Bowman, Marion (Spike) - Interview master file / Witness to Guantanamo / Duke Digital Repository

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[Male Interviewer] By introducing the project,

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and then I'll ask you those questions,

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those personal questions,

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to get some background on who you are.

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So, okay.

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Ready, okay.

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Good morning.

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We are very grateful to you for participating in

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the Witness to Guantanamo project.

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We invite you to speak of your experiences

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and involvement with detainees

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who were held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

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We're hoping to provide you with an opportunity

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to tell your story in your own words.

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We are creating an archive of stories

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so that people in America and around the world

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will have a better understanding

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of what you and others have experienced and observed.

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Future generations must know what happened at Guantanamo,

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and by telling your story,

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you're contributing to history.

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We appreciate your courage and willingness to speak with us.

0:50

At if any time during the interview,

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you want to take a break,

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just let us know and we can take a break.

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And if there's anything you say

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that you would like to retract,

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just let us know,

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and we can remove it.

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Now, I'd like to begin with just some basic information

1:04

as to your name,

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and hometown,

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and birth date and age.

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Yeah, my name is,

1:12

my real name is Marion Bowman.

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Most people call me Spike.

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I've been known as Spike most of my year, my life.

1:16

I originally come from a little town called Weiser in Idaho.

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I left there when I was 18,

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but still call it my home.

1:25

I'm 66 years old.

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I'm retired from the Navy.

1:30

I'm retired from the FBI,

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and I'm retired from the Director of National Intelligence.

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[Male Interviewer] Would you mind telling us

1:36

your birth date, just so we can-

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May 26, 1944.

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[Male Interviewer] And marital status?

1:42

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I'm married.

1:43

I have been married for 40 years,

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and I am, I have three children.

1:46

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[Male Interviewer] And education?

1:49

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I have a bachelor's degree with dual majors

1:50

from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon,

1:53

a master's degree from the University of Wisconsin,

1:55

a JD from the University of Idaho,

1:58

and an LLM from the George Washington University.

2:01

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[Male Interviewer] Why don't we begin with

2:05

just a little background,

2:06

since you had a really illustrious career?

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If you begin with how it all began with your naval work,

2:09

going up to the present?

2:14

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Well, I go back into the Vietnam era,

2:15

and I was subject to the draft at the time.

2:17

And so, I, looking at options,

2:21

it appeared that I would be drafted.

2:24

Although I wouldn't have been,

2:26

because a lottery came in just after I went into the Navy.

2:28

But I went into the Navy,

2:31

went to Officer Candidate School,

2:33

and became an intelligence officer.

2:34

I spent six years in military intelligence,

2:37

and then the Navy

2:40

was looking to try to send

2:43

a handful of people to law school,

2:45

and I was selected as one of

2:48

the first about 17 people to go to law school

2:50

on full paying allowances.

2:53

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[Male Interviewer] And naval,

2:56

how long were you in naval intelligence?

2:57

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I was in naval intelligence for six years,

2:58

and then converted to the Judge Advocate General's Corps,

3:01

but spent most of my career

3:05

still supporting intelligence operations

3:07

on two sort of different types of assignments.

3:10

One was as the Head of International Law

3:14

at the Naval War College,

3:15

and one, as a diplomat at the embassy in Rome, Italy.

3:18

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[Male Interviewer] Are these subsequent

3:21

to your law degree?

3:23

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Those were all subsequent to the law degree, yes.

3:25

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[Male Interviewer] So when you finished your law degree,

3:27

what exactly did you do?

3:28

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Well, my first assignment was court-martial work

3:30

at Treasure Island in San Francisco.

3:33

I was pulled out of there after about two years

3:36

to become the first Judge Advocate

3:38

assigned to the National Security Agency,

3:40

mainly because of my intelligence background,

3:42

and most of my work after that

3:45

revolved around intelligence work,

3:48

and for the next several years,

3:50

prosecuting espionage spies, agents.

3:52

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[Male Interviewer] And where does

3:56

your FBI experience come in?

3:57

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Well, the, I spent a military career, basically,

3:59

as a judge advocate,

4:04

supporting intelligence operations,

4:04

and particularly espionage issues.

4:06

And,

4:09

in 1995,

4:10

the, when I came back from the tour in Rome, Italy,

4:12

the FBI contacted me

4:15

and asked me to come down and interview,

4:17

because they were looking for

4:19

someone with intelligence background,

4:20

and a legal degree,

4:23

to try and help them build up

4:24

their national security law capabilities.

4:26

And they offered me a senior executive service position,

4:29

and I accepted that.

4:32

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[Male Interviewer] What exactly were your

4:33

responsibilities at that time?

4:36

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I was responsible for providing legal advice

4:38

for all national security investigations,

4:41

espionage,

4:44

industrial espionage,

4:45

terrorism,

4:47

weapons of mass destruction,

4:47

some of the fledgling cyber issues at the time,

4:50

which were very new back in in those days.

4:52

But I was the senior lawyer responsible for all of that.

4:56

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[Male Interviewer] Did you ever interface with the CIA?

5:00

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A great deal of interface with the CIA.

5:03

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[Male Interviewer] And can you explain how that worked?

5:06

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Well, the CIA and the FBI are

5:08

basically

5:11

partners at arm's length for many things.

5:15

The CIA handles

5:18

the types of issues that the FBI works on abroad,

5:21

and the FBI handles the types of issues

5:24

CIA works on in the United States.

5:26

They overlap significantly.

5:30

There's a handoff of investigative types of work

5:32

from one to the other,

5:36

whenever the subjects move from one venue to another.

5:37

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[Male Interviewer] And as we were getting closer to 9/11,

5:42

did you have any hints that

5:44

things might be happening like that?

5:46

Or did you have any,

5:48

did the FBI have any sense that something,

5:49

a terrorist plot could occur?

5:52

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No, not at all, actually.

5:55

We did have a significant focus

5:56

on terrorist issues in the United States

5:58

back in those days,

6:00

but the experience that we had was that

6:02

most people in the United States

6:05

who were associated with terrorist activities

6:07

were here to raise money,

6:10

to recruit,

6:12

and in those days,

6:14

when communications were different,

6:15

so service communications hubs,

6:17

because communications in the United States were cheaper

6:19

than they were in other parts of the world.

6:21

So what we saw here were basically

6:24

logistical support to terrorism.

6:25

We did not see much in the way of

6:28

anybody who wanted to cause harm in the United States.

6:31

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[Male Interviewer] So when 9/11 occurred,

6:35

where were you,

6:37

and what happened that day in your life?

6:38

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I was sitting at my desk

6:41

giving advice on an espionage case,

6:42

and the first airplane flew into the

6:44

World Trade towers,

6:48

and we thought it was some kind of an accident at first,

6:50

and then a few minutes later,

6:55

my secretary called around the corner and said,

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"Another plane just hit."

6:58

And at that point,

7:00

everybody went to their own place to work.

7:02

I went to the Command Center,

7:05

where I basically spent the next six months.

7:07

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[Male Interviewer] Where was the Command Center, in DC?

7:09

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In DC, in the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

7:11

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[Male Interviewer] And what was your responsibilities

7:14

during those six months?

7:16

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I was again responsible for providing legal advice

7:16

for the investigations that ensued from that.

7:19

Practically all of my work at that point

7:23

went into counterterrorism types of advice.

7:26

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[Male Interviewer] Can you be more specific?

7:30

What exactly were you advising on?

7:32

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Mostly the investigations,

7:34

how to go about the,

7:36

investigating different persons,

7:38

different organizations.

7:40

It's very, very difficult

7:42

in our culture and in our law

7:44

to investigate organizations,

7:46

because of the First Amendment.

7:48

It's also very difficult to investigate people

7:50

without a predicated cause,

7:53

for, not only for privacy reasons,

7:56

but because of the regulations that

7:57

the Department of Justice provides the FBI

8:00

in order to conduct their work.

8:03

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[Male Interviewer] Well, who specifically

8:06

were you investigating,

8:08

or were you assigned to investigate

8:09

during those six months?

8:11

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Literally thousands of people around the country.

8:14

It was not so much an investigation of each individual.

8:17

It was knocking on doors,

8:20

trying to find out if people knew anything.

8:22

After 9/11,

8:25

we had no idea whether there were

8:26

other types of activities that were planned,

8:28

that were in,

8:32

there were other people in the United States,

8:33

and the all-out

8:35

impetus was to try to prevent any further harm.

8:38

And so, virtually,

8:41

I would say half of the FBI was redirected

8:44

to go talk to people around the country,

8:48

to knock on doors,

8:50

to go talk to imams,

8:52

to go find people who might know something

8:54

about anything that was going on in the United States.

8:57

You know, we did not know,

9:00

we, the FBI, did not know that

9:03

the 19 hijackers were in the United States.

9:05

There was a glitch in communications with the CIA.

9:09

The CIA did know of two of them

9:12

that had come into the United States,

9:14

but that was not passed onto the FBI.

9:16

And so, when we found out that

9:19

they had been living in the United States,

9:21

there was an all-out push to find out

9:22

where they had been,

9:24

who they had been in contact with.

9:26

And interestingly,

9:28

they had been all over the United States.

9:29

So there were many doors to knock on.

9:31

There were many places to go.

9:33

They had engaged prostitutes.

9:35

They had been stopped for speeding.

9:37

One of them had actually reported a crime.

9:39

You know, there were just many, many things

9:42

to go try to run down,

9:44

and we didn't have the luxury of time.

9:46

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[Male Interviewer] And in the Command Center,

9:49

what exactly was your responsibility?

9:50

To gather all this information,

9:52

or to assign people to-

9:53

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No, my job and that of my,

9:56

the attorneys that worked for me

9:58

was to be a resource.

10:00

We were there around the clock, literally,

10:01

to, for, to talk to agents when information came in,

10:05

to help them understand what they could do,

10:11

where they could go,

10:13

whether they needed to call on other resources.

10:15

You know, for example, the immigration and,

10:18

what was then the INS,

10:21

the Immigration and Naturalization Service,

10:22

was a huge part of all of this.

10:24

And we had to,

10:28

after the, all the airlines were shut down,

10:29

we had to get some people, for example,

10:32

back to Washington, DC, to help us,

10:35

and had to enlist the help of military aircraft

10:37

to get them here.

10:40

So there was a lot of investigation like that with, went on.

10:41

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[Male Interviewer] Were you involved in

10:44

sending the Saudis back to Saudi Arabia right after 9/11?

10:45

Was that an FBI-

10:49

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We didn't send them back.

10:51

The, if you're talking about

10:52

the Bin Laden family out of Boston,

10:54

we were involved in making sure that nothing happened

10:57

in their trying to get back.

11:00

The, Director Freeh, at the time,

11:03

took a very personal interest in making sure

11:05

that their desire to leave

11:08

was not hampered in any way.

11:10

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[Male Interviewer] Did that seem odd,

11:12

that the family would have flight privileges

11:13

and no one else did?

11:17

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It wasn't a question of flying around the United States.

11:20

So, we had planes that were flying.

11:23

The question was,

11:27

in this case, was simply a plane

11:29

that was flying outside the United States,

11:31

going away from us,

11:33

and of course there were, you know,

11:35

there, we knew what the plane was.

11:36

We knew who the pilots were.

11:38

We knew who the family was,

11:40

and we were talking, we're talking about an extended family.

11:42

So there were a lot of people,

11:44

women, children, and so forth.

11:46

It was, and the people were personally known

11:48

to Director Freeh,

11:51

so we were not concerned about this flight.

11:52

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[Male Interviewer] Did you work with Director Freeh?

11:55

Were you close to him when-

11:57

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I saw Director Freeh probably every day.

11:59

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[Male Interviewer] And when people stood,

12:02

when we dropped flyers over Afghanistan,

12:05

were you aware of that?

12:08

Is that part of your responsibility, too,

12:09

to know what we were doing

12:12

in capturing people in Afghanistan?

12:13

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It was, part of my responsibility

12:16

was trying to help

12:18

the very few agents who were over there.

12:21

When

12:25

Afghanistan occurred,

12:26

there was very little known in the world about Al-Qaeda,

12:28

and the greatest repository of information about Al-Qaeda

12:32

resided in the New York Field Office of the FBI.

12:36

We sent a couple of agents from the New York Field Office

12:40

to Bagram Air Force base

12:44

very soon after Bagram was set up.

12:46

And it was,

12:49

the purpose was simply to give the military commanders there

12:51

an understanding of what Al-Qaeda was,

12:56

and an understanding of who we knew

12:58

who were associated with Al-Qaeda,

13:00

anything we knew about their plans,

13:02

designs,

13:04

organization,

13:04

and so forth.

13:05

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[Male Interviewer] Did you know,

13:06

when they were being picked up

13:08

and taken to Bagram and Kandahar,

13:09

were you aware of that at the time?

13:11

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Yes, I, we were aware of it.

13:13

We only had, as I say,

13:15

two agents on the ground at the time.

13:17

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[Male Interviewer] Well, some of the detainees

13:20

we interviewed,

13:21

all of 'em actually,

13:22

went through Bagram or Kandahar on their way to Guantanamo,

13:23

and most of 'em told us how they were

13:26

mistreated and even tortured

13:29

in both those cities, or Air Force bases,

13:31

before they came to Guantanamo.

13:34

Was the FBI present at that time,

13:36

and were they aware of it?

13:38

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I received calls,

13:39

and others in the operational chains of command

13:40

received calls from the agents in,

13:45

that were forward deployed,

13:49

and eventually there became,

13:51

there were more than two,

13:52

but we got a lot of concerns from

13:54

the FBI agents who were there

13:57

specifically saying,

13:59

"We aren't sure what they're doing,

14:01

"but what we hear is not good.

14:02

"It's stuff that we would not do.

14:05

"We want to know what we're supposed to do.

14:07

"We're here.

14:09

"You know, what should we do?"

14:10

And our basic advice to them was,

14:11

"Do not be involved in anything that goes

14:14

"beyond the scope of what you could lawfully do

14:16

"in the United States,"

14:19

and there-

14:21

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[Male Interviewer] What about having them report

14:22

what was unlawfully being done?

14:24

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They were not witnesses to this.

14:27

They were, their instructions were to stay

14:29

as far away from it as possible,

14:31

because we did not want the FBI

14:33

to be associated with any of that type of activity.

14:35

Whether it was torture or not

14:39

is, was irrelevant to the FBI,

14:41

because there's a lot of activity short of torture

14:44

that the FBI cannot and will not engage in.

14:47

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[Male Interviewer] Wouldn't the FBI

14:51

be concerned about other American citizens, if you will,

14:52

torturing these people?

14:56

Wouldn't the FBI want to be involved, too?

14:59

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The FBI was very concerned about it.

15:04

I don't know what was done at the highest level.

15:08

I know that Director Mueller was personally involved

15:11

in briefing this to the President.

15:15

He saw the President literally every single morning,

15:17

and these were issues that were brought up,

15:21

and we were,

15:24

as, from, when I speak from a distance when I say this,

15:27

because I was not part of this,

15:30

very few people were part of those discussions,

15:32

but I think that we were basically told,

15:34

"This is not the FBI's concern.

15:37

"This is a military concern.

15:39

"You leave it to the military."

15:40

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[Male Interviewer] And because it's under

15:44

the word I keep hearing, this "need to know,"

15:46

if the FBI does not need to know about this,

15:49

the FBI just goes off the page

15:51

and lets the military handle this,

15:54

or the CIA handle this.

15:56

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We were, that's the way the FBI

15:57

was instructed to leave it.

15:59

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[Male Interviewer] Did you have any involvement in

16:06

the FBI's interrogation of John Walker Lindh,

16:09

which happened around this time, too?

16:12

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No, I did not.

16:15

Peter

You weren't aware of that,

16:16

when John Walker Lindh was captured?

16:17

You must've been aware of that.

16:19

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I was aware of the capture.

16:20

Frankly, Lindh was a very small speck

16:23

on my radarscope at the time.

16:26

We were more concerned about

16:28

trying to prevent harm in the United States

16:29

than we were about, you know,

16:32

one American that was captured in Afghanistan.

16:34

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[Male Interviewer] And when people from Afghanistan

16:38

who were held in Bagram and Kandahar

16:41

were then shipped to Guantanamo,

16:43

the FBI was aware of that, right?

16:45

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The FBI was quite aware of that,

16:48

and it changed,

16:50

to some degree,

16:52

the way of our thinking about what was going on.

16:53

The FBI has a Behavioral Science Unit,

16:57

which does a lot of different things,

17:02

but among the things that it does do

17:04

is it tries to figure out

17:06

how best to do an interrogation

17:09

for a particular person.

17:12

And usually it concentrates on an individual,

17:14

so that, you know, they learn about

17:17

an individual's background.

17:20

You know, what his likes and dislikes were,

17:22

what his family was like,

17:24

who he grew up with.

17:25

Does he likes sports?

17:25

You know, what does, food does he like?

17:26

Everything,

17:28

and try to develop a line of questioning for agents

17:29

to better elicit, you know, cooperation from a person.

17:32

And it's very much a rapport-building type of activity.

17:38

When agent, when individuals began showing up at Guantanamo,

17:43

a number of our behavioral scientists

17:48

were sent down to Guantanamo

17:51

to try and help them establish

17:53

a protocol for doing interrogations

17:56

that the FBI has found successful,

18:00

and were basically told to go pound sand.

18:02

"This is not a, it's not an FBI thing,

18:04

"it's a military thing,

18:07

"and we'll do it our way."

18:08

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[Male Interviewer] Who's they, who told you?

18:09

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The military in

18:11

Guantanamo told them that we're not,

18:14

told the behavioral scientists,

18:17

"We're not interested in this."

18:18

The behavioral scientists came back to Quantico,

18:20

where they're stationed,

18:23

and called me,

18:25

because I was retired military.

18:26

I was very well known in the Pentagon,

18:29

and I was the,

18:32

an official liaison for significant purposes

18:33

between the FBI and the Department of Defense.

18:38

And they called me,

18:40

on the assumption that

18:42

I would be able to do something about this.

18:43

And frankly, I thought I could.

18:45

I called up the Deputy General Counsel for Intelligence

18:48

at the Department of Defense,

18:52

who I assumed would be handling this.

18:53

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[Male Interviewer] Who?

18:55

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It was Bob Deitz, at the time.

18:57

He was on loan from the National Security Agency,

18:58

where he was a General Counsel.

19:00

Bob told me that this was not on his plate,

19:02

that it had been taken over by the General Counsel

19:05

and the Deputy General Counsel,

19:08

and he was not working the issue.

19:09

So I called the Deputy General Counsel at the time, and-

19:12

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[Male Interviewer] Who's that?

19:16

-

Told,

19:16

Dan Dell'Orto.

19:22

Dell'Orto.

19:25

And-

19:28

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[Male Interviewer] Told him-

19:29

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I told Dan the, you know, that,

19:30

what had happened down there.

19:34

I told him what the behavioral scientists had said,

19:35

and he said he'd look into it.

19:40

Nothing happened.

19:42

The, they called me back again.

19:44

I said, "Look, give it to me in writing.

19:46

"Let me see everything that you know about it.

19:50

"Who you talked to,

19:53

"what you tried to help them do.

19:55

"You know, what your views are on this,

19:58

"and send it to me."

20:01

It took them several months, actually, to get it to me,

20:02

and

20:04

that's a slap on the FBI's butt.

20:05

When it came to me,

20:09

I called down to Dan Dell'Orto again,

20:10

and I said, "Look, I've got all these papers here."

20:12

And he said, "Yeah, I think I know what you've got.

20:15

"I think I've seen it all.

20:18

"I know all about it,

20:19

"and I'll look into it."

20:21

And again, nothing happened.

20:23

Sometime later, I called Dan back again.

20:25

He wasn't there,

20:27

and I talked with the General Counsel, Jim Haynes,

20:28

and I said, "Jim, you know, this is,

20:31

"you know, this is what I've got,

20:34

"and I'd like to know what's going on."

20:36

He says, "Oh, well, I'm,

20:38

"I don't have anything to do with that.

20:38

"That's, Dan's handling all that."

20:40

And basically, I just got stiff-armed at, in the Pentagon.

20:43

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[Male Interviewer] What year are we talking about here?

20:47

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(exhales) I think the behavioral scientists

20:51

went down to Guantanamo in November of 2002, I believe,

20:54

and I got the papers from them in May, and,

20:59

of 2003.

21:02

And so, the conversations that I had

21:04

with the Department of Defense

21:07

ranged from, basically, November, December of 2002

21:09

until August, September of 2003.

21:13

-

[Male Interviewer] So, did you know

21:17

these men were lying to you?

21:19

When, like, when Jim Haynes said he knows nothing about it,

21:21

I mean, did you know he was lying,

21:24

or what did you,

21:26

what were you thinking at that time?

21:27

-

I did not think he was telling me the truth,

21:31

because he spent his time with the Secretary of Defense,

21:34

and these were daily conversations that,

21:38

there's no way that

21:41

the Department of Defense General Counsel

21:42

is not involved in those discussions.

21:44

-

[Male Interviewer] Well, what were you thinking then?

21:47

I mean, you're hitting a wall here,

21:49

and you're hitting wall there.

21:50

What are you thinking about,

21:53

what's going on?

21:54

-

I was flabbergasted, to tell you the truth.

21:55

The,

21:59

I used to teach law of armed conflict.

22:02

There were a small handful of

22:06

senior officers in the military,

22:09

different services,

22:11

who sort of managed rules of engagement,

22:12

law of armed conflict training,

22:16

throughout all of the Department of Defense,

22:17

and what we saw happening was that

22:20

everything that we had been teaching for so very long

22:23

was just being tossed out the window

22:27

just virtually overnight,

22:29

and all of us were simply stunned that this could go on,

22:31

because each one of us,

22:36

in our own sphere of influence,

22:37

was really quite influential.

22:39

Didn't do any good.

22:43

-

[Male Interviewer] So after Jim Haynes tells you

22:44

that he knows nothing about it,

22:46

what did you do then?

22:49

-

I reported everything up the chain of command to the FBI.

22:51

At that point, those discussions,

22:55

really, go into the White House and,

22:58

or the National Security Council.

23:00

It's, you know, way beyond anything

23:02

that I would get involved in.

23:04

-

[Male Interviewer] Well, then, so from your vantage point,

23:07

you're seeing torture or mistreatment

23:09

occurring in Afghanistan and then in Guantanamo.

23:13

-

No,

23:18

I did not see torture.

23:19

-

[Male Interviewer] I don't mean you, visually, yet.

23:20

-

Neither did the FBI see torture.

23:22

We did see mistreatment.

23:24

-

[Male Interviewer] In Guantanamo,

23:27

you did see mistreatment?

23:28

-

We, yes, yes.

23:29

They, we saw mistreatment in Guantanamo.

23:30

We, but

23:33

really,

23:34

the, what we saw was,

23:35

and what bothered us was

23:37

that we believed it was dysfunctional.

23:39

We thought that if you want information from these people,

23:41

there's a better way to get it.

23:45

And what, we felt that what they were doing

23:47

was, you know, clearly dysfunctional,

23:49

and it was not going to get them

23:52

any kind of credible information.

23:53

-

[Male Interviewer] And did Mueller have

23:56

the same frustrations you had,

23:57

or do you know,

23:58

have you met him as frequently as you did?

23:59

What were you gonna...

24:03

-

I don't know what he thought.

24:07

You have to understand that

24:08

Bob Mueller had been on the job four days when 9/11 hit,

24:10

and he was swamped,

24:15

and he was learning on the job as he went.

24:18

He was

24:22

told

24:23

from, in the White House,

24:25

what, you know, what his job was,

24:26

and I have no idea exactly,

24:30

you know, what he was thinking about it because

24:31

he was pretty tight-lipped about it all.

24:35

-

[Male Interviewer] And during these first two years,

24:38

did you have any interaction with the CIA at that point,

24:40

in terms of being able to get better,

24:43

and telling 'em what they're doing isn't really,

24:45

not the most successful way of-

24:47

-

Yes, yes.

24:50

We talked to the CIA.

24:52

We told them that we did not agree

24:53

with the types of things that they were doing.

24:57

We told them that we will not be present

25:00

if they're going to do things that we would not do,

25:04

and they understood that.

25:08

They respected that.

25:11

They had different marching orders.

25:14

-

[Male Interviewer] I mean, (sighs)

25:18

what does an American do

25:19

if they see another American mistreating a,

25:20

you know, and violating the law?

25:24

What, I mean, it seems to me that

25:25

somebody should have been speaking out.

25:28

I mean, someone tried,

25:30

but what do you do

25:31

if you just hit a wall again and again?

25:33

-

Well, we hit the wall.

25:36

I mean, there's no question about it.

25:38

We hit the wall over and over on this,

25:40

and over and over,

25:42

we gave the same advice to our agents.

25:43

You know, you are not going to go to the dark side.

25:46

You'll stay with the rules that you've been taught.

25:49

You will do things just as if, and abroad,

25:53

just as if you're in the United States.

25:56

You will use, you know, our use of force policy,

25:58

not their use of force policy.

26:01

You know, so it's, nothing changed for the FBI,

26:04

and we were very, very adamant about that.

26:07

-

[Male Interviewer] And there,

26:11

no pressures were put on the FBI to change,

26:11

or do you know if there were any?

26:13

-

I don't believe there were any.

26:14

I think that everybody recognized that the FBI,

26:18

in an entirely different context,

26:23

you have two organizations,

26:26

two major intelligence organizations

26:28

that are present in overseas areas,

26:30

the CIA and the FBI,

26:32

and it is extremely important to the FBI,

26:34

and to the nation,

26:37

that the FBI always be looked at

26:38

as the ones who are the,

26:40

wearing the white hat.

26:42

And that is extremely valuable for the United States,

26:44

and for FBI missions,

26:48

and we were very careful to maintain that,

26:50

you know, that appearance.

26:54

-

[Male Interviewer] See, and I might go back to this,

26:56

but when did you go down to Guantanamo,

26:57

and why did you go to Guantanamo?

26:59

-

I went down very early.

27:02

I don't remember exactly when it was.

27:03

It was very, very warm down there.

27:05

I think it was probably like a June or July time frame.

27:10

-

[Male Interviewer] Of '02?

27:15

-

(exhales)

27:16

I just, I don't remember.

27:18

I can't remember if it was '02 or '03.

27:19

-

[Male Interviewer] Well, it would've been, not,

27:22

in '03, May of '03,

27:23

is when you got those documents from Jim Haynes.

27:24

So it would have been either right after that,

27:27

or a year before that.

27:29

-

It was probably the year before that.

27:30

I, it was very early on,

27:32

because the, both the CIA interrogators

27:34

and the FBI and military interrogators

27:38

were

27:40

concerned not knowing

27:42

exactly what they should be doing.

27:43

You know, who were these people who were showing up?

27:47

You know, were they prisoners of war?

27:49

Were they criminals?

27:52

You know, how do you treat them?

27:53

And (clears throat) they weren't getting

27:55

very good guidance on it.

27:57

So they were very concerned about, you know,

27:59

what their roles would be,

28:02

and I talked to a number of them

28:04

for quite some period of time.

28:06

-

[Male Interviewer] Who's "them"?

28:07

-

The interrogators.

28:08

I talked to a number of them from different agencies,

28:10

mostly in a big group,

28:14

and

28:15

basically gave them,

28:17

you know, sort of the straight-up,

28:18

you know, here's the, here are the rights

28:20

that people have when they're captured.

28:22

You know, whether they're enemy prisoners of war or not,

28:24

there are basic rights that come along with it.

28:27

We're, you know,

28:30

different,

28:32

that, there, that you just don't,

28:34

you don't throw out all the rights, you know?

28:36

There are some that accrue no matter what their status is.

28:38

You know, I talked to them about interrogation techniques.

28:41

I talked to them about, you know,

28:44

the way the FBI does things.

28:46

They were, by and large, very relieved,

28:48

very grateful to have, you know,

28:51

what, you know, my sort of guidance on it.

28:53

Not that it did any particular good,

28:56

because very, it wasn't very long before

28:59

they were given more specific marching orders.

29:01

-

[Male Interviewer] Well, who were these interrogators?

29:05

Were they military?

29:06

Were they CIA?

29:07

Were they FBI?

29:08

-

Everybody.

29:09

-

[Male Interviewer] So you were counseling

29:10

all three kinds of interrogators?

29:12

-

Yeah, not officially,

29:14

but, you know, here I was,

29:15

a senior military officer, retired,

29:17

a senior lawyer for the FBI,

29:20

somebody with a great deal of national security

29:24

and legal experience.

29:27

And, you know, they all, they asked to talk to me.

29:30

They asked, you know, for some guidance,

29:32

so I wasn't there to do that.

29:35

I was there to look and see what they were doing down there,

29:36

how the prisoners were being housed,

29:39

this sort of thing,

29:41

and this was just a, sort of a sidelight.

29:43

-

[Male Interviewer] Well, what were your impressions

29:46

when you first went down there?

29:47

Or when you went down there?

29:49

-

I was impressed, frankly,

29:50

with the way the prisoners were being treated.

29:52

-

[Male Interviewer] How was that?

29:55

-

Well, this was very early on,

29:56

so they did not have a lot of the building facilities

29:58

that came along later in time.

30:01

But they were being treated, I thought, fairly nicely.

30:04

They were given culturally appropriate meals.

30:08

They were allowed to pray, to have a Quran.

30:12

The Marines were treated worse than the prisoners were.

30:16

-

[Male Interviewer] And what other impressions did you have

30:22

when you were down there,

30:24

and how long were you down there?

30:26

-

I was just down there for a day.

30:28

-

[Male Interviewer] Oh.

30:29

And did you sit in on an interrogation?

30:30

-

No, I did not.

30:33

I saw some of the interrogation rooms.

30:35

I saw how they were set up.

30:37

They were set up

30:41

very efficiently.

30:43

There was a shackle on the floor

30:46

to shackle a leg down while they were being interrogated.

30:47

You know, there was a,

30:52

sort of a little hut with two rooms in it

30:53

where, and then things were recorded or not.

30:56

Mostly recorded, I think.

31:00

And, it was set up fairly efficiently.

31:02

But this was,

31:04

and fairly quickly, you know.

31:05

-

[Male Interviewer] And who do you think gave

31:08

what you described as marching orders to the interrogators,

31:10

if the FBI didn't have the influence?

31:12

Where'd it come from?

31:15

-

The Department of Defense.

31:16

-

[Male Interviewer] Department of-

31:18

-

Department of Defense.

31:19

-

[Male Interviewer] Defense.

31:20

And I'm, my understanding from people

31:22

who have been in interrogations is that

31:24

there's usually two interrogators there,

31:26

and one might be the FBI,

31:29

or simply an interrogator,

31:30

and a military interrogator.

31:33

So sometimes an FBI interrogator is present at the time.

31:35

-

In Guantanamo, yes.

31:39

There were two organizations that had the,

31:42

a different view of interrogations.

31:46

(clears throat) That was the FBI,

31:48

and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service,

31:49

and usually, if the FBI was interrogating,

31:51

the partner was an NCIS agent.

31:54

-

[Male Interviewer] So the FBI was actually present

31:57

in interrogations.

31:59

So from your instructions,

32:00

the FBI agent would have done it appropriately

32:02

without any mistreatment.

32:06

-

That's correct.

32:07

-

[Male Interviewer] And if, what would the FBI agent do

32:08

if, during the interrogation,

32:10

a military contractor,

32:11

a CIA contractor or a military person,

32:13

was inappropriate in the way he treated

32:15

the interrogator, the detainee?

32:19

-

I suppose it would have depended on the individual,

32:22

and the point in time.

32:25

Early on, I think the FBI and NCIS agents

32:27

were objecting rather vociferously.

32:32

As time went on,

32:35

it became apparent, I think, that that wasn't,

32:36

they weren't gonna make any difference,

32:38

what they were doing.

32:41

-

[Male Interviewer] Were FBI allowed to

32:42

go through the cells

32:43

and talk to the detainees?

32:44

-

I don't know the answer to that.

32:52

-

[Male Interviewer] And you would get intel from FBI agents

32:54

who were on the ground,

32:57

both in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo?

32:58

-

Yes.

33:01

-

[Male Interviewer] They were,

33:02

and as the policy unfolded,

33:03

is there something else that disturbed you,

33:04

or that you noticed that I haven't asked yet?

33:07

-

No, not really.

33:11

The

33:13

difficulty I had was,

33:14

A, they were,

33:18

the Department of Defense was ignoring all of

33:21

the decades of training

33:23

that so many of us had invested our lives in,

33:26

and B, the information that they were getting

33:29

was

33:32

suspect.

33:35

You know, you don't know whether you're gonna get

33:36

any legitimate information out of somebody

33:39

if you, they're just being mistreated.

33:41

You know, they may just say anything

33:43

in order to get it to stop,

33:44

or, in the case of some of them,

33:46

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,

33:48

he was very happy to pass on information

33:50

that he thought had already been exposed.

33:53

You know, things like that.

33:54

-

[Male Interviewer] Were you aware of

33:57

the extraordinary renditions that were going on then?

33:58

-

Yes.

34:01

-

[Male Interviewer] And did the FBI have

34:03

a policy about that?

34:04

-

Yes, we did not have anything to do with it.

34:06

We had one situation

34:13

in which

34:16

a rendition occurred,

34:19

a relatively important one,

34:24

and two FBI personnel were sent to the scene.

34:26

We're told that the, "You're not gonna do anything.

34:31

"You can go and observe.

34:35

"You keep your mouth shut."

34:36

You know.

34:38

They got there,

34:39

and the individual who was being rendered,

34:40

who had been injured badly,

34:42

was on the verge of dying.

34:45

The CIA interrogators had not shown up yet,

34:47

and they were told to go interrogate him,

34:50

and they said, "Wait a minute.

34:52

"We're not supposed to be doing that.

34:53

And they said, "Go interrogate him.

34:54

You know, "He's, the guy might die."

34:55

Well, he didn't die.

34:58

But what they did is they took care of him.

34:59

They looked-

35:03

-

[Male Interviewer] The FBI took care of him,

35:03

you're saying?

35:04

-

The FBI took care of him.

They literally bathed him,

35:06

changed his diapers and everything

35:08

while he was recovering.

35:10

Got a lot of information from him.

35:12

When he was strong enough,

35:14

the CIA said, "We're gonna take over now."

35:16

And at that point,

35:18

the FBI backed out and left.

35:20

-

[Male Interviewer] You can't give us more details

35:23

about who this person was?

35:24

-

That's about all I can say now.

35:25

-

[Male Interviewer] And other than that,

35:27

the FBI was not present at any of these?

35:28

-

I don't know for sure,

35:31

because the FBI was sent

35:33

all over.

35:37

You know, they may have gone places

35:37

where there was somebody being rendered

35:40

to try to put together information that the CIA had.

35:43

I just don't know.

35:46

-

[Female Interviewer] I have a question.

35:50

At what point did you find out about

35:51

the now famous torture memo,

35:53

and how did you respond professionally

35:55

and personally to that?

35:58

Cinematographer

If you can look at Peter

36:00

while you answer,

36:01

that'd be best.

36:02

-

(sighs)

36:03

I don't remember when I learned of the torture memo.

36:10

I probably didn't hear about it too much

36:14

before it became more common knowledge.

36:16

The,

36:19

my reaction to it was that,

36:20

it was twofold.

36:24

One is I thought it was seriously flawed.

36:25

However, I also know John Yoo very well,

36:29

and I know John Yoo,

36:32

his views and my views don't always coincide,

36:36

but he is honest in what he writes,

36:39

and he,

36:42

I have no doubt he honestly believed what he was writing.

36:43

I think it was deeply flawed,

36:46

but I think he believed in what he was writing.

36:48

Peter

Why would you know him so well?

36:51

-

Well, he was doing, worked across the street from me.

36:53

He worked in the Office of Legal Counsel.

36:55

The Office of Legal Counsel is the government's lawyer.

36:57

And, if you want to know,

37:01

you know, what the government policy is, should be

37:03

on some particularly sticky legal issue

37:07

that doesn't have a clear answer,

37:09

you give it to the OLC,

37:11

and OLC renders an opinion.

37:12

Some of them are classified,

37:14

some of them are unclassified,

37:16

but those, that is what the government goes by,

37:17

short of court hearings.

37:20

Peter

Well, why would that,

37:22

but why did you get to know him?

37:24

Did you send questions to him, as well, for opinions?

37:26

-

Yeah, we sent questions over,

37:30

but OLC was involved in a lot of the discussions

37:32

that went on through the years.

37:36

I saw John in meetings with some frequency.

37:38

We were both invited to speak at different conferences

37:42

with some frequency.

37:45

You know-

37:48

Peter

He never spoke to you about these memos

37:49

prior to their being released?

37:50

-

No.

37:52

Peter

And did you know Jay Bybee, too?

37:53

-

I had met Jay.

37:55

I did not know him like I knew John.

37:56

Peter

And did you ever have

37:59

discussions with John about torture

38:00

prior to the release of these memos?

38:03

-

No.

38:05

-

[Female Interviewer] What was the FBI response

38:09

to that memo?

38:11

-

The OLC memos had been written

38:15

in response to a CIA question.

38:17

The FBI was, to the best of my knowledge,

38:20

unaware that the question had been answered,

38:23

had been asked,

38:25

and

38:26

the FBI looked at this and said,

38:27

"Well, you know, maybe,

38:30

"but this ain't the way we do business."

38:32

Peter

Have you ever heard of

38:37

a separate unit at Guantanamo

38:40

that the CIA would be running while, you know,

38:43

the military was there and the FBI was there?

38:46

Apparently, there's also a unit

38:48

just run by the CIA down in Guantanamo.

38:50

Have you ever heard of that?

38:53

-

(exhales) I've heard about it.

38:57

I haven't heard about it through official channels.

38:58

I've heard about it through an investigative reporter

39:00

who uncovered it.

39:04

Peter

And that, we're talking about Camp No,

39:06

is that what-

39:08

-

Yeah.

Peter

Had, you never saw it when you were down there?

39:09

-

No.

39:11

Peter

And you had never heard anything more about it

39:12

from other sources?

39:13

-

No, the only time I've heard about it,

39:15

I've heard about it twice.

39:19

Once from an investigative reporter,

39:21

and once from,

39:22

oh,

39:25

it was just recently.

39:27

I was speaking at Wayne State University Law School,

39:28

and

39:31

an individual there

39:33

who used to be president

39:35

or director of a civil liberties type of organization,

39:38

I can't think of the name of it right now,

39:43

which is heavily invested in the Guantanamo issues,

39:44

he mentioned this, at the time,

39:47

and it struck a chord with me

39:51

because the investigative reporter

39:54

had only had one source,

39:56

and didn't go, couldn't go any further with only one source.

39:58

When this guy mentioned it,

40:02

he mentioned

40:03

some other data

40:06

that I, you know, I thought might be useful

40:07

to the investigative reporter,

40:10

and told him to contact this guy.

40:11

Peter

But you don't have any other knowledge,

40:14

and you never heard of anything while you were

40:16

still working for the FBI?

40:18

-

No,

40:19

no.

40:20

Peter

As this went forward,

40:25

did the FBI change its policies at all,

40:27

in terms of trying to put a stop to what they were seeing,

40:29

or maybe circumventing

40:33

the President if, in fact,

40:39

the President wasn't stopping it?

40:40

If there's other ways that the FBI could

40:41

prevent this mistreatment?

40:46

-

Well, the FBI works for the Attorney General,

40:49

and the Attorney General is the one who gives the FBI

40:53

its marching orders.

40:56

The FBI doesn't go to the White House alone.

40:57

So it's, you know,

41:01

there's a master and a servant relationship there

41:03

that had to be observed.

41:05

Peter

So that's John Ashcroft, was he-

41:06

-

That would, John Ashcroft, yes.

41:08

Peter

So do you know if anyone went to him and said,

41:11

is there a way he could stop their abuse?

41:13

-

I know that the issues were brought to him.

41:17

I don't know what he did with them.

41:19

Peter

Who else was at your level?

41:24

Who, you said you reported to Mueller?

41:26

Did you, who did you-

41:30

-

Well, I reported it to the General Counsel.

41:31

Peter

Who was?

41:33

-

At this point in time,

41:34

that would have been Ken Wainstein.

41:38

-

And did he have any thoughts on what was going on?

41:41

Did he ever express to you his concerns?

41:43

-

No.

41:46

Peter

And he reported to Mueller, or-

41:47

-

Right.

41:49

Peter

Did you ever travel around the country as,

41:53

when you were in this position,

41:56

or pretty much, you were in DC the whole time?

41:58

-

Oh, I traveled around the country.

42:00

I traveled abroad.

42:02

Peter

Did you go to Afghanistan?

42:03

-

No, I never did.

42:04

Peter

Where did you travel abroad?

42:06

-

Oh, all over Europe,

42:08

South America,

42:09

Japan.

42:11

Peter

For what purpose?

42:12

-

Lots of different purposes,

42:16

all of them having to do with national security issues.

42:18

Peter

This is post-9/11, too?

42:20

-

Yeah.

42:22

Peter

But they never sent you to Afghanistan to-

42:25

-

No.

42:30

Peter

To Bagram or Kandahar?

42:31

-

No, we didn't send any lawyers to either.

42:31

Peter

How about to Pakistan?

42:36

-

No.

42:39

No, we had, you know, we had Legat,

42:40

a Legat in Pakistan.

42:43

A Legat, in fact, was a,

42:45

the Assistant Legat at the time

42:48

was a lawyer who had been one of my lawyers,

42:49

who was an agent,

42:52

and went back into the agent field.

42:53

-

[Female Interviewer] What is Legat?

42:57

-

Legat stands for legal attache.

42:59

It's a holdover name from,

43:02

really, before World War II,

43:04

and it's the FBI's diplomatic representative

43:06

in another country.

43:11

I think we have Legats in something like 76 countries,

43:12

with many Legats having responsibility

43:16

for more than one country.

43:18

Peter

Did you ever talk to any doctors

43:21

who were down in Guantanamo?

43:24

The medical profession?

43:26

-

No, I never did.

43:27

Peter

Did you ever hear about any of the abuse

43:28

that might have occurred by the medical profession?

43:30

-

No.

43:33

Peter

Did you ever wonder if, in fact,

43:36

like, say there were hunger strikes and force-feeding,

43:38

did that ever come to the FBI's attention?

43:41

-

Well, we knew that there were some hunger strikes.

43:43

We knew that there was at least one case of force-feeding,

43:46

but

43:50

you know,

43:52

these issues came up,

43:53

really, kind of long after the time

43:55

we were told to mind our own business.

43:57

Peter

Can I just ask you again,

44:04

just who exactly said, "Mind your own business"?

44:06

-

I know that,

44:19

you know, our agents in the field,

44:22

or, in the, in Guantanamo,

44:24

were told that directly.

44:26

The issues that we took up the chain in Washington, DC,

44:29

fell flat.

44:34

I know that, when there was some objections

44:36

to the treatment of detainees,

44:40

Rumsfeld, as Secretary of Defense, poo-pooed them,

44:44

saying that, you know,

44:47

he stands on his feet longer than they do.

44:48

So, you know, we were basically given a stiff-arm.

44:51

Peter

And when you spoke to John Yoo

44:56

after the memos came out,

44:59

were you still friendly with him at that time?

45:01

-

Yes, I'm still friends with John Yoo today.

45:03

Peter

And did you have conversations with him then

45:05

about telling him that you thought he was

45:07

on weak, shaky ground with his analysis?

45:11

Did you ever tell him that?

45:14

-

I have told him that I don't agree with the positions,

45:15

but I understand, you know, that,

45:19

you know, that he believes in them,

45:22

and that, you know, I've told him

45:24

I'm sorry for all of the abuse that he takes over,

45:27

for what for him was, I think, a principled stand.

45:30

I think it's wrong,

45:34

but I think it was principled.

45:34

Peter

Did you ever interface with Cheney,

45:36

or with Dick, or with Addington?

45:40

-

Addington, I have talked with on a number of cases.

45:42

Peter

Why so?

45:45

-

Mm,

45:49

most of the things

45:51

that I had to talk with Addington about

45:52

were investigations other than terrorism,

45:55

and had to do with things that go on

45:58

in the old executive office building in the White House,

46:01

and so forth.

46:04

In order to go into some of those,

46:05

we had to go through certain wickets,

46:08

and Addington was often one of those.

46:10

Peter

Some people, most people believe

46:13

that David Addington actually wrote the memos with John Yoo.

46:15

Did you get that indication?

46:17

-

I know that he was very heavily involved

46:19

in all of the policy issues having to do with terrorism.

46:21

Peter

And was Gonzales any,

46:25

did you ever interface with Gonzales?

46:28

-

Yes.

46:30

Uh-huh.

46:32

Peter

What kind of impressions did you have there?

46:33

-

A very nice man

46:36

who was way over his head.

46:37

He was way over his head

46:40

when he was Counsel in the White House.

46:40

Very, very nice man.

46:43

I actually have a picture of myself and him

46:46

in Brussels together.

46:48

But

46:51

this was not a job for him.

46:53

Peter

And was it a job for Addington?

46:57

Was he up to it?

46:58

-

Addington is a very, very bright man.

47:00

He's very smart.

47:03

He's very focused.

47:04

He, you know, he's, he literally carries around

47:06

a copy of the Constitution with him

47:09

and uses the words in it to,

47:12

you know, to try to bolster any argument that he has.

47:15

It's very difficult to win an argument with Addington,

47:20

because he's very, very well prepared.

47:23

You usually end up losing on policy grounds

47:26

which have a legal backdrop to them.

47:30

Peter

You think he was designing the policy,

47:32

post-9/11?

47:36

Do you think he designed-

47:37

-

Well, I think that Addington and Cheney

47:38

were the driving forces behind the policies, yes.

47:41

Peter

Do you think Addington

47:46

came up with the term "enemy combatant"?

47:46

Do you know?

47:49

-

Enemy combatant is not a term that was new

47:52

with the detainees.

47:56

Peter

Well, it didn't exist that,

47:59

under the Geneva Convention,

48:00

only two kinds of combatants,

48:01

lawful and unlawful.

48:03

-

That's right,

48:05

but you had enemy, EPWs, enemy prisoners of war.

48:06

Peter

Right, but every prisoner of war

48:09

is a prisoner of war, it's not a-

48:11

-

It's not that, yeah, but you're talking about distinctions

48:13

that were attempted to be drawn in 1945,

48:18

when the lawful combatant

48:22

and the unlawful combatant

48:24

referred primarily to the difference between

48:26

a uniformed soldier and Tito's Partisans.

48:30

They were designed to try to make sure

48:33

that organizations like Tito's Partisans,

48:37

who did carry their arms openly,

48:39

who did wear a distinctive emblem,

48:40

and who did function under military hierarchy,

48:42

would not be summarily executed,

48:45

as the the Germans did execute them.

48:47

So you have a couple of terms that fit World War II

48:50

that don't necessarily fit the, you know, the 21st century.

48:55

Peter

But someone came up with that term,

48:58

and I just wondered if you think Addington was the one,

49:00

if he was so bright and so well, so knowledgeable?

49:02

-

I don't think it was a large leap

49:05

for anybody to come up with the term.

49:07

I don't know who did it.

49:08

Peter

Did you ever interface with Rumsfeld?

49:11

-

No.

49:13

I've written a state secrets privilege that he signed,

49:14

but that's as close as I came to him.

49:17

Peter

And what was your impressions of Jim Haynes?

49:20

-

I have very little respect for Jim Haynes.

49:23

Peter

Because?

49:25

-

He tried to duck all responsibility.

49:30

He tried to push any responsibility

49:31

for anything that might be different to somebody else.

49:35

He had his goal set on being a circuit court justice,

49:38

and didn't want anything to interfere with that.

49:42

He did not want to have information,

49:45

if it were information he might later have to recall.

49:48

Yeah.

49:51

Peter

So was he an appropriate person for

49:53

Rumsfeld and Addington to put in place though, right?

49:56

He did their bidding,

49:59

is that kind of what you're saying?

50:00

-

He was very much in tune with whatever Rumsfeld wanted.

50:03

Peter

Did you ever think of going back to Guantanamo

50:07

after that first time?

50:09

-

No.

50:11

No.

50:12

Most of the things that I could accomplish,

50:14

I had to accomplish in Washington, DC.

50:16

Our, my job was really,

50:20

you know, for, from that perspective,

50:23

it was really more on the policy level

50:24

than the tactical level.

50:26

Peter

What do you think of Obama

50:29

not prosecuting people today?

50:30

Do you think that's appropriate,

50:34

given what you observed back then?

50:35

-

Yes.

50:39

I don't think that prosecutions are appropriate

50:40

at this point in time.

50:42

I think that one of the singular issues

50:43

that comes out of Guantanamo

50:46

is a, so far, a failure to recognize that

50:48

the laws that we tried to carve out of World War II

50:52

don't neatly apply to today,

50:55

and international lawyers,

50:57

and I am an international lawyer,

50:59

most international lawyers

51:00

don't want to face up to the necessity of

51:02

having to accept new customary international law.

51:06

They want it to stay the same way it is right now,

51:09

'cause they're comfortable with it.

51:11

We can't afford to do that.

51:13

We have to move forward.

51:14

The issues of terrorism,

51:16

of the detainees,

51:19

of piracy,

51:20

things like this have moved beyond

51:22

the codification of the laws that we've got.

51:25

Peter

Do you think we cannot prosecute those people

51:29

under the old laws?

51:32

Is that what you're saying?

51:33

-

I think that,

51:38

I think we could prosecute them under the old laws.

51:41

I think it would be a mistake to do so,

51:44

because it would be trying to carve into the 21st century

51:46

something that was barely adequate for the 20th century.

51:51

And we, instead of having to say,

51:55

"You did something wrong,

51:58

"look what the Geneva Convention said in 1945,"

51:59

we should be saying,

52:02

"We, you were stumbling along

52:04

"trying to work with something that doesn't exist."

52:06

You need, we need to recognize the fact

52:08

that we have to move forward and develop new distinctions,

52:10

new definitions,

52:13

and allow the law to develop the way it has

52:15

for the last several centuries.

52:17

Peter

What's gonna stop America from again

52:19

mistreating or abusing or torturing prisoners?

52:23

Will the FBI be able to stop next time?

52:28

If we don't prosecute, will we stop next time?

52:30

What will stop,

52:32

if there's another 9/11,

52:33

what will stop it from happening again?

52:34

-

Well, understand, the FBI is not gonna be in a position

52:36

to stop anything like this.

52:39

The FBI is in a position

52:41

to take care of things that happen in the United States,

52:44

and uphold the laws that we have

52:47

for criminal and national security purposes

52:49

in the United States.

52:52

The Geneva Conventions are not one of the things

52:54

that the FBI, you know, prosecutes or investigates.

52:56

What will stop is to,

53:01

having more principled people come back into service.

53:03

I have very little respect for Secretary Rumsfeld.

53:07

Brilliant man,

53:10

dynamic person,

53:12

hard worker,

53:13

very, very capable person,

53:15

but, you know, he,

53:18

rather than trying to accept the world the way it is

53:21

and move forward with it,

53:24

he just decided he was gonna ignore, you know,

53:25

the problems and move forward with them.

53:27

He didn't try to find solutions to contemporary problems.

53:32

He just ignored them.

53:35

Peter

Well, ignoring isn't quite true.

53:37

Didn't, I mean, he supported the torture,

53:38

so he did, he took a positive approach.

53:41

He didn't just shut his eyes to what was going on.

53:44

-

No, he didn't shut his eyes to it,

53:46

but I think he,

53:48

I still think that that's ignoring

53:49

the fundamental issues there.

53:52

He just decided that it wasn't going to be a problem.

53:53

(paper rustles)

53:58

Peter

And who's gonna stop people like

53:59

Addington or Cheney in the future,

54:01

if we don't prosecute?

54:03

-

I think that the way to move forward

54:10

is to move forward

54:12

within the constructs of international law.

54:13

I do not think that going back and trying

54:17

to validate a law that did not fit the purposes

54:21

is the way to move forward.

54:26

That will only keep us where we have been.

54:27

Peter

Did you ever get the impression,

54:31

some people have said that

54:32

Cheney just grabbed these people

54:33

and brought 'em to Guantanamo

54:35

just to prove to the world that we're tough,

54:38

and that we're not going to accept another 9/11,

54:40

and if it means that some of these,

54:43

or if most of these men are really not a threat,

54:46

we're still gonna grab 'em and hold them

54:49

just to let the world know that we mean business?

54:51

Have you ever-

54:53

-

I don't know what to think about Cheney.

54:54

He is a, an entirely different man.

54:57

He was an entirely different man as Vice President

55:01

than he was as Secretary of Defense.

55:03

The two personalities just don't jive at all.

55:05

So I don't know what to think about him.

55:10

Peter

What's the difference between the two men?

55:13

-

When he was Secretary of Defense,

55:16

he was a,

55:17

a very kind, jovial,

55:19

focused.

55:22

He was a very good Secretary of Defense.

55:23

He was

55:26

personable.

55:27

When it came to when he was the Vice President,

55:30

he was an entirely different personality.

55:32

He had,

55:34

he was driven in ways that I had never seen

55:36

as a Secretary of Defense.

55:40

When he was Secretary of Defense,

55:42

you know, I remember joking with him about fly-fishing.

55:43

He was a great fly fisherman.

55:46

You know, he's from Wyoming.

55:47

And,

55:49

you know,

55:51

I can't imagine joking with him about fly-fishing now.

55:52

Peter

How'd you know him as Secretary of Defense?

55:56

What was your role at that time?

55:58

-

I was a Navy captain at the time.

55:59

He, I only met him a couple of times.

56:02

The closest, the most I ever talked with him was

56:04

when I was on a diplomatic assignment in Rome,

56:07

and he was at the embassy,

56:10

and we had a meeting with the ambassador

56:12

and some of the senior officers there,

56:14

and I talked with him at some length there,

56:16

and then I escorted his aide,

56:19

who's a Navy admiral, around Rome,

56:22

and showed them the sites and everything.

56:24

Peter

Did you ever meet Bush?

56:27

Bush II, President?

56:29

-

No, I never did.

Peter

Did you meet Bush I?

56:31

-

No, I missed him, actually.

56:32

He, I had to go to Vicenza in Northern Italy

56:35

on the same week that he showed up at the embassy in Rome.

56:38

-

[Female Interviewer] A couple questions.

56:46

Can I ask, if you were in charge,

56:48

how would you handle Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, now?

56:52

-

Well, (clears throat)

56:57

I think the, physically,

57:00

most of the things that they had set up there

57:02

were quite adequate.

57:05

The question is, how do you treat the prisoners?

57:07

How do you treat them,

57:10

not only in interrogation,

57:12

but, you know, in their cells, and so forth?

57:13

I became a huge believer in the FBI's

57:17

modus operandi,

57:23

in trying to build rapport

57:25

with the people you're trying to get information from.

57:27

And

57:30

I would structure it,

57:32

I would structure the treatment itself

57:35

to include the interrogations,

57:38

but also the, you know,

57:39

how you treat them in their cells,

57:41

and how you move them from one place to another

57:42

in accordance with basic FBI procedures,

57:45

which are designed to gain rapport.

57:48

And I can give you an example.

57:51

We had, when

57:52

Padilla,

57:54

and they had pronounced it Padilla, not Padilla,

57:55

when he was taken by the military,

57:58

the military

58:01

refused to let the FBI

58:03

interrogate him,

58:06

for about six months.

58:08

And then one day,

58:09

a young man walked into my office,

58:11

and said he had been given permission finally

58:13

to go interrogate Padilla.

58:15

He said, "Mr. Bowman, I just want to know if this is okay."

58:17

He said, "I want to go down there,

58:20

"and it's just gonna be me and him, nobody else,

58:22

"and I want to question him as long as I possibly can,"

58:24

he says, "and if I'm up, he's up,

58:28

"and if I go to bed, he gets to go to bed.

58:31

"Is there any problem with my keeping him up,

58:32

"you know, for long periods of time?"

58:35

I said, "No, there's no problem with that at all."

58:36

So he went down to South Carolina

58:38

and started interrogating at 8:00 in the morning,

58:41

and by noon, Padilla was talking to him.

58:43

That's the difference.

58:47

Peter

Are you saying Padilla wasn't talking

58:49

to any of the military interrogators?

58:51

-

That's right.

58:52

They said, "You can talk to him,

58:54

"but you're not gonna get anything out of him."

58:55

Peter

Do you know what year this was?

58:57

-

No, I can't remember.

58:59

Peter

I want to follow up on that,

59:02

but, go ahead and ask your-

59:03

-

[Female Interviewer] Well, in terms of

59:04

the detainees that are there,

59:06

how would you address that?

59:09

You've got 172 of them who are still there.

59:12

Would you do military tribunals?

59:17

Would you do,

59:18

would you try to close the prison?

59:22

Do you have any thoughts on that?

59:24

-

Well, you've got several different issues

59:27

with the detainees that are there.

59:30

One of the issues is,

59:31

where can you send them?

59:33

Who's gonna take them back?

59:34

And some of them,

59:35

we have trouble trying to find a country

59:36

that will take them.

59:38

That's a difficulty that I'm not sure

59:40

how we structure that.

59:41

There are a number of them

59:45

who probably deserve to be tried, one way or another.

59:46

I would probably use a military commission.

59:50

It's much more expedient.

59:52

A lot of people disagree with me on this,

59:55

but

59:57

having been in the military,

59:58

having seen how court-martials work, and so forth,

1:00:00

I'd rather have a military jury

1:00:03

than a civilian jury, any day of the week.

1:00:05

You know, they're much more discerning.

1:00:08

It's a blue-ribbon panel to start with.

1:00:11

The,

1:00:15

then you have

1:00:17

the ones who

1:00:18

you can't try,

1:00:20

for whatever reason.

1:00:23

Maybe the evidence is too tainted.

1:00:24

Maybe you don't have the evidence or whatever.

1:00:26

You know, I would say that

1:00:29

the only thing you can do with them

1:00:32

is you're gonna have to release them,

1:00:33

and understand that the consequences are

1:00:35

that they're gonna,

1:00:38

they may be going back to pick up weapons again,

1:00:39

and we've seen that happen.

1:00:41

We've seen it happen any number of times.

1:00:43

In fact, we released some people,

1:00:45

and within 10 days,

1:00:46

they were back on the battlefield, you know.

1:00:47

So, but these are things that,

1:00:50

this is the way life is, you know?

1:00:52

We're gonna have to accept some risks.

1:00:54

Would I close up Guantanamo?

1:00:57

That's a good question.

1:00:59

I think that if Guantanamo

1:01:01

had been properly handled from the start,

1:01:03

we would never have had the Supreme Court issues

1:01:05

that came out of it.

1:01:07

I think that, you know,

1:01:09

my recommendation a long time ago,

1:01:10

when we lifted the Kurds out of Northern Iraq,

1:01:13

was to put them in Guantanamo.

1:01:17

You know, not Guam,

1:01:19

which proved to be

1:01:21

a big mistake.

1:01:22

I, yeah, so I thought, I was happy

1:01:26

when Guantanamo was selected for this,

1:01:27

but we went ahead and messed up the whole thing,

1:01:30

which required, I think, the courts to feel

1:01:33

that they had to get involved with it,

1:01:34

and I think they probably did.

1:01:36

But it was because we mismanaged it, I think.

1:01:39

-

[Female Interviewer] Is it your sense that there have been

1:01:44

any lessons learned by the CIA,

1:01:45

or the President's office

1:01:48

about

1:01:50

how to interrogate?

1:01:52

Because, clearly, the FBI was,

1:01:54

came from a very different philosophy,

1:01:57

and felt that they could succeed,

1:02:00

whereas the others

1:02:02

were going from a very different perspective.

1:02:04

Would you say that there,

1:02:06

that these other agencies have changed at all

1:02:08

since the, that initial Bush-era response to 9/11?

1:02:11

-

I think there has, (clears throat)

1:02:16

I think there's been a fundamental change,

1:02:17

and the fundamental change is,

1:02:19

who is the interrogator?

1:02:20

The most fundamental flaw

1:02:24

that the Department of Defense made

1:02:26

in trying to develop the interrogators

1:02:29

was to take the lessons of SERE School,

1:02:32

survival, escape, and resistance, evasion,

1:02:36

and try to translate that into an interrogation technique.

1:02:39

That's fundamentally flawed.

1:02:43

I've been through SERE School.

1:02:44

I've had the crap beat out of me.

1:02:46

The purpose of the SERE School is not to elicit information,

1:02:50

it's to resist information.

1:02:54

So, you know, my, when I went through this,

1:02:57

I was an intelligence officer.

1:03:00

Nobody wanted me to talk, if I were captured,

1:03:02

and they tried to give me some tools to use, you know,

1:03:05

if I ever were captured.

1:03:09

You don't take that kind of mistreatment

1:03:11

and try to elicit information out of it,

1:03:13

and that was a fundamental flaw.

1:03:16

They brought in SERE instructors

1:03:18

to try to train people to be interrogators,

1:03:21

and that's just fundamentally flawed.

1:03:24

Peter

You know, following up on that,

1:03:27

the term "learned helplessness,"

1:03:29

did that,

1:03:30

did the FBI have any

1:03:32

sense on that term,

1:03:35

whether they supported that,

1:03:37

or they understood that?

1:03:39

-

I don't remember that ever being a term used at the FBI.

1:03:41

Peter

Did you know that it was used

1:03:45

by the military down in Guantanamo Bay?

1:03:46

-

No, I'm not familiar with it.

1:03:48

Peter

Did you have another question?

1:03:50

-

[Female Interviewer] In terms of the FBI currently,

1:03:53

do you feel that the FBI is,

1:03:56

I don't want to say adequate to the task,

1:04:01

financially, appropriately funded

1:04:02

to be able to address the issues of domestic terror

1:04:05

in the US right now?

1:04:08

-

The FBI

1:04:14

is fairly well funded for what it can do.

1:04:17

There are about 13,000 FBI agents.

1:04:20

Who, these are the, you know,

1:04:24

the eyes and the hands and feet of the FBI.

1:04:25

Of the 30,000 or so that work for the FBI,

1:04:31

only 13,000 or so are our agents.

1:04:33

They cover 305 million people,

1:04:35

so there is no way that the FBI, or any agency,

1:04:39

can really handle the domestic issues.

1:04:43

So the question is,

1:04:46

how do you leverage the rest of the resources?

1:04:47

There are around 900,000 state, local,

1:04:51

and tribal police out there

1:04:55

who are much closer to things on the ground than as FBI.

1:04:56

You know, you have to be able to marshal those resources.

1:05:01

You have to be able to get people to be

1:05:04

observant, without being scared.

1:05:09

You know, we've had exercises where,

1:05:13

you know, we were going to,

1:05:16

and I've seen this happen.

1:05:17

We do a terrorist exercise on a base,

1:05:19

and everybody on the base knows the terrorists are coming.

1:05:22

And so, for the week that, near there,

1:05:25

you know, everybody is on tender hooks,

1:05:28

and somebody'll walk outside their front door,

1:05:31

and they'll see a box or something

1:05:33

that's been there for six months,

1:05:35

but this is the first time they've noticed it.

1:05:36

And so, they call in a bomb threat.

1:05:38

You know, somehow you have to bridge the gap

1:05:41

between being observant and being scared.

1:05:43

And, you know, it's really the populous

1:05:46

that has to be involved.

1:05:50

You know, with the 19 hijackers, for example,

1:05:52

they, you know, two of them came across a police agent.

1:05:55

One for a speeding ticket,

1:05:59

and one, because he reported a theft out of a car.

1:06:01

The other people who came in contact with the 19 hijackers

1:06:03

were hotelkeepers,

1:06:06

and people who were renting them phones,

1:06:08

and, you know, the airline passenger ticket counters,

1:06:10

places like this.

1:06:14

You know, that's where the real eyes are.

1:06:16

And then, so the FBI is quite capable of

1:06:18

doing what it can do,

1:06:21

but it has to leverage the rest of the nation, as well.

1:06:22

-

[Female Interviewer] Great.

1:06:26

Cinematographer

I have one quick question.

1:06:28

On the day that you went to Guantanamo,

1:06:29

given that it was after,

1:06:33

there was some (clears throat) disagreement about

1:06:36

what was going on there between the FBI and the military.

1:06:39

So you arrive,

1:06:43

the military shows you around.

1:06:44

Did you feel confident that you were being shown

1:06:45

the actual, typical living conditions of prisoners there?

1:06:50

-

I saw them.

1:06:54

I was in their living conditions.

1:06:55

So, yeah, no, you know, this was,

1:06:57

this is when it was still fairly primitive.

1:06:59

You know, they built them much nicer places

1:07:02

after I had been there.

1:07:03

But yeah, I saw everything that,

1:07:05

where they lived and everything.

1:07:07

And as I say, frankly,

1:07:09

they were living better than the Marines

1:07:10

who were living in tents that were hotter than Hades.

1:07:12

Peter

They were living in cages at that time,

1:07:15

as Camp X-Ray.

1:07:17

-

That's right.

1:07:19

Peter

Right?

1:07:20

And those, they had no bathrooms in those cages,

1:07:20

and they were exposed to all the elements,

1:07:23

so they weren't particularly fabulous housing.

1:07:25

-

No, it wasn't fabulous housing,

1:07:29

but the weather wasn't all that bad, either.

1:07:31

They built stuff for them pretty quickly.

1:07:36

Peter

Did you have another question, Johnny?

1:07:38

Johnny

No, that's it.

1:07:39

Peter

Did you know,

1:07:41

there was, apparently there was

1:07:42

a base up in Washington State

1:07:44

that was used for practice for detaining-

1:07:46

-

Fairchild Air Force Base.

1:07:49

Peter

Yeah, were you ever present at that?

1:07:51

-

Well, no.

1:07:53

I used to shop there when I went to law school

1:07:54

up in Moscow, Idaho,

1:07:57

but that, Fairchild was one of the Air Force's

1:07:58

primary SERE training areas.

1:08:02

Peter

And you knew of that,

1:08:06

you knew about that because it was

1:08:07

within the FBI's jurisdiction,

1:08:09

or why would you know about that even?

1:08:10

-

No, I knew about it because I went through SERE School,

1:08:12

and, you know, some of my Air Force friends

1:08:14

went through SERE School.

1:08:16

They went through Fairchild.

1:08:17

Peter

And that was then converted into

1:08:19

a Guantanamo-type practice?

1:08:22

-

It was, yeah.

1:08:24

For, they used Fairchild to try to

1:08:25

sort of experiment with how they were going to do things

1:08:28

with the detainees.

1:08:32

Peter

Did FBI agents, were they present

1:08:34

to watch that experimentation to see if-

1:08:36

-

Not likely.

1:08:39

The nearest FBI agent is over in Moscow, Idaho,

1:08:42

which is about 90 miles away.

1:08:47

Peter

Can I go a little, talk a little,

1:09:00

I hadn't thought of it,

1:09:01

but since you mentioned Padilla,

1:09:02

did you ever go to the naval brig in South Carolina?

1:09:04

Did you ever

1:09:07

see where Padilla and Hamdi and al-Marri were?

1:09:09

-

No, I've seen the naval brig,

1:09:12

but only from the outside.

1:09:14

Peter

And, were FBI agents also involved

1:09:15

in interrogating Hamdi and al-Marri?

1:09:18

-

I don't remember.

1:09:23

Peter

And after the, your agent

1:09:25

was able to get Padilla to talk,

1:09:27

did your agent then allow it to go back?

1:09:29

'Cause if he was the only one

1:09:31

who could get Padilla to talk,

1:09:32

he must have been more valuable than

1:09:33

all the other agents up until then.

1:09:35

-

Well, there's only so much

1:09:38

that you can get out of Padilla.

1:09:39

I mean, he was sent here to try and think of

1:09:40

a way to use a dirty bomb in the United States.

1:09:44

He was not an integral player

1:09:49

in any operational sense other than himself,

1:09:52

so there's only so much you get out of him.

1:09:55

Peter

Well, the US never prosecuted him for that,

1:09:57

so it's, is it really clear that that was his intent?

1:09:59

-

Let's, let me say, it was clear to me.

1:10:04

Peter

And were you not supposed to be involved

1:10:08

in the interrogation of those three,

1:10:10

or was the FBI not supposed to be involved in that?

1:10:12

That it was pretty much hands-off,

1:10:14

that you didn't even know whether the FBI was

1:10:16

interrogating the other two men and...

1:10:18

-

(exhales)

1:10:23

Well, I retired from the FBI in 2006,

1:10:25

and for the year and a half or almost two years before that,

1:10:28

I was,

1:10:32

I moved jobs,

1:10:33

and I was responsible with a,

1:10:36

yeah, about a, six or seven of us

1:10:39

were responsible for setting up

1:10:41

the new National Security division at the FBI.

1:10:42

So, you know, I was the policy and legal guy

1:10:47

to set up the new division.

1:10:50

So I moved away from some of that.

1:10:51

I was still called on.

1:10:54

I still, I'm called on today, still,

1:10:55

for advice on things.

1:10:58

But I moved away from the day-to-day operations.

1:10:59

Peter

Who calls on you today?

1:11:02

-

Everybody in town.

1:11:04

(Female Interviewer chuckles)

1:11:06

They keep my clearances alive so they can talk to me.

1:11:08

Peter

They pay you for this, or just-

1:11:10

-

I'm, I do get paid for some consulting,

1:11:12

but the main thing is that,

1:11:15

as long as somebody keeps my clearances alive,

1:11:17

then they can call me.

1:11:19

Peter

You know the Chertoff Group?

1:11:21

Were you, did they ever ask you to work for them?

1:11:22

-

No.

1:11:26

No, those are,

1:11:27

the Chertoff Group are all people who have been

1:11:28

right at the top of whatever game they've been in.

1:11:32

Peter

Did you know him, Chertoff?

1:11:35

-

Yeah, I know Mike well.

1:11:36

Peter

And what did you think of his behavior?

1:11:38

He was involved in some of the,

1:11:42

at least one of the torture memos.

1:11:44

Did you...

1:11:45

-

I don't know what he did with respect to any of that.

1:11:50

Mike is a brilliant guy,

1:11:54

and

1:11:57

he suffers one flaw that most lawyers suffer,

1:11:59

and that is that lawyers don't manage large organizations.

1:12:03

You know, they advise large organizations.

1:12:08

So, as, you know, when he went to be

1:12:11

the Secretary at Homeland Security,

1:12:13

he stepped into a quagmire that,

1:12:15

I won't say,

1:12:18

he wasn't over his head,

1:12:19

but he was not prepared.

1:12:20

Peter

How did you know him?

1:12:22

You seem to know him well.

1:12:24

-

Yeah, well, he was the Assistant General Counsel,

1:12:25

I mean, Assistant Attorney General for Criminal Affairs

1:12:27

for some period of time,

1:12:32

and I worked with him in that capacity.

1:12:34

Peter

Did you know Diane Beaver?

1:12:37

-

I don't know her, no.

1:12:39

Peter

Did you have any interaction with her,

1:12:41

even if you didn't know her?

1:12:43

-

No.

1:12:44

Peter

Did you know about her work?

1:12:46

-

I only know about her work because

1:12:47

an English barrister wrote a book about Guantanamo,

1:12:51

and interviewed her extensively,

1:12:55

and talked to me about her,

1:12:58

and about what, you know, that.

1:12:59

Peter

But you had nothing to add about her, or, did you?

1:13:01

-

I was not,

1:13:04

I didn't see any of the work that she did at the time.

1:13:05

Peter

Do you know if she was influenced by John Yoo,

1:13:09

since you knew John Yoo?

1:13:11

I mean-

1:13:12

-

I doubt it.

I doubt if either one knew of the other.

1:13:14

Peter

They each wrote their own memos independently?

1:13:17

-

I am pretty sure, yeah.

1:13:20

Peter

Doesn't it, I mean, this just surprises me.

1:13:22

Doesn't it seem odd that both of 'em

1:13:24

would come up with very similar approaches,

1:13:25

if they're independent?

1:13:29

-

Well, my understanding is that Diane Beaver,

1:13:30

who was

1:13:33

sort of under the gun to produce a particular result,

1:13:37

and

1:13:42

it's,

1:13:44

she was in a very difficult position

1:13:45

because the

1:13:48

people down,

1:13:50

who were sent down to General Miller, and so forth,

1:13:51

who were sent down to Guantanamo,

1:13:54

where very single-minded.

1:13:56

General Miller is one of the villains of all of this,

1:13:59

that I think should have been,

1:14:01

there should be more about him than we know.

1:14:03

Peter

And you think he pressured Diane Beaver

1:14:07

to write the memo then?

1:14:09

-

I'm pretty sure she was pressured

1:14:10

to write a particular point of view.

1:14:12

Peter

Did you know General Miller?

1:14:17

-

No.

1:14:18

Peter

Okay.

1:14:19

-

You don't know who might've pressured Diane Beaver?

1:14:22

I'm just-

1:14:25

-

No, the,

1:14:26

that was a very cloistered group of people down there.

1:14:29

They took, they had their, they took their own counsel.

1:14:34

They did not solicit information or advice from others.

1:14:38

They basically rejected any advice

1:14:42

that was contrary to their way of doing things.

1:14:45

It was a very discouraging way of doing business.

1:14:49

Peter

So there's one detainee

1:14:53

that everybody knows about in Guantanamo

1:14:54

who is considered the 20th hijacker,

1:14:56

al-Qahtani.

1:14:59

Do you think he was the 20th hijacker?

1:15:00

And the FBI was involved in interrogating him,

1:15:02

perhaps more so than they were in others.

1:15:06

Can you talk a little bit about that,

1:15:08

since you probably were present at that time?

1:15:10

It was early on.

1:15:12

-

Well, al-Qahtani, we do believe

1:15:14

was probably the 20th hijacker.

1:15:16

He was turned around when he tried to come

1:15:19

into the United States by a customs official,

1:15:20

or NS, I forget which it was.

1:15:23

We, the FBI was very interested in interrogating him

1:15:27

because we thought he was the 20th hijacker.

1:15:31

Because if he was, then there might be

1:15:33

other information about other plots,

1:15:36

about the organization of, that supported them,

1:15:38

things of that nature.

1:15:40

So that's, they, I think the FBI took more interest in him

1:15:43

than in any other single individual for that reason.

1:15:46

Peter

And do you know how the FBI interrogated him?

1:15:50

Because some of the literature about

1:15:53

how he was interrogated,

1:15:55

or in his interrogation log,

1:15:56

shows that a lot of abuse there was,

1:15:57

he was treated to a lot of abuse.

1:16:01

Where was the FBI in all of that?

1:16:03

-

Not part of the abuse.

1:16:05

Peter

Well, were they in that interrogation log?

1:16:07

I mean, were they covered by that log?

1:16:10

-

(exhales) The log that I saw,

1:16:14

which was, (chuckles)

1:16:16

was sent to me by a private individual stamped secret,

1:16:18

I think it's been released now.

1:16:23

Peter

Private individual from Guantanamo?

1:16:25

-

No, no,

1:16:27

but

1:16:30

the log that I saw

1:16:32

had, was very clearly,

1:16:34

very clearly did not have FBI in it,

1:16:36

because they, you could see what they were doing in there.

1:16:40

It was a

1:16:42

absolutely ludicrous way of trying to interrogate somebody.

1:16:44

In fact, it appeared to me that it was,

1:16:48

you know, Simon Legree whipping the slaves or something,

1:16:52

because it was, there was no purpose to it.

1:16:54

They weren't trying to elicit information.

1:16:57

They were trying to abuse a person.

1:16:59

Peter

But you had to be present at that time,

1:17:01

knowing the FBI was talking to him,

1:17:04

because, right, that was right under your domain?

1:17:07

So what actually was going on

1:17:09

with the FBI's interrogation of him?

1:17:12

-

I didn't know the FBI was interrogating him at the time.

1:17:16

Peter

Huh.

1:17:19

-

I mean, this is, again, you're getting down into

1:17:20

a tactical thing on, at Guantanamo

1:17:22

and, you know, the fact that I was

1:17:25

giving advice on counterterrorism

1:17:28

doesn't mean that everything else stopped.

1:17:30

We still had spies,

1:17:32

we still had organized crime.

1:17:33

We still had weapons of mass destruction.

1:17:34

We had all these other issues that were going on, too.

1:17:37

Peter

So you just couldn't be involved

1:17:41

in all that day-to-day,

1:17:42

is that what you're saying?

1:17:43

-

That's right.

1:17:44

My, in fact, when I first started at the FBI,

1:17:45

I had three lawyers.

1:17:47

When I left the FBI,

1:17:48

I had 56.

1:17:49

It was, it, you know, it grew that much.

1:17:52

Peter

You know, it's really off the page.

1:17:55

I won't spend much time on it,

1:17:57

but were you still present when Abu Ghraib broke,

1:17:58

and did you-

1:18:01

-

Yes.

1:18:02

Peter

See that coming?

1:18:03

-

Did not see it coming.

1:18:04

That really shocked me.

1:18:05

I was as surprised and shocked as anybody

1:18:07

that this would happen.

1:18:10

I mean, these were individuals who were specifically trained

1:18:12

by judge advocates, you know,

1:18:18

and probably had training more than once.

1:18:20

I just, I'm still shocked that it had happened.

1:18:23

Peter

Well, people have said that General,

1:18:27

the reason why I bring it up,

1:18:28

people have said General Miller

1:18:29

started the abuse in Guantanamo,

1:18:31

and took it to-

1:18:33

-

When he left Guantanamo,

1:18:35

he was, I felt that he was terribly abusive in Guantanamo.

1:18:38

When he left and went to Iraq,

1:18:43

he was quoted as saying that he

1:18:46

"needed to have a lot more latitude"

1:18:48

than he had in Guantanamo.

1:18:50

Peter

So then, on some level,

1:18:52

the FBI was in Abu Ghraib.

1:18:55

They must've seen it coming there too then, right?

1:18:57

-

No, no, because the FBI was not involved

1:19:00

in that sort of thing at Guantanamo.

1:19:03

The, I mean, at Iraq.

1:19:05

Peter

Abu Ghraib.

1:19:07

-

The, one of the major purposes for the FBI in Iraq

1:19:09

was to gather evidence and

1:19:15

collate it,

1:19:18

tag it,

1:19:19

keep everything, you know,

1:19:21

so that you could refer to it in the future.

1:19:22

Whether it's gonna be used as evidence or not

1:19:24

is unimportant.

1:19:27

It has to be collected and preserved in such a way

1:19:28

that it can be useful, you know, down the road.

1:19:31

So if the military was going to, for example,

1:19:33

go kick down a door somehow,

1:19:36

so they had this suspicion of terrorist activity,

1:19:39

they would go in and clear the house.

1:19:43

Then the FBI,

1:19:44

who would be waiting around the corner someplace,

1:19:45

would come in and start collecting things,

1:19:48

photographing,

1:19:50

doing all the things that police do to preserve information.

1:19:51

They also served as interrogators

1:19:58

when somebody was picked up.

1:20:01

The, you know, they were involved with

1:20:04

the detention of Hussein.

1:20:08

In fact, one of our, (chuckles)

1:20:11

one of our analysts actually cut his hair, but-

1:20:13

Peter

Why would that be?

1:20:18

-

Because (chuckles) she was there,

1:20:20

and he wanted a haircut. (chuckles)

1:20:22

Peter

Well, I think,

1:20:27

is there anything else,

1:20:28

in terms of looking forward that you want to talk about,

1:20:29

in terms of, you know,

1:20:32

how we should change our policies or whether,

1:20:34

you know, we, Obama needs to do something

1:20:39

to make sure that we don't have another,

1:20:42

what essentially is a, you know, violation of the law

1:20:45

for the last, you know, 10 years,

1:20:48

in terms of how we treated people?

1:20:49

-

Well, I think the fundamental problem is

1:20:51

that the world is sticking its head in the sand.

1:20:55

Assuming that, you know, we don't have to

1:20:57

worry about something like this happening again.

1:21:00

And the fact of the matter is,

1:21:03

we do have to worry about it happening again,

1:21:04

and the only way you can prevent it

1:21:06

is to recognize that the world has moved beyond

1:21:09

where we were 100 years ago.

1:21:12

I mean, if you, even leaving aside terrorism,

1:21:16

and take the piracy issues that we have,

1:21:19

they are beyond the realm of piracy

1:21:22

as we have known it through the years.

1:21:25

They do not fit with,

1:21:27

the piracy that we see

1:21:28

does not fit well within the definition,

1:21:29

which is carved into the Law of the Sea Convention,

1:21:31

and nobody wants to do anything about

1:21:35

changing the way we look at the world as it is.

1:21:37

You know, this is gonna be a fundamental problem.

1:21:40

If, you know, if this administration

1:21:43

really wanted to do something,

1:21:44

they would assert some leadership

1:21:46

in trying to move international law forward.

1:21:48

-

[Female Interviewer] And that would be through the UN,

1:21:53

or through the US law?

1:21:55

Are you thinking we influence the UN,

1:21:57

or US law changes?

1:21:59

Or both?

1:22:02

-

Well, there are several ways to develop international law.

1:22:02

One of them is just to do things,

1:22:06

and the United States has the power to do things

1:22:10

that others would not do.

1:22:14

One of, you know, that others may not be able to do.

1:22:15

One of them would be to take on the issue

1:22:18

of the enemy combatant,

1:22:21

and start saying, "Look, we don't have

1:22:23

"a definition in the Geneva Conventions

1:22:26

"that works for the world that we've got today."

1:22:27

Here is a way of moving forward,

1:22:30

and get the International Red Cross onboard with it.

1:22:32

You know, that's one thing you can do.

1:22:35

Multilateral treaties are very difficult to work with,

1:22:37

but you can manage,

1:22:40

you can start massaging treaties

1:22:41

that are already in existence,

1:22:44

such as the Geneva Conventions,

1:22:45

or the, you know, some of the other-

1:22:47

Peter

Convention Against Torture,

1:22:49

we might want to resurrect. (chuckles)

1:22:50

-

Yeah, you may want to do something about that.

1:22:53

Another issue that is handicapping us

1:22:57

all over the world is what, is privacy rights.

1:23:01

You know, the privacy rights of the United States citizen

1:23:05

and the privacy rights of the European citizen

1:23:08

are quite different.

1:23:10

You know, and it is a real stumbling block

1:23:11

on trying to share information about terrorism,

1:23:13

or organized crime,

1:23:15

or anything else.

1:23:16

You know, these are issues that have to be

1:23:18

taken into account,

1:23:20

because we live in a globalized world.

1:23:21

We aren't, those borders that the United Nations charter

1:23:22

says are sacrosanct

1:23:25

just don't exist anymore.

1:23:27

Peter

You know, I'm going back to one specific

1:23:30

before we close.

1:23:31

Just reminded.

1:23:33

Were you, was the FBI involved in taking

1:23:34

the men from Guantanamo back to,

1:23:37

you mentioned earlier, to other countries?

1:23:39

The FBI ever ride those planes

1:23:41

or be present when they landed or-

1:23:43

-

Yes, and I'm not sure to what extent,

1:23:48

but FBI did occasionally go with them

1:23:52

to take, you know, to repatriate them someplace,

1:23:55

with the idea that maybe you can get

1:23:59

some more information out of them.

1:24:00

Peter

Do you,

1:24:03

you were never present on those planes, I assume?

1:24:04

-

No, no.

1:24:05

Peter

Do you know why the men were held in the same,

1:24:07

well, at least what they told us is that

1:24:11

some of the men,

1:24:13

when they were bound and gagged

1:24:14

and hooded and earmuffed and goggled

1:24:16

on their way to Guantanamo,

1:24:19

some of 'em had said they had the same experience

1:24:20

on the way, when they were released from Guantanamo

1:24:22

and sent to their countries,

1:24:25

whatever countries they were sent to.

1:24:28

Some of 'em said they were still held the same way.

1:24:29

Do you know why that might've been, I wondered?

1:24:32

-

(inhales) I suppose, in abundance of caution.

1:24:35

I don't know what the decision-making process was,

1:24:37

but, you know, if you're on a military airplane,

1:24:41

probably the military is gonna say,

1:24:44

"Look, we don't want any disturbance back there.

1:24:46

"We're not equipped to, you know, to be a brig."

1:24:49

So, I suppose it's just an abundance of caution.

1:24:54

Peter

Those military planes,

1:24:57

from my understanding,

1:24:58

it had a second layer where soldiers would be

1:24:59

holding guns aimed at the detainees,

1:25:01

while the detainees were on the bottom floor.

1:25:03

Is that true?

1:25:07

-

I can't think of a military aircraft

1:25:15

that fits that description.

1:25:17

Peter

Hmm, I wonder why someone told me that.

1:25:18

-

I mean, the only military aircraft that I can think of

1:25:22

that has two layers like that is a C-5,

1:25:24

and there are 72 passenger seats in a C-5,

1:25:29

and then you can put, like, 16 buses in the bottom,

1:25:31

but, you know, that's-

1:25:35

Peter

Well, what kind of planes did fly the men back?

1:25:37

-

Probably C-17s.

1:25:39

Peter

Which are much smaller?

1:25:41

-

Much smaller.

1:25:42

Peter

Mm-hmm.

1:25:43

Is there anything else?

1:25:46

-

[Female Interviewer] Anything else you would like to add?

1:25:47

-

Well, I can't think of anything.

1:25:50

-

[Female Interviewer] Thank you.

1:25:52

Peter

Yeah, thank you.

1:25:53

We need 20 seconds of just

1:25:54

quiet.

1:25:57

Johnny has to just get some room noise, if you will,

1:25:58

for 20 seconds.

1:26:02

So,

1:26:02

if you feel that you've said as much as you'd like to say,

1:26:04

then thank you,

1:26:06

and I'll have Johnny do 20 seconds.

1:26:07

Spike

Okay.

1:26:09

Peter

Thank you.

1:26:10

Johnny

Begin room tone.

1:26:11

End room tone.

1:26:23

Peter

Thanks so much, you know-

1:26:25

Bowman, Marion (Spike) - Interview master file

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