AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

INSIDE THE ISLAMIST TERRORIST’S MIND: A CONVERSATION WITH FORMER CIA INTERROGATOR JAMES MITCHELL

BOOK DISCUSSION

PARTICIPANTS:

JAMES MITCHELL, AUTHOR

MARC A. THIESSEN, AEI

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM TUESDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2016

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/inside-the-islamist-terrorists-mind-a- conversation-with-former-cia-interrogator-james-mitchell/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY DC TRANSCRIPTION – WWW.DCTMR.COM

MARC THIESSEN: (In progress) — on September 11th, 2001, and how stunned our whole nation was at the ability of terrorists to penetrate our defenses and wreak such destruction in our midst. All of us were wondering who had attacked us, what do they want, and most importantly, what else were they planning?

Today, we take for granted the fact that we know the answers to those questions, we know that the attacks were carried out by al Qaeda on the orders of Osama bin Laden, that they were conceived and executed by his operational commander, a terrorist mastermind named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But in those early days after 9/11, we didn’t know any of that. We almost knew nothing about the enemy who had hit us. We didn’t know that KSM was the mastermind of 9/11 or that he was the operational commander of al Qaeda or who his key accomplices were or what they were planning by way of follow-on attacks.

And unbeknownst to us, there were actually two terror networks out there that were waiting to carry out the second wave. There was the KSM network that carried out 9/11, and then there was something called the Hambali network, which was a network of Southeast Asian terrorists that KSM had recruited because he knew we’d be on the lookout for Arab men. And they had a series of attacks planned that our guest today knows very well.

But on 9/11, we didn’t know any of that. Then, beginning in 2002, we began to capture and interrogate senior terrorist leaders, men like Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al- Shibh and the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And these captured terrorists gave us information that allowed the CIA to round up virtually all the key members of those networks and dismantle them and stop the attacks that they had planned.

And today we are honored to have with us the man who interrogated those high- value terrorists and got them to provide that information that saved so many American lives, Dr. James Mitchell.

In the 15 years since 9/11, no one has heard from KSM. He’s been isolated from the world, first in CIA custody, then in Guantanamo Bay. But Dr. Mitchell has spent thousands of hours with KSM and other senior al Qaeda operatives. He’s looked directly into the face of evil. And in doing so, he came to understand the terrorist mind, what drives them, what motivates them better than almost anyone in America because the terrorists told him what drives them and what they believe.

And now, for the first time, Dr. Mitchell is sharing what KSM told him, including his opinions on US counterterrorism policy, the Bush administration’s response to 9/11, his plans for new attacks, and why KSM believes that ultimately they’re going to prevail, again, their war against America.

Dr. Mitchell’s new books, “Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America,” offers his first-person account of the CIA’s terrorist interrogation program, his personal interactions with the men who planned and executed the biggest and worst terrorist attack in history and people who would do it again gladly if they had the chance. This is the first time that Dr. Mitchell I believe is speaking in public at a forum like this about this, and so we’re very honored that you chose to join us here at AEI. Thank you for coming.

JAMES MITCHELL: Thanks for having me.

MR. THIESSEN: So the details of enhanced interrogation have been widely discussed and debated, and I’m sure when we get to the Q&A, we can get into some of those questions, but I’d like to focus today primarily on what you’ve learned from these terrorists in talking to them. But just so people understand that the conversations with KSM that you’re describing weren’t happening while he was strapped to a waterboard.

MR. MITCHELL: Oh, no.

MR. THIESSEN: Can you explain the difference between enhanced interrogation, debriefing, and also what you call “how you doing?” visits, right? Walk us through that.

MR. MITCHELL: Okay. These enhanced interrogations that I was part of really only dealt with about 14 of the top folks. I didn’t have anything to do with the mid-level or low-level folks at all. And most of these interrogations took place over a period of time of about two weeks. KSM’s took about three weeks. And then after that, there was no enhanced interrogations for KSM — you know, none at all.

And so our goal in doing enhanced interrogations was to get them to make some movement, to be willing to engage in the questions instead of rocking and chanting and doing the other sorts of things that they had previously been doing. And once they started doing that, we switched to social influence stuff because we know that the real way that you get the cooperation that you want is not by trying to coerce it out of them. It’s by getting them to provide the information in a way that they don’t feel particularly pressured to do it. And we had to be very, very careful when we were doing enhanced interrogations not to ask leading questions, not to try — we weren’t interested in confessions, you know.

I don’t ever know — in fact, I don’t know a single — I’ve dealt with 13 or 14 of the worst ones, right, KSM, Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, al Nusri, the Cole bomber, I’ve dealt with a lot — and none of them refused to identify what they had done. I mean, so it wasn’t a matter of — we weren’t looking for confessions because confessions won’t stop attacks. What stops attacks is actionable intelligence. And the way that you can get the actionable intelligence dealt with is to get through these enhanced interrogations, get them working with you so that you can use social influence after that to get the information that you want because — so what we did is we moved very quickly to debriefing.

And the way that worked was — for the CIA, interrogation was questioning a person who was deliberately trying to withhold information and was hostile about providing that. And it usually involved at least the possibility of some EITs, although we didn’t — you might be authorized to do EITs for 15 days, but we wouldn’t do EITs for 15 days, right? As soon as they started working with us, we moved away from it. And then, after that, we would gradually bring the subject matter experts in because I’m not the guy to be asking the questions. The guy you want to ask them the question is the expert on whatever the question is that they have.

So we would bring in, in one case, the person who wrote the president’s daily briefs because he had questions that he wanted to ask Abu Zubaydah. So we’d bring in other people, and we would sit in there with them and help them without any kind of coercion at all to ask the questions that they were hoping to get. And then, once the person was completely able to — meaning the detainee was willing to engage with a debriefer, we got out of it. You know, we stepped back. We might still monitor; we might still go in in the beginning to see how things were going.

But you need your WMD experts asking about WMD. You know, Jim Mitchell is not the guy to be making up intelligence requirements. That’s done by huge numbers of experts who are experts in the field, what I think is almost irrelevant. They would give me briefings on who these people were and intensive briefings on what expected before we did it. So you had interrogations, which usually took about two weeks. And then, their entire rest of the time, they were with the CIA, they were never subjected to EITs again — never, right?

So KSM had three weeks of EITs and then never again, not even when they were trying to find out the location of bin Laden, not even when they were trying to get him to provide information that would allow us to identify the courier. And we knew he was lying to us. We did not use EITs on him because EITs were to be used to stop catastrophic attacks. And if it wasn’t an attack, Jim wasn’t interested in doing it, you know. And since I worked for them, they weren’t interested in doing it either. They don’t want to beast people to find out where somebody’s hiding, right?

So there were interrogations, which were short, then there were debriefings, where you dealt specifically with intelligence requirements. And then there were a variety of other meetings that we had with the detainees. In my book I call them maintenance visits because that’s what the CIA called them, but we had great concerns about these guys once they started working with us getting sour because they were in isolation. And so we would just stop by and play board games with them or go to the basketball court and play basketball or go to the gym and lift weights with them or watch a movie with them. You wouldn’t think that from listening to what people say on TV, right, about what we did. But, in fact, we did a lot of that. And KSM is one of those guys. He’s like Yoda. He likes to sit there and talk. So you might go play basketball with Hassan Ghul, but you wouldn’t do that with KSM. He wants to tell you things.

And he had two kinds of things that he did. He had an alcohol board, you know, one of those dry erase boards, and he loved to lecture. And so he would — we would go and listen to him lecture so he’d have something to do when he wasn’t servicing intelligence requirements, and occasionally something useful came out of that. The other thing he liked to do when we came around and said, how are you going, things, is he’d like to sit there and talk to you about what was on his mind, whatever was on his mind. And he thought he was a Sufi. I guess he still thinks he’s a Sufi. And so he liked to tell you about his religion.

And what I do in my book is I take all of the things that they’ve told me over the, you know, six, seven, eight years, whatever it was, from the beginning, and I bring them all together into one place and talk about it in one setting. But those things that I write about in the book, those things that I write about in the book, are not one session where we sat down and we had somebody on a waterboard, asking them to tell us about their religion. That wouldn’t have worked, and that’s not what we did.

MR. THIESSEN: So EITs were to take people from a state of resistance to a state of cooperation, primarily, right?

MR. MITCHELL: Right.

MR. THIESSEN: And so once they got —

MR. MITCHELL: They never fully cooperated, did they? I mean, they always had secrets that they were going to protect. There was nothing that we could have done to KSM to get him to tell us Bin Laden’s location, but he told us inadvertently by lying, right, because he was —

MR. THIESSEN: Well, tell that story. Tell — because there’s been a lot of people who said the CIA interrogation program had nothing to do with the operation to get bin Laden. They lied to you. They resisted. They misled you. You got nothing of value. It was actually other means that got us to bin Laden.

MR. MITCHELL: Right. It is true that KSM lied to us. What’s not true is that we didn’t know what that meant. It is true that Abu Faraj lied to us, but it isn’t true that we didn’t know what that meant. KSM’s nephew, Ammar Baluchi, I think, after EITs, there were done, right? We’re now in the debriefing stage — tells us that, well, you know, KSM told me that Ahmed al-Kuwaiti delivered a letter to Abu Faraj appointing him the chief of external operations.

So now we’re interested, right, because if he’d delivered a letter from UBL to Abu Faraj, we believed that they don’t know where he is because in 2002, UBL went underground. He didn’t even use electronics. There was just a few people. But here we’ve got a guy who’s saying that there was a courier using his jihadi name, his Abu name, who delivered a letter from UBL to Abu Faraj, appointing him.

So because Ammar Baluchi said KSM did it, we go to KSM. And KSM says, no, no, no, no, no. That guy used to work for me. He was a protégé of mine. He was an associate of mine, but we retired him. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. We go back to his nephew, and his nephew says he’s lying. I don’t know what that little guy’s doing but he’s lying to you, right?

And so we think, I wonder why KSM’s lying. Could this guy be important? Well, what most people don’t know is we had — they had established a secret way to communicate with each other, the detainees had. So KSM could get messages out to the troops. What he didn’t know is that we knew it and that we left it there because we wanted to see what he was saying to the troops. So we’re asking him about Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti and he says — you know, the guy, he’s quit. Then he puts in a secret message, whatever you do, don’t tell him about the courier, don’t tell them about Abu Ahmed.

And so what we were thinking is that guy has to be important because here is a relatively cooperative guy who some people would say probably experienced the worst that, you know, you could experience in terms of EITs, who was willing to risk going back to that to protect the identity of this one courier. So, eventually, they got Abu Faraj, the guy who got the letter. And he said, I never heard of that guy. I don’t even know who you’re talking about. There’s never a guy like that. But we had been asking all of these other detainees about him.

And so we had Hassan Ghul, for example. Hassan Ghul, before EITs said —

MR. THIESSEN: Who was Hassan Ghul, just for people —

MR. MITCHELL: Hassan Ghul was a facilitator that worked with — high-level facilitator that worked with KSM, you know. He goes, yeah. That could be two, three, maybe more people working with bin Laden. You know, he’s disappeared, he’s got a small group of people. It could be him. It could be him. After EITs, it’s him. He does this. He moves letters. You know, he moves people. He works for him. It made it clear that this other stuff was just a smokescreen and that this was the case.

Also, we had a detainee who said, well, one of bin Laden’s wives — not his youngest wife, who bin Laden had with him — one of bin Laden’s wives gave Abu Faraj a letter to deliver to bin Laden. So you’ve got to be thinking, you know, I wouldn’t give him a letter to deliver to my wife if I don’t know who he is and I don’t have some sense that he could actually get to her, you know. And so all of these little clues kind of fell into place. And then the brilliant men and women at the CIA who are analysts and targeters were able to put it together.

There was a partial true name for the courier that was already in the database out there, but we didn’t know how important that was or how to find him. But I interrogated — probably the shortest interrogation that ever took place, less than 10 minutes, a guy by the name of Abu Yasr, and after that, when he moved almost immediately in the debriefing, he said, this guy that you’re interested, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, has a speech impediment. When he talks, he talks in Arabic and Pashtun. The agency was then able through means to find out where that guy who spoke like that lived. And then the question is how do we — because we knew he was living — or we had been told he was likely to be living with bin Laden, staying with bin Laden, because essentially he had no outside contact. And so then, what they did was they tried to find out whether or not bin Laden was staying with this guy, Abu Ahmed, and that’s the process that that happened.

So it wasn’t the case that, you know, somebody’s hands were taped to a steering wheel and somebody was cutting their fingers off with a — it was hard work that was done on the part of the CIA analysts to piece together this matrix of stuff, some of the actionable intelligence — some of the actionable intelligence becomes actionable only when it’s placed in the greater context of what you know from everybody.

MR. THIESSEN: The Feinstein Commission and Senator McCain and other people say, we already had the name of the guy, we got it from somebody who wasn’t in the program, and we would have gotten this information without EITs and without this program anyway.

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. The problem with that is when you roll up a detainee in the beginning, they would say, tell us everyone that you think Osama bin Laden knows. And they would run off 100 names. And there was nothing about a single name that highlights their importance. So it’s like picking up a phone book and saying that because somebody’s name is in the phone book, we should have known that he was the guy that was going to rob the gas station. It’s just — that’s just not the way it works. You need something, some cue to take you to that piece of information, to highlight that guy’s importance.

And another thing, and unless I’m confusing this — it’s clear in my book — but unless I’m confusing it up here on the stage, the guy who gave them his name thought he was dead. They thought he was dead. And it was the smart, clever work by the CIA analyst who was able to determine, this guy was confusing him with his brother or something like that and the guy that he actually identified, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, was still alive.

So in hindsight, it’s easy — it’s like doing one of those little labyrinth puzzles backwards. In hindsight it’s easy to put the — because you know where they’re at. You know where the cues are. But I’m telling you, the people who put this thing together, not the interrogators, but the analysts who put this thing together were brilliant. To be able to get back into that intelligence database and hunt hard and review all those things and piece together this matrix that led to him was amazing.

MR. THIESSEN: The analogy Mike Hayden, former CIA Director Mike Hayden, uses is that it’s like putting together a puzzle with tens of thousands of pieces, but you don’t have the picture on the cover of the box.

MR. MITCHELL: Exactly.

MR. THIESSEN: And that what these detainees provided was the picture on the cover of the box. Is that a fair way to describe it?

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. What happened is the only two detainees that were denying that Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was probably UBL’s courier were KSM and Abu Faraj. The rest of them were providing bits and pieces of information that could be put into the larger matrix.

MR. THIESSEN: So most of us have — nobody’s heard from KSM since the 9/11 attacks. Most we’ve seen of him is never — we’ve never seen an interview with him. The most we’ve seen is the disheveled picture of him after he was picked up.

MR. MITCHELL: That was his actual capture photo.

MR. THIESSEN: Yeah. Yeah. What was KSM like?

MR. MITCHELL: Well, in the book, I call him a devil and diva. You know, the beginning, he was belligerent. He was really belligerent. I did the — here’s what you need to know about KSM. KSM for two or three days was held in Pakistan and he was questioned or tried to be debriefed by CIA officers in a standard, noncoercive, like you would debrief an asset, right? And they tried tea and respectful conversation. One of them dressed up in Pakistani dress and spoke, you know, perfect.

And that guy, KSM described to me later was a clown, and most of the time — I don’t believe he was, but KSM thought he was — most of the time, KSM rocked and prayed and quoted the Koran and acted belligerently. And there’s a lesson here for today — I’ll interrupt this thought. Some people are saying you can get more out of these high- level detainees with food and a little bit of drink, but that didn’t work for KSM. He told me, I’m not going to give up my God. I’m not going to turn on my God for a handful of dates. You know, what are you thinking? Because that’s when he was describing the behavior of the other person.

Then after that, he went into a place that in Feinstein’s report she calls Cobalt, and he was treated badly there, right, and then he came to us. But in each case, he had an opportunity before EITs to answer the question with no coercion at all — just provide some information with no coercion. So I did — the way it works with us, with me and Dr. Jessen, is we would do something we called a neutral assessment in the beginning, and that is I would just come in and talk to you and say, this is the kind of information we want.

So with KSM, I went in and I said, we need information to stop operations. We know you don’t have all of it, but we think you have some of it. You know, we have reason to suspect that you have people on the ground in the United States. We have reasons to suspect that you have other operations in the works. And he looked at me and told me, you might hear from me when I get to Washington, DC, meet that cowboy, George Bush, and talk to my lawyer. And I said, that’s not going to happen, you know. And so I asked questions several different ways, and then he looks at me and says, soon you will know. I’m asking him about these other attacks. Soon, you will know.

And then, I go into this in great detail in the book because I don’t want to waste your time going into it now. But, basically, I had this little spiel that we used, which is I say, in every man’s life there are moments of opportunity. There are times when the decision you make forever changes your future and you can’t go back. I want to be sure that you understand that this is one of those times. You have until I walk out of this room to work with us. We know you don’t know everything. We know that there are people out there are doing things in your name. You may not know precisely where they are, but you know something, and we’re interested in that something. And so the next time you see one of us, things will get rougher, but before that happens you’re going to be given the opportunity to answer this question. And so we ask him the question.

And then the next time he comes out, before EITs start, they ask him that question. I mean, you just ask him that question. It’s called a bridging question, and the whole point of the thing is to give him a chance to think about it. Does that answer that question?

MR. THIESSEN: Sure. And so once he through EITs — so he was belligerent and resistant and then once he went to a state of cooperation, what was he like?

MR. MITCHELL: Immensely charming. He reminded me of Yoda. It was like visiting a Sufi master, you know. Everybody thinks he’s pure evil, and he is pure evil, but what I used to tell the folks who would come — after EITs were over, right, I would tell them, sometimes you rub the devil’s belly, sometimes you poke him in the eye. We’re in the belly rubbing stage with KSM. We won’t be doing any eye poking, not that they would really do eye poking, but people would come in and they would think they needed to be Perry Mason or they would think that they needed to be some kind of tough debriefer or almost an interrogator. None of that was necessary, unless you got sideways with him. If you got sideways with him, heaven help you, you know, because he — I haven’t seen this much raw brain power in one place since the last time I sat in his cell with just him. He is probably the brightest person I have ever seen in my life, and I have seen some pretty bright people.

And so he was very charming, immensely charming, but that is often how evil looks, right? If evil looks too evil, you can push back against it. If it’s charming, then you bring people into the fold, right? You get them to act. He thinks he’s a Jedi master, to use an analogy, and that these people out there who he’s recruiting are Jedi warriors.

Abu Zubaydah told me, I’m a Muhahedeen in a long line of Muhahedeens. What you don’t understand is that you have already lost. In Allah’s timeline, the world is already under strict Sharia law, and I am just a warrior who is standing in my place. And when I fall, another one will come up. So you have already lost. You just don’t know it. Fascinating the way they think about this stuff.

MR. THIESSEN: Tell us about the time you were in his cell and he said, go get the lady who writes the notes. I have something important to tell you.

MR. MITCHELL: Okay. I’m going to be careful about this because I don’t want to upset Daniel Pearl’s parents. I won’t give you the full story.

MR. THIESSEN: Okay.

MR. MITCHELL: We were pressing him hard — actually, there was a — we were past the EITs and we were dealing — we had a WMD expert in there, and they were trying to figure out if al Qaeda has any nuclear material. And the reason for that — and this is really the reason that in the beginning it was as rough as it was. We had credible intelligence that UBL had met with the Pakistanis that were distributing nuclear technology around the world to these rogue states that were outsourcing terror. He had met with those Pakistanis. And the Pakistanis said, the hardest part is to get the nuclear material. The hardest part is to get the fissionable material. And UBL said, what if we already have it?

And so the WMD expert, not Jim and Bruce — Jim and Bruce is sitting in with her because he’s not long out of EITs but he’s probably been out of EITs for about a month, a month and a half. And we’re sitting in there with her, and she’s asking her questions. And she’s done, and she leaves. And we do this thing, I call a fireside chat, which is just — sometimes when you take people out of one situation and you put them with a new situation, the dynamics of the situation will pull them to act in a certain way. So we go in, and we say the interrogation’s over. We’re still sitting there. The interrogation is over. Let’s talk about how that went for you, right?

And Bruce, who’s incredibly empathetic and who KSM liked a little bit better because he had a son — KSM’s had sons, and I don’t. Bruce says, I noticed that you were uncomfortable at times, that sometimes when the lady would ask you questions, you would seem almost like you were going to say something, but then you would hold back and you wouldn’t say it. And we had a couple of those sorts of things, like, what were you thinking about that? And he goes, go get the lady who takes the notes, which is what he insultingly called every female person who was three times as smart as we were, you know, who was actually asking the questions, but, you know, the jihadi Islamists who don’t think very much of women.

So he goes, go get the lady who takes the notes. And we bring her back. And he describes killing Daniel Pearl. He describes cutting his head off and dismembering him and burying him in a hole. And I don’t recall whether it was me or was Bruce, but one of us asked him, was that difficult for you to do, thinking emotionally this had to be hard to do. And he said, oh, no. I had sharp knives. The toughest part was getting through the neck bone, just like that. And then he started king of mugging and sort of happy and — it was creepy. That was when, you know, you asked me what was he like sometimes.

MR. THIESSEN: This is like — he’s Yoda, but then the evil shines through.

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. The evil kind of shines through because he referred to Daniel Pearl as Daniel, in just that tone of voice — Daniel, you know. And what you have to understand about KSM is KSM thought that what he was doing to Daniel Pearl showed his god, KSM’s god, right, the god of Islamists, not the god of Islam but the god of Islamists is showed his god how much he loved his god because for KSM, taking the life of someone who was helpless to prevent it — like you see ISIS doing when they burn people in cages or when they crucify children — taking someone’s life who is helpless to prevent it shows his glory, shows how much his influence is. It’s almost like an act of worship to him, not a hostile act. So he’s talking about Daniel Pearl as if they had some intimate moment. It’s just creepy.

And after it’s over, we’re walking back to the cell and one of the guards — because, you know, there were lots of guards there — says to me, that guy needs to die. And he didn’t mean that we should kill me. He meant that the world would be a better place if that particular monster was gone.

MR. THIESSEN: So let’s talk a little bit about Islam, that we often hear that —

MR. MITCHELL: Islam?

MR. THIESSEN: Islam, that — I mean, we often hear that terrorist attacks — Islam as terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, and, you know, KSM told you a lot about his views of Islam. He said, for example, that Islam is a religion of peace.

MR. MITCHELL: Right, I’m going to answer that question, but I want to make one point first. KSM is an Islamist. And in my mind, an Islamist is a person who wants to impose Sharia law on the whole world. So if you’re a Muslim and you’re not an Islamist, I’m not talking about you, right? I’m just not. When people talk about the Ku Klux Klan, I don’t get insulted because I’m not a member of the Ku Klux Klan in spite of what some media people would probably have you believe, right? I just don’t get insulted about that. So please don’t take my — when I’m saying out of context, I’m not attacking all of Islam. What I’m saying is these Islamists who want to destroy our way of life have a set of beliefs that make them incredibly dangerous. So your question was —

MR. THIESSEN: So what did he tell you about their set of beliefs? Describe some of what he told you about what they believe. He said that Islam is a religion of peace.

MR. MITCHELL: Well, that was an interesting thing. One of the conversations I had with him in a snippet was I said, you guys are telling us that Islam is a religion of peace. What’s that about? And he said it is a religion of peace. The world will be at peace when Sharia law is imposed on the whole world. So we’re a religion of peace because we’re trying to impose Sharia law on the whole world. Right now, it’s not at peace because you have all of these different groups who believe that they can influence how things are going.

He told me that Western democracy and true Sharia law could not coexist because we foolishly believe that we get vote in how we live, that we can decide what our fashions are, that we can decide the laws that need to be enforced, that we can change those laws. Well, not true. In his mind, how we’re supposed to live was established 1,400 years ago in the Koran and in the perfect words and deeds of the prophet. There’s no question about how we do that.

I asked Abu Zubaydah one time. I said, Abu Zubaydah, how can you say that there’s freedom of choice in your version of Islam? How can you say that? Oh, freedom. And he goes, well, I am free. The perfect words of the Prophet Mohammed and deeds and the Koran tells me everything I need to do in my life so I have to make no choices. I don’t have any choices to make, so I’m free to do whatever is allowed. It’s the exact opposite of the way that I think, right? It’s the exact opposite of what I think.

He told us that Americans didn’t have the moral courage to do what would be necessary in order to prevent them from prevailing, that we were — he told me that — and Bruce — he told us — and this is one of those conversations, not when he’s being interrogates and not when we’re trying to get intel out of him. He told us that our civil liberties, our willingness to be tolerant of other people, our openness, those were all flaws that Allah had put into our character to ensure that Islamists could win because they’re just going to continue to do what they do while we make excuses for them. This obsessive political correctness — I haven’t asked him about this but I’m certain if I sat down and said, what do you think of all this obsessive political correctness, he would say, another flaw, and tell me that essentially what happens is it’s a cloaking device so they can operate in the open without being confronted. And that is a big deal.

He said to me that al Qaeda — now, remember, when he did 9/11, he wasn’t a member of al Qaeda. He had not sworn bayat yet to al Qaeda. So he’s basically a free agent at that particular point. And he said that al Qaeda dreams of bringing down America with catastrophic attacks, but that’s not particularly practical. He said the real way to bring down America was with low-tech, lone-wolf attacks because the target is not our military capabilities. It’s not our buildings. It’s not our roads. It’s the minds of the Americans. He said, we don’t have to defeat you. We only have to persist long enough for you to defeat yourself.

We only have to persist long enough — I talked to Abu Hadi one time, who was a military commander for them and did a lot of attacks against Americans, and I was asking him about how he stages ambushes — you know, why they didn’t stay there longer and fight longer and try to kill more people. And he said, we only have to kill one or two Americans because it’s not the Americans over there that we’re trying to kill. We know we can’t defeat them but if we kill enough of them, the American people will want you to turn tail and run. And when you do, then we’re going to be able to take over.

That’s the way they think. They think that our — they think that they’ve been given a special position by their god and the right to dominion over the world. They think — and now I’m talking about the Islamists; not Islam in general, just the Islamists — they think that they’ve been appointed by their god to determine what your child’s future is, you know. And if they don’t do that — this is the piece that’s so hard for people to understand — if they don’t do that, then they will suffer the torments in the grave. They’re going to be judged. And whether or not they participate in the jihad and whether or not they continue to do that in spite of all of the difficulties will be part of what happens when at their end of their lives there’s this accountability.

The piece that — the piece that I come away knowing that I didn’t know then was that they — first off, the depth of their belief. I don’t think most Americans understand that they no kidding believe what they believe. They really do believe that there’s a paradise. They really do believe they’re going to end up with 72 spiritual beings that become virgins every time you have sex with them. They really do believe they’re going to be treated like rock stars up there, you know, and never have to want for anything. They believe that stuff. It sounds ridiculous to me, but they believe it.

And a point that I would make is, to those people who say 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam, nothing to do with Islam, I would say, I bet you in the World Trade Center, there were people who thought the attack on the Cole had nothing to do with Islam, nothing at all to do with Islam, but that’s not what that little guy that drove that plane into the building thought. It had everything to do with Islam. And what we’re doing that’s incorrect, because I’m the guy that’s interested in finding them and killing them, because I can’t imagine a situation in which someone who has crucified a child or set someone on fire in a cage or threw gay people off of buildings or nailed people to trees, I can’t imagine a situation in which I say that that person, well, here’s how it really is. We’d like you to like us. You know, we don’t really mean to take — and he goes, oh, I didn’t think of it that way. Now that you put it like that, I’m going to quit doing these horrible things. They don’t think like that. When I say to them, really we want to get along, you know, we would like to get along with you, there’s no reason for us to fight, the first KSM thinks is that’s a weakness. That’s something that god put in your head so that I can manipulate you. That’s what he thinks.

So we have to start thinking about terrorists the way they think about themselves and not how the victims think, you know. In another life before I got caught up in these CIA interrogation things, I used to do forensic evaluations for horrible people — rapists, murderers, child molesters. And what the victim thought about why the perpetrator was attacking them had nothing to do. It mattered what the perpetrator thought, you know. It matters what they think. It doesn’t matter what I think. So whether I think it has anything to do with Islam or not is completely irrelevant. It matters what they think.

MR. THIESSEN: So KSM told you that it doesn’t matter if we think we’re in a religious war with him. He’s in a religious war with us.

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. He said, what you clowns don’t realize is that we’re in a battle of civilizations. Our civilization is going to defeat your civilization in part because you don’t have the moral fortitude to recognize this for what it is. You may not be in a religious war with me, but I’m in a religious war with you, and we’re going to win because you don’t acknowledge that. That’s what he thinks.

And if you think that, if you’re KSM and you think that, it doesn’t matter that we would like to live with them and get along with them and all that sort of stuff. It makes no difference at all because he’s going to continue to press forward, and they’re going to continue to press forward.

MR. THIESSEN: So we’ve heard a lot of voices on both the left and the right in recent — as the rise of ISIS has come up saying that the reason al Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 was they wanted to draw us into a quagmire in Afghanistan and that’s what ISIS is trying to do in Iraq and Syria. They want to draw us in and get us to bog down so they can kill us there. And KSM — KSM told you something very different about what he thought would be the response to the 9/11 attacks.

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. We were asking him — this is long after EITs were over. This is years after EITs were over. Bruce and I are there; Dr. Jessen and I are there. And we go in and we go, Muq, which is what we called him, what were you guys thinking?

MR. THIESSEN: What does Muq mean, by the way?

MR. MITCHELL: Muqtar. It’s a short — muqtar means the brain, right? So we go in — and that’s what he liked to be called. He asked us to call him Muq. So we go and we’re sitting with him and we go, what were you thinking? What did you think we were going to do when you guys knocked down those buildings and attacked the Pentagon and you wanted to take out the Capitol building? What did you think Americans were going to do?

And he said, first off, they were surprised that the World Trade Center fell. When the World Trade Center fell, he said, I thought it was a sign from Allah that it was time to rise up. It was a beacon drawing other jihadists to us and that the Muslims around the world who shared the same jihadi mindset would rise up and attack America. And then he goes, but then I was lucky to survive the night. And he said, I thought you would do what you always do. I thought you would turn tail and run. In 1983, the Marine barracks in Beirut is blown up. Reagan turned tails and ran. In 2000, the Cole was blown up. They make it an FBI issue, you guys turn tail and run. In 1998, two embassies blown up, right? Two US embassies — turn it over to the FBI, nothing happened. He said, so what I thought was you’d turn it over to the FBI. There would be this long investigation. You would ask the Taliban to extradite us, and we would have time to pull off another attack.

And then he looks down and he goes, how was I to know that cowboy George Bush would say he wanted us dead or alive and invade Afghanistan to get us? And he said it just about like that, like he was befuddled, like he couldn’t imagine it, you know. This ought to be a law enforcement issue, you know. What’s he doing, you know? Apparently, he was the only one that didn’t know you don’t mess with Texas, and it’s not because of the terrain. It’s because of the attitude of the people that live in Texas, right?

So he was startled by it. And in fact, they had made steps to ensure that the Taliban wouldn’t allow them to be turned over. They had helped the Taliban kill the Afghan Northern Alliance leader in an agreement that if they helped them kill that guy, they wouldn’t allow them to be extradited.

MR. THIESSEN: Ahmed Shah Massoud, right?

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. And he told us that he had been funding to the tune of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars Hambali’s network. And that Hambali already had people lined up — and I don’t remember whether they already in flight school or they were on their way to flight school. And that if we had handled it as a law enforcement matter, he would have had time to launch that attack and there would be big smoking holes in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Chicago because those were the targets that he had.

What he said was the ferocity and the swiftness of George Bush’s response — initially, they were just fleeing for their life, you know. They were just trying to stay alive. And it got them off balance and off kilter and they could never quite — they couldn’t pop up on the radio. They couldn’t communicate with people overseas like they were. They were just incredibly frightened to do anything. They were just fleeing.

And then when they started being able to get that thing back on track again, because it was disrupted initially by — or delayed initially by the ferocity and swiftness of George Bush’s response, we had captured people and through the use of EITs, the very brief time that we used them, they were falling like dominos. And so what ended up happening was the people who were involved ended up being captured and the whole thing was disrupted. So I don’t know about you guys, but I’m actually grateful that President Bush did what he did, you know.

MR. THIESSEN: What else did he say about Bush? What was his view of George Bush?

MR. MITCHELL: I mean, every time he referred to him, he called him that cowboy — you know, that cowboy, in that tone of voice, that cowboy, you know. He just couldn’t get — he thought Bush was playing unfair. That’s the thing that was so weird is he thought it was unfair that we didn’t follow the template that we have followed before. And there’s a lesson to be learned here.

This is the lesson for going forward. They based how vulnerable we are and what they could get away with by what we had done in the past few years. Look at what we’ve done in the last eight years and ask yourself, what is ISIS and al Qaeda thinking now? And I’m not — I just don’t think we can treat — I’m going to make a little comment here that’s going to anger some people. We’re seeing increased attacks because we’ve been trying to manage it like a problem. We’ve quit trying to find and kill those people who were going to destroy us, and we’re trying to figure out some way to live with them in our midst. And that’s not going to work for these guys. It might work for 99 percent of every other — I mean, if you’re an Islamist, and you think that you want to take over the United States by voting or by, you know, outbreeding us, I don’t have an issue with you. I really don’t. Good luck. I don’t think you can do it. But if you’re an Islamist who thinks that the way to do is to crash a plane into the Capitol building and kill all our legislators, I have a problem with it. I don’t want to see it happen. And that’s the problem.

MR. THIESSEN: So he told you a lot of ideas he had for plots that could easily be carried out. And I don’t want you to say anything that would endanger us, but can you give us a flavor of his kind of thinking? And also, how dangerous would it be if he was able to freely communicate with the outside world?

MR. MITCHELL: It would be horrific. I mean, it would just be absolutely horrific. He said that — again, he said, al Qaeda dreams of these large-scale attacks, he said, but he got fascinated by the Beltway sniper. Remember when that was going on, Malvo, or whatever that guy’s name was — and the other guy, Muhammad. They were hiding in the trunk of cars and shooting people. I think they killed 17 people in and around here. He was fascinated by that. He would spend hours to me talking about that. And then he would talk about the economy of scale and what that actually means for planning attacks because that’s what he’s always doing is planning — he gets up every day and tries to figure out how to kill more Americans, you know.

And what he said was al Qaeda’s dreaming about these large-scale catastrophic attacks. And that would be great, but that’s not all that practical, right? It’s too slow, because the target isn’t our buildings or our tanks or our military. The target is our minds, right? It’s not going to be one with blood and bullets. It’s going to be one in our heads. And so what he said is we need lots of lone wolf — he didn’t call them that — he called single martyrs, shahids, who would go into the American culture and pull off low-tech attacks. He said, with enough of those low-tech attacks, like happened with the Beltway shooter, it would cripple America. It would — and I can’t really go into the attacks because they were incredibly easy and horrific, you know.

But he said what we can expect is what we’re going to see more of that because likeminded brothers are going to immigrate to the United States. He’s not saying that al Qaeda is going to deliberately send people over, although they’ve done that in the past. What he’s saying is that other Islamists, like himself, are going to migrate to the United States, immigrate to the United States, wrap themselves in our civil rights to protect themselves, live off our welfare system to feed themselves, spread their jihadi message, and then when the time is right rise up and overthrow us from within. And, you know, he was pretty good at predicting the future. He said that to me in 2004. He said that about lone-wolf stuff and about immigration in 2004. And he was just philosophizing. You know, he was just sitting around talking about that stuff. He said, this is what’s coming next. Get ready for it.

MR. THIESSEN: He had a lot of ideas for these attacks. I mean, President Obama wanted to put these guys in federal prison. How dangerous would it be to put someone like KSM in a federal prison? You know that mob bosses run mob, you know, networks from prison, drug cartels are run out of prisons. I mean, if KSM was able to communicate with the outside world from a federal prison, what would that mean for our security?

MR. MITCHELL: Well, it would be — I mean, hopefully, nobody would even consider giving him access to the outside world. I mean, that would be crazy. I have mixed feelings; I have to tell you. I don’t want KSM on US soil, but I’ve seen a maximum- security prison. He would be a lot worse off there than he is here. I wish we could build on Guantanamo, outside of the country. If he’s 23 hours a day in isolation and one hour out in the yard and he’s not allowed anybody else, that would be some form of justice for him. But I don’t think it would happen that way. I’m for leaving him at Guantanamo or doing what we should have done in the first place. Let me tell you my reaction to his — to having his confession set aside.

KSM told me he was ready to be a martyr, right — that he was ready to martyr himself, meaning he’s ready for the US to execute him. And when he got to Guantanamo, he made out this long list of things that he had done, 28 of them. And he pled guilty in front of the military commission. And then the Obama administration set that aside because they wanted to try him in New York. Let me tell you what that little monster thought. He thought this is a sign from god that I’m not supposed to martyr myself now — that instead, I’m to continue the jihad inside of the court system. And as soon as I saw them do that, I thought, that little guy is going to be the most obstructionist defendant probably in the history of the military commissions. And if you look at all the things that he’s done to disrupt that, you’ll see what I’m talking about. He is a master at that sort of stuff, and he thinks that his god has now commanded him to drag this out as long as he can because he believes it will pull more likeminded jihadists to the cause.

MR. THIESSEN: He would get offended — so some of this, the plots that he had conceived came out like, for example, poisoning a reservoir, and people kind of pooh- poohed them over here and they said that, you know, that’s ridiculous. How much poison would you need to poison a reservoir? And when you told him this, he was actually offended.

MR. MITCHELL: Right. I went back to him, and I said, what’s this business about poisoning reservoirs, you know? I mean, I know you told us that, but, you know, folks in the United States are saying, that sounds crazy. And he goes, of course it’s crazy. I have an engineering degree from a North Carolina University, and I was the chief engineer at the water treatment plant — and I don’t want to say the country — but he was the chief engineer at a water treatment plant in the country. He said, I wouldn’t try to poison the reservoir. That’s a crazy thing to do. He said, what I — I would do this. And then he described what he would do to the water as it left the reservoir. He said, I don’t have to kill people. I just have to make a lot of people sick. And if I do that, you won’t trust the system. Again, his point is to get into our heads, not necessarily to kill us all.

And he said the same thing with the gas stations. I’ll talk about the gas station one.

MR. THIESSEN: Yeah. Please.

MR. MITCHELL: That little guy bought a gas station in Pakistan so he could figure out how to build a bomb that they could slide down into the gas tanks at gas stations, all up and down the East Coast. And one of his operatives that he had in the United States at the time that he was doing this had a gas route driving gas trucks up and down the East Coast of the United States filling up gas stations. And if we had done anything other than treat it like an act of war, he would have been able to finish developing that fusing system.

See, I used to be a bomb squad guy. First six years of my life, I worked in an explosive ordinance disposal. I know that one of the problems with building a device that you slide down a tank is you’ve got a lot of liquid down there. And so you don’t get quite the burst that you would like to have if that’s what your intention is. He’s working on that. He’s got people working on that. They’ve got a gas station where they’re practicing, you know.

That I thought — and then, what we’re going to do is, say, well, that’s probably not really possible. Brooklyn Bridge was the same thing. Had a guy down here trying to figure out how to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge. Again, I was a bomb disposal guy. We knew how to cut engine blocks in half. There are devices for cutting those great, big cables on bridges. There are explosive devices that use shape charges to do it. He could have done it. And he didn’t get to do it because the president and the CIA and the brave men and women in the military and in the intelligence community did what was necessary to disrupt those attacks.

MR. THIESSEN: And so his plan after 9/11, when he thought it was going to be law enforcement was to do a lot of small-scale attacks around the country that would disrupt this and —

MR. MITCHELL: To harass us.

MR. THIESSEN: — disorient us and send us chasing those things while he was planning for the Library Tower attacks. Is that basically —

MR. MITCHELL: Here’s what they think. If I use up your resources, then that’s jihad. So if I’m planning a great, big attack and you’ve sent the FBI after me and I’ve got multiple small attacks all over your country, you have fewer resources to send my way. So that gives me some cover to do that. Brilliant man.

MR. THIESSEN: So during the campaign, Donald Trump said we’re going to bring back waterboarding and worse.

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah.

MR. THIESSEN: And then, after meeting with General Mattis, he said, well, General Mattis told me that that’s never really worked for him, and we’re going to use cigarettes and beer to convince these people.

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. I don’t know that that wasn’t taken out of context. I have a lot of respect for General Mattis, and you know how things get taken out of context when somebody says something that’s a good sound bite. So, personally, I want to give him the benefit of the doubt, but I’m perfectly willing to address that.

MR. THIESSEN: Yeah.

MR. MITCHELL: Well, we know that didn’t work for KSM because he had two days of conversation and tea, and all he did was rock and pray and taunt the interrogators. So there was plenty of opportunity for the tea and sympathy to work with KSM. It wasn’t moving him at all. But this is the real question that I would ask General Mattis, or I would ask you: would you give information that would get Americans killed if you were captured by ISIS or al Qaeda for a Michelob and a pack of Winstons? I don’t think so. It’s insulting to suggest that the general would do that. KSM wouldn’t do that either.

You know, somewhere between waterboarding and worst and what’s in the Army field manual, I think there needs to be some form of legal — let me emphasize that, legal — coercion to move them along so that you can start using social influence to get them talking again, because here’s the way — I’m going to tell you the way that I think about EITs.

I think about them like a dental phobia, right? Have you ever known anybody with a dental phobia? When is it that they the hardest to get out of going to the dentist? It’s right when they’re reaching for the door, right? It’s right when they’re reaching for the door at the dentist’s office. They’re looking for any kind of excuse not to go inside. And so what we found because of the way we put that program together was that when they were likely to give up information, it wasn’t when we were waterboarding them or when we were walling them or whatever we were doing. It’s before the next session started. Remember what I told you was we would ask them a bridging question.

So I might ask him where he got his tie. He doesn’t want to tell me. We do an enhanced interrogation thing, and then when it’s over, I say to him, go back to your cell and think about this. This doesn’t have to happen this way. This is your choice. Next time we come out, I’m going to ask you where you got that tie. And if you tell us where you got that tie, this won’t happen again. We don’t want to do this. It doesn’t have to happen. And the next time they bring him out of the cell and the pull the hood off, the first thing we ask him is, where did you get that tie? And if he tells us, no EITs — none.

And so it’s like a dental phobia in the sense that where we got the actionable stuff, where they started working with us wasn’t when you were — like there was never a case where we were waterboarding someone and said, tell us about the next attack. That’s not what we told them. What we told them was “We know you have something that could help us. We know you don’t have everything, but as you’re laying there, you’re thinking of something, something just flashed through your mind. That’s what we want to know.” And more often than not, at some point, when you took the hood off and you asked them the bridging question, they gave you a snippet of something. And as soon as they did that, we could switch to noncoercive social influence stuff and move them relatively rapidly to debriefing.

There’s a phenomena called the abstinence violation effect. I don’t know if any of you guys have heard of it. It’s a psychological phenomenon. It sounds like gobbledygook. My brother would call this book poisoning. But what it is is that most of us have experienced it, and that is we make a commitment to ourselves to never, ever, ever again have a Hostess Ding-Dong — not going to do it, not going to do it. I make that commitment. I draw a line in the sand, no Ding-Dongs. And then somehow, accidentally, I end up with a bag of Ding-Dongs. And I eat that first Ding-Dong, right? I don’t put the bag down. I don’t spit that out of my mouth. I eat the rest of the Ding-Dongs because once you get past this thing that you said you were never going to do, your resistance collapses. And it’s the same way with those people who are hardcore about withholding information.

The other thing that we — in terms of social influence — somebody asked me one time, “how would you use social influence in this setting/” There’s a phenomenon called the anchoring effect, right? If I want you to think that a price that I’m asking you is reasonable, I get you to think about some number that’s a lot higher than that because when I give you the reasonable price, right, you’ll go, oh, that doesn’t seem like all that much because your mind has already been focused on this higher number. And it doesn’t even have to be related to the dollars or whatever you’re talking about. You could ask him the temperature of the sun and then, you know, tell him you wanted $1,500 and the $1,500 wouldn’t sound like very much.

So sometimes when you’re dealing with these guys and they’re moving, they’re not quite out of EITs but they’re close to be in the EITs, they resist different questions to different levels. They don’t have the same level of resistance to every intelligence requirement. So we might ask them an intelligence requirement they didn’t want to talk about so they put up some resistance and get apprehensive about it and dread what’s going to happen next. And then we ask them a real intelligence requirement that we do want something about, and they experience relief when they get a chance to talk about because we’re off this other topic. Well, all we’re doing is tricking their learning system so that they begin to experience relief for providing answers.

And it’s much more sophisticated than what some people in the CIA and virtually everybody in the press thought, which is hurt them until they tell you what you want to hear, then hurt them some more to see if they change their story. And I’m not saying that that didn’t happen, right? Some people who weren’t trained and did things they weren’t supposed to do did those kind of things, but the CIA did what it was supposed to do. When the leaders found out about it, they referred them to the Justice Department, they had accountability boards, they asked for IG things. They did what they were supposed to do. They did what a responsible organization should do. But inside of the official high-value detainee program, we had no interest in that.

We were not — because in my book, I talk about the preacher, right? And the preacher didn’t want to do that because if you did that sort of stuff, you got spurts, right? I might be able to get you to tell me where you bought that tie one time by doing this sort of thing I described, but I don’t want you to tell me just where you bought the tie. I want you to help me interpret this letter. I want you to tell me who gave Hambali that $500,000, you know.

I want you to tell me things beyond the simple question because one of the weird things that happened that we noticed early on — I feel like I’m rambling, but — one of the — I’ll share this with you — is that once they start — you know, it’s a sin. It’s a sin in their religion, in the way that they — that version of Islam that they have, to help your enemy. It’s a sin. As I said before, I think I said you must —

MR. THIESSEN: Tell that story about Abu Zubaydah. So you —

MR. MITCHELL: Oh, I haven’t told it yet?

MR. THIESSEN: So Abu Zubaydah had undergone EITs and went from a state of resistance to a state of cooperation. And you got another detainee and you came to him and you said, we don’t want to do this. And he said something —

MR. MITCHELL: Yeah. Dr. Jessen and I went to Abu Zubaydah. We didn’t like doing the — we just didn’t like doing EITs. And, in fact, you should never have anybody doing anything like that who looks forward to it because it’s just a horrific thing. When we did EITs, it was more like a surgical suite, right? We had doctors, we had psychologists, we had people — (inaudible) — we had all these guards. Anyone could stop the interrogations anytime they wanted to, at least the ones that we were involved in, right?

And so Abu Zubaydah moves out of EIT, has been working with us for months, and I can tell you who it is because I say in the book. It’s Nashiri, the Cole bomber, you know, gets caught. I go in the rendition, we do the neutral assessment at the places now called Cobalt, and we come back, and we know that we’re going to have to use EITs on him because he’s unwilling to provide the piece of information. He’s willing to tell us everything about the Cole attack, but we’re not there to get a confession. I wasn’t sent there to be a law enforcement officer. I wasn’t sent there to be a mental health worker. I was sent there to use what I know about psychology as a weapon against those people who are trying to destroy us to get them to talk to us, right?

So we got to Abu Zubaydah and we say, we don’t want to do this. We don’t want to waterboard Nashiri. We don’t want to use EITs on Nashiri. You have to help us. Tell us how we can get around this. And Abu Zubaydah goes, oh, no, you’ve got to do this for all the brothers. And I’m thinking — I mean, literally I’m thinking, what? And he goes, if they help you, it is a sin and they will suffer the torment of the grave. So you have to do this for all the brothers. And either me or Bruce said, you mean we’ve got to use more of this? And he goes, oh, no. Not more. Just enough, because if you use more than is required, Allah will know that and he will punish you. If you use less than is required and the brother gives up the information, he will punish him. Allah does not expect me to cut mountains because he knows I can’t do it. He doesn’t expect me to carry a burden that is too great to bear. He knows that when I get tired, I will set that down because I can’t do it. So the brother has to be pushed to the point that he’s right with his god so he save face with his god and not suffer the torment of the grave.

And I said, so you’re saying we need to do this to everybody, because, you know, I’m starting to not like it. And he said, oh, no. Some brothers can’t stand any pain. And he called it pain. And the only reason I’m saying pain is because he said pain, right, not because I think it was necessarily painful. He said, some brothers can’t stand any pain, no hard times, no hard times for them. They already know they can’t hold out. And it would be sin and Allah would punish you if you do bad things to them. Other brothers, there was nothing that you could do to get them to talk. There was no way that you could do something physical to get them to talk. Allah knows that. They know that. And if you try and you hurt those people, then Allah will punish you. He said, but in the middle there are all these people who need to resist to the best of their ability. And then, when their burden is too great, they can set it down and they can freely talk to you without worrying about the torment of the grave.

And that profoundly changed the way that I think about it because what it did for me was it helped me switch my perspective from what Jim Mitchell, you know, the white guy that grew up in rural Florida, thinks about how these interrogations should be done, and it got me focusing on what’s in their head, you know, how are they interpreting what we’re doing.

And, for example — I’ll give you an example. This burden that’s too great to bear speech that Abu Zubaydah gave us, at the worst of time when we were still in the middle of EITs with KSM, I wanted a way to suggest to him that he could work with us, that he didn’t have to continue to do what he was doing. So I used — and this would be another social influence thing — I used what Abu Zubaydah had told me. I said — so, you know, I’m walling him or something, and I stopped and I said, I don’t know about your god but my god doesn’t expect me to carry a burden that I can’t carry. He knows that at some point, I’m going to put it down. And he goes, my god feels the same way, right? So I’m not telling him what Islam thinks, you know, although I’m using that as a way to get him planting the idea that he doesn’t have to continue to resist, you know. Did I answer your question?

MR. THIESSEN: You did. Why don’t we take some questions from the audience? Sir. This gentleman here.

Q: Thank. Tom Watkins with Agence France-Presse.

MR. MITCHELL: I can almost hear you.

Q: Can you hear me now? Is that better?

MR. MITCHELL: Yes.

Q: Tom Watkins with AFP. I just wanted to bring you back to the point you were making earlier. You said I think there needs to be some sort of legal coercion to move the suspects along. Can you describe what that perhaps would actually look like? And also, while I’ve got the microphone, I’d like to get your reaction to the condemnation that you’ve received from the American Psychological Association, who lambasted you and your partner after the Senate report came out on torture. Thank you.

MR. MITCHELL: Okay. So, first, let me respond to the American Psychological Association thing. Those people are not part of my life. I don’t care what they think. That report is full of mischaracterizations. The suggestion that the CIA somehow colluded with the American Psychological Association to justify enhanced interrogation is poppycock, crap. So I don’t have a — I mean, it has zero impact on my life, and I don’t care.

Second point you asked me about is what it should look like? I don’t know. What Jim Mitchell thinks it should look like is irrelevant. I think the American public needs to have a debate about how they want to protect themselves. I think they need to ask themselves what — and I would ask President-elect Trump this. What are you going to do when you have credible evidence, like the CIA did, of another pending catastrophic attack that could — we didn’t know any better, we didn’t know it had been disrupted — that could potentially involve nuclear weapons, and the person that you’re interrogating or questioning isn’t responding to the Army field manual? What are you going to do?

Well, there are people in our government who say, well, what we’d expect in those cases is that the CIA interrogators would do the right thing. They would use whatever means necessary to get the information out of them and then at trial — at their trial, we would take that into consideration.

MR. THIESSEN: That’s John McCain’s line.

MR. MITCHELL: If they saved lives. Well, the problem with disrupting attacks is they don’t happen. And when they don’t happen, the people it doesn’t happen to begin to think, maybe it wasn’t going to happen, right? So as a guy who’s been under the bus more than one time in my life about this particular issue, I would say those people who say that want to live under the protection of the men and women who are willing to sacrifice their life to protect them, but they’re unwilling to provide the protection of law as cover. And I don’t want to be a part of that.

I’ve said before to people, and what I’ve said is that at some point, if this obsessive political correctness continues, we’re going to be standing on the moral high ground looking down into our smoking hole that used to be several blocks in Los Angeles. At some point, somebody’s going to have to make some hard decisions because — what did we do in the past? In the past, we turned them over to other countries who really did torture them. The same thing has happened to the word torture that has happened to the word racist. It’s been used to often that it’s lost its meaning. I had a reporter ask me one time — I’m not going to say that just because of the audience. I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to say my response. Maybe I will. (Laughter.)

He asked me — he said, was this thing that you did torture? I said, no. If it was torture, they wouldn’t have to pass a law in 2015 outlawing it because torture is already illegal, right? The highest Justice Department in the land wouldn’t have opined five times that it wasn’t torture, one time after I personally waterboarded an assistant attorney general before he made that decision three or four days later, right? So the time to tell me that it was a torture was when that attorney general got off of the waterboard. That would have been an excellent time to tell me. I would have been listening had he told me at that time. But that’s not what he said. What he said is, I felt like I was going to drown but I don’t think it’s torture, you know. Well, he didn’t actually say that at the time. He said that later in his opinion.

The other thing —

MR. THIESSEN: And you underwent it.

MR. MITCHELL: I did. Yeah. It sucks. But there’s no way — I waterboarded almost as many lawyers — and I put this out there if there are any lawyers in the group there. I waterboarded almost as many lawyers as I did terrorists. I’m one down. I just need one, right? And I could get that off my bucket list, although I’d be willing to do more than one. Anyway, it sucks, but if it’s done properly and it’s properly — and I’m not advocating waterboarding. I don’t want to be the poster boy for waterboarding. I didn’t like it. Most people don’t know that every single time that waterboarding was stopped by the CIA, it was the interrogators that wanted to stop it. There were people in the building who wanted to continue, and they wanted to use it more often. We just said there’s no — the person is working with us. There’s no point to it.

So you had asked — I had two thoughts that I — and I got off on the rant. Forgot the one — give me the question again.

MR. THIESSEN: Going forward, what should we be doing?

MR. MITCHELL: It’s not my future they’re coming for. I’m a crabby old white guy who’s heavily armed. I’ve got a conceal-carry permit. My house has more stingers than a Portuguese man o’ war. I’ve shot thousands of shots. My entire military career was spent learning how to defend myself, and my wife is a better shot than I am. It’s not my future they’re coming for. It’s the future of your kids they’re coming for. And so the American public has to decide what they want.

What are they going to do when they get credible intelligence that there’s another catastrophic attack and the Army field manual doesn’t work, because I’m telling you it won’t work on KSM. It wouldn’t have worked on KSM. If KSM had been willing to talk, the CIA doesn’t give a rat’s hiney where they get their intelligence. If they can get it from you while you’re willing to give it to you, they’re happy with that. I would never have been there. If law enforcement techniques had been working, they would have been happy with that. I would have never been there. The fact is on the worst of the worst, those people who know the most about those folks who are trying to kill us, there needs to be some sort of a strategy. We have to think it through.

MR. THIESSEN: Questions. This gentleman right there.

Q: Thank you. My name is Hamed al-Shueiter (ph). I’m a Fulbright fellow at the American University from Yemen. My question is — I mean, it seems like ISIS or al Qaeda are more idea than organizations. And even though you differentiate between Islamists and Muslims, they have very common sharing thoughts, which always offer a very wide area to recruit people. So how do you think can be counter — to counter the narratives among Muslims even inside Islamic countries or outside Islamic countries to mitigate the number of people recruited to these groups?

MR. MITCHELL: That’s a very complex question that has about eight different phases to it. Let me give you the answer for how I think we should go about finding out the problem — the answer, not what the answer is.

We used to have a thing called the terrorist think tank. Once all of these guys started cooperating with us, we had them all relatively close to each other so that when we got a threat or we picked up a piece of intel or we captured somebody and we got their pocket litter, we could go to each one of them, one after the other. So I could show Abu Zubaydah a surveillance photo and ask him, who’s this guy? And he would say, this is so and so, right? And then I’d go to KSM and say, who’s this guy? Same guy. Don’t tell him I’ve talked to Abu Zubaydah. He’d go, he’s so and so but you know that guy in the back? That guy’s a sniper. We’ve been training him to go in the United States and shoot, you know, ex presidents. You know, well, that’s a piece of information. So then I’m going back to Abu Zubaydah, within seconds back to Abu Zubaydah.

So I think the thing that we lost — and I know we had to do it — but the thing that we lost when they were transferred to Guantanamo is that think tank where we could ask the terrorist, if we were going to disrupt you, how would we go about doing that? And we had to be clever about how we’d ask that question because, you know, obviously. So that’s how we should have been able to answer the question, but it’s not how we can because we no longer have a terrorist think tank. What we have is a bunch of academics who are telling what we need to do instead of the people who are most knowledgeable of what we need to do.

MR. THIESSEN: Questions. This gentleman here.

MR. MITCHELL: Sir, I like your hat.

Q: Gerald Chandler. Thank you for coming. Could you tell me the process that your company was selected? As I understand it, so you had a consulting firm and you didn’t speak Arabic? So what were the important parts of your background that led your company to be selected?

MR. MITCHELL: Well, that company existed in 2005 so the period that we’re talking about, it didn’t even exist. And by 2005, you know, I’d had a tremendous amount of experience. It was an open bid, and we bid on it using the same government contracting laws that Feinstein’s husband bid on when he bid on the contract — the multimillion contract that he has. You know, it’s evaluated the same way. And the CIA decided it was a sole source bid. I don’t know what their decision-making process was. I wasn’t part of that. So we fully expected it to be an open bid for all the companies. They decided. If you want to know what the decision-making process was, you need to ask the CIA, not me because I wasn’t in those rooms.

MR. THIESSEN: Questions. This gentleman right here.

MR. MITCHELL: And the other thing is I don’t know that the CEO of a company necessarily needs to speak the language if everybody else does. The most brilliant interrogator that I have ever seen is the man who wrote that op-ed in The Weekly Standard, Jason Biehl. He never worked for me, doesn’t work for me, isn’t someone — now, that’s a pseudonym. That’s not his real name. He speaks fluent Arabic. He does his interrogations in English. You know why he does his interrogations in English? Because sometimes the bad guys say things to the linguist that they wouldn’t say to the good guys. Please keep an open mind about why people do what they do.

Q: My name is Sam Greskin (ph). Following on your first question, you kind of said that it was really my generation’s problem and not yours, which is true. But I think just from my perspective, and there’s legitimate criticism about the Bush administration and then the Obama administration’s way of dealing with terrorism and Islamists, but it kind of seems like it’s more of an issue of prevention and management than just winning because —

MR. MITCHELL: Well, first off, you’re not going to win.

Q: Yeah. Exactly.

MR. MITCHELL: Here’s the deal. It’s like a cold sore. All they’re going to do is retreat. It’s like a virus. You have to treat the vectors, and you have to treat the sores, you know. We make it look sexy for them because we allow them to operate in the open, and that’s one of the things that pull young people into it. You know, we make it — instead of confronting them, we try to get them to like us enough that they won’t attacks us, and all that does is convey to them that we are weak, that Allah has put in our minds this thing that makes us vulnerable because we care more — you know, somebody said, ISIS and al Qaeda do not represent an existential threat to the United States.

Let me tell you what that means. I’m a guy that’s been right at the point of the spear. When somebody says that, I hear, you cannot — they cannot kill enough Americans to bring down our government. But our government doesn’t exist so you can stack up Americans like cordwood to prevent its demise. It exists to protect Americans. It’s the opposite. And I’m disturbed by that sort of stuff, that kind of talk because it makes us look weak.

MR. THIESSEN: I’m being told we’re — I’ll ask a final question for you.

MR. MITCHELL: Sure.

MR. THIESSEN: So one thing KSM told you is he predicted that your country would turn on you. Can you tell us about that moment?

MR. MITCHELL: Sure. This is about 2004 probably. And he said, I understand why you do what you do. I would do this myself to protect my country, to protect our ideology. He said, but your country’s going to turn on you. Your leaders will turn on you, the American people will turn on you, the American press will turn on you, your leaders will turn on you to save themselves. The press will turn on you, and they will portray the war — and that’s his words, not my words — the war against Islam as too difficult to win and too cruel, right, and not appropriate. And the American people will turn on you, and all that will do is stiffen the hearts and bring joy to the hearts of other likeminded jihadis because they’re going to see you as weak and divided. And that will bring them to our cause. He said, so expect it.

And he’s pretty much right. Just as soon as the — the same people who criticized the CIA for being too forward leaning were the same ones who brought them into the Senate chambers and dressed them down for missing the first attack. So as soon as they felt safe again, they crawled back out from under that rock and started attacking the same folks that they had demanded that they do more. We were told to do everything that was legal, to walk right up to the line, put our toes right on the line, and we depended on the Department of Justice to tell us what that was. They had four, maybe five chances. And each time, they told us the same thing.

Some things happened inside of the CIA that weren’t part of that program that were wrong. Jim Mitchell, who’s pretty tough about these things, thought it was probably torture, right? But it wasn’t — it wasn’t part of the official program. And when the leaders of the CIA found those things out, they took the appropriate action.

MR. THIESSEN: I’ll close simply by saying that the American people never turned on you. A 2015 Washington Post poll found that 76 percent of Americans say they would do it again if it was necessary to protect the country. They said looking forward, should we use these techniques? And 17 percent said that we should use them often, 40 percent said sometimes, 19 percent said rarely, only 20 percent said never justified.

MR. MITCHELL: Let me just say this. I’m not for legally torturing anybody. If it’s torture, don’t do it. If it’s illegal, don’t do it. If our government believes that the death of 3,000 people because you want to use the Army field manual is the way to go and we can live with those losses because it’s not an existential threat to the people who live around this area, right, then I would expect the American people wouldn’t put up with that crap, you know. I’m not advocating that we torture people. I’m advocating that we have a civil debate about whether there are forms of — because one of the underlying assumptions — I know we’re on time here — one of the underlying assumptions is that they have the right to remain silent — that these people who have taken up arms voluntarily against us, who are not American citizens, have the right to protect the information so that they can kill us.

The other thing about it is sometimes they say, well, you know, you did these EITs, and they couldn’t do anything to stop them. Well, there was an easy thing they could do to stop them. They could stop it in the instant that they said, I’ll answer that question. They would have gone away. And then they did as quick as we could.

MR. THIESSEN: Jim, I’ve got four kids. And because of what you did and your colleagues did, we were not hit again. So on behalf of millions of Americans who are grateful to you, thank you for keeping our country safe, and thank you for joining us here today.

MR. MITCHELL: Well, you know, I wasn’t — (applause). I just want to say the book is about me, but I wasn’t the only one there and by no means deserve the bulk of the credit. So the men and women in the CIA and in the military, they can keep us safe from our enemies, but they can’t keep us safe from ourselves.

MR. THIESSEN: Jim will be signing copies of the book outside if you’re interested. Thank you.

(END)