Jane Mayer

The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.

And the program was developed in large part by behavioral scientists who were working with the military, who do everything they possibly can to measure a soldier's stress levels to see how they're doing physically and emotionally, as they go through this program.

So, it, of course, makes one wonder how many other people there might be who are completely innocent, who have been sent by the U.S. to countries where they've been interrogated, and in some instances it seems tortured.

Well, they are critics of the Bush administration generally on the human rights record of the administration, and in particular, they are very, very critical of this use of science.

I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.

And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.

Well, yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my sources suggest that there's a lot of support for the notion that there is a lot of Koran abuse and that it was very much a systematic design, not just an aberration.

Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration.

The world's a small place and people are watching; and, you know, somebody disappears, the family knows and their colleagues know, and so eventually, these things do get out.

And, in fact, there is a connection, the people who designed this here program and who implement it are the same people who are overseeing and helping in the interrogations of detainees in places like Guantanamo.

And I think that what is of concern is that they seem to be bringing skills from the scientific world into the interrogation room in a way that begs a lot of questions about whether it's ethical.

Now that he has disavowed as outright lies many of the stories he told himself, it's hard to know what to make of those who still insist that David Brock had it right the first time.