 Welcome to this event for this new book, The Forever Prisoners. So I'm just coming to focus here with the Forever Prisoner, the full and serious account of the CIA's most controversial covert program. It's authored by Kathy Scott Clark and Adrian D.V. Kathy is here today to discuss the book. She and Adrian have written a number of books together, including the Exile, a very detailed account of the post-911 Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. The siege, a really excellent account of the Taj, the attack on the Taj hotel in Mumbai, by Dashkar at Tiber. Spent a great deal of time in South Asia, Pakistan, and we're delighted, Kathy, Osha should mention that this was, the book was turned into a film, which was directed by Alex Gibney, an excellent film. Kathy, let me turn it over to you to open it up with kind of the big themes and interesting stories in the book and congratulations on the publication, which is tomorrow in the United States. Thank you very much, Peter. I'd quite like to start by just a little bit of explanation as to how the book came about. It really came out of the research and the work we were doing on the previous book, The Exile, which was an account of Osama bin Laden, the last 10 years in Pakistan on the run, as told by his family members and Shura members and trying to tell the al-Qaeda story rather than the western version of his story. And because he was on the run, obviously, US government was looking for other people to pick up and one of the people, the first high-value detainee to be picked up was Abbi Zabeda in March 2003, sorry, 2002. And he was really just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But because he was the kind of first big name to be captured, everything was thrown at him. And until we started work on this new book, I just felt his story and the story of enhanced interrogation had never really been told properly. I mean, we hadn't heard from him because he was deemed to be incommunicative the rest of his life from the day the CIA decided to subject him to enhanced interrogation. And I didn't, Jim Mitchell, the architect of the EIT program had just started talking when I started researching. He'd done one interview, I think, with Vice, but it was very kind of like CIA narrative driven and not, in my opinion, particularly informative. So I came to the States in February 2017 and knocked on his door in Florida and he threatened to call the FBI on me and threw me out. And said, I've got nothing to say to you. I don't talk to journalists. And I said, I'll come all the way from London. He said, I don't care if you come from Mars. I'm not going to talk to you. But luckily I had a very kind of tenuous connection to him because another previous book that we've written was about a kidnapping of six Westerners in Kashmir in 1995. Both of whom never came home. And one of the people who never came home was one of Jim's best friends, a guy called Donald Hutchings. So I sort of thrust this book into Mitchell's hands and I said, look, have a look at this. I'm going to drive off and go and look at the coast and give me a ring if you would let me come back and talk to you. And later that day he did bring me back. And he said, okay, you can come and sell yourself to me and I'll decide. And the rest is kind of history. I mean, the following five years, I got to know him and his wife, Kathy, very well. He introduced me to a lot of his professional and personal friends. And I think we did get to know each other extremely well. And I got to know the program and the beginnings, the genesis of the program and the rollout of the program very, very well. And it was a very interesting period of time. Getting to know someone who is labeled publicly as a torturer and trying to decide myself whether or not he is. And at the same time wanting to try and reach out to the man who's mostly in communicative the rest of his life. It was like in the Bantanamo. He would never spoken at all beyond his lawyers and the fact that he was in communication with me like a red bag to go. And I just thought we have to, there has to be some way to communicate with him. And eventually I did find a way to communicate with him and he has over the past five years answered practically every question that I've asked him. So yes, the product of all of that work is this book. So what, I mean, so, what are the, what are your key findings? I think the most one of the most shocking things to me is that I should preface this by saying that what with Jim I found he had a huge number of very good friends, both in the military when he was at survival school and in the CIA. I mean, genuine friends who are not just there to kind of like cover up and gather around him to just provide the truth. But I think he, he brought into the CIA something that was, was totally inappropriate, which was using survival school and not torture techniques against real life. One of the things I found most shocking when I met him and talked over multiple days over five years and to his former colleagues in Sears school was that they really did literally transplant Sears school from Spokane, Washington to the jungles outside of Chiang Mai. So they rebuilt everything that was in Sears school. They called that their school Spokane, and they have like fake military uniforms and fake decals on their, on their rusting vehicles and, and sort of set, set procedures for the power to teach us military personnel to survive torture, and then give them and to give them the tools as they call them the tools to come back from the edge and to survive and return to the US with honor. So half of that was basically unloaded on Abbott's beta without him being given the tools to come back. So they did literally turn it on its head and he Mitchell will always say that he didn't reverse engineer the survival school into enhanced irrigation but but he really did. I mean, every aspect of the program was based on the survival school from the fact they built a booze, which was bright white in the school with with a shadow curtain and light from cold and music. I mean everything was sort of transplanted, even the ideas that you have to have a safe word that you could stop things if it all got too much and survival school it was shout out flight surgeon if I'm the person being tortured. And for Abbott's beta, his safe phrase was to tell Washington what it wanted to know that the sad things that he didn't know what Washington wanted to know. So there really wasn't a safe word for him. But it was just, I found it shocking that that all of these military professionals who all had very very successful careers believed that they could turn this whole thing on its head and get extract real genuine and actionable results out of war on terror detain me by subjecting by sending him to CSU. I also found I interviewed someone who I've called us in the book, who was the head of special missions inside the cancer center at CIA. And he ran all the he ran the rendition detention interrogation group. And Jim introduced me to him. And he had never spoken for and has never spoken since and in fact, I think he was prevented from giving evidence during saline versus Mitchell which is the civil suit that was in 2017 brought by two former detainees and the family of its pain and he died. Gus was extremely regulatory and explained how the whole black site network was rolled out, how they persuaded countries to agree to sign up to lend facilities, how they built the facilities. They tried to video everything in case someone died. So they have evidence that that that they haven't deliberately tried to kill someone and how when they got to the end game stage. I what do you do with these people that you've subjected to enhanced interrogation, aka torture. How did you put them for the rest of their lives. And he recounted this very interesting conversation he had with the top people, big boys of CIA so seven boys like to get some good internet. And he said that he came to the meeting before options, which was one was keep them in CIA facility forever. And then sending them to the third commentary forever. Third was to let them go. And the fourth was to prosecute them. And somebody at the meeting piped up and said, Well, what's what about the fifth option. He said I don't have a fifth option. And this person who is we're in Nameless said, Why don't we just kill them. So there were quite a few regulations like that which I found a little bit alarming. I think it was having met an interview so many people connected to the program I think that my overall feeling is that it just became like kind of packed mentality that everybody was in it together. And if anyone ever says who's responsible, should someone be prosecuted. I don't think you can point to any one person because it was just kind of grew into this beast. Everyone who was co-opted into whatever element, whether you were a nurse or a doctor or interrogator or debrief or subject matter expert, everybody kind of got stuck into the horrible rolling ball. And the other thing that I put together in great detail in the book is how, how the CIA enhanced irrigation program absolutely definitely led to abuses in the US military as well. So one of the first things that Jim Mitchell said to me, when he let me in his house, he said I don't want to be involved in a film or a book where I'm connected to Abbey Grape because the CIA program was totally legal. And what they did there was illegal and has nothing to do with what we did. But sadly, if you read the book, you will see that the same people, particularly Bruce Justin, and people from the Joint Personal Recovery Agency and from CS schools were involved in putting together training programs, training materials, training with CIA, training interrogators going to Guantanamo, training interrogators at Bagram and then interrogators who went to Abbey Grape as well. So the whole thing, Jim can rightly say I didn't design what went wrong at Abbey Grape, but he has to accept the responsibility that he created something which got out of control basically. Kenny, I missed the person who was running rendition, what's the name of that person? I can't give his real name, but I've hit the name I've given him in the book is Gus. Okay, got it. So for the audience, like who, who was his average abader and kind of what, what was the, how was he understood at the time he was captured and how is he, how do you understand him now? I think at the time, like I said, at the time he was captured, he really was the wrong person in the wrong place, he was in the wrong place. With, with a son been loving on the run after Torah Bora, Zahra here disappeared, all the big names, apart from number 395, who had been killed, Abbey Grape, who was killed in Afghanistan. There was no real kind of focus of who to go after. And, and many people in CIA have said openly and to me that there was a very limited understanding of al-Qaeda's senior structure at that in those early months. But Abbey Zabeda who had been a logistics guy in Peshawar, Pakistan, and whose job was to pick up someone who wanted to come to Jihad training, check them out. Get them from the airport, bring them to his house of martyrs, which is guest house in Peshawar, check them out again, send them on for the training camps, keep their passports while they're away. I mean, he did that for hundreds, probably thousands of different young men wanting to train for Jihad for all manner of different reasons. So because his name and his telephone number and later his phone, sorry, his photograph was widely known. He was one name that the US government and the CIA had latched on to, but when they captured him six months after 911 he was the first big catch. And, and basically everything was thrown at him. So he was just for reasons I believe are the wrong reasons in that he needed to be made bigger than a big a monster. They need to turn him into a monster. It's now they've bought the monster and this is the man who's going to tell us about the next second wave of attacks. So he became overnight number three in Al Qaeda, he became a financier and a planner of 911. He became the plotter of the so-called Millennium Plot in Jordan and US in December 1999. He supposedly had knowledge of all previous al-Qaeda attacks. He was a senior lieutenant to his arm bin Laden. This was all presented to the Department of Justice, in order to justify enhanced interrogation. He was also allegedly resistance trained, so traditional interrogation wouldn't work. He allegedly wrote the, what's now called the Manchester manual, which is an Al Qaeda training guide, which gave, among other things, lessons in how to have to deal with being tortured. So they turned him into this big fish as they called him and got permission to subject him to some of the most brutal torture techniques, I think, that have ever been written about. But gradually, and in fact, even before the legal authorizations were in place, a lot of most almost all of these allegations fell away. And eventually the CIA and the US government quietly dropped their claims against him. And so now he remains in Guantanamo, never charged with anything, because he facilitated training. He didn't train people himself. He looked after their clothes and passports while they went for training. But he did not do any of the things that he was accused of doing at the time of the capture and for the period during which he was tortured. But he's never charged and he will probably never get out because of what was done to him. And what else can I say about him? He's the state of Palestinian, whose family was displaced three times before he was even born. So he grew up in Saudi Arabia as a refugee, not not as in a refugee refugee camp, but someone living in a fairly middle class family, but never would never become a citizen of Saudi Arabia. And that was a rise which led to a lot of arguments with his father who wanted to look forward and try and become assimilate with Saudi society and he was constantly arguing with his father, why aren't you backing Gaza fighting the Israelis and getting an occupied Palestine back. So there was a huge clash within the family. And that was one of the main reasons he left home at the age of 1819 and went travelling and ended up in Pakistan, ended up in a G-hope camp. I'm not quite sure if this is me, because what's going to happen when the G-hope party is over and I've only got one leg, who's going to take me to the bathroom. This is why he rose in his diary age 19. And that kind of come true, but he just got, he got sucked in and he found a place for himself in this world as a facilitator. And he became quite important on which he had seen as the person that you always had to get past the age of 18 to go for training. But in terms of plotting and planning attacks and wanting to attack America, that is never his thing at all. Is he, I mean, is he releasable in the sense that, I mean, is there a policy about, I mean, if he hasn't been prosecuted. And what, and the stated policy of the Obama administration, the Biden administration is the closure of Guantanamo and it looks like there's a plea deal discussion with a lot of the 9-11 plotters which would sort of end this military tribunal process. If it was successful. So I mean, is there a game plan for what the future might hold for him? At the moment, I wouldn't say there is an active game plan. Other than what I understand is that he, all of the detainees who remain at Guantanamo, whose situations have not been determined yet, have all had periodic review board hearings in the last year. And quite a lot of people have been recommended for transfer as a consequence of that. I know that he had his periodic review board hearing in July last year. And normally, you get the results in two weeks. And every other time he's had one before, I think he's had three previously. He's been told like within a week. No, you're not going anywhere. You're still an enemy combat combatants. And that being the bar, you have to pass the bar of no longer being an incompetent to be recommended transfer among other issues. And so I think he's very hoping his legal team is very hopeful that because it's now months since that process happens, and they still haven't been given an answer. I think that hopefully at some stage in a not too distant future, you might be recommended for transfer. But that then begins next process, which is, where's he going to go? Because he says he's the state of the Palestinian. This is his birthright. He's never had a nationality anywhere. So, so if the US government was to decide that they'd let him go, he would have to he and his legal team would have to find a place to take him. Which is not impossible. I mean, there are countries like Qatar, that have taken. And obviously, you know, all that this is Taliban guys from Guantanamo. There are possible options that I think it's going to be quite a long drawn out process. But I think the best hope for him is the fact that Mohammed Khatami, who was the military's kind of lab rats to for want of a better phrase. The first person who was subjected to the military version of the house in house interrogation, which was called counter resistance techniques that they did the same thing. When he was asked in widely reported he has been repatriated to Saudi Arabia last month, I think. And so I think there is light at the end of the tunnel, but I think it's the tunnels not quite at the end yet. If you want to submit questions, please use the slide box located to the right of the video. Thank you. So, I mean, obviously, there was a Senate intelligence report which, you know, did a pretty very thorough account of the program. What did you find in, I mean, what they were looking at the entire program. How does your book differ or supplement what was in the Senate intelligence report? I don't think it differs. Because I think Dan Jones and the people who worked with him did an incredible job, although obviously we've only seen the 500 page summary of the 6000 page reports. I think I would hope that this book complements the Senate talk report because we, we, and when I say we, I mean, Alex give me and people that were in the film, Ray Bonner, who's another outstanding American journalist, they submitted a lot of FOIA requests. And so we have access to a huge number of more CIA declassified documents. So just through the time passing, the last five years we've managed to obtain a lot more documents, which I'm sure Dan Jones and his colleagues had access to but that were redacted or that were in the portions of the main report that we haven't been able to see. So there is a lot of, I've quoted a lot from those documents in the book, which just, I mean, it's a very slow process of just pushing the door out and getting a little bit more about certain days or times or moments or movements or renditions. And I think because Jim Mitchell allowed me to speak to many of his friends in the program. That also pushed the door open a little bit further and people speaking quite frankly who had never talked before from the CIA side. And I know with one of Dan Jones's issues. Well, it's time of justice, it's time that one of the issues in the Senate sort of report was the CIA complained that they never had a chance to speak to the investigators. Whether they would have told truth is another issue, but the people who are actually sort of working in the program, not the politicians on the 7th floor. The people working in the program have given me a lot more information about how things happen and who signed things off and what dates certain things happen. Jim always says all the CIA is very funny about dates. And one of the big things I did in the book at the beginning of putting it together was to put together a complete as possible chronology because there are lots of very fuzzy periods that are very legitimate reasons as far as the CIA is concerned, such as when did, when did the CIA start talking about enhanced interrogation. Because the official narrative is that is that they captured Abtabeda. He was a resistance trained. He shot down. He was not going to give up that information about second wave of attacks without being thoroughly roughly handled. And therefore the CIA then developed enhanced interrogation to get him talking to save lives. And that narrative, when you actually put together the proper chronology, forced pieces. And so that is one thing that I've done in the book, which is, you can read between the lines within what you can read in the Senate talk, which we thought summary. But there's a lot more information in the book about kind of what happened exactly when what point did they actually start talking about getting off, taking the gloves off. Practically a week after my mother, basically, there was a lot of revenge involved. Nothing to do with Abtabeda and whether or not he was resisting. So, on how is Abtabeda doing now. Well, you'd have to officially talk to his legal team. But I believe from the correspondence that I have been able to exchange that he is thoroughly frustrated. Furious that this is being going on. It was 20 years. It was the 20th anniversary of his capture at the end of last month. I think he is hopeful. I mean, he wants to get out. He wants to believe that he can have a part of his life at the end of his life as a free man. Unlike some of the people who've been charged 911 who have no prospect of going to be freed like Kalashen Hamid, who I know has been reported. He doesn't want to leave Guantanamo because he doesn't want to end up on the lockdown 23 as a day in ADI Explorer, which is in Sydney. But I believe he is a lot better than Abtabeda, a lot better than he was. He still hasn't got proper medical support. He still suffers from seizures, I believe. He still has waterboarding nightmares. He has very substantial physical injuries to his leg and abdomen. He has a hole in his head, which is not the reference to the CIA at all, but it's exacerbated because he's walled so many times. He has no interest in retribution, no interest in going back to Jihad. He wants to have a quiet, normal life somewhere and write his stories. I mean, he's writing two books at the moment, one of which is called, I think, A Terrorist. He wrote Diary of a Quote's Terrorist Asalga, which is a kind of rerun of all of his diaries, because he wrote diaries before he was captured, and then about a year and a half after his capture he was allowed to restart his diary. It gets taken away now and again, but he's a prolific diarist, if that's the correct word, and I know that he is working on putting together a book version of his diaries. He also has drawn a huge number of drawings, some are artistic drawings, some are torture drawings, but he wants to bring out a book of his torture drawings of which there are 43 drawings, and I think that is hopefully quite imminent. I've seen the pictures, and they are truly shocking, and also show, if we believe him, choose to believe him, that the CIA, and I'm not blaming Jim Mitchell or Bruce Jessen specifically, but CIA interrogators went way beyond what was legally approved, and he has depicted some of the way beyond stuff in the drawings which hopefully will come out as a book in a not too distant future. So, there's the book, and then there's the film, what was the difference for you as a working on both, I mean, how do they, how do you, in a book you have, you know. That's much information. There are 240 pages in the film, you have two hours, so how do you, how did you manage that? Well, I was obviously not in charge of the film because the director's Alex Gibney, and Alex was very, very fascinated as I am in the process of what is good interrogation. So, that's the best way to get information from a terrorist, a murderer, a suspect, whatever, what is the right way of doing things. And so, the film focused very much on the first six months of Abbas Bay's capture, and focus very much on the huge tossing that developed very quickly between the CIA and the FBI, particularly in the form of Alice Dufan and James Mitchell going hammer and tongs in Thailand and who was in charge and who was going to get hands on with the detainee. And so the film sort of finishes really when the waterboarding, the enhanced interrogation of Abbas Bay finished in August 22, 2002. And Alex did a brilliant job of putting together in great detail kind of that very intense six months of a fear about the next wave of attacks, the arguments about how to interrogate this guy, see arguments about who the hell is he, is he dangerous, it doesn't know what's coming next, can he tell Washington what they want to know what they need to know. Can we, can we get it passed the law? I mean that's that's very much the focus, the intense focus of the film is that those months, immediately after his capture. Whereas with the book obviously I've got a lot more space, and, and can drive people into tedious, long distractions of detail with copious CIA documents quoted. I've followed Abbas Bay and other detainees who were subjected to the same enhanced interrogation technique, all the way up to the present day. He is the main focus of the book, but you start with this one person, and then his treatment where he almost dies becomes template for all high value detainees. And then he gets rolled out on ramping in our ship, and kind of sharing hammers, etc, etc, etc. So, so yes I go well beyond the first year and write up into the present day. And I mean both both exercises were really interesting, it was great working with Alex. I think we put together a really good film. It's also really nice to come away from that very collaborative, huge team process to be back on my own and writing what I wanted without someone saying you can't do that. And you've written a number of your books with Adrian Levy. How do you, and your partners, so how do you, how does that work. It's changed over the years. When we first started out, 30 years ago, 25 years ago, we used to put together a vague structure of a book, and then split it in half, which sounds crazy now. And we would, before we had kids, we used to do all the research together and travel around together, which was great. And then we go right well I'm going to do the six chapters, and usually the second six chapters, and then we kind of not talk for six months. And then we swap over and have huge arguments about, about who is written more rubbish and who has got stuff on the right track. And, but now it's evolved into a slightly different working arrangement whereby we've really Adrian's been working on a different book about Pakistan and Indian intelligence services. And he's, he helped me a lot with this book, but we kind of were running parallel projects. And then we swap over our manuscripts and have another huge fight. Well, it's been a very fruitful partnership because the exile is amazing book and so is the siege, the two books I've read of course the most recent ones. So we have some questions coming in one is, you mentioned Abou Zaveda's father did you make contact with the family while you're writing the book and I think the answer is yes. I did. The family. The family are in a really tricky position. I mean when I first started and I made contact with Abou Zaveda indirectly he said the last thing I want you to do is contact my family and if you do contact my family I want to speak to you, because I don't want them to be involved in this. I mean they still, and they wouldn't really want me to be talking about this actually, but they still live in Riyadh. They're still refugees. They still live on green card like a green card equivalent, which they have to renew every year, which could be withdrawn at any moment for any reason, even though his father and father has been living and working in between them for 50 years. He will never be a citizen. So I spoke, I spoke mostly to his eldest brother Mahir, who actually cropped up in some of his early diaries because Mahir was in Pakistan at the time that Abou Zaveda was first deciding to join Jihad as a cadet and go for training himself and Mahir who was trained in Faisalabad, trained to be a doctor, was sent to Peshawar and then into Afghanistan to try and get his wayward younger brother out and failed, but he has helped a little bit, but I wouldn't want to suggest the family has been actively involved in the book at all because his brother Hisham, who lives in the States, has helped me a lot because he's not in the same situation in Saudi Arabia, although he is also in a difficult situation because he's the third brother. He's also in a difficult situation because he is still a Palestinian refugee as well. So he doesn't have a green card and he's been a citizen, he's lived in the States for 20 years and is not a citizen and is still on deportation order thanks to his brother being picked up by the CIA. But again, no one can find anywhere to send him, but Hisham was very helpful to me. Another question, which is so it's a question around the, you know, since the United States is withdrawn from Afghanistan. You know, does that change the sort of legal framework under which is obviously, you know, hostilities in Afghanistan are over and part of the theory of the case of Quantana would be that people would be held there while until hostilities ended so I mean, there hasn't been a drone strike in Pakistan as you know for many, many years now. There are no American troops in Afghanistan. So, has that affected any of this. You're better talking to the legal teams for the guys who've been charging 911 about the detail because I know there have been some challenges from them to the Biden administration to say, look, war on terror is now over. In speeches, war on terror is over, you've withdrawn from Afghanistan. So, if the war on terror is over, these enemy competence that you're keeping in Guantanamo. If they can't provably be shown to be continuing to pose a risk to the United States that there is no legal justification for holding them. I don't believe that those arguments have succeeded as of yet, but that's definitely something that have a space team will be working on. But I mean, he doesn't even have a case. He's militarily Militia Council assistant me. He's not like television, he has a case and you can fight a case but if you don't have a case and you haven't even been able to have habeas rights and we know from the Supreme Court hearing and discussion recently that there's still, he's a very long way from any kind of legal justice or legal discussion because he's he's in limbo. And I guess that the fact that the war on terror is over and Afghanistan has been left behind by almost all American food. It's something that they will, that his legal team will use, but it's not going to get him out. That's a heated question from the audience what would you have President Biden do with respect to the remaining detainees a gitmo and to redress the wrongs that have been committed. Huge question. I think it's, I think people who have been charged and are in the middle of negotiations, those those negotiations need to come to some kind of conclusion and result that's agreeable to everyone. I believe that the deal that's on the table at the government side is so unreasonable that it's not even really being properly considered. But that should come from the 919s. I believe people who've been approved transfer of which I think there are 18 detainees who've been approved for transfer some of them years back. Some of them will be transferred elsewhere to another country. I imagine their teams are working on finding the right places to send them and I know there are certain kind of like anyone who's from Yemen can't get back to Yemen because there's a no deal arrangement that you can't get back to Yemen. But there are other options like Qatar and Saudi Arabia with the Sea Radicalization Programme. I don't know how good that is. So that, so there's 18, I think 18 who've been approved for transfer. There are five people who are negotiating at the moment. There's people like her magic pond has done a deal, which needs to come to the fruition. And naturally, I think it's on his trial is almost concluded. But the forever prisoners, the seven, I think, remaining detainees who don't have a face like Abbas baby. How to deal with it. I mean, I think they need to, they need to either be charged, or they need to be approved for transfer, and someone needs to find places to go and live out their lives. Not being a lawyer, that's the best I can offer. I think, I think, I think, while sorry, while Granthana is still open, it's just, it's just a constant reminder. It's just like a constant saw that of what was done that was wrong and like last week, I think there are some of these accusations flying out to the states about war crimes in Ukraine and obviously Peter, President Putin, all of his supporters and poetry around and you can just say, well, who are you to tell us about war crimes. Look what you've done yourself and here's the living proof because there are also some of them are still sitting there down in Granthana Bay. So I think it's, it's a problem for the US government that has to, it has to close. So, Jim Mitchell, you said you spend a lot of time with him. He's very prominent in the film of the book as well as the book itself. I mean, how was it was his reaction to the book in the film. He's very angry with me. So he, when we did spend lots of time together, not just me and him, me, him and his wife. I visited him, I visited them at their home multiple times. And when, when he did watch the film and he got very angry, he said, I thought you were friends, Kathy. And I said, well, yes, I am a professional friend. I'm not a social friend. I don't just come to Florida to go to the canoeing and looking at alligators and there was, there's always been a reason for this friendship, which is that I have always made it clear that I was writing a book and making a film. And he now thinks that I have betrayed him. He thinks that I lied my way into his house, and then I used my access to him to get to his friends. And he thinks I've been very disingenuous, and I had a plan all along to turn him over. I was a journalist, which actually is not true, because I went into this story with a very open mind. And I tried not to have any come with any preconceptions about either Abbas Abedah or Dan Mitchell. I was very curious and interested to know about both of them and what it was like for both of them. So the first thought about the book and the film is kind of what would it have been like to have been in the interrogation cell in the torture room, whatever you call it. For those two particular individuals, although there are many, many other people in there, doctors, nurses, whatever, subject matter experts, but those two people are the people that locked eyes and spent a huge amount of time together over several months. And in fact, Mitchell went back and said I've debated many, many times, even after the CIA had handed the claims over to the Department of Defense. And so I wanted to approach them both as human beings. But Jim now thinks that I have basically turned him over and betrayed him. And he has the right to think like that, but I honestly did not have a preconceived notion about what I felt about him. I found it very difficult to watch him in giving his testimony at Guantanamo in January 2020, because I mean very well by then. And so he went down two weeks with Bruce Jessen to give testimony in the 9-11 pre-trial hearings. And I said to him before he went there, are you concerned about being back in the room with these guys who you talked to? Like for the first time in what, 15 years possibly? And he went, no, I don't know, it's fine, water up the ducts back. But to actually be sitting in the war port and seeing this interaction between him and them, back in the same room, A was really interesting. But B, it was really disturbing, because I'm afraid he just told so many lies. And he addressed them in a kind of way that you could just see was the kind of constant life. Just remember, we can come back, you're not out, you're still here, and it's never really over. And he was very rude, he was very racist, which, okay, I mean, kind of shaped how I just self-concessed, confessed, mastermind 9-11 and 3,000 people died, which was absolutely awful in shopping and not excusing that whatsoever. But I found it very difficult to reconcile the Jim Mitchell on the stand in Guantanamo with the Jim Mitchell at home in Florida. And that, for me, was a turning point. So that was two years ago. I mean, we were already tweaking the situation film and the book at that stage, but yes, it did kind of cloud my mind a little bit about him. And I told him, I told him that when we spoke again, I said, I was really shocked to see what you said on the stand and how you behave. One of the themes that I think of your book and also the Senate Intelligence Committee report and tell me if I'm wrong is that a kind of conventional wisdom is the Bush White House sort of forced this on the CIA and that's really, you know, John Rousseau and the Mamos and blah blah blah, but it seems that the reverse may have been true. Is that correct? It was totally coming from CIA, totally coming from CIA. John Rousseau, I know you have had quite a low opinion of him, but he, and he didn't know he was going to die last year, but he, I think he got to a point where he wanted, he felt he wanted just to come clean. And he was extremely, he was good in the film, but I interviewed him five or six times before the film, and he really did kind of just let it all out and was very, I think, 70% honest about what had happened. The whole impetus for the whole enhanced interrogation program and the way to handle high value, important, interesting detainees, not the Mickey Mouse detainees, as they were described in Guantanamo, but the sort of the bigness was something that the CIA wanted right from the beginning. We want to do this within days of 9-11. We're ready to leave this fight. It's not a military fight, it's a CIA intelligence-led gathering of inspiration, and once we catch these bad guys, we want the right to interrogate them in the way that we need to interrogate them. And I think I believe there was a whole narrative, there is a whole narrative constructed by the CIA retrospectively and at the time to lead the administration down the path that the CIA wanted to go. It all starts in Langley. It all starts with the CIA. I mean, if you look at, I was reading, it's the book of the weekend, but if you look at what the CIA presented to the Department of Justice in order to get this over the legal line to get permission to submit Abbas Bader to Enhanced Terrigation. I mean, it took four drafts and four or five months to actually get it legal. And there are so many lies in what the CIA presented to the Department of Justice and to the National Security Council and the National Security Advisor, to the President, to any general, from the litany of sort of the fake CV, to a sort of fanciful psychological profile of Abbas Bader, which basically said he's the toughest guy on earth, and he can withstand anything. And if we don't get him talking, thousands of people are going to die, and the blood's going to be on your hands. And, I mean, there was, there's a really interesting Inspector General report, no, Officer Public Responsibility Report from the Department of Justice, which quotes John Belliger saying things like, in reflection, saying things like we felt completely boxed in, and there was huge pressure coming from the CIA to make this legal. And I mean, I mean, lies in terms of other lies were things like the CIA program, no one ever suffered psychological damage. No US military personnel suffered long-term psychological damage from going through the CIA program, which is totally untrue. And there was the resident expert on CIA and cortisol and stress levels, the guy who was Charles Morgan, Professor, sorry, Charles Morgan, he was not consulted, he published widely at this stage, saying that the CIA program is dangerous, people died in the CIA program, students in the training exercise. And that was completely covered up in what was submitted to John New and the Justice Department. The complete reverse was reported. I mean, the Martin Seligman, the professor, and the owner of the famous Learned Helpfulness Theory. I mean, he was, he was led down a ridiculous path by CIA by Jim and Bruce and other people. He was led to say, Learned Helpfulness, as in the dog experiments, ceases and a dog stroke person can go back to being normal once the conditions are removed. And this is not what Martin Seligman discovered at all. And they were not, the CIA wasn't honest with him either. He thought that the CIA wanted his expertise in case American service personnel, in case American service personnel were captured by Al Qaeda, when in fact there was already a stand to subject Al Qaeda detainees to Learned Helpfulness type of experiment. And they persuaded him to say something that wasn't true. And also, for example, the way it presented as a medically led program. So the CIA doctors and medical research all backs that this is the right way to go. This is what the Department of Justice is told. Whereas the Office of Medical Service at the CIA and chief psychologist at the CIA and Professor Charles Morgan, who was the leading expert on CIA. None of those people consulted. So it all started at Langley. Another question which relates to so it. Let me ask you a question then I added a little something to it which is so in the in the Alex Gibney film, I was abated as time at the CIA black site in Thailand, sort of the focus that his time in Eastern Europe was not in it was there a reason behind this and maybe just more generally, you know, what's the role of these countries like Thailand and Poland and Romania. I went to Thailand I think right to to look into some. Yes, yes, I mean I used to live in Thailand in fact I was actually in Chiang Mai when I was abated brought Chiang Mai. Because I didn't know the time I was living there. But yeah I went to Thailand. Well the role of the countries is that Gus, who was the man who had to go and find the country is not not Thailand that was pointed. The first role was to find countries that could be co-opted into lending some kind of innocuous building that could be used as a prison that didn't look like a prison, whether it's a riding stable in Lithuania, or a villa in Poland or a house in in the Chiang Mai. But I mean one of one of the key aspects of persuading countries was well a huge amount of money, $20 million in most cases, plus. To be, they, there's the I focused in on countries that wanted to get into NATO or NATO, and non member states that kind of thing, big political rubber stamps, and, and Thailand was rewarded with non member NATO ally status, if that's the right phrase, as a result of helping with that site. But I mean that that story was fascinating because I went to interview. I went to try and find out where the black side was three years ago. And I met the former chief special branch for a different reason. And I was actually talking to him about Zubair and Hanbali. And I said, oh, what about Abyssinia? Did you ever know where that black site was? And he had never talked to anybody. And he's very, very westernized, very entertaining, interesting guy, very clever guy. But no one had ever really asked him this question before. And he just kind of like, and he went, yes, basically my holiday home in Chiang Mai. And I said, Oh, tell me more. And, and so he gave me chapter and verse on kind of lending his slightly run down to the chicken coop style holiday home in the jungles outside Chiang Mai to the CIA. But yes, I mean to answer the bigger question, the work countries were identified that had sort of white pressure points that could be applied to them. So, techniques from the CIA, there's another question filtered from the CIA to Guantanamo in the military. Did you find any evidence they went to US local partner forces? Sorry, I don't understand the question. Well, so you mentioned that some of the CIA techniques migrated in the military. Evidence that they migrated to US partner forces. I did not investigate that. Personally, I mean, I looked very deeply into how enhanced to get EITs migrated out of the CIA and down to Guantanamo and to background and to be great. I mean, all I'd say is, is the rogue regimes like Duterte in the Philippines and lots of Modi is not a rogue regime but in India. Many, many dictatorial type regimes now, or after the enhanced interrogation program and at the grave scandals were exposed, I think felt unleashed and taxing the Prime Minister of Thailand. Actually, I cannot answer that question, but more specifically, taxing launched a war on drugs after the CIA was hosted. And I do know from the head of Thai special branch that and this war on drugs you probably remember it was 2004-2005 was really brutal. And it's about 2500 drug dealers were were murdered in the streets and then you would picture the newspapers every day of somebody being shot off their motorbike, whether they were guilty or not. It was a full runner to what happened in the Philippines under Duterte. But I do know from the head of Thai special branch that US military trainers at his request, who had worked in enhanced interrogation or interrogation style techniques within war on terror were dispatched to help tie the royal Thai police. So, yes, in that particular case, I can say that the war is the link and the war is the training of the past one. The book is The Forever Prisoner, the full and searing account of the CIA's most controversial covert programs. Kathy Scott Clark is the lead author with Adrian Levy. It's on sale tomorrow in the United States. And Kathy, we want to thank you very much for writing the book, for doing the film, and for speaking with us today. Bye.