MG: At what point were you removed?
Mitchell: An hour or so later.
MG: How high was the water?
Mitchell: It comes right up to your nose. It comes right up so you really don’t know. I mean, the thing’s coming up around your neck, it’s coming up around your ears.
MG: You’re in darkness?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.…Maybe it wasn’t an hour, maybe it was less than that. I’m sure it was, otherwise I’d have some hypothermia. It felt like an hour. Anyway I’m in this thing, and they lower you down, and I think, “Oh, they’re going to put me in a barrel, see if I’m claustrophobic. I’m not. No big deal to me.” Oh no. They stick the hose in, put that little metal lid on, and then cover it up with rocks.
MG: Do they tell you beforehand what they’re going to do?
Mitchell: They tell you as they’re doing it.
MG: Everything they were doing to the trainees at SERE they did to you as well?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.
As Mitchell put it, “A lot of people spent time in that barrel.” At the time, that was part of the standard course.
Mitchell: I also took the advanced course. If you think the basic course is rough.…Dude.
3.
This is where the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program came from. The CIA came to Mitchell and Jessen and asked for their advice. The two of them had been working for years, designing and implementing what they believed to be the most effective interrogation technique imaginable, and the agency wanted to know what worked. So Mitchell and Jessen made a list, at the top of which was sleep deprivation, walling, and waterboarding. Waterboarding is where you’re placed on a gurney with your head lower than your feet, a cloth is placed over your face, and water is poured into your mouth and nose to produce the sensation of drowning. As it happened, waterboarding was one of the few techniques Mitchell and Jessen didn’t use at SERE. From the Air Force’s perspective, waterboarding was too good. They were trying to teach their people that resisting torture was possible, so it made little sense to expose them to a technique that, for most people, made resistance impossible.1 But to use on suspected terrorists? To many in the CIA, it made sense. As a precautionary step, he and Jessen tried it out on themselves first, each waterboarding the other—two sessions in total for each of them, using the most aggressive protocol, the forty-second continuous pour.
“We wanted to be sure the physicians could develop safety procedures and the guards knew what they were going to do, and we wanted to know what [the detainees] were going to experience,” he said.
MG: So describe what it was like.
Mitchell: You ever been on a super tall building and thought you might jump off? Knowing you wouldn’t jump off, but thought you might jump off? That’s what it felt like to me. I didn’t feel like I was going to die, I felt like I was afraid I was going to die.
When the Justice Department sent two senior attorneys to the interrogation site to confirm the legality of the techniques under consideration, Mitchell and Jessen waterboarded them too. One of the lawyers, he remembers, sat up afterward, dried her hair, and said simply, “Well, that sucked.”
Mitchell and Jessen developed a protocol. If a detainee was reluctant to answer questions, they would start with the mildest of “enhanced measures.” If the detainee persisted, they would escalate. Walling was a favorite, as was sleep deprivation. The Justice Department’s rules were that seventy-two hours of sleep deprivation was the maximum, but Mitchell and Jessen found that unnecessary. What they preferred to do was to let someone sleep, but not sleep enough; to systematically break up their REM cycles.
Waterboarding was the technique of last resort. They used a hospital gurney, tilted at 45 degrees. The Justice Department allowed them to pour at twenty- to forty-second intervals, separated by three breaths, for a total of twenty minutes. They preferred one forty-second pour, two twenty-second pours, and the remainder at three to ten seconds. “The main point,” Mitchell said,
is you don’t want it to go in their lungs, you just want it to go in their sinuses. We had no interest in drowning the person. We originally used water out of a one-liter bottle, but the physicians wanted us to use saline because some people swallowed the water and they didn’t want [them] to have water intoxication.
Before the first pour, they took a black T-shirt and lowered it over the subject’s face, covering their nose. “The cloth goes like this,” Mitchell said, miming the lowering of the shirt.
And then you lift the cloth up, and then you put the cloth down, and then you lift the cloth up, and then you put the cloth down, and you lift the cloth up, and you put the cloth down.
Literally, when you lift the cloth up, the pourer stops pouring. There’s a guy up there with a stopwatch and he’s counting the seconds so I know how many seconds it’s going on. We’ve got a physician right there.
The room was crowded. Typically, the chief of base would be there, the intelligence analyst responsible for the case, and a psychologist, among others. Another group was outside, watching the proceedings on a large TV monitor: more CIA experts, a lawyer, guards—a big group.
No questions were asked during the process. That was for later.
Mitchell: You’re not screaming at the guy. Literally, you’re pouring the water, and you’re saying to him in a not-quite-conversational tone, but not an aggressive tone, “It doesn’t have to be this way. We want information to stop operations inside the United States. We know you don’t have all of it, but we know you have some of it.…” I’m saying it to him as it’s happening, “It doesn’t have to be this way. This is your choice.”
MG: How do you know—in general, with EITs—how do you know when you’ve gone as far as you need to go?
Mitchell: They start talking to you.
Talking meant specifics—details, names, facts.
Mitchell: You’d give him a picture and say, “Who’s this guy?” He’d say, “Well, this guy is this guy, but you know, the guy in the back, that guy in the back is this guy, and this is where he’s at…” and you know—so he would go beyond the question.
Mitchell and Jessen focused on compliance. They wanted their subjects to talk and volunteer information and answer questions. And from the beginning with KSM, they were convinced they would need every technique in their arsenal to get him to talk. He wasn’t a foot soldier on the fringes of Al Qaeda, someone ambivalent about his participation in terrorist acts. Foot soldiers are easy. They have little to say—and little to lose by saying it. They’ll cooperate with their interrogators because they realize it is their best chance of winning their freedom.
But KSM knew he wasn’t seeing daylight again, ever. He had no incentive to cooperate. Mitchell knew all the psychological interrogation techniques used by the people who didn’t believe in enhanced interrogation, and he thought they would work just fine on what he called “common terrorists that you catch on the battlefield, like the everyday jihadists that were fighting Americans.” But not on “the hard-core guys.”
And KSM was a hard-core guy. Mitchell and Jessen could use only walling and sleep deprivation to get him to talk because, incredibly, waterboarding did not work on him. Somehow KSM was able to open his sinuses, and the water that flowed into his nose would simply flow out his mouth. No one understood how he did it. Mitchell calls it a magic trick. After a few sessions, KSM grasped the cadence of the pours. He would mock the room by counting down the remaining seconds on his fingers—then making a slashing gesture with his hand when it was over. Once, in the middle of a session, Mitchell and Jessen ducked out of the room to confer with a colleague; when they came back inside, KSM was snoring. “He was asleep,” Mitchell said, laughing at the memory. “I know I’m laughing at this potentially horrific image that people have, but there is a piece of this…” He shook his head in wonderment. “I’d never heard of it,” he said. “I’m telling you, when the CIA was doing due diligence, they called JPRA.” JPRA is a Pentagon agency that monitors the various SERE programs run by the service branches. They had a file on waterboarding. “The person they talked to there said it’s 100 percent effective on our students. We have never had anyone not capitulate.”