Khalid Sheikh Mohammed "I gave a lot of false information"
ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen "High Value Detainees" in CIA Custody
by the International Committee of the Red Cross
43 pp., February 2007
There is a reverse side, of course, to the "ticking bomb" and torture: pain and ill-treatment, by creating an unbearable pressure on the detainee to say something, anything, to make the pain stop, increase the likelihood that he will fabricate stories, and waste time, or worse. At least some of the intelligence that came of the "alternative set of procedures," like Zubaydah's supposed "information" about attacks on shopping malls and banks, seems to have led the US government to issue what turned out to be baseless warnings to Americans. Khaled Shaik Mohammed asserted this directly in his interviews with the ICRC. "During the harshest period of my interrogation," he said,
I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.... I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent...wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of 9/11, was waterboarded 183 times in one month, and “confessed” to murdering the journalist Daniel Pearl,
which he did not. There could hardly be more compelling evidence that such techniques are neither swift, nor efficient, nor reliable.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article6150151.ece
At least four of the operatives whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators critical information as a way to stop being “tortured.” The claims came during their hearings last spring at the U.S. military facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…
In the letter placed in the record, Ali Khan claims his son, Majid, underwent extensive torture before and after interrogation sessions.
The Americans tortured him for eight hours at a time, tying him tightly in stressful positions in a small chair until his hands feet and mind went numb. They retied him in a chair every hour, tightening the bonds on his hands and feet each time so that it was more painful. He was often hooded and had difficulty breathing. They also beat him repeatedly, slapping him in the face, and deprived him of sleep.
When he was not being interrogated, the Americans put Majid in a small cell that was totally dark and too small for him to lie down in or sit in with legs stretched out. He had to crouch. The room was also infested with mosquitoes.
This torture only stopped when Majid agreed to sign a statement that he wasn’t even allowed to read. But then it continued when Majid was unable to identify certain streets and neighborhoods in Karachi that he did not know.
http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx
Abu Zubaida - fingered Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the 9/11 mastermind. So we have independent confirmation that KSM was the chief architect of 9/11, right?
Well, the New Yorker notes this week:
The F.B.I.’s point man on the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, Daniel Coleman, had read Zubaydah’s diaries and concluded that he “
had a schizophrenic personality.”
Indeed, the Washington Post noted in 2007:
Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida's information.
"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but
they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much."
***
Abu Zubaida ... was a "safehouse keeper" with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did.
***
Looking at other evidence, including
a serious head injury that Abu Zubaida had suffered years earlier, Coleman and others at the FBI believed that he had severe mental problems that called his credibility into question. "
They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone," Coleman said, referring to al-Qaeda operatives. "You think they're going to tell him anything?"
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind writes that Coleman advised a top FBI official at the time:
"This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality."
So the two witnesses who said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the 9/11 mastermind were:
A guy who confessed to a crime he didn't commit, and was waterboarded 183 times in one month, and
A guy who was crazy even before the CIA started torturing him, who claimed to know a lot more than he really did
No judge in the country would convict based upon such flimsy evidence.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/04/justin-vogt-zubaydahs-sanity-bybees-clarity.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121702151.html
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/witness-who-fingered-911-mastermind-was.html