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American Morning
Interview with Mark Bowden
Aired September 10, 2003 - 08:05 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: In a war on terror, perhaps more so than in conventional war, intelligence and interrogation play a crucial role, and that's where the rules have really changed. In next month's issue of "Atlantic Monthly," Mark Bowden studies this in his article, "The Dark Art Of Interrogation: A Survey of the Landscape of Persuasion." Bowden is also the author of "Black Hawk Down."
He joins us this morning.
It's nice to see you.
This is a fascinating article. You really had great access inside the people who are both the, I guess what have historically been called the torturers and the people who had also been tortured.
How is the war on terror, do you think, how has that changed -- the art of interrogation sounds weird, but that's really sort of what it is.
MARK BOWDEN, "THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY": It is. It's more of an art than a science, because there is no trick way of getting somebody to tell you something that they don't want to. This is a skill that was practiced by the CIA and by military interrogators for a long, long time. And it really was only in the like early 1970s, when there was a sort of backlash against the abuses of the Watergate era and a lot of these more despicable practices were discontinued, because -- and I think, in part, because there was no really pressing need for them.
But since September 11, with the existence of these organizations who do nothing but plan mass murder, I think that there's been a fairly compelling moral and strategic argument for learning how to use these tools again. And so what I did was try to figure out what they actually do.
O'BRIEN: When you talk about tools, I think historically many of us think of torture as slashing someone with a belt, burning them with cigarettes, things that Saddam Hussein's regime has done, let's say. But give me a laundry list of the kinds of things that are actually more useful, I would guess, in getting a prisoner to talk.
BOWDEN: Well, ultimately, that's what you want, you want to know what works. And what doesn't work, oddly enough, is the traditional method of sort of pulling out fingernails and, you know, really severe torture, which is still practiced in many parts of the world. More often practiced to force somebody into confessing something they didn't do or to terrorize people who are considered to be a threat to a regime. What we're interested in is finding out important lifesaving information. And what works in that regard are things like keeping people awake for long periods of time, keeping them really uncomfortable...
O'BRIEN: Sensory deprivation was, I thought, really interesting, just how the human body cannot take being alone.
BOWDEN: Most people can't. Although there are exceptions, most people go really nuts if they're trapped in an area where they can't hear anything, they can't see anything, they can't move freely.
O'BRIEN: Let's talk about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. We saw the picture March 1st. They said, "Captured!," the front page of every newspaper. It looked like he had just been hauled out of bed. You say there's a good chance he was actually captured much earlier than that picture shows.
BOWDEN: Right. I was in Pakistan. I actually went to the house where that raid took place. And the owners of the house told me that -- and I don't know if they were telling me the truth or not -- but that a number of people were arrested there that day, but not Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
We know that his wife and children had been arrested some weeks before. And it makes a lot of sense for intelligence agencies not to reveal when someone is in custody, because the minute all of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's organization knows that he's been captured, they start to scatter, they change their method of operation, they change their codes.
O'BRIEN: Many people think here is a guy who is accused of killing thousands of people, a heartless, terrible terrorist, why would any -- and then we read well, he's talking, he's sharing information. It's almost hard to believe, that someone who, you know, says that he will die for the cause could be spilling his guts to U.S. authorities.
BOWDEN: And I think it's right to be skeptical about that information because certainly it serves the interests of our forces to put out that he is cooperating. But he may well be, because some of these techniques are really effective. And I talked to Michael Kuby, who's the head of interrogations for Shabat, the Israeli secret service. And he's interrogated thousands of Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian arrestees over the years. And, you know, he's learned that even the most hardened cases like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed sometimes flip very easily, particularly middle-aged men.
O'BRIEN: Yes, it seems as if people who have more to lose...
BOWDEN: Right.
O'BRIEN: ... family connections.
BOWDEN: Well, young men tend to be far more passionately committed to a cause. Middle-aged and older men -- and I'm sure the same is true of women -- tend to form, place a higher priority on family, on their children. These things begin to supplant the sort of zeal of their youth.
O'BRIEN: He talked a little bit about a trick that he used. After the interrogation was finished over whatever time it took, then the person would be released to his new Palestinian, in this particular case, friends...
BOWDEN: Right.
O'BRIEN: ... who say tell us, we need to know what you said and what you didn't say, because we're your buddies. And these were actually people on the other side who were working for Israel.
BOWDEN: Right.
O'BRIEN: And he says it's so incredibly successful. Why?
BOWDEN: Well, it's, I think, successful because it's emotionally so satisfying or rewarding to be -- after being treated really badly, you know, living with tremendous discomfort for a period of time, you're welcomed as a hero, your needs are met, people are congratulating you for having held out like such a hero. And then they say but you need to tell us, you know, what you told them and what you didn't tell them so we can get that information back out to the people on the outside. They need to know this. And out would come all this information that they had very heroically kept to themselves.
They call them the birdies, the cooperative prisoners.
O'BRIEN: At the end of the day, people want to talk.
BOWDEN: Yes.
O'BRIEN: That's the bottom line.
BOWDEN: Everybody wants to tell their story.
O'BRIEN: Mark Bowden, it is a fascinating article in "Atlantic Monthly."
Thanks for joining us this morning.
BOWDEN: Thank you, Soledad.
O'BRIEN: It's nice to see you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired September 10, 2003 - 08:05 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: In a war on terror, perhaps more so than in conventional war, intelligence and interrogation play a crucial role, and that's where the rules have really changed. In next month's issue of "Atlantic Monthly," Mark Bowden studies this in his article, "The Dark Art Of Interrogation: A Survey of the Landscape of Persuasion." Bowden is also the author of "Black Hawk Down."
He joins us this morning.
It's nice to see you.
This is a fascinating article. You really had great access inside the people who are both the, I guess what have historically been called the torturers and the people who had also been tortured.
How is the war on terror, do you think, how has that changed -- the art of interrogation sounds weird, but that's really sort of what it is.
MARK BOWDEN, "THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY": It is. It's more of an art than a science, because there is no trick way of getting somebody to tell you something that they don't want to. This is a skill that was practiced by the CIA and by military interrogators for a long, long time. And it really was only in the like early 1970s, when there was a sort of backlash against the abuses of the Watergate era and a lot of these more despicable practices were discontinued, because -- and I think, in part, because there was no really pressing need for them.
But since September 11, with the existence of these organizations who do nothing but plan mass murder, I think that there's been a fairly compelling moral and strategic argument for learning how to use these tools again. And so what I did was try to figure out what they actually do.
O'BRIEN: When you talk about tools, I think historically many of us think of torture as slashing someone with a belt, burning them with cigarettes, things that Saddam Hussein's regime has done, let's say. But give me a laundry list of the kinds of things that are actually more useful, I would guess, in getting a prisoner to talk.
BOWDEN: Well, ultimately, that's what you want, you want to know what works. And what doesn't work, oddly enough, is the traditional method of sort of pulling out fingernails and, you know, really severe torture, which is still practiced in many parts of the world. More often practiced to force somebody into confessing something they didn't do or to terrorize people who are considered to be a threat to a regime. What we're interested in is finding out important lifesaving information. And what works in that regard are things like keeping people awake for long periods of time, keeping them really uncomfortable...
O'BRIEN: Sensory deprivation was, I thought, really interesting, just how the human body cannot take being alone.
BOWDEN: Most people can't. Although there are exceptions, most people go really nuts if they're trapped in an area where they can't hear anything, they can't see anything, they can't move freely.
O'BRIEN: Let's talk about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. We saw the picture March 1st. They said, "Captured!," the front page of every newspaper. It looked like he had just been hauled out of bed. You say there's a good chance he was actually captured much earlier than that picture shows.
BOWDEN: Right. I was in Pakistan. I actually went to the house where that raid took place. And the owners of the house told me that -- and I don't know if they were telling me the truth or not -- but that a number of people were arrested there that day, but not Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
We know that his wife and children had been arrested some weeks before. And it makes a lot of sense for intelligence agencies not to reveal when someone is in custody, because the minute all of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's organization knows that he's been captured, they start to scatter, they change their method of operation, they change their codes.
O'BRIEN: Many people think here is a guy who is accused of killing thousands of people, a heartless, terrible terrorist, why would any -- and then we read well, he's talking, he's sharing information. It's almost hard to believe, that someone who, you know, says that he will die for the cause could be spilling his guts to U.S. authorities.
BOWDEN: And I think it's right to be skeptical about that information because certainly it serves the interests of our forces to put out that he is cooperating. But he may well be, because some of these techniques are really effective. And I talked to Michael Kuby, who's the head of interrogations for Shabat, the Israeli secret service. And he's interrogated thousands of Palestinian terrorists and Palestinian arrestees over the years. And, you know, he's learned that even the most hardened cases like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed sometimes flip very easily, particularly middle-aged men.
O'BRIEN: Yes, it seems as if people who have more to lose...
BOWDEN: Right.
O'BRIEN: ... family connections.
BOWDEN: Well, young men tend to be far more passionately committed to a cause. Middle-aged and older men -- and I'm sure the same is true of women -- tend to form, place a higher priority on family, on their children. These things begin to supplant the sort of zeal of their youth.
O'BRIEN: He talked a little bit about a trick that he used. After the interrogation was finished over whatever time it took, then the person would be released to his new Palestinian, in this particular case, friends...
BOWDEN: Right.
O'BRIEN: ... who say tell us, we need to know what you said and what you didn't say, because we're your buddies. And these were actually people on the other side who were working for Israel.
BOWDEN: Right.
O'BRIEN: And he says it's so incredibly successful. Why?
BOWDEN: Well, it's, I think, successful because it's emotionally so satisfying or rewarding to be -- after being treated really badly, you know, living with tremendous discomfort for a period of time, you're welcomed as a hero, your needs are met, people are congratulating you for having held out like such a hero. And then they say but you need to tell us, you know, what you told them and what you didn't tell them so we can get that information back out to the people on the outside. They need to know this. And out would come all this information that they had very heroically kept to themselves.
They call them the birdies, the cooperative prisoners.
O'BRIEN: At the end of the day, people want to talk.
BOWDEN: Yes.
O'BRIEN: That's the bottom line.
BOWDEN: Everybody wants to tell their story.
O'BRIEN: Mark Bowden, it is a fascinating article in "Atlantic Monthly."
Thanks for joining us this morning.
BOWDEN: Thank you, Soledad.
O'BRIEN: It's nice to see you.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
