O'REILLY: OK. So you saw what Mr. Bush saw. What is the headline?
THIESSEN: Well, the headline is CIA interrogations work. I mean, the fact is in the period after 9/11, we knew absolutely nothing about the enemy who attacked us. We did not know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11. We didn't know who his key operatives were. We didn't know what they had planned. And then we started capturing these terrorists. We captured Abu Zubaydah, who was a key Al Qaeda facilitator, and he gave us information that led us to Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was one of key KSM's key operatives. And they together led us to KSM. And KSM was resistant when he came into the -- when he was captured by the CIA. When they asked him about new plots, he said soon you will know.
And he said I will tell you everything when I -- when I get to New York and see my lawyer. And he didn't see a lawyer. He was put under enhanced interrogation techniques and he went -- once he went through those, he made a decision to cooperate. And when he was done, he was running a graduate level class on Al Qaeda operations for the CIA. The former director…
O'REILLY: And you believe that he was broken because of waterboarding. He was waterboarded many times.
THIESSEN: Absolutely.
O'REILLY: OK, now…
THIESSEN: There is no -- there is no question.
O'REILLY: Let's zero in on the courier who was the key to finding bin Laden. I understand that the -- that KSM and another guy who is subjected to enhanced interrogation mentioned…
THIESSEN: Abu Faraj al-Libi.
O'REILLY: OK, mentioned the courier, pick it up.
THIESSEN: Well, I mean, they -- we had very little information about Al Qaeda's courier networks. What happened was first -- Abu Zubaydah and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who were the first guys brought into the program, gave us some general information about couriers and some code names for those folks. When KSM was interrogated after he underwent waterboarding; not during it, afterwards. When he was going -- when he was being questioned, he acknowledged that he -- they had given us the name of this fellow al-Kuwaiti which was a nom de guerre and KSM admitted that he knew him. Then in 2004, we captured a fellow named Hassan Ghul who was a senior Al Qaeda operative. He was captured in Iraq, and he told us that this courier al-Kuwaiti was a key lieutenant of KSM's successor Abu Faraj al-Libi…
O'REILLY: Now, did he do that under duress -- let me just -- did he do that under duress or did he just tell us?
THIESSEN: Well, this is the thing that people don't understand. You're hearing a lot of the left is trying -- the deniers of this program are trying to say, well did they use -- did they tell us this under waterboarding or under standard interrogation later and that misunderstands how interrogation works. Enhanced interrogation was never used to get intelligence; it was used to get cooperation. So you took a detainee like KSM, who is in the state of total resistance, and you used the enhanced interrogation techniques to bring him to a state of cooperation. And when he's under enhanced interrogation techniques, they are asking him questions they already know the answers to in order to gauge whether he had stopped lying and made the decision to cooperate. And then, once he starts cooperating, the technique stops. In most cases with enhanced interrogation, the detainees went under them for a couple of days. And KSM -- he was a really tough, tough guy. He was -- he went for about a month. But once that month ended, the interrogation, the enhanced interrogations stopped and we had a -- they had a conversation with him like you and I are speaking today.
O'REILLY: All right. So you are convinced then that the information provided by KSM and then the other guy Ghoul who was captured a couple of years later…
THIESSEN: Yes.
How Waterboarding Breaks You: An O'Reilly Factor Exposé - Waterboarding - Fox Nation