welcome to hardtalk, with me, zeinab badawi, from florida, where my guest is american psychologist james mitchell. he helped draw up and carry out the cia's enhanced interrogation program after the september 11th attacks. he personally interrogated some of the top terror suspects

using the techniques, including waterboarding. his critics say he is a torturer. he says he has nothing to apologise for, and what he did was harsh but legal and necessary. so this is your study? yes. the thing that is useful about a library like this is, for example, this is this is reliance of the traveller. it's a book of sharia law from a salafist position. i've got a couple of different versions of the koran, because the translations are not always the same. what kind of insights, using the knowledge you've gained from these books, as well as your training as a psychologist, about what motivates the kind of people you've interrogated into carrying out the deeds, or wanting to carry out the deeds that we know about? i've heard people say that these terrorist suspects that we are seeing in europe, great britain and the united states have nothing to do with islam, but having spent years with men like khalid sheikh mohammed

and abu zubaydah, and ramzi bin al—shibh, and al—nashiri, i can tell you that, in their minds, it has everything to do with islam. their interpretation? their interpretation, their salafist, islamist interpretation of islam. james mitchell, welcome to hardtalk. thanks for having me on. so, there you were, after more than 20 years in the us air force. you'd retired, you were working as a consultant for the cia, the september 11th attacks happened, you say to the cia, "i want to be part of the solution." why? it was an attack on our homeland. the main thing that influenced me to want to volunteer to help out was the death and destruction. the critical thing, when they asked me if i would

be willing to get involved in the interrogation programme, really was the falling man and the people jumping off the building. i thought it was inappropriate and wrong for them to have to choose which way they died as a result of this cowardly attack that was done by these islamists who were trying to destroy our way of life. so you, obviously using your experience as a clinical psychologist working with the american military for many years, could help identify, recommend techniques that would work as part of the enhanced interrogation program. but how would you make the leap from that to actually carrying out, personally, some of those interrogation techniques? by the time they asked me if i would do the interrogations myself, i had received over 90 intel briefings about the impending catastrophic attacks that were in the works. there was a lot of reliable intelligence to suggest that that second wave of attacks might involve a nuclear weapon. when they asked me, i was initially reluctant to do it.

why were you reluctant? because i knew that i wasn't going to be a psychologist any more. i had no illusions about that. i'm not going to practice mental health. and i had invested a lot of my time and education into developing those skills, which were useful for what i did do, but i knew i wasn't going to use them again. and one of the senior people, along withjose rodriguez, who was the chief of the counter—terrorism centre at the time, leaned over to me and said, "if you're not willing to help us, how can we ask somebody else to?" because i had been... like i said, i had received these very in—depth intel briefings about these pending, catastrophic attacks. but you knew what was being asked of you, that you were actually being asked whether you could personally carry out techniques

such as waterboarding, slapping a terror suspect around the face, putting them in a small, confined space, that kind of thing. well, i'd seen those techniques used for at least 11 years in my military career, and i knew that it didn't result in permanent harm, you know, either mentally or physically, and i'd been trained to apply them myself. in addition to that, i'd experienced all of them. so, to me, it didn't seem like as big a jump as it might be to someone who you just stopped on the street and asked them to do that. would you grit your teeth when you had to do these? i found them difficult to do morally, but it was always a moral choice between trying to save lives and allowing people who were trying to withhold information that could potentially stop those attacks to continue to do it, especially since they had voluntarily taken up arms against us. those eits were used in very short periods of time. abu zubaydah was subject to enhanced interrogation techniques for 14 days.

abu zubaydah, of course, was working with al-qaeda, and he was one of their facilitators. he was the first senior person that we had captured. he had not sworn bayat to bin laden, but he was the same as they were. he had given them money for 9/11, and he had moved money and people for them, and he was running a training camp that they sometimes relied on, not all the time, but sometimes. so he was a person of interest, and the first person that enhanced interrogation techniques were used on. waterboarding was one of the techniques that you also recommended. just describe to us what it's like to... well, i was waterboarded myself. in fact, i waterboarded almost as many attorneys as i had terrorists. in the run—up to deciding whether or not waterboarding was legal and didn't violate any of the us laws or the

constitution or the treaties, i actually waterboarded an assistant attorney—general. it sucks. it's uncomfortable. it feels like you could potentially suffocate. i mean, you know you're not going to, but, you know, it's hard to keep that out of your mind. so it's not painful in the sense that you don't experience a lot of pain, but it's frightening. because it makes the person think that they are suffocating or drowning? you feel as though you could. you don't feel as though you are. what do you actually experience yourself, as the person who is carrying out the waterboarding? we would prefer that people just volunteered the information, and, in fact, one of the deceptive things is, abu zubaydah, who we've been talking about, was held in cia custody for 1,623 days. of that, he received 1a days of eits, and the rest

of the time, the entire rest of the time, 1,609 days, he more or less cooperated with us, and didn't receive any mistreatment. or even any physical coercion or that sort of stuff. so what we wanted to do was to take these people who were withholding information and put them in a situation where they would try to find some solution, and as soon as they tried to find a solution, then we could switch to social influence stuff, the kinds of things you would know as a psychologist, or an interrogator, or any other kind of investigator, to be able to ask questions, so you can move them past this. but initially, especially a man like abu zubaydah, who was taught resistance to interrogation, they know how to withhold information, so we're not talking about the run of the mill islamistjihadi who's been caught up on the battlefield. we're talking about the top tier of people.

but still, how do you feel? ifeel like it was my duty, you know? my preference was, all along, my preference was to simply ask the question and get the answer. and, in fact, we started that way. anyone who is familiar with the way it was done knows we would... every time, we would start with a neutral assessment of whether or not the person was going to talk, and then, in those cases where they would use the eits, and then as soon as it was over, we told them what we were going to ask them about the next time, and then the next time we started with a neutral assessment. so as soon as the person began to cooperate, we stopped eits. eits, i have to say, of course, enhanced interrogation techniques. khalid sheikh mohammed, who was the mastermind of the september 11th attacks, was also one of the people you interrogated. you also waterboarded him, but he had a technique to resist waterboarding. it looked like magic to me. he could...

i don't know what was going on with his sinuses, but he swallowed some of the water, so the physicians required that we switched to normal saline so he didn't suffer from water intoxication. the other thing he would do is he would pass it through his nose and out of his mouth, so waterboarding, although he came to dread it, wasn't really as effective on him as it was on the others. because, with abu zubaydah, when you were... one session you described, he actually vomited. that was the very first session, before they had... the physicians had said you needed to give him 12 hours, or 1a hours, or something like that. but he actually temporarily became unconscious, or you weren't sure whether he was breathing or not. right. a couple of... we are talking about heartbeats. so he did vomit at one point, but he vomited up his food. i mean, i have to say that, of course, as you outlined in your book, enhanced interrogation, waterboarding was something that was authorised by the bush

administration, from the very top, the department of defence and the department ofjustice had said, this was an authorised form. not once, but four different times. sure. vice president dick cheney said that waterboarding was fine, it didn't constitute torture. so i want to make that clear. however, there is an alternative point of view that says waterboarding does constitute torture. we know, for example, barack obama said it did constitute torture, so by extension, therefore, your critics would say that you are a perpetrator of torture, or to put it another way, you are a torturer yourself. what's your response to that? well, fortunately, what matters is what the justice department says. the office of legal counsel is the highest law enforcement agent in terms of making these decisions. torture has a legal definition.

and so the colloquial way that we use the word "torture"... i can see why people might think that, and that's the way that barack obama used it. i personally think late—term abortion is a torture, but it doesn't matter whatjim mitchell thinks is or isn't torture, it matters what the justice department thinks, and it matters what the people who've done the investigations think. you know, there was a several—year—long criminal investigation into whether or not anyone involved in the enhanced interrogation program had tortured anyone, and in the end, a career prosecutor came back and said, there is no case to be made. so what do you say, when people say to you, jim mitchell, james mitchell, you are a torturer, because you carried out waterboarding? i say, you're entitled to your opinion. it's not mine. we live in the united states. in the united states, people can have different opinions. you don't feel you have to apologise, or... we stopped that attack. we stopped that second wave of attacks, and i don't feel

that the temporary discomfort of a person like khalid sheikh mohammed outweighs the moral requirement that, if i can, i save lives. i just don't think it does. because khalid sheikh mohammed voluntarily decided to attack us, voluntarily decided to attack as a second time, and he's not a us citizen. he wasn't captured inside the united states. he's not really someone who should be given the constitutional rights of an american citizen. so i owe my fellow countrymen more than i owe khalid sheikh mohammed. given that, at any point, he could have said, "i will tell you how to stop an attack." you know, one of the criticisms is that there hasn't been a safe word, but in fact, there is a safe word, and the safe word is, "i'll answer that question." president donald trump, on the campaign trail, said he wanted to bring back waterboarding. what he said was, "i'd bring

back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding." however, he has since said he'd go with what his secretary of defence, general mattis, and cia director mike pompeo think. would you like to see waterboarding brought back? because of course barack obama stopped the enhanced interrogation techniques in 2009. i think some form of legal coersion and, and let me emphasise the word "legal" is apt to be necessary, because at the very top, that handful of people, people like khalid sheikh mohammed or abu zubaydah, they are not going to freely give up that information. in fact, this is what i would say... what general mattis had said was — and i've got a lot of respect for the man — but he said, "give me some beer and a pack of cigarettes and i think i could get more." that's the rapport—building approach. yes. here's the problem with that. you've got to ask yourself, would general mattis give up information that could potentially get his countrymen killed and disrupt our attacks for a michelob and winston? he's not going to do that,

and neither would ksm. the only thing standing between another catastrophic attack from some senior person is whether or not that person is willing to voluntarily provide that information to us. so you feel that because america no longer uses enhanced interrogation techniques, that it's a less safe place? they no longer even can use law enforcement techniques. the local mall cop has more choices as to what kinds of interrogation techniques to use than the cia interrogator. so america is less safe, in your view, as a result? it is less safe as... notjust this, but a lot of things have happened in the last eight years. but, you know, one person who has been tortured is the republican senator, john mccain... yes. ..the vietnam war veteran. and he wrote in the washington post in 2011, "i know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners sometimes produces good intelligence, but often produces bad intelligence, because, undertorture, a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear. so that's a response to your point, because actually

coercion sometimes doesn't yield the right results, they just say something to stop the torture. if you ask questions that way, that's true. if you ask leading questions, and you tell the person or lead the person to believe that the only way they're going to stop that is to tell you what you want to hear, then you do get that kind of information, you do get misinformation. but that's not how it was done. let me be clear with you. what happened is, when the eits were used, we would say to the person, we want information to stop operations. we know you don't have all of it, but you have some of it, and that's what we want to talk about. and so the point would not be to tell them where we wanted them to go. there was of course the the senate intelligence committee report into the practices of the cia...

there were two reports, actually. yes. that's the one i want to pick up on, though, the one that was chaired by the democratic senator, dianne feinstein, and she said that "these are a stain on our values, the us values, and our history." so do you not have any sympathy with that kind of argument? although what you did was authorised, because it was approved, but nevertheless it was a stain. i have sympathy for it, but i reject the idea that it's a stain. you have to to understand, we're talking about a matter of days for this thing. for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques. one of the ways that i think about this is, we do, as do other countries, drone strikes. when we do a drone strike, we send a cruise missile or a hellfire missile into a family, and we kill the grandmother, we kill the kids, we kill

the neighbours, we kill whoever happens to be around. that's not a stain? you know, in my mind, capturing someone, questioning them, even if it requires some temporary discomfort, you don't harm them, and then you can go out and capture these other people. it does a lot less damage than these other things. she also said, in the forward to the report, that the programme by the cia, both the authorised and the unauthorised, amounted to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. that it was a violation of us values. what you did, arguably, waterboarding and the other techniques, did amount to that cruel and injured humane and degrading treatment. would you accept that criticism? i accept that there are people who think that way.

i'm not going to try to argue them out of their position. here's the thing to remember. in those circumstances where there are catastrophic attacks coming, and there were catastrophic attacks coming, and the people are withholding the information, we were under no obligation to allow them to withhold that information and kill thousands of americans. and the way the current setup is is we are dependent entirely on the voluntary statements. so you say that it was entirely justifiable? i'm not saying that the entire cia programme was justifiable. no, because you warned yourself of abusive drift, and you talked about how some interrogators would threaten the terror suspects they were interrogating with a handgun or a power drill...

they did things that were not authorised, like taking people's elbows together and raising them above their head, and some things that should not have ever happened, because i think they were not reviewed by thejustice department, and, in my view, violated the law. and then we saw of course the abu ghraib prison scandal 2004 in iraq by military police officers, parading iraqi detainees and keeping them naked and putting a leash around them and so on, and in guantanamo bay, and all the criticisms there about people being detained without proper legal process and so on. obviously, you're not part of that. none of that. sure. but do you feel that, nevertheless, perception could see you as being part of this whole programme which, in some people's minds, does really denote... i can understand that people might think that way, and i accept that there were people who feel that way. i don't know how to respond to it beyond that. i believe there are people who think that way. i think a lot of that is based on ignorance. some of that is based on this

mistaken notion that we can somehow make the islamists who are attacking us like us, that if we just spent more time with the islamists, trying to convince them that it would be ok, but i spent years with khalid sheikh mohammed and the other high—level, the top 1a or so terrorists that the us captured, and it was clear to me from talking to them that there was nothing that we were going to do that would allow them to accept western democracy. in fact, they said western democracy and true sharia cannot coexist. general stanley mcchrystal, former head ofjoint special operations command in 2013 said about his time in iraq, "when you become the torturer, something happens. "i think it has a corrosive effect over time. "i think you move down a path that is difficult to come back from." does it affect you? does it change you in some way?

i think it makes you more empathetic to what people are experiencing. remember that the reason that waterboarding wasn't done more than it was was because the interrogators didn't want to do it. we had agreed to waterboard those people to stop these catastrophic attacks, and once it seemed like we'd got enough information to be able to do that, we weren't interested in doing that again. waterboarding was never the first or best choice for any of these people, and we went out of our way to try to avoid doing that. and so i think it's one thing to burn people in cages and nail people to trees and crucify children and bury people up to their necks and throw rocks at them and that sort of stuff. i think it is tough to come back from that. i think it is difficult. has it been tough for you? no, and here's the reason. i was convinced because i've relied on the department of justice that they were legal, and i'm convinced because of the way that we did them, we did them in a way that

wouldn't produce permanent harm, mental or physical harm. that was my obligation when i did it. i don't have any control over how someone else did it. do you have any regrets, though? because you said that when you thought about whether you should actually carry out the interrogations, and carry out waterboarding, that it would change your life as you knew it. do you regret that you went down that path? well, the only thing that i actually regret is that, in doing that, i'm not likely to be a college professor. i'm not still doing consultation for some of the things i was involved in. so to the extent that having done those things sort of blackballed me from doing other stuff, i have some regrets about that, but no regrets about doing it. because i don't think you need to be ashamed about trying to save american lives.

i travel around quite a bit in the us, and i have not personally ran into one single person who was critical of me. i've run into people who disagree about the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, who said, i prefer if it didn't happen, but i can understand that you did it to try to stop this next attack. but the vast majority of people i run into are grateful that somebody was willing to do what must be done to protect them. james mitchell, thank you very much for coming on hardtalk. thank you. hello. there's a weather system bringing cloud across the uk. initially most of the rain will be across western parts and as we head across monday and into tuesday, some of that rain will be quite widespread and quite heavy, but you can see by the position

of the weather system why it really is mostly across western areas for monday, we are going to see some rain. lots of cloud to begin with, parts of wales, western england, perhaps into the eastern side of northern ireland and south of scotland with some rain, chilly in north—east scotland with clear skies and mist and fog patches to begin with, north—east scotland will hold onto the lion's share the sunshine in the day ahead with a few brighter breaks across east anglia and south—east england as well. much of wales, the western side of england, northern ireland, southern and western scotland, cloudy, and there will be some patch outbreaks of rain around. but further east, much of the day will be dry but there will still be quite a bit of cloud to be had. the highest temperatures with those sunny spells towards east anglia and south—east england, just getting up to around 20 degrees and for many it is mid

to high teens. that's how things are shaping up as we have gone through monday night and you can see some outbreaks of rain just becoming a little more widespread and some heavier bursts just pushing up across southern parts of england going into tuesday morning and temperatures holding up in the mid to low teens. still some clear spells in northern scotland. so, some heavier bursts of rain around, during tuesday, affecting parts of england and wales, so wales turning dry as the day goes on but still potentialfor some rain affecting central and eastern parts of england even into the evening. a few showers around in scotland and northern ireland. once that weather system clears away, wednesday morning, there could be mist and fog patches around and wales and england. sunny spells going through, weaker weather system will deliver a bit of cloud and patchy rain into parts of scotland and northern ireland as the day goes on. temperatures edging upwards

a little bit, 21 celsius in cardiff, for example. there's a ridge of high pressure, largely fine on thursday. low pressure on friday. thursday is going to be the driest, the brightest day of the week. that's more widely across the uk. by friday, the winds are picking up and there is some wet weather spreading from west to east across us. that is your weather for the week ahead.

welcome to newsday, reporting live from singapore, i'm karishma vaswani. the headlines... north korean media claims the country's successfully tested a new long—range missile — we'll get the latest from our correspondent in the region. as the first aid from the world food programme arrives in afghanistan — since the taliban captured the capital — we have a special report from the pakistan border — on the worsening refugee crisis. give mea give me a home, give me a place to stay, like, a place for me to stay, like, a place for me to study, to do it i went to my welt 100% stay with them, that is no doubt about it. iran and the un nuclear inspection agency strike a deal

on monitoring some iranian nuclearfacilities — in talks