Inside the Islamist Terrorist's Mind: a Conversation With
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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.