Many times in recent years I have reflected on KSM’s comment to me in his black site cell that our own government would turn on those of us who were trying to stop the next terrorist attack. With the swearing in of the Obama administration, KSM’s prophecy quickly and chillingly came true.

Although the investigation into the destruction of the videotapes had resulted in no charges, it seemed that some in the government still held out hope for taking CIA scalps. The tape investigation was launched during the Bush administration by Attorney General Michael Mukasey. But before the federal prosecutor, John Durham, finished the job, the Obama administration was in office. The new attorney general, Eric Holder, expanded Durham’s original mandate. It was no longer just about tapes. In August 2009, Holder announced that Durham had been ordered to “conduct a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations.”

The 2009–2012 Justice Department Investigation into the Use of “Torture” During CIA Detainee Interrogations

By the time this investigation kicked off, I was no longer working for the CIA. One of the first things that happened in the immediate aftermath of President Obama’s taking office was that he shut down the CIA interrogation program. There was work we could have done for the CIA that didn’t involve EITs, but our contract was canceled because of pressure from Senator Feinstein and other Democrats in Congress.

I found myself a “subject” but not a “target” of the DOJ’s expanded investigation into detainee mistreatment. To me it was a distinction without a difference. Being a subject meant that although I wasn’t being investigated per se, any wrongdoing on my part uncovered during the investigation or any false statements I made during the investigation could result in criminal charges. I was certain that I had not done anything illegal, but I was not certain that Attorney General Holder wouldn’t try to trump up a phony obstruction of justice charge just to please political cronies demanding my hide.

After all, in June 2008, seven months before he became attorney general, during a speech he gave at the American Constitution Society, Holder claimed that President Bush had authorized torture and promised his cronies “a reckoning.” He subsequently filled the third-highest position in the Justice Department with a lawyer who had represented terrorists before he came to work for Holder. But that wasn’t all. On February 8, 2010, Holder sent a letter in response to questions from Senator Charles Grassley indicating that nine of his DOJ appointees had been involved in work on behalf of terror suspects: five of them had acted as lawyers for detainees, and the other four had either filed amicus briefs or acted as advocates. He brought in a lawyer who had served as senior counsel for Human Rights Watch and put her on the Detention Policy Task Force. His principal deputy solicitor general once had been the lawyer for one of Usama bin Ladin’s drivers.

To me it felt like Holder was stacking the Justice Department with al-Qa’ida’s lawyers and looking for any excuse to file criminal charges against the men and women of the CIA who had been keeping Americans safe, including me.

In the press and in the statements of political leaders speaking out about their newly contrived objections to the detention and interrogation program, the CIA received no credit for actions it had taken to punish wrongdoers who were part of it. The CIA received no credit for the numerous criminal referrals it had made to the DOJ, for the dismissals of CIA officers and contractors who were out of line, or for the August 17, 2006, conviction of a former CIA contractor, David Passaro, for assault in conjunction with the 2003 beating death of an Afghan detainee at a U.S. military base in Asadabad, Afghanistan. Passaro, by the way, was not part of the CIA’s interrogation program. I don’t know what section he worked for because I wasn’t read into the case, but it wasn’t part of the CIA’s interrogation program.

By this time I had a new lawyer, Henry Schuelke, a former federal prosecutor. Gorelick had had to recuse herself some months before because of a conflict of interest. Schuelke tried to assure me that the special prosecutor, John Durham, was an honest and honorable man who would review the evidence meticulously and base his recommendations on fact, not political pressure.

That made me feel better, but I was still concerned that I’d forget a date, misremember some event, not remember some event at all, or say something that I thought was correct but that ultimately wasn’t. I knew I had not broken any laws, but in a game of political scalp hunting with gotcha questions and tricky maneuvering, I wasn’t sure the playing field was level. I had a great attorney, but I was not allowed to look at any of the records or documents to refresh my memory.

At one point my lawyer and I had a series of strange exchanges about a hard drive the CIA had installed and maintained in our company’s offices. After Senator Feinstein had our contract canceled, CIA personnel pulled their equipment and took it back to Langley. Here is our conversation about the hard drive.

“Durham wants the hard drive,” my lawyer said.

“What hard drive?”

“The one out of your old offices. John Durham wants you to send him that hard drive.”

“I don’t have that hard drive,” I said for what felt like the hundredth time. “That hard drive and all the security hardware and software associated with it belonged to the agency. They sent a security crew. They removed it and took it back to DC. Durham will need to get it from them.”

A few weeks later: “Durham wants the passwords to the hard drive.”

Not again, I thought. I knew I’d gone over this before. “I don’t have the passwords. I never did. It wasn’t my hard drive. I didn’t have administrator access. In fact, I was never allowed in the specially constructed room where that hard drive and encryption gear were kept. I would have given it to Durham if I had it and it was legal to do so, but he’ll have to get that from the agency. I don’t have it. Never did.”

“He says the agency doesn’t have the passwords and they are telling him that they can’t break the encryption. He wants you to tell him how to access the hard drive so he can pass that information to the FBI.”

“Let’s see if I got this right. First the CIA said they didn’t have the hard drive. Then they found it and gave it to him. Now the CIA can’t break its own encryption on one of its own hard drives. The FBI can’t break the encryption either, and somehow I’m supposed to magically unlock that thing for them.”

“I know, I know,” he said, “but they asked me to inquire. So I am.”

There were several times when I asked my attorney, “Can’t we just pick up the phone and let me answer his questions?” It would have been so much simpler.

But, of course, we couldn’t. Durham wanted me to testify in front of the grand jury, and my attorney wanted to be cautious. I wanted to help Durham in his investigation, but I didn’t want to get ensnared in some kind of trumped-up obstruction charge, so I waited.

Meanwhile some in the press were certain that Bruce and I were about to be perp-walked as war criminals and were making the case in the media with smoke and innuendo as evidence. They continued to link our names with every horrible thing, real or imagined, alleged to have happened as part of that program. Because of our nondisclosure agreement, we were unable to defend ourselves publicly.

Meanwhile, the people who actually had done the things that the DOJ’s special prosecutor, John Durham, was investigating were getting a pass in the press. The focus should have been on the guys who used unauthorized techniques such as threatening a detainee with a drill and gun or putting a broomstick behind the knees of a kneeling detainee. But instead the press was focused on the authorized techniques that had been used against KSM.

Eventually my lawyer was satisfied with Durham’s assurances. He successfully negotiated immunity for Bruce and me, and in spring 2012 I testified in front of the grand jury. I’m not going to go into my testimony here, but it was actually a relief to get it over with. Durham was a professional, and the grand jury asked interesting questions. The only person who concerned me was one of Durham’s investigators who seemed overly interested in clever verbal jousting during our pre– and post–grand jury meetings. But even he settled in and turned out to be a pretty decent guy.

But I still didn’t trust Holder, and some in the press continued their ugly and inaccurate accusations. (They’re still doing it as I write this.) Finally, sometime in August 2012, my attorney called and said he had received word that Holder was going to announce closure of the investigation. Once again, no charges were to be filed against anyone.

I thought that would be the end of the false accusations in the press about me torturing people. After all, one of the country’s most highly respected criminal investigators, John Durham, had been tasked with, in the words of Attorney General Holder, examining “whether any unauthorized interrogation techniques were used by CIA interrogators, and if so, whether such techniques could constitute violations of the torture statute or any other applicable statute.” This prosecutor from the highest law enforcement agency in the land and a federal grand jury spent years examining all the evidence and returned no indictments. No charges were ever filed against me, Bruce, or any other CIA officer.

In my mind the conclusion of John Durham’s investigation should put to rest once and for all the question of whether I tortured people. But apparently being cleared by the Justice Department wasn’t enough; I was still subject to indictment by a kangaroo court.

The 2009–2014 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Investigation into the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program

It was mid-December 2014, over two years after Eric Holder’s Justice Department completed its multiyear criminal investigation into whether any CIA interrogators used unauthorized interrogation techniques and broke the law.

It was clear and sunny and windy. I was off the coast of Bayport, Florida, fishing with my younger brother. My airboat was pinned to the bottom with two long black carbon fiber spikes driven into the sand and rocks underneath it. We held fast, unmoving in the current rushing out of the mouth of the crystal-clear Weeki Wachee River. Huge manatees came up to the boat, unafraid, curious. An armada of predatory fish swam with them, mostly cobia, darting out from the moving gloom of their shadows and ambushing bait fish spooked by the great beasts passing. White egrets and great blue herons waded in the shallows. Eagles and ospreys rode the thermals overhead, occasionally plunging into the water, snatching unsuspecting fish.

My cell phone rang.

“How does it feel to have Senator Feinstein call you a torturer?” blurted the reporter on the other end.

“What? Repeat that,” I said. I could hardly hear him over the wind and the sound of head-high saw grass swaying along the riverbank. I motioned to my brother to stop walking around so that the boat didn’t rock and I could concentrate on what the guy on the phone was saying without falling in.

“Senator Feinstein and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence say you were paid $81 million by the CIA to torture people. Want to comment on that?”

“If that’s what they said, they’re wrong, but what makes you think it’s me they’re talking about?”

“One of the Senate staffers gave reporters your name on background.”

Suddenly I was besieged with more calls from the media, most of them asking the same one or two stupid questions, trying to provoke a reaction, trying to get a sound bite or quote that put me in a bad light: “How does it feel to be called a torturer?” or “Feinstein says you aren’t qualified to interrogate terrorists. What do you say to that?”

Such allegations had been made before. Always in the past, I had refused to confirm or deny my involvement with the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program not because I was ashamed of it but because I had a nondisclosure agreement that prohibited me from doing so without risking going to jail. The result was that people could say or write anything they wanted, no matter how inaccurate, and I couldn’t defend myself. As a consequence, the media got most of what they wrote about me wrong.

Feinstein left my name out of her report but not my identity. She would have named me if she could have. That was part of the food fight between the CIA and the Democrats in Congress. But the CIA dug in. I was told they thought naming us and any of the other CIA officers and contractors involved in the interrogation program would unnecessarily endanger our lives.

Apparently Feinstein’s staff didn’t feel that way or didn’t care. In the media feeding frenzy immediately after the report’s release I had two reporters from different media outlets tell me that Democratic staffers on the SSCI had acknowledged on deep background which pseudonyms referred to me and Bruce. Feinstein’s office denied it. You know how Washington works. I know what I believe.

The only one who wasn’t allowed to say that I was part of the CIA program was me. I contacted the CIA and asked them to allow me to identify myself; they reluctantly agreed but didn’t fully release me from my nondisclosure agreement.

I was tired of being coy. For several days, I alternated between feeling betrayed and being angry. The one bright spot in the whole thing was the way people around me reacted. I discovered that the majority of people outside the Washington Beltway actually supported what the CIA had done to keep them safe. The few I met who didn’t fully support what was done said they appreciated why we had done it.

One of the things that struck me when I saw Feinstein’s report was how much it read like a prosecutorial brief. I remember standing in my kitchen with my wife, who was taking it in stride, discussing not the content of the report but rather the way the report was put together. It reminded me of some of the legal briefs from lawyers that I’d encountered in my past forensic work.

Then it struck me that that was exactly what it was. It was a prosecutorial brief. Realizing this cleared up something that had puzzled me: it explained why the Democratic SSCI staffers, the lawyers who put Feinstein’s report together, refused to correct errors of fact when they were pointed out by the CIA in its response to a draft of the document, and why they never interviewed anyone from the CIA who had been directly involved in the interrogation program.

Feinstein’s final report was never intended to be about all the facts; it was never intended to tell the whole truth. The intent was to win an adversarial contest with the CIA by telling a version of the truth that influenced what Americans thought about the program and the people involved with it. She wanted to use a lawyer’s trick to rewrite history.

Let me explain. As you know, our judicial system is adversarial; attorneys for both sides of an issue approach a case with different, competing stories of what happened. The story that is most persuasive to those who decide the case wins the proceeding. It is not about establishing the truth; it’s about establishing a winning version of the truth that supports what you are trying to accomplish.

Lawyers are trained to use something called narrative framing, a persuasive form of storytelling, to construct a concisely phrased statement that justifies the sought-after decision or verdict. Here is the narrative frame for Feinstein’s report: The CIA’s enhanced interrogation program tortured detainees. It was illegal, brutal, unnecessary, and completely ineffective. Nothing of value came out of it. It was administered by corrupt and incompetent CIA officials who lied to the president, Congress, and the American people. It was put together and run by two greedy contractors who lacked the necessary skills and experience. The program was a stain on the fabric of American morality, and as a result the United States is less safe and its standing in the world has been tarnished.

It is a nicely put together prosecutorial narrative frame, simple and easy to digest or put into talking points. But it is a false narrative designed specifically to hide the fingerprints of some politicians on the program by smearing the CIA and the people who worked hard to protect America.

SSCI staffers had cherry-picked the CIA’s documents, choosing some and excluding others to present an inaccurate picture of what was going on. Friends of mine who were familiar with the true history of the program were stunned and appalled.

“This report was never about presenting a truly accurate picture of what was going on,” I said. “It was about denigrating the program and destroying the reputations of the people involved.”

To separate themselves from the program, the committee members needed a powerful, emotionally charged story to poison the minds of Americans against the CIA officers and contractors who had kept them safe after 9/11, and so they manufactured one. The key to getting away with that ruse was to create a story that had the appearance of being based on fact. In my opinion, this required the Democratic lawyers on the committee staff first to develop their theory and then to cherry-pick through CIA documents, selecting some and excluding others, to amass those which supported the story they wanted to tell.

From their perspective, it would have been counterproductive to include documents that didn’t support what they wanted Americans to believe happened or to correct the many errors pointed out by the CIA before releasing the report. The same goes for interviewing CIA officials and contractors who undoubtedly would have tried to correct errors and present a story of what happened that conflicted with what Feinstein wanted Americans to believe. A winning case does not present evidence that supports the opposing counsel’s position unless it means to set it up as a straw man to knock down later.

The difference between seeking the whole truth and fabricating a selective version of the truth highlights the difference between the culture of CIA officers and that of lawyers like those working as staff on Feinstein’s committee. They both strive to collect and analyze information, but that’s where the similarity stops. CIA officers do it to prepare intelligence briefs that reflect what is actually going on in the world so that our political and military leaders can make informed decisions. Lawyers, in contrast, do it so that they can construct a version of the truth that leads to an outcome they advocate. These are not at all the same things.

There is another interesting strategy the SSCI may have employed. They selected the data they wanted to include to support the conclusion they were looking for. They removed it from the original data set and put it in its own database to isolate it from those things in the original data set that might not have supported their findings. The cherry-picked data were the data they used. When there were inquiries or criticisms, they could present their own preselected data set and act as if conflicting data did not exist.

It is a little like someone going through your e-mails from the past eight years, picking out every one of them that puts you in a bad light while excluding those which don’t, and then using those cherry-picked e-mails to tell people you are a bad guy. When someone asks about you, they can say, “No, come look at his e-mails. There’s nothing in here that suggests he is a good guy. Everything I’ve got says he’s a dirtbag.”

—

Please don’t assume that I’m saying the interrogation program was flawless. Far from it. You know from reading this book that in the early days, as the CIA scrambled to defend the nation, a number of major errors were made. Most were well intended; a few were not.

The CIA has acknowledged that mistakes were made early in the program and that some officers and contractors did things they weren’t supposed to do. But the CIA brought the troubled detention sites under one office for closer supervision and referred personnel who had done questionable things to the Justice Department. According to the website ciasavedlives.com, there were twenty-nine CIA inspector general investigations plus two wide-ranging reviews and six accountability boards related to the detention and interrogation program. The CIA disciplined some of its officers and got rid of others. But it did not discipline me or Bruce and did not get rid of us. Instead, it gave us Agency Seal Medallions, the highest award a civilian can be given by the CIA.

The SSCI report said my behavior was excessive. I would have welcomed an opportunity to answer any questions or concerns about my behavior in a fair and bipartisan setting, and I would have welcomed the chance to answer any questions members of the SSCI had that were based on the documents they reviewed. I believe I should have had a chance to defend myself before the report was released and my family was endangered.

The terrorists who killed thousands of Americans have the chance during military commissions to address the charges against them, but I didn’t, nor did any of the other men and women of the CIA. The SSCI and its staff didn’t interview anyone from the CIA who was actually involved in the program or give those people a chance to explain what happened on the ground. Five years and $40 million later, they issued a one-sided, inaccurate report that stirred up the crazies and the jihadists, essentially putting a target on my back and the back of everyone past or present working to protect Americans from jihadi terrorist attacks.

The pretense is that the report represents the SSCI’s bipartisan assessment of the CIA’s interrogation program. It doesn’t. It only represents what the Democrats wanted the report to say. The witch hunting was so egregious that the Republicans on the SSCI withdrew from the investigation in 2009 and issued a rebuttal in 2014 documenting the successes of the CIA detention and interrogation program.

Those in Congress investigating what happened could have provided a real service to the country by accurately describing the successes and failures of the program, but they did not.

Recently, the former acting director of the CIA Michael Morell articulated precisely what I’ve thought all along. He noted that from early on, Senator Feinstein made it clear to everyone she spoke with, including her staffers, that she wanted the SSCI “report to be the nail in the coffin of the country ever doing anything like this again.” He speculates that her saying that day after day signaled the kind of report she was looking for and biased the report’s final conclusions.

Morell also pointed out something else that sheds light on why Senator Feinstein and the Democrats in Congress are acting as if they never heard of the program or as if the CIA lied to them. He said the leadership of both parties, Republicans and Democrats, in the House and Senate were briefed multiple times on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program from its inception in 2002 and as long as it was operating. Not only did the leadership in Congress approve of the program and encourage going further, but when the program was shut down for reconfirmation of its legal status, some of these leaders accused the CIA of being too risk-averse. The only way that Democrats such as Senator Feinstein can distance themselves from a program they approved of and urged those working in to be aggressive is to claim they were lied to by corrupt CIA officers.

That’s their position: the CIA officers working in the detention and interrogation program were corrupt and incompetent, they lied to Congress and the president, and not one piece of actionable intelligence came from the program that couldn’t have been obtained from somewhere else. Not one.

One of the odd things about the Senate report is that although it was advertised as being intended to lift the veil on the CIA’s long-secret program, the document actually succeeded in cloaking it in a number of myths. Some were quite colorful.

Within hours of Feinstein’s report being released, a longtime friend of mine, a special operations warfighter who caught some of the breathless reporting about it, gleefully asked me, “Did you really stick a hose up KSM’s butt?”

“What?” I said. “No! Don’t be gross.”

I had never heard of such a thing. But sure enough the media were reporting that as part of the detainee interrogation program, the CIA supposedly used “rectal hydration” and, even more bizarrely, “rectal feeding” as part of its interrogation efforts.

“So you weren’t there wearing rubber gloves and waving a hose around, shouting, ‘Talk, you hairy bastard, or I’ll—’ ” my friend continued.

“No!” I cut him off, not liking where this was going. Another couple of minutes and he would have been acting it out in exaggerated pantomime, hair wild, eyes gleaming.

“No? You didn’t wear rubber gloves or—?” He wouldn’t let it drop.

“The idea is nuts,” I interrupted. “I’m just now hearing about it. So if it happened at all—and I’m not saying it did—it had to be some sort of medical procedure, something doctors did for a hunger strike or some other health reason. The rest is spin. I can’t imagine anyone used it as part of an interrogation plan, and I certainly had nothing to do with it.”

“Well, you wouldn’t think that from some of the stories in the media,” he said. “They leave the distinct impression that it was an interrogation technique. If that’s not true, why do they say that crap?”

Good question, I thought.

When I finally was able to read a copy of the report’s executive summary—not just journalists’ accounts of what was in it—I found that the report alleges that five detainees were subjected to rectal rehydration or rectal feeding without “documented medical necessity.” The report implies that in a couple of instances it was done as part of the interrogation process by the chief interrogator (my nemesis) but doesn’t make that claim in clear language.

The CIA’s response to the SSCI report says that medical personnel at CIA black sites administered those procedures because detainees were either dangerously dehydrated or on a hunger strike and at risk of harming themselves by ripping the IVs and nasogastric tubes out during attempts to feed them.

I never participated in anything remotely like rectal hydration. I believe the allegation was included in the report simply because it was titillating and would arouse public outrage. The fact that they had to use the awkward phrasing “no documented medical necessity” should tell readers something shifty is afoot. Here is yet another example of where it would have benefited the investigators to talk to the medical personnel who were on-site, but finding out the true story wasn’t part of their agenda.

There were several other myths promulgated by the Senate report and by the media that I need to deal with briefly here.

One frequently repeated piece of misinformation is that two detainees in the CIA detention and interrogation program died. The allegation is that one froze to death and the other died from injuries sustained after he was assaulted by a contract CIA interrogator. It is true that two detainees died. However, it is not true that they were part of the CIA detention and interrogation program. Neither death occurred at one of the interrogation program’s black sites.

In November 2002, Gul Rahman died in CIA custody. The cause of death according to autopsy reports was probably exposure. But Rahman was not a detainee in the high-value CIA detention and interrogation program that I was involved in, and the CIA officer responsible for questioning him was not an interrogator from that program. Rahman’s death spurred the CIA’s leadership to move the responsibility for managing that facility to the CIA detention and interrogation program a few days later to improve the management and supervision of what was happening there. To imply that his death was part of the program I was involved with is simply false.

A second detainee, Abdul Wali, died of injuries sustained during an alleged assault by former CIA contractor David Passaro on June 21, 2003. It is alleged that Passaro assaulted Wali with his hands, his feet, and a flashlight. Passaro was a CIA contractor but was never an interrogator for the CIA detention and interrogation program. Contrary to what has been reported in the media, he was not following rough interrogation guidelines established by the CIA to question Wali. At trial, even his lawyer didn’t make that claim. Wali died at a U.S. military firebase in Afghanistan, not at one of the CIA detention and interrogation program black sites. In August 2006, Passaro was convicted of assault and sentenced to approximately eight years in prison.

It is regrettable that these two detainees died, and undoubtedly the CIA writ large bears some of the responsibility. However, the blame cannot be placed on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program or any of the CIA officers or contractors working for that program.

The report also alleges that the CIA interrogation program subjected detainees to brutal, unauthorized techniques as part of its interrogation strategy. In its response, the CIA acknowledged that some of its officers and contractors used techniques that were not authorized. I mentioned some examples earlier in this book. But those incidents were reported, investigated, examined in administrative review boards, and referred to the Justice Department to determine whether crimes had been committed. Allegations about detainees being forced to stand on broken bones and chained for weeks in total darkness in what amounted to a freezing dungeon were made. If such things happened (and I cannot confirm that they did), most of the problems did not involve program interrogators and happened in places that were not under the program’s operational control.

The truth is messy, more so than people on either side of the EIT issue would have you believe. It is not the case that no abuses occurred, nor is it the case that the CIA’s interrogation program was rife with the illegal abuse of detainees. I’ve been told by some journalists that allegations are more important than facts, but that is patently ridiculous. Facts do matter, and allegations alone can never warrant lynching the accused, except perhaps in the minds of some advocacy journalists and Democratic senators who view the cause as so important that it is worth winning at the expense of honesty.

In that regard, I am repeatedly surprised at the number of different physically coercive acts some journalists claim were part of the CIA’s interrogation tool kit.

Loud music is an example. If you read some media reports, you would conclude that loud music was played incessantly at earsplitting volume at all CIA black sites where high-value detainees were held for as long as they were in CIA custody. But like much of what has been written about the CIA’s use of coercive measures, that is not accurate.

Loud music was played for the first three or four months after Abu Zubaydah’s capture. And yes, it was used early on to soften him up by being an irritant, but it was also for security reasons: to mask sounds outside his cell where the guards were stationed. What has not been routinely reported is that Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) noise exposure standards were used to determine how loud the music could be and how long the detainee could be exposed.

The determination of what music or audio to play was left up to the guards. I recall there were a few audio loops from the SERE schools. A tape of a teething baby crying and a loop of a little girl screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! The bad man is hurting Mommy!” over and over was played occasionally. But the use of these SERE tapes didn’t last long. We were all exposed to the same noise as Abu Zubaydah and couldn’t get any work done. After that, the guards played their own music CDs, which consisted of everything: metal, country, hard rock, hip-hop. We tried to keep away from anything with explicit lyrics, but occasionally I’d hear “I’m from Wisconsin, I got a big Johnson” wailing out from the speakers by the guard station.

Sometime before August 2002 we switched from music to white noise generators and then used them exclusively for security masking. Noise no longer was used as an irritant to soften up detainees. The generators were situated well outside the cells and away from the detainees to keep them from overhearing discussions in other cells or rooms. In fact, in most locations in a detainee cell you could barely make out the hiss from the generators when the cell doors were closed.

Keeping the cells cold was another physical pressure I saw mentioned in the media as having been used at the first black site. I saw it mentioned even in official documents. But I don’t recall the temperature of the cell being used as an interrogation technique. I do recall there were a couple of times when it was uncomfortably cool, but usually that was because the guard staff was dressed head to toe in heavy black clothing with gloves, balaclavas, and goggles. The guards were the only people other than the COB who were authorized to change conditions in Abu Zubaydah’s cell. Sometimes they couldn’t accurately judge the temperature in the cell, and when they had to spend long periods in it, a few of them would keep cranking up the air conditioner until someone at the site not dressed as they were would complain and call their attention to it. I can’t speak for other interrogators except for Bruce, but I can say that neither of us advocated using cold cells as an interrogation technique.

As I write this, I’m tempted to generate a list of physically coercive techniques that have been mistakenly conflated with the authorized EITs that were employed as part of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. I could compile that list from those which were used without authorization by rogue CIA officers and contractors, from the multitude of abuses perpetrated by DOD personnel in places like Abu Ghraib, and from the list of harsh techniques employed with DOD authorization in places where the military was holding detainees. The list of things we did not do goes on and on and on. We didn’t use dogs, or leashes, or sexual threats, or rectal feeding, or rectal hydration, or standing on broken bones, or drills, or guns, or stacking detainees up in naked piles, or attaching wires to their genitals, or…Well, I could list more, but you can see that it would get unwieldy, so I’m not going to do that. There is a much simpler way to address this issue.

The CIA’s enhanced interrogation program that Bruce and I were part of used only the EITs that were cleared by the Department of Justice, approved by the president, briefed to congressional leadership, and authorized by CIA headquarters.

Another myth that I want to debunk is that Bruce and I made $81 million running the program. That is one story I wish were true. Here are the facts. When I first got involved in advising the agency regarding al-Qa’ida detainees in spring 2002, I was a single independent subcontractor. I asked that Bruce be brought in to help. He came on board as an independent subcontractor. In 2005, the agency decided it was going to combine most of the support required to help it run a very large program in numerous places around the world under one commercial contract.

Through our company, we bid on it and ended up providing interrogators, debriefers, operational psychologists (not me or Bruce), and security personnel for all black sites with high-value detainees. We also were tasked with conducting ongoing conversations with detainees to learn about the terrorist mindset (as part of the Terrorist Think Tank that was discussed in chapter 9), consulting with foreign liaison intelligence and law enforcement services on noncoercive interrogation of detainees of interest to CIA held in foreign custody, and sometimes serving as intermediaries.

I’m not allowed to give an exact number, but at times we had around a hundred people on our payroll, most of whom were serving in places of extreme hardship and in some cases combat zones. The money we were paid was used not just for their salaries but also for things such as insurance. Take a guess how much it costs to insure the lives and provide health insurance for scores of civilians in places the State Department designates as “high-risk” areas 365 days a year. Think millions and I’ll bet your guess is still too low.

Ours was a multiyear commercial contract that deployed scores of people twenty-four hours a day year-round to dangerous places, embedded with the CIA and under the command and control of CIA officers. It was a commercial contract, and it was let under government contracting law.

The government awarded the contract, conducted multiple audits, and renewed it annually until it was canceled in January 2009 for the convenience of the government because of pressure from Senator Feinstein.

The percentage of profit I earned from the contract was in the small single digits. No one in the company took salaries as corporate officers or for sitting on its advisory board. Everyone in the company was paid by the hour in amounts approved and vetted by CIA contracting—everyone, including Bruce and I. I should add that our hourly rate was one-fourth the amount later paid to the lawyers hired to defend us.

There is something about the detention and interrogation program that brings out the worst in people. Not the people running it but the people reporting on it. Here I am not talking only about congressional investigators. Reporters too seem to lose all reason when they get the torture bug. Here is one more example. There are several reporters obsessed with the three Guantanamo prisoners who died on the night of June 9, 2006. The Pentagon announced at the time that the three had coordinated a suicide as an act of “asymmetrical warfare.” I have no idea what happened to those detainees. But the press accounts luridly suggest that they were murdered and that on the night of the deaths “ear-piercing shrieks and wailings were heard coming out of this facility and one James Elmer Mitchell was seen entering it.” No matter that I was in the United States at the time. It seems that to some my name is all you need to evoke fears of dastardly deeds and sell stories to the media.

I’ve been asked as a psychologist why some journalists reporting on controversial stories often go to the “darkest corner of the room.” That is, why do they take an ambiguous story detail and spin it as if the worst and most nefarious interpretation of events were true?

The media coverage of the reports of rectal rehydration and rectal feeding in the SSCI majority report is an excellent example. Some journalists almost immediately published salacious stories spinning these activities as interrogation techniques with a hint of sexual sadism condoned by the agency, rather than medical procedures performed by physicians.

These stories follow a pattern. They start with one or two solid facts, then shift to facts that are partially true and partially matters of interpretation, and end with full-on fabrications framed as plausible truth. The content is believable because it starts off anchored in fact and there is buy-in by the reader before the story veers off into conjecture and innuendo.

There is also a first-strike intentionality to these stories by those who want to control what Americans think. Critics of the program want to be first in to frame the narrative so that when the stories are pushed back against, as will inevitably happen, the pushback repeats and reinforces the original narrative frame. If you say that interrogators put a hose up KSM’s butt and imply there was a hint of sexual sadism involved, it is impossible to discuss and debunk the allegation directly without evoking the original idea. You end up trying to explain that it didn’t happen the way it was reported, but meanwhile the people you are talking to have the image of KSM with a hose hanging out of his butt floating around in their minds.

Also, there is the blinding effect of emotions. Generate enough outrage at the authorities, and a monster who killed over three thousand people becomes a pitiable victim of sexual sadism. If your goal is to smear the agency’s interrogation program and the people involved, you must attribute salacious and damaging motives to them.

My assessment is that most journalists take sides. I don’t know if there was ever a time when more journalists were fair and impartial, but if there was, it is gone. We are now faced with the blending of advocacy journalism and the mentality and manners of Internet trolls. It is not enough for some journalists to slant their stories to advocate a point of view; it is now necessary for them to destroy the reputations of those in their crosshairs with innuendo, speculation that has not been fact-checked, and pernicious lies.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a female journalist who ran some line of bullshit by me that she intended to publish. When I told her that what she was saying was not even remotely true, she told me, “Even if it’s not, what I’m going to write about you speaks to a larger truth that may not come across if I stick to the facts of the situation.”

Reporting untrue things about me somehow sheds light on a larger truth? That’s the kind of crap self-serving reporters tell themselves to justify distorting facts to fit whatever narrative they happen to be pushing. Some journalists seem to think they are our betters. They believe their job is to shape American opinion so that it lines up with their personal ideologies because after all, when they think a thought, it must be correct.

There are other reasons, of course. It feels good. There is the excitement, the crack-like addiction to the adulation of those with similar opinions, the junkie fix from the feelings of schadenfreude (pleasure from another’s suffering) that come from destroying the livelihood and reputation of someone who deserves to be brought down, and the rush of pride that comes from the reporter feeling that he or she is a significant part of something larger and more noble.

Hunter S. Thompson encouraged journalists to “use [their] art like a hammer to destroy the right people.” He said he used reporting as a weapon: inventing quotes, fabricating facts, and outright flat-out lying for a cause. At least he was honest about it.