[NYTr] The Back Sites: Jane Mayer on CIA's Secret Interrogation Program

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

The New Yorker - Aug 13, 2007 issue
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer

A Reporter at Large

The Black Sites:

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

by Jane Mayer 

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. custody—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader
who was the primary architect of the September 11th attacks—had
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 times—at least thirty—possibly 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 skeptical—they didn’t believe it.”

Special Agent Randall Bennett, the head of security for the U.S.
consulate in Karachi when Pearl was killed—and 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
Jesus—he 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 States—and
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 detainees—including 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 plots—an 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
level—meaning the director of the C.I.A. Any change in the plan—even if
an extra day of a certain treatment was added—was 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 SERE—an acronym
for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was 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 vulnerable—to 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 future—when 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 tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing
blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed 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 techniques—they 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 Greensboro—where he was remembered as a
class clown, but religious enough to forgo meat when eating at Burger
King—he 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 sensitive—bin Laden never stayed in
one place for long—and 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 time—a
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, 2003—a month and a half after he was
captured—Mohammed 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 department—not 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 him—is 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.”