＂CIA's Motive Was REVENGE＂ - CIA Whistleblower BREAKS DOWN Post-9⧸11 Interrogation TORTURE Tactics
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Summary
In this episode, Patrick and Mark discuss CIA interrogation techniques, torture, and the cover-up that went on in the CIA's secret detention and interrogation sites. They discuss the tactics and techniques used, and how the CIA covered it up.
Transcript
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Listen, Patrick, it is like a kick in my gut to have to compliment the FBI.
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But if there's one thing that they are really good at, it's interrogation.
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They've been doing it since the Nuremberg investigations.
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What is the different tactics they use in interrogation from the CIA?
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Oh, yeah. Well, that's a good question. It's the most basic one.
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Their tactic is to sit across the table like you and I are doing right now.
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Maybe you give him an apple or a cup of tea or a cigarette.
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And you establish this rapport, this relationship.
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Eventually, he's going to talk to you. Eventually.
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For the CIA, there was this element of revenge.
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9-11 was the worst intelligence failure in the history of the Republic.
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And so there was this idea that we had to avenge the deaths of 3,000 Americans.
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We had the deaths of 3,000 Americans on our shoulders.
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And so you want to go in there with fists flailing.
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Besides the fact that the CIA did not stop at those 10 techniques,
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they did things that the Justice Department had never approved,
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things that I thought were worse than waterboarding.
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Like, for example, what they called the cold cell.
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so you can't sit or lay or get comfortable in any way.
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And then every hour, a CIA officer throws a bucket of ice water on you.
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We just dig a hole outside the interrogation room
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You can't send the body back to their families.
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You don't even know where they're from half the time.
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The other one was sleep deprivation, which sounds kind of silly.
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But, for example, Don Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense at the time
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and he poo-pooed this whole thing in the press saying,
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and sometimes I work for 24 hours standing there
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Well, we're not talking about standing for 24 hours at Don Rumsfeld's desk.
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The American Psychological Association, the APA,
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They told us that people begin to lose their minds at day seven with no sleep.
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They begin to die of organ failure at day nine.
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The CIA was authorized to keep people awake for 12 days.
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Now, imagine, again, you're chained to that eye bolt in the ceiling
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with industrial strength lighting on you 24 hours a day
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and death metal at volume 11 in your cell 24 hours a day
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and then your organs just shut down and you die chained to that eye bolt.
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And you heard and saw many stories of people that died that didn't make it past night.
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Oh, yeah. We would get cables, you know, the next morning saying,
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unfortunately, prisoner so-and-so passed away as a result of interrogation.
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We will, you know, dispose of his body in this way.
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All this stuff is being documented and communicated.
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How does the CIA protect that somebody right there doesn't take a screenshot
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and keep it in their phones for later on in case if the CIA flips and comes after them
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for them to say, let me tell you what I have on you guys.
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But the CIA would tell you that that's an easy answer.
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Because if you breathe one word, one word to the press,
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Because from the moment you left, it didn't happen eight years until after you left the CIA, right?
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I wish I could tell you that I took a moral stand and I went up there and I told them.
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So I'm seeing these cables come back from the secret sites.
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And I'm thinking to myself, this is wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Listen, we've got a law in this country called the Federal Torture Act of 1946
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And not only are we signatories to the United Nations Convention Against Torture,
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we wrote the United Nations Convention Against Torture,
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which, again, specifically outlawed these techniques.
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Let me add, before I get to your specific point,
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in 1946, 1945, we executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POWs.
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That was a death penalty crime to waterboard somebody.
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In January of 1968, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara
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saw a front page photograph in the Washington Post
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of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner.
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He was convicted of torture and sent to Leavenworth for 20 years.
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And so, like magic, in 2002, because we didn't like that law,
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And then I'm seeing cables from people who were out there at the secret site
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I'm going to say at least a dozen people either resigned, retired, or curtailed.
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We had a secretary who passed out while watching somebody be tortured.
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There was a doctor who revived Abu Zubaydah when his heart stopped during waterboarding.
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And he's like, look, I took a Hippocratic oath.
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That's a career-ending decision to curtail an assignment and come back.
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So I thought, well, certainly somebody's going to say something.
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And then in 2007, December of 2007, I get a call from Brian Ross at ABC News.
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And he said, he had a source who said that I had tortured Abu Zubaydah.
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I was the only person who was kind to Abu Zubaydah.
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I said, I never laid a hand on him or on anybody else.
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And so he said, and I didn't know this was an old reporter's trick because I'd never spoken to a reporter before.
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He said, well, you're welcome to come on the show and defend yourself.
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CIA, FBI, DOD, torture, secret prisons, international renditions.
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Maybe you or your child want to apply for a job at the CIA and are looking for some tips.
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