Persuading KSM to talk about al Qaeda plots

NY Post:

In the end, it was the prospect of a nap that made 9/11 terror mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed sing like a canary. 

“Even with waterboarding, he was counting on his fingers, because he knew we would stop at 10, so he wasn’t terribly intimidated by that,” ex-CIA official José Rodriguez Jr., told The Post. 

“It was the sleep deprivation that finally got him.” 

Still, the man described as the Hannibal Lecter of al Qaeda wasn’t easy to crack.

It took two weeks to break him after he was nabbed in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, in 2003 and quickly squirreled away to a secret CIA prison called a “black site.” 

CIA officers started on him slowly, asking the Kuwaiti-born terrorist if he planned to cooperate. 

He chanted Koranic verses in defiance. 

He was asked about Osama bin Laden. 

No answer. 

He was asked about future terror plots. 

“Soon you will know.” The answer cast a pall on the room. 

‘We couldn’t idly sit by and wait for a chance to bond with our detainee or for him to see the error of his ways and open up to us,” Rodriguez, 64, writes in his new book, “Hard Measures.”

Rodriguez, who oversaw the CIA’s interrogation and detention program, stridently defends the techniques used to extract information from detainees, saying the methods were all legally sanctioned by the Bush administration — and thwarted terror plots. 

...

Mohammed, 48, was subjected to a range of methods. They may have included dietary restrictions, where prisoners wore diapers and were fed only the dietary shake Ensure. Leaving detainees naked in their cells was also used. 

And there was “walling,” in which interrogators pushed him backwards in a small plywood-walled room so that his shoulder blades bounced off the wall with a “boom.” 

“We were after the shock value,” Rodriguez says.

...

There is much more.

Interrogators kept him awake and told him to politely request to be allowed to sleep, but he had to make the request in English.  KSM attended school in the US but he was pretending to not know the language.  Once he cracked he disclosed numerous plots which were subsequently thwarted including a 9-11 type attack on the West Coast.

It is still strange to me that Democrats are so concerned about his discomfort.  Obama would rather launch a Hellfire strike on someone like him and kill him than put him through enhanced interrogation techniques that saved lives.