Page 110 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

second pours, and the remainder at three to ten seconds. “The main point,” Mitchell said,
is you don’t want it to go in their lungs, you just want it to go in their sinuses. 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.

And then you lift the cloth up, and then you put the cloth down, and then you lift the cloth up,
and then you put the cloth down, and you lift the cloth up, and you put the cloth down.
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.

Mitchell: 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.”
MG: How do you know—in general, with EITs—how do you know when you’ve gone as far as
you need to go?
Mitchell: They start talking to you.
Talking meant specifics—details, names, facts.

Mitchell: 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…” He
shook his head in wonderment. “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.”