The CIA forcibly cut off a 9/11 suspect when he tried to talk about attacks

In his first month in U.S. custody, the man accused of planning the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks confessed to the crime during interrogation and wanted to keep talking about it, according to the psychologist who interviewed him.

But the CIA wanted him to discuss al Qaeda’s future plans, not the attacks that had horrified America a year and a half earlier, said psychologist Dr. James E Mitchell. So when the prisoner, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mentioned September 11, they slammed him naked against a wall.

It was March 2003. That month, interrogators allegedly waterboarded Mr. Mohammed 183 times in a secret overseas CIA prison in the mistaken belief, Dr. Mitchell said, that a nuclear attack in the United States was imminent. But Mr Mohammed still did not say what his captors wanted to hear.

“We walled it off,” said Dr. Mitchell Monday, explaining that he and his colleagues had rammed their prisoner backwards into a wall to punish him because they feared he was talking about September 11 to distract them from another impending crime.

The idea that Mr Mohammed was punished for speaking about this subject in his first month of US detention is new to the proceedings. Dr. Mitchell has been testifying at hearings in the death penalty cases at Guantanamo Bay since 2020 and has never spoken about it before.

But it fits with the prosecution’s argument that the CIA was not seeking confessions for a future trial when it brutally interrogated prisoners held incommunicado in the secret prisons known as black locations.

Like Dr. Mitchell and prosecutors say, the agency was looking for “actionable intelligence” that could be used for a military or agency mission — not for prosecution.

The government considers the distinction between interrogations to gather information and not to build a case important.

According to prosecutors, Mr. Mohammed again bragged about his role in the attacks in 2007 when he was brought before FBI agents at Guantanamo Bay. They want to use that confession – to “clean out” teams 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. Mohammed through torture informed the FBI’s interrogations, which could make the confession inadmissible.

Dr. Mitchell testified that Mr. Mohammed was interrogated almost daily up to three times a day for three years in the CIA prison network before being transferred to Guantanamo. The questions came via secret cables from CIA headquarters. But some questions originally came from FBI agents and analysts who were building a possible case for prosecution, according to government documents and pretrial testimony.

The testimony of Dr. Mitchell also highlighted the use of “walling” on the black sites.

If done right, he says, it shouldn’t cause lasting damage. The “enhanced interrogation technique” was designed for an Air Force program that trained American pilots to resist enemy interrogations. A student was then confronted by a mock interrogator who smashed 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 smashed against concrete walls. Their lawyers blame Walling for brain injuries found in some detainees.

Those who were walled off were seen as the enemy: terrorism suspects held naked, hooded and systematically deprived of sleep. They were “conditioned,” in the words of Dr. Mitchell, to expose Al Qaeda’s secrets about sleeper cells, future plots and how they found Osama bin Laden.

In 2020, Dr. testified. Mitchell that three interrogators took turns surrounding Mr. Mohammed so they wouldn’t get tired and make a mistake. Dr. Mitchell wrote in his 2016 memoir that he and his team used walling in combination with sleep deprivation as part of “a gradual conditioning process” after, in Dr. Mitchell, waterboarding failed to elicit the desired response from Mr. Mohammed.

One of his interrogation partners, Dr. John Bruce Jessen, placed a rolled up towel held together with duct tape around the naked prisoner’s neck and pulled him forward. Mr. Mohammed refused “to help us shut down operations in the United States,” he wrote, so Dr. Jessen “bounced him off the wall several times.”

In 2022, Dr. Jessen testified in another case that a towel was necessary because the prisoner was wearing at most a diaper. There was no way to grab him.

Dr. Mitchell has described the rolled towel as both “a safety collar” and a tool to condition prisoners. After the brutality ended, he said, an interrogator could only take a towel to a debriefing session to remind a prisoner of “the hard times,” and code in the black locations for brutal interrogations.

Over time, said Dr. Mitchell, the prisoners were so cooperative that a towel was no longer necessary.

In other stories about the CIA’s reward and punishment system, interrogators sometimes gave a naked cooperating prisoner a towel to cover his genitals during interrogation.

Dr. Mitchell said the wall and waterboarding ended a month after Mr. Mohammed’s detention, but he continued to answer questions for the next 1,250 days at the black sites, where detainees had contact only with CIA personnel.

Prisoners deemed less cooperative were given a “maintenance visit” by Dr. Mitchell or Dr. Jessen, who reminded them that displeasing Washington could result in more “enhanced interrogations,” although that never happened, he said. Instead, “provisions,” including mattresses, clothing and Qurans, could be given or taken away.

Over time, Dr. Mitchell said, Mr. Mohammed’s conditioning to be afraid when he did not respond to questions waned, and he answered questions to keep facilities or buy new ones.

Despite the testimony of Dr. Mitchell about institutional disinterest, someone recorded on the black sites what Mr. Mohammed had said about the September 11 attacks. This week, Mr. Mohammed’s lawyers showed the judge CIA cables from March 2003 containing information about the plot attributed to Mr. Mohammed that had been circulated throughout the intelligence community, including to the FBI.