BILL MOYERS: With me now is Jane
Mayer, one of the country’s top investigative reporters. Twelve years
with the WALL STREET JOURNAL, covering the White House, war and foreign
crises and twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, bestselling author
Jane Mayer is now based in Washington as staff writer for THE NEW YORKER.
In the past several days, her new book, THE DARK SIDE: THE INSIDE STORY
OF HOW THE WAR ON TERROR TURNED INTO A WAR ON AMERICAN IDEALS, has created
even more passionate discussion than the hearings themselves.
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL.
You’ve been attending some of these hearings.
Are you certain that the witnesses who came from the government knew
they were talking about torture?
JANE MAYER: Well, I think they
knew they were being asked about torture. I mean, they danced around
the question. They’ve redefined the term “torture” so that
what was torture before 9/11 they say has not been torture since.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
JANE MAYER: Because they wanted
to interrogate people in completely brutal ways. And they wanted to
avoid being accused of war crimes. So one of the witnesses there, Doug
Feith in particular, who was the number three in the Pentagon, argued
right after 9/11 that the Geneva Convention should no longer apply to
anybody that was picked up in the war on terror, that was a terrorist
suspect. And so they took away the rules of war, which were the Geneva
Conventions, which America really pioneered in many ways. And they also
said that the criminal laws didn’t apply to the same suspects. So they
were left with kind of a legal limbo. And they made up the laws as they
went along on it. So-
BILL MOYERS: Can we fault them
for wanting to put first the safety of the United States in the hours,
days, and weeks after 9/11?
JANE MAYER: Well, you know, this
isn’t really so much about fault. It’s a question, seven years later,
if what they did in those panicky moments right after 9/11 were the
right choices and whether they’re still the right choices. I think that
there’s been a re-consideration from many quarters. And one of the things
that I write about it in this book is that, unseen by the American public,
there were many people really early on who had big problems with what
this program required. And they were not just liberals at the ACLU.
They were-
BILL MOYERS: No, they were conservatives
inside the government, right?
JANE MAYER: They were. And, particular,
the first line of dissent came from the United States military leaders
and particularly the military lawyers who are experts in the laws of
war. And they said this is dishonorable. This is not how we fight wars.
And if you do this to these people, they’re, it’s going to enflame them
and it’s going to endanger our own men and women when they get taken
captive. And another very early line of dissent came from the FBI, who,
when they first saw what the CIA was doing, when they started interrogating
high-value detainees, a couple of the FBI agents who were there said,
“These people, the CIA, should be arrested for criminal behavior.
What they’re doing is, the quote was, “borderline torture.”
BILL MOYERS: And some FBI agents,
as I read your book, refused to take part in this brutality.
JANE MAYER: They did refuse. Absolutely.
They said, “We’re not gonna have anything to do with this.”
And, in fact, it wasn’t just on the low level. What it was a completely
remarkable situation where it, the issue, went all the way up to the
top of the FBI, where the director of the FBI took a look at this and
he said, “Well, we’re not gonna be involved.” So you – we’ve
had a war on terror where the FBI has pretty much taken a backseat or
no seat because they don’t want to have any part in this thing because
they know that they think that some of it’s criminal.
BILL MOYERS: Who were some of
the other conservative heroes, as you call them, in your book?
JANE MAYER: A lot of them are
lawyers. And they were people inside the Justice Department who, one
of whom, and I can’t name this one in particular, said when he looked
around at some of the White House meetings – he was in where they were
authorizing the President, literally, to torture people – if he thought
that was necessary, he said, “I can’t, I could not believe these
lunatics had taken over the country.” And I am not talking about
someone who is a liberal Democrat. I’m talking about a very conservative
member of this Administration. And there was a-
BILL MOYERS: Your source?
JANE MAYER: My source.
BILL MOYERS:
And, yet, when these conservatives – as you write in your book – when
these conservatives spoke up, Cheney and company retaliated against
their own men.
JANE MAYER: People told me, “You
can’t imagine what it was like inside the White House during this period.”
There was such an atmosphere of intimidation. And when the lawyers,
some of these lawyers tried to stand up to this later, they felt so
endangered in some ways that, at one point, two of the top lawyers from
the Justice Department developed this system of talking in codes to
each other because they thought they might be being wiretapped. And
they even felt-
BILL MOYERS: By their own government.
JANE MAYER: By their own government.
They felt like they might be kind of weirdly in physical danger. They
were actually scared to stand up to Vice President Cheney.
BILL MOYERS: And you say that
all of this was maintained by a, quote, “top-down quality control?”
How did they do it?
JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, I think
this is important because we’ll all remember when the pictures of Abu
Ghraib came out, the Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said, you know, these
were, you know, just a few rotten apples. There wasn’t a policy here.
So, part of what I spent a lot of time trying to do was to figure out
what was policy? What was official U.S. policy? And there’s a paper
trail that goes right to the top of our government. And Congress is
beginning, in some of those hearings that you showed, they’ve begun
to ask questions and subpoena documents. And-
BILL MOYERS: Are they getting
to the truth? You’ve been watching the hearings.
JANE MAYER: They’re beginning
to.
BILL MOYERS: You think they’re
getting to the truth?
JANE MAYER: I think that they’re
beginning to piece it together. It’s a humungous jigsaw puzzle. I mean,
and there are many, many secrets we still don’t know. There are legal
memos that nobody’s ever seen. There’s a memo, for instance, that exists
still that defines all the interrogation techniques that were allowed.
And, for some reason, the government, the White House, won’t allow even
Congress to see it. Even the members of Congress with top security clearances
can’t see it. You have to wonder at a certain point is this because
they’re afraid of hurting national security? Or are they afraid of being
ashamed in public when that list comes out?
BILL MOYERS:
But there is also this fact that, which is that there was a briefing
in which four top members of Congress, including House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi, was present, were present, and they were told what was going
on. Have they been compromised by their knowledge of what was happening?
JANE MAYER: Well they’ve been
very defensive about it, the Democrats in particular, because they’ve
said that in private they complained about this. They felt they were
not allowed to speak out because they’d be accused of violating national
security. I also think that, what I’ve talked to some of them, that
say that while the CIA explained what it was doing, it didn’t explain
it thoroughly. So they used a lot of euphemisms as the kind of euphemisms
that we’ve been hearing, which are intent, enhanced interrogation, or
special interrogation.
BILL MOYERS: The other side of
it was raised by Representative Trent Franks, a Republican on the committee.
Let me play this for you.
REP. TRENT FRANKS:
CIA Director Michael Hayden has confirmed that, despite the incessant
hysteria in some quarters, the waterboarding technique has only been
used on three high-level captured terrorists – the very worst of the
worst of our terrorist enemies. Now, what are these people like, Mr.
Chairman? When the terrorist Zubaydah, a logistics chief of al-Qaeda
was captured, he and two other men were caught building a bomb. A soldering
gun used to make the bomb was still hot on the table, along with the
building plans for a school. CIA Director Hayden has said that Mohammed
and Zubaydah provided roughly 25 percent of the information CIA had
on al-Qaeda from all human sources.
BILL MOYERS: What he is saying
is that torture works.
JANE MAYER: Right. That’s been
the argument.
BILL MOYERS: What is your conclusion
after these many years of reporting is?
JANE MAYER: Well, there are a
couple of things I want to say about this. One is to say that there’s
a special exception here: We won’t torture except when we will torture,
is a legal problem. The convention against torture, which the United
States Senate ratified, has no exceptions. It’s a major felony. There’s
no excuse for doing it for war. There’s no excuse for national security.
It doesn’t have exceptions. So this is a serious legal problem.
JANE MAYER: Secondly, what did
they get from, let’s take his case of Abu Zubaydah. There was a soldering
iron, as he says, and they were building a bomb. What led them to Abu
Zubaydah? Was it torture? It wasn’t actually. It was a bribe that they
gave to the Pakistanis that got them to Abu Zubaydah. Bribing people
does work, and that’s, you can see again and again in the war on terror.
Then, what did they get out of Abu Zubaydah when they brutalized him?
It turns out and I’ve talked to, for instance, Dan Coleman, who’s an
FBI agent who knows a lot about Abu Zubaydah and this interrogation.
He questioned, he thinks they got nothing out of him. First of all,
he was mentally unstable. They you, they, he said all kinds of crazy
things. He later said that he made up half of the things that he told
them.
There’s – the reason that people don’t
torture is not just because it’s a moral issue. It’s because when we
moved to a system of law that was on the principles of the enlightenment,
the effort was to get at the truth. And you don’t torture because people
say anything under torture. And, according to a very top CIA officer
I spoke to who was very close with Tenet, he said 90 percent of what
we-
BILL MOYERS: George Tenet.
JANE MAYER: George Tenet, the
former director of the CIA. He said 90 percent of what we got was crap.
And he said and that was true of every method we used: Torture, non-torture.
BILL MOYERS: There have been some
suggestions recently that they may have begun to torture Abu Zubaydah
before the Justice Department drew up this memo justifying it. Do you
think-
JANE MAYER: But the torture memo,
the famous torture memo that was written in August of 2002 by, mostly
by John Yoo, was written to justify these harsh interrogations, whatever
you want to call them. But when John Ashcroft, the former attorney general,
testified recently, he was asked, “Well, you know, when did these
interrogations on Zubaydah begin?” It turns out they’d been interrogating
him since March, which is several months before they had legal approval
to do so. That’s an area where there seems to be super legal exposure
for the people involved in this program, the interrogators, the people
at the CIA who authorized it. And, in particular, there were a number
of psychologists who were contracted psychologists who designed that
program.
BILL MOYERS:Yeah, that’s a fascinating
part of your book. You talk about the doctors and the psychologists
who participated in the government’s program of torture. What, tell
us about it.
JANE MAYER: They’re civilians.
And they hadn’t, these psychologists had never actually interrogated
anyone. They’d trained in this odd little program where they did mock
torture on people. And they had studied how to break people down. And
one of them in particular, a fellow named James Mitchell, spoke, according
to my sources, about how the science behind breaking someone down psychologically
is based on experiments shocking dogs, using electric shocks on dogs.
JANE MAYER: There’s this theory
called learned helplessness, where if you keep shocking a dog in a cage
in a random way so that there’s no sense to it, the dog’ll just kind
of give up. They won’t even try to escape after a while when you open
the door because they’re completely despondent. And this particular
psychologist, James Mitchell, what showed up near Abu Zubaydah and started
talking about this theory of learned helplessness and how the science
was great and you could sort of break resistance of detainees if you
applied some of these same methods.
JANE MAYER: Now, just for legal
reasons, I need to say that a lawyer for James Mitchell says that he
never really believed this. Yet, I have people on the record in here,
in this book, talking about how he talked about it all the time.
BILL MOYERS:You write movingly
in here about your concern over the participation in the torture program
of these civilian doctors and psychologists.
JANE MAYER: That, to me, is actually
a terrible ” something I still can’t fathom; which is, how can doctors,
who take a Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, be involved in a program
that, call it torture or not, it’s purposefully cruel? And they pop
up again and again.
BILL MOYERS: Doing what? What
were they doing there?
JANE MAYER: They measure people’s
blood pressure. They make sure that detainees are strong enough so that
they continue to, can continue to be tormented.
BILL MOYERS: I mean, they’re observing
the torture or the-
JANE MAYER: Yes.
BILL MOYERS: Enhanced interrogation?
JANE MAYER: They are. In one case,
Mohammad al-Khatani, who was a detainee down in Guantanamo, falls apart.
His, all his vital signs are, you know, cratering. And they, he gets
emergency medical care, so that they can make sure that then he can
be brought back and go through more of this. And I guess, you know,
everybody knows in World War II that science was perverted by the Germans.
And this is – I don’t want to draw this parallel because what we did
is not on an order of that. Anyway, doctors take an oath. There’s an
international oath that doctors take to do no harm. And particularly,
it’s particularly horrible, I think, to see people use their psychological
and medical expertise to hurt people.
BILL MOYERS: Some of these doctors
and psychologists who participated, where they’re watching the torture,
as you say, did you talk to them?
JANE MAYER: Yes, I have talked
to them. I’ve talked to the psychologist James Mitchell. I interviewed
him at one point.
BILL MOYERS: Were they-
JANE MAYER: He said he felt he
had nothing to be ashamed of.
BILL MOYERS: Why?
JANE MAYER: I think he feels that
he was doing the right thing.
BILL MOYERS: Because?
JANE MAYER: Because he thought
he was protecting the country.
BILL MOYERS:
Torture can become an accepted way of life for a society. I mean, you
can get used to it. Or you can know it’s going on and realizing that
it doesn’t affect you, so it doesn’t matter to you. Do you is there
a possibility that that’s happening here?
JANE MAYER: Well, you know, there’s
a great book out called, “Torture and Democracy,” by Darius
Rejali, which is about how torture has worked over the years. And one
of the things he writes about is that it has a very corrupting effect
on a society and also on military discipline, on anybody involved in
it. There’s this tendency to get rougher and rougher. You don’t get
the answer you want? You up the level of aggression. It also has a horrific
effect on the outlook of the people who were involved in this program
there and I do describe how one of the interrogators in particular who
did waterboarding with the CIA is wracked by nightmares now according
to one of his friends. He – you can’t go to that dark place without
it affecting you.
BILL MOYERS: Why did you go to
the dark side? I mean, you spent three or more years there.
JANE MAYER: I became, I have to
admit, somewhat obsessed with the subject because when I did the first
story for “The New Yorker” of this series of stories which
was about the program called Rendition, in which American government
officials working for the CIA had black hoods over their heads, no one
knew who they were. And they were kidnapping people, snatching them
off of streets, and throwing them basically in dungeons where they could
never be heard from again. And the more I found out, the more disturbing
it became. And so, and also I was told at every step, “You can’t
know this.” And for an investigative reporter, you know, it’s like
someone waving a red flag at a bull.
BILL MOYERS: Where did these three
years take you? Where did you spend these three years?
JANE MAYER: Well, I was just sitting
at my desk in Washington really. I’ve been to Guantanamo. In the past,
I’ve been in the Middle East. And to some extent, I think that made
me interested in this. I was actually in Beirut in on October 23, 1983,
when the U.S. Marine barracks was blown up by terrorists. So, I was
kind of there when America started dealing with this issue. And it was
the most horrific thing I’d ever seen. I wondered, “Well, what
mindset makes a terrorist like this? And how do you deal with this?”
And, but I knew enough about the Middle
East when I saw, for instance, the Abu Ghraib pictures, to know if you’re
going to humiliate people like this, you’re going to have a powerful
backlash in the Middle East. And many people I interviewed said the
war on terror is a war on hearts and minds. We’ve got to win over the
next generation of young Muslims. And if you start torturing their relatives,
it’s gonna be pretty hard.
BILL MOYERS: What’s the most horrific
thing you found on the dark side?
JANE MAYER: I guess, I just think
the worst thing for me is reading and finding out about innocent people
who were taken by mistake and put through this program. And there’s
one, you know, there’s one, a German citizen, Khalid el-Masri, who was
locked up for months. And the CIA actually had doubts that he was a
terrorist from the start, and they wouldn’t do anything about it, which
I think is unconscionable. They just kept him in there to the point
where he lost 70 pounds. Everybody, you, who was around him, was banging
their heads in, against the wall, trying to commit suicide. It’s, it’s
really awful to see the psychic destruction of people for no reason.
It just doesn’t seem American to me.
BILL MOYERS:On the basis of what
you report in THE DARK SIDE, do you think that these high officials,
present and former, have any fear of prosecution?
JANE MAYER: Oh, I think that,
especially after the Supreme Court ruled in the Hamdan case, which was
in 2006, that actually the Geneva Conventions should cover detainees,
there was just a chill that went through the top ranks of the government
because they suddenly realized that if you violate the standards in
those conventions, it’s a war crime, which is an incredibly serious
situation. So, yes, I mean, and you begin to hear in some of the meetings
I described, Vice President Cheney and the former Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales, literally start saying, “Well, we better be careful.
If we move these detainees out of the black prison sites, people are
gonna wonder where they’ve been and what have we been doing with them.”
I mean, they’re getting sort of spooked about the whole thing. So, yes,
I think they’re worried. And I think they have to defend this at this
point because they’re up to their eyeballs in it. So they have to say
it worked and it was necessary.
BILL MOYERS:Would that explain
why Attorney General Mukasey has actually made a speech recently saying
that Congress, not the courts, should define how the detainees can appeal
their cases? Turning it into a political rather than a legal issue?
JANE MAYER: Well, I guess, I mean,
the thing is the courts have, in my view anyway, have been terrific
in standing up for the rule of law in this country and for American
ideals, as we’ve known them since the founding of the country. And the
congressmen tend to be a little, have a little less spine, especially
as we approach an election, which we are. So, if you put this issue
in Congress now as we’re facing an election, it’s gonna be demagogue-ed.
And I think that there’s some sense that a lot of people know that.
BILL MOYERS:Some observers like
the lawyer Glenn Greenwald say that what Congress is doing, and this
is a direct quote, is “to immunize the Administration’s law breaking
and retroactively protect it.” What would be the impact of that?
JANE MAYER: I think that, you
know, there’s been a lot more discussion recently about whether or not
President Bush might issue blanket pardons of some sort retroactively
to anybody involved in this program. And that is the program of detention
and interrogation. And I, you know, I think it might happen. I – there
have been blanket pardons before. I’m not sure. Again, I don’t know
where the American public really is on these issues. Nobody ever asked
the American public, “Do you want to start torturing people?”
It happened in secret. Now-
BILL MOYERS: But the American
public did want to be protected from a second strike after 9/11.
JANE MAYER: I think they did.
And I think they were told that this would work. And the question is,
now, I think it’s worth knowing a lot more about did it really work
and was it necessary? And what are the long-term consequences of this?
BILL MOYERS: What do you think
the country would gain or lose from pursuing war crimes?
JANE MAYER: Well, you know, I
think that it could be very toxic in some ways to hold people as criminals
who were doing what they thought was right for the country. But, at
the same time, I have to say I think that we need accountability in
this country in order to make sure that people abide by the laws. And
I can tell you when I interview people at the CIA, a number of people
said that they didn’t want to get involved in this because they thought
there’d be criminal repercussions. So, if there never are any criminal
repercussions, I’m not sure where that leaves us.
BILL MOYERS: Do you think that
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and John Yoo and David Addington and
all of the participants in these decisions would have done the sort
of unthinkable things you describe in here before 9/11?
JANE MAYER: Well, I think the
panic certainly unleashed them. And it’s not that I think they were
sitting there saying, “I can’t wait to torture people.” What
I do think, though, is that there was a long festering political agenda,
which was to gut international law. There’s been a movement in conservative
legal circles to try to push back international law and to also, to
not coddle criminals, which is what, you know, they, how they see al-Qaeda
in some instances, to get tough.
JANE MAYER: I mean, right after
9/11, there’s a speech from President Bush in which he says, you know,
we’ve been too soft. So, they felt that they had to get tough. And this
is what they thought being tough was, being macho. And I think the Bush
Administration really thought, “Okay, we’ll take this shortcut
and it, and we got to do it.” And so they did it.
BILL MOYERS: And, in the face
of this, why is Congress so pliant?
JANE MAYER: Well, I think, politically,
this is not a winning issue – to look like you’re standing up for terrorists.
And it’s really not about standing up for terrorists. And that’s why
I have to say I admired the statement from John McCain where he said
it’s not about them, it’s about us. And it’s about our country. You
know, you don’t wan to imitate the terrorists. We’re better than that.
BILL MOYERS:THE DARK SIDE: THE
INSIDE STORY OF HOW THE WAR ON TERROR TURNED INTO A WAR ON AMERICAN
IDEALS. Jane Mayer, thank you very much for the book and for being here.
JANE MAYER: Glad to be with you.