Foreign Policy In Focus

Exactly what is waterboarding a prisoner 83 -- or 183 -- times supposed to accomplish?

We recently posted about the railroading of former CIA offer John Kiriakou on flimsy charges of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. In the course of his article about the case -- in which he himself was a protagonist -- Scott Shane of the New York Times writes that Kiriakou

… led the team in 2002 that found Abu Zubaydah. … While he had spent hours with Abu Zubaydah after the capture, he had not been present when Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded, a fact he made clear to me and some other interviewers. But based on what he had heard and read at the agency, he told ABC and other news organizations that Abu Zubaydah had stopped resisting after just 30 or 35 seconds of the suffocating procedure and told interrogators all he knew. 

In fact

… the prisoner was waterboarded some 83 times, it turned out. Mr. Kiriakou believes that he and other C.I.A. officers were deliberately misled by other agency officers who knew the truth.

Meanwhile, in 2009, at Empty Wheel, Marcy Wheeler wrote: "According to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo" -- the same memo that revealed how many times Abu Zubaydah had been tortured -- "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003."

Eighty-three times? 183 times? To begin with, there's something insidious about the neat difference of 100 in the number of tortures meted out. Other, more tangible, questions come to mind. Before moving on to the humanistic, what about the sheer logistics? Ms. Wheeler cited a memo that explained

… how the CIA might manage to waterboard these men so many times in one month. …where authorized, it may be used for two "sessions" per day of up to two hours. During a session, water may be applied up to six times for ten seconds or longer (but never more than 40 seconds). In a 24-hour period, a detainee may be subjected to up to twelve minutes of water application. … Additionally, the waterboard may be used on as many as five days during a 30-day approval period.

So: two two-hour sessions a day, with six applications of the waterboard each = 12 applications in a day. Though to get up to the permitted 12 minutes of waterboarding in a day (with each use of the waterboard limited to 40 seconds), you’d need 18 applications in a day. Assuming you use the larger 18 applications in one 24-hour period, and do 18 applications on five days within a month, you’ve waterboarded 90 times–still just half of what they did to KSM.

Next, one wonders why the victim -- much as one resists casting Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in this light of a victim, can there be any doubt that our "enhanced interrogation" practices has turned him into a victim, too? -- doesn't die from the relentless assault on his body? Of course, a doctor is present to make sure he lives to be tortured another day. But how many brain cells does near-asphyxiation kill?

Also, even though interrogators were presumably vetted to weed out psychopaths, if the practice alone doesn't suggest unbridled sadism at work, the repetition does. In -- facetiousness alert! -- fairness, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed may have been extraordinarily tough as well as holding out for concessions of some sort -- better conditions in jail, treatment of their families.

Or the repetition may have been a measure of the interrogator's frustration with the perceived inadequacy of the tools of torture with which he'd been supplied: "They call this waterboarding and all we're allowed to use is a common water bottle? Let me dunk his entire head in a tub and I'll get answers after his first immersion."

Perhaps, too, the more they tortured, the more they hated themselves and took out their anger on their subjects.

In any event, as Ms. Wheeler wrote:

The CIA wants you to believe waterboarding is effective. Yet somehow, it took them 183 applications of the waterboard in a one month period to get what they claimed was cooperation out of KSM. 

That doesn’t sound very effective to me. 

In the end -- and while torture by American citizens may have ended, we may still be outsourcing the practice -- the sessions described above certainly fulfilled all the requirements for the frequently cited definition of insanity (doing the same thing over and over, ad nauseam). The torturer and the government that empowers him inevitably wind up as degraded as those tortured.

I'm currently reading The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer (Little, Brown, 2012) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. For further background on KSM -- while it borders on the overly familiar, the abbreviation is convenient -- I'm also reading "The Truth Left Behind: Inside the Kidnapping and Murder of Daniel Pearl," a report issued in 2011 by the Pearl Project.

One way to interpret KSM's hands-on murder of Daniel Pearl is that fresh from "masterminding" 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's blood lust remained unsated. He still sought to kill an infidel hands-on, and up close and personal. McDermott and Meyer report:

"Whoever did this was a professional," [FBI Special Agent Ty Fairman] said in describing Pearl's slaying to other Americans working the case. "He was slaughtered like an animal."

Bear in mind that KSM was the product of Pakistan's middle class (Baloch, to be exact), not some Yemeni shepherd accustomed to slaughtering sheep. Though he may have had undocumented experience butchering animals, it's impossible not to wonder how many humans he may have beheaded prior to Daniel Pearl.

Members of al Qaeda have been heard to claim that they kill thusly to instill fear in the hearts of infidels. Execution or even cutting someone's throat might be understandable by that logic. But once you reduce yourself to beheading and holding up the head for the camera, you're entering the realm of necrophilia.

While KSM is one creepy dude, what the death and destruction that the United States has unleashed in Afghanistan and Iraq dwarfs what he did. Furthermore, the United States has sabotaged its own case against KSM. The Pearl Project report describes the day in 2003 when then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice called Daniel Pearl's widow, Mariane, and informed her that KSM was the killer.

Rice didn't let on to what was then one of the Bush administration's most closely-held secrets -- that KSM was being held in a secret CIA prison and had been subjected to waterboarding and other hard-core interrogation techniques. Those facts would turn out to have major consequences. They both raised questions about the reliability of KSM's confession and created a major obstacle to ever trying him in a U.S. criminal court for Pearl's murder.

The next pre-trial hearing for KSM's war crime trial in Guantanamo is scheduled for August. As the case proceeds, we'll find out if incarceration there and torture prove to be obstacles to finding him guilty of the current charges.

I've been reading The Hunt for KSM by Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer (Little, Brown, 2012). Valuable and engrossing as this account of how Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was brought to justice -- if you call waterboarding justice -- it's also frustrating. While The Hunt for KSM isn't a biography per se, it provides just enough details of his early life to leave you wishing that the authors had discovered and shared with the reader the wellspring -- however poisoned -- of his motivation. (Not to discount the legitimacy of some of his beef with the West.)

In other words what, beyond indoctrination and a college experience in the United States that soured him on American culture (in the timeless tradition of U.S. disaffection of influential Islamist theorist Sayyid Qutb) drove a middle-class kid from Pakistan who grew up in Kuwait to become an alleged mass murderer, as well as to personally cut someone's (Daniel Pearl's) throat?

Even if Sheikh Mohammed believed he was waging war in the form of jihad, the  psychopathy he seemed to have evinced is no different from that of a serial killer in civilian life. Especially if you believe terrorism should be addressed by police, not military action, Sheikh Mohammed was no different from Anders Behring Breivik, except that he seems to have killed even more people.

Much has been written on the deep-seated urges that drive terrorists to pull the trigger or the pin (however electronic these days) on a suicide bomb. Perspectives on Terrorism, the Terrorism Research Initiatives journal, recently published/posted Terrorism Bookshelf: Top 150 Books on Terrorism and Counterterrorism. Among those that address motivation are The Psychology of Terrorism by John Horgan (New York: Routledge, 2005) and The Making of a Terrorist: Recruitment, Training, and Root Causes, edited by James J.F. Forest, editor (Praeger Security International, 2006).  

Thus far, though, only one book has been written in English that resembles a biography of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But, like The Hunt for KSM, it doesn't seem to plumb the roiling waters of the subject's mind. What's really needed is a book about a high-profile terrorist like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed written from the perspective of psychohistory. For those unfamiliar with this provocative offshoot of psychoanalysis, the dean of psychohistory, Lloyd deMause, explains its central tenets in his classic book, The Emotional Life of Nations.

… to show that childrearing evolution is an independent cause of historical change … to show how political, religious and social behavior restage early traumas.

To put it another way, it's likely that this kind of cause and effect can be shown in many (most?) cases of individuals who perpetrate terrorism. While it may not be possible due to lack of cooperation with figure from his early life, it would be ideal if an enterprising journalist could discover whether the psychopathology of a terrorist like Sheikh Mohammed can be traced back to child abuse, whether violent or sexual or both.