JANE MAYER

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.

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.

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.

But there have been many news reports that water-boarding has been used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is one of the major al Qaeda figures that we have in U.S. custody.

It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.

Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on.

The idea is that if we can put our own people through something almost as bad as what they might have to go through if they were taken captive, they will inoculate themselves.

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.

In government, consensus is more important than command; persuasion not only works better than arrogance, it's vital to the democratic process.

Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The natural thing would be to suggest money on the right [wing] doesn't really matter that much. The first thing you have to know is that the presidential elections are the ones where it's most difficult for money to hold sway, in that they're the most public elections.

This year [2016] we're seeing a really strange upending [of the party]. The money was coming from these super-wealthy donors who were really on the far, hard right, people like the Kochs. So the party and the candidates moved so far to the right that a lot of people who don't share their point of view were unhappy.

David and Charles Koch are pretty much as far right as you can get on the ideological spectrum without falling off. They are far right libertarians, very anti-government, very pro-business, very anti-tax, anti-regulatory, in favour of free markets ruling the day.

There's a difference between those two [George Soroses and the Tom Steyers] and the Kochs that I think is important.

I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and candidates and politicians funded by the Kochs and other deep-pocketed groups on the far right ready to attack Hillary Clinton.

People I've interviewed say they're terrified there may be boycotts of their [the Kochs] products, which include so many household items that everybody's familiar with, things like Stainmaster Carpet and Dixie Cups and Brawny paper towels and Lycra.

It's hard to look at [Donald] Trump as a hopeful sign because, in his own way, he is offering false solutions to many problems.