cried and still do, because it was horrific.” Daniel Pearl was the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped—and then killed—in Pakistan in January 2002. KSM brought up the subject of Pearl without being asked, then got out of his chair and demonstrated—with what Mitchell thought was a touch of relish—the technique he had used in beheading Pearl with a knife. “What was horrific about it was he acted like he had some sort of an intimate relationship with Daniel. He kept calling him ‘Daniel’ in that voice like they were not really lovers, but they were best friends or something. It was just the creepiest thing.”
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.”