Shortly After March 1, 2003: KSM Is Extensively Waterboarded and Tortured in Secret CIA Prisons

Communications antenna at Stare Kiejkuty, the Polish “black site” where Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was held for a time after his capture. [Source: CBC]Shortly after he is arrested in Pakistan (see March 1, 2003), al-Qaeda leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) is taken to a secret CIA prison and tortured. He is initially taken to a secret prison somewhere in Afghanistan. He is reportedly placed in a cell naked for several days and repeatedly questioned by females as a humiliation. He is attached to a dog leash and repeatedly yanked into the walls of his cell. He is suspended from the ceiling, chained naked in a painful crouch for long periods, doused with cold water, and kept in suffocating heat. [New Yorker, 8/6/2007] But he is resistant to these methods, so it is decided he will be transferred to a secret CIA prison in Poland and waterboarded, which is a technique simulating drowning that is widely regarded as torture. He is only one of about four high-ranking detainees waterboarded, according to media reports (see May 2002-2003). [New Yorker, 8/6/2007; MSNBC, 9/13/2007] Accounts are contradictory about the use of waterboarding on KSM:
NBC News will later claim that, according to multiple unnamed officials, KSM underwent at least two sessions of waterboarding and other extreme measures before talking. One former senior intelligence official will say, “KSM required, shall we say, re-dipping.” [MSNBC, 9/13/2007]
A former CIA official familiar with KSM’s case will later tell ABC News, “KSM lasted the longest under waterboarding, about a minute and a half, but once he broke, it never had to be used again.” A senior CIA official claims that KSM later admitted he only confessed because of the waterboarding. [ABC News, 9/14/2007]
The New York Times will later claim that “KSM was subjected to intense and repeated torture techniques that, at the time, were specifically designated as illegal under US law.” Some claim that KSM gives useful information. “However, many of the officials interviewed say KSM provided a raft of false and exaggerated statements that did not bear close scrutiny—the usual result, experts say, of torture.” CIA officials stopped the “extreme interrogation” sessions after about two weeks, worrying that they might have exceeded their legal bounds. Apparently pressure to stop comes from Jack Goldsmith, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, who is troubled about updates from KSM’s interrogations and raises legal questions. He is angrily opposed by the White House, particularly David Addington, a top aide to Vice President Cheney. [New York Times, 10/4/2007]
The New Yorker reports that officials who have seen a classified Red Cross report say that KSM claims he was waterboarded five times. Further, he says he was waterboarded even after he started cooperating. But two former CIA officers insist that he was waterboarded only once. One of them says that KSM “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick. A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. KSM was just a little doughboy.”
A different ABC News account claims that KSM was al-Qaeda’s toughest prisoner. CIA officers who subject themselves to waterboarding last only about 14 seconds, but KSM was able to last over two minutes. [ABC News, 11/18/2005]
Regardless, footnotes to the 9/11 Commission final report indicate that KSM begins providing substantial information by April 17, 2003. [New Yorker, 8/6/2007] It will later be reported that up to 90 percent of KSM’s confessions may be unreliable. Furthermore, he has recanted many of his statements (see August 6, 2007).