فصل 9

Part Four

Lessons

Chapter Nine

KSM: What Happens When

the Stranger Is a Terrorist?

“My first thought was that he looked like a troll,” James Mitchell remembers. “He was angry, he was belligerent, he was glaring at me. I’m doing a neutral probe, so I’m talking to him basically like I’m talking to you. I took the hood off and I said, ‘What would you like me to call you?’” The man answered in accented English, “Call me Mukhtar. Mukhtar means the brain. I was the emir of the 9/11 attacks.” It was March 2003, in a CIA black site somewhere “on the other side of the world,” Mitchell said. Mukhtar was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, as he was otherwise known—one of the most senior Al Qaeda officials ever captured. He was naked, hands and feet shackled, yet defiant.

“They had shaved his head by that point and shaved his beard,” Mitchell said. “But he just was the hairiest person I’d ever seen in my life, and little, real little. He had a huge, like Vietnamese pot-bellied pig belly. I thought—this guy killed all those Americans?” Mitchell has a runner’s build, tall and slender, with longish white hair parted in the middle and a neatly trimmed beard. He speaks with a mild Southern accent. “I look like some guy’s uncle,” is how he describes himself, which is perhaps overly self-deprecating. He gives off a sense of unshakable self-confidence, as if he always gets a good night’s sleep, no matter what he did to anyone that day, or what anyone did to him.

Mitchell is a psychologist by training. After 9/11, he and a colleague, Bruce Jessen, were brought in by the CIA because of their special skills in “high stakes” interrogation. Jessen is bigger than Mitchell, quieter, with a cropped military haircut. Mitchell says he looks like “an older [Jean-]Claude van Damme.” Jessen does not speak publicly. If you hunt around online, you can find portions of a videotaped deposition he and Mitchell once gave in a lawsuit arising from their interrogation practices. Mitchell is unruffled, discursive, almost contemptuous of the proceedings. Jessen is terse and guarded: “We were soldiers doing what we were instructed to do.” Their first assignment, after the towers fell, was to help interrogate Abu Zubaydah, one of the first high-level Al Qaeda operatives to be captured. They would go on to personally question many other “high value” suspected terrorists over eight years in a variety of black sites around the world. Of them all, KSM was the biggest prize.

“He just struck me as being brilliant,” Mitchell recalled. During their sessions, Mitchell would ask him a question, and KSM would answer: “That’s not the question I would ask. You’ll get an answer and you’ll find it useful and you’ll think that’s all you need. But really the question I would ask is this question.” Mitchell says he would then ask KSM’s question of KSM himself, “and he would give a much more detailed, much more global answer.” KSM would hold forth on the tactics of terrorist engagement, on his strategic vision, on the goals of jihad. Had he not been captured, KSM had all manner of follow-ups to 9/11 planned. “His descriptions of the low-tech, lone-wolf attacks were horrifying,” Mitchell said. “The fact that he sits around and thinks about economy of scale when it comes to killing people…” He shook his head.

“He completely creeped me out when he was talking about Daniel Pearl. That was the most…I cried and still do, because it was horrific.” Daniel Pearl was the Wall Street Journal reporter kidnapped—and then killed—in Pakistan in January 2002. KSM brought up the subject of Pearl without being asked, then got out of his chair and demonstrated—with what Mitchell thought was a touch of relish—the technique he had used in beheading Pearl with a knife. “What was horrific about it was he acted like he had some sort of an intimate relationship with Daniel. He kept calling him ‘Daniel’ in that voice like they were not really lovers, but they were best friends or something. It was just the creepiest thing.” But all that was later—after KSM opened up. In March 2003, when Mitchell and Jessen first confronted him, tiny and hairy and potbellied, things were very different.

“You’ve got to remember at that particular time [we] had credible evidence that Al Qaeda had another big wave of attacks coming,” Mitchell said.

There was a lot of chatter. We knew that Osama bin Laden had met with the Pakistani scientists who were passing out nuclear technology, and [we] knew that the Pakistani scientists had said to Bin Laden, “The biggest problem is getting the nuclear material.” Bin Laden had said, “What if we’ve already got it?” That just sent chills through the whole intelligence community.

The CIA had people walking around Manhattan with Geiger counters, looking for a dirty bomb. Washington was on high alert. And when KSM was first captured, the feeling was that if anyone knew anything about the planned attacks, it would be him. But KSM wasn’t talking, and Mitchell wasn’t optimistic. KSM was a hard case.

The first set of interrogators sent to question KSM had tried to be friendly. They made him comfortable and brewed him some tea and asked respectful questions. They’d gotten nowhere. He had simply looked at them and rocked back and forth.

Then KSM had been handed over to someone Mitchell calls the “new sheriff in town,” an interrogator who Mitchell says crossed the line into sadism—contorting KSM into a variety of “stress” positions, like taping his hands together behind his back, then raising them up over his head, so that his shoulders almost popped out. “This guy told me that he had learned his interrogation approaches in South America from the communist rebels. The new sheriff had this idea that he wanted to be called sir. That’s all he focused on.” KSM had no intention of calling anyone sir. After a week of trying, the new sheriff gave up. The prisoner was handed over to Mitchell and Jessen.

What happened next is a matter of great controversy. The methods of interrogation used on KSM have been the subject of lawsuits, congressional investigations, and endless public debate. Those who approve refer to the measures as “enhanced interrogation techniques”—EITs. Those on the other side call them torture. But let us leave aside those broader ethical questions for a moment, and focus on what the interrogation of KSM can tell us about the two puzzles.

Default to truth is a crucially important strategy that occasionally and unavoidably leads us astray. Transparency is a seemingly commonsense assumption that turns out to be an illusion. Both, however, raise the same question: once we accept our shortcomings, what should we do? Before we return to Sandra Bland—and what exactly happened on that roadside in Texas—I want to talk about perhaps the most extreme version of the talking-to-strangers problem: a terrorist who wants to hold on to his secrets, and an interrogator who is willing to go to almost any lengths to pry them free.

Mitchell and Jessen met in Spokane, Washington, where they were both staff psychologists for the Air Force’s SERE program—Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. All branches of the U.S. military have their own versions of SERE, which involves teaching key personnel what to do in the event that they fall into enemy hands.

The exercise would begin with the local police rounding up Air Force officers, unannounced, and bringing them to a detention center mocked up as an enemy POW camp. “They just stop them and arrest them. Then they hand them over to whoever’s going to do the operational-readiness test.” One exercise involved crews of the bombers that carry nuclear weapons. Everything about their mission was classified. If they were to crash in hostile territory, you can imagine how curious their captors would be about the contents of their planes. The SERE program was supposed to prepare a flight crew for what might happen.

The subjects would be cold, hungry, forced to stand—awake—inside a box for days. Then came the interrogation. “You would see if you could try and extract that information from them,” Mitchell said. He says it was “very realistic.” One particularly effective technique developed at SERE was “walling.” You wrap a towel around someone’s neck to support their head, then bang them up against a specially constructed wall.

“You do it on a fake wall. It’s got a clapper behind it and it makes a tremendous amount of noise and there’s a lot of give, and your ears start swirling. You don’t do it in a way to cause damage to the person. I mean, it’s like a wrestling mat, only louder. It’s not painful, it’s just confusing. It’s disruptive to your train of thought, and you’re off balance.

Mitchell’s responsibility was to help design the SERE program, and that meant he occasionally went through the training protocol himself. Once, he says, he was part of a SERE exercise involving one of the oldest tricks in the interrogation business: the interrogator threatens not the subject, but a colleague of the subject’s. In Mitchell’s experience, men and women react very differently to this scenario. The men tend to fold. The women don’t.

“If you are a female pilot and they said they were going to do something to the other airman, the attitude of a lot of them was, ‘It sucks to be you. ‘You do your job, I’m going to do mine. I’m going to protect the secrets. I’m sorry this has happened to you, but you knew this when you signed up.’” Mitchell first saw this when he debriefed women who had been held as POWs during Desert Storm.

They would drag those women out and threaten to beat them every time the men wouldn’t talk. And [the women] were angry at the men for not holding out, and they said, “Maybe I would have gotten a beating, maybe I would have got sexually molested, but it would have happened one time. By showing them that the way to get the keys to the kingdom was to drag me out, it happened every time. So let me do my job. You do your job.” In the SERE exercise, Mitchell was paired with a woman, a senior-ranking Air Force officer. Her interrogators said they would torture Mitchell unless she talked. True to form, she said, “I’m not talking.” They put me in a fifty-five-gallon drum that was buried in the ground, put a lid on it, covered it up with dirt. At the top of the drum, protruding through the lid, was a hose spewing cold water.…Unbeknownst to me because of the way they positioned me, the drain holes were at the very top, at the level of my nose.

Slowly the barrel filled with water.

I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t kill the next psychologist to come to the school, I was pretty sure of that, but I wasn’t convinced of that. You know what I mean?

How did you feel when that was happening?

I wasn’t happy, because your knees are up against your chest and you can’t get out. Your arms are down beside you. You can’t move. They put a strap underneath you and lower you into the thing.

At what point were you removed?

An hour or so later.

How high was the water?

It comes right up to your nose. It comes right up so you really don’t know. I mean, the thing’s coming up around your neck, it’s coming up around your ears.

You’re in darkness?

Oh yeah.…Maybe it wasn’t an hour, maybe it was less than that. I’m sure it was, otherwise I’d have some hypothermia. It felt like an hour. Anyway I’m in this thing, and they lower you down, and I think, “Oh, they’re going to put me in a barrel, see if I’m claustrophobic. I’m not. No big deal to me.” Oh no. They stick the hose in, put that little metal lid on, and then cover it up with rocks.

Do they tell you beforehand what they’re going to do?

They tell you as they’re doing it.

Everything they were doing to the trainees at SERE they did to you as well?

Oh yeah.

As Mitchell put it, “A lot of people spent time in that barrel.” At the time, that was part of the standard course.

I also took the advanced course. If you think the basic course is rough.…Dude.

This is where the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program came from. The CIA came to Mitchell and Jessen and asked for their advice. The two of them had been working for years, designing and implementing what they believed to be the most effective interrogation technique imaginable, and the agency wanted to know what worked. So Mitchell and Jessen made a list, at the top of which was sleep deprivation, walling, and waterboarding. Waterboarding is where you’re placed on a gurney with your head lower than your feet, a cloth is placed over your face, and water is poured into your mouth and nose to produce the sensation of drowning. As it happened, waterboarding was one of the few techniques Mitchell and Jessen didn’t use at SERE. From the Air Force’s perspective, waterboarding was too good. They were trying to teach their people that resisting torture was possible, so it made little sense to expose them to a technique that, for most people, made resistance impossible.1 But to use on suspected terrorists? To many in the CIA, it made sense. As a precautionary step, he and Jessen tried it out on themselves first, each waterboarding the other—two sessions in total for each of them, using the most aggressive protocol, the forty-second continuous pour.

So describe what it was like.

You ever been on a super tall building and thought you might jump off? Knowing you wouldn’t jump off, but thought you might jump off? That’s what it felt like to me. I didn’t feel like I was going to die, I felt like I was afraid I was going to die.

When the Justice Department sent two senior attorneys to the interrogation site to confirm the legality of the techniques under consideration, Mitchell and Jessen waterboarded them too. One of the lawyers, he remembers, sat up afterward, dried her hair, and said simply, “Well, that sucked.” Mitchell and Jessen developed a protocol. If a detainee was reluctant to answer questions, they would start with the mildest of “enhanced measures.” If the detainee persisted, they would escalate. Walling was a favorite, as was sleep deprivation. The Justice Department’s rules were that seventy-two hours of sleep deprivation was the maximum, but Mitchell and Jessen found that unnecessary. What they preferred to do was to let someone sleep, but not sleep enough; to systematically break up their REM cycles.

Waterboarding was the technique of last resort. They used a hospital gurney, tilted at 45 degrees. The Justice Department allowed them to pour at twenty- to forty-second intervals, separated by three breaths, for a total of twenty minutes. They preferred one forty-second pour, two twenty-second pours, and the remainder at three to ten seconds. “ We had no interest in drowning the person. We originally used water out of a one-liter bottle, but the physicians wanted us to use saline because some people swallowed the water and they didn’t want [them] to have water intoxication.

Before the first pour, they took a black T-shirt and lowered it over the subject’s face, covering their nose. “The cloth goes like this,” Mitchell said, miming the lowering of the shirt.

Literally, when you lift the cloth up, the pourer stops pouring. There’s a guy up there with a stopwatch and he’s counting the seconds so I know how many seconds it’s going on. We’ve got a physician right there.

The room was crowded. Typically, the chief of base would be there, the intelligence analyst responsible for the case, and a psychologist, among others. Another group was outside, watching the proceedings on a large TV monitor: more CIA experts, a lawyer, guards—a big group.

No questions were asked during the process. That was for later.

You’re not screaming at the guy. Literally, you’re pouring the water, and you’re saying to him in a not-quite-conversational tone, but not an aggressive tone, “It doesn’t have to be this way. We want information to stop operations inside the United States. We know you don’t have all of it, but we know you have some of it.…” I’m saying it to him as it’s happening, “It doesn’t have to be this way. This is your choice.”

How do you know—in general, with EITs—how do you know when you’ve gone as far as you need to go?

They start talking to you.

Talking meant specifics—details, names, facts.

You’d give him a picture and say, “Who’s this guy?” He’d say, “Well, this guy is this guy, but you know, the guy in the back, that guy in the back is this guy, and this is where he’s at…” and you know—so he would go beyond the question.

Mitchell and Jessen focused on compliance. They wanted their subjects to talk and volunteer information and answer questions. And from the beginning with KSM, they were convinced they would need every technique in their arsenal to get him to talk. He wasn’t a foot soldier on the fringes of Al Qaeda, someone ambivalent about his participation in terrorist acts. Foot soldiers are easy. They have little to say—and little to lose by saying it. They’ll cooperate with their interrogators because they realize it is their best chance of winning their freedom.

But KSM knew he wasn’t seeing daylight again, ever. He had no incentive to cooperate. Mitchell knew all the psychological interrogation techniques used by the people who didn’t believe in enhanced interrogation, and he thought they would work just fine on what he called “common terrorists that you catch on the battlefield, like the everyday jihadists that were fighting Americans.” But not on “the hard-core guys.” And KSM was a hard-core guy. Mitchell and Jessen could use only walling and sleep deprivation to get him to talk because, incredibly, waterboarding did not work on him. Somehow KSM was able to open his sinuses, and the water that flowed into his nose would simply flow out his mouth. No one understood how he did it. Mitchell calls it a magic trick. After a few sessions, KSM grasped the cadence of the pours. He would mock the room by counting down the remaining seconds on his fingers—then making a slashing gesture with his hand when it was over. Once, in the middle of a session, Mitchell and Jessen ducked out of the room to confer with a colleague; when they came back inside, KSM was snoring. “He was asleep,” Mitchell said, laughing at the memory. “I know I’m laughing at this potentially horrific image that people have, but there is a piece of this… I’d never heard of it,” he said. “I’m telling you, when the CIA was doing due diligence, they called JPRA.” JPRA is a Pentagon agency that monitors the various SERE programs run by the service branches. They had a file on waterboarding. “The person they talked to there said it’s 100 percent effective on our students. We have never had anyone not capitulate.” Mitchell and Jessen gave KSM the full treatment for three weeks. Finally, he stopped resisting. But KSM’s hard-won compliance didn’t mean his case was now open-and-shut. In fact, the difficulties were just beginning.

A few years before 9/11, a psychiatrist named Charles Morgan was at a military neuroscience conference. He was researching post-traumatic stress syndrome, trying to understand why some veterans suffer from PTSD and why others, who go through exactly the same experiences, emerge unscathed. Morgan was talking to his colleagues about how hard it was to study the question, because what you really wanted to do was to identify a group of people before they had a traumatic experience and track their reactions in real time. But how could you do that? There was no war going on at the time, and it wasn’t as though he could arrange for all his research subjects to simultaneously get robbed at gunpoint, or suffer some devastating loss. Morgan jokes that the best idea he could come up with was to study couples on the eve of their wedding day.

But afterward, an Army colonel came to Morgan and said, “I think I can solve your problem.” The colonel worked at a SERE school at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He was the Army’s version of the Air Force school in Spokane where Jessen and Mitchell worked. “For about an old car for a ride,” that’s Charles Morgan. He goes on, “hire results for foggy day car and the writing one fixing trails that are unmarked and everything and we end up in the spot and for all the world is for lithic dissent from organ 00 people out there is a mini concentration camp and in the fog I couldn’t tell how big it was or not. And I have it to give me up. There was nothing running up Simonson her students there. They were running a course of time. So is this abandoned concentration camp”. The Army had built a replica of a prisoner-of-war camp—the kind you might find in North Korea or some distant corner of the old Soviet Union. “I had a tour of the whole compound when nothing was running, so it was this really foggy, gray morning. It reminded me of some war movie you’ve seen, showing up in this concentration camp, but no one’s there.” Morgan went on:

“And they walked me through and described all the different dilemmas that they expose students to so they have an opportunity to demonstrate in 100 here to the Geneva Convention and the code of conduct rules if the captured.” Morgan was fascinated, but skeptical. He was interested in traumatic stress. SERE school was a realistic simulation of what it meant to be captured and interrogated by the enemy, but it was still just a simulation. At the end of the day, all the participants were still in North Carolina, and they could still go and get a beer and watch a movie with their friends when they were done: How could they be truly stressed, as in a combat situation? “It’s hard to believe at first, like why don’t they know their intercourse so they know is training in a training can be rigorous, but still, it wouldn’t feel like uncontrollable stress, which is most of the animal models for.” The SERE instructors just smiled at that. “Then they invited me to come and said I could monitor it for about a six-month period.

He started with the interrogation phase of the training, taking blood and saliva samples from the soldiers after they had been questioned. Here is how Morgan describes the results, in the scientific journal Biological Psychiatry: The realistic stress of the training laboratory produced rapid and profound changes in cortisol, testosterone, and thyroid hormones. These alterations were of a magnitude that…[is] comparable to those documented in individuals undergoing physical stressors such as major surgery or actual combat.

This was a pretend interrogation. The sessions lasted half an hour. A number of the subjects were Green Berets and Special Forces—the cream of the crop. And they were reacting as if they were in actual combat. Morgan watched in shock as one soldier after another broke down in tears. “I was amazed at that,” Morgan said. “It was hard for me to figure out.” Well, I [had] thought, these are all really tough people—that it’ll be kind of like a game. And I hadn’t anticipated seeing people that distressed or crying. And it wasn’t because of a physical pressure. It’s not because somebody’s manhandling you.

These were soldiers—organized, disciplined, motivated—and Morgan realized that it was the uncertainty of their situation that was unsettling to them.

Their internal alarm bells going off even in a controlled situation. Then he decided to have the SERE students do what is called the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure drawing test. So when you see this, you got this box with the single most effective sale on top in the triangle here. First you have to copy the image. Then the original is taken away and you have to draw it from memory.

There’s one words into colors. Adults so we give them pen and then about either 30 seconds or 40 seconds, and it was a flip panel over the other sort changes color and what you’ll see with adults is the first color you’ve given them will be all of these large features like the box and the big acts that cuts across it, and in all these little details the little lines and things like this always in the second color so people have done the big picture of the forest and the other trees. Most adults are pretty good at this task, and they use the same strategy: they start by drawing the outlines of the figure, then fill in the details. Children, on the other hand, use a piecemeal approach: they randomly do one chunk of the drawing, then move on to another bit.

They start on one side and they just incrementally work their way across the drawing. So when you switch the color. It looks like you’ve just cut the picture in half and change color. So in in that paper with the applicable see the picture… Just having read in half and white. Before interrogations, the SERE students sailed through the test with flying colors. Being able to quickly memorize and reproduce a complex visual display, after all, is the kind of thing Green Beret and Special Operations soldiers are trained to do.

So, even though they been sleep deprived, they drew the picture in the normal adult manner and they would get many more of the components, whereas under stress they would draw the picture in these bifurcated colors of the look like a prepubescent acumen and in the recall, they would have poor recall for the constituent parts. It was as he says, “like a prepubescent kid, which means your prefrontal cortex has just shut down for the while.” For anyone in the interrogation business, Morgan’s work was deeply troubling. The point of the interrogation was to get the subject to talk—to crack open the subject’s memory and access whatever was inside. But what 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’ll never forget when I was collecting like spit samples from one of the students. 20 minutes later when the experience was over role still standing in the same area of the train, is a dual ceremony, welcoming people back home and it’s very moving. And the student had just been talking to and testing, looking as when did you arrive, did you just get here. I meant what he meaning is why haven’t seen her the entire time and remember to read 1/2 weeks ago you were here and told us you would you would come see us while we were in training and collect samples on I just was talking to you 20 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.

He also put in the physician for the unit who just returned from vacation the day before. 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!’” 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?

The argument early on had been well maybe this is the way to get information from people. My view is pretty vocal at Simonson. I just don’t see it. I do think that’s like you know damaging your radio and hoping it better signals. TSM may have felt like it was torture. But the fact was that the enhanced interrogation program signed off on by the Justice Department using techniques we used on our own people and training. It wasn’t torture. No matter what anybody said it was a good legitimate program that led us develop the intelligence we had to have to keep America safe. That’s the former VP Dick Cheney recorded by C-SPAN in 2013.

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 Jihad… I was the Operational Director for Sheikh Usama Bin Laden for the organizing, planning, follow-up, and execution of the 9/11 Operation.… I was directly in charge, after the death of Sheikh Abu Hafs Al-Masri Subhi Abu Sittah, of managing and following up on the Cell for the Production of Biological Weapons, such as anthrax and others, and following up on Dirty Bomb Operations on American soil.

Then he listed every single Al Qaeda operation for which he had been, in his words, either “a responsible participant, principal planner, trainer, financier (via the Military Council Treasury), executor, and/or a personal participant.” There were thirty-one items in that list: the Sears Tower in Chicago, Heathrow Airport, Big Ben in London, countless U.S. and Israeli embassies, assassination attempts on Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II, and on and on, in horrifying detail. Here, for example, are items 25 to 27: 25. I was responsible for surveillance needed to hit nuclear power plants that generate electricity in several U.S. states.

1. I was responsible for planning, surveying, and financing to hit NATO Headquarters in Europe.

The statement ended. The judge turned to KSM: “Before you proceed, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the statement that was just read by the Personal Representative, were those your words?” KSM said they were, then launched into a long, impassioned explanation of his actions. He was simply a warrior, he said, engaged in combat, no different from any other soldier: War start from Adam when Cain he killed Abel until now. It’s never gonna stop killing of people. This is the way of the language. American start the Revolutionary War then they starts the Mexican then Spanish War on and on.

KSM’s extraordinary confession was a triumph for Mitchell and Jessen. The man who had come to them in 2003, angry and defiant, was now willingly laying his past bare.

But KSM’s cooperation left a crucial question unanswered: was what he said true? Once someone has been subjected to that kind of stress, they are in Charles Morgan territory. Was KSM confessing to all those crimes just to get Mitchell and Jessen to stop? By some accounts, Mitchell and Jessen had disrupted and denied KSM’s sleep for a week. After all that abuse, did KSM know what his real memories were anymore? In his book Why Torture Doesn’t Work, neuroscientist Shane O’Mara writes that extended sleep deprivation “might induce some form of surface compliance”—but only at the cost of “long-term structural remodeling of the brain systems that support the very functions that the interrogator wishes to have access to.” Former high-ranking CIA officer Robert Baer read the confession and concluded that KSM was “making things up.” One of the targets he listed was the Plaza Bank building in downtown Seattle. But Plaza Bank wasn’t founded as a company until years after KSM’s arrest. Another longtime CIA veteran, Bruce Reidel, argued that the very thing that made it hard to get KSM to cooperate in the first place—the fact that he was never getting out of prison—is also what made his claims suspect. “He has nothing else in life but to be remembered as a famous terrorist,” Reidel said. “He wants to promote his own importance. It’s been a problem since he was captured.” If he was going to spend the rest of his days in a prison cell, why not make a play for the history books? KSM’s confession went on and on: 9. I was responsible for planning, training, surveying, and financing for the Operation to bomb and destroy the Panama Canal.

1. I was responsible for surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American Presidents, including President Carter.

Was there anything KSM did not claim credit for?

None of these critics questioned the need to interrogate KSM. The fact that strangers are hard to understand doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Ponzi schemers and pedophiles can’t be allowed to roam free. The Italian police had a responsibility to understand Amanda Knox. And why did Neville Chamberlain make such an effort to meet Hitler? Because with the threat of world war looming, trying to make peace with your enemy is essential.

But the harder we work at getting strangers to reveal themselves, the more elusive they become. Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should have stayed home and read Mein Kampf. The police in the Sandusky case searched high and low for his victims for two years. What did their efforts yield? Not clarity, but confusion: stories that changed; allegations that surfaced and then disappeared; victims who were bringing their own children to meet Sandusky one minute, then accusing him of terrible crimes the next.

James Mitchell was in the same position. The CIA had reason to believe that Al Qaeda was planning a second round of attacks after 9/11, possibly involving nuclear weapons. He had to get KSM to talk. But the harder he worked to get KSM to talk, the more he compromised the quality of their communication. He could deprive KSM of sleep for a week, at the end of which KSM was confessing to every crime under the sun. But did KSM really want to blow up the Panama Canal?

Whatever it is we are trying to find out about the strangers in our midst is not robust. The “truth” about Amanda Knox or Jerry Sandusky or KSM is not some hard and shiny object that can be extracted if only we dig deep enough and look hard enough. The thing we want to learn about a stranger is fragile. If we tread carelessly, it will crumple under our feet. And from that follows a second cautionary note: we need to accept that the search to understand a stranger has real limits. We will never know the whole truth. We have to be satisfied with something short of that. The right way to talk to strangers is with caution and humility. How many of the crises and controversies I have described would have been prevented had we taken those lessons to heart?

We are now close to returning to the events of that day in Prairie View, Texas, when Brian Encinia pulled over Sandra Bland. But before we do, we have one last thing to consider—the strangely overlooked phenomenon of coupling.