, the CIA sent a cable
telling the agents to stop the interrogation.
That confused the FBI agents.
What happened to all the urgency?
But orders are orders.
They were told to wait for a team
from CIA headquarters to arrive.
Back in Washington,
the CIA was desperately trying to figure out
who should be on the team.
And now, there was no more time left to lose.
The video you're about to see is a deposition from a lawsuit
brought against key players
of the CIA interrogation program.
Woman: Can you raise your right hand, please?
Do you solemnly swear that...
Other right hand, please. (laughs)
Gibney: The man wearing the blue and white tie
is Jose Rodriguez.
In 2002, he was the head
of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center,
or CTC.
-Yes, I do. -Gibney: He was the man
Tenet leaned on to replace
the FBI interrogators
and to find someone to invent overnight
a new CIA interrogation program.
Lawyer: I want to direct your attention
to the time period
in which, um, doctors Mitchell
and Jessen were hired.
-Mm-hmm. -Lawyer: Um...
And, uh, for the record,
doctors Mitchell and Jessen are here today.
Um, did you select
Dr. Mitchell to work with CTC?
Once he was recommended and I met, uh, Dr. Mitchell,
yes, I recommended him to continue working with us.
Lawyer: Okay.
Um, I want to read you
a passage from your book "Hard Measures."
-Do you see that there? -Rodriguez: Mm-hmm.
-Lawyer: That looks like you. -Rodriguez: That looks like me?
Lawyer: Yeah. Um...
and, um, if you could take a look at page 55.
-Rodriguez: Mm-hmm. -Lawyer: You see that?
And in the second full paragraph
is the sentence, "Within two days of AZ's capture,
"we tracked down the contractor
"and asked if he would accompany a team
"of CTC officers to the black site
where we hoped Abu Zubaydah would be interrogated."
-Do you see that? -Rodriguez: Yes.
Lawyer: First of all, the reference to AZ
is Abu Zubaydah, correct?
-Rodriguez: Correct. -Lawyer: And the reference
to the contractor is Dr. Mitchell. Is that correct?
-Rodriguez: Correct. -Lawyer: Okay.
How did you reach him
within two days of AZ's capture?
Well, I assume that he was at headquarters.
Somebody, you know, somebody reached him.
I did not reach him myself.
Somebody in the Counterterrorism Center
reached him.
Jones: Jim Mitchell was identified
because one of the chief lawyers
in the counterterrorism division
happened to be married to another CIA employee
who was in something called
the Office of Technical Services.
This involved psychologists.
And there was a psychologist on contract,
Jim Mitchell, who had written a report for the CIA.
This report was based on what was believed
to be an Al-Qaeda manual,
and it included details on interrogations.
Gibney: The manual was called "The Manchester Manual"
in honor of where it was found in Manchester, England,
by Ali Soufan.
Soufan: I was in Manchester investigating
a member of Al-Qaeda.
And we did a search of his house
where we found a handwritten book,
"The Manchester Manual."
It's mostly about urban warfare.
And it has a section about what happens if you get caught.
What should you expect to endure?
It talks about very harsh techniques,
beatings, rape, they're going to be sodomized,
their family going to be tortured.
These are the things that were ingrained
in the head of Qaeda operatives.
Gibney: Soufan recognized it as a kind of
cut-and-paste terrorist pamphlet.
But the CIA imagined it might be
a window into the Islamist mind.
So they hired a psychologist named James Mitchell
to analyze it.
He and his colleague, Bruce Jessen,
concluded that the manual was a diabolical guide
to play mind games on interrogators,
which could only be overcome through harsh physical
and psychological countermeasures.
Even though those techniques were milder
than the torture expected by the manual,
the message found favor at the agency.
Mitchell, who had no experience
interrogating anyone,
was the only candidate considered
for the job of inventing
the CIA's new system of interrogation.
Jones: There was no blue ribbon commission.
There was no outreach to the FBI
or to the Department of Defense
or any other US agency,
or foreign entity, for that matter.
Gibney: The CIA's hiring policy
was much more casual.
A CTC lawyer whose pictures
have been scrubbed from the internet
just asked his wife if she knew anyone
who might be good for the job.
Jones: This lawyer says, "Abu Zubaydah's been captured.
I don't know what we're going to do with this guy."
And she says, "Well, I got a guy in my office
"who just wrote a report
"on this believed-to-be an Al-Qaeda training manual.
You should talk to him."
Mitchell: I got a phone call from the CIA
and they said, "You need to come in tomorrow."
I was curious because that was,
you know, that sounds like comic book, uh, material.
So I went.
I parked in the furthest space in the parking lot,
the only place I could find.
That building is a labyrinth of hallways and rooms.
I got to the door,
and they rushed me into the room,
told me that they had captured Abu Zubaydah,
and asked me if I would deploy
with the interrogation team
to help them... recognize
if he was using sophisticated resistance
to interrogation techniques
to resist providing information.
Lawyer: He said he provided psychological support.
What does that mean?
He provided, uh, research
and applied psychological support,
-uh, to the agency. -Lawyer: Mm-hmm.
Um, so he did research?
I assume so.
Lawyer: You don't know?
No.
Jones: So Jim Mitchell walks in the door,
says that I have experience in interrogations,
describes what he would do,
and Jose Rodriguez says, "You're hired,
"and we're going to put you on a flight
to the first detention site right now."
No other vetting.
(airplane whooshing)
(insects chirping)
Gaudin: Those first few days were very chaotic.
He was very wounded
and sometimes while we were talking to him,
the doctors had to come in and change bandages,
or change dressings.
And sometimes, the, the medical folks would say,
"You can't talk to him for a little while. We need to let him rest."
Soufan: They said he was dehydrated.
So Stephen and I were caring for him.
We put ice on his lips.
Ali is holding his hand. Ali's rubbing his forehead.
Ali's praying with him, saying, "Hang in there, brother.
"Don't worry. We're going to take care of you.
You're going to be okay."
He defecates all over himself.
Soufan: Later on, I don't know,
two or three o'clock in the morning, the medic came in
and he said, "Is this guy important?"
And I said, "Yeah, I believe so."
He said, "Well, if, you know,
"if you think he knows information,
"you better get it from him now.
You better go and talk to him now."
I said, "Why?" He said, "Because he's septic.
"I don't think he will live
to see the morning."
So the chief of base wrote a cable about the situation,
and the answer came back, short and sweet:
"Death is not an option."
We had to come up with a cover story
to take him to a hospital.
We were wearing military uniforms,
said he was one of our soldiers,
that he went crazy and he got shot.
And that's why we're taking him for medical care.
Reporter: Abu Zubaydah,
Al-Qaeda's top field commander,
is talking.
The trouble is, American interrogators
are not sure whether to believe him.
Donald Rumsfeld: I don't know that I want to give
a day-to-day report on, on his, uh,
how enthusiastic he is about his situation.
Um... he is not well.
He's got several bullet holes in him,
and, uh...
well, how fast he'll recover
and when he'll start cooperating, time will tell.
Jones: While Abu Zubaydah is in the hospital,
things begin to change.
It's during this period of time
that Jim Mitchell is sent to the detention site.
He goes merely as an observer
and to provide feedback to CIA headquarters.
But his influence becomes very clear.
They talk about returning Abu Zubaydah
to the detention site in an all-white room,
which is very bright,
kept cold.
He'll be kept naked and sleep deprived.
These are the ideas that are coming about.
Even though he's not particularly doing the interrogation,
these are his ideas that he's pushing forward.
Gibney: They weren't asking you at that time
to help with interrogations, or were they?
Not to do interrogations.
They were help-- asking me to help brainstorm
with the interrogation team, the whole interrogation team,
uh, any countermeasures that they might use,
if he was employing resistance techniques.
Soufan: He stayed in the hospital, recovering.
We get a clearance from the doctors that we can talk to him,
and we went back to talking about
what he knows about a plot.
So I asked him,
"Do you know if Bin Laden is planning to do anything?"
He said, "Yes, Al-Qaeda is planning
"to do something.
He has his own people."
I said, "Are you aware of an operation that's ongoing?"
He said, "Yes, there's an operation
against an American facility in a foreign country."
So I said, "Who's doing this operation?
He said, "al-Zayyat."
We know al-Zayyat is an alias
for Abu Mohamed al-Masri,
who was the mastermind
of the East Africa embassy bombings.
Gaudin: So Ali and I came up with a plan
to show him a photo of this guy,
and if he identifies him, he's working with us.
I'm not saying he's giving us the keys to the kingdom,
but we can walk out of the room and go,
"Hey, I think we're at the point now we can
start asking him questions to answers we don't know."
So I had this electronic organizer,
the HP Jordana.
Soufan: Steve had downloaded
the poster of the 22 most-wanted terrorists
that the FBI released after 9/11.
It had the people who were involved
in the East Africa embassy bombings,
the "USS Cole," and the Khobar bombing.
All these individuals,
from Mugniyah to Bin Laden.
So, Steve clicks a photo, gives me the Palm Pilot.
I didn't look at it to check if it's the right person,
but I showed Abu Zubaydah.
I said, "Is this the guy?"
And Abu Zubaydah said,
"No, it's not."
I was convinced that al-Zayyat is Abu Mohamed al-Masri,
and I thought that he's playing games.
So I was really frustrated.
I'm like, "Dude, we saved your life.
"We're sitting here like your next of kin,
and you're still playing games with us."
And Abu Zubaydah had enough of me.
He said, "Come on, brother, I'm not playing games.
You know who the guy is."
I said, "Who the fuck is he then?"
And he said, "Well, this is Mokhtar."
And when he said "Mokhtar," my heart stopped.
Mokhtar, as Abu Zubaydah identified from the picture,
was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
(indistinct chatter)
After 9/11, we had an operation in Afghanistan
where they found videotapes
and documents
in Al-Qaeda's military community.
One of the videos is Bin Laden talking
to a paraplegic mullah.
He's talking about 9/11,
praising the operatives and the operation.
And every time he talks, he points towards
an individual next to the camera
and he says, "Mokhtar."
Mokhtar.
Soufan: And then he starts talking about people
having dreams that there is Al-Qaeda
playing karate with America
and Mokhtar is the trainer,
and he's pointing at Mokhtar.
So we knew that Mokhtar is important,
but we had no idea who Mokhtar was.
(monitor beeping)
But we cannot show Abu Zubaydah that we did not know that.
So I said, "Oh, Mokhtar."
He said, "Yeah, you know, the guy who did the plane operation."
Basically 9/11.
So he told me that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed
came to visit him.
He had a plan to take Cessna planes
and fly them into the World Trade Center,
and he needed resources for this operation.
Zubaydah told him, "This is way above me.
I don't have this capability, nor such resources."
But according to Abu Zubaydah,
when KSM briefed the idea later on
to Osama Bin Laden
and some of his senior lieutenants,
Bin Laden was not excited about it.
He commented, "Why do you want to go to war
"with an axe
when you can go with a bulldozer?"
(sirens wailing)
Man: You better get out of the way!
(monitor beeping)
But again, we cannot make him feel
that he gave us something we didn't know.
So I looked at the picture, I'm like,
"Oh, Steve,
you gave me KSM's photo, come on, man."
And Steve looked at it, and then Steve realized
exactly what was going on.
We leave the room and Ali and I are just shaking.
Did that really just happen?
We just identified who did 9/11.
That was a huge moment.
So we send it to the CIA.
We were kind of, like, high.
We just identified KSM as the mastermind of 9/11,
and we get another plot.
You know, we were doing our job and you just feel that,
you know, wow, it's working well.
Right. So you're pleased about that.
Rizzo: I was still hearing progress reports nightly
from our CIA people.
And they were increasingly convinced
that while he was providing
some good information,
he was definitely holding back
on the more important stuff,
namely the location and timing
of another major terrorist attack.
So that led to people from our Counterterrorism Center
deciding that the normal interrogation techniques
that had been applied up to that point
weren't going to work.
Something more aggressive had to be done.
Soufan: Abu Zubaydah was moved
from the hospital,
and they took him back to the site
that we originally were in.
And, at the black site,
a new team from CTC had shown up.
The team was comprised of individuals
that I will give aliases to,
and these aliases I used in my book.
So there is Wilson,
one of the top CIA behavioral analysts.
He had a lot of experience in different regions,
especially the Middle East.
I worked with him before.
Then there was Ed. He's a CIA interrogator.
We did a few interrogations together.
There was Frank. He was a polygrapher.
And then they had a contractor.
I call him Boris.
But since then, he has been actively vocal, uh, about this,
so I don't think anybody will mind me
calling him with his real name, James Mitchell.
The people who had conducted a lot of interrogations before
failed to do the job that the CIA wanted.
So they were looking to use what I knew about psychology
as a weapon against our enemies
so that we could get them to talk.
Soufan: Wilson introduced Mitchell,
saying that he knows about interrogation.
He has a strategy. The strategy can work.
Steve and I were just looking at each other.
I'm like, "Well, it's working."
You know, "If, uh, if it's working, why break it?"
Now, it was like, "Stop what you're doing.
"'The A-Team' is coming in and they're taking over.
You guys are done."
Soufan: Mitchell said, look,
you take everything away from him
to the point that his life, his death,
his comfort all depends on the interrogator.
Mitchell said, and I'll never forget
the way his fingers moved,
"We need to diminish his capacity to resist."
Soufan: This way, he will immediately start cooperating
and give you everything you want.
And he will see only one interrogator.
Only one interrogator. Nobody else.
The next time you meet with him,
you say, "Our boss is upset with you."
You introduce the boss, which is going to be Ed.
And then you walk and you'll never see him again.
That's it. So Ed is going to be his god.
Gibney: With a new god came a new white Heaven.
Years later, while in Guantanamo,
Abu Zubaydah penned descriptions and drawings
of what happened to him in Thailand.
(keys jingling, gate clanks)
Soufan: So they put him in the cell.
They put cameras, hidden CCTV.
They were recording everything.
He's totally naked. He has nothing.
So then Ed walks in, and Ed tells him,
"Tell me what I want to know."
And Abu Zubaydah looks at him and he said, "What do you want to know?"
An Ed cannot tell him anything.
The only thing, the only thing that Ed can do,
the instructions from "the expert"
is to turn and get out.
(keys jingling, gate clanks)
So they add something to make Abu Zubaydah's life more uncomfortable:
loud music.
(rock music blaring)
Then, you wait for 12 hours or so
and then he does it again.
"Tell me what I want to know."
"Well, what do you want to know?"
You walk out.
The music that they played initially
was music that the guards had.
(rock music playing)
And it was as bad for us as it was for him
because we're in that same building,
not far from where he's at, and it's blaring.
(rock music blaring)
Eventually, we went to white noise generators
because nobody wanted to listen to that music.
(static hissing)
So it goes from this to sleep deprivation,
"24 hours didn't work. Maybe we need 48 hours.
Oh, 48 hours didn't work. Maybe we need 72 hours."
And nothing's coming out.
(static hissing)
So they decided to go back to the loud music,
the same song again and again and again, very loud.
Gibney: Do you remember what the song was?
I think it was, uh, Red Hot Chili Peppers.
It was the only CD that somebody had.
Something like, you know, it was just going, going around.
♪ What I got you got to give it to your mama ♪
♪ What I got you've got to give it to your papa ♪
I used to like them until now. I never listened to them again.
♪ Give it away, give it away, give it away now ♪
♪ I can't tell if I'm a kingpin or a pauper ♪
♪ ♪
(water splashes)
Soufan: I spoke with Wilson,
the other psychologist,
and I said, "This is crazy."
And he said, "Look, this guy is supposedly an expert.
"He knows what he's doing.
"What if he's successful? That will be really good.
"You know, we don't have the time and the experts
"to talk to all these people.
Give him a chance."
But I looked at Wilson,
and I think he was just being
a good soldier
and saying the company line.
But a decision has been made
in a place way higher than all of us.
At one point, they had
everything approved by Gonzales.
And my thing is like,
"Who the hell is Gonzales? Is he from DOJ?"
I had no idea who Gonzales was at the time.
And he said, "No, I, I think he's Bush's lawyer."
I was like, "But is he part of DOJ?
He said, "I... don't think so.
I think he's part of the White House."
So I said, "No, we need DOJ."
They came back and said, "DOJ gave verbal approval."
"Verbal approval don't mean anything.
"You're in the CIA. I'm in the FBI.
"You know what the saying is,
if it's not on paper, it doesn't exist."
Gibney: The man who gave verbal approval
was John Yoo from the Department of Justice.
He provided unofficial reassurance
to the CIA, the White House,
and the US Attorney General
that Mitchell's experiments need not be considered torture
as long as the interrogators didn't intend
to cause severe pain or suffering.
Soufan: These things were going on
in April, in May.
Suddenly...
all intelligence
that was flowing before stopped.
And people in D.C. were asking...
"What's going on?"
A few days and nothing is coming out from that base.
Even though everything that they requested has been approved.
And nothing's coming out.
So Wilson mounted a campaign
to bring Steve and I back to the interrogation room.
And this was the first violation
of the cardinal rule of Mitchell,
that he will only see one person.
It is going to be Ed, and he's his god.
Now, all of a sudden... we're back.
I made a cup of tea, and I brought it to Abu Zubaydah,
I said, "Take it. That will make you feel better."
We covered him to help him warm up.
That's something I told Wilson
when he brought us back in.
I said, "I will never talk to him naked. Period.
"I will never do that. I know that's your rule.
It's approved by Langley, but I won't go in."
Abu Zubaydah took the tea, he drank some,
and he looked at me and he smiled.
It was tough to reengage Abu Zubaydah.
He really had no clue what's happening,
But we tried to reengage him,
and we were able to bring him back.
We started the rapport again.
And sometimes he's that guy
that you can sit down and talk to about everything,
from social justice to economic justice.
That guy wasn't a typical Qaeda operative.
Rarely he talked about religion.
He was more into American corporations
controlling the world,
the United States destroying grain
and agricultural products to maintain prices,
and the fact that Americans spend more money
on their pets when people are hungry around the world.
And I don't argue with him.
I take these opportunities
for us to build rapport.
So I can be lectured about all these kind of things,
you know, I give him something.
This is one of the things that I give him,
to lecture me about his views
of the United States and the world.
So I said, "Look, I'm going to go and get a soda.
You want anything?" He said, "Pepsi."
I said, "Are you kidding me?
"After lecturing me for an hour
"about American corporations,
you want Pepsi?"
He said, "Yeah, I'm embarrassed, but I like Pepsi."
(laughs)
But Mitchell continued to interfere.
Like, one point, for example,
we came to talk to him, Steve and I.
We walked in the room, in the cell,
and it was freezing cold.
Freezing cold.
And remember, Abu Zubaydah was totally nude
and on the floor, on a cement floor.
He looked bluish.
I went back and said,
"Are you playing with the temperature?"
And he said, "No, no, no."
I said, "Well, go and check him out."
So he puts a mask, he goes in,
he checks his vitals, and he comes back.
And he was basically like,
"Pfah! There's nothing going on.
He's fine."
As if we're making that thing up.
Gibney: And it was temperature manipulation--
Well, I saw that temperature.
I saw the temperature manipulation thing,
but I don't recall-- I don't actually re--
And I have no reason to hide it. I--
because I don't, you know what I mean?
But I don't remember temperature manipulation.
I don't remember anybody
specifically manipulating the temperature.
I don't remember that. I've seen it in reports.
If it happened, it wasn't while I was there.
He was nude a lot.
That was something that was discussed with the physicians
because he had a pretty severe leg wound,
and they were concerned about infection.
(air conditioner rumbling)
I'm not saying that that's the only reason he was nude.
He was nude to make him feel vulnerable and uncomfortable.
Gaudin: Mitchell seemed to be the one
that everybody had to defer to,
and we would actually be given questions saying,
"Okay, let's theorize.
"If you were going to do an attack on the United States,
where would you do an attack?"
And Zubaydah would say something like,
"Well, you know, I would look at your biggest landmarks,
"something that would hurt you.
"Maybe the Brooklyn Bridge
or maybe the Statue of Liberty."
And then we would see on CNN later that day or the next day,
the Statue of Liberty is closed.
Brooklyn Bridge just closed.
My God. (chuckles)
It was, it was nuts.
Soufan: Shows you what kind of an operative he was, right?
He kinda figured out what's going on.
But the cornerstone of an interrogation is
what that suspect understands
the evidence against them to be.
So, for example, we had
three taped calls from Abu Zubaydah.
But having Abu Zubaydah think
we only have three conversation
does not work.
He's going to have a different impression
of the information that we have against him.
So we bought a few dozen empty audiotapes,
painstakingly marked all these tapes
and planned the interrogation
so that every time he is trying to lie about something,
we turned the conversation into a tape
that we already have.
And by luck, on one tape,
Abu Zubaydah forgot to hang up.
So you can hear what's going on in the background.
So Abu Zubaydah thought that all these tapes
are not only phone calls.
He thought we had a wire in his house.
So we changed his impression of what we have on him.
And he starts talking.
(men singing in foreign language)
Soufan: After the "USS Cole," the Taliban shut down
all the Arab training camps in Afghanistan.
So when Khalden was shut down,
Abu Zubaydah doesn't have a job anymore
to bring people to Khalden.
So he came to Afghanistan.
And this is actually the first time
that he met Osama Bin Laden.
And when he arrived, they said,
"Oh, so this is Abu Zubaydah that we hear about."
He became very well known in the jihadi networks.
He gets the money, he gets the operatives.
He can smuggle people left and right.
Anything you need, Abu Zubaydah can get it.
So they gave him protection in Kandahar,
and he was working with them and he was trusted.
And then 9/11 happened,
and Abu Zubaydah decided to also capitalize.
(speaking in foreign language)
Soufan: He wanted to put a video out,
sell it to Western media...
(speaking in foreign language)
Soufan: ...saying that all the Arab Mujahideen
now are under Bin Laden.
He is their emir in the fight
against the United States and so forth,
and he wanted to do different operations.
Mitchell: They got intelligence that Abu Zubaydah had sent
an American citizen named Jose Padilla
to KSM
so that he could send him to the United States
to join "the others already on the ground"
and do possibly a dirty bomb
or if not that, some other kind of an attack.
And actually, it was not, uh...
it was not the Muslim FBI agent
that got the information about Jose--
Gibney: You mean Ali Soufan?
It was not Soufan, it was the other one
whose name I can't give you,
uh, because it's still protected
by the government, regardless of what's known
in the press, right?
So, uh, what happened that night was
they had been, uh...
Gibney: This was a strange moment
in the interview.
Mitchell felt he needed to throw shade on Soufan,
whom he called "the Muslim agent."
But he also acknowledged that the FBI, not the CIA,
obtained critical information about Jose Padilla.
Later on, the CIA would try to rewrite the story
and claim EITs caused Abu Zubaydah
to spill the beans about Padilla.
That claim was false.
Soufan: Padilla was arrested
because of smart police work.
We got some information from Abu Zubaydah
about two individuals.
Put it in a cable
and some smart intelligence officer
in Pakistan looked at it and was like,
"Wait a second, I just saw the passports
"of these two guys.
It seems they fit the description."
Someone was able to say,
"You know what? There were these two guys,
"there was an American and British guy,
and the American was here to get a new passport."
They just pulled on the thread until they figured,
okay, is this the guy?
Gibney: My understanding is that Abu Zubaydah
had actually identified the photo of Padilla.
And I think Padilla was arrested in May 2002.
Well, he didn't identify a picture of Padilla.
Your understanding is incorrect.
-He mentions-- -Gibney: You're absolutely sure?
-I was there. -Gibney: Uh-huh.
I was there...
for all of those interrogations and watched all of them.
So, yeah, I'm absolutely sure.
Gibney: Actually, according to declassified cables,
Abu Zubaydah did identify Padilla's photo.
Zubaydah also revealed
that Padilla was not the terrorist mastermind
the CIA imagined him to be.
Soufan: They wanted to go to the United States,
hijack a uranium truck,
steal the uranium, and build a dirty bomb.
And Abu Zubaydah said, "So how do you enrich the uranium?"
And literally, they told him, "We put it in a bucket
"and we turn the bucket very fast,
and then that's how it will be enriched."
And he was just like, "Yeah, that does not work."
Zubaydah was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's exactly what we should do."
But he was placating them.
I don't need this guy to make a bomb.
I need this guy because he has an American passport.
He knew the value that it could have
to people that were actually planning real operations.
Soufan: He called KSM and he told him,
"I'm sending you these two operatives, see what they have.
If you can use them in an operation, they are yours."
Gibney: KSM did send Jose Padilla to the United States
allegedly to blow up a series of apartment buildings.
He was arrested in Chicago on May 8th,
just 15 days after Abu Zubaydah identified him.
Despite Abu Zubaydah's cooperation,
the CIA and Mitchell
kept pushing to turn up the heat.
Soufan: Even when we were allowed back in under our condition,
they still were playing games.
One day I walked in and I saw a big coffin in the room.
I actually went in it.
I'm telling you, it's not a good feeling.
You try to be professional.
You try to focus on the mission.
But unfortunately, you know, every day you bring him back,
and then they try to play that game again.
And at this point, everything that I was seeing
was kind of like borderline torture.
But now we're even crossing that line.
So I called FBI headquarters.
I asked to speak with my boss in New York.
I said, "Please, I-I need to leave.
"I-I cannot stay here.
"If I stay here, I...
"I will probably arrest that guy.
I mean, this is crazy."
So he said, "Okay, I need you to leave the location immediately."
And that was the end of my involvement in the black site.
Gibney: Soufan and the CIA polygrapher returned
to the United States.
Mysteriously, the entire interrogation team
soon followed.
All the questions and answers stopped.
Abu Zubaydah was left alone in his cell
where the only sound was the hiss of a white noise machine.
These are more than 100 pages of interrogation notes
from Ali Soufan.
Though heavily redacted, we can see they contain details
about future plots and portraits of the people
in and around Al-Qaeda, how they worked,
and what they were planning.
To the FBI, it was a treasure trove
of evidence and proof
that Abu Zubaydah was cooperating.
The CIA saw it differently.
Analysts in Washington were certain
he was holding back because he wasn't telling them
what they wanted to hear.
It was time to take the gloves off.
Wilkerson: We've tortured before.
We tortured in the Philippines.
We tortured in Vietnam.
We are one of the most violent people
on the face of the Earth.
To deny that is to deny reality.
But we were the leaders of the effort
to push through the United Nations
the Convention against Torture
and Cruel and Unusual Punishment.
We were the leaders
in getting that phrase in there
that essentially says,
"No in extremis national security conditions
warrant going beyond this."
After 9/11, we obviated the whole thing.
We said, because of national security concerns,
that's out the window.
This was the first time that torture as a policy
was authorized
by the highest power in the land.
Gibney: President Bush paved the way for torture
when he signed an order saying that the Geneva Conventions
did not apply to Al-Qaeda.
That allowed George Tenet to try something different
so long as Abu Zubaydah was believed
to be a member of Al-Qaeda.
President Bush today has decided that Al-Qaeda
is an international terrorist group
under the treaty.
Gibney: If members of Al-Qaeda were different
from other prisoners of war,
then perhaps different interrogation techniques
could be used,
but not so different as to cause permanent damage,
which could be evidence of torture.
That led the CIA to retrofit a program
developed after the Korean War,
in which we brutalized our own soldiers
to prepare them to resist the brutality of others.
If we did it to ourselves, how bad could it be?
Col. Steven Kleinman: When I started, I was a human intelligence officer,
but then I had an opportunity
to go on the other side of the table
and work in resistance training.
The CIA Enhanced Interrogation Program
is the product of the government's fear
of what they saw happen during the Korean War.
Especially the Chinese interrogators
were masterful in their ability to manipulate.
They knew how to get people to say things
that they didn't want to say, and the CIA would say,
"Wow, if they can do that, what else can they do?"
Allow me to introduce our American visitors.
I must ask you to forgive
their somewhat lackadaisical manners,
but I have conditioned them or "brainwashed" them,
which I understand is the new American word.
Take this scarf.
And strangle Ed Mavole.
-Hey, Sarge. Cut it out. What-- -Tut-tut-tut-tut.
Quiet, Ed, please.
Now you just sit there quietly
and cooperate.
Yes, ma'am.
(choking)
Gibney: The popular fear of brainwashing,
making prisoners do or say anything,
led every branch of the military
to create schools for soldiers
to learn how to survive,
evade capture, resist interrogation
and, if possible, escape.
The so-called SERE School for the Air Force
near Spokane, Washington,
is where James Mitchell taught resistance.
Mitchell: The basic course is several weeks long,
and there's two parts.
There's the bugs and berries part of it
where, you know, they teach you how to survive and evade.
And then there's the second part of it,
which is the resistance to interrogation lab.
And in that, they essentially have
what I would call an undergraduate course
for protecting secrets.
Our emotions can marshal resources
that we never knew that we had available.
But those very same emotions,
either fear or anger or anxiety,
can also cripple us in survival situations.
Eyes on the ground!
Mitchell: They expose you to a variety
of interrogation strategies
and teach you how to resist.
It's a phenomenally well-designed,
systematic, professional program
from, from beginning to end.
And it was Jim Mitchell who helped develop that program.
He was actually known for being a stickler for safety,
because when they're performing as interrogators,
they were simulating torture.
What we tried to teach people is how to be resilient
in the face of stress, of coercion, even torture,
so that you will not create propaganda.
Gaudin: I went to SERE School.
SERE School is teaching people,
if you get captured, how to stay alive.
It's teaching people how to resist.
It's not eliciting information from people.
Jones: These techniques were used in a coercive way
to get someone to admit to something they didn't do,
to get them to say anything.
It was never devised
even by the worst regimes,
as a means to obtain accurate intelligence.
And that was Jim's experience.
He was observing our US service members
being exposed to some of these techniques
during training.
Gibney: So the purpose of the school is not
to teach interrogation.
It was to teach people how to resist interrogation.
-Is that right? -Yeah, that's the purpose of the...
That's the purpose of the survival school,
is to teach people how to resist interrogation.
But you know what, if you don't understand interrogation,
you're not going to do a very good job resisting it.
It isn't gonna happen.
Gibney: The kind of interrogation Mitchell was interested in
was rooted in another psychological experiment
in which dogs were jolted with electric shocks.
(dog whimpering)
The idea was to create, in animals,
a feeling called "learned helplessness."
To get humans into that state,
interrogators would subject prisoners
to SERE techniques until they were helpless
and would do or say anything.
Lawyer: Why did you think Dr. Mitchell was qualified?
Because of his experience with SERE
and because we needed to do something different
than what had been done before,
and he looked like the right person to do it.
Lawyer: Why did he look like the right person to do it?
Because he had a tremendous expertise
and, uh...
he, uh, had a good vision
for what needed to be done.
Lawyer: Okay.
What did he have tremendous expertise in?
In SERE.
Lawyer: What was his, uh, SERE experience,
to your knowledge in, at that time?
He had spent many years, uh,
with the Air Force, uh, working on SERE.
Lawyer: Okay. Did he have...
was there any other source of his tremendous expertise?
Uh, the expertise I was interested in was SERE.
Mitchell: Once the CIA concluded
that he was withholding information,
they pulled everybody back in the early summer,
and it was clear to me
in the conversations that were going around the table
that they had decided they were going to use
physical coercion against Abu Zubaydah.
And I thought...
well, if you're gonna use it,
then you ought to use something--
not that you should use it
or even that it was desirable
or even that it was legal.
But if you're going to do that,
then you ought to consider using the things
that they've been using at the SERE schools
because they don't produce a lot of lasting injuries.
They don't produce injuries.
So I gave them a list of techniques that they could consider.
Once they decided they were going to go forward with it,
they began to, I guess...
I mean, we've got all of the documents
released from the CIA, so it's perfectly...
We can trace it,
you don't have to depend on my memory.
Interviewer: I'm just trying to reconcile too,
because we interviewed James Mitchell,
and he puts the timeline more towards June, July
that he proposes the EIT program.
So, I'm just trying to figure out, I'm just trying--
Well, that's not-- Yeah, that's not correct.
I mean, uh, by June and July,
I was heavy into discussions with the,
with the, uh, Justice Department.
All I can tell you was
I was first told about this idea
of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
in... sometime in early to mid April.
Gibney: When exactly were the techniques invented?
The answer is the difference between a wink and a nod
and a written plan.
In April and May, Mitchell was experimenting
with SERE techniques for which he had
no official legal approval.
To go further, the techniques would have
to be codified and approved in writing.
Rizzo: There was a team that came up to my office
one afternoon, you know, unannounced.
I mean, I had no preview.
I was just told it was a matter of some urgency
about an operational proposal. That's all I knew.
And I was gobsmacked.
My very first reaction was, you guys are crazy.
This is, we shouldn't be doing this.
We've never done this kind of thing before.
But I remember walking around the CIA compound,
smoking a cigar, trying to absorb
what I'd just been told.
And I started to play out the scenarios in my head,
that, okay,
I go in to the CIA director.
I say, "We shouldn't do this.
"This is barbaric.
It may or may not be legal."
And on the other hand, I thought, well, here are all the experts.
Saying that, that these kinds of aggressive measures
are the only ones
that we believe
will cause Abu Zubaydah
to tell us completely
what he knows about another terrorist attack.
And the idea of the consequences
was something I couldn't countenance on myself.
So that led to a couple meetings
in George Tenet's office
with the senior CIA leadership.
Lawyer: So did you propose any other list
other than this list
-to Mr. Rizzo or to the department? -No.
Lawyer: So you never proposed any other list
-other than this list to Mr. Rizzo? -No.
Lawyer: Did you propose any other list
other than this list to the Department of Justice?
No.
Mitchell: They began to work back and forth
with the Justice Department, but they needed approval
from Tenet to go forward.
And so I met with Tenet, Rizzo.
Jose Rodriguez took me up there,
and there were several other people in the room.
He asked me to describe the techniques, and I described them.
Rizzo: They went through each of these techniques.
Mitchell: Attention grasps,
walling.
Sort of a shock and awe technique.
Mitchell: Facial slaps, a couple of stress positions...
Rizzo: Extended sleep deprivation
for days.
And the most controversial one was,
of course, waterboarding.
Rizzo: I'd never heard of waterboarding.
I didn't even know what the term meant.
Simulated drowning is the way it was described to me.
And there was another one that called for a mock burial.
It sounded something out of Edgar Allan Poe.
I think it was.
Mitchell: So Tenet gets up to get a cigar.
He didn't smoke in the building,
but he had a cigar quite frequently.
He motions with his head
for Rizzo to walk over there with him,
and he leans forward and he says in a way
that I don't think I'm supposed to hear.
"Make sure this is legal before we go forward with this."
Rizzo: So that's when I decided
to seek definitive legal guidance
from the Department of Justice
as to whether any or all
of these techniques were legal
and if any crossed the line into torture.
Gibney: While the lawyers in Washington worked
to make sure that no one would be prosecuted
for using Mitchell's techniques on Abu Zubaydah,
the prisoner himself remained in Thailand, alone.
(birds chirping)
Soufan: When all intelligence stopped coming from Abu Zubaydah,
Mueller asked Tenet
why the intelligence stopped from Abu Zubaydah,
what happened with Abu Zubaydah.
And Tenet's response to him was,
"Your guys really messed him up.
So we're, we're trying to fix him."
This was shocking to me, because if you are trying
to get EITs approved,
even though you were doing it before,
if you're trying to get EITs approved...
because of the ticking bomb scenario, right,
you don't leave a guy with nobody interrogating him.
Mitchell: There's a difference between a ticking time bomb
and a looming time bomb.
At some point, we realized
that it was a looming time bomb,
not a ticking time bomb.
Uh, and, um...
So that's-- Of course, we didn't know it at that time.
You'd have to ask the CIA why they had that long.
I didn't, you know, I wasn't in charge.
I didn't do it. I'm not making light of it. It was a long time.
Lawyer 2: Do you know whether Abu Zubaydah
was asked any questions during the isolation phase?
Did I know?
-Lawyer 2: Do you know now? -Do I know now?
Uh, I've come--
yeah, I've come to learn that there was a period of time
where he was not asked questions.
Lawyer 2: And at the time, did you know that?
At, at the very beginning,
as the techniques were being described to me?
-At that point in time? -Lawyer 2: At the time when you were seeking
the Department of Justice's opinion
on the techniques?
No, I don't believe so.
Jones: The CIA is tasked with stopping the next attack.
Abu Zubaydah has been providing intelligence
up until this point.
And yet they leave him,
the only high-value detainee,
alone without any contact.
During that period, there are analysts still sending in requirements.
One analyst says,
"I want to learn more about an individual
"who is in Abu Zubaydah's address book.
Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti."
Of course, nobody is around
to ask about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
(helicopter blades whirring)
(indistinct radio conversation)
Nearly a decade later,
we finally obtained Bin Laden's location,
and it's through a man named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti.
So this lost opportunity
to ask Abu Zubaydah in July of 2002,
when he's providing information about a man in his address book
who is Osama Bin Laden's personal assistant
is a remarkable failure.
Abu Zubaydah's isolation was not about Abu Zubaydah.
It was about the politics and legal opinions, right?
This was the idea that we need to go hard.
We want it on paper that you will not prosecute us
for engaging in torture.
From the very beginning in late 2001,
there were people in the Agency,
in the Counterterrorism Division,
in their legal department discussing torture.
And they're using the word "torture."
One email says in the subject line,
"Torture update"
And the lawyers, not the operators,
not people who are out in the field,
lawyers are discussing
how the CIA can engage in torture
without being prosecuted later on.
And in fact, they reach out to the Department of Justice
to try to obtain a declination of prosecution,
which says, "If we engage in torture,
will you agree not to prosecute us?"
Rizzo: After that initial briefing by our people,
I convened a meeting at the White House.
The initial reaction, not just of the Justice Department lawyers,
but the White House counsel,
and the National Security Council legal advisors
was what my initial reaction was.
What, what is this stuff, I mean, you know,
it was just so beyond anything
any of us could have even contemplated.
None of the lawyers assembled there said,
"You guys are crazy.
"This administration is never going
"to do something like that.
"This is immoral, it is illegal.
End of story."
None of them did that.
There's two kinds of lawyers.
There's one that comes in and says,
"What do you want to do, boss? I'll tell you if it's legal."
And then there's the other one that comes in and says,
"What do you want to do, boss? I'll make it legal."
Well, I found out there were six of those,
at least six of those
second type in the administration.
Starts with White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales.
But the real Machiavelli in the whole thing,
and that's an insult to Machiavelli,
was David Addington,
Dick Cheney's go-to man
for everything of a legal nature.
We used to call him when he was in the Pentagon, "Weird David."
We thought no one would listen to David.
He's so crazy.
David was crafting
the, the whole business of cover for torture
from the Vice President's office,
using John Yoo using Jay Bybee.
And the lawyers are omnipresent.
If you get a bunch of them whose whole philosophy is,
"Tell me what you want to do, Mr. President,
and I'll make it legal," they mean it.
Jones: At the very end, end of July,
Condoleezza Rice is pushing back.
"How can you tell me waterboarding,
"sleep deprivation,
"putting someone in a coffin-shaped box,
"how can you tell me this won't result
"in lasting harm?
How could you possibly say that?"
So Mitchell and company go back to the SERE Program
and they say, "Has there ever been
any lasting harm with these techniques?"
And the SERE Program says, "Hold on.
"First of all, this is a training scenario.
"We expose these members very briefly
"to techniques used by our enemies
"that don't believe in Geneva.
"And second of all, are you thinking
"about using this for intelligence collection?
Because this doesn't-- this isn't for that."
Woman: Raise your right hand.
Gibney: For some reason, the CIA never consulted
its own experts.
One of them was Charles Morgan,
a psychiatrist who had studied
the effects of the SERE Program
and knew that some soldiers had died
and many others suffered from PTSD.
With respect to stress, it was well known
with the data we had presented
and were publishing in the science community
that the level of stress in the training program
was creating hormone changes and psychological changes
greater than we'd ever measured in humans,
in human experiments
and that that stress was capable
of being traumatic
in the training program, that it had that capacity.
So, I would have said that.
The second point would have been
that, um...
as a way of using techniques to get information,
it was probably a very dumb idea.
And I would say that because
the impact of stress on human cognition
degrades cognitive functioning
and human memory.
Rapport-building techniques is, is the way to go
if you want to get accurate data.
That never gets reported back to Rice.
Rizzo: A month or two later,
we received the final written opinion,
the first of many over the years,
now euphemistically referred to
as the torture memos.
Gibney: The first memo was predicated
on facts presented by the CIA.
But it also stated that if those facts were to change,
the legal basis for torture might disappear.
And what if the facts weren't facts at all?
As support for EITs, the CIA presented
a psychological assessment of Abu Zubaydah
as a rationale for why the agency
would have to subject him to something different.
Here, take a look at this, or-or scan through it quickly.
-Right. -And talk about the psychological assessment
of how important this was
in terms of setting up this whole
enhanced interrogation program.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is it.
This is the document.
It's really overly generous
to call this a psychological assessment.
That's the label they give to it.
Um, but, um,
what it is, an-an-and to this day,
so far as I know, we don't know who wrote it.
What we know is that it was faxed to John Yoo,
who is a lawyer in the Office of Legal Counsel
on the 24th of July of 2002,
when Yoo was drafting the torture memo.
In the memo that approves
the enhanced interrogation of Abu Zubaydah,
John Yoo recognizes that these techniques
could have lasting destructive effect
on Abu Zubaydah.
And for that reason, it is important, he says,
to know something about his background
and psychological profile.
So lo and behold, this document appears,
which says, here's-- here's who he is.
Soufan: They made their legal position
based on facts presented to them by the CIA.
And their facts are what?
That Abu Zubaydah was not cooperating.
Which is a lie. He was.
There was a discussion about the CIA representation
that Abu Zubaydah is resisting interrogation
and that he's a trained resister.
But there's no evidence of that whatsoever.
In fact, all of the documentary evidence
suggests that Abu Zubaydah always cooperated.
Joe Margulies: It claims, "Abu Zubaydah is currently
the third or fourth man in Al-Qaeda." That's wrong.
He wasn't even a member of Al-Qaeda,
and we knew that.
There was only one person
who ever identified Abu Zubaydah
as number three or four in Al-Qaeda.
And we know this because CTC legal,
the top of CTC legal,
the people who's providing this information
to the Department of Justice,
discussed the fact
that there was one person who said this
and the person retracted that
in June or July of 2002,
prior to the DOJ legal opinion.
Yet they keep it in there.
"A planner of the September 11 hijackings."
That's wrong.
"Alleged to have written Al-Qaeda's manual
on resistance techniques." That's wrong.
"Involved in every major Al-Qaeda
terrorist operation." That's wrong.
"Served as the operational planner
for the Millennium plot." That's wrong.
"Directed the startup
of a Bin Laden cell in Jordan."
No. "Managed a network
of training camps for Al-Qaeda."
No. It's-- there's nothing.
Gibney: The CIA claims presented as facts
resulted in official legal approval
for the new Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.
The only question was who would decide in the field
when to throw the prisoner against the wall
and when to waterboard him.
Mitchell: At some point,
Jose Rodriguez came up to me and said,
"Will you do these interrogations?"
And I said... "No."
And then one of his senior guys
leaned into me and said,
"You've watched him now for months.
"You've seen all the intelligence.
"You know what we're up against.
"And if you're not willing to help,
how can we ask somebody else to?"
I wasn't willing to stand by.
I knew that I would feel much worse about myself
if there had been a big smoking hole in Los Angeles
that had killed a bunch of people
and I had walked away from something
that the Justice Department said was legal,
that I was unwilling to help them with.
I said, "I will do it, but I need help
because I don't know everything I need to know."
And they had worked with Doc Jessen,
so they agreed to bring him in.
He had been through several interrogation courses.
He's brilliant and much more familiar
with these things than I was.
I don't know exactly how it happened,
but Jose Rodriguez... What?
Is that okay?
Alright. Jose Rodriguez, uh...
who already had a relationship with Jim,
uh...
they had a discussion about the tactics,
uh, that are used at the SERE School to train
not just the standard folks
but the special operators in particular.
Jose told me that he asked Jim what he needed,
and Jim said that he would like me to help him.
Lawyer: So what led you to conclude that they were
quote, "eminently qualified"?
I just took it for granted that they knew
what they were doing.
Kleinman: Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen helped develop the best
Resistance to Interrogation program
in the world, bar none.
But here's what should have happened.
After their presentation, George Tenet should have said,
"Gentlemen,
"I really appreciate you coming by,
"but just a few questions before you leave.
"I didn't see here-- Tell me about the,
"the real-world interrogations
"that you've actually conducted?
"Oh. None. Okay.
"Well, how about the real-world interrogations
"that you've observed?
"Oh, well, maybe a couple? Okay.
"Um, alright. Well,
"but you've worked in the intelligence world before? No.
"But you do have a deep understanding of--
"No, not that either.
"All right, well, so you've actually,
"your experience is all about teaching resistance,
"which was actually-- we were mimicking the
"what we call torture
"by countries that weren't signatory to Geneva Convention.
"And the doctrine was, if I recall,
"that that...
"is not useful for anything but propaganda
"and false confessions, which,
"I'm the, I'm the director of Central Intelligence,
"I deal with information. That'd be on the other end
"of the spectrum from intelligence.
"So why is it that we could switch...
"We really can't. Well, gentlemen,
"you are the best at teaching resistance to interrogation.
"We need to hire you to train everybody
"in this room that ever goes overseas.
"But when it comes to interrogation, thank you for your time."
Gibney: There's that word again: time.
As it turned out, the CIA was so grateful
for Mitchell and Jessen's time
that the agency paid the psychologists
$1,800 a day
to go back to Thailand to interrogate Abu Zubaydah.
While they weren't interrogators,
they were armed with one important weapon,
a decision from the Department of Justice
that would allow them to torture Abu Zubaydah
within seconds of death without fear of prosecution.
Rizzo: A fateful decision was made
at the beginning of his interrogation
to videotape the sessions.
We were just trying to ponder every worst-case scenario.
That he dies while in CIA custody.
The possibility would exist
that somewhere somehow someone
would accuse CIA of purposely killing him.
Jones: They begin at 11:50 a.m. on August 4th.
Abu Zubaydah is hooded.
A coffin-shaped box is brought into the room.
Abu Zubaydah is unhooded and shown the box...
the insinuation being, of course,
that he could be killed and buried there.
Within seven hours, around six p.m. that night,
Abu Zubaydah is waterboarded for the first time.
He's in isolation for 47 days.
Within six hours, he's waterboarded,
and he has these convulsions and he vomits.
And for 17 days,
Abu Zubaydah is tortured nonstop.
Lawyer: I was reading through the cables
from Abu Zubaydah's interrogation.
Do remember those cables?
Uh, it's been 15 years.
Lawyer: Okay, let's, let's show them to you.
This is a cable regarding
the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, correct?
Yes.
Lawyer: And it goes through a number
of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, right?
-Rodriguez: Yes. -Lawyer: It describes walling
and, um, and it describes the confinement box.
And in paragraph nine, it says,
the "subject has not provided any new threat
or elaborated on any old threat information."
-Do you see that? -Yes.
Lawyer: Um, when you read that kind of thing,
was there any sense
that the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
were not being effective?
-At that point. -Lawyer: At that point what?
At that point, they were not being effective.
-Eventually, they were. -Lawyer: Okay.
In what regard did you then dial it back?
Because I'm reading these cables
and it looks like for 17 days,
he's being waterboarded and he's put in confined,
in-in a confinement box
and put in stress positions and walled.
-Am I wrong about that? -Man: Objection.
Jones: He spent 11 days in the coffin-shaped box
several days in a much smaller box.
If he wasn't in the smaller box or in the coffin-shaped box,
he was on the waterboard with a towel over his face
or in a sleep deprivation position,
essentially hanging from the cell.
Margulies: He was put in these boxes,
not much wider than his shoulders
and not much higher than him.
And he was just left there, 260-some hours
to urinate and defecate on himself.
That's not in the cables,
but his drawings capture that.
Mitchell: Most people misunderstand
or they don't understand
or they haven't bothered to understand
the way that EITs were used.
EITs were used to shape cooperation.
So what you did is you put them in a situation
where they were uncomfortable,
and then as soon as they started working with you,
even a little bit, you-you cut back on that
and shift to social influence techniques.
Jones: Mitchell and Jessen themselves
engaged in the waterboarding.
They engaged in all of the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.
And yet they had never applied these techniques
to any members of the US military.
They were only observers.
The initial legal opinion
approved everything but waterboarding.
But Jim Mitchell said he would not do this
unless waterboarding was approved
because it's an absolutely convincing technique.
Mitchell: The Justice Department said
you could waterboard from 20 to 40 seconds,
give them three full breaths
and then waterboard again for 20 minutes.
The first time we waterboarded Abu Zubaydah,
it was clear to me that that was too much water
and it was too long.
So what we did was we cut back
to pours that were eight seconds.
You can easily hold your breath for eight seconds.
And then there were two pours
that were 20 seconds
and one pour that was 40 seconds.
Gibney: Eighty-three times, was that the number?
That's the number of times it was poured.
We know now that he was waterboarded
83 times in the month of August alone
and what the waterboarding is, right,
sometimes you'll see it described as "simulated drowning."
There's nothing "simulated" about it at all.
It's drowning, right?
You are strapped to a board,
your legs, your chest, your arms,
and your head is strapped down
so you cannot move.
You're utterly immobilized.
And your neck is lower than your feet.
Then they wrap your face
in something to obstruct breathing,
but that allows water to pass through.
And then they pour water up your nose
and down your throat so that you breathe the water.
And if you breathe water, you will drown.
And so, straining against the straps,
unable to move, you begin to drown.
And the art of this particular torture
is to know just the moment
when the brain convinces the person
they are about to drown.
You are about to die.
And at just that instant,
when you have just given up into hysteria
because you are about to drown,
that's when they raise the board
and you vomit.
And just as you take the first breath,
they put it down again and then do it again.
Mitchell: He wasn't waterboarded on a board.
He was waterboarded on a hospital surgical gurney.
Because that's what the CIA wanted him waterboarded on.
I can't tell you the number, but it took more than a handful
of security guards to raise it up
so he could clear his nasal passages.
Jones: The cables show that he's having involuntary spasms.
He's weeping, he's crying out for Allah.
Mitchell: We weren't interested in drowning him.
We were interested in getting him
to want to work with us.
We weren't interested in making him suffer.
Nobody was interested in that.
Now, you know, because it is an art,
one time they waited too long
and they didn't raise him up fast enough.
And he actually did come very, very close to dying.
Jones: During one waterboarding session,
Abu Zubaydah became completely unresponsive,
with bubbles rising out of his mouth
and needed to have medical intervention.
Gibney: Following his near-death experience,
Abu Zubaydah became compliant,
just like the dogs who'd been shocked.
As Mitchell predicted,
Abu Zubaydah learned helplessness.
Rizzo: This is a perilous course for the CIA to undertake.
So we made a collective decision
that no one in CIA
would be required to take part in it
if their moral, ethical,
or just personal dictates
could not do it.
They were hardcore about continuing this,
but after 72 hours, I became convinced
and Doc Jessen became convinced
that while he had a lot of information
that could help us stop threats in other countries
and help us identify the structure of Al-Qaeda,
he didn't know anything about attacks
that were on the ground in place
in the United States.
And so Doc Jessen and I said,
"Hey, we don't need to do this."
Jones: Within six days of using
the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,
there were calls by the detention site team
requesting CIA headquarters' permission to stop.
People at the detention site are upset, choking up,
wanting to leave the detention site,
wanting to quit the program, wanting to go back home.
They wrote that they were reaching
the legal limits on what they could do.
Nonetheless, Jose Rodriguez responds,
"Do not put your legal concerns in writing.
Not helpful."
Lawyer: Were you involved in ordering
Doctors Mitchell and Jessen
to continue to waterboard Abu Zubaydah?
-Yes. -Lawyer: Why?
Well, I was the head of it, and my analysts were concerned
that perhaps he was not compliant.
Lawyer: Mm-hmm.
It says, "For several days,"
Dr. Mitchell writes, "We questioned
"the necessity of continuing the EITs,
"but every day we received cables,
"phone calls, or emails instructing us
"to continue waterboarding Abu Zubaydah.
"At one point, Bruce and I pushed back hard
"and threatened to quit.
"We were told, quote, he's turning you.
"You are not turning him.
"The officers we were dealing with,
"mid-level CTC officials
"really pissed us off by saying, 'You've lost your spine.'"
"You've lost your spine. He's turned you."
They called us pussies. They said--
Lawyer: "If we didn't keep waterboarding Abu Zubaydah
"and another attack happened in United States,
it would be, quote, unquote, 'Your fault.'"
Is that, to your knowledge, true?
Uh, I don't know what mid-level officials
will tell, were telling, uh... Mitchell.
Lawyer: Mm-hmm. Did you direct any mid-level officials
-to say that kind of thing to Mitchell? -No.
There came a point when Dr. Jessen and I said,
"We're not going to continue doing this, you know.
"We don't think it's necessary to continue
to waterboard Abu Zubaydah."
At one point, they requested that CIA personnel travel
to the detention site
and observe what they were doing.
CIA headquarters declined.
So the detention site personnel decided
to put together a "Best Of" tape.
And the purpose of that tape was
to depict the absolute worst moments
of torture of Abu Zubaydah, to make it very visceral.
So CIA headquarters would view this tape
and say, "Okay, we need to stop.
We agree. Stop torturing Abu Zubaydah."
Instead, headquarters told them to keep going.
-Gibney: After they viewed the tape? -After they viewed the tape.
The detention site personnel were surprised.
They blamed it on a poor video link.
They can't quite see the quality
of how bad it is with this tape.
They couldn't believe that anyone could view
what was happening and tell them to keep going.
Gibney: In Washington, psychologist Terry DeMay,
the head of CIA's Office of Medical Services,
raised a ruckus.
After receiving a series of secret messages
from nurses at the black site,
DeMay would later denounce the interrogation
as an amateurish experiment,
not safe or effective.
To get a firsthand assessment,
Jose Rodriguez sent a team from headquarters to Thailand.
Among them were the lawyer who had recommended Mitchell for the job
and an analyst named Alfreda Bikowsky,
whose enthusiasm for harsh interrogations
would earn her the nickname "The Queen of Torture."
Mitchell: I suggested that they be
in the room with us unmasked
while we did the waterboarding
so they could see what it was really like.
And we waterboarded him one last time,
and the most senior person there said,
"We don't need to do this anymore.
"We concur that he probably doesn't know anything
"about current threats inside the United States
"or he's, you know, he's,
he's not going to share them."
And, um... literally,
we bathed him and told him we weren't going to,
you know, nothing bad was going to happen to him,
uh, and, uh...
it was a pretty touching moment.
Gibney: The CIA cables from Thailand
struck a very different tone.
Jones: The detention site never said
that Abu Zubaydah had information.
In fact, Mitchell and others say
the program was a success, not because it produced
vital unavailable information,
but because it proved from the very beginning
he never had that information.
Gibney: There was one other success.
Toward the end of the torture,
when the new team from Washington was watching,
Abu Zubaydah said he made up a number of plots
and admitted that, yes,
he really was the number three in Al-Qaeda.
He knew it was false. The CIA knew it was false.
But his confession confirmed that the CIA's techniques
could get him to say anything to make the torture stop.
Jones: They finally get permission
to stop torturing Abu Zubaydah,
and they call the program a success.
And the cable recommends using the same techniques
for other high-value detainees.
And who wrote that cable? Jim Mitchell.
Gibney: Mitchell denies writing the cable
but the techniques he devised
would become standard operating procedure
for the CIA.
For a price of over $180 million,
the CIA would contract Mitchell and Jessen
to train and supervise interrogators
at black sites in eight foreign countries.
Despite Mitchell's attempts to impose guidelines,
things would spin out of control.
Following the torture of Abu Zubaydah,
EITs mutated like a virus
and spread throughout the CIA to Guantanamo
and military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
What evolved from Mitchell's techniques
was revealed in the photographs
from the prison at Abu Ghraib.
The public uproar over those images
caused the CIA to reckon
with its own photographic record.
("The Blue Danube Waltz" playing)
♪ ♪
Rizzo: The first time I knew that
Zubaydah was being videotaped
is when Jose Rodriguez came to me and said,
"We have these videotapes. We want to destroy them."
So that was the first I learned that they existed.
-Interviewer: What was your reaction? -(laughs)
"Whatever you do, do not destroy them."
(waltz continues)
But, of course,
destroying evidence, destroying videotapes,
would inevitably lead
sooner or later to accusations of a cover-up.
♪ ♪
Rodriguez: I felt it was important to have the tapes destroyed
because I needed to protect the people
who were there in the black sites.
-That was the primary reason. -Lawyer: Mm-hmm.
Was there a secondary reason?
Well, the secondary reason, as I have said publicly,
was that the, uh...
public, the media would not make a distinction
once the tapes were released
between a legally approved program like this was
and the Abu Ghraib scandal
that involved illegal activity.
It would make the CIA look bad,
and it would, actually, in my view,
you know, almost destroy
the clandestine service because of it.
Lawyer: Mm-hmm.
Did you have anything to do with the destruction
of those videotapes?
No.
Lawyer: Did you have any conversations
with anybody at any time
about the destruction of those videotapes
other than your lawyers?
Yes.
Mitchell: I told the...
I forget what he's called,
I think the chief of clandestine service,
that I thought those videotapes should be destroyed
because I, I thought they were ugly
and they would, you know,
potentially endanger our lives
by putting our pictures out,
uh, so that the bad guys could see us.
Rizzo: When I learned that they had been destroyed,
I was beside myself.
But I was told, "Oh, your lawyers signed off on this."
That piqued my interest, needless to say.
But the final approval authority
on the actual directive to the field station
that was holding these tapes
was Mr. Rodriguez.
And it was drafted by Mr. Rodriguez's chief of staff.
Gibney: Mr. Rodriguez's chief of staff was Gina Haspel,
who would rise to become the CIA director in 2017.
Neither she nor Mr. Rodriguez was punished
or charged with a crime for destroying evidence.
The tapes were destroyed for one reason,
and that was because they were so damned incriminating
with regard to going beyond,
going well beyond anything that,
you know, you would have had to have said, "That's torture."
That's torture, clear and plain.
It is not covered by the Bybee memo, the Yoo memo,
it's not covered by anything, that's torture.
("The Blue Danube Waltz" continues)
Margulies: The best evidence of what happened is the video.
So the destruction of the tapes was
an-an-an egregious abuse.
You could never capture
what took place at Abu Ghraib
without the pictures.
We have a dialog about Abu Ghraib
because the pictures exist.
Well, we don't have that with Abu Zubaydah.
So we asked him to draw what was done to him
as best he could reconstruct it.
To understand it.
Jones: I came to the Senate in January of 2007.
By the end of that year,
there was a "New York Times" article
that came out that said the CIA had destroyed
interrogation videotapes from early 2002.
The Senate Intelligence Committee had been looking
to learn more about this program
for a very long time.
They had no idea that tapes existed,
so they call the CIA and demand
that the then CIA director, Michael Hayden,
come to the Committee to explain
the destruction of tapes.
I'm very delighted to come on down
and lay out the facts as we know them,
and we'll be very happy
to let the facts take us where they will.
Michael Hayden testifies
that this was not destruction of evidence.
In fact, the CIA has
very detailed written records
of everything that happened at the detention site,
so it didn't need those videotapes.
There are written records.
And he says if the committee wants to see those records,
of course it can see those records.
So what does the committee say immediately?
"We want to see these records tomorrow."
The committee finally acquires
those heavily redacted cables
in May of 2008,
and myself and two other Senate staffers
are sent to the CIA
to review these cables and write a report.
The CIA eventually gave us
6.3 million pages of documents.
We identified at least 119 CIA detainees.
Reporter: But at the heart of this release today
is the conclusion that the interrogations
did not make the country safer
and that the CIA misled
the Bush administration about the program.
Jones: We saw constant manipulation
of the White House, the Department of Justice,
and Congress by the CIA.
I mean, this is what I thought would be
the most important finding
coming out of the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
You know, misleading Bush, misleading Obama,
misleading the Congress, repeatedly we see this.
John Brennan, CIA director under Obama,
made a speech after the report came out
and said we'll never know
if we could've gotten this intelligence in any other way.
...and the ultimate provision of the information
is unknown and unknowable.
Jones: But we do know, we have an entire report,
500 pages here with almost 3,000 footnotes
and a 7,000-page classified report
with 38,000 footnotes
that says we do know that, in fact,
the capture of Jose Padilla
did not come from the waterboarding
of Abu Zubaydah.
We do know that, because the records are there.
We tortured some folks.
We did some things that were contrary to our values.
It's important for us
not to,
uh, feel too sanctimonious
in retrospect
about the tough job that those folks have.
And a lot of those folks
were working hard,
under enormous pressure, and are real patriots.
But having said all that...
we did some things that were wrong.
Jones: I remember hearing that line about patriots
and thinking about the people
who said they were resigning from the CIA,
people who said they didn't want to be involved in this program
and the people who engaged in the torture,
who defended the torture.
And this is who Obama identifies as real patriots.
Gibney: The word "patriot" struck a chord with me.
So long as you believe you're a patriot,
do the ends always justify the means?
And if we all believe that,
are we prepared to abandon our principles
in order to defend them?
Jose Rodriguez and James Mitchell
both live in Florida.
Mitchell's company grossed $81 million
for his interrogation services.
Rodriguez became an intelligence consultant
working for IBM.
He has a fondness for Corvettes and Harleys
and owns a 30-foot powerboat
called "Shaken, Not Stirred."
It's a great thing about this government,
the only people that ever stand up
and tell the truth are who, intelligence officers,
because our culture is never break faith with the truth.
We'll tell you, you don't have to drag it out of us.
Mitchell: You're not going to get me
to say I think it's torture.
You might as well just quit.
If you want to think it's torture, think what you want to think.
I'm not in the business of controlling your mind,
nor am I in the business of trying to coerce you
into saying something that you don't believe
or want to comment on.
This was the least worse of two bad choices.
Both choices suck.
Both choices are bad.
But on the one hand, you have
thousands of dead Americans
and on the other hand, you have
the temporary discomfort of a terrorist.
I thought there was going to be a major catastrophic attack
that was going to kill millions of Americans.
And, uh...
I thought that my government had asked me
to stop it.
And I felt responsible... for doing that.
That's what I thought.
Gibney: From near his home in Florida,
Mitchell can paddle to the Gulf of Mexico.
From there, it's a straight shot
to Cuba and Guantanamo,
where Abu Zubaydah lives out his days.
As its creators intended,
Gitmo is a kind of nowhere land
outside of time and place.
The images you see here were shot by me in 2006.
The government won't permit me to return,
so I depend on others to tell me
not much has changed.
Fast food, first-run movies,
the gift shop where I bought my T-shirt,
sporting a local joke about interrogators.
After Thailand, Abu Zubaydah would be sent
to black sites in Poland,
Lithuania, and Morocco.
When he first landed in Gitmo,
he was imprisoned in the secret CIA unit
known as Strawberry Fields,
as in forever.
♪ Strawberry fields forever ♪
Recently, along with the 13 others
held in indefinite detention,
he was moved to Guantanamo's Camp V.
No one will say what kind of law governs Abu Zubaydah.
So he has two legal teams,
one civilian and one for the military commissions.
His military lawyer, Chantell Higgins,
sees him most often.
Zayn is a colorful storyteller.
Very funny.
Always well-dressed. Very particular.
He's a sort of a...
how do I say it, a diva. (laughs)
Gibney: Does he suffer from some kind of PTSD?
I don't know how anyone could have endured that
and not suffered from PTSD.
I know that he has nightmares about drowning.
Waking up and drowning.
Gibney: To what extent does Abu Zubaydah remember
anything about James Mitchell?
Does he remember who he was?
(sighs)
Uh, yeah, he remembers very clearly who he was.
Yeah.
Gibney: And does he understand that he was the guy
who designed these techniques?
He does.
I think all the detainees understand that by now.
Rizzo: Abu Zubaydah was the first high-level detainee.
But he's not one of the ones
who have actually been charged by the military commissions.
So his status is... really permanent limbo.
I can't imagine any US President
in any US administration ever letting him go.
But what do you do with him?
Lt. Col. Chantell Higgins: In America, we have this thing
called innocent until proven guilty.
If we think they're guilty of something
we should take them to trial,
give them opportunity to be heard,
sentence them accordingly, and send them on their way.
It's just inhumane
to... detain someone...
and not give them rights.
Period.
Mora: Almost half of the American public believes
that the use of torture is acceptable.
There's growing acceptance of the use of cruelty
as a tool
to address social situations
or national security crises.
And I think in the right combination of situations,
you have other individuals who'll say,
"This is another tool we should use again,"
and we'll go back to use it despite all the reasons
why it shouldn't be countenanced again.
Gibney: For nearly 20 years,
Abu Zubaydah has been in US custody.
In all that time, the man with one eye
and one good leg
has remained mostly incommunicado.
I can see some of his drawings.
I can read censored letters,
and the briefs of his lawyers.
But I cannot talk to him.
His voice has been kept silent,
just as the CIA promised.
He's the forever prisoner
meant to fade from memory
like old photographs left in the sun.
Twenty years after 9/11,
I'm stirred to remember the innocents
who died on that day.
But I'm also stirred to remember the purpose
of that vicious attack.
It wasn't to win a war.
It was to provoke us to abandon
the principles of democracy we claim to live by.
The forever prisoner is a living reminder
of one of the ideals we abandoned:
equal justice under the law.
As the saying goes,
there is no them, there is only us.
If we believe in that idea,
how can we imprison a man without charge
for the remainder of his life?
Not for what he did to us...
but for what we did to him.
♪ ♪