Anthony Summers - The Eleventh Day

A year after 9/11, a senior Justice Department official asserted in a memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales that “certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A’s proscription against torture.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the Geneva and U.N. Conventions on the treatment of “prisoners of war,” long asked in vain for access to KSM and thirteen other detainees. When finally allowed to see them in 2006, the Red Cross reported that the prisoners had indeed been subjected to “torture.” Two years later, when its report was leaked, the public learned the details.

Between them, the detainees alleged ill treatment that included “suffocation by water”—better known as waterboarding; prolonged stress standing naked, arms chained above the head for days at a time, often with toilet access denied; beatings and kicking; use of a neck collar to bang the head and body against a wall; confinement in a coffinlike box; enforced nudity for periods up to months; deprivation of sleep by enforcing stress positions, repetitive loud noise or music, or applications of cold water; exposure to cold; threats to harm a detainee’s family; restriction of food; and—serious for Muslim men—forced shaving of the head and beard.

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In the event of being taken prisoner, a captured al Qaeda manual showed, operatives had been advised to “complain of mistreatment … insist on proving that torture was inflicted.” Though alert to false claims, however, the Red Cross was impressed by the consistency of the prisoners’ allegations. A then-secret CIA inspector general’s review, moreover, had acknowledged—even before the Red Cross reported—that “enhanced interrogation techniques” had indeed been used as described by the prisoners.

KSM told the Red Cross that his ill treatment had ranged right across the U.S. inventory of abuse. During his transfer around the planet, he said, “my eyes were covered with a cloth … a suppository was inserted into my rectum.… After arrival my clothes were cut off … photographs taken of me naked … made to stand on tiptoes for about two hours during questioning … the head interrogator (a man) and two female interrogators, plus about ten muscle guys wearing masks … a tube was inserted into my anus and water poured inside.… No toilet access was provided until four hours later.”

At some point, physical coercion was compounded by psychological terror. “If anything else happens in the United States,” KSM was allegedly told, “we’re going to kill your children.” KSM had some reason to fear this was true. His sons Yusuf and Abed, aged nine and seven, had been seized months before his own arrest. It has been claimed by another detainee that at some point even they were tormented—supposedly with insects—to scare the children into blabbing clues to their father’s whereabouts.

Transported to Poland—KSM thought it was Poland because of a label on a water bottle he saw—three interrogators of non-American extraction told KSM they had approval from Washington to give him “a hard time.” He would, they told him, be brought to the “verge of death and back again.”

Waterboarding.

“I would be strapped to a special bed, which could be rotated.… A cloth would be placed over my face. Cold water from a bottle that had been kept in a fridge was then poured onto the cloth by one of the guards so that I could not breathe.… I struggled in the panic of not being able to breathe.… The harshest period of the interrogation was just prior to the end of the first month.… The worst day … my head was banged against the wall so hard that it started to bleed.… Finally I was taken for a session of waterboarding. The torture on that day was finally stopped by the intervention of the doctor.”

The average time the CIA expected a subject to endure—before begging for relief and starting to talk—was fourteen seconds. KSM reportedly lasted as long as two to two and a half minutes before providing information. He was submitted to waterboarding 183 times.

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.”