John Kiriakou

And within 12 hours, the CIA began to torture Abu Zubaydah.

He went completely silent and remained silent.

And then the FBI went back to the president and said, look, the CIA is screwing this up.

We were getting all this intelligence from this guy.

Now he won't say anything.

And we're putting him in a coffin.

And we heard that he had this irrational fear of bugs.

So we pour a

box of cockroaches on him in the coffin and close up the coffin and we would open it up every couple days to change his diaper and give him food and he went nuts and so finally the White House turns everything back over to the FBI it takes Ali months to get him to talk again and then he starts talking again and he's given us more and more information about

Al-Qaeda operations in Malaysia and anti-Australia operations and what's going on in Canada and how Al-Qaeda is able to move across borders between Europe and Asia.

And then the CIA comes back in again and starts torturing them again and screwed it all up.

I think for a couple of reasons.

I think we should never underestimate the motivating factor of, of a desire for revenge, right?

This was the worst intelligence failure in the history of the country.

3000 people died because we hadn't done our jobs.

So that was one thing.

The other thing is the CIA had entered into an agreement with these two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in October of 2001.

And they said, hey, we've reverse engineered the military's SEER program.

And we think this would be an effective but harsh interrogation technique.

And so we were chomping at the bit at the agency to try this thing out without using the word torture.