Page 115 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

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 then World War One, World War Two. You read the history. You
know never stopping war. This is life.
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.
10. 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