THE WATERBOARD has a long history; it was a torture option for the Spanish Inquisition as early as the fifteenth century. In the twentieth century it was used by the British in the 1930s in Palestine, by the Japanese during World War II, by the North Koreans and by the French—in Algeria—in the 1950s, by the Americans in Vietnam in the 1960s, by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the military regimes in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s.
In 1900, an American judge advocate general declared at an Army major’s court-martial that waterboarding was “in violation of the rules of civilized war.” In the late 1940s, when trying Japanese military personnel who had used waterboarding on American prisoners, the United States deemed them to be war criminals. They were executed.
To the Bush administration in 2006, however, waterboarding had become acceptable. “The United States does not torture,” declared President Bush, conceding that the CIA had used an “alternative set of procedures” on detainees. “I cannot describe the specific methods used,” he added, but the “separate program” was “vital.”
In his 2010 memoir, the former President recalled having been asked by Director Tenet whether he had permission to use waterboarding and other techniques on KSM. “I thought about the 2,973 people stolen from their families by al Qaeda on 9/11,” Bush wrote. “And I thought about my duty to protect the country from another act of terror. ‘Damn right,’ I said.”
As Bush recalled it, when told earlier by legal advisers that certain “enhanced” interrogation techniques were legal, he had rejected two that he felt “went too far.” Waterboarding, though, “did no lasting harm”—according to medical experts consulted by the CIA.
The “separate” interrogation program was essential, he had said in 2006, because it helped “take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill.” KSM, he said by way of example, had provided information that helped stop a further planned attack on the United States. According to Vice President Cheney, “a great many” attacks had been stopped thanks to information obtained under the program.
Had only conventional interrogation techniques been used on KSM, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in 2008, he “would not have talked to us in a hundred years.” Former CIA director Porter Goss has said the use of “enhanced” techniques produced “provable, extraordinary successes.”
Others did not agree. FBI agents involved in the investigation thought ill treatment achieved little or nothing that skilled conventional questioning could not have achieved. Cheney’s claim that the program obtained hard intelligence was “intensely disputed.” On his first day in office, President Obama banned “alternative procedures.”
Coerced admissions, meanwhile, are probably inadmissible in a court of law. “The use of torture,” said Professor Mark Danner, who was instrumental in publishing the details of the Red Cross report on the prisoners’ treatment, “deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice.”
THERE IS SOMETHING else, something especially relevant to the information extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “Any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress,” said Lieutenant General John Kimmons, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, “would be of questionable credibility.”
Is that the case with KSM, on whose statements much of the 9/11 Commission Report relies? The prisoner positively spewed information, and that is a part of the problem. At a rough count, he confessed to having carried out or plotted some thirty crimes—more than is plausible, surely, even for a top operative.
Transcripts of interrogation sessions with KSM were reportedly transmitted to Washington accompanied by the warning: “Detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.” In a combined confession and boast, the prisoner himself told the Red Cross: “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.… I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent … wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.”
A parallel issue is what torture may have done to KSM’s mental condition. His defense attorney at the initial military tribunal proceedings at Guantanamo in 2008, Captain Prescott Prince, thought KSM appeared to have suffered “some level of psychological impairment” as a result of the mistreatment.
When the 9/11 Commission was at work, KSM had yet to admit that he had lied under torture. Nor, at that time, did the Commission know that he or others had been tortured. “We were not aware, but we guessed,” executive director Philip Zelikow has said, “that things like that were going on.”
If Zelikow and senior colleagues guessed it, they seem not to have shared their guess with Commission members. “Never, ever did I imagine that American interrogators were subjecting detainees to waterboarding and other forms of physical torture,” Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste has said. “No one raised such a possibility at a Commission meeting. In hindsight we were snookered.”
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The commissioners asked the CIA to allow its own staff access to detainees, only to meet with a flat refusal. If security was the issue, they then offered, staff could be taken to the prisoners’ location wearing blindfolds. Could Commission people at least observe CIA interrogation sessions through a one-way observation window? The CIA blocked all such suggestions.
Commission senior adviser Ernest May thought the CIA’s summaries of the results of interrogations “incomplete and poorly written.” “We never,” he wrote later, “had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.” Former Commission counsel John Farmer warns that, even now, “reliance on KSM’s version of events must be considered carefully.”
The issue was and remains a huge problem, a blemish on the historical record. As the Report was being assembled, the Commission attempted to resolve the concern by inserting a paragraph or two on a page deep in the text—a health warning to the American public about the product of the CIA interrogations.
“Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses,” it read, “is challenging.… We have evaluated their statements carefully and have attempted to corroborate them with documents and statements of others.”
THERE IS, however, a measure of considerable consolation. Long before they were caught, KSM and a fellow operative
Seven months after the 9/11 attacks, Fouda found himself listening to an anonymous male voice on the telephone proposing “something special for the first anniversary … exclusive stuff.” Then, four days later, came a fax offering to provide him with “addresses of people” for a proposed documentary. Then another phone call, asking him to fly to Pakistan. Fouda did so, without confiding even in his boss.
After a harrowing process, an internal flight to Karachi, a change of hotels, a journey by car and rickshaw, then—in another car, blindfolded, the final leg—the reporter was ushered into a fourth floor apartment. The blindfold removed, Fouda found himself looking into the eyes of the fugitive who was being hunted more feverishly than anyone in the world except Osama bin Laden.
KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh, a key accomplice, told Fouda their story—the story, at any rate, as they wanted to tell it—over a period of forty-eight hours. “I am the head of the al Qaeda military committee,” KSM said that first night, “and Ramzi is the coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation. And yes, we did it.”
After prayers together the following morning, the two men shared their version of the preparation and execution of 9/11. Their accounts largely match the version subsequently extracted from KSM by the CIA. Binalshibh pulled from an old suitcase dozens of mementos of the operation: information on Boeing airplanes, a navigation map of the American East Coast, illustrations on “How to perform sudden maneuvers”—a page covered in notations made, Binalshibh said, by the hijackers’ leader, Mohamed Atta.
The interview over, blindfolded again, reporter Fouda was taken back to the airport. He had—and has—no doubt that the men he had met at the safe house in Karachi were who they said they were, that what they told him
