if the process of securing compliance proved so stressful to the interviewee that it affected what he or she could actually remember? Morgan was watching adults turn into children.
“I had just been in the compound collecting spit from all the different students,” Morgan says, remembering one incident from early at his time at SERE:
And I went back out because they had now opened the gates, the family [members] are there. They all say hello. And I walked up to a couple of students: “So, it’s nice to see you when no longer under those conditions.”
And I remember some of them went, “When did you get here?” And I was like, “What do you mean, when did I get here? I actually collected spit from you twenty minutes ago. I had you fill out—”
“I don’t remember that.”
And I said, “And I saw you the other night when you were being interrogated.”
And they’re like, “No, got nothing.”
I looked at one of the instructors and I said, “That’s crazy.” And he said, “Happens all the time.” He goes, “They don’t even remember me, and I’m the guy who was yelling at them thirty minutes ago.”
Morgan was so astonished that he decided to run a quick field test. He put together the equivalent of a police lineup, filling it with instructors, officers, and a few stray outsiders.
“The physician for the unit had come back. He’d been on vacation.…I said, ‘You’re going in the lineup today.’ We put him in.”
Then Morgan gave his instructions to the soldiers: “We’re really interested in the person who ran the camp and ordered all your punishments. If they’re there, please indicate who they are. If they’re not, just say, ‘Not here.’” He wanted them to identify the commandant—the man in charge.
“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