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• "The CIA and Interrogations: A Bad Fit from the Start"
• About The Devil We Know
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Former CIA operative weighs in on why he thinks Cheney is coming out so publicly regarding torture. (1:39)
 

Full interview. (11:56)
 

Tavis: Robert Baer is a former CIA operative turned best-selling author whose books include "See No Evil," the basis for the George Clooney film "Syriana," and "The Devil We Know," which is now out in paperback. He is also the intelligence columnist for Time.com. He joins us tonight from Berkeley. Robert Baer, nice to have you back on the program, sir.

Robert Baer: Hey, Tavis.

Tavis: Good to have you on. Let me start with the news of yesterday. Dick Cheney, former vice president, was on "Fox News" Sunday with Chris Wallace and had this to say, and I quote, "It's an outrageous political act that will do great damage long-term to our capacity to be able to have people take on difficult jobs, make difficult decisions, without having to worry about what the next administration is going to say."

He then went on to say, "I'm very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the last eight years successfully," close quote. Of course, those thoughts coming from Cheney in response to the administration's investigation - the Obama administration's investigation into these harsh interrogation tactics. Your thoughts on his quote?

Baer: Well, he's wrong on several levels. One is no one until now has demonstrated with any good evidence at all that torture works. The whole body of literature, inside our military, inside the CIA, is it doesn't work. The documents that have been released don't show that it worked; we got information from arrestees in this, so he can't say we defended the nation.

And as far as the investigation goes, when atrocities have been committed inside the military and there's military court martials, we don't complain, even in the middle of a war. After Abu Ghraib we investigated, people went to jail, and the military's morale was not hurt. I spent a lot of time talking to the Pentagon and they absolutely, 100 percent go along with these investigations. They're necessary.

Tavis: Why, then - and I'm not naïve in asking this question - why, then, does Mr. Cheney feel so committed, for lack of a better word, to defending their record for eight years? Which, one does have to admit, we did not get hit again after 9/11 on their watch.

Baer: Well, we didn't get hit by a meteor, either. Look, (laughter) Cheney invented this program in the first place. He put his political reputation at stake, he thought that torture worked, he forced it on the CIA, and now there's no evidence that it did. This man is trying to protect his reputation. Maybe he's running for office again, I don't know. But I know that he's damaged the CIA more than anybody has, including the press or the Department of Justice.

It's very clear to me - look, Tavis, torture works, but very, very rarely, and it's the ticking bomb scenario that comes along like a black swan - very, very rare and it has to be done in extraordinary circumstances. But in this case, with Cheney's program, it was to go out there, round up the usual suspects, and torture them, which it just created more enemies.

Tavis: This issue has become a political football, obviously, and Dick Cheney is not just defending himself, Bob. As you know, he's also speaking to an audience of people who think that by any means necessary, literally, we have to stop these terrorists, we have to do what we can to keep us from being hit again.

And so there is an audience of Americans who believe that again, whatever you have to do needs to be done, and some folk don't even want to know about it. Your thoughts on how, then, this is becoming such a political football being kicked around by everybody?

Baer: Well, Tavis, I don't think Americans are looking at history. Totalitarian regimes say the same thing - in order to protect ourselves, we have to take extraordinary measures. We have to have concentration camps, we have to have mass arrests, and it goes on and on. But once you start down that slope, there's no bottom to it, we are over as a democracy.

Yes, the vast - there are a lot of Americans who think this should go on, they don't want to know about it, but I think what we should really find out, and I keep on harping on this, is did it at any point work? People inside the CIA tell me no, it never did. It got marginally better information in some cases. In most cases, and the FBI will tell you this, it sent them on false leads.

It wasted time, and that's not to mention, as I said, it created enemies. That's the kind of facts we need out. We just can't have Cheney, who has a stake, his reputation in this, telling us it worked, nor the CIA. We need an independent investigation. Whether it's in the Department of Justice or a senior general that's trusted, we need the facts out.

Tavis: So it's not just Cheney taking on the Obama White House. Inside the Beltway, as you know, there is this sense now that inside the Obama administration you have the Justice Department against the CIA. Your thoughts on the inner workings of that administration and how this is going to play out?

Baer: Look, this administration has got two burdens - it's got Iraq and Afghanistan, two wars that they inherited from the Bush administration. Neither war can be won. It's trying to defend its national security credentials. The prosecutor investigating the CIA is a Republican. He was appointed by the Bush administration to look into torture, the disappearance of 92 tapes the CIA destroyed. Once this report came out from the CIA last week, there was no choice but to open an investigation.

The pure politics are on the part of Cheney and the Republicans that defend that policy, not on the Obama administration.

Tavis: You say there's no choice. Leon Panetta, the CIA director, didn't see it that way. He made the case, we're told, for this investigation not to move forward, and the argument essentially was that these things have been looked at, let's not open this can of worms again. We understand the lessons that we've learned from that, we have a different policy moving forward.

So not everybody agrees with you that there was only one choice here, Panetta being, of course, the lead person in that regard.

Baer: Well, Panetta has to defend the CIA. I don't anymore, I'm out. I spent 21 years there, I'm out, and I can call it as I see it. I know exactly what he's saying. He can't demoralize the place any more than it already is. But the fact is that between Iraq and Afghanistan there are 100 people that died in detention. We still don't have the answers of how they died, who killed them.

You can't turn this over and leave the results - the investigations with the previous Justice Department, which invented this program in the first place. This is like counting your own Easter eggs. Or hiding your own Easter eggs.

Tavis: You made the argument, Bob, in the past that the CIA was never established, set up, trained to do these kind of interrogations in the first place, whether they work or not.

Baer: Now, I was a CIA operative for 21 years, as I said. I was a liberal arts major. The biggest confrontation I ever had in my life before I went in the CIA was defending a dissertation. That's by and large what CIA people are - liberal arts majors. They don't know how to do this. They've had no experience up to 9/11, and on top of it, it was illegal. We weren't even allowed to watch torture, let alone participate in it.

So on 9/11 the White House comes to the CIA and said, "Hey, this is yours. Trust us, it's legal, we'll back you up, and you figure it out." And as we've seen, the CIA turned to contractors who in fact knew little more than the CIA officers. These two psychologists that were brought in new something about survival courses in the military, but they knew nothing about torture, nothing at all.

So we invented this as we went along, and as a result a lot of innocent people were tortured.

Tavis: So to your earlier point, how do you at this point keep the department from being demoralized? I've been of the view that Panetta could very well have said like any organization, we've got some bad apples in this operation. We have weeded those folk out, we're going to weed out the ones that need to be weeded out, but we're going to move forward and so bring on whatever investigation you have.

Ultimately, it's going to make this department stronger. Maybe he could have sold that down the line inside the department, I don't know. But at this point, how do you keep the department from being demoralized?

Baer: Tavis, you're absolutely right. You've got to say investigate. The military's investigated, police forces are, the FBI is always under some sort of investigation. Bring it on. We'll get rid of the bad apples. The problem is that the CIA is so demoralized, and it just hasn't been since the Bush administration, it goes back before. So he's got a harder fight, and that's why he's so defensive. I understand they're paying for lawyers for the CIA officers, and a lot of the abuses occurred with contractors and the CIA is trying to weed them out as well.

I think one thing you have to do is get a culture in the CIA and go back to the basics. The CIA doesn't collect information by coercion. That's never been its role. It needs to go back and do it the way it used to do work, recruit sources, and the rest of it. A classical intelligence service, and it'll be just fine and the morale will return. But not denying this happened.

Tavis: Beyond this investigation, and that's easier said than done, but what are we missing here about making our intelligence-gathering process work better?

Baer: Well, I think what we're missing is that - and this goes back to this went from a war on al Qaeda on 9/11 to a war on a fictional enemy, and that was Saddam Hussein. When we invaded Iraq we spread the CIA too thin. We got in involved in a war. What we have to focus on is capturing bin Laden or killing him, and once we lost sight of our goals, that's where we all went wrong, the CIA as well. That's what I'd go back and do.

Tavis: Politically, how do you think this is going to play out? And I ask that because there are a lot of Americans - I was just reading about this earlier today - a lot of Americans who believe that these investigations ultimately never go anywhere. No one believes - there are many Americans, I should say, maybe even me, who believe that these investigations kick up a lot of dust, they get a lot of media attention. In the end, nobody gets prosecuted, nobody gets called out.

It certainly, pardon my English, ain't gonna reach up to Dick Cheney and Bush and the folk in the White House who signed off on this. Nobody's going to throw Alberto Gonzalez in jail. What's the end game here?

Baer: Well, I agree with you. That's probably what's going to happen, but we have to go after people like Cheney, the people that started this program, because look, Tavis, it's either against the law or it's not, torture. In any international convention you look at - Geneva conventions - conventions on torture say that waterboarding is illegal. It's flat-out illegal according to American law. So how was it that we resorted to waterboarding?

We have to go up the line, and we have to hold people accountable for war crimes.

Tavis: But President Obama himself, though, has already made it clear despite this decision by Holder that he's not interested in going backwards.

Baer: Well, I disagree with him. I think we should go after the people on Wall Street, too. Anybody that has broken the law needs to go to jail. This is what this society is about, and that's how we win the war on terror is when we're a law of nations (sic) and we go out in the world and hold people to the same standards we hold ourselves to. That's how we win the wars.

Tavis: We shall see, or not see, as it were - we will see. Robert Baer, his new book, latest book out in paperback now called "The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower." Robert, as always, appreciate your insight. Nice to have you on.

Baer: Thanks.