>> caller: this is my first meeting with you today. this is a great sunday for me. i tell you, your words, your poise, your clarity and description offers such great hope, calm, balanced for me on today, especially in this life and time. we are in a really, really interesting period in this world today. i mean, you just really, really hit home and make sense for .. you, what one piece of advice would you give to your daughter's generation, and be able to successfully navigate this world of ours? >> guest: she's eight. to be night in october. fi to give just one piece of advice, i will say don't pay attention to people who impose limits on what you can do. needless to say i have all kinds

of advice but if i would limited to one thing that would be at. >> host: and there's a picture. >> guest: and that's my wife also and supreme court justice sonia sotomayor. >> host: and finally, this is >> host: finally, this is from kevin spacey. when is your next book and what will the subject matter be about? >> guest: my agent and are discussing that at this point. one idea, i'm not committing to this because i haven't decided to this would be a book that in essence would be aimed at people like my daughter or at least young women. and sort of what they can expect and what this new world will bring us. i am not committing to that but that is one idea but i haven't decided that yet. >> host: ellis cose has been our guest.

long time newsweek editor. here's a quick look at eight of his nonfiction books. the press was his first one basically about the year 1963 and changes in the newspaper industry. that came out in 1989. nation of strangers in 1992. best selling rage of a privileged class in 1983 and man's world in 1995. colorblind in 1997. the envy of the world in 2002. bonet to pick in 2004 which we did talk about. and an end of a anger is his most recent book. it came out in 2011. ellis cose, they give for being here. >> guest: great pleasure. and didn't have a chance to talk about bonet to pick but it is my favorite book. issues of forgiveness and reconciliation internationally and domestically but unfortunately came out as we were getting geared up to go

into iraq. therefore it got lost in the shuffle in some respects. >> host: thank you. >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs use the online. tight the offer or book title in the search bar on the upper left of the page and click search. you can also share any thing you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left of the page and select the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours each weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. next on booktv, richard mintier talks about his biography of khalid shaikh mohammed from the spy museum in washington d.c.. this is about an hour. >> i'm glad to see all of you. writing is a very solitary endeavour. the only time you get out side staring at your computer screen

in a dark and dusty place and books go out on their own. with lost children you don't actually get to see what readers think after they read the book. not very often. and sometimes you only hear from people who are upset. hopefully you are not upset and i am delighted you are here. the stand-up comics and actors get to get the immediate response from the audience after their performance at don't even have to write their own lines. when you are being hunted by american men 18-25 years old it is almost inevitable you are going to get a nickname if not several make names. and khalid shaikh mohammed quickly became known inside the special forces community and broader intelligence community as ksm. he also had another nickname. because this story is so the

ability of a front. he had another nick and which was kfc. he got the name because he ate buckets and buckets of kentucky fried chicken in pakistan. he is 5 foot 4 man who weighed 140 pounds in college but after 9/11 when he was in karachi and other pakistani cities chattering down and kfc he ballooned up to 120 pounds. this led to a lot of teasing inside al qaeda. they called him kfc and he didn't like it. when the wall street journal reporter daniel pearl was kidnapped by omar sheik, ksm arrange for that man to self a captive to him. this is not as unusual as it sounds. captives are sometimes bought and sold inside the terror network. and he brought a film crew to the home where daniel pearl was

held. once the camera was up on the tripod running he leaped on to the right shoulder of daniel pearl and began sawing away at his neck. i will spare the grisly details. it took about 11 minutes for my former wall street journal colleague to dar. 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 and in a senior position he could not -- not only killed -- sent people to kill but he could kill himself. he killed daniel pearl not because of anything daniel pearl said or wrote or even thought. he did it to change it affect his reputation inside al qaeda. that gives us a small window into the man and our hopes to open other windows as i talk

today. inside al qaeda it is not as monolithic as you might imagine. i wrote the book "mastermind" to answer three questions. the old saying that you write a book when you spend a couple years studying something and want to teach yourself something. the three question the war on terror way john, dog to be in the back of my mind. these were the questions. how does an educated, successful person, educated in america in western universities become a remorseless killer? of our society and its own? what is 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? obviously this leads into the territory of interrogation, rendition and what some people colporteur. those of the three things i am going to talk about today. khalid shaikh mohammed is born in kuwait on the coast. his father came there in 1950. it was never very important village. it became important in the 1950s briefly because of oil production and attract a lot of british and australian and some american engineers and became a boom town but before the coming of western engineers it was a small coastal village where men died of bear chested for pearls and sold seafood. it was an arab seaside town. the oil boom of attracting immigrants from across the muslim world, and the call of

wealth or possible wealth from this area reached amount since of a region you won't find on many maps but was a country that no longer exists. it goes into a three different -- it is a people that sprawls over three countries. iran, pakistan, and these people without a country migrated for money. some of them were soldiers of fortune. others were like khalid shaikh mohammed's father. they came looking to make money and make a new life. his father comes quickly as a merchant and a peddler and becomes an imam preaching a radical version of islam. more or less at this time unknown to the village people of which he was one. he captures this ideology in kuwait most likely through saudi sources or people loosely called wahabism more properly known as

sloth is in. this radical form of islam in the 1950s and 60s is immensely appealing in that section of kuwait for two reasons. most of the presidents are not kuwaitis. they are displaced peoples. predominantly palestinians and palestinians have much of the lower professional jobs, schoolteachers, police officers and things like that. the other displaced people bangladeshis from the war between india and pakistan, pakistani looking for money. people from the far east predominantly muslim, all of whom come into kuwait without these but very shortly, khalid shaikh mohammed is about 4 years old at the time. his father dies. i searched for the death records. apparently his father died in

1969 and the kuwaitis simply didn't keep records of resident foreigners. bursts, death and marriages. wasn't interesting to them. so we have this account of his father's best that is very sparse and no official transcripts to back it up. his father dies and there's no welfare state. there is no organized charity. for foreigners at the time. so his mother takes a job washing the bodies of the dead. female bodies of the dead and preparing them for burial. very low status, low income job but it enables her to leak out a living. at the time she has nine children. khalid shaikh mohammed is the fourth male. years pass on and khalid shaikh mohammed is doing well at school. he is a good student. somewhat bookish boy. the family decides they can't -- they don't have any money at all. that they need to back once on

to get an education and that one son is typical in arab families in this period of time would support the rest of them. that sun is khalid shaikh mohammed. and they ultimately he applies to school in north carolina and schumann university at the time. historically baptist school in north carolina. either the family has save some money or more likely the muslim brotherhood of kuwait has agreed to sponsor him. he joined the muslim brotherhood after two of his older brothers joined. so he arrived in america at roughly 18 years old and he is unprepared for what he sees. i interviewed the man who picked him up at the airport in virginia beach, and what he remembers years later, the memory he remembers his khalid

shaikh mohammed being surprised by what he saw, surprised by the geography, the intense greenery. when you see trees in kuwait they're usually behind walls. here their trees everywhere. more surprising and more strange and more off-putting than the trees were the people and what they were doing. they were sitting in for lawn chairs on their front lawn visible from the road. they were growing out, playing with their kids, taking a hose to the bushes outside the front window. what surprised him once so much of american family life happening in public. this was not the kind of thing that would happen in the arab world. 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 and public, they trusted

each other very quickly, and they didn't go out at night. after dark is when most social occasions happened in kuwait and many arab countries but in the united states and in murphysborough, there was one pizza parlor. no bars. the pizza parlor closed at 9:00. the town was asleep. far from the night being alive, social and friendly, it was as silent as a tomb. it was the day when americans were busy. he felt more and more alienated by america because it wasn't an arab country. these are very small observations. these things buys themselves do not make him a terrorist but it does set him at odds with the country. there's nothing that schumann did other than to make him attend chapel service that made him part of his larger community. in fact one of the things i

learned in writing "mastermind" is nothing more civil and colleges do to integrate foreign students and explained this country to them. we take it for granted that everyone knows these things. when the fbi search the car of the 9/11 hijackers left behind at dulles airport they felt the small spiral bound notebook and careful arabic script there was a description explaining the differences between shampoo, conditioner and body wash. we think these are easily understood but from another culture and another time, it was puzzling. may be an explanation is in order for foreign students. naturally ksm spend most of his time in college with not just the other arab students but other kuwaiti arabs students. he didn't even mix with the non kuwaiti arabs. after a semester transfers to n.c. jesse jackson's alma mater.

here he studied engineering but again his social network is very limited. 15 or 20 people. all of whom are muslim and all our kuwaiti air. some transferred with him from john. he emerges from someone known on campus as a mullah. he is technically not but what they mean is he as an enforcer. he makes sure that the other students in his group do not violate these very small, very obscure tenets of islam:00 or what they believe to be islamic law. for example, the cuff of your pants can never cover your ankle. is forbidden ever to wear shorts because they exposed the knee and so on. even when they would go to the gym and work out, they would be fully covered. and forcing all these differences kept them apart from the american college campus. i met a number of people who went to college with ksm who

remember him. they mostly remember him fondly. he was a comedian. he was a member of and informal student group known as the friday tonight show where he put on plays and skits, very successfully and humorously imitate various arab leaders. but his audience was the other 2280 arab students. i couldn't find anyone who wasn't a kuwaiti arabs who was a muslim who knew him well in school. his lab partner just remembers him as a person with very broken english. his professors remember him being a very good at math and science but never had a substantial substantive conversation with him about anything that didn't involve molecule's and formulas. so he was in north carolina for several years but came into contact with americans on a very glancing basis. it is as if you are changing

planes and walk through the airport. have you met the people in cincinnati? not really. you pass by them. that is what he did in four years. he self isolated himself and policed the borders, the social perimeter to limit contact with americans. but sometimes events intervened and one thing i learned which was a surprise to me was he had a criminal record in the united states. i am surprised other investigators in the government didn't turn this. he liked to drive at high speeds with an expired driver's license and roar through the streets of greensboro and other parts of north carolina. maybe he saw too much dukes of hazzard. he would occasionally crash. one day two women are talking in a parked car. some urgent confidence that could go on in their living room i imagine. when their car is smashed by

khalid shaikh mohammed. their injuries are so severe they sue him. they found a copy of the lawsuit. their last name is christian. the lawsuit is christian versus mohammad. ultimately they will won the case. they are awarded $10,000 in 1985. a substantial sum of money at the time. their injuries were fairly severe. he never paid. he dodges the sheriff. he flout the law. i talk to the christian women's attorney, stephen j. teague and he remembers ksm bursting into his office with a translator and a small posse of other arab students to lecture about the iran/iraq war and why america is wrong about israel. israel turns out to be a very important point. more so than i would have thought. if you look at most al qaeda communications they very rarely mentioned is real. it is not a core concern of al qaeda's but it was a core

concern of ksm's probably because his social group in kuwait was primarily palestinian and his initial indoctrination into radical islam is for the palestinian message. sometimes when he talked to arab reporters he claimed his mother or grandmother were palestinian. this is a flat-out lie. his mother is from the mountains of iraq and his grandmother most likely the same. ramzi yousef, his cousin -- his nephew who is later behind the february 1993 plot to blow up the world trade center towers also claimed in an interview with an air of paper that his grandmother this time was palestinian. but again not true. you feel this kinship with the palestinian cause, and yet they keep encountering americans who are not jewish who admire israel as the sole democracy in the

middle east, as of place where lots of different types of people including muslims get human rights and rule of law and even truckdrivers and bus tour operators tell ksm and his classmates there are eight arab muslim elected members of the israeli knesset. that is a statistic that rolls off the tongue apparently. and as recalled by one of ksm's classmates, how often they heard this, there are arab muslims elected to israel's parliament. how many jews are elected in saudi arabia's? and this really bothered him. and a return visit to kuwait he went to see his high school principal. is principal recalled the conversation that he now hates america. he hates america because of our support for israel and is

irreducible. every american he encountered. he hasn't encountered all that many. is perot is real. that is something that astonished him and shocked him. when ksm, this is a critical turning point encounters another point of view he is not intrigued by it. he doesn't see to debate it. he is angry at the existence of an alternative point of few. ultimately it is a totalitarian mind-set but it also shows how ill-equipped he is for intellectual debate necessary for high scholarship. it allows him to succeed in science because most scientific questions in particle physics which is -- there is one answer that is right. in politics and literature and the so-called humane sciences there's not one answer that is

right or certainly not one answer that we all know it universally accept. so he never tries to debate. in chapel service i talked to the dean in charge of making sure students attended chapel and asked him and the classmates is there room for discussion in chapel service? it wasn't a religious service at all. usually an academic lecture on some aspect of christianity. sometimes just music. did he ever debate the son of an imam quite learned in the koran or how he presented himself? did he ever debate anything being taught? because remember also moses and jesus up here in the koran they're in different forms that they do in the christian jewish holy books. the account of moses that christians and jews have is a 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 what they write about moses. for example. or some of the other profits. cheese this figure is more in the koran than any other profit and again the accounts of jesus' in the muslim one is very different. you would think that he would engage in debate or any of his classmates would but none of them did. this lack of intellectual curiosity is fascinating. the in tolerance for another point of view is something that the schools, north carolina -- 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 from north carolina, a man comes to speak. a former rabbi now remember of

the israeli knesset who is notorious or famous dependent on your point of view for founding the jewish defense league. he has a very hard line. he thinks the palestinian arabs should go home as he calls it. they should leave gaza and the west bank and go to syria, jordan or egypt or wherever they like but the land he called the land between the two rivers should be the land of the jews. and everyone else, at least the muslims should leave. ksm does not think he is wrong. he thinks he is evil. he has a view that is exactly opposite of ksm's. ksm thinks all the jews should leave. they should die or go to europe. he is almost in different which of the two choices they take. the point is they should leave. matter meets anti matter in north carolina. what is interesting is there's

not a single footnote in the 9/11 commission report referring to ac i a interrogation memo in which ksm says that his first assassination in america was that of myron kahan. the cia briefer does not believe him. they would be immediately curious. so i began investigating. there are a lot of links between the 1990 assassination four years after his speech in new york city and ksm. let's go through a couple brief ones. the man who drove the getaway car for that murder is the same man who drove the getaway car for the world trade center bombing in 1993. the man in the room of the marriott east new york hotel with video camera was supposed

to videotape the moment of glory, two shots to the body, that man is also involved and on the bun laden truck in the 1993 world trade center bombing. and so on. there are about four or five different people who are involved in both the assassination and the 1993 bombing of the world trade center. that is run by ramzi yousef, the nephew and best friend of khalid shaikh mohammed. and the mastermind of the attack is indeed khalid shaikh mohammed himself. dusty records of the justice department they find a single wire transfer which they don't pursue. i will explain in a moment while. from khalid shaikh mohammed transferring money to the world trade center bombers in 1993. why don't they pursue it? after the explosion which killed

27 people if you count the unborn son of monica smith who died in world trade center bombing, when used for true -- 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. in the course of that investigation which they code-named trade bomb by the way, they had very strict orders currently from the clinton white house not to investigate any overseas leads. so the connection to ksm was never explored by fbi -- the lead fbi investigator on the trade bomb case, james fox. that is something that irritated the investigation at the time because they saw lots of foreign connections. instead the bombing was portrayed as a random group of people who spontaneously came together for reasons perhaps

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 found other connections. the man who killed him --myer a hahan one of the demand of the world trade center bombers was his release from sing sing. that can't be a coincidence. and how are these men connected? by the so-called blind sheik, sheik abdul rahman on who is in prison but at the time was teaching at the mosque of peace in new jersey who was across the river from the world trade center. so khalid shaikh mohammed sets in motion and i believe the america hon --myra khana

assassination. is brothers have joined the extended community that is supporting the arab port of the jihad against the soviets and afghanistan. let me pause and explain for a moment. the cia and the u.s. government supported seven different afghan factions who were fighting the soviets. the arab factions, osama bin laden was one of the smaller arab faction leaders. they were never funded by the u.s. government or the cia. they prefer did mostly out of saudi arabia and a collection of other donations from gulf arab states. they had a different goal. the afghans just want their country back. the saudi backed mujahedin wanted to create an islamic state in afghanistan. these two groups didn't work together. they have a common goal in that they liked to kill soviets but

the arabs didn't like to kill them very much. there were very few reliable accounts of arabs fighting soviets. they spend a lot of time fighting each other. one thing i realized was the car bomb before it existed there was something called the camel bomb where they load camels with explosives and allow them to detonate against rival arab factions in afghanistan. so into this mix plunges ksm. he goes to see founder of what later becomes the al qaeda training camps on a hilltop overlooking the refugee camp in pakistan. from that hilltop you can see into the mountains of afghanistan about 40 miles away. through him he meets a number of people. he meets the mentor of osama bin laden. he probably meets bin laden though he later denied that that was their first meeting 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 1991 fact what flag by israeli intelligence by the way. u.s. intelligence says go after these and don't take it seriously. the challenge is there. to bomb the world trade center which at the time they believed was literally the center of the world's trade. they imagined the world as an arab city with a market. you take out the market and trade stops. the idea that the name might simply be a marketing gimmick by the new york port authority never occurred to them. so ksm and his nephew ramzi yousef become famous in jihadis circles for carrying out this attack which for various logistical and other reasons was considered impossible. now he has a choice.

he can join al qaeda or one of the major terror organizations or he can set out on his own as a terrorist entrepreneur. and interestingly does. he has his own network of funders. he plans to carry out his own attacks. so in 1994 we find him in the philippines plotted to blow up 11 airliners simultaneously over the pacific and as i detail in "mastermind" he plots to kill the pope and president clinton in separate attacks. he later make another attempt on the pope's life in 1998. the pope and the president are ongoing targets for ksm and al qaeda. these attacks failed. the philippine police stumble onto a burning bomb parts in the kitchen sink of an apartment

building in manila. he has to flee. his cell numbers are captured and ultimately ramzi yousef is captured in 1995 in islamabad, pakistan. the idea that the moms are killed in pakistan is not strange when you consider two thirds of senior operatives killed or captured anywhere in the world two surge were captured or killed in pakistan. that is more than iraq or afghanistan combined. to a certain extent we could think of al qaeda as predominately a pakistani organization. sayre lead in its location used as safe house to secure communications and as a place to coordinate fund-raising and training pakistan and other debates. but by 1996 or early 1997 khalid shaikh mohammed has run out of money. is best friend, ramzi yousef, his three years younger nephew.

they grew up together. one day in high school they -- khalid shaikh mohammed gets the idea of ripping down the kuwaiti flag from the front of the school and gets his cousin to rip down. if they were caught they would both have been expelled ending any financial future for their families. but they took the risk any way. this is revealing. with ramsey gone and most of his fellows arrested or killed he is running out of options. he goes to brazil and central asia. he goes to iran. he goes to sudan. looking for a source of funds and new recruits for new operations. he is married. his first child is on the way and he is broke. and ultimately his wife tells him this or not, he realizes he needs to get a job. now comes another critical

choice. does he leave the life, the exciting rock star life? ramzi yousef, his nephew, had a business card made that underneath his name said international terrorists. these guys loved the high life. they loved hanging out in high price hotels in manila and karachi and other places in the world read in hooker's, going to strip clubs, having cocktails and listening to loud music. all of which the music was forbidden by strict interpretation of islamic law. they loved of all life. so the idea that he might leave it even though he could 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 with government--not just with government officials but rulers some of those countries.

but apparently he never even considered going straight. reluctantly he talks to his friend and get the meeting with osama bin laden. he and bin laden do not get along. there are very different personalities. ksm is like the independent movie producer. lots of ideas. some bold and exciting. but he needs money and men to carry them off. bin laden has a reservoir of people ready to die for the cause but he also has lots of technical facilities just like hollywood does oresteia chief would. he has people who make passports and create legends and false identities. he has got the safe houses and courier's for moving money. he has the enormous amounts of money to fund the operation blue tactical team supports the operation so that most likely to succeed. and he has a well-established

propaganda arm to lead the world know he has done it. they certainly see the utility in each other. bin laden is a venture capitalist. there is no major attack al qaeda carries out its entire history that was solely or even mainly the idea of osama bin laden. he funds and approves other people's ideas. he doesn't tend to originate them himself. ksm is full of ideas but does he have the discipline to work inside an organization? initially he says no. forget it. you want to give me some money to do what i do that is great. he wants to be the entrepreneur. over the course of the next year in 1997 he becomes financially desperate. the cia has tracked him the year before in 1996 because of a fight between the cia and the fbi league in rome of all places. the u.s. government decides to go through the formal process of

extraditing him from his apartment which is supplied by the minister of religious instruction. later it becomes the interior minister. the interior is the euphemism for intelligence. here he is supported on the government payroll. the cia warned the fbi if we do this officially, threw open documents, ksm will be told he will fully. the government cannot be self-contained. however they are prepared to let us snatch him in the middle of the night. the fbi says that wouldn't be legal. how would we put him on trial? how would we explain how he came into our custody? who will arrest him? we see the beginnings of the fight to capture ksm in 1996 and the beginning of this law enforcement versus warfare debate of the war on terror

which continues to this day. they take the law enforcement approach and ksm gets away. if they had taken the other approach 9/11 most likely would not have happened. ksm would have been in custody and all of his plots after 1996 simply wouldn't have happened. 1998 embassy bombings in kenya and tanzania which killed 224 people, the attack on the uss cole which injured 44 people. 9/11 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people bali bombing which killed 202 people and so on. that of these attacks would have happened. would it have been legal? so ultimately he joins al qaeda and it is like an entrepreneur joining a fortune 500 company. and he doesn't like it. bin laden doesn't make it easy for him. bin laden's decisionmaking

process is very different from ksm's. ksm is very impulsive and makes quick decisions and if he makes a mistake he thinks i will go back and fix it. osama bin laden likes to brood. he would think according to date he's for days about the code name for operation. the only known inside al qaeda, he will spend days thinking about it. bin laden is terrified of making a mistake. he likes bureaucracy and process. he has a council like a board of directors. even if it is unanimously against bin laden he can overrule them. not the way councils work. he likes everyone to have their input. he likes to take his time. he is afraid of making a mistake. somehow these two people begin to work together on one of the most complicated and effective

terrorist strikes in the history of the world, the 9/11 attacks. from the beginning it is a managerial nightmare for ksm. one of the so-called pilots of 9/11 from lebanon, the was born christian and converts to islam, studying in germany and falls in love with a non muslim german girl. it is a matter of public record. their love letters are a matter of public record. they are deeply love with each other. he either knows or has reason to suspect that in a few months he is going to die. whether he has told his girlfriend everything he knows we don't know. she was interviewed extensively by the german version of the fbi. we do know that in july of 2001 she persuades him to break all security and take a 1-way ticket

to dusseldorf. there she meets to map the airport and he disappears into her apartment for several days. al qaeda panics. he has all-pro -- all of the operational secrets of 9/11. deron the final stages of the attack. do they still go forward? is he going to spill the beans? ultimately face and i believe ramsey ben al shea. he now lives in camp 7 in guantanamo. his job is to talk him into leaving the woman he loves and going back to the united states and dying for islam. we don't know what he says but somehow he does it. this is just one of a number. there are 13 different moments in the 9/11 plot in which the plot could have been stopped. muhammed ata stopped for speeding is another one.

all these turning points are driving ksm crazy. each time in which he wants to stop the operation or reconfigure the operation, bin laden even though he hates to make a mistake once he has made a decision hates to reconsider it. so the plot lumbers on word. there's a detailed account of it in "mastermind". the internal mechanics of al qaeda is what makes 9/11 possible. even ksm was ready to pull the plug at different point. after the 9/11 attacks al qaeda initially thinks the u.s. will be afraid to strike. and ultimately scatters 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 is killed

by a predator drone in november of 2001. he stages a series of daring attacks which i detail in the book and in march of 2003, 4 story of how we found him, which is a very funny and strange story involving cellphone as, text messages and the crazy character who had it with ksm but had to wander around the night in pakistan. eventually he is captured in the home of a prominent microbiologist, a famous figure in pakistani society. and the wife of the man whose home ksm is captured in is the local leader of the largest political party in pakistan. this is like capturing the unabomber in beverly hills in the home of two movie stars. but pakistan has no connection.

after he is captured he disappears from view. very hard to get an account of what happens between march of 2003 and september of 2006. ksm disappears into a series of essentially cia run secret prisons in thailand, romania and outside a some 80 airport near warsaw, poland. one of the reasons we don't know is that attorney-general eric holder is continuing to prosecute ksm's cia interrogators. men under criminal indictment are subject to criminal investigation and oddly enough don't like to talk to writers or reporters and put things on public record. so there are very limited accounts of this period. we do know certain things for a fact based on government documents that were released. one is that ksm was water boarded in march of 2003.

half of all al qaeda captors talk without any coercive measures at all. the other half are put on a staircase of increasingly severe measures. these measures are not all that severe. one is the belly slap. you need to get written permission from headquarters 24 hours in advance before you slap a detainee in the belly. there is a very specific description how you have to form your hand, the gap between your fingers and you can slap once in the belly to get them to talk. if that doesn't work and you decide you would like to slap them again you can fill out a form and wait 24 hours that you might be able to slap them second time in the belly as long as your fingers are properly spread. obviously this is a very

bureaucratic process. there is a physician, board certified physician in the room at all times as is a translator and several other observers. interrogators are rarely if ever alone with their subject. you have seen reported in the new york times that ksm was water boarded 183 times. that is technically true but very misleading. what it really means is water was poured on his face 183 times but there were not 183 separate sessions of water boarding. water boarding is the top of the staircase. the twelfth and the most severe. water boarding has been extensively studied. tens of thousands of u.s. service men have been water boarded in military schools and there has been a lot of medical examinations. there is no peer reviewed study anywhere in the world that shows

that the american style of water boarding lead to any permanent or irreversible physical or mental problem. none at all. the list of subjects is between 20,000, and 30,000. they have never been able to find any serious medical, mental or physical problems as a result of water boarding. but ksm knew the rules. he knew they could only for the water for a maximum of 40 seconds. as they were pouring the water he would stick his hand out and kaufhof the seconds, mocking his interrogators. one of the problems with publicly announcing what the limits are so your enemies note to game the system. ultimately ksm breaks. maybe he breaks out of boredom. maybe he breaks because he doesn't have 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 board you will say anything to make it stop. that might be true. but it is a useless observation because when you are being water boarded you are not being asked any questions the interrogators don't already know the answers to. they are asking questions they know the answers to because they are testing your veracity. your willingness to offer the truth. once you begin to cooperate you move out of what is strictly speaking interrogation into debriefing. there you meet a totally different set of characters. now the people who water boarded you. i should also remind you the people who do the water boarding have been water boarded themselves. they received extensive training a purge of 200 hours of it. they have been -- part of that training they have in water boarded themselves so they know exactly what the subject is going through because they have done it themselves.

ksm breaks and he begins to talk. when he offers up information and questioning that information is checked and cross checked. they simply don't write down everything he says and take it as gospel. why would they? good information is rewarded. access to his favorite foods, an extra pillow and so on. that information -- bad information is punished. your favorite foods go way or the air-conditioning becomes a little cool. very quickly prisoners realized the parameters. cooperation is rewarded, lack of cooperation is punished. do i think ksm was tortured? having looked through hundreds of pages of government documents released by the cia by the inspector general's report which is fairly critical and the legal memos put out by the justice department i would say no. because torture by the classical definition is a permanent irreversible change in well-being such as gouging out

and i or amputating a healthy limb or ripping out a tooth without anesthesia. there are countries that do this for information. we are not one of them. those countries in fact do torture. but we do not permanently and irreversibly affect someone's well-being, mental or physical. we simply put a subject under a period of stress so he can cooperate and provide life-saving information. d. kinder you are to your subject, the harsher you are to be 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 terrorist bomb will go off. you never know when the machine gun carrying man will burst into the crowded bus. so be harder, be nicer you are to the detainee, it is a trey of. the harder you are on the innocent person who might know nothing of politics and living

an ordinary life. if you go too far toward harsh treatment you also eliminate the possibility of the subject's cooperation. that too is a balance. i could talk more about this in questioning. but ultimately, i will end with this, let's look at some of the benefits. we heard a lot about the cost. americans don't do that. this is very unsightly and so on. let's look at the benefits of the interrogation of khalid shaikh mohammed. plots to blowup the u.s. embassy in paris were stopped. plots to blow up the capital of molly were stopped ands to kill the ambassador to singapore and attack the australian and israeli embassies in the same city were stopped. 44 people were arrested in that particular case. plots to bomb u.s. warships off the streets of gibraltar were stopped. plot to blow up the empire state building and brooklyn bridge, chicago sears tower, seattle's space needle, library tower in

downtown los angeles and stalin. plots to blow up gas stations in baltimore, all stopped based on interrogating and debriefing khalid shaikh mohammed. how many of these plots with you have liked to see succeed by giving up the water boarding option? how many? how many people do you want to trade so that we don't water board someone who has devoted his life to terrorism? thank you very much. [applause] >> we have a few minutes for questions. the microphone here. >> you said you have questions that going too far can be counterproductive. what are the talking heads on ms nbc interviewed several people described as interrogators who

said that water boarding have a counter-productive effect of causing someone to hate america which intuitively sounded absurd to me in cases like ksm. that you could increase hatred for america in any way. would you comment upon that? i am interested to know how does an interrogator take this position that interrogation using water boarding is counterproductive? how does one get, quote, interrogated to say that? >> that is a great question. the m s nbc interviews i have seen were u.s. army interrogators' so they were not interrogating high-value al qaeda targets like ksm. it was done as part of the cia program and khalid shaikh mohammed and other high-value targets are in the custody of the u.s. navy. the army interrogators are looking at low-level taliban figures in afghanistan or iraq.

your view of interrogation from inside the bureaucracy is splintered along agency lines. fbi and law enforcement folks think about making the case. lawyers have written themselves a complex set of rules over the last couple hundred years especially since the 1960s and they're very cautious about these rules. rules of evidence, change of custody and so on. these are the kinds of things that obsess the fbi. if you are going to prosecute using civilian courts, terrorists are absolutely right. the evidence seems to be maintained that interrogation must be conducted in such a way as to avoid spoiling the evidence for ruining the case. there are some military predominantly army people who believe field interrogation they were doing in afghanistan and iraq should be the model. there are interrogating the same

hard cases. this is the senator john mccain of view that we should follow the 1940 u.s. army field manual. that is great except the field manual has surge limitations. you can never shopped at the detainee. you can't make false threats. you can't play good, bad cop. those are all forbidden in the 1940 manual. so if you get a rest and you are suspected of, i don't know, graffiti, you can be interrogated by your local police who use all these techniques and somehow our constitution maintains itself leader society continues. the dark night of fascism does not descend but if you question members of the taliban or al qaeda and played good, bad cop you violated the u.s. army field manual of 1940 and that a very bad thing and the constitution is going to come tumbling down.

a ridiculous position. it is based on where people stand on this issue is about where they sit in the bureaucracy. the cia people are mostly interested in stopping future attacks. they are not really concerned how they get there. they think there's a certain amount of life-saving information inside the head of the detainees and their job is to get it out. it may well be that their measures are counterproductive but it doesn't appear to be so based on the consciousness of this process. step number 7, the belly slap, they take the detainee into a room and fro him against a false wall which collapses six inches making a very loud noise. you get written permission in advance and there's a doctor in the room and so on. that is another one of these techniques designed to elicit cooperation. only three people have ever been water board and khalid shaikh

mohammed is one of them. their manual which was captured in 2002 requires them to hold out. it is a matter of personal honor which is not a small thing in the arab world. to hold out as long as possible. so if you don't do something sufficiently severe as to compel cooperation, they have not met the test of their honor and can't cooperate. it is an interactive process. i am not in favor of torture perce, and i don't think what we do or what the u.s. government does is torture. but you need to create stress in the subject to extract that life-saving information. if you don't create enough stress and don't 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, we could