“Out of the fifty-two students, twenty of them picked this doctor.…And he goes, ‘But I wasn’t here! I was in Hawaii!’”2
If one of the soldiers had gotten it wrong, it would have been understandable. People make mistakes. So would two misidentifications, or even three. But twenty got it wrong. In any court of law, the hapless physician would end up behind bars.
After 9/11, Morgan went to work for the CIA. There he tried to impress upon his colleagues the significance of his findings. The agency had spies and confidential sources around the world. They had information gathered from people they had captured or coerced into cooperating. These sources were people who often spoke with great confidence. Some were highly trusted. Some gave information that was considered very credible. But Morgan’s point was that if the information they were sharing had been obtained under stress—if they had just been through some nightmare in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria—what they said might be inaccurate or misleading, and the sources wouldn’t know it. They would say, It’s the doctor! I know it was the doctor, even though the doctor was a thousand miles away. “I said to the other analysts, ‘You know, the implication of this is really alarming.’”
So what did Charles Morgan think when he heard what Mitchell and Jessen were up to with KSM in their faraway black site?
I told people—this was before I was at the CIA, and I told people while I was there—“Trying to get information out of someone you are sleep-depriving is sort of like trying to get a better signal out of a radio that you are smashing with a sledgehammer.…It makes no sense to me at all.”
5.
KSM made his first public confession on the afternoon of March 10, 2007, just over four years after he was captured by the CIA in Islamabad, Pakistan. The occasion was a tribunal hearing held at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There were eight people present in addition to KSM—a “personal representative” assigned to the prisoner, a linguist, and officers from each of the four branches of the U.S. military service.
KSM was asked if he understood the nature of the proceedings. He said he did. A description of the charges against him was read out loud. Through his representative, he made a few small corrections: “My name is misspelled in the Summary of Evidence. It should be S-h-a-i-k-h or S-h-e-i-k-h, but not S-h-a-y-k-h, as it is in the subject line.” He asked for a translation of a verse from the Koran. A few more matters of administration were discussed. Then KSM’s personal representative read his confession:
I hereby admit and affirm without duress to the following:
I swore Bay’aat [i.e., allegiance] to Sheikh Usama Bin Laden to conduct Jihad…
I was the Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 Operation.…
I was directly in charge, after the death of Sheikh Abu Hafs Al-Masri Subhi Abu Sittah, of managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American soil.
Then he listed every single Al Qaeda operation for which he had been, in his words, either “a responsible participant, principal planner, trainer, financier (via the Military Council Treasury), executor, and/or a personal participant.” There were thirty-one items in that list: the Sears Tower in Chicago, Heathrow Airport, Big Ben in London, countless U.S. and Israeli embassies, assassination attempts on Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, and on and on, in horrifying detail. Here, for example, are items 25 to 27:
25. I was responsible for surveillance needed to hit nuclear power plants that generate electricity in several U.S. states.
26. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing to hit NATO Headquarters in Europe.
27. I was responsible for the planning and surveying needed to execute the Bojinka Operation, which was designed to down twelve American airplanes full of passengers. I personally monitored a round-trip, Manila-to-Seoul, Pan Am flight.
The statement ended. The judge turned to KSM: “Before you proceed, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the statement that was just read by the Personal Representative, were those your words?” KSM said they were, then launched into a long, impassioned explanation of his actions. He was simply a warrior, he said, engaged in combat, no different from any other soldier:
War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people. This is the way of the language. American start the Revolutionary War then they starts the Mexican then Spanish War then World War One, World War Two. You read the history. You know never stopping war. This is life.
KSM’s extraordinary confession was a triumph for Mitchell and Jessen. The man who had come to them in 2003, angry and defiant, was now willingly laying his past bare.
But KSM’s cooperation left a crucial question unanswered: was what he said true? Once someone has been subjected to that kind of stress, they are in Charles Morgan territory. Was KSM confessing to all those crimes just to get Mitchell and Jessen to stop? By some accounts, Mitchell and Jessen had disrupted and denied KSM’s sleep for a week. After all that abuse, did KSM know what his real memories were anymore? In his book Why Torture Doesn’t Work, neuroscientist Shane O’Mara writes that extended sleep deprivation “might induce some form of surface compliance”—but only at the cost of “long-term structural remodeling of the brain systems that support the very functions that the interrogator wishes to have access to.”
Former high-ranking CIA officer Robert Baer read the confession and concluded that KSM was “making things up.” One of the targets he listed was the Plaza Bank building in downtown Seattle. But Plaza Bank wasn’t founded as a company until years after KSM’s arrest. Another longtime CIA veteran, Bruce Reidel, argued that the very thing that made it hard to get KSM to cooperate in the first place—the fact that he was never getting out of prison—is also what made his claims suspect. “He has nothing else in life but to be remembered as a famous terrorist,” Reidel said. “He wants to promote his own importance. It’s been a problem since he was captured.” If he was going to spend the rest of his days in a prison cell, why not make a play for the history books? KSM’s confession went on and on:
9. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing for the Operation to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.
10. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American Presidents, including President Carter.
Was there anything KSM did not claim credit for?
None of these critics questioned the need to interrogate KSM. The fact that strangers are hard to understand doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Ponzi schemers and pedophiles can’t be allowed to roam free. The Italian police had a responsibility to understand Amanda Knox. And why did Neville Chamberlain make such an effort to meet Hitler? Because with the threat of world war looming, trying to make peace with your enemy is essential.
But the harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become. Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should have stayed home and read Mein Kampf. The police in the Sandusky case searched high and low for his victims for two years. What did their efforts yield? Not clarity, but confusion: stories that changed; allegations that surfaced and then disappeared; victims who were bringing their own children to meet Sandusky one minute, then accusing him of terrible crimes the next.