Hayden: ‘I’d Be Disappointed if Interrogation Did Not Take a Human Toll on Interrogators’

Discussing why some officials who implemented enhanced-interrogation techniques could come to regret the program, former CIA director Michael Hayden, appearing on ABC’s This Week, said: “I would be very, very disappointed if this did not take a human toll on our CIA interrogators.”

“After all,” Hayden continued, “although that person across the table from you was a terrorist, he’s also a human being. I would not want people in the room doing this who are not affected by it.”

The point was partially in response to an op-ed published in the New York Times last week by Erik Fair, a former CIA interrogator who now teaches at Lehigh University. “I was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib. I tortured,” Fair wrote. “One day, the students will come to know that this country isn’t always something to be proud of.”

Hayden was quick to distinguish the illegal abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 from the techniques legally employed, which were at issue in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s so-called “torture” report, released last week.