But all that was later—after KSM opened up. In March 2003, when Mitchell and Jessen first confronted him, tiny and hairy and potbellied, things were very different.
“You’ve got to remember at that particular time [we] had credible evidence that Al Qaeda had another big wave of attacks coming,” Mitchell said.
There was a lot of chatter. We knew that Osama bin Laden had met with the Pakistani scientists who were passing out nuclear technology, and [we] knew that the Pakistani scientists had said to Bin Laden, “The biggest problem is getting the nuclear material.” Bin Laden had said, “What if we’ve already got it?” That just sent chills through the whole intelligence community.
The CIA had people walking around Manhattan with Geiger counters, looking for a dirty bomb. Washington was on high alert. And when KSM was first captured, the feeling was that if anyone knew anything about the planned attacks, it would be him. But KSM wasn’t talking, and Mitchell wasn’t optimistic. KSM was a hard case.
The first set of interrogators sent to question KSM had tried to be friendly. They made him comfortable and brewed him some tea and asked respectful questions. They’d gotten nowhere. He had simply looked at them and rocked back and forth.
Then KSM had been handed over to someone Mitchell calls the “new sheriff in town,” an interrogator who Mitchell says crossed the line into sadism—contorting KSM into a variety of “stress” positions, like taping his hands together behind his back, then raising them up over his head, so that his shoulders almost popped out. “This guy told me that he had learned his interrogation approaches in South America from the communist rebels,” Mitchell said. “He got into a battle of wills with KSM. The new sheriff had this idea that he wanted to be called sir. That’s all he focused on.” KSM had no intention of calling anyone sir. After a week of trying, the new sheriff gave up. The prisoner was handed over to Mitchell and Jessen.
What happened next is a matter of great controversy. The methods of interrogation used on KSM have been the subject of lawsuits, congressional investigations, and endless public debate. Those who approve refer to the measures as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—EITs. Those on the other side call them torture. But let us leave aside those broader ethical questions for a moment, and focus on what the interrogation of KSM can tell us about the two puzzles.
The deceptions of Ana Montes and Bernie Madoff, the confusion over Amanda Knox, the plights of Graham Spanier and Emily Doe are all evidence of the underlying problem we have in making sense of people we do not know. Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do? Before we return to Sandra Bland—and what exactly happened on that roadside in Texas—I want to talk about perhaps the most extreme version of the talking-to-strangers problem: a terrorist who wants to hold on to his secrets, and an interrogator who is willing to go to almost any lengths to pry them free.
2.
Mitchell and Jessen met in Spokane, Washington, where they were both staff psychologists for the Air Force’s SERE program—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. All branches of the U.S. military have their own versions of SERE, which involves teaching key personnel what to do in the event that they fall into enemy hands.
The exercise would begin with the local police rounding up Air Force officers, unannounced, and bringing them to a detention center mocked up as an enemy POW camp. “They just stop them and arrest them,” Mitchell said. “Then they hand them over to whoever’s going to do the operational-readiness test.”
One exercise involved crews of the bombers that carry nuclear weapons. Everything about their mission was classified. If they were to crash in hostile territory, you can imagine how curious their captors would be about the contents of their planes. The SERE program was supposed to prepare a flight crew for what might happen.
The subjects would be cold, hungry, forced to stand—awake—inside a box for days. Then came the interrogation. “You would see if you could try and extract that information from them,” Mitchell said. He says it was “very realistic.” One particularly effective technique developed at SERE was “walling.” You wrap a towel around someone’s neck to support their head, then bang them up against a specially constructed wall.
“You do it on a fake wall,” Mitchell explained:
It’s got a clapper behind it and it makes a tremendous amount of noise and there’s a lot of give, and your ears start swirling. You don’t do it in a way to cause damage to the person. I mean, it’s like a wrestling mat, only louder. It’s not painful, it’s just confusing. It’s disruptive to your train of thought, and you’re off balance. Not only physically off balance—I mean, you’re just off balance.
Mitchell’s responsibility was to help design the SERE program, and that meant he occasionally went through the training protocol himself. Once, he says, he was part of a SERE exercise involving one of the oldest tricks in the interrogation business: the interrogator threatens not the subject, but a colleague of the subject’s. In Mitchell’s experience, men and women react very differently to this scenario. The men tend to fold. The women don’t.
“If you are a female pilot and they said they were going to do something to the other airman, the attitude of a lot of them was, ‘It sucks to be you,’” he said. “‘You do your job, I’m going to do mine. I’m going to protect the secrets. I’m sorry this has happened to you, but you knew this when you signed up.’” Mitchell first saw this when he debriefed women who had been held as POWs during Desert Storm.
They would drag those women out and threaten to beat them every time the men wouldn’t talk. And [the women] were angry at the men for not holding out, and they said, “Maybe I would have gotten a beating, maybe I would have got sexually molested, but it would have happened one time. By showing them that the way to get the keys to the kingdom was to drag me out, it happened every time. So let me do my job. You do your job.”
In the SERE exercise, Mitchell was paired with a woman, a senior-ranking Air Force officer. Her interrogators said they would torture Mitchell unless she talked. True to form, she said, “I’m not talking.” Mitchell said:
They put me in a fifty-five-gallon drum that was buried in the ground, put a lid on it, covered it up with dirt. At the top of the drum, protruding through the lid, was a hose spewing cold water.…Unbeknownst to me because of the way they positioned me, the drain holes were at the very top, at the level of my nose.
Slowly the barrel filled with water.
Mitchell: I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t kill the next psychologist to come to the school, I was pretty sure of that, but I wasn’t convinced of that. You know what I mean?
MG: How did you feel when that was happening?
Mitchell: I wasn’t happy, because your knees are up against your chest and you can’t get out. Your arms are down beside you. You can’t move. They put a strap underneath you and lower you into the thing.