Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
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Alexander, who conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000 others in Iraq, says the key to a successful interrogation lies in understanding the subject's motivation. In the spring of 2006, he was interrogating a Sunni imam connected with al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was then run by al-Zarqawi; the imam "blessed" suicide bombers before their final mission. His first words to Alexander were, "If I had a knife right now, I'd slit your throat." Asked why, the imam said the U.S. invasion had empowered Shi'ite thugs who had evicted his family from their home. Humiliated, he had turned to the insurgency. Alexander's response was to offer a personal apology: "I said, 'Look, I'm an American, and I want to say how sorry I am that we made so many mistakes in your country.'"
The imam, Alexander says, broke down in tears. The apology undercut his motivation for hating Americans and allowed him to open up to his interrogator. Alexander then nudged the conversation in a new direction, pointing out that Iraq and the U.S. had a common enemy: Iran. The two countries needed to cooperate in order to prevent Iraq from becoming supplicant to the Shi'ite mullahs in Tehran — a fear commonly expressed by Sunnis. Eventually the imam gave up the location of a safe house for suicide bombers; a raid on the house led to the capture of an al-Qaeda operative who in turn led U.S. troops to al-Zarqawi. (See pictures of U.S. troops' 6 years in Iraq.)
The Ticking Time Bomb
Proponents of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques say the noncoercive methods are useless in emergencies, when interrogators have just minutes, not days, to extract vital, lifesaving information. The worst-case scenario is often depicted in movies and TV series like 24: a captured terrorist knows where and when a bomb will go off (in a mall, in a school, on Capitol Hill), and his interrogators must make him talk at once or else risk thousands of innocent lives. It's not just fervid screenwriters who believe that such a scenario calls for the use of brute force. In 2002, Richard Posner, a Court of Appeals judge in Chicago and one of the most respected legal authorities in the U.S., wrote in the New Republic that "if torture is the only means of obtaining the information necessary to prevent the detonation of a nuclear bomb in Times Square, torture should be used ... No one who doubts that this is the case should be in a position of responsibility."
The CIA's controversial methods, argue their defenders, were spawned by precisely that sense of urgency: in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, amid swirling rumors of further attacks to come — including the possibility of a "dirty" nuclear bomb — the Bush Administration had no choice but to authorize the use of whatever means necessary to extract information from suspected terrorists. "We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country," former Vice President Cheney explained in a May 21 speech in Washington. "We didn't know about al-Qaeda's plans, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn't think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all."
But professional interrogators say the ticking-time-bomb scenario is no more than a thought experiment; it rarely, if ever, occurs in real life. It's true that U.S. intelligence managed to extract information about some "aspirational" al-Qaeda plots through interrogation of prisoners captured after 9/11. But none of those plots have been revealed — at least to the public — to have been imminent attacks. And there is still no conclusive proof that any usable intelligence the U.S. did glean through harsh interrogations could not have been extracted using other methods.
In fact, a smart interrogator may be able to turn the ticking-bomb scenario on its head and use a sense of urgency against a captive. During combat raids in Iraq, Maddox grew used to interrogating insurgents on the fly, often at the point of capture. His objective: to quickly extract information on the location of other insurgents hiding out nearby. "I'd say to them, 'As soon as your friends know you've been captured, they'll assume that you're going to give them up, and they'll run for it. So if you want to help yourself, to get a lighter sentence, you've got to tell me everything right now, because in a couple of hours you'll have nothing of value to trade.'"
That trick led to Maddox's finest hour in Iraq. At 6 a.m. on December 13, 2003, the final day of his tour of duty, two hours before his flight out of Baghdad, he began interrogating Mohammed Ibrahim, a midranking Baath Party leader known to be close to Saddam Hussein. More than 40 of Ibrahim's friends and family members associated with the insurgency were already in custody. For an hour and a half, Maddox tried to persuade him that giving up Saddam could lead to the release of his friends and family. Then Maddox played his final card: "I told him he had to talk quickly because Saddam might move," he says. "I also said that once I got on the plane, I would no longer be able to help him. My colleagues would just toss him in prison. Instead of saving 40 of his friends and family, he'd become No. 41." It worked. That evening, Ibrahim's directions led U.S. forces to Saddam's spider hole.
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Correction: The original version of this story identified Ali Soufan as an expert witness in cases brought by detainees. He has been a witness in cases against detainees.