WGBH News: Author Interviews

Michael Moore On His Penchant For 'Trouble'

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Michael Moore didn't plan on becoming a filmmaker. As a teenager growing up in the Midwest, he considered documentaries to be a bit like broccoli: good for you, but boring.

Instead, he spent his adolescent and young adult years rabble-rousing. He was elected to the school board when he was a senior in high school, became a young supporter of Richard Nixon and even flirted with the idea of becoming a Catholic priest.

But once Moore got around to finally making his first film, he stumbled upon a new kind of documentary: confrontational, comedic and provocatively political. Roger & Me, about the decline of Moore's hometown, Flint, Mich., was the public's first glimpse of the documentarian's often brash interview style.

Moore talks with NPR's Neal Conan about his new memoir, Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life, why he bristles at being called controversial and how he feels about the current partisan mood in the United States.

Interview Highlights

On when he committed himself to standing up against injustice

"When you think back to those pivotal moments ... you're trying to figure out, 'How did I get here?' and sometimes they aren't big things that happen in your life. Sometimes they're very small events.

"And I had just been elected to the school board, but I still had a week left of school. So I was both a student and the boss — or one of the bosses — of the vice principal. We're standing there in line, getting ready to go up to the graduation ceremony, and he's coming down the line making sure each of the boys have a tie on underneath their gown.

"The boy in front of me, [the vice principal] pulls his gown down and he sees a tie, but its one of those bolo ties ... And he yanks him out of the line and he says, 'You don't have a proper tie on, and you're not graduating.'

"'But sir, this is a tie, this is what we wear.'

"And he yanks him out and he literally takes him out the door. And ... his parents are sitting up there in the stands — go through the whole graduation — their son never comes out. Later they find him curled up in the back seat of their car crying, because he didn't get to graduate.

"But what bothered me really, wasn't so much what the vice principal did. It's that I was standing right behind this kid and I said nothing. I didn't want to cause any trouble. It was my graduation night; I didn't want to get thrown out. And so I stood there in silence. And his mother called me the next day and said, 'What can you do?' And I said, 'Well we can't re-run the graduation.'

"'Well, did you see it happen?'

"'Yes.'

"'Well, what did you do?'

"'Um, nothing.'

"And this just — this just did a number on my own conscience. And I just thought, I will never be silent again. And I stood there and said nothing. And I just resolved at that moment, at 18 years old, that I will not stand silently by when I see some injustice taking place, even if it is the smallest thing ... And so I was kind of a different person from that moment on."

On why he dislikes being called controversial

"I started my own newspaper when I was 22, 23 years old. And it was an alternative newspaper, and I edited and wrote for that paper for almost a decade. And that was kind of my early background before Roger & Me, in terms of investigate reporting and writing about what was going on, especially with General Motors.

"I was writing back in the '70s that something's wrong with this company. This can't sustain itself if they keep behaving this way. If you keep laying people off who buy the cars, who's gonna buy the cars? And when you lay them off, they don't just stop buying cars. They stop buying washing machines and clock radios and things like that ... I wasn't an economist, but it just made sense to me that moving these jobs to Mexico and other places was going to totally decimate our economy here.

"I wrote about this back in the '70s. And of course, back then GM was the No. 1 company in the world. A lot of people in Flint thought I was nuts — 'GM is never going to leave Flint, this is the best we could ever hope for and its wonderful and nothing's going to change.' And I just kept warning about this ...

"I get called controversial all the time ... What's so controversial about just trying to warn people that this company — the way they're being run — it's not good? And it's going to hurt everybody and everything eventually. That seems like a community service to me. I don't know, maybe I don't have a good view of myself ... I never think I'm controversial. If I stand on the Oscar stage and I say, 'Hey folks, they're not gong to find any weapons of mass destruction; we're not being told the truth' and etcetera, etcetera; what's so controversial about that? It's just the truth."

On partisanship in America

"I firmly believe that ... where we need to come together as a country is to realize that we all have more in common than not. If we got out a piece of paper ... draw a line down the center — agree, disagree — the list of what we agree on, I am certain, is much longer than the things we don't agree on.

"I'm going to guess Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, all want clean air to breathe and clean water to drink. I'm sure most people think women should be paid the same as men if they're doing the same job. I think we all want good schools for our kids. If we made that list, we actually are in agreement on more things.

"The things we don't agree on — if I don't want to own a gun, I won't own one; if you want to buy a gun, buy a gun. If you don't want to marry a man, and you're a man, for God's sake, don't marry a man! You'll hate it! But if other people want to do that, what's it to you?

"And I think we've got to come to just a place of agreeing to disagree on some things. Let's have the big debate on them, some will win, some will lose. But listen: we are all Americans, we are all in the same boat and we are going to sink or swim together. And my friends, we are sinking right now. And if we don't put aside some of this, and figure out a way to get together to fix some of these problems, we are in deep, deep trouble." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

How To Help Your Child's Brain Grow Up Strong

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 16:02:00 GMT

Babies may look helpless but as soon as they come into the world, they're able to do a number of important things. They can recognize faces and moving objects. They're attracted to language. And from very early on, they can differentiate their mother from other humans.

"They really come equipped to learn about the world in a way that wasn't appreciated until recently," says neuroscientist Dr. Sandra Aamodt. "It look scientists a long time to realize that their brains are doing some very complicated things."

Aamodt and fellow neuroscientist Sam Wang explain how the human brain develops from infancy to adolescence in their new book Welcome to Your Child's Brain. The two researchers also offer tips for parents to help their children eat their spinach, learn their ABCs and navigate elementary school.

Before all of those things, however, children have to learn how to talk. Babies can differentiate syllables and new sounds from very early on, but there are ways for parents to help their children develop their language skills faster and more efficiently.

"The most simple way is to talk to your baby and around your baby a lot," says Aamodt. "And the other thing that parents can do is to respond when the baby speaks, even if the baby isn't forming the words correctly or you don't understand it. Just act like some communication has occurred — smile and give the baby a little pat — and that encourages the baby to continue to try to communicate."

But because language is so social, says Wang, passive exposure to words really doesn't help babies learn in any way.

"For instance, videos that are often shown to babies containing language are not nearly so effective," he says. "In some cases, people try to teach babies language by showing them videos in a foreign language. It doesn't work very well at all because these are not social ways of exposing a child to language."

Parents should also realize that their children may reach certain intellectual milestones at different times — and that's okay.

"Language is acquired quite well before the age of 6 but trying to force your children to read before the age of 4 is an effort that doesn't work very well because the brain is not very well-equipped to tell the letter 'b' from the letter 'd' and so on," says Wang. "[But] it's something that older children can do without any effort at all."

And children who grow up in bilingual households have a distinct advantage over their peers.

"Kids who learn two languages young are better able to learn abstract rules and to reverse rules that they've already learned," says Aamodt. "They're less likely to have difficulty choosing between conflicting possibilities when there are two possible responses that both present themselves. They're also better at figuring out what other people are thinking, which is probably because they have to figure out which language to use every time they talk to somebody in order to communicate."

Teaching Self-Control

Aamodt and Wang also emphasize the importance of teaching your children self-control from an early age.

"This is really critical because there are so many things parents want to do when they read parenting books," he says. "They take steps to teach their children math or reading ... but a big thing we can do for our children is to do the best to foster the development of self-control and willpower. Self-control and the ability to restrain impulses is associated with success at every age, whether it means being able to read at age 4 or being able to restrain impulses at a later age or even what your peers think of you in high school. At all of these ages, willpower and self-control is a strong predictor of academic success than IQ."

When children are young, they can learn self-control by focusing on any fun activity — whether that means studying martial arts or playing with dolls and planning a make-believe tea party.

"It gives the child practice at planning and organizing a series of topics to achieve a desired goal," says Aamodt. "When you're planning a tea party, you can't be acting like a fighter pilot. You have to be acting like a lady having a tea party. So pretending is one of the earliest types of exposure most kids get to planning and organizing their actions. And the more you practice that, the better you're going to be at it."

Making sure your child has fun while learning self-control is vitally important. Aamodt and Wang recommend, for instance, telling your child to pretend he or she is protecting a castle instead of just saying 'Stand still.'

"Taking advantage of a child's natural sense of fun is a terrific way to instill these things," says Wang. "This is not the kind of thing that works well if it's forced. It can be something as easy as pretending to guard the castle or playing a take-turns game where you say 'I'm going to draw an ear on this piece of paper and when you see an ear, then it's your time to listen and if you see a mouth on this other piece of paper, then it's your time to talk.' So all of these things can be done in very simple ways — in ways that are often fun — and the more fun it is, the more likely the child is to pay attention for a longer period of time. These things are fun, they don't cost money and anybody can do it."

Dr. Sam Wang is an associate professor of neuroscience at Princeton University. Dr. Sandra Aamodt is a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience. They are also the co-authors of Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.

Interview Highlights

On rewards vs. punishment

Dr. Aamodt: "With a child, you're not only concerned with getting a child to behave. You're also concerned with building a good relationship with your child. You want your child to think of you as a wonderful person to be around. You also don't want to teach our kids that the way we solve our interpersonal problems is with violence."

Dr. Wang: "Negative reinforcement is often not very effective with deterring behavior. ... negative reinforcement punishment tends to not be very general. So the child will avoid doing the specific thing that led to the punishment and not learn some broader rule. From a practical standpoint, negative reinforcement is not terribly effective."

On time out

Dr. Wang: "One thing that's similar between how children and non-human animals learn best is the phenomenon of time out which has entered the lexicon as a means of getting a child to avoid doing something later. It comes from technical literature from which the long phrase is 'time out and reinforcement' which is if the kid does something undesirable, you simply take the child go to the corner and just sit there. And you don't say anything at all. You don't have to be negative. You don't have to mete out a punishment. You just have to say 'Sit there for 3 minutes and when I come back, we're done.' And then you forget about it and move on. This works at all ages."

On stress and pregnancy

Dr. Aamodt: "Stress is not good for babies. No ethics review board in the world would approve [an experiment] in which we deliberately damaged [pregnant women's] babies. But there are these so-called experiments of nature. One experiment that was done looked at women who had been evacuated from a hurricane in Louisiana when they were pregnant. What that study found was a substantially increased rate of autism in babies who had been in their fifth or sixth month of gestation at the time they fled the hurricane. The effect was stronger in cases where the hurricane was more dangerous."

On 'tiger parenting'

Dr. Wang: "I'm not very much of a tiger mother. I'm more of a pussy cat dad." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Patricia Marx Tells A Tale Of Sweet, Unbalanced Love

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 20:46:00 GMT

Here's a warning: if you start reading Patricia Marx's new novel in public, you might just find yourself snorting out loud — and with some explaining to do.

The book, Starting From Happy, is a sharp-edged love story told in 618 mini-chapters. It's sprinkled with Marx's quirky line drawings of origami instructions, pie charts, pasta shapes, and — for no apparent reason — a kumquat.

Marx, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former writer for Saturday Night Live, describes her protagonist, lingerie designer Imogene Gilfeather, as an atypical female lead.

"Imogene Gilfeather says things that I wouldn't dare to say and doesn't become a better character in the end of the book," Marx tells NPR's Melissa Block. "She has been described by one character as 'a big No.' The other character — the one who she's involved with, Wally Yez — is 'a big Yes.'"

Imogene thinks she's doing just fine on her own, so when people try to fix her up with Wally, telling her he's perfect for her, Imogene's response is telling: "Perfect ... is not my type."

"I wanted to write a book about a single woman who wasn't desperately lonely and yearning to be with a guy," Marx says. "I kind of wanted to reverse the conventional roles of man and woman in a romantic comedy: the man being much more ardent; the woman being much more committed to her work and committed to not making any commitments."

Wally, the scientist with a fondness for reading instruction manuals, is a different story.

"He is as enthusiastic as Imogene is not," Marx says. "He's just a happy guy."

'It's One Of Those Things. Like Soil Erosion.'

Scattered throughout Marx's novel are pages that are practically blank, except for one-liners like "Everyone has a mother" and "It's one of those things. Like soil erosion." Think of them as shorter, more concise versions of the everyday chapter. Marx likes to call them "chaplettes."

"I'm sort of temperamentally terse," she says. "The book before this, I forced myself to get up to 20 pages per chapter, but truly I can reduce everything to about a word. If I were Shakespeare's editor, 'To be, or not to be' would be just 'Be,' question mark."

There's also an aesthetic appeal in Marx's chaplettes.

"As a writer, [I] think visually," Marx says. "And I like a pretty page, so I thought this would be kind of a nifty look with lots of blank space."

On Getting Away With Comedy

Marx has been known to say that she writes comedy because she's too shallow to do anything else.

"Being serious just makes me a little bit embarrassed," she says. "I write the shopping column. I think I've proven my superficiality."

But being the funny person can also be a burden — like when people ask her to say something funny when she isn't necessarily feeling it.

"[I] just say, 'Not today — not on Thursdays,'" Marx tells Block. "You come up with something. And then the advantage is [that] if you are billed as being funny, people laugh even if you say, 'The wall is white.' ... They don't want to not get the joke." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

'Night Circus' Comes To Town With Magic, Mystery

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:33:00 GMT

Magic has never really gone out of style. As long as mere mortals have been telling stories, they've dreamed up tales of gods and demons, monsters and magicians. But for the last several hundred years, those stories have been competing with the reality-based fiction of the modern novel; magic was thought to be the stuff of kids' books. But don't ask adults who grew up on Harry Potter to give up magic, says Salon reviewer Laura Miller:

"That generation has grown up to say: 'Yeah, I may want to read Jane Austen. I may want to read Jonathan Franzen. But I also want to read this intoxicating imaginative narrative as well. I don't want to have to leave that behind just because I'm a grown-up.' And really there is no reason that they should."

Miller, who says she has always loved fantasy fiction, is delighted to see this new trend. She says readers who might never have indulged in books about the fantastic now feel they have permission to take the plunge.

"Obviously there are many adults who have never had any problem with reading narratives with elements of the fantastic in them," Miller explains. "It's more the falling away of the idea that only a realistic narrative is sufficiently serious or sufficiently highbrow or sufficiently adult for a self-respecting reader. It's more that once that falls away, then the basic human desire for stories of the marvelous just comes flooding in."

Books like Lev Grossman's The Magician King and George R.R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons have already captured readers' imaginations this summer. Poised to grab a chunk of this readership is The Night Circus by first-time novelist Erin Morgenstern. It's the story of a mysterious circus that is the setting for a prolonged life-or-death competition between two young magicians. Before it's all over, the two competitors defy all the rules of the game by falling in love with each other.

"I figured out pretty early on that it wasn't a regular circus and that there were magical things creeping around the edges," Morgenstern says. Her own interest in fantasy grew out of her love for books like Alice in Wonderland and later, magic realism.

"My magic is sort of real world magic," she says. "I like that accessibility of maybe the circus would show up in your own back yard. It makes it seem a little closer."

An artist as well as a writer, Morgenstern describes the circus vividly. It is entirely black and white and made up of a series of tents, each one a fully realized world. No one knows where or when the circus will appear: "The circus arrives without warning," Morgenstern writes. "No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not."

The magic in the book is real. The two young contestants, Marco and Celia, have trained their entire lives for the competition, the rules of which they only barely understand. But if they are in the dark, the people around them are even more so. They think the magic of the circus is trickery — a very sophisticated sleight of hand. No one is quite sure what is real and what is fake.

"I liked the idea of having actual magic performed as stage magic so you could assume that it was just a trick, that something was all smoke and mirrors, but there's that feeling in the back of your mind: What if it's not?"

As mind-boggling as Marco's and Celia's tricks may be, they still have to play by certain rules. Morgenstern has allowed their magic to go only so far in helping them shape their own destinies.

"The phrase 'nothing is impossible' comes up a lot," she says. "I think I wanted to play with that a little bit and have ... limits to what can be done: That there was a life-and-death aspect, that they can't fix certain things."

Magic may not be able to fix everything, but in the world of books, it's a force to be reckoned with — and enjoyed. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

'Wonderstruck': A Novel Approach To Picture Books

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 04:01:00 GMT

It's not often that a writer can illustrate his own books, but Brian Selznick is that rare find. He began his career as an artist collaborating with authors on children's books. But he gradually realized that he wanted to tell his own stories in both words and pictures — and to do that, Selznick invented a unique narrative device.

Wonderstruck is both a novel and a picture book, a form Selznick first experimented with in The Invention of Hugo Cabret when he had the idea of telling a story in much the same way that film does.

"I thought: is there a way of combining what the cinema can do with panning, and zooming in and out, and edits, and what a picture book can do with page turns, and what a novel does," Selznick says.

Selznick's illustrations work like a camera, zooming in on details and following his characters around as they move through the world. In the beginning of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the reader follows a boy through a grate in the wall, down a hallway, to an old man in a toy booth, who sees a clock, and behind the number five in the clock, there's the boy ... (Click here to see that opening sequence of drawings.)

In Wonderstruck, Selznick wanted to take this narrative experiment a step further. "I had this idea to try to tell two different stories," he says. "What if I told one story just with pictures and then told a completely different story that was set 50 years later with words? And then had these two separate stories weave back and forth until they came together at the end?"

Wonderstruck is the story of Rose and Ben, a young boy and girl who live years and worlds apart. By the end of the book, the reader learns they have a special connection. But from early on, they have one thing in common: She is deaf and he loses his hearing when he is struck by lightening.

Selznick says the idea for the book began forming when he saw a documentary about deafness and deaf culture. One of the deaf educators emphasized how hyper-attuned deaf people are to the visual world. So Selznick set out to tell the story of a deaf character in pictures. "We experience [Rose's] story in a way that perhaps might echo the way she experiences her own life," he explains.

Rose's story, told almost entirely through Selznick's compelling black and white illustrations, alternates with Ben's story which unfolds in written form. At first, the reader is not sure how the two stories relate, but here and there, the characters' worlds collide. Both get caught in a storm, both go in search of their parents, both find refuge in New York's Museum of Natural History (one of Selznick's favorite destinations when he was a kid growing up in New Jersey). When Ben and Rose finally do meet, Selznick says, the book becomes all about how we communicate with each other.

"At the end of the story, we have scenes where there's a deaf character who signs, a hearing character who signs, and a deaf character who doesn't sign — and they all have to have a conversation," Selznick says. "And so who speaks, who writes, who can sign ... it all becomes mixed up until they can figure out a way to communicate."

Creating these books is a complicated process Selznick says, and he is always a little surprised in the end when everything comes together. When he's in the middle of it, it's a little like looking for buried treasure.

"It's sort of like going through a treasure map backwards in a certain way, where I know what I want it to be, but I don't know how to get there," he says. "It does end up feeling like I have been on this really exciting journey that I ultimately hope that the reader will be excited to be on, too."

A writer and artist who is fascinated with film, Selznick is about to see a fantasy come true: In November the film version of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, directed by Martin Scorcese, will be released on the big screen. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

An Interrogator Writes 'The Inside Story Of 9/11'

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:59:00 GMT

In the new book The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al Qaeda, former FBI agent and interrogator Ali Soufan says that the government missed key opportunities to prevent terrorism attacks and find Osama Bin Laden sooner because of mismanaged interrogations and dysfunctional relationships within the government's counterterrorism agencies.

On today's Fresh Air, Soufan describes some of the key al-Qaida interrogations he conducted after September 11 which provided valuable intelligence to U.S. officials. During one interrogation, Soufan and his partner got Abu Jandal, Bin Laden's former bodyguard, to identify several of the Sept. 11 hijackers. He also interrogated a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan after September 11. Soufan got Zubaydah to give up valuable information, including the fact that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was the mastermind behind 9/11 and that Jose Padilla was plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States, by using techniques that hinged on building trust and rapport with Zubaydah, withholding information and determining exactly what the terrorist knew.

"We started with Abu Zubaydah with a very simple question — asking him his name — and he responded by giving a fake name," Soufan tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "After he gave that fake name, I said, 'What if I call you honey?' [which was] the name which his mother nick-named him as a child. ... We needed to shake this individual and say 'Look, we know a lot about you. Don't lie to us.'"

Halfway through Zubaydah's interrogations, which Soufan refers to as 'mental poker games,' the CIA decided to take over the sessions. They brought in a private contractor to use what they called enhanced interrogation techniques with the terrorist.

"He had a different approach that [those of] us on the ground with the counter terrorism team were a little nervous about," says Soufan. "We had never done something like this in the U.S. government. ... At the time, the idea was to stop this rapport thing, stop talking to him and try to find ways to diminish his abilities to resist. That was nudity, sleep deprivation, loud music etc."

Soufan says that he objected to the enhanced techniques, which eventually included waterboarding Zubaydah 83 times.

"I think the frustration part was [thinking] 'Okay, we have a guy cooperating [with our methods.] Why stop? If it's working, why break it?'" he says.

Soufan also tells Terry Gross that the information received from the enhanced techniques was later distorted by some in the intelligence community.

"When there was a pushback later about enhanced interrogation techniques, we were giving alleged facts that enhanced interrogation techniques [like waterboarding] produced a lot of actionable intelligence that saved lives," he says. "We were told that Abu Zubaydah, after being waterboarded, identified Jose Padilla as the alleged dirty bomber and that Khalid Sheikh Muhammed was the mastermind behind 9/11. The problem with this [was that] these allegations were totally false because Abu Zubaydah gave this information well before these advanced interrogation techniques were applied."

Ali Soufan retired from the FBI in 2005. During his career, he investigated the Jordan Millennium Bombing plot, the USS Cole bombing and the September 11 attacks, among other incidents. In 2009, he testified in front of the Senate Judicial Committee for their hearing on torture. He was profiled in New Yorker in 2006. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Behind The War On Terror's Dark Curtain

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 04:01:00 GMT

On Sept. 12, 2001, Ali H. Soufan, a special agent with the FBI, was handed a secret file. Soufan had spent nearly a decade investigating terrorism cases, like the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. He says that this file was one he had requested before the attacks, and that had it been given to him earlier it may have helped to prevent them.

Following 9/11, Soufan interrogated suspects as one of the few FBI agents at the time who spoke Arabic. In a new book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda, out today, he reveals many long-held secrets about both the operations of terrorists as well as the American efforts to find and bring them to justice, including how he was able to elicit confessions from members of al-Qaeda.

According to his book, and as he tells NPR's Steve Inskeep, Soufan's interrogations did not involve the physical technique known as waterboarding, but rather involved conversations that hinged on what each man knew.

"You interview a lot of people and the most important thing during interviews is to have the person talk," Soufan says. "And then you can figure out: he's lying here, he's not lying there, maybe he's trying to hide something here."

One of the men he interrogated was Abu Zubaydah, who had been captured in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks, and whom the Bush administration thought was a high-ranking al-Qaeda official. Soufan says though assessment was incorrect, Abu Zubaydah did give up valuable information.

"From the very beginning, Abu Zubaydah was very cooperative, and he provided the information that led us to identify the mastermind of 9/11, which is Khalid Sheikh Muhammed," Soufan says. "He also provided significant details about the plot and how the plot came to be."

Why would a terrorist volunteer such information?

"We were nice to him," Soufan says. "I mean, we had a lot of things going on, you know? He knew that we knew everything about him. We knew even what his mother used to call him as a child. He was not providing information just because he wanted to provide information. He was providing information because he's trying to convey to us that, 'Look, I am cooperating with you.' But at the same time, he didn't know what we knew. And we started playing this mental poker game with him, if you want to call it, and [got] more and more information from him."

Soufan says that the information stopped flowing after the arrival of a man he calls Boris.

"At the time, we were really surprised, because we had a good team on the ground and then we found that someone had hired this psychologist who supposedly was an expert. And when I spoke with him about his level of expertise, we were dumbfounded," Soufan says. Boris had not ever conducted an interrogation and lacked the team's depth of knowledge about al-Qaeda. He told Soufan, "I do know human nature."

"Unfortunately, he knew neither," Soufan says.

Boris employed what was referred to by former CIA director George Tenet as "standard interrogation techniques."

"And the standard interrogation techniques at the time was believed to be nudity, was believed to be sleep deprivation, loud noise," Soufan says. "And we had many problems with this technique. First of all, if it's working, why break it? if someone is talking, the best thing you can do is keep him talking. The number two issue is al-Qaeda and their associates, and Islamic extremists in general, they are anticipating to be tortured when they get caught."

Many of these extremists have been through jails in the Middle East, Soufan says, and "expect to be beaten, they expect to be burned, their nails to be pulled out, they expect to be sodomized. I mean, there is a lot of sick things that happens over there. And now we are saying that we're going to take your clothes off, we're going to put some loud music on, and you're going to cooperate. He's not going to cooperate because he's gonna see how long can he endure the treatment that you're giving him. And you know with 'enhanced' interrogation techniques, you hit the last one we have, which is waterboarding. So when you get [to] waterboarding, what do you do? You keep doing it again and again, in the case of Abu Zubaydah 83 times. In the case of KSM, 183 times. You know when do you realize that it's not working? 102nd time? 101st time? When?"

After his retirement from the FBI, Soufan testified before a Senate Administrative Oversight and the Courts subcommittee on the Bush administration's interrogation and detention program. He spoke to the subcommittee from behind a black screen to protect his identity.

"As I mentioned in my Senate statement, Abu Zubaydah stopped talking. So for a few days we didn't get one single piece of information. Just a day before that started, we get that KSM is the mastermind of 9/11," he says.

In The Black Banners, Soufan repeatedly uses a word not usually associated with interrogation to refer to another suspect, a man by the name of Ali al-Bahlul. Soufan visited Bahlul in Guantanamo, where the military explained that the prisoner was cooperative, and that there was no reason to believe that he was dangerous. His story: that he went to Afghanistan to teach the Quran to poor Afghanis.

"So when we had him brought to the interrogation room, I just felt that there is something wrong with this guy," Soufan says. I mean, he is saying all the rhetoric. He is repeating all the counter-narrative of al-Qaeda. He is very knowledgeable about it. But that means he is also very knowledgeable about al-Qaeda's rhetoric. So I was the devil's advocate here."

Soufan says that he began arguing on behalf of al-Qaeda, "from political perspective and from ideological perspective," and that during the debate, he stopped taking notes, which upset Bahlul.

"He asked me, 'So why are you not taking notes?' And I said, you know, 'I respected you this whole time. I never lied to you. I'm telling you who I am and why I'm here, but I don't see the same from you.' And this is the last thing somebody like him, who claims that he is pious, want to hear from someone," Soufan says. "So I explain to him that I know a lot about him, I know who he really is, and then I ask him to go and pray. So he went, he prayed, he came back. I gave him a cookie, if you want to eat a cookie. So he was chewing on the cookie and he was looking down on the floor and then he looked at me and he said, 'I am Anas al Makki. That's my Qaeda name.'"

The man they had known as Bahlul explained that he was actually a leader of al-Qaeda, and a personal secretary of Osama bin Laden. "What do you want to know?" he asked.

"I said, 'Do you want some tea?' He almost spit the cookies from his mouth," Soufan says. "He said, 'I just told you who I am, and you're just asking me if I want tea?' I said, 'Well, I knew that, but now I know you're respecting me, so I'm offering you some tea.' I had no clue who the guy was."

Al Makki eventually revealed that while the Sept. 11 attacks were being carried out, bin Laden was attempting to use a satellite to watch the destruction on television.

"He said that he was not able to get a signal because they were running away and they were hiding in the mountains somewhere," Soufan says. "So they ended up listening to it on the radio. He talked about different individuals in the group. He talked about the structure. And he is now going to be serving his life in jail." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Understanding History With 'Guns, Germs And Steel'

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Freshmen "common reads" programs are becoming increasingly popular at American colleges and universities. Incoming freshmen are assigned the same book over the summer, and are asked to come to prepared to discuss the book in their first week on campus.

One of the more popular 2011 selections is Jared Diamond's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Society. In it, Diamond explores why some world civilizations became more economically and politically dominant than others.

Diamond joins NPR's Neal Conan to discuss what Guns, Germs and Steel can teach young people about the complex web of factors that have shaped human history. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

A Libyan Son Mourns His Father's 'Disappearance'

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:01:00 GMT

It's been 20 years since Hisham Matar's father disappeared. He was a vocal opponent of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and was kidnapped while living in exile in Egypt in 1990. Just as Gadhafi's regime was collapsing this summer, Matar published Anatomy of a Disappearance, a novel about an exile who is kidnapped, as told from the perspective of his teenage son.

"All that I did not know about my father ... was like a mask that suffocated me," the 14-year-old narrator says. He does not know who kidnapped his father or why. He does not know if his father is dead or alive. The young boy feels guilty for losing his father, and for not knowing "how to find him or take his place. Every day I let my father down," he says.

The construct of the father and son is one way to approach contemporary Middle Eastern history, Matar tells NPR's Steve Inskeep. The older generation of the father was the "audacious" generation, he says. "[They] were reckless politically and had these high dreams." Matar's generation — the generation of the son — was more "restrained" and "shy."

"I am part of a generation that isn't as audacious as the generation before," Matar says, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. "I think my generation's inability to speak in absolute terms when it comes to politics is a very positive thing; it's made us more nuanced, made us more complex."

With the Libyan revolution this summer, it appears that the cultural pendulum may be swinging back in the other direction. "One of the nicknames of the Libyan revolution is the 'revolution of the young men in falling jeans,' " Matar says. "It seems like audacity has skipped a generation."

Watching the dramatic events unfold in Libya, Matar says he sees a moment of transition, full of uncertainty and anxiety. "But what is certain," he says, "is that people have glimpsed another possibility ... a very quick glimpse of what it might be to live in a just and dignified way."

Matar was just a boy when his family left Libya in 1979, but he says his childhood memories of the country are vivid. "Some of the most powerful memories are those when you are very, very young," he says. "Adult life is seen through the reflection of complex, rational thought."

Matar hasn't been back to his home country in 32 years, but he says he's still in love with Libya. "My family history is so intertwined with the country," he explains.

Matar's father was kidnapped by the Egyptian secret service in 1990. He was taken to Libya where, the family later found out, he was imprisoned and tortured. He never had a trial, so they do not know what he was accused of. They also do not know whether he is dead or alive.

"It's impossible to give up hope until you know ... " Matar says. "I recently went to a fishing village in Ireland and it's the only place ... where I found people that feel exactly the same way that I do about my father."

In this village, several fishermen had gone out to sea in their tiny boats and never returned. Their loved ones had not given up hope that the men would someday return — however unlikely the odds.

"Living in hope is a really terrible thing," Matar says. "People speak about hope most of the time as a very positive thing. ... [But] it's a very dispossessing thing, it's a very difficult thing to live with. When you've been living in hope for a long time as I have, suddenly you realize that certainty is far more desirable than hope." [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]

Writers Reflect On Childhood Torment In 'Dear Bully'

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:00:00 GMT

Children who were bullied often carry those memories for years. In Dear Bully: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories, writers share their own experiences, with the benefit of hindsight.

Co-editor Carrie Jones and contributors Eric Luper and Carolyn Mackler join NPR's Neal Conan to discuss what they've taken away from those difficult years. [Copyright 2011 National Public Radio]