Brave New Worlds

that allow sustained equilibrium. No fainting, no grogginess, no euphoria. It isn't quite the same as True Awake; Dr. Ghose calls it a simulacrum. It's better than True, in some ways. Ali's awake, sans certain defenses. With catheters and drips, we can preserve that balance — not for hours, but weeks, months. Last week, I left a Session, went home, played kickball with my son, dinner with my wife, long night's sleep, woke up, breakfast, walk the dog, read the paper, when I come back in, Ali's still going from the night before. With the pinpoints, we don't have to take the Rests, and there's not the same concern about organic damage.

That's the drug side. Part two is, the control technologies, and some of the advances over there. The tech stuff's done a lot to change the playing field. The new Chairs don't just offer refined muscular control; we actually have retinal. When I peel the skin back, when I kiss the edges of the F1 joint with my drill, Ali's going to be paying close attention. And because of the synthetics, he's not in la-la land; he's tracking, he's alert, and he's ready to talk.

We're careful to stay on the right side of the line. I've referred three men for crossing that line. Dishonorables in every case. It's something we take seriously. Even without the Protocols, I'd tell my teams: nothing that results in death or organ failure. Because it's lazy, because it's counterproductive. Because it misses the point. The promise of survival: that's everything. The promise of emerging intact. If you don't understand that aspect, you won't understand Deep Interrogation — I don't call it Heavy, I call it Deep — and that lack of understanding's going to show up in your Usable Intel numbers.

The other reason's trust. When you do the cowboy shit, you might break through some walls, but other walls are shutting up tighter than before. The new model, we do much more than break the subject. Break Ali's will, reduce him to a state of dependence, we do that, but it's just step one, the first pivot point. In any interrogation, there are multiple pivot points. The first is when Ali discovers he no longer has the power to end his life. Everything before that moment is pre-interrogation, as far as I'm concerned. That's why, in the Chair, we keep him ventilated and catheterized. We decide whether and when you eat, shit, piss, breathe — and we can keep you here as long as we like. And we can. We can keep these guys alive forever.

Not literally — not yet. That's one of my dreams: the replenishers, the Suspensions — push them to the point where we can squeeze these guys indefinitely. We're on our way. It won't happen in my lifetime, probably, but someday, yes. Keep Ali in the Chair thirty, forty, a hundred years. I'm not kidding. Ghose is doing stuff that's going to change the medical sciences forever, forget about interrogations. And the longer you keep these guys, the more you can do with them. Their reality is changing every minute, every hour. At 90 days, you aren't looking at the same Ali you had at 30. At 30, he's still fighting you, in some small part of himself, whether he knows it or not. By 90, 150, 200, you have the power of a God.

That's why we welcome hunger strikes. That's why we welcome suicide attempts. You can tell Ali, you'll be here till your hair's as gray as mine, but it's just talk until he makes a move. That's why it works for us when Ali tries to kill himself. It's a teaching moment. Suicide we don't allow. Starvation we don't allow. Ali wrapping his head in a bedsheet noose is Ali testing the boundaries, feeling out the limits of his field of control. Ali chewing off his tongue is Ali testing the limits. And what he finds, in every case, is exactly what we said he'd find. There's one way out of this, and it's through us.

But that, as I say, is only the first part of our work. When you break a subject, you get the stuff he wants to keep from you. A Deep Interrogator's after more. We want to get inside the memory and experience of a subject — get inside and have a long look around. Look, listen, smell. And we get everything: childhood, adolescence, grief, anger, fantasies and phobias. We get the transient moments and impressions that may not seem, in themselves, to hold any strategic value, but which, in combination with a thousand other such impressions, taken from a hundred other guys, form a kind of tapestry — or, as Ghose puts it, a vivid four-dimensional map — of daily life in extremist enclaves. You can think of the new model, then, as a way of getting access to the peripheral perceptions. Ali's no longer the author of his story; he no longer gets to judge what's worth our knowing.

I'm not afraid to talk about it. It's a tricky area. Interrogation of Confirmed Innocents. It's complicated, and there are good arguments on both sides.

Defense knows what its policy is, certainly. To some extent, we'll follow that. Certainly, we obey the Protocols. We'll track the White Papers to a point. And then, to some extent, we'll go our own way. There's a degree of autonomy. But the short answer is, yes. If there's usable intel, we will interrogate. We don't look to Culpability as an Entrance Criterion.

That doesn't mean we don't wrestle with it. We make evaluations on a case-by-case basis.

Last year, after the Ramadan attacks, the decision was made to go ahead with a Deep Program on a suite of CIs. Before we initiated that Program, we did ask ourselves, what are our obligations here. In the end, the determination was made to go ahead. And I stand by the decision. Why? Because we found the bomb. That's not to say it's simple — and there will be some people for whom that's not enough. Find the bomb, save a couple thousand lives, that's not enough, and I respect that. Where you are on that issue is, I think, largely an ethical matter, and something that will differ for you, depending on who you are personally. For me, the Objective is decisive. Without the CIs, the bomb explodes. The target was a metro station in central DC, which is maybe something to consider.

Different Guidelines will apply, of course, if it's a CI in the Chair. That's literally — as in, there's a separate set of Guidelines printed off, everybody has a copy — and also in the — maybe just the attitude you take into the interrogation room.

One difference — to start with one example — is when we're working a CI, we won't do the chin. That's not Protocol; that's our own rule. My rule, actually. And I enforce it just like any other policy, and I don't make exceptions. When Culpability isn't Indicated on the Profile, the chin becomes an organ.

If we're doing a CI, we'll conduct the interrogation fairly. We'll make the Parameters clear. When the Objective is reached, we'll stabilize and Exit. Ideally, in a CI Session, it's a team process, where we're working with The subject to achieve a common goal. We'll never go into a CI Session blind— ever, that's the rule — and we won't do fishing expeditions.

And that's obviously very different from the program we apply to CCs and Suspecteds. When a Suspected's in the Chair, we'll wring him out. When Ali thinks he's told us everything he knows, that's when the Session begins. Where the problem area starts is when a CI tells us something that alters his designation. This is tricky, because a lot of CIs will confess to things they haven't done. In that case, there's no way to avoid changing the subject's designation and reverting to the CC protocols. But it's something that we wrestle with.

The suite last autumn, a lot of my CI Alis didn't lose a drop of blood. I'm not exaggerating. I say you can tell my guys from their hands, these guys, you can't, because it never got to that point.

Others, it did. And that's tough. When you're dealing with a wife, a husband, and you're saying, where's Ali, where's the husband, the wife, the son, the uncle, that can be tough, because relatives are intransigent. The wives, sometimes, are more intransigent than the target CCs.

And there's where a sense of delicacy, and a sense of balance, can be very helpful. Say you've got Ali's wife in the Chair. Okay: now she knows what Ali's in for. Or Thinks she knows; actually, she has no idea. But she knows Ali's going in the Chair. How bad, then, do you make it? You have to find a place where Mrs. Ali wants to end the Session, where she's ready to give her husband up — but not so far that she knows she won't be able to live with herself if she cooperates. You have to let her leave the Chair with dignity, let her feel she's made a choice that she can live with, morally.

It's delicate. When a Confirmed Combatant's in the chair, there's no Good Cop-Bad Cop; there's no carrot and stick; it's Bad Cop-Worse Cop, and it's stick, razor, drill. CIs, it's different. With Ali's wife, there might be a carrot in there too.

I'll give you an example.

These CIs, most of them, they won't ever be going home. I say most, really it's all. If it's home, it's a prison in Pakistan — but that's not most cases. Most cases, the CI's done with the Chair, he or she is headed to the Low Restraint Unit, presumably for the remainder. One reason we keep them is, we'll be needing them again when their intelligence proves out: when my target Ali is in the Chair. And there's a host of other reasons.

Ali's kid, though, sometimes he can be an exception. If we have Ali's wife in the Chair, if there are no Culpability Markers, we've been willing, in certain cases, to see about orphanages, see if we can keep the child in the US, versus Pakistan, Syria. So that's an example of the carrot. If Ali's wife is ready to give her husband up, here's a chance for Ali, Jr. To enjoy some of the benefits of an American upbringing. And that's