If you want prisoners to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.

My take on the torture thing and even drones is: If we're going to get into assassination and torture, the second question is the morality, but the first is the effectiveness of it.

The CIA is an incompetent bureaucracy, generally.

Destroying Iraq was the greatest strategic blunder this country has made in its history. Unless we change course, there's every reason to believe the Iraq War will end up changing the United States more than it will ever change Iraq.

I don't trust American intelligence. You look at the torture report from the Senate: People inside the CIA are saying that it doesn't work, and we're getting the information not from torture, but simply from questioning people.

I truly believe that if torture had worked and there was a case to be made for it, we would see that on the front pages of the American press.

The first suicide bombing that entered my consciousness was the Beirut embassy bombing. It was very personal. I'd been in the embassy and I knew most of the people in the station who were killed in the bombing. So you take the personal aspect of it and the mystery of who the bomber was and the fact that a small group of people could drive us out of a country that was absolutely key to the United States, and what was behind this... The fact that they've been able to hide the embassy bombers' identities for all these years tells me we're up against a very capable movement.