MADELEINE BRAND, host:
From the studios of NPR West, this is Day to Day. I'm Madeleine Brand.
ALEX COHEN, host:
And I'm Alex Cohen. Coming up, a young soldier's journey back to Iraq.
BRAND: But first, waterboarding is torture. The U.S. will not use it when interrogating terrorism suspects, that today from Attorney General Eric Holder. New Yorker contributor Jane Mayer has written a book on harsh interrogation techniques in the Bush administration. It's called "The Dark Side." And she's here again. Welcome back to Day to Day, Jane.
Ms. JANE MAYER (Writer, New Yorker; Author, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals"): Great to be with you.
BRAND: Well, now, Eric Holder said waterboarding was torture during his confirmation hearings in January. What do you make of today's announcement?
Ms. MAYER: I think he's just reiterating about the position he took before and making clear that this administration is not going to be waterboarding anybody in its custody. He's defined water boarding as torture, and torture is a major crime. So anybody who went in that direction would be committing a major crime. They're simply not going be going there.
BRAND: Right. Well, so, what does this mean for the testimony, or the confession by one of the biggest terrorists and suspects now at Guantanamo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? He was waterboarded, and he gave up information apparently on lots of other suspects. What will today's announcement mean for those cases?
Ms. MAYER: Well, I think - I mean, you know, it's several things. One is the question is whether it would make it hard to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed himself as is the mastermind, self-confessed, of the 9/11 attacks, so somebody who the United States truly wants to prosecute and convict. And my sense is there's enough other evidence on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, including a confession that he gave voluntarily when he was interviewed by Al Jazeera. He was boasting about his role in the 9/11 attacks. So he - and nobody was twisting his arm in any way when he did that. He just simply stepped up to the cameras and said, I did it all. And, you know, he was dying to take credit for it. So I don't think it will undermine the ability of the government to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. There's plenty of other material. In fact, he wants to be prosecuted.
Where it gets sticky, though, is that he has been the source of information implicating a number of other terror suspects. One of them is the al-Marri case, in which al-Marri is accused of being a sleeper cell for al-Qaeda. And the fact that information for him came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed during waterboarding sessions will certainly complicate that case.
BRAND: And in fact the government indicted him last week in federal court. There's some other news out today which is interesting. The government admitted that it destroyed nearly 100 tapes - videotapes of interrogation techniques. This is information the ACLU had wanted. What do you make of that?
Ms. MAYER: I think it's completely fascinating. Ninety-two tapes, they said exactly, were the number of videotapes that the CIA destroyed. What happened was the ACLU has been asking for a long time to try to get the information about these videotapes. And finally, the CIA was in a position where it had to explain at least how many tapes we're talking about that they destroyed. They still won't say what was on the tapes, but they said - they have now admitted that there were 92 tapes destroyed. This is a potentially serious problem for the CIA that they did this. They're being investigated now by an independent prosecutor. The 9/11 Commission asked for such evidence, and so there was - and there may have been a court also in one of the cases, one of the judges asked for any evidence that might have included videotapes. So the CIA may have destroyed evidence that had been asked for, you know, in ways that would put them into a position of having obstructed justice which presses(ph) criminal.
BRAND: Jane Mayer is a writer for the New Yorker and she wrote the book "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals." Jane, thank you.
Ms. MAYER: Great to be with you. Thanks.
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