khalid sheikh mohammed is alive and well and gaining weight. >> were you waterboarded? >> no, those techniques were not used on trainees when i was inside the cia, but before i came here, i looked at the clips from the hearings in congress, and general after general have gone up there and said -- >> what they want is with this. they don't want to be using these techniques. the military is not and should not the question, whether with the intelligence community there can be a small cadre that uses them in exceptional circumstances by the director, addressed only by the president. not the military, not by the police or every interrogator absolutely. but should it not -- would you prefer that khalid sheikh mohammed had not been waterboarded even if it means the second wave attack against los angeles would have proceeded? >> or said differently, cliff, is there anyone that would argue we shouldn't have waterboarding we had the option on the 9th or 10th of september? i don't think anybody would make that appointment. i'm sorry i'm out of time. >>> up next, a case of mistaken

next came khalid sheikh mohammed. he too is now a resident of guantanamo bay. abu faraj al libi was captured in 2005, he then joined his predecessors in guantanamo bay. hamza rabia was killed six months in pakistan, then came the longest-running al qaeda number three, abu laith al-libi. he was killed in january 2008. that gave sheikh al-masri his lead, after being killed, followed by, as we said, rahman, whose killing was reported this weekend. now, there's a lot of issues around these predator drone strikes, how many innocents they kill, how many times they target these people and get an innocent target. there's a lot of stuff to wonder about the legality of these killings, it's very, very dubious to say the least. are they assassinations prohibited by american law or is this acceptable method of war against a terror group that attacked the united states, plenty to wonder there, but what is not in doubt, is if you move up to al qaeda number three, which as we said, without osama bin laden is now al qaeda number two, you have absolutely no chance of collecting

when the car smashed by khalid sheikh mohammed. the injuries are so severe they sued him and i found a copy of lawsuit. by the way it is christian verses mohammed. [laughter] ultimately they went in the case and they are awarded more than $10,000 in 1985 which is an essential sum of money the times of the injuries were fairly severe. he never pays. he dodges the sheriff, fly is the law the christian women's

one of them, as you say, was khalid sheikh mohammed, our most important source on al qaeda after he waserboarded, including among other thing as plot calmed the second wave meant to knock down the largest building in los angeles, and so i think the evidence there suggests that had we not used enhanced interrogation techniques including waterboarding on sheikh mohammed, los angeles would be the size of new york city. the other go ask is one of common sense. you have a terrorist. you try to persuade him to cooperate. he won't. can fear and pain at all help him persuade limb to become cooperative? not torture, but pain which is what enhanced interrogation are meant for. common sense, that could probably make someone more cooperative. >> professor alan dershowitz is the add vvocate for this. you believe actionable intelligence and no plethds short of waterboarding is working, you'd still say no? >> absolutely. i mean, why can't we do that in, locally, inside it's united states in criminal cases? if you had a kidnapping, you think somebody's life's in danger and have certain suspects, wee no

khalid sheikh mohammed, who's currently in kwan tan mow bay, of course, had conveyed that, and i'm willing to bet you didn't bring that up in your book. and lastly, about the dancing israelis on 9/11 that the fbi arrested that were, basically, doing surveillance? i'm just saying they knew about 9/11 ahead of time, and the fbi arrested these israelis as they looked at the burning twin towers, and they're holding up cigarette lighters -- >> guest: well, i ended up not doing so much about al-qaeda and its background because that story has been very well told in "the looming tower" by lawrence wright as well as, of course, by the 9/11 commission report. i was trying to set out to tell the u.s. response from the fbi's standpoint about the way that the bureau has evolved both before and after 9/11. >> host: that caller specifically is someone critical of u.s. policy towards israel, as you could tell from his remarks. can you talk a little bit about the fbi and its relationship with israeli security? >> guest: the fbi does work -- the fbi has a different role as a law enforcement agency than an i

. >>> khalid sheikh mohammed is about 4 years old at the time. his father dies. i search for the death records. apparently, his father died in 1969. and the kuwaitis simply didn't keep records of resident foreigners, births, deaths, marriages. it just wasn't interesting to them. so we have this account of his father's death that's very sparse, and there's really 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 income job, but it enables her to eke out a living. at the time she has nine children, khalid sheikh is the fourth male. years pass on, and khalid sheikh is doing very well at school. he's a good student, somewhat bookish boy. and the family decides that not, they can't -- they don't have any money at all. that they need to just back one son to get an education. and that one son, this is typical in arab familie

when you are dealing with khalid sheikh mohammed for example, a man who was the self-admitted mastermind9/11 and killed 3,000 americans and at a time when we had very little knowledge and understanding about al qaeda and what they were doing, and after we had gone through a lot of of other procedures and interrogation efforts, then this the end of that process, he was subjected to the program. it is very carefully supervised and none of the techniques used were things that we hadn't already used on our own people. >> and you know though that if you were to conduct a poll in the country to ask if waterboarding is torture the vast majority of people would say it is. >> and i would argue, matt, it is important for us not to get caught up in the notion that you can only have popular methods of interrogation if you run an effective counterterrorism program. the fact is that it worked and we learned valuable, valuable information from that process and kept the public safe for years. >> and you have heard the differences of opinion between cheney and former secretary of state powell. in the boo

confidence that couldn't go on in a living room, i imagine -- when their car is smashed by khalid sheikh 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 lawsuit is christian v. mohamed. [laughter] ultimately, they win the case. he is -- they are awarded more than $10,000 this 1995 -- in 1995 which is a substantial sum of money at the time, so their injuries were fairly severe. he never pays. he dodges the sheriff, he flouts the law. but i talked to their, 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 him about the iran/iraq war and why america's wrong about israel. israel turns out to be a very important point in his radicalization. more so than i would have thought. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> you're watching booktv here on c-span2. here's our prime time lineup for tonight. starting at 7:30 eastern syndicated columnist mark stein argues that the united state

and let's put it up on the scene, khalid sheikh mohammed, captured in pakistan in 2003, at a militaryring in 2007, four years ago, he confessed to planning the attacks, december 2008, informs the judge he wants to plead guilty, when eric holder became the attorney general, the case was dismissed, transferred to civilian courts in the su, he later reversed himself, holder did and now it's back at a military commission. look, shouldn't this case have been resolved a long time ago? >> heck yeah, and i think everyone appreciates the frustration of not only the victims of 9/11, the families directly impacted, but the americans who still are concerned about justice for the 9/11 attacks. the fact is this has been three steps back, one step forward, all along, and the justice department in their defense, and i usually don't defend the justice department very often, doesn't have that much control over the commission's process, because the commission's process is independent from whato from other justice departments. gregg: they had a guilty plea at one point in time, literally a couple of week

will recall that for about six months to try to persuade new york city to hold a tryout of khalid sheikh mohammedin new york city refused, including his democratic colleague, chuck schumer. and i guess that a response would be as soon as you can identify the locale of where they can hold these trials, i'm sure they'd be happy to get them started. so i don't know why he hasn't closed the base, but i think that is something to do with the reasons why they haven't held trials. in terms of the larger question of race, and this is my friend did in terms of attention and is the. mayor stephen i have both been speaking as if everyone has read everything william james and john dewey have ever written. just a couple words about philosophical pragmatism. it develops in the 20th and early century from exasperation some philosophers felt with the confidence that some other philosophers had that there were systems that would answer all the questions we have about issues of politics or ethics. and they said when you don't have certain answers, you should feel free to experiment and you should judge the consequ