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tv   Interview  RT  February 9, 2013 11:47pm-12:00am EST

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self with the same intelligence advisors who advised president bush through most of the first term the cia had the same deputy director that bush had the same director of operations that bush had john brennan who is president obama's new designee to be the cia director and until what a week ago or so was the deputy national security adviser was under president bush the director of the national counterterrorism center and up to his eyeballs in torture policy so even though we changed presidents there was really no change of intelligence advisors at least not on counterterrorism john brennan you mentioned john brennan and i want to ask you about him the future head of the c.i. what kind of a cia chief is he going to be in your opinion i think he's going to be somebody who will be extremely aggressive and who will probably be comfortable. walking on the edge of the law you worked with him i did i worked with john brennan
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for many years and i know him pretty well. mr kaplan you yourself supported torture before you were against it what happened what changed your position well let me correct you on that and this is something that that i think most americans missed in my original n.b.c. interview i was trying to draw a distinction between whether torture was right and wrong or whether it worked i believed it was wrong and i called it torture and i said that torture was official policy that's on the one side on the other side the cia had told us internally at the time that it was working what year was that that was in two thousand to two thousand and three they were telling us that it was working we now know from the inspector general's report that was released in the spring of two thousand and nine that that was a lie that the cia was lying even to those of us inside the cia and i think it was just to protect themselves and to protect the policy but it never worked did
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you have a personal experience related to torture where you personally involved in torture no thank god i was never a person involved in torture when i returned from pakistan in the early summer of two thousand and two where i had been chief of counterterrorism operations i was asked by a senior officer in the cia's counterterrorist center if i wanted to be trained in in the use of these torture techniques and i said no i had a moral problem with it and i didn't want to be associated with it there were fourteen of us at the time who were. made the offer. two of us said no and then one of us not me the other guy changed his mind so i was the only one who was made the offer who declined. because at that time you already believe that it wouldn't work i just thought i didn't know if it would work i mean they were telling us it would but i just believed it was wrong you know it
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at the cia part of the cia's culture is to couch all issues in shades of grey you have to be very comfortable working in morally nebulous situations or legally nebulous situations but there are some things that really are black and white and i believe that that was a black and white issue there's something that i think you will find interesting and something that i'd like you to comment on polls by the american red cross show that the majority of americans find torture acceptable sixty percent of young people agree whereas four years ago torture was largely condemned in the u.s. . how did this become the new normal what happened in those four years i think that many people who told pollsters in the early or middle part of the last decade were reacting to president bush little by little president obama adopted most of
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president bush's counterterrorism policies and just because he happens to be a nobel peace prize winner barack obama after most americans i brought haven't paid much attention all of these have just bought iraq hussein obama does i think it's a question of education here domestically execute people need to be informed that hollywood have a role to play i think hollywood had a role to play i think that zero dark thirty for example did a grave disservice to counterterrorism zero dark thirty perpetuates this grand lie that torture led to the the. the killing of osama bin laden it's just simply not true myths often become history one comedian here said movies it was about zero dark thirty about the way it's serious movies is where. americans learned their history it's true what myths what other myths do you see being perpetuated now related to the war on terror i think one of the great myths
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and i chuckle to myself because it always seemed so ridiculous to me was president bush's statement that they hate us because we love freedom i know what al qaeda i've captured al qaeda fighters i've had conversations sitting across the table like i am with you with al-qaeda leaders and i can tell you from firsthand personal experience that the reason people take up arms against us is because of a lack of education yet that i understand that the united states can't educate the whole wall no we can't but we can we can help other countries develop an infrastructure so that they can educate themselves coming more and more about your encounters with those what are their impressions that you have the first kind of fighter i ever caught was in one thousand year old boy from tunisia and the only reason he went to afghanistan was because he had nothing else to do he had no skills and no way of making a living and he wanted to get married so the local in mom said if you want to make
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some money you know what you should do you should go to afghanistan and make jihad against the americans if you do that i know somebody who will pay your family five hundred dollars and you can use that for a dowry and you can you can get a wife. so this kid had nothing against the united states he had never even really thought about the united states so from your experience you saw no ideology i saw very little you see ideology and some of the older fighters some of the leaders the camp commanders for example sure there's ideology there but in my short time in pakistan i captured fifty two al-qaeda fighters i can count on one hand the number of people who were real ideologues who really were there for jihad who were really there to kill americans three out of fifty two the perception of one condiment two has gone a long way since two thousand and eight when he was a burning and a highly controversial issue most recently you know the state department has shut
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down the office that was working to shut down the guantanamo prison is that this administration's way of saying. forget about guantanamo let's move on i think it is i think it is again where's the outrage the american people really don't care if one time the most open or closed this administration it appears decided not to bother about interrogations kuantan prisoners and all that and just to bomb whoever seems suspicious was drones what do you think about this administration's no prisoners policy we find ourselves murdering people in many cases children with no evidence whatsoever that they're involved in any criminal or terrorist activity and what this does is it encourages other people to take up arms against us john brennan the architect of the drone program basically and it was last year i
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think when he claimed that u.s. drone strikes caused no civilian deaths in pakistan over the prior year which was an outright lie by so many accounts do you think we're going to see more transparency was regards to drones with john brennan at the helm of the cia no. no i don't with john brennan. secrecy is the key word. unless of course you know if he chooses to leak for the benefit of the administration what did you expect when you decided to go public to come clean on on on torture at the cia i mean if your wife worked at the cia and she was fired because of him and your father of five and you were going to prison what future did you envision for yourself five years ago. i didn't envision prison in my future five years ago i expected there to be a national debate on whether or not we wanted to use torture as an official u.s.
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policy now i'm very happy proud actually that i played a role in that debate and now the limbo law of the land is that torture is illegal i'm very proud of that i frankly didn't expect that the government would would go after me so relentlessly i stood in the snow for two hours to vote for president obama i really believed that this was a positive change i believed that he deserved that nobel peace prize or only because i expected things to change so dramatically at the beginning of his first term so no i never believed i would be going to prison under a president obama never. that's been i think my biggest disappointment but you haven't seen a dramatic change i haven't seen any change no torture he stopped torture sure but
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in terms of counterterrorism policy i think the obama administration is largely an extension of the bush administration and stick it out with thank you for the interview i wish all the best thanks very much for having me. my juggling geog. do hack work and get caught when lobbyists money and lawmakers are combined together that's where the problem of corruption comes from. i don't know the document's. keep up
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a smart look. there is also. another way behind that which is how to influence the citizens steer clear of provocations don't answer any question. came into the office and found banners hanging around the office and lots of strange faces around so i said what's what's happening will somebody please tell me what's going on and they said oh we've come to occupy your building. possibly they want to do a confrontation possibly they wanted me to ring up the police and have the police come in through the mount but it didn't seem to be a good idea to learn the european way with brussels business. in the uk risky it's one person one fault but in brussels business it's one euro one fault.
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