In the first month of his US detention, the accused mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks confessed to the crime during questioning and wanted to keep talking about it, according to the psychologist who questioned him.
But the CIA wanted to discuss Al Qaeda’s future plans, not the attacks that had terrorized America a year and a half earlier, said Dr. James E. Mitchell, the psychologist. So when the prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, reported on 9/11, he was beaten naked against a wall.
It was March 2003. That month, interrogators boarded Mr. Muhammad 183 times at a secret CIA prison overseas in the mistaken belief, Dr. Mitchell said, that a nuclear attack on the United States was imminent. But Mr. Mohammed still wasn’t saying what his captors wanted to hear.
“We walled him up,” Dr. Mitchell said Monday, explaining that he and his colleagues had backed their prisoner up against a wall to punish him because they feared he was talking about 9/11 to distract them from another looming crime.
The idea that Mr. Muhammad was punished for speaking out about this issue in the first month of his US detention is new to the proceedings. Dr. Mitchell has been testifying at pre-trial hearings in death penalty cases at Guantanamo since 2020 and has never mentioned it before.
But it aligns with the prosecution’s argument that the CIA was not seeking confessions for a future trial when it brutally interrogated detainees held on hold at the secret prisons, known as black sites, from 2002 until they were transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.
As Dr. Mitchell and prosecutors call him, the agency was looking for “potential information” that could be used for a military or diplomatic mission — not for prosecution.
The government considers the distinction between interrogation to gather information rather than to build a case to be important.
In 2007, Mr. Muhammad again bragged about his role in the attacks when he was brought before FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay, according to prosecutors. They want to use this confession – to “clear groups” that did not use or threaten 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 Mr. Muhammad through torture informed the FBI’s interrogations, which could make the confession inadmissible.
Dr. Mitchell testified that Mr. Muhammad was interrogated up to three times a day almost every day for three years at the CIA prison network before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay. The questions reached classified cables from CIA headquarters. But some questions initially came from FBI agents and analysts building a potential case for prosecution, according to government documents and pretrial testimony.
The testimony of Dr. Mitchell also highlighted the use of “the wall” in black locations.
If done correctly, he said, it shouldn’t cause permanent damage. The “enhanced interrogation technique” was designed for an Air Force program that trained American pilots to resist enemy interrogation. A trainee then faced a mock interrogator, who slammed his shoulder blades, not his head, against a plywood and burlap wall to “disorient” him.
But CIA prisoners experienced it differently.
They said their heads were hit with concrete walls. Their lawyers blame the wall for brain injuries that have been found in some inmates.
Those walled in were considered the enemy – terror suspects kept naked, hooded and routinely deprived of sleep. They “require” them, according to the wording of Dr. Mitchell, to give up al-Qaeda secrets about sleeper cells, future plots and how to find Osama bin Laden.
In 2020, Dr. Mitchell testified that three investigators took turns putting Mr. Mohamed in so they wouldn’t get tired and make a mistake. Dr. Mitchell wrote in his 2016 memoir that he and his team used the wall in conjunction with sleep deprivation as part of “a gradual preparation process” after, in Dr. Mitchell’s estimation, Mitchell, the waterboard failed to elicit the desired response from Mr. Muhammad.
One of the coroner’s colleagues, Dr. John Bruce Jessen, placed a rolled-up towel held in place with duct tape around the naked inmate’s neck and pulled him forward. Mr. Muhammad refused “to help us stop business inside the United States,” he wrote, so Dr. Jessen “bounced him off the wall multiple times.”
In 2022, Dr. Jessen testified on another occasion that he needed a towel because the inmate was wearing a diaper at most. There was no way to catch him.
Dr. Mitchell has described the rolled towel as both a “safety collar” and a tool to prepare prisoners. After the brutality ended, he said, an interrogator might bring only a towel to a debriefing session to remind a detainee of “tough times,” the black sites’ code for brutal interrogations.
Over time, Dr. Mitchell said, the inmates were so cooperative that a towel was no longer needed.
In other accounts of the CIA’s system of reward and punishment, interrogators sometimes gave a naked detainee who cooperated a towel to cover his genitals during interrogation.
Dr. Mitchell said the bricking and water boarding ended a month after Mr. Muhammad was detained, but that he continued to answer questions for the next 1,250 days at the black sites, where detainees had contact only with CIA personnel. .
Prisoners who were deemed less cooperative received a “maintenance visit” from Dr. Mitchell or Dr. Jessen, who reminded them that Washington’s displeasure could lead to more “enhanced interrogations,” although that never happened, he said. Instead, “comforts,” including mattresses, clothes, and korans, could be given or taken away.
Over time, Dr. Mitchell said, Mr. Mohamed’s conditioning to fear if he didn’t answer questions lessened, and he answered questions to maintain comforts or get new ones.
Despite Dr. Mitchell’s testimony of institutional indifference, someone on the black websites recorded what Mr. Muhammad had said about the 9/11 attacks. This week, Mr. Muhammad’s defense lawyers showed the judge CIA cables from March 2003 with information about the plot attributed to Mr. Muhammad that had been circulated to the intelligence community, including the FBI
