Psychologist who waterboarded CIA prisoners defends method’s use in 9/11 case

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba – In the years after the CIA waterboarded the man accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks, the agency offered explanations of how he withstood the technique 183 times at a secret overseas prison.

The prisoner, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was strapped to a gurney with his head tilted down and a cloth covering his face. Somehow, the theory went, he realized that his captors would pour water on the cloth for at most 40 seconds at a time. So he used his fingers to count until he could breathe again as he experienced the sensation of drowning.

This month, at a hearing in the case, Mohammed’s lawyer, Gary D. Sowards, offered an alternative explanation while questioning a psychologist who administered the waterboarding.

Some Muslims, including Mohammed, repeatedly put a thumb to three fingers as they say a prayer praising Allah, Sowards said. Some also point upward, as if to the sky, when they believe they are taking their last gasps of life – a gesture some CIA observers interpreted as Mohammed signaling that the time limit was approaching on that round of simulated drowning and to let him breathe.

No prisoner in U.S. history is known to have been subjected to the technique as many times as Mohammed. And while waterboarding has been discussed and described periodically during hearings since his arraignment in 2012, this recent testimony offered a clinical discussion of how CIA representatives repeatedly used it and evaluated its efficacy in a secret prison in Poland in March 2003.

The military judge in the case is trying to decide whether the confessions of Mohammed and the other 9/11 defendants are tainted by torture. If so, they would not be admissible at their eventual capital trial.

The psychologist, John Bruce Jessen, said he agreed with CIA cables to headquarters at the time that Mohammed “yelled and writhed” while guards “were trying to put him on the waterboard.” Jessen confirmed that, in his first month of custody, Mohammed “would sob when he was taken off the waterboard.”

But Jessen also recalled that Mohammed was “extremely, uncharacteristically resilient on the waterboard” and “defeated it quite early,” as the CIA has often said.

Waterboarding involves restraining a prisoner and then pouring water onto a cloth on his face to suffocate him long enough to make him physically feel that he is drowning. The United States has condemned its use on U.S. prisoners of war as torture, and it is defined as such under international law.

But lawyers for the George W. Bush administration authorized the CIA to waterboard prisoners in its secret overseas network. President Barack Obama subsequently declared it illegal.

Before 9/11, Jessen oversaw Defense Department programs that trained U.S. forces to resist and survive captivity. He said he had observed exercises during which U.S. military personnel were waterboarded – each person just once. But, he testified, he had never done or experienced it before he proposed that the CIA use it on terrorism suspects in 2002.

So he was voluntarily strapped down and waterboarded three times, he said, knowing that his colleagues would not kill him. Still, he said, he got the feeling of, “Wow, if this doesn’t stop, I’m in trouble.”

The CIA has officially admitted to using the technique on three prisoners in the years before they were transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006.

In the summer of 2002, Jessen poured water on the face of a prisoner known as Abu Zubaydah 63 times in Thailand in his “enhanced interrogation.” The team also tried to do it while interrogating Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of plotting the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole off Yemen in 2000. But Nashiri was too small and slid off the waterboard.

Jessen testified that a fourth man, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, described having it done to him at a CIA prison in Afghanistan – and that he believed him and reported it. Hawsawi is also charged in the 9/11 case.

After Mohammed was captured in 2003, Jessen said, the waterboarding team, now in Poland, was under pressure from the president “on down” to get information out of him. During that time, Mohammed was kept nude and forced to stand in chains to deprive him of sleep, at one point for a week.

Bad intelligence suggested that terrorists would soon detonate a nuclear bomb, possibly in the U.S., and the interrogators wanted that information. But Mohammed apparently had no information to share because, Jessen testified, a device was never found.

“You’re not there to hurt them,” Jessen said of the prisoners.

During the hearing, he frequently seemed confused when the defendant was referred to as Mohammed, his surname. In the CIA prison network, the black sites, Mohammed was called KSM, his initials.

“I had no personal animosities towards Mr. KSM,” Jessen said. “But he was a lethal enemy. And my job was to do the best I could, along with the rest of the people, to find out if these attacks were real.”

Based on his professional experience, “moral compass” and legal opinions, Jessen said, he was satisfied that the techniques he helped devise did not constitute torture.

Jessen was a contractor at the CIA in a consulting partnership with another psychologist, James E. Mitchell, with whom he waterboarded and interrogated prisoners. In 2005, they set up a business that the U.S. government paid $81 million to provide all of the contract guards at the black sites and 80% of the agency’s interrogators.

The two men have been testifying in part as stand-ins for full-time CIA employees, whose identities are secret.

Mitchell had testified earlier that during his “enhanced interrogation,” Mohammed tried to offer information about the 9/11 attacks. But the psychologists said their mission was to get him to reveal details of future plots. So the interrogators repeatedly rammed him backward into a wall when he tried to discuss the coordinated hijackings that killed 2,976 people in New York, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

In video testimony from Virginia on Wednesday, Jessen offered a slow-motion demonstration of the “walling technique” on one of Mohammed’s lawyers. He gently placed a rolled-up, duct-taped towel around the lawyer’s neck and lifted a dark hood off his head as he was standing against a wall inside a courtroom annex. Then the interrogator slowly pushed the lawyer’s back, shoulder blades and head against a wall.

Interrogators have described a dual purpose for the towel: It protects against whiplash and gives a captor a way to take hold of a prisoner who is naked, or wearing only a diaper, as he “bounces off the wall.”

Jessen started the testimony more than four years ago. His return to the court was repeatedly postponed, first by its 500-day closure for the coronavirus pandemic and then by health problems.

For this recent hearing, Jessen declined to return to Guantánamo. He appeared on a large screen over the court’s witness stand on the opposite side of the room from Mohammed.

It was hard to discern how much of the testimony the prisoner was following. He mostly huddled with defense team members at the far end of his lawyers’ table, his head down or turned away from the screen, flipping through documents or reading case-related material on a laptop.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.