Prisoner’s son was threatened with death
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — The CIA contractor who interrogated Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, testified Monday that he threatened to kill one of Mohammed’s sons if there was another attack on America.
James Mitchell, a psychologist who helped develop the CIA’s interrogation program, said he made the threat after he had waterboarded Mohammed for the 183rd time. He said he did so after he consulted a lawyer at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center about how to make the threat without violating “the Torture Convention.”
He said he was advised to make the threat conditional.
So, before telling Mohammed, “I will cut your son’s throat,” Mitchell said, he added a series of caveats. They included “if there was another catastrophic attack in the United States,” if Mohammed withheld “information that could have stopped it” and “if another American child was killed.”
Mitchell was testifying in a pretrial hearing that has been focused in part on the torture of the defendants in the Sept. 11 case before they were sent to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Mitchell said he made the threat in March 2003 as “an emotional flag” as he was transitioning from waterboarding and other violent “enhanced interrogation techniques” to more traditional questioning of Mohammed.
Pakistani security forces reportedly seized Mohammed’s sons, Abed, 7, and Yusuf, 9, in September 2002 in a joint raid with U.S. forces that seized Ramzi bin alShibh, another defendant in the 9/11 war crimes case. Mohammed would be captured in Pakistan six months later. He was at a CIA black site in Poland later that month when Mitchell made the threat.
The boys were subsequently released and are believed to be living in Iran, with their mother, but Mohammed apparently did not know the fate of the boys until many years later, after the CIA transferred him to the Pentagonrun prison complex at Guantanamo Bay.
It was one of the most emotional moments in five days of testimony by Mitchell on the question of torture before the trial of five men accused of conspiracy in the attacks is scheduled to start next year.
Mitchell said that eight children died in the 9/11 hijackings that killed 2,976 people in New York, Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon. Then he gestured toward Mohammed, who was sitting with his lawyers 25 feet away and declared, “He’s smirking.”
The smirk, or any emotion, was not visible from a spectator’s gallery at the back of the court. Mohammed appeared impassive throughout the testimony, occasionally fingering his long orangedyed beard, while his lawyer, David Nevin, questioned Mitchell.
“Do you think that telling someone that might instill fear in that person?” Nevin asked.
“Yes, I do,” Mitchell replied.