The Dark Side

"Because it is a remarkable account of a remarkable period. I was covering Northern Ireland in the late 1970s when there were allegations of abuse – the IRA called it torture, although I didn’t believe it was torture. But there were allegations of IRA suspects and a few Loyalist suspects being beaten up by police officers during interrogation. I investigated those allegations, decided they were basically true and wrote a book about it called Beating the Terrorists? I think that is probably a pretty definitive account of what was going on in that particular period of the history of the Northern Ireland conflict. When I was covering Al-Qaeda in the 10 years since 9/11, I never really came to terms with CIA black sites, with extraordinary rendition, and in particular with enhanced interrogation techniques. Yes, they are, and I think there is probably more than a grain of truth in that. But I am not convinced that the intelligence about the courier came from waterboarding. Although both of those involved – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libi – were subjected to the enhanced interrogation techniques, and the CIA are saying the intelligence about the courier [Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, who led investigators to Bin Laden’s hiding place] came from those interrogations, ergo the interrogation techniques were justified, I am not absolutely sure about that. It is a really interesting spin-off from the death of Bin Laden. But coming back to your original question, I felt that I had been remiss in not really focusing my attention on that critical area. So when I came to do my last series for BBC Two earlier this year, called The Secret War on Terror , I realised that you have to grasp the nettle of enhanced interrogation techniques, extraordinary rendition, torture and all that goes with it. I read Jane Mayer’s book and was just amazed at the forensic detail, the way it was written, the sources that she had. Although many of the sources were ones that she had mined via the freedom of information – sources that were out there on the Internet because of declassified documents – also there are all the interviews she had done. And again it is really well written. All the five books that I have chosen are well written, which I think is really important. They are readable, accessible and also informative, and if you add those various qualities together you get some really important books. So when I read Jane Mayer’s book and I thought of my book, Beating the Terrorists? , which was written in 1980 and provided the background context to the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981, I thought, “Gosh, this is really good and is the book I should have written and I didn’t”. In my book Talking to Terrorists I do actually grasp that nettle, but Jane did it first and I am sure did it much better! I think there is no doubt about it – that the enhanced interrogation techniques and the allegations of torture helped to radicalise them. This isn’t just my view, it is also the view of Eliza Manningham-Buller, the director of MI5 whom I interviewed for my last series. She believed that waterboarding was torture. Undoubtedly, not just those techniques but CIA black sites and what was happening there did contribute substantially towards the radicalisation of young Muslims all over the world. And that was on top of Iraq, Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and a whole range of things. I don’t think you can put radicalisation down to one particular factor, but I think the treatment of the prisoners was all part and parcel of it."