Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know

In March 2003, the CIA detained a senior Al Qaeda official accused of planning the September 11 attacks. The detainee (referred to by his initials, KSM) was interrogated by the psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Mitchell and Jessen developed what were known as enhanced interrogation techniques, although some people simply considered them torture. After years of experiencing sleep deprivation and waterboarding, KSM confessed to a long list of crimes in March 2007.

Before becoming interrogators for the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen worked on the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) program, which trained military personnel in how to handle interrogation. This program involved subjecting the trainees to realistic simulations of what enemy interrogators might do to them. Although the trainees knew that none of the simulations were real, a significant number of them experienced traumatic stress. The psychiatrist Charles Morgan conducted studies of SERE participants and found that the experience had a profound effect on their memories. When the whole point of interrogation is to get the subject to share what they know, it is highly problematic if their ability to remember is affected in the process.

This naturally raises questions about KSM’s confession: Was he confessing just to make it all stop? Were his memories affected by four years of abuse? Was he trying to gain a measure of fame by claiming credit for anything and everything? Trying to get KSM to talk meant compromising their ability to learn anything from him.