Khalid Sheikh Mohamed Trial: CIA Contractor On Torture of 9/11 Suspects
Under oath in a pretrial hearing for the criminal case against five accused Sept. 11 terrorists, psychologist and interrogator James Mitchell spoke about CIA torture, highlighting, Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded more than 80 times at a CIA site overseas. He has been held at Guantánamo for more than 13 years and has never been charged with a crime, NPR reported
Sitting less than 25 feet from Khalid Sheikh Mohamed (referred to as KSM), Mitchell gave a detailed description of how Mohamed was waterboarded. Mitchell read aloud details and repeated the questions he asked Mohamed during a March 2003 interrogation session that included pouring 12 liters of water over Mohamed’s nose and mouth. He even claimed that at one point during a waterboarding session “KSM fell asleep on the waterboard” and thus could not have been scared, Human Rights Watch said in a dispatch.
Unapologetic about torture, he did object to using waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah because he had concluded Abu Zubaydah had no intelligence to offer, making those methods “unnecessary.”