[Ppnews] A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program

[Political Prisoner News]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer

The Black Sites




A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.




by 
<http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13//search/query?query=authorName:%22Jane 
Mayer%22>Jane Mayer August 13, 2007

In the war on terror, one historian says, the 
C.I.A. “didn’t just bring back the old 
psychological techniques­they perfected them.”

In March, Mariane Pearl, the widow of the 
murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel 
Pearl, received a phone call from Alberto 
Gonzales, the Attorney General. At the time, 
Gonzales’s role in the controversial dismissal of 
eight United States Attorneys had just been 
exposed, and the story was becoming a scandal in 
Washington. Gonzales informed Pearl that the 
Justice Department was about to announce some 
good news: a terrorist in U.S. custody­Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who was the 
primary architect of the September 11th 
attacks­had confessed to killing her husband. 
(Pearl was abducted and beheaded five and a half 
years ago in Pakistan, by unidentified Islamic 
militants.) The Administration planned to release 
a transcript in which Mohammed boasted, “I 
decapitated with my blessed right hand the head 
of the American Jew Daniel Pearl in the city of 
Karachi, Pakistan. For those who would like to 
confirm, there are pictures of me on the Internet holding his head.”

Pearl was taken aback. In 2003, she had received 
a call from Condoleezza Rice, who was then 
President Bush’s national-security adviser, 
informing her of the same news. But Rice’s 
revelation had been secret. Gonzales’s 
announcement seemed like a publicity stunt. Pearl 
asked him if he had proof that Mohammed’s 
confession was truthful; Gonzales claimed to have 
corroborating evidence but wouldn’t share it. 
“It’s not enough for officials to call me and say 
they believe it,” Pearl said. “You need 
evidence.” (Gonzales did not respond to requests for comment.)

The circumstances surrounding the confession of 
Mohammed, whom law-enforcement officials refer to 
as K.S.M., were perplexing. He had no lawyer. 
After his capture in Pakistan, in March of 2003, 
the Central Intelligence Agency had detained him 
in undisclosed locations for more than two years; 
last fall, he was transferred to military custody 
in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There were no named 
witnesses to his initial confession, and no solid 
information about what form of interrogation 
might have prodded him to talk, although reports 
had been published, in the Times and elsewhere, 
suggesting that C.I.A. officers had tortured him. 
At a hearing held at Guantánamo, Mohammed said 
that his testimony was freely given, but he also 
indicated that he had been abused by the C.I.A. 
(The Pentagon had classified as “top secret” a 
statement he had written detailing the alleged 
mistreatment.) And although Mohammed said that 
there were photographs confirming his guilt, U.S. 
authorities had found none. Instead, they had a 
copy of the video that had been released on the 
Internet, which showed the killer’s arms but 
offered no other clues to his identity.

Further confusing matters, a Pakistani named 
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh had already been 
convicted of the abduction and murder, in 2002. A 
British-educated terrorist who had a history of 
staging kidnappings, he had been sentenced to 
death in Pakistan for the crime. But the 
Pakistani government, not known for its leniency, 
had stayed his execution. Indeed, hearings on the 
matter had been delayed a remarkable number of 
times­at least thirty­possibly because of his 
reported ties to the Pakistani intelligence 
service, which may have helped free him after he 
was imprisoned for terrorist activities in India. 
Mohammed’s confession would delay the execution 
further, since, under Pakistani law, any new evidence is grounds for appeal.

A surprising number of people close to the case 
are dubious of Mohammed’s confession. A longtime 
friend of Pearl’s, the former Journal reporter 
Asra Nomani, said, “The release of the confession 
came right in the midst of the U.S. Attorney 
scandal. There was a drumbeat for Gonzales’s 
resignation. It seemed like a calculated strategy 
to change the subject. Why now? They’d had the 
confession for years.” Mariane and Daniel Pearl 
were staying in Nomani’s Karachi house at the 
time of his murder, and Nomani has followed the 
case meticulously; this fall, she plans to teach 
a course on the topic at Georgetown University. 
She said, “I don’t think this confession resolves 
the case. You can’t have justice from one 
person’s confession, especially under such 
unusual circumstances. To me, it’s not 
convincing.” She added, “I called all the 
investigators. They weren’t just skeptical­they didn’t believe it.”

Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of 
security for the U.S. consulate in Karachi when 
Pearl was killed­and whose lead role 
investigating the murder was featured in the 
recent film “A Mighty Heart”­said that he has 
interviewed all the convicted accomplices who are 
now in custody in Pakistan, and that none of them 
named Mohammed as playing a role. “K.S.M.’s name 
never came up,” he said. Robert Baer, a former 
C.I.A. officer, said, “My old colleagues say with 
one-hundred-per-cent certainty that it was not 
K.S.M. who killed Pearl.” A government official 
involved in the case said, “The fear is that 
K.S.M. is covering up for others, and that these 
people will be released.” And Judea Pearl, 
Daniel’s father, said, “Something is fishy. There 
are a lot of unanswered questions. K.S.M. can say 
he killed Jesus­he has nothing to lose.”

Mariane Pearl, who is relying on the Bush 
Administration to bring justice in her husband’s 
case, spoke carefully about the investigation. 
“You need a procedure that will get the truth,” 
she said. “An intelligence agency is not supposed to be above the law.”

Mohammed’s interrogation was part of a secret 
C.I.A. program, initiated after September 11th, 
in which terrorist suspects such as Mohammed were 
detained in “black sites”­secret prisons outside 
the United States­and subjected to unusually 
harsh treatment. The program was effectively 
suspended last fall, when President Bush 
announced that he was emptying the C.I.A.’s 
prisons and transferring the detainees to 
military custody in Guantánamo. This move 
followed a Supreme Court ruling, Hamdan v. 
Rumsfeld, which found that all 
detainees­including those held by the C.I.A.­had 
to be treated in a manner consistent with the 
Geneva Conventions. These treaties, adopted in 
1949, bar cruel treatment, degradation, and 
torture. In late July, the White House issued an 
executive order promising that the C.I.A. would 
adjust its methods in order to meet the Geneva 
standards. At the same time, Bush’s order 
pointedly did not disavow the use of “enhanced 
interrogation techniques” that would likely be 
found illegal if used by officials inside the 
United States. The executive order means that the 
agency can once again hold foreign terror 
suspects indefinitely, and without charges, in 
black sites, without notifying their families or 
local authorities, or offering access to legal counsel.

The C.I.A.’s director, General Michael Hayden, 
has said that the program, which is designed to 
extract intelligence from suspects quickly, is an 
“irreplaceable” tool for combatting terrorism. 
And President Bush has said that “this program 
has given us information that has saved innocent 
lives, by helping us stop new attacks.” He claims 
that it has contributed to the disruption of at 
least ten serious Al Qaeda plots since September 
11th, three of them inside the United States.

According to the Bush Administration, Mohammed 
divulged information of tremendous value during 
his detention. He is said to have helped point 
the way to the capture of Hambali, the Indonesian 
terrorist responsible for the 2002 bombings of 
night clubs in Bali. He also provided information 
on an Al Qaeda leader in England. Michael 
Sheehan, a former counterterrorism official at 
the State Department, said, “K.S.M. is the poster 
boy for using tough but legal tactics. He’s the 
reason these techniques exist. You can save lives 
with the kind of information he could give up.” 
Yet Mohammed’s confessions may also have muddled 
some key investigations. Perhaps under duress, he 
claimed involvement in thirty-one criminal 
plots­an improbable number, even for a high-level 
terrorist. Critics say that Mohammed’s case 
illustrates the cost of the C.I.A.’s desire for 
swift intelligence. Colonel Dwight Sullivan, the 
top defense lawyer at the Pentagon’s Office of 
Military Commissions, which is expected 
eventually to try Mohammed for war crimes, called 
his serial confessions “a textbook example of why 
we shouldn’t allow coercive methods.”

The Bush Administration has gone to great lengths 
to keep secret the treatment of the hundred or so 
“high-value detainees” whom the C.I.A. has 
confined, at one point or another, since 
September 11th. The program has been 
extraordinarily “compartmentalized,” in the 
nomenclature of the intelligence world. By 
design, there has been virtually no access for 
outsiders to the C.I.A.’s prisoners. The utter 
isolation of these detainees has been described 
as essential to America’s national security. The 
Justice Department argued this point explicitly 
last November, in the case of a Baltimore-area 
resident named Majid Khan, who was held for more 
than three years by the C.I.A. Khan, the 
government said, had to be prohibited from access 
to a lawyer specifically because he might 
describe the “alternative interrogation methods” 
that the agency had used when questioning him. 
These methods amounted to a state secret, the 
government argued, and disclosure of them could 
“reasonably be expected to cause extremely grave 
damage.” (The case has not yet been decided.)

Given this level of secrecy, the public and all 
but a few members of Congress who have been sworn 
to silence have had to take on faith President 
Bush’s assurances that the C.I.A.’s internment 
program has been humane and legal, and has 
yielded crucial intelligence. Representative 
Alcee Hastings, a Democratic member of the House 
Select Committee on Intelligence, said, “We talk 
to the authorities about these detainees, but, of 
course, they’re not going to come out and tell us 
that they beat the living daylights out of 
someone.” He recalled learning in 2003 that 
Mohammed had been captured. “It was good news,” 
he said. “So I tried to find out: Where is this 
guy? And how is he being treated?” For more than 
three years, Hastings said, “I could never 
pinpoint anything.” Finally, he received some 
classified briefings on the Mohammed 
interrogation. Hastings said that he “can’t go 
into details” about what he found out, but, 
speaking of Mohammed’s treatment, he said that 
even if it wasn’t torture, as the Administration 
claims, “it ain’t right, either. Something went wrong.”

Since the drafting of the Geneva Conventions, the 
International Committee of the Red Cross has 
played a special role in safeguarding the rights 
of prisoners of war. For decades, governments 
have allowed officials from the organization to 
report on the treatment of detainees, to insure 
that standards set by international treaties are 
being maintained. The Red Cross, however, was 
unable to get access to the C.I.A.’s prisoners 
for five years. Finally, last year, Red Cross 
officials were allowed to interview fifteen 
detainees, after they had been transferred to 
Guantánamo. One of the prisoners was Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed. What the Red Cross learned has 
been kept from the public. The committee believes 
that its continued access to prisoners worldwide 
is contingent upon confidentiality, and therefore 
it addresses violations privately with the 
authorities directly responsible for prisoner 
treatment and detention. For this reason, Simon 
Schorno, a Red Cross spokesman in Washington, 
said, “The I.C.R.C. does not comment on its 
findings publicly. Its work is confidential.”

The public-affairs office at the C.I.A. and 
officials at the congressional 
intelligence-oversight committees would not even 
acknowledge the existence of the report. Among 
the few people who are believed to have seen it 
are Condoleezza Rice, now the Secretary of State; 
Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser; 
John Bellinger III, the Secretary of State’s 
legal adviser; Hayden; and John Rizzo, the 
agency’s acting general counsel. Some members of 
the Senate and House intelligence-oversight 
committees are also believed to have had limited access to the report.

Confidentiality may be particularly stringent in 
this case. Congressional and other Washington 
sources familiar with the report said that it 
harshly criticized the C.I.A.’s practices. One of 
the sources said that the Red Cross described the 
agency’s detention and interrogation methods as 
tantamount to torture, and declared that American 
officials responsible for the abusive treatment 
could have committed serious crimes. The source 
said the report warned that these officials may 
have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva 
Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. 
Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The 
conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for 
its credibility and caution, could have 
potentially devastating legal ramifications.

Concern about the legality of the C.I.A.’s 
program reached a previously unreported breaking 
point last week when Senator Ron Wyden, a 
Democrat on the intelligence committee, quietly 
put a “hold” on the confirmation of John Rizzo, 
who as acting general counsel was deeply involved 
in establishing the agency’s interrogation and 
detention policies. Wyden’s maneuver essentially 
stops the nomination from going forward. “I 
question if there’s been adequate legal 
oversight,” Wyden told me. He said that after 
studying a classified addendum to President 
Bush’s new executive order, which specifies 
permissible treatment of detainees, “I am not 
convinced that all of these techniques are either 
effective or legal. I don’t want to see 
well-intentioned C.I.A. officers breaking the law 
because of shaky legal guidance.”

A former C.I.A. officer, who supports the 
agency’s detention and interrogation policies, 
said he worried that, if the full story of the 
C.I.A. program ever surfaced, agency personnel 
could face criminal prosecution. Within the 
agency, he said, there is a “high level of 
anxiety about political retribution” for the 
interrogation program. If congressional hearings 
begin, he said, “several guys expect to be thrown 
under the bus.” He noted that a number of C.I.A. 
officers have taken out professional liability 
insurance, to help with potential legal fees.

Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the C.I.A., 
denied any legal impropriety, stressing that “the 
agency’s terrorist-detention program has been 
implemented lawfully. And torture is illegal 
under U.S. law. The people who have been part of 
this important effort are well-trained, seasoned 
professionals.” This spring, the Associated Press 
published an article quoting the chairman of the 
House intelligence committee, Silvestre Reyes, 
who said that Hayden, the C.I.A. director, 
“vehemently denied” the Red Cross’s conclusions. 
A U.S. official dismissed the Red Cross report as 
a mere compilation of allegations made by 
terrorists. And Robert Grenier, a former head of 
the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, said that 
“the C.I.A.’s interrogations were nothing like 
Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo. They were very, very 
regimented. Very meticulous.” He said, “The 
program is very careful. It’s completely legal.”

Accurately or not, Bush Administration officials 
have described the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib 
and Guantánamo as the unauthorized actions of 
ill-trained personnel, eleven of whom have been 
convicted of crimes. By contrast, the treatment 
of high-value detainees has been directly, and 
repeatedly, approved by President Bush. The 
program is monitored closely by C.I.A. lawyers, 
and supervised by the agency’s director and his 
subordinates at the Counterterrorism Center. 
While Mohammed was being held by the agency, 
detailed dossiers on the treatment of detainees 
were regularly available to the former C.I.A. 
director George Tenet, according to informed 
sources inside and outside the agency. Through a 
spokesperson, Tenet denied making day-to-day 
decisions about the treatment of individual 
detainees. But, according to a former agency 
official, “Every single plan is drawn up by 
interrogators, and then submitted for approval to 
the highest possible level­meaning the director 
of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan­even if an 
extra day of a certain treatment was added­was 
signed off by the C.I.A. director.”

On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a 
secret Presidential finding authorizing the 
C.I.A. to create paramilitary teams to hunt, 
capture, detain, or kill designated terrorists 
almost anywhere in the world. Yet the C.I.A. had 
virtually no trained interrogators. A former 
C.I.A. officer involved in fighting terrorism 
said that, at first, the agency was crippled by 
its lack of expertise. “It began right away, in 
Afghanistan, on the fly,” he recalled. “They 
invented the program of interrogation with people 
who had no understanding of Al Qaeda or the Arab 
world.” The former officer said that the pressure 
from the White House, in particular from 
Vice-President Dick Cheney, was intense: “They 
were pushing us: ‘Get information! Do not let us 
get hit again!’ ” In the scramble, he said, he 
searched the C.I.A.’s archives, to see what 
interrogation techniques had worked in the past. 
He was particularly impressed with the Phoenix 
Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including 
military historians, have described it as a 
program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A 
Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 
and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong 
targeted by the Phoenix Program were of 
negligible importance. But, after September 11th, 
some C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a 
useful model. A. B. Krongard, who was the 
executive director of the C.I.A. from 2001 to 
2004, said that the agency turned to “everyone we 
could, including our friends in Arab cultures,” 
for interrogation advice, among them those in 
Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, all of which the 
State Department regularly criticizes for human-rights abuses.

The C.I.A. knew even less about running prisons 
than it did about hostile interrogations. Tyler 
Drumheller, a former chief of European operations 
at the C.I.A., and the author of a recent book, 
“On the Brink: How the White House Compromised 
U.S. Intelligence,” said, “The agency had no 
experience in detention. Never. But they insisted 
on arresting and detaining people in this 
program. It was a mistake, in my opinion. You 
can’t mix intelligence and police work. But the 
White House was really pushing. They wanted 
someone to do it. So the C.I.A. said, ‘We’ll 
try.’ George Tenet came out of politics, not 
intelligence. His whole modus operandi was to 
please the principal. We got stuck with all sorts 
of things. This is really the legacy of a 
director who never said no to anybody.”

Many officials inside the C.I.A. had misgivings. 
“A lot of us knew this would be a can of worms,” 
the former officer said. “We warned them, It’s 
going to become an atrocious mess.” The problem 
from the start, he said, was that no one had 
thought through what he called “the disposal 
plan.” He continued, “What are you going to do 
with these people? The utility of someone like 
K.S.M. is, at most, six months to a year. You 
exhaust them. Then what? It would have been better if we had executed them.”

The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was 
Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was 
captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. 
Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, 
the agency hired a group of outside contractors, 
who implemented a regime of techniques that one 
well-informed former adviser to the American 
intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork 
Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were 
retired military psychologists, and their 
backgrounds were in training Special Forces 
soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever 
be captured by enemy states. The program, known 
as SERE­an acronym for Survival, Evasion, 
Resistance, and Escape­was created at the end of 
the Korean War. It subjected trainees to 
simulated torture, including waterboarding 
(simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, 
isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, 
enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with 
agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual 
humiliation. The SERE program was designed 
strictly for defense against torture regimes, but 
the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help 
interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very 
arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official 
knowledgeable about the program said. “They 
sought to render the detainees vulnerable­to 
break down all of their senses. It takes a 
psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

The use of psychologists was also considered a 
way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such 
as the Convention Against Torture. The former 
adviser to the intelligence community said, 
“Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a 
theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t 
just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ 
When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they 
could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these 
theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., 
where a number of scientists work, there was 
strong internal opposition to the new techniques. 
“Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think 
about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”

Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were 
apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s 
interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that 
he was not only waterboarded, as has been 
previously reported; he was also kept for a 
prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” 
which was so small that he could not stand. 
According to an eyewitness, one psychologist 
advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James 
Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to 
a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and 
an experienced interrogator who has known 
Mitchell professionally for years, said that 
“learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” 
Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what 
he says is the whole cycle. It starts with 
isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ 
ability to forecast the future­when their next 
meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It 
creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. 
model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who 
had turned against the state to confess falsely. 
The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”

As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al 
Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of 
psychological coercion. The program tied together 
many strands of the agency’s secret history of 
Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. 
(In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held 
secret documents known as the Family Jewels, 
which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on 
rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of 
Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to 
his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days 
after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The 
C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the 
surprisingly powerful effects of psychological 
manipulations, such as extreme sensory 
deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history 
professor at the University of Wisconsin, in 
Madison, who has written a history of the 
C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the 
agency learned that “if subjects are confined 
without light, odors, sound, or any fixed 
references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”

Agency scientists found that in just a few hours 
some subjects suspended in water tanks­or 
confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out 
goggles and earmuffs­regressed to semi-psychotic 
states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so 
desperate for human interaction that “they bond 
with the interrogator like a father, or like a 
drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If 
you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll 
turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that 
“after the Cold War we put away those tools. 
There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from 
those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the 
war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the 
old psychological techniques­they perfected them.”

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable 
for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most 
sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” 
an outside expert familiar with the protocol 
said. “At every stage, there was a rigid 
attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to 
almost to the letter. There was top-down quality 
control, and such a set routine that you get to 
the point where you know what each detainee is 
going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It 
was almost automated. People were utterly 
dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the 
intentional and systematic infliction of great 
suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

The U.S. government first began tracking Khalid 
Sheikh Mohammed in 1993, shortly after his nephew 
Ramzi Yousef blew a gaping hole in the World 
Trade Center. Mohammed, officials learned, had 
transferred money to Yousef. Mohammed, born in 
either 1964 or 1965, was raised in a religious 
Sunni Muslim family in Kuwait, where his family 
had migrated from the Baluchistan region of 
Pakistan. In the mid-eighties, he was trained as 
a mechanical engineer in the U.S., attending two colleges in North Carolina.

As a teen-ager, Mohammed had been drawn to 
militant, and increasingly violent, Muslim 
causes. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the 
age of sixteen, and, after his graduation from 
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State 
University, in Greensboro­where he was remembered 
as a class clown, but religious enough to forgo 
meat when eating at Burger King­he signed on with 
the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, receiving 
military training and establishing ties with 
Islamist terrorists. By all accounts, his animus 
toward the U.S. was rooted in a hatred of Israel.

In 1994, Mohammed, who was impressed by Yousef’s 
notoriety after the first World Trade Center 
bombing, joined him in scheming to blow up twelve 
U.S. jumbo jets over two days. The so-called 
Bojinka plot was disrupted in 1995, when 
Philippine police broke into an apartment that 
Yousef and other terrorists were sharing in 
Manila, which was filled with bomb-making 
materials. At the time of the raid, Mohammed was 
working in Doha, Qatar, at a government job. The 
following year, he narrowly escaped capture by 
F.B.I. officers and slipped into the global 
jihadist network, where he eventually joined 
forces with Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. 
Along the way, he married and had children.

Many journalistic accounts have presented 
Mohammed as a charismatic, swashbuckling figure: 
in the Philippines, he was said to have flown a 
helicopter close enough to a girlfriend’s office 
window so that she could see him; in Pakistan, he 
supposedly posed as an anonymous bystander and 
gave interviews to news reporters about his 
nephew’s arrest. Neither story is true. But 
Mohammed did seem to enjoy taunting authorities 
after the September 11th attacks, which, in his 
eventual confession, he claimed to have 
orchestrated “from A to Z.” In April, 2002, 
Mohammed arranged to be interviewed on Al Jazeera 
by its London bureau chief, Yosri Fouda, and took 
personal credit for the atrocities. “I am the 
head of the Al Qaeda military committee,” he 
said. “And yes, we did it.” Fouda, who conducted 
the interview at an Al Qaeda safe house in 
Karachi, said that he was astounded not only by 
Mohammed’s boasting but also by his seeming 
imperviousness to the danger of being caught. 
Mohammed permitted Al Jazeera to reveal that he 
was hiding out in the Karachi area. When Fouda 
left the apartment, Mohammed, apparently unarmed, 
walked him downstairs and out into the street.

In the early months of 2003, U.S. authorities 
reportedly paid a twenty-five-million-dollar 
reward for information that led to Mohammed’s 
arrest. U.S. officials closed in on him, at 4 
A.M. on March 1st, waking him up in a borrowed 
apartment in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. The officials 
hung back as Pakistani authorities handcuffed and 
hooded him, and took him to a safe house. 
Reportedly, for the first two days, Mohammed 
robotically recited Koranic verses and refused to 
divulge much more than his name. A videotape 
obtained by “60 Minutes” shows Mohammed at the 
end of this episode, complaining of a head cold; 
an American voice can be heard in the background. 
This was the last image of Mohammed to be seen by 
the public. By March 4th, he was in C.I.A. custody.

Captured along with Mohammed, according to some 
accounts, was a letter from bin Laden, which may 
have led officials to think that he knew where 
the Al Qaeda founder was hiding. If Mohammed did 
have this crucial information, it was time 
sensitive­bin Laden never stayed in one place for 
long­and officials needed to extract it quickly. 
At the time, many American intelligence officials 
still feared a “second wave” of Al Qaeda attacks, 
ratcheting the pressure further.

According to George Tenet’s recent memoir, “At 
the Center of the Storm,” Mohammed told his 
captors that he wouldn’t talk until he was given 
a lawyer in New York, where he assumed he would 
be taken. (He had been indicted there in 
connection with the Bojinka plot.) Tenet writes, 
“Had that happened, I am confident that we would 
have obtained none of the information he had in 
his head about imminent threats against the 
American people.” Opponents of the C.I.A.’s 
approach, however, note that Ramzi Yousef gave a 
voluminous confession after being read his 
Miranda rights. “These guys are egomaniacs,” a 
former federal prosecutor said. “They love to talk!”

A complete picture of Mohammed’s time in secret 
detention remains elusive. But a partial 
narrative has emerged through interviews with 
European and American sources in intelligence, 
government, and legal circles, as well as with 
former detainees who have been released from 
C.I.A. custody. People familiar with Mohammed’s 
allegations about his interrogation, and 
interrogations of other high-value detainees, 
describe the accounts as remarkably consistent.

Soon after Mohammed’s arrest, sources say, his 
American captors told him, “We’re not going to 
kill you. But we’re going to take you to the very 
brink of your death and back.” He was first taken 
to a secret U.S.-run prison in Afghanistan. 
According to a Human Rights Watch report released 
two years ago, there was a C.I.A.-affiliated 
black site in Afghanistan by 2002: an underground 
prison near Kabul International Airport. 
Distinctive for its absolute lack of light, it 
was referred to by detainees as the Dark Prison. 
Another detention facility was reportedly a 
former brick factory, just north of Kabul, known 
as the Salt Pit. The latter became infamous for 
the 2002 death of a detainee, reportedly from 
hypothermia, after prison officials stripped him 
naked and chained him to the floor of his 
concrete cell, in freezing temperatures.

In all likelihood, Mohammed was transported from 
Pakistan to one of the Afghan sites by a team of 
black-masked commandos attached to the C.I.A.’s 
paramilitary Special Activities Division. 
According to a report adopted in June by the 
Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, 
titled “Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers 
of Detainees,” detainees were “taken to their 
cells by strong people who wore black outfits, 
masks that covered their whole faces, and dark 
visors over their eyes.” (Some personnel 
reportedly wore black clothes made from specially 
woven synthetic fabric that couldn’t be ripped or 
torn.) A former member of a C.I.A. transport team 
has described the “takeout” of prisoners as a 
carefully choreographed twenty-minute routine, 
during which a suspect was hog-tied, stripped 
naked, photographed, hooded, sedated with anal 
suppositories, placed in diapers, and transported 
by plane to a secret location.

A person involved in the Council of Europe 
inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the 
frequent use of suppositories during the takeout 
of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” 
He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the 
detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s 
sense of impenetrability. The interrogation 
became a process not just of getting information 
but of utterly subordinating the detainee through 
humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed 
that the agency frequently photographed the 
prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The 
person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry 
said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s 
quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review.

A secret government document, dated December 10, 
2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard 
Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of 
stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation 
of the detainee, stripping can be used to 
demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to 
debilitate the detainee.” The document advises 
interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by 
firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons 
and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to 
prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The 
memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach 
Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a 
variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”

In the process of being transported, C.I.A. 
detainees such as Mohammed were screened by 
medical experts, who checked their vital signs, 
took blood samples, and marked a chart with a 
diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, 
and other imperfections. As the person involved 
in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s 
like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling 
where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. 
Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”

According to sources, Mohammed said that, while 
in C.I.A. custody, he was placed in his own cell, 
where he remained naked for several days. He was 
questioned by an unusual number of female 
handlers, perhaps as an additional humiliation. 
He has alleged that he was attached to a dog 
leash, and yanked in such a way that he was 
propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say 
that he also claimed to have been suspended from 
the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching 
the ground. The pressure on his wrists evidently became exceedingly painful.

Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, 
said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad 
al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that 
he had received similar treatment in the Dark 
Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed 
to have been suspended by his arms for long 
periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. 
“It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” 
Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi 
also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.

According to sources familiar with interrogation 
techniques, the hanging position is designed, in 
part, to prevent detainees from being able to 
sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is 
knowledgeable about the interrogation program, 
explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your 
electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance 
and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes 
out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an 
effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, 
when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was 
also recognized for decades in the United States 
as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar 
Association report, published in 1930, which was 
cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, 
said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that 
deprivation of sleep is the most effective 
torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”

Under President Bush’s new executive order, 
C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic 
necessities of life, including adequate food and 
water, shelter from the elements, necessary 
clothing, protection from extremes of heat and 
cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, 
according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the 
simple act of remaining upright can over time 
cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, 
noted that “longtime standing” was a common 
K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, 
“A Question of Torture,” he writes that the 
Soviets found that making a victim stand for 
eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce 
“excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, 
skin becomes tense and intensely painful, 
blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates 
soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”

Mohammed is said to have described being chained 
naked to a metal ring in his cell wall for 
prolonged periods in a painful crouch. (Several 
other detainees who say that they were confined 
in the Dark Prison have described identical 
treatment.) He also claimed that he was kept 
alternately in suffocating heat and in a 
painfully cold room, where he was doused with ice 
water. The practice, which can cause hypothermia, 
violates the Geneva Conventions, and President 
Bush’s new executive order arguably bans it.

Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that 
their cells were bombarded with deafening sound 
twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even 
months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now 
in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford 
Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell 
while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the 
sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like 
the soundtrack from a horror film,” to 
ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said 
that his client found the psychological torture 
more intolerable than the physical abuse that he 
said he had been previously subjected to in 
Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence 
agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The 
C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” 
Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. 
“Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people 
knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”

Professor Kassem said his Yemeni client, Kazimi, 
had told him that, during his incarceration in 
the Dark Prison, he attempted suicide three 
times, by ramming his head into the walls. “He 
did it until he lost consciousness,” Kassem said. 
“Then they stitched him back up. So he did it 
again. The next time, he woke up, he was chained, 
and they’d given him tranquillizers. He asked to 
go to the bathroom, and then he did it again.” 
This last time, Kazimi was given more 
tranquillizers, and chained in a more confining manner.

The case of Khaled el-Masri, another detainee, 
has received wide attention. He is the German car 
salesman whom the C.I.A. captured in 2003 and 
dispatched to Afghanistan, based on erroneous 
intelligence; he was released in 2004, and 
Condoleezza Rice reportedly conceded the mistake 
to the German chancellor. Masri is considered one 
of the more credible sources on the black-site 
program, because Germany has confirmed that he 
has no connections to terrorism. He has also 
described inmates bashing their heads against the 
walls. Much of his account appeared on the front 
page of the Times. But, during a visit to America 
last fall, he became tearful as he recalled the 
plight of a Tanzanian in a neighboring cell. The 
man seemed “psychologically at the end,” he said. 
“I could hear him ramming his head against the 
wall in despair. I tried to calm him down. I 
asked the doctor, ‘Will you take care of this 
human being?’ ” But the doctor, whom Masri 
described as American, refused to help. Masri 
also said that he was told that guards had 
“locked the Tanzanian in a suitcase for long 
periods of time­a foul-smelling suitcase that 
made him vomit.” (Masri did not witness such abuse.)

Masri described his prison in Afghanistan as a 
filthy hole, with walls scribbled on in Pashtun 
and Arabic. He was given no bed, only a coarse 
blanket on the floor. At night, it was too cold 
to sleep. He said, “The water was putrid. If you 
took a sip, you could taste it for hours. You 
could smell a foul smell from it three metres 
away.” The Salt Pit, he said, “was managed and 
run by the Americans. It was not a secret. They 
introduced themselves as Americans.” He added, 
“When anything came up, they said they couldn’t 
make a decision. They said, ‘We will have to pass 
it on to Washington.’ ” The interrogation room at 
the Salt Pit, he said, was overseen by a 
half-dozen English-speaking masked men, who 
shoved him and shouted at him, saying, “You’re in 
a country where there’s no rule of law. You might be buried here.”

According to two former C.I.A. officers, an 
interrogator of Mohammed told them that the 
Pakistani was kept in a cell over which a sign 
was placed: “The Proud Murderer of 3,000 
Americans.” (Another source calls this 
apocryphal.) One of these former officers defends 
the C.I.A.’s program by noting that “there was 
absolutely nothing done to K.S.M. that wasn’t 
done to the interrogators themselves”­a reference 
to SERE-like training. Yet the Red Cross report 
emphasizes that it was the simultaneous use of 
several techniques for extended periods that made 
the treatment “especially abusive.” Senator Carl 
Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services 
Committee, who has been a prominent critic of the 
Administration’s embrace of harsh interrogation 
techniques, said that, particularly with sensory 
deprivation, “there’s a point where it’s torture. 
You can put someone in a refrigerator and it’s 
torture. Everything is a matter of degree.”

One day, Mohammed was apparently transferred to a 
specially designated prison for high-value 
detainees in Poland. Such transfers were so 
secretive, according to the report by the Council 
of Europe, that the C.I.A. filed dummy flight 
plans, indicating that the planes were heading 
elsewhere. Once Polish air space was entered, the 
Polish aviation authority would secretly shepherd 
the flight, leaving no public documentation. The 
Council of Europe report notes that the Polish 
authorities would file a one-way flight plan out 
of the country, creating a false paper trail. 
(The Polish government has strongly denied that 
any black sites were established in the country.)

No more than a dozen high-value detainees were 
held at the Polish black site, and none have been 
released from government custody; accordingly, no 
first-hand accounts of conditions there have 
emerged. But, according to well-informed sources, 
it was a far more high-tech facility than the 
prisons in Afghanistan. The cells had hydraulic 
doors and air-conditioning. Multiple cameras in 
each cell provided video surveillance of the 
detainees. In some ways, the circumstances were 
better: the detainees were given bottled water. 
Without confirming the existence of any black 
sites, Robert Grenier, the former C.I.A. 
counterterrorism chief, said, “The agency’s 
techniques became less aggressive as they learned 
the art of interrogation,” which, he added, “is an art.”

Mohammed was kept in a prolonged state of sensory 
deprivation, during which every point of 
reference was erased. The Council on Europe’s 
report describes a four-month isolation regime as 
typical. The prisoners had no exposure to natural 
light, making it impossible for them to tell if 
it was night or day. They interacted only with 
masked, silent guards. (A detainee held at what 
was most likely an Eastern European black site, 
Mohammed al-Asad, told me that white noise was 
piped in constantly, although during electrical 
outages he could hear people crying.) According 
to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, 
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he was 
shackled and kept naked, except for a pair of 
goggles and earmuffs. (Some prisoners were kept 
naked for as long as forty days.) He had no idea 
where he was, although, at one point, he 
apparently glimpsed Polish writing on a water bottle.

In the C.I.A.’s program, meals were delivered 
sporadically, to insure that the prisoners 
remained temporally disoriented. The food was 
largely tasteless, and barely enough to live on. 
Mohammed, who upon his capture in Rawalpindi was 
photographed looking flabby and unkempt, was now 
described as being slim. Experts on the C.I.A. 
program say that the administering of food is 
part of its psychological arsenal. Sometimes 
portions were smaller than the day before, for no 
apparent reason. “It was all part of the 
conditioning,” the person involved in the Council 
of Europe inquiry said. “It’s all calibrated to develop dependency.”

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland 
detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. 
According to the sources familiar with the Red 
Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been 
waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. 
officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s 
interrogators called this bravado, insisting that 
he was waterboarded only once. According to one 
of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown 
the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”

“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. 
“Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. 
People dream about it. It’s human nature. 
Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re 
waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates 
the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the 
shit out of you.” (The former officer was 
waterboarded himself in a training course.) 
Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang 
right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A 
lot of them want to talk. Their egos are 
unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. 
He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a 
doctor standing by during interrogations. He 
insisted that the method was safe and effective, 
but said that it could cause lasting psychic 
damage to the interrogators. During 
interrogations, the former agency official said, 
officers worked in teams, watching each other 
behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group 
support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator 
“has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you 
cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to 
come back. You lose your soul. You can do your 
best to justify it, but it’s well outside the 
norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without 
it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a 
good guy. It really haunts him. You are 
inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”

Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the 
details of the detention and interrogation 
program, there was a tense debate about where to 
draw the line in terms of treatment. John 
Brennan, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said, “It 
all comes down to individual moral barometers.” 
Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many 
officials, from both a moral and a legal 
perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration 
lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a 
permissible interrogation technique for “enemy 
combatants,” it was classified as a form of 
torture, and treated as a serious criminal 
offense. American soldiers were court-martialled 
for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.

A C.I.A. source said that Mohammed was subjected 
to waterboarding only after interrogators 
determined that he was hiding information from 
them. But Mohammed has apparently said that, even 
after he started coöperating, he was 
waterboarded. Footnotes to the 9/11 Commission 
report indicate that by April 17, 2003­a month 
and a half after he was captured­Mohammed had 
already started providing substantial information 
on Al Qaeda. Nonetheless, according to the person 
involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, he was 
kept in isolation for years. During this time, 
Mohammed supplied intelligence on the history of 
the September 11th plot, and on the structure and 
operations of Al Qaeda. He also described plots 
still in a preliminary phase of development, such 
as a plan to bomb targets on America’s West Coast.

Ultimately, however, Mohammed claimed 
responsibility for so many crimes that his 
testimony became to seem inherently dubious. In 
addition to confessing to the Pearl murder, he 
said that he had hatched plans to assassinate 
President Clinton, President Carter, and Pope 
John Paul II. Bruce Riedel, who was a C.I.A. 
analyst for twenty-nine years, and who now works 
at the Brookings Institution, said, “It’s 
difficult to give credence to any particular area 
of this large a charge sheet that he confessed 
to, considering the situation he found himself 
in. K.S.M. has no prospect of ever seeing freedom 
again, so his only gratification in life is to 
portray himself as the James Bond of jihadism.”

By 2004, there were growing calls within the 
C.I.A. to transfer to military custody the 
high-value detainees who had told interrogators 
what they knew, and to afford them some kind of 
due process. But Donald Rumsfeld, then the 
Defense Secretary, who had been heavily 
criticized for the abusive conditions at military 
prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, 
refused to take on the agency’s detainees, a 
former top C.I.A. official said. “Rumsfeld’s 
attitude was, You’ve got a real problem.” 
Rumsfeld, the official said, “was the third most 
powerful person in the U.S. government, but he 
only looked out for the interests of his 
department­not the whole Administration.” (A 
spokesperson for Rumsfeld said that he had no comment.)

C.I.A. officials were stymied until the Supreme 
Court’s Hamdan ruling, which prompted the 
Administration to send what it said were its last 
high-value detainees to Cuba. Robert Grenier, 
like many people in the C.I.A., was relieved. 
“There has to be some sense of due process,” he 
said. “We can’t just make people disappear.” 
Still, he added, “The most important source of 
intelligence we had after 9/11 came from the 
interrogations of high-value detainees.” And he 
said that Mohammed was “the most valuable of the 
high-value detainees, because he had operational 
knowledge.” He went on, “I can respect people who 
oppose aggressive interrogations, but they should 
admit that their principles may be putting American lives at risk.”

Yet Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 
9/11 Commission and later the State Department’s 
top counsellor, under Rice, is not convinced that 
eliciting information from detainees justifies 
“physical torment.” After leaving the government 
last year, he gave a speech in Houston, in which 
he said, “The question would not be, Did you get 
information that proved useful? Instead it would 
be, Did you get information that could have been 
usefully gained only from these methods?” He 
concluded, “My own view is that the cool, 
carefully considered, methodical, prolonged, and 
repeated subjection of captives to physical 
torment, and the accompanying psychological terror, is immoral.”

Without more transparency, the value of the 
C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program is 
impossible to evaluate. Setting aside the moral, 
ethical, and legal issues, even supporters, such 
as John Brennan, acknowledge that much of the 
information that coercion produces is unreliable. 
As he put it, “All these methods produced useful 
information, but there was also a lot that was 
bogus.” When pressed, one former top agency 
official estimated that “ninety per cent of the 
information was unreliable.” Cables carrying 
Mohammed’s interrogation transcripts back to 
Washington reportedly were prefaced with the 
warning that “the detainee has been known to 
withhold information or deliberately mislead.” 
Mohammed, like virtually all the top Al Qaeda 
prisoners held by the C.I.A., has claimed that, 
while under coercion, he lied to please his captors.

In theory, a military commission could sort out 
which parts of Mohammed’s confession are true and 
which are lies, and obtain a conviction. Colonel 
Morris D. Davis, the chief prosecutor at the 
Office of Military Commissions, said that he 
expects to bring charges against Mohammed “in a 
number of months.” He added, “I’d be shocked if 
the defense didn’t try to make K.S.M.’s treatment 
a problem for me, but I don’t think it will be insurmountable.”

Critics of the Administration fear that the 
unorthodox nature of the C.I.A.’s interrogation 
and detention program will make it impossible to 
prosecute the entire top echelon of Al Qaeda 
leaders in captivity. Already, according to the 
Wall Street Journal, credible allegations of 
torture have caused a Marine Corps prosecutor 
reluctantly to decline to bring charges against 
Mohamedou Ould Slahi, an alleged Al Qaeda leader 
held in Guantánamo. Bruce Riedel, the former 
C.I.A. analyst, asked, “What are you going to do 
with K.S.M. in the long run? It’s a very good 
question. I don’t think anyone has an answer. If 
you took him to any real American court, I think 
any judge would say there is no admissible evidence. It would be thrown out.”

The problems with Mohammed’s coerced confessions 
are especially glaring in the Daniel Pearl case. 
It may be that Mohammed killed Pearl, but 
contradictory evidence and opinion continue to 
surface. Yosri Fouda, the Al Jazeera reporter who 
interviewed Mohammed in Karachi, said that 
although Mohammed handed him a package of 
propaganda items, including an unedited video of 
the Pearl murder, he never identified himself as 
playing a role in the killing, which occurred in 
the same city just two months earlier. And a 
federal official involved in Mohammed’s case 
said, “He has no history of killing with his own 
hands, although he’s proved happy to commit mass 
murder from afar.” Al Qaeda’s leadership had 
increasingly focussed on symbolic political 
targets. “For him, it’s not personal,” the official said. “It’s business.”

Ordinarily, the U.S. legal system is known for 
resolving such mysteries with painstaking care. 
But the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program, 
Senator Levin said, has undermined the public’s 
trust in American justice, both here and abroad. 
“A guy as dangerous as K.S.M. is, and half the 
world wonders if they can believe him­is that 
what we want?” he asked. “Statements that can’t 
be believed, because people think they rely on torture?”

Asra Nomani, the Pearls’ friend, said of the 
Mohammed confession, “I’m not interested in 
unfair justice, even for bad people.” She went 
on, “Danny was such a person of conscience. I 
don’t think he would have wanted all of this 
dirty business. I don’t think he would have 
wanted someone being tortured. He would have been 
repulsed. This is the kind of story that Danny 
would have investigated. He really believed in American principles.”







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