Sharyl Attkisson interviewed James Mitchell, a former Air Force psychologist-turned CIA interrogator and now known as man who waterboarded 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mitchell, who also gave a thorough interview with Megyn Kelly last week, said he and other CIA agents “had to do our duty.”
A Democrat-led Senate panel headed up by Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) released the report on enhanced interrogation despite dire warnings from lawmakers and intel officials. These warnings, which were even echoed by some within the Obama administration, who contended the findings would “endanger the lives of Americans” all over the world.
“We had to do our duty,” he told Attkisson of the enhanced interrogation techniques used on terror suspects. “We were trying to save American lives. The point is that we had just been hit after 9/11 in an attack where they tried to decapitate us.”
Former CIA Directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden, and former CIA Deputy Directors John E. McLaughlin, Albert M. Calland and Stephen R. Kappes, penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal claiming, in fact, the program did work and provided plenty detailed accounts of actionable intelligence gathering to prove it.
“Our view on this is shared by the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Republican minority, both of which are releasing rebuttals to the majority’s report,” the three former CIA heads wrote. “Both critiques are clear-eyed, fact-based assessments that challenge the majority’s contentions in a nonpartisan way.”
Mithcell also pushed back on the idea that enhanced interrogations didn’t provide vital intelligence, and slammed the Senate report for misleading the American people on the facts of the program.
“Feinstein is trying to re-write history,” he said of the Intelligence Committee chairwoman. “In my view, what she’s done is gone back into 6 million pages worth of information, cherry-picked it, put together some kind of prosecutorial brief, and then released it—in essence putting a jihad or some sort of contract out on me and [John Bruce Jessen].”
According to recent polls, including a PPD Poll, Americans support the use of enhanced interrogation over Feinstein’s moral high ground.
