but then a friend of yours idea was very bright, called and said andrew breitbart, i've got the perfect job for you. >> he was from harvard. houston astro physics major who always cared for me. he always knew that in prep school is not going to be that a student, that i was the class clown, but that i'm not well. ..

>> i'd rather drive around l.a. listening to talk radio and music. >> oh, but you started listening to rush limbaugh. >> uh-huh. i told me i've seen the internet and i've seen the future and i think there's something almost too eery about that. he's right. the internet does work the way that my brain works. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org.

>> i thank all of you for coming. i'm actually glad to see all of you and i'll tell you why. writing is a very solitary endeavor. about the only time you get outside of staring at your computer screen is interviewing somebody in some dark and dusty place and books go out on their own like lost children and you don't get to see what readers think about your book, not often, and sometimes you only hear from the people who are upset so hopefully you're not upset. and i'm delighted you're here. the stand-up comics and actors, they get to get the immediate response from the audience about their performance and they don't have to write their own lines. when you're being hunted by american men from 18 to 25 years old it's almost inevitable that you're going to get a nickname

if not several nicknames. and khalid shaikh mohammed very quickly became known inside the special forces community and in the broader audience as ksm, his u.s. government network name if you will. cr he had a nickname called kfc and he got the nickname kfc because he ate buckets of kentucky fried chicken or conduct fried chicken knockoffs. he's about a 5'4" man. when he was in karachi and other pakistani cities, chowing down on kfc he ballooned up to over 200 pounds. he had this jaba the hut-like girth and this led to a lot of teasing in al-qaeda and they called him kfc and he didn't

like it. and when daniel pearl was kidnapped by omar sheik, he bought ksm for the men to sell the captive to daniel pearl to him. and this is not as unusual as it's sound. captors are bought and sold inside the terror network. and he brought a film crew to the home where daniel pearl was held. and once the camera was up on the tripod and running he leaped up to the right shoulder of daniel pearl and began sawing away at his neck. i'm going to spare you the grisly details. it took 11 minutes for daniel pearl, my former wall street colleague to die. why did he do it? he did it because he hated the nickname kfc in part. he wanted to show even though he was fat, even though he was now in a senior leadership position, he could not only send people to kill and to die, but he could

kill himself. he made -- he killed daniel pearl not because anything daniel pearl said or wrote or even thought. he did it to change and affect his reputation inside al-qaeda and that gives us is small window into the man and i hope to open a few other windows as i talk briefly today. now, inside al-qaeda, it's not as monolithic as you might imagine. i wrote the book "mastermind" to answer three questions. the old saying you write a book when you want to spend a couple years studying something and teach yourself. the three questions on the war on terror sort of waged on that dogged me at the back of my mind and these are the questions. one, how does an educated, successful person, educated in america and in our western universities, become a remorseless killer of our society and of his own? what's that pattern of

transformation? what are the choices that person makes to become a terrorist? how does that happen? secondly, i wanted to know how does al-qaeda function on the inside? what is it like to work for al-qaeda? what are the internal dynamics? and third, what techniques in the war on terror work and don't work. and that, obviously, leads us into the territory of interrogation, rendition, and what some people call torture. so those are the three things i'm going to talk to you about briefly today. khalid shaikh mohammed is born in kuwait in a city called fahil. it's on the coast. his father came there in 1950. and it was really never an important village and it became important in the 1950s briefly because of oil production and it attracted a lot of british and australian and some american engineers and it became a

boomtown. but before the coming of the western engineers it was a small coastal village where men dived bare chested for pearls. and with the oil boom it attracted immigrants from across the world and the call of wealth or possible wealth from fahil reached the hills of baluchistan which is a region you would find on many maps but it's a country that no longer exists but it goes into three different -- it's a people that straws over three countries, iran, pakistan, and afghanistan. and these people without a country migrated for money. some of them were soldiers of fortune but some were like his father, khalid shaikh's father and they were looking for a new life and his father comes and very quickly is a merchant, a

peddler and becomes an imam preaching a very radical version of islam which is more or less at this time unknown to the village people which he was one. he captures this ideology in kuwait most likely through saudi sources, what people loosely call wahhabism which is more properly known as the soloviism. and this radicalism in the 1950s and '60s which is immensely appealing in that section of kuwait. two phone reasons. most are in the native kuwaitis, they are displaced peoples. they are predom inabilitily palestinians and the palestinians have much of the lower professional jobs, school teachers, police officers, things like that. and the other displaced people, bangladeshis from the war between india and pakistan,

pakistanis looking for money, people from the far east, predominantly muslim. all who are able to come in to kuwait without a visa. but very shortly in his life khalid shaikh mohammed is about 4 years old at the time and his father dies and he searched for the death records. apparently his father died in 1969 and the kuwaitis simply didn't keep records of resident foreigners, births, deaths, foreigners. it just wasn't interesting of them. so we have this account of his father's death and it's very sparse and there's no official transcripts to back it up. his father dies and there's no welfare state. there's no organized charity in kuwait for foreigners at the time. so his mother takes a job of washing the bodies of the dead, female bodies of the dead, and preparing them for burial. it's a very low status, low-incomed job but it enables her to eek out a living. at the time she has nine

children. khalid shaikh is the fourth male. years pass on and khalid shaikh is doing very real at cool. a good student. a somewhat bookish boy. and the families decides they don't have any money at all that they need to back one son to get that education and that one son and this is typical in arab families at the time would support the family and that's khalid shaikh and ultimately he applies to school in north carolina. an historically baptist school in murfreesboro, north carolina. and either the family has saved some money or more likely the muslim brotherhood of kuwait has agreed to sponsor him. he joined the muslim brotherhood after two of his old everbrothers had joined at age

16. so he arrives in america at roughly 18 years old. and he's unprepared for what he sees. i interviewed the man who picked him up at the airport, outside of virginia beach, who drove him to murfreesboro. and what he remembers, this is years later, but the memory that he remembers is khalid shaikh being surprised by what he saw. first of all, he's surprised by the geography, the intense greenery. when you see trees in kuwait, they're usually behind private walls. and more string and more offputting than the trees were the people and what they were doing. they were sitting in lawn chairs on their front lawn visible from the road. they're grilling out, playing with their kids, taking a hose to the bushes outside of the front window. but what surprised him was so

much of american family life happening in public. and this is not the kind of thing that would happen in the arab world. and the more time he spent in north carolina, the more he was persuaded that americans were really backwards. they did things that should be private in public. they trusted each other very quickly. and they didn't go out at night. after dark is when most social occasion would also happen in kuwait and many arab countries and in the united states, in murfreesboro, at the time, 1983, '84. murfreesboro had one pizza parlor. no bars. the town was asleep. so far from the night being alive and social and friendly, it was as silent as the tomb. it was the day when americans were busy. so he became more and more alienated by america because it

wasn't an arab country. and these are, you know, very small observations. these things by themselves do not make him a terrorist, but it does set him at odds with the country. there's nothing that the college did, other than make him attend chapel service, that made him part of its larger community. in fact, one of the things i learned in writing "mastermind" there's really nothing our civilian colleges do to intergrate foreign students, to explain this country to them. we take it for granted that everyone knows these things. when the fbi searched the car of the 9/11 hijackers left behind at delles airport, they found a small spiral bound airport and in very careful arabic script, there was a description explaining the differences between shampoo, conditioner and body wash. we think we're easily understood but from another culture, another time, yeah, it's

puzzling. maybe an explanation is in order for foreign students. so naturally ksm spent most of his time in college with not just other arab students but other kuwaiti arab students. he didn't even mix with the non-kuwaiti arabs. after a semester, he transfers to north carolina a & t, jesse jackson's al ma mater. he socializes with 20 people, all of them are arab and muslim. but he emerges as someone who's known on campus as a mullah. technically he's not a mullah but what they mean by that he's an enforcer. he makes sure that the other students in his group do not violate these very small very obscure tenets of islamic law or what they believe to be islamic law. for example, you know, the cuff of your pants can never cover

your ankle. it's forbidden to wear shorts because they expose the knee and so on. so even when they would go to the gym and work out, they would be fully covered. enforcing all these differences kept them apart from the american college campus. i met a number of people, almost a dozen in fact, who went to college with ksm who remember him. and by the way, they mostly remember him fondly. he was a comedian. he was a member of an informal student troupe know as the friday night show where he put on plays, skits, very successfully and apparently very humorously imitate various arab leaders. but his audience was those other 20 kuwaiti arab students. he didn't -- i couldn't find anyone who wasn't a kuwaiti arab, who wasn't muslim, who knew him well in school. his lab partner just remembers him as a person who had very broken english. his professors remember him being very good in math and

science. but never had a single substantive conversation with him about anything that didn't involve molecules and formulas. so he was in north carolina for almost four years but he came into contact with americans on a very glancing basis. it's as if you are changing planes in a strange city and you walk through the airport. have you met the people of, say, cincinnati? not really. you passed by them. that's what he did in basically four years. he self-isolate himself and he policed the borders, the perimeter, the social proximity, to limit contact with americans. but sometimes events intervened and one of the things i learned, which was a surprise to me was that he had a criminal record in the united states. i'm surprised that other investigators -- the government didn't turn this up but he liked to drive at high-speeds without a driver's license and he would

drive through the streets of greensboro and other parts of north carolina. maybe he saw too much of the dukes of hazard, i don't know. but he would occasionally crash. one day two women are talking in a parked car, some urgent confidence that couldn't go on in their living room, i imagine. when their car smashed by khalid shaikh mohammed. their injuries are so severe they sue him. i found a copy of the lawsuit. their last name by the way is christian, the law is christian v. mohammed. [laughter] >> ultimately, they win the case. they're awarded more than $10,000 in 1985, which is a substantial amount of money at the time. so their injuries were fairly severe. he never pays. he dodges the sheriff and flouts the law and i talked to the christian women's attornnd he

remembers him bursting into his office and a posse of other. israel is an important point in his radicalization than i thought. when you look at most al-qaeda communications they very rarely israel. it's not just a core concern of al-qaeda's but it was a core concern of ksm, probably because his social group in kuwait was predominantly palestinian and his initial indoctrination in radical islam is through the palestinian message. sometimes when you talk to arab reporters, he claimed that his mother or his grandmother were palestinian. this is a flat-out lie. his mother is from the mountains of iran and his ethnic baluch and his grandmother is most likely the same. ramzi yousef, his cousin who was -- sorry, his nephew who is later behind the february 1998

plot to blow up the world trade towers also said his grandmother was palestinian but again, not true. so they feel this kinship with the palestinian cause but yet they keep encountering americans who are not jewish, who admire israel as the sole democracy in the middle east, as a place where lots of different types of people, including muslims, get human rights and the rule of law. and even truck drivers and bus tour operators are able to tell ksm and some of his classmates that there are eight arab muslim-elected members of the israeli knesset. and that's a statistic that rolls off the tongue apparently and is told by one of ksm's classmates how often they heard this. that there are arab muslims elected to israel's parliament. how many jews are elected to

saudi arabia's? and this really bothered him. on a return visit to kuwait, he went to see his old high school principal, and his principal recalls a conversation that he now hates america. and he hates america because of their support -- our support for israel. and its irreducible and every american that he's encountered, and remember he hasn't encountered that many is pro-israel. and that's something thatstonishes him, that shocks him. when ksm, and this is a critical turning point encounters another point of view, he's not intruding by it. he doesn't seek to debate it. he's angry at the existence of an alternative point of view. it's ultimately it's an authoritarian mindset but it shows he's ill-equipped for the intellectual debate for high scholarship. it allows you to succeed in

science, because most scientific questions which is molecule physics which is a branch of metaphysics in my view, there's one answer that's right. but in politics and literature and so-called humane sciences, there's not one answer that's right or certainly not one answer that's right that we all know and the university accepts. and so he never tries to debate -- when he was at the chapel service, i talked to the dean who was in charge of making sure that the students attended chapel, and i asked him and i also asked the classmates, is there room for discussion in these chapel services? it wasn't a religious service at all. it was usually an academic lecture on some aspect of christianity, sometimes it was just music. well, did he ever debate -- this is the son of an imam, quite learned in the koran or at least he presented himself, did he ever debate anything that he was being taught?

'cause remember although moses and jesus appear in the koran, they appeared in very different forms than they do in the christian and jewish holy books. the account of moses that the christians and the jews have is virtually identical. the differences are based on language and translation. whereas, the account of moses, for example, in the koran is completely different. and so you would think someone trained in the koran would debate, are they right about moses? for example, or some of the other prophets. >> jesus figures more in the koran than any other prophet and again, the christian account of jesus and the muslim one is very different. you would think he would engage in debate or any of his classmates would, his kuwaiti arab classmates but none of them did. this lack of intellectual curiosity is just fascinating but the intolerance for another point of view is something that the schools did nothing to

remove that aspect of his personality. and this leads to a turning point, in 1986, shortly before ksm graduates with a degree in chemical engineering, i believe, from north carolina a & t, a man comes to speak, a former rabbi, now a member of the israeli knesset meyer cahaan who found the jewish defense line. and he thinks the palestinian should go home and leave gazaa and the west bank and go to jordan, syria and what he called the land between the two rivers, the sea and the jordan river should be the land of the jews and everyone else, or at least the muslims should leave. ksm did not think he was wrong. he thinks he's evil. meyer cahaan has a view that's

exactly opposite of ksm. ksm thinks all the jews should leave. they should die or go to europe. and he's almost indifferent as to which of the two choices they should tabling but the point is they should leave. so matter meets antimatter in greensboro, north carolina. and what's interesting is in the single footnote in the 9/11 commission report, referring to a cia interrogation memo in which ksm says that his first assassination in america was that of meyer cahaan. the rest of the footnote says that the cia briefer does not believe him. it made me immediately curious. and so i began investigating. and there are a lot of links between the 1990 assassination four years after his speech in greensboro of meyer cahaan in greensboro and ksm. let's go through a couple brief

ones. the man who drove the get-away car for the meyer cahaan murder is the same man who drove car for the of 1993 world trade center bomb. and the man with the video camera who was supposed to videotape the moment of glory, the two shots to the body of meyer cahaan, that man is also involved and, in fact, on the bomb leaving truck on the 1993 world trade center bombing. there's about four or five different people who are involved in both the cahaan assassination and the 1993 bombing of the world trade center. that cell upon the world trade center is run by ramsey yousef, the nephew and best friend of khalid shaikh mohammed and the mastermind of that attack is in fact khalid shaikh mohammed

himself. in the dusty records of the justice department they find a single wire transfer which they don't pursue and i'll explain in a moment why for khalid shaikh in doha transferring money to the world trade center bombers in 1993. now, why don't they pursue it? after the explosion which kills seven people, seven if you count the unborn son of monica smith, one of the secretaries who died in the world trade center bombing. when you sort through -- when the fbi sorted through the rubble, they ultimately found a piece of a truck with a vehicle identification number that led to the bombers. but in the course of that investigation, which they conamed trade bomb, by the way, they had very strict orders apparently from the clinton white house not to investigate any overseas leads. so the connection to ksm was

never fully explored by fbi -- the lead fbi investigator on the trade bomb case, james fox. and that's something that irritated the investigators at the time because there were lots of foreign connections. instead, the bombing was portrayed as a random group of people who spontaneously came together for reasons perhaps of insanity to carry out the first major foreign terrorist bombing in the united states. and it ends there. years later, as the investigation deepened, they find other connections. the man who al-qaeda meyer cahaan -- one of the demands of the world trade center bombings was his release from [singinsin. and that can't be a coincidence. how are these men connected, by the so-called blind sheik who is now in prison but at the time

was teaching at the mosque of peace in new jersey, just across the river from the world trade center. so khalid shaikh mohammed sets in motion, i believe, the meyer cahaan assassination. and then he travels briefly to kuwait and then to afghanistan to join his older brothers. two of his older brothers have now joined the extended community that is supporting the arab port of the jihad against the soviets in afghanistan. let me pause and explain for a moment here. the cia and the u.s. government supported seven different afghan factions who were fighting the soviets. the arab factions, bin laden, was one of the leaders -- one of the smaller factions -- the arab factions were never funded by the u.s. government. they were never funded by the cia.

they were, in fact, funded mostly out of saudi arabia and a collection of other donations from gulf arab states. they had a different goal. the afghans just wanted their country back. the saudi-backed mujahedeen wanted to create an islamic state in afghanistan. so these two groups didn't work together. they had a common goal that they like to kill soviets, although, the arabs didn't like to kill them very much. there are very few reliable accounts of arab fighting soviets. they spent a lot of time fighting each other. one of the things i realized is the car bomb before it existed, there was something called the camel bomb, where they load camels with explosives and allowed them to detonate against rival arab factions in afghanistan. and he goes to see the founder what later became the al-qaeda training camps on a hilltop

overlooking the refugee camp in pakistan and from that hilltop you can see into into afghanistan, 40 miles away. and through him, he meets a number of people. he meets abdullah adzam who's the mentor to bin laden and he begins developing a web of social connections to finance terrorism, and he sees the beginning of a terrorism career. the world trade center bombing is a challenge put out by a 1991 fatwa. the u.s. intelligence said, well, there's lots of fatwa, and they don't take it seriously but the challenge is there to bomb the world trade center, which at the time they believed is the center of the world trade. ..

>> and interestingly, he does. he has his own network of funders, he plans and carries out his own attacks. and so in 1994, we find him in the philippines, plotting to blow up 11 airliners over the ma sick. -- pacific. as i say in "mastermind" he plotted to kill the pope and the

president. but the pope and the president of the united states remain ongoing targets for consideration sm and al qaeda. so these attacks fail as the philippine police stumble on to burning bomb parts of the kitchen sink in an apartment building. he has to flee. ultimately, the youth of the capture in islamabad. the idea that bin laden is killed in pakistan is not strange when you consider that 2/3 of all senior al qaeda operatives killed or captures, 2/3 of them were captured or killed in pakistan. that's more than iraq or afghanistan combined. so to a certain extent, we could think of al qaeda is predominantly a pakistani

location. certainly in the safe houses, communications and a place to coordinate fund raising and training, pakistan has long been their base. but by 1996, early 1997, the sheikh has run out of money. his best friend, ramsey yousaf, one day in high school -- sheikh gets the idea of ripping down the kuwaiti flag and gets his cousin to shimmy up the flag pole and rip it down. if they were caught, they would have been expelled. ending financial future for their family as educated men. they took the risk anyway, which also revealing. with ramsey gone and most of his cell arrested or killed, and he's running out of options. he goes to brazil, central asia,

iran, sudan looking for a source of funds and new recruits for new operations. he's married, his first child is on the way, and he's broke. end ultimately, whether his wife tells him this or not, he realized he needs to get a job. now comes another critical choice. does he leave the life, the sort of exciting rock star life, you know, ramsey yousaf, his nephew that say ramsey yousaf, international terrorists. they love the high life. hanging out in high priced hotels in manila, renting hookers, having cocktails, listening to loud music, all of the which even the music is forbidden.

they love the life. and so the idea that he might leave it, even though he'd get a very decent job as a chemical engineer in the middle east, fairly easily, especially based on his extensive connections in saudi arabia and the persian gulf, not just with government officials, but, in fact, the rulers of some of those countries. but apparently he never even considers going straight. reluctantly, retalks to his friend and gets a meeting with bin laden. he and bin laden do not get along. they have very different personalityies. ksm is the independent movie producer. lots of ideas, some of them bold and exciting. he needs money and men to carry them off. bin laden has a reservoir of people ready to die for the cause. he also has lots of technical facilities, like hollywood does. the studio chief would.

he has people who make forged passports and create legends, super false identities, he has safe houses, couriers for moving money, he has enormous amounts of money and a technical team to support the operation. so it's most likely to succeed. he has a well established propaganda to let the world know he's done it. so they certainly see the utility in each other. bin laden is sort of a venture capitalist. there's no major attack that al qaeda carries out in the entire history that was soully or even mainly the idea of osama bin laden. he funds other ideas. he approves and funds other people's ideas. he doesn't tend to originate them himself. ksm is full of ideas. does he work inside the organization? originally, no, forget it. you want to give me money to do

what i do, that's great. he wants to be the entrepreneur. over the course of the next year, he becomes increasingly financially desperate. the cia tracked him to doha because of fight between the cia in rome of all places. they decide -- the u.s. government decides to go through the formal process of extraditing him from his apartment in doha, which is supplied by the minister of religious instruction at the time, later it becomes the interior minister. interior is the euphemism for intelligence. here he is supported on the government payroll. the cia warns the fbi look if we do this officially, through open documents, ksm will be told and he will flee. the government cannot be seen to do it openly. however, they are prepared to let us snatch him in the middle

of the night. and the fbi says that wouldn't be legal. how would we put him on trial? how would we explain how he came into the custody? so we see the beginnings in the fight to capture ksm, the beginnings of the law enforcement versus warfare debate about the war on terror. the debate which tonights until this day. well, they take the law enforcement approach and ksm gets away. if they had taken the other approach, 9/11 would have most likely not have happened. ksm would be in custody and all of the plots after 1996 simply wouldn't have happened. the 1998 embassy bombings which called 224 people. attack on the uss cole which killed and injured 30 people, and the attacks in new york and washington, the bali bomber, so

on, none of these attacks would have happened. would it have been legal? so ultimately he joins al qaeda. it's like an entrepreneur joining the fortunate 500. he doesn't like it. bin laden doesn't make it easy for him. his decision making process is different. ksm is very impulsive. he makes quick decisions. if he makes the mistake, he'll think i'll go back and fix it. osama bin laden likes to brood. he would think, according to detainees, he would think for three or four days just about the code name for an operation. the code name that will only be known inside al qaeda. he will spend days thinking about it. he's terrified of making a mistake. he likes bureaucracy, he likes process. he has a sure counsel, which is

sort of like a board of directors. even if it's unanimous against him, they can't overrule him. he likes everyone to have input, take his time, and afraid of taking a mistake. temperament tally, they are very different. somehow the two people begin to work together on what is one the most complicated and sadly one the most effective terrorists strikes in the history of the world, 9/11 attacks. from the beginning, it's a managerial nightmare. one the pilots, he was born christian, converts to islam, he's studying in germany and falls in love with a nonmuslim german girl. it's a matter of public record. their love letters with a matter of public record. they are deeply in love with each other. he either knows or has reason to

suspect that in a few months he's going to die. whether he's told his girlfriend everything he knows, we don't know. she was interviewed extensively by the german version of the fbi. we know in july 2001, she persuades him to break all security and take a one-way ticket to dust eluder of -- dust the doff. al qaeda panics. they are in the final stages of the 9/11 attacks. can he go forward? is he going to spill the beans? ultimately they send ramsey, the man who wanted to be the 20th hijacker who lives in camp seven in guantanamo.

we don't know what he says to convince him to leave the girl, but he does it. there are 13 different moments in the 9/11 plot in which the plot could have been stopped. muhammad stopped by a maryland state trooper for speeding is another one. all of these turns points are driving ksm crazy. each time in which he wants to stop the operation or reconfigure the operation, bin laden, even though he makes to make a mistake, once he made a decision, he hates to reconsider it. so the plot lumbers onward. there was a detailed account of it. but the internal mechanics of al qaeda is what makes 9/11 possible. al qaeda was ready to pull the plug at different points. after the 9/11 attacks, al qaeda

initially thinks the u.s. will be afraid to strike and ultimately scattered into pakistan where many of them are later killed or captured. at this point, ksm is promoted to head of military operations, his friend and contact muhammad is killed by a predator drone in november 2001. he stages a series of dares attacks. which i detail in the book. in march of 2003, i reveal the story of how we found him, which is in turns very funny and strange story involving cell phones, text messages, and a crazy character who has dinner with ksm. he had to wonder around the nights in pakistan. eventually he's captured in the home of a prominent

microbiologist. a famous figure in pakistani society. and the wife of the man who's home ksm was captured in is the leader -- local leader of the largest political party in pakistan. this is like capturing the unibomber in beverley hills in the home of two movie stars. of course, pakistan has no connection. it's surely a coincidence. after he was captured, he disappears from view. it's hard to get an account of what happens between march 2003 and september 2006. ksm disappears into a series of essentially cia run secret prisons in thailand and out of the airport in warsaw poland. ones reasons we don't know, attorney, eric holder is, is

continuing to prosecutor. men under criminal indictment are subject to investigation oddly enough don't like to talk to reporters. there are very limited accounts of this period. we do know certain things for a fact based on government documents that have been released. one is that ksm was water boarded in march 2002. half of all of al qaeda captures talk without any course of measures at all. the other half are put on a staircase of increasingly severe measures. these measures aren't all that severe. one is the belly slap. you need to get written permission from langley, cia headquarters, 24 hours in advance before you slap the detainee in the belly. there's a very specific description of how you have to form your hand, the gap between your fingers, and then you can

slap him once in the belly to get him to talk. if that doesn't work, and you decide you'd like to slap him again, fill out a form, send it to langley, wait 24 hours, you might be able to slap him the second time in the belly as long as your fingers are properly spread. obviously, that's a very bureaucratic process. there's a physician, a board certified physician in the room, as translator and several ore observers. interrogators are rarely if ever alone with their subject. now you've seen reported in the "new york times" ksmfuls -- ksm was water boarded 183 time. it means water was poured on his face 183 times. not 183 sessions.

it's the top and most severe. the water boarding have been extensively studied. tens of thousands of u.s. servicemen had been water boarded and escaping evasions and other military schools. there's been a lot of medical examinations. there's no pure -- peer reviewed study that shows the american style of water boarding leads to any permanent, irreversible, physical or mental problem. none at all. the list of subjects is you know between 20 and 30,000. they've never been able to find any serious mental -- medical or physical problem as a result of the water boarding. ksm knew the rules. he knew they could only pour the water for a maximum of 40 seconds. as they are pouring his water, he would stick his hand out and count off the seconds.

mocking the interrogators. one of the problems with announcing the limits is your enemies know and gain the system. ultimately ksm breaks. maybe he breaks out of boredom, or maybe he doesn't like having a towel over his face and water poured on him. but he does break. a lot of people will say when you are being water boarded you'll say anything to make it stop. that might be true. but it's a useless observation because when you are being water boarded, you are not being asked any questions that the interrogators don't already know the answer. they are asking you questions because they are testing your veracity, your willingness to offer the truth. once you begin to cooperate and move out of interrogation into what's called debriefing. there you meet a totally different set of characters. not the people who have water boarded you. i should also remind you that

the people who do the water boarding has been water boarded themselves. they receive extensive training, upwards of 200 hours of it. but they have been in -- part of that training they have been water boarded themselves. they know exactly what the subject is going through because they've done it themselves. ksm breaks. he begins to talk. when he offers up information, that's checked and cross checked. they simply don't write down everything they says and take it as gospel. why would they? good information is rewarded. they will have access to the favorite foods, he'll get an extra pillow, so on. that information is punished. the favorite foods go away. maybe the air conditioning in the room becomes cool. very quickly people with prisoners realize the parameters, cooperation is rewarded, lack of cooperation is

punished. do i think that ksm is tortured having looked through hundreds of pages, the respecter generals report and legal put out by the department of justice? because torture is a permanent, irreversible change in well being, such as gouging out an eye, amputating a healthy limb, ripping out a tooth anastasia. there are countries that do this. we do not permanently and irreversibly affect someone's well being. they put the subject into the period of stress to cooperate and provide life saving information. the kinder that you are to your subject, the harsher you are the innocent american who might simply be picking up her child from school or going to the grocery store for some food.

you never know when the terrorists bomb will go off, you never know when the machine gun carrying men will burst into the crowded bus. the kinder you are to the detainee the harder you are on the citizens. the harder you go, the more you eliminate the cooperation. that too is a balance. ultimately, i'll end with this. let's look at some of the benefits. we've heard a lot about the costs. this is unsightly and so on. let's look at the benefits of the interrogation of khalid sheikh mohammed. plots to blow up the u.s. embassy in paris, plots to bill

the u.s. embassy in singapore were stopped, 44 people arrested. plots to sink u.s. warships were stopped, plots to blow up the empire state, brooklyn bridge, the chicago sears tower, the seattle space, library tower and so on. plots to blow up a series of gas stations in baltimore, all stopped. based on interrogating and debriefing khalid sheikh mohammed. how many plots would you like to see succeed by giving up the water boarding? how many? how many people do you want to trade so that we don't water board someone who's devoted his life to terrorism? thank you very much. [applause] [applause]

>> sorry about that. microphone. >> you said that you deal in questions with the issues going too far can be count productive. one the talking heads on msnbc interviewed several period described as interrogators. who said the water boarding as a counterproductive effect causing everybody to hate america. which sounded absurd to me in the case of ksm, that you can increase the hatred for america in any way. would you comment? i'm interested to know how does an interrogator take the position that interrogation using water boarding is productive? how does one get quote, unquote interrogated to say that? >> that's a great question. first of all, the msnbc are all u.s. army interrogators.

they were not interrogating high targets. that was initiallydown done as part of the cia. now ksm and the other are in the custody of the u.s. navy. the army interrogators looking at low-level taliban in afghanistan or iraq. but your view of interrogation is splintered along agency lines. the fbi and law enforcement folks think about making a case. you know, lawyers have written themselves a complex set of rules, over the last 100 years. especially since the 1960s. and they are very cautious about these rules. rules of evidence, chains of custody and so on. these are the kinds of things that upset the fbi. if you are going to prosecutor using the civilian courts, they are right. evidence needs to be maintained and interrogations conducted in

such a way as to avoid tampering with or spoiling the evidence and ruining the case. there are some military, predominantly army people who believe the interrogations in afghanistan and iraq should be the model. they are not interrogating the same cases. this is sort of the center of john mccain to follow the 1940 u.s. army field manual. that's great expect that the field manual makes -- has a certain limitations. for example, you can never shout at a detainee. you can't make false threats. you can't play good cop/bad cop. those are forbidden in the 1940 manual. you get arrested and suspected for, i don't know, graffiti, you can be interrogated by the local

police and somehow the constitution maintains itself, the society continues, the dark knight does not offend, but if you do it with al qaeda, you've violated the field manual and the constitution is going to come tumbling down. where people stand on the issue is where they sit in the bureaucracy. now the cia are mostly interested in stopping future attacks. and they don't -- they are not really concerned how they get there. they think there's a certain amount of life-saving information inside the heads. their job is to get it out. it may well be that their measures are counterproductive. but it product appear to be so based on the number that the cautiousness of this process. you know, step number seven is

walling. where they take the detainee and throw them against the false wall which collapses back, making a loud noise. you need written permission in advance, there's a doctor in the room, so on. but that's another one the techniques designed to elicit cooperation. only three people have ever been water boarded, khalid sheikh mohammed is one of them. remember their manual, captured in afghanistan in 2002, requires them to hold out as a matter of personal honor which is not a small thing in the arab world, to hold out as long as possible. if you don't do something sufficiently severe, they have not met the tests of their honor and can't cooperate. so it's an interactive process. i'm, you know, i'm not in favorite of torture, per se. i don't think what the u.s.

government does is torture. you need to create stress in the subject in order to extract the life saving information. if you don't create enough stress and get the information and people die, how do you explain to the families who lost somebody because they got on a bus or went to the mall at the wrong time? well, we would have found out about that plot. but we might have this to pour water on his face. we might have had to keep him in an air conditioned room for hours, maybe days. what's the explanation to the family? it's a tradeoff. you are weighing the two. you can't -- critics imagine they live in a world of infinite means to have the most humane and gentle treatment. if you look at the cia reports on this, which are now public.

you look at the elaborate bureaucratic precautions, no person would find they are harsh. even if you do believe they are harsh, you must be honest enough and adult enough to say there is a tradeoff. if you don't do the things, there's information that we will not get and people will suffer. the question becomes how many innocent civilians do you want to die in order to prevent water boarding. >> time for one more question. after this talk, richard will be in the back. >> hi, i think you mentioned briefly, there were several other times ksa got away. especially detail about specifically how he was captured at the end. pakistanis or the -- cia? or how did that come about? >> the tip that