The CIA violently interrupted a 9/11 suspect when he tried to talk about the attacks

GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba – In his first month in U.S. detention, the man accused of planning the 9/11 attacks confessed to the crime during the interrogation and wanted to continue talking about it, according to the psychologist who questioned him.

But the CIA wanted him to discuss it future projects of Al Qaeda, not the attacks that had shocked the United States a year and a half earlier, said Dr. James Mitchell, the psychologist.

So when the prisoner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mentioned 9/11, he was beaten, naked, against a wall.

It was March 2003. That month the investigators applied the submarine to Muhammad 183 times in a secret CIA prison overseas in the mistaken belief, Mitchell said, that a nuclear attack on the United States was imminent.

But Mohammed had not yet said what his captors wanted to hear.

“We isolated him,” Mitchell said Monday, explaining that he and his colleagues had slammed their prisoner against a wall to punish him because they feared he was talking about 9/11. distract them of another impending crime.

The idea that Mohammed was punished for speaking out about the issue during his first month in U.S. detention is new to the proceedings.

Mitchell has been testifying in preliminary hearings in death penalty cases at Guantanamo Bay since 2020 and has never spoken about them before.

But this is in line with the prosecution’s thesis that the C.I.A I wasn’t looking for confessions. for a future trial when he brutally interrogated prisoners who had been held incommunicado in secret prisons, known as black sites, from 2002 until their transfer to Guantánamo in 2006.

Intelligence

As Mitchell and prosecutors say, the agency sought “usable intelligence that could be used for a military or agency mission, not for a trial.

The government sees an important distinction between questioning to gather information and not to build a case.

In 2007, Mohammed again boasted about his role in the attacks when he was brought before FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay, according to prosecutors.

They want to use that confession (to “clean up equipment” they didn’t use or threaten with violence) as key evidence in the trial.

It will be up to the military judge to decide whether the 2007 confession was voluntary.

But the judge must also decide whether previous statements obtained from Mohammed through torture informed FBI interrogators, which could invalidate the confession. inadmissible.

Mitchell testified that Mohammed had been interrogated up to three times a day, almost daily, for three years in the CIA prison network before his transfer to Guantánamo.

The questions came in classified cables from CIA headquarters.

But some questions originally came from FBI agents and analysts who were building a possible case for the prosecution, according to government documents and preliminary testimony.

Mitchell’s testimony also highlighted the use of the term “wall” at black sites.

If done correctly, he said, it shouldn’t cause any permanent damage.

The “enhanced interrogation technique” was designed for an Air Force program that trained American pilots to do so resist enemy interrogations.

One intern was then confronted by a mock interrogator, who slammed his shoulder blades, not his head, against a plywood and canvas wall, to “disorientate” him.

But the CIA prisoners experienced it differently.

They said their heads were hit against concrete walls.

His lawyers blame Walling for the brain injuries which have been detected in some prisoners.

Those who were walled in were seen as enemies: suspected terrorists who were kept naked, hooded and systematically deprived of sleep.

They were “conditioned,” in Mitchell’s words, to reveal Al Qaeda’s secrets dormant cellsfuture plots and how to find them Osama bin Laden.

In 2020, Mitchell testified that three interrogators took turns cornering Mohammed so they wouldn’t get tired and make a mistake.

Mitchell wrote in his 2016 memoir that he and his team used the use of walls in combination with sleep deprivation as part of “a gradual conditioning process” after, in Mitchell’s assessment, waterboarding did not he managed to provoke desired response of Muhammad.

One of his interrogation partners, Dr. John Bruce Jessen, placed a rolled towel around the naked prisoner’s neck and pushed him forward.

Mohammed refused to “help us stop operations inside the United States,” he wrote, so Jessen “thrust him against the wall multiple times.”

In 2022, Jessen testified in another case that a towel was needed because the prisoner was wearing at most a diaper.

There was no way to catch him.

Mitchell described the rolled up towel as “a safety collar and a tool for conditioning prisoners. Once the brutality is over, he said, an interrogator might bring only a towel during the briefing to remind the prisoner of “the hard times”, code on black sites for brutal interrogations.

As time went on, Mitchell said, the prisoners became so cooperative that the towel was no longer necessary.

In other accounts of the CIA’s reward and punishment system, interrogators would sometimes give a towel to a cooperative naked prisoner to cover his genitals during interrogation.

Mitchell said the wall and waterboarding ended a month after Mohammed’s arrest, but he continued to answer questions in the months that followed. 1,250 days in black siteswhere prisoners had contact only with CIA personnel.

Treatments

Prisoners deemed less cooperative received a “maintenance visit” from Mitchell or Jessen, who reminded them that upsetting Washington could lead to more “enhanced interrogations,” though that never happened, he said.

Instead, “services” could be given or taken away, including mattresses, clothes and Korans.

Over time, Mitchell said, Mohammed’s conditioning to be afraid if he didn’t answer questions diminished, and he answered questions to preserve modern comforts or get new ones.

Despite Mitchell’s testimony about institutional disinterest, some at the black sites picked up on what Mohammed had said about the 9/11 attacks.

This week, Mohammed’s defense lawyers showed the judge CIA cables from March 2003 containing information about the plot attributed to Mohammed that had been circulated throughout the intelligence community, including the FBI.

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