CIA interrogator says he threatened to kill prisoner’s son
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 Guantánamo 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. Ramzi bin al-Shibh, another defendant in the
9/11 war-crimes case, was captured in the same raid. Mohammed would be captured in Pakistan six months later. He was at a CIA black site in Poland 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 Pentagon-run prison complex at Guantánamo 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. He was unapologetic.
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. “That was the only time that I made that threat to him.”
Mitchell identified the CIA lawyer he consulted by a code that prosecutors assigned him to avoid disclosure of his name, PJ1. In testimony last week, Mitchell said PJ1 was at a July 1,
2002, meeting where lawyers and others from the intelligence agency’s Counterterrorism Center first discussed using “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques.” PJ1 was also part of a CIA delegation that visited a black site in Thailand in August 2002 and observed the waterboarding of a prisoner named Abu Zubaydah, a display that brought tears to the eyes of some in the delegation.
Mitchell said he invoked Mohammed’s children during interrogations again that same month, March 2003, in pressing for details on the whereabouts of Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar alBaluchi. Mitchell quoted himself as saying it would be “safer” for Mohammed’s family to help the United States find Baluchi rather than “have him running around and the U.S. dropping a missile on him.”
Baluchi, who is charged in the same case with helping the 9/11 hijackers with money transfers and travel arrangements from the United Arab Emirates, where he worked at the time, was captured in Pakistan in April 2003 in a vehicle with another defendant in the case, Walid bin Attash.
Zeke Johnson, a program director for Amnesty International who was watching the proceedings, said the threat to kill one of Mohammed’s children no doubt broke the law.
“Threatening to kill a detainee’s child would violate the Convention Against Torture and be illegal,” Johnson said. “Anyone who broke the law must be held accountable — from those at the top who ordered it to those who carried it out.”