Interrogatoire

Conseils généraux
http://meridien.canalblog.com/archives/2006/08/24/2527813.html

PDF
http://www.fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-50.pdf



Débats
http://www.commelair.com/fcde/Debatci.htm

In July 1963, the CIA printed a secret handbook on interrogation that remained a standard reference for two decades. The text, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation," KUBARK being a cryptonym, KU a random diptych and BARK the agency's code word for itself at that time-was produced under the aegis of James J. Angleton, the CIA's chief counterspy from 1954 to 1974. Like the late Angleton, it is sophisticated, scholarly, occasionally witty and utterly cold-blooded. Such interrogations were meant for traveling salesmen, refugees, defectors and spies, with corresponding intensity, skepticality, brutalness. A suspected Soviet agent, for example, would be handled with Soviet methods.
The manual's description of coercive techniques, including the milder forms of torture practices the agency says it abandoned in 1985, makes it a Cold War artifact of the first order. The 128-page text was unearthed by a Freedom of Information request filed by The Baltimore Sun.

From the introduction

Once it is established that the source is probably a counterintelligence target (in other words, is probably a member of a foreign intelligence or security service, a Communist, or a part of any other group engaged in clandestine activity directed against the national security), the interrogation is planned and conducted with increasing intensity as the focus on source resistance grows sharper.

The legislation which founded KUBARK specifically denied it any law-enforcement or police powers. Yet detention in a controlled environment and perhaps for a lengthy period is frequently essential. Interrogations conducted under compulsion or duress are specially likely to involve illegality and to entail damaging consequences for KUBARK. Therefore, prior Headquarters approval must be obtained for the interrogation of any source against his will and under any of the following circumstances:

If bodily harm is to be inflicted.
If medical, chemical, or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence.
(deleted)
The manual then discusses "non-coercive" interrogation:
The effectiveness of most of the non-coercive techniques depends on their unsettling effect. The interrogation situation is in itself disturbing to most people encountering it for the first time. The aim is to enhance this effect, and to create a traumatic or sub-traumatic experience which explodes, as it were, the world that is familiar to the subject as well as his image of himself within that world......

The interrogator can create and amplify an effect of omniscience in a number of ways. For example, he can show the interrogatee a thick file bearing his own name. Even if the file contains little or nothing but blank paper, the air of familiarity with which the interrogator refers to the subject's background can convince some sources that all is known and that resistance is futile.

The manual describes some non-coercive techniques. First, the "Ivan Is a Dope" ploy, in which the suspected spy's intelligence service is bad-mouthed-prompting indignation perhaps, but also truthful responses:

It may be useful to point out to a hostile agent that the cover story was ill-contrived, that the other service botched the job, that it is typical of the other service to ignore the welfare of its agents. The interrogator sells the agent the idea that the interrogator, not his old service, represents a true friend, who understands him and will look after his welfare.

Next, the "Mutt and Jeff" routine, better known as the good-cop/bad-cop ruse:

This routine works best with women, teenagers, and timid men. The angry interrogator makes it plain that he personally considers the interrogatee the vilest person on earth. During the harangue the friendly, quiet interrogator breaks in to say, "Wait a minute, Jim. Take it easy." The angry interrogator shouts back, "Shut up! I'm handling this. I've broken crumb-bums like this before, and I'll break this one, wide open." When the door slams behind him, the second interrogator tells the subject how sorry he is, how he hates to work with a man like that but has no choice, how if maybe brutes like that would keep quiet and give the man a fair chance to tell his side of the story.

More esoteric was the "Spinoza and Mortimer Snerd" technique, in which a low-ranking spy would be grilled at length about great affairs of state of which he knows nothing to break his resistance to revealing the lesser details with which he is well-acquainted:

Continued questioning about topics that the source knows nothing about may pave the way for the extraction of information at lower levels. The interrogatee is asked about KGB policy. His complaints that he knows nothing of such matters are met with flat insistence that he does know, he would have to know, that even the most stupid men in his position know. Communist interrogators who used this tactic against American POW's coupled it with punishment. Numbers of Americans have mentioned "the tremendous feeling of relief you get when he finally asks you something you can answer." One said, "I know it seems strange now, but I was positively grateful to them when they switched to a topic I knew something about."

Then there was the "Alice in Wonderland" method:

The Alice in Wonderland technique is designed not only to obliterate the familiar but to replace it with the weird. A doubletalk question is followed by a wholly unrelated and equally illogical query, day after day. The subject begins to try to make sense of the situation, which becomes mentally intolerable. Now he is likely to make significant admissions, or even pour out his story, just to stop the flow of babble which assails him.

If all else failed, violence and other coercive methods were options. The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources:

The principal coercive techniques are arrest, detention, the deprivation of sensory stimuli, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, and drugs. If a coercive technique is to be used, or if two or more are to employed jointly, they should be chosen for their effect upon the individual and carefully selected to match his personality. The usual effect of coercion is regression. The interrogatee's mature defenses crumble as he becomes more childlike. The subject may experience feelings of guilt, and it is usually useful to intensify these......

No mention has been made of what is frequently the last step in an interrogation conducted by a Communist service: the attempted conversion. In the Western view the goal of questioning is information. However, this pragmatic indifference may be short-sighted. Less time may be required to complete his conversion (and conceivably to create an enduring asset) than might be needed to deal with his antagonism if he is merely squeezed and forgotten.

On May 19 1998, B'Tselem released a report which presents an up-to-date and detailed picture of the interrogation methods used by the General Security Service (GSS). B'Tselem estimates, based on official sources, human rights organizations and attorneys, that the GSS annually interrogates between 1,000-1,500 Palestinians. Some eighty-five percent of them - at least 850 persons a year - are subjected to methods which constitute torture. The report includes a detailed description of the methods, including extracts from testimonies and medical documents. The case of 'Omar Ghanimat, whose torture caused permanent disability, is presented as an example, including the High Court discussion of his case and the decision of the Department for the Investigation of Police not to take any measures against his interrogators.

The following are the principle methods:

Detention Conditions

Palestinian detainees are held in complete isolation from the outside world, in cramped and filthy conditions. They are not allowed to change clothes, even during interrogations that last months. They must eat with their hands in toilet stalls.


Shabeh Combination

Description:Shabeh is the combination of methods, used for prolonged periods, entailing sensory isolation, sleep deprivation, and infliction of pain. Regular shabeh entails shackling the detainee's hands and legs to a small chair, angled to slant forward so that the detainee cannot sit in a stable position. The interrogee's head is covered with an often filthy sack and loud music is played non-stop through loudspeakers. Detainees in shabeh are not allowed to sleep. Sleep deprivation is achieved by using the aforementioned methods and by having a guard wake up any detainee who dozes off.

In many cases, the GSS add to and vary shabeh as follows: "Refrigerator" - exposing the interrogee to an air-conditioner shooting cold air directly at him.
Standing shabeh - compelling the detainee to stand, his arms tied behind him and to a pipe
affixed to the wall.
Standing shabeh with the detainee's arms drawn backward and upward, so that the upper body
is forced forward and down.

Duration: The GSS generally uses shabeh for several days at a time, and with short breaks for several weeks at a time.

Position of the State: The GSS and the State's Attorney's Office admit to using shabeh, at least "regular shabeh."


Threats and Curses

Description: Interrogators use this method during the interrogation itself. They threaten to murder the interrogee, mentioning detainees who died during interrogation or detention, and to harm his relatives.
Some of these threats are of a sexual nature.

The State's Position: The State's Attorney tends to ignore complaints of threats and curses. However, in response to a compensation suit, the State recently acknowledged that interrogators use threats and curses.


Qas'at a-Tawleh
(Painful Stretching using a Table and Direct Pressure)

Description: This method has been used with increasing frequency during the past two years. The method combines a painful position with the application of direct violence by the interrogator, and is used during the interrogation itself. The interrogator compels the interrogee to kneel or sit down (on the floor or on the shabeh chair) in front of a table, with the detainee's back to the table. The interrogator places the interrogee's arms, bound and stretched behind him, on the table. The result is intense pain. Sometimes the interrogator sits on the table, his feet on the interrogee's shoulders, and pushes the interrogee's body forward, stretching his arms even more, or pulls his legs, creating the same painful effect.

Duration: Interrogators are liable to force the interrogee to remain in this position for hours, with the interrogators adding the direct pressure at will.

The State's Position: The State has not admitted to using this method and has not directly addressed itin its response to High Court petitions which included complaints of its use. However it has, as mentioned previously, admitted to applying pressure by compelling the interrogee to remain in various positions.


Qambaz
(The "Frog Position")

Description: The GSS uses this method during the interrogation itself. The interrogator compels the interrogee to kneel on his toes, his arms tied behind him. If the interrogee falls, the interrogator forcefully compels him to return to the position, at times by beating and kicking him.

Duration: Interrogators are liable to force the interrogee to remain in this position for hours, sometimes with breaks interspersed.

The State's Position: The State admitted to using qambaz as an interrogation method for up to an hour each time.


Violent Shaking

Description: In this method, direct, potentially lethal, force is applied. It is used during the interrogation itself. The interrogator grabs the interrogee, who is sitting or standing, by the lapels of his shirt, and shakes him violently, so that the interrogator's fists beat the chest of the interrogee, and his head is thrown backward and forward.

Duration: Violent shaking lasts for several seconds - up to five seconds according to testimonies - each time.

The State's Position: The state admits to using violent shaking as an interrogation method. In April 1995, 'Abd a-Samad Harizat died as a result of being violently shaken by GSS interrogators. Even though the state acknowledged this, and though it could not guarantee unequivocally that violent shaking would not cause deaths in the future, or even less severe injuries, it has continued to use this method.


Slapping, Beating, Kicking and Causing Direct Pain by Use of Shackles

Description: These violent methods are used during the interrogation. In addition to slapping, punching, and kicking, the interrogators tighten the shackles to cause pain greater than that normally suffered when remaining shackled for a prolonged period. One of these violent methods is where the GSS interrogator tightens the shackles and, grasping the shackles, drags the interrogee along the floor.

The State's Position: The State does not admit to using these methods. However, the Landau Commission also mentioned "a slap to the face" as being a legitimate interrogation technique.

A lire :

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200310/bowden

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

Joe Martin—a crack interrogator who discovered that a top al-Qaida leader, whom Pakistan claimed to have in custody, was still at large and directing the Afghani resistance—explains the psychological effect of stress: “Let’s say a detainee comes into the interrogation booth and he’s had resistance training. He knows that I’m completely handcuffed and that I can’t do anything to him. If I throw a temper tantrum, lift him onto his knees, and walk out, you can feel his uncertainty level rise dramatically. He’s been told: ‘They won’t physically touch you,’ and now you have. The point is not to beat him up but to introduce the reality into his mind that he doesn’t know where your limit is.” Grabbing someone by the top of the collar has had a more profound effect on the outcome of questioning than any actual torture could have, Martin maintains. “The guy knows: You just broke your own rules, and that’s scary. He might demand to talk to my supervisor. I’ll respond: ‘There are no supervisors here,’ and give him a maniacal smile.”


__________

Did the stress techniques work? Yes. “The harsher methods we used . . . the better information we got and the sooner we got it,” writes Mackey, who emphasizes that the methods never contravened the conventions or crossed over into torture.

Stress broke a young bomb maker, for instance. Six months into the war, special forces brought a young Afghan to the Kandahar facility, the likely accomplice of a Taliban explosives expert who had been blowing up aid workers. Joe Martin got the assignment.

“Who’s your friend the Americans are looking for?” the interrogation began.

“I don’t know.”

“You think this is a joke? What do you think I’ll do?”

“Torture me.”

So now I understand his fear, Martin recollects.

The interrogation continued: “You’ll stand here until you tell me your friend.”

“No, sir, he’s not my friend.”

Martin picked up a book and started reading. Several hours later, the young Taliban was losing his balance and was clearly terrified. Moreover, he’s got two “big hillbilly guards staring at him who want to kill him,” the interrogator recalls.

“You think THIS is bad?!” the questioning starts up again.

“No, sir.”

The prisoner starts to fall; the guards stand him back up. If he falls again, and can’t get back up, Martin can do nothing further. “I have no rack,” he says matter-of-factly. The interrogator’s power is an illusion; if a detainee refuses to obey a stress order, an American interrogator has no recourse.

Martin risks a final display of his imaginary authority. “I get in his face, ‘What do you think I will do next?’ ” he barks. In the captive’s mind, days have passed, and he has no idea what awaits him. He discloses where he planted bombs on a road and where to find his associate. “The price?” Martin asks. “I made a man stand up. Is this unlawful coercion?”

Under a strict reading of the Geneva protections for prisoners of war, probably: the army forbids interrogators from even touching lawful combatants. But there is a huge gray area between the gold standard of POW treatment reserved for honorable opponents and torture, which consists of the intentional infliction of severe physical and mental pain. None of the stress techniques that the military has used in the war on terror comes remotely close to torture, despite the hysterical charges of administration critics. (The CIA’s behavior remains a black box.) To declare non-torturous stress off-limits for an enemy who plays by no rules and accords no respect to Western prisoners is folly.

The soldiers used stress techniques to reinforce the traditional psychological approaches. Jeff (a pseudonym), an interrogator in Afghanistan, had been assigned a cocky English Muslim, who justified the 9/11 attacks because women had been working in the World Trade Center. The British citizen deflected all further questioning. Jeff questioned him for a day and a half, without letting him sleep and playing on his religious loyalties. “I broke him on his belief in Islam,” Jeff recounts. “He realized he had messed up, because his Muslim brothers and sisters were also in the building.” The Brit broke down and cried, then disclosed the mission that al-Qaida had put him on before capture. But once the prisoner was allowed to sleep for six hours, he again “clammed up.”

To read the techniques requested is to understand how restrained the military has been in its approach to terror detainees—and how utterly false the torture narrative has been. Here’s what the interrogators assumed they could not do without clearance from the secretary of defense: yell at detainees (though never in their ears), use deception (such as posing as Saudi intelligence agents), and put detainees on MREs (meals ready to eat—vacuum-sealed food pouches eaten by millions of soldiers, as well as vacationing backpackers) instead of hot rations. The interrogators promised that this dangerous dietary measure would be used only in extremis, pending local approval and special training.

The most controversial technique approved was “mild, non-injurious physical contact such as grabbing, poking in the chest with the finger, and light pushing,” to be reserved only for a “very small percentage of the most uncooperative detainees” believed to possess critical intelligence. A detainee could be poked only after review by Gitmo’s commanding general of intelligence and the commander of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, and only pursuant to “careful coordination” and monitoring.

So what were these cruel and degrading practices? For one, providing a detainee an incentive for cooperation—such as a cigarette or, especially favored in Cuba, a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich or a Twinkie unless specifically approved by the secretary of defense. In other words, if an interrogator had learned that Usama bin Ladin’s accountant loved Cadbury chocolate, and intended to enter the interrogation booth armed with a Dairy Milk Wafer to extract the name of a Saudi financier, he needed to “specifically determine that military necessity requires” the use of the Dairy Milk Wafer and send an alert to Secretary Rumsfeld that chocolate was to be deployed against an al-Qaida operative.

Similar restrictions—a specific finding of military necessity and notice to Rumsfeld—applied to other tried-and-true army psychological techniques. These included “Pride and Ego Down”—attacking a detainee’s pride to goad him into revealing critical information—as well as “Mutt and Jeff,” the classic good cop–bad cop routine of countless police shows. Isolating a detainee from other prisoners to prevent collaboration and to increase his need to talk required not just notice and a finding of military necessity but “detailed implementation instructions [and] medical and psychological review.”

The only non-conventional “stress” techniques on the final Guantánamo list are such innocuous interventions as adjusting the temperature or introducing an unpleasant smell into the interrogation room, but only if the interrogator is present at all times; reversing a detainee’s sleep cycles from night to day (call this the “Flying to Hong Kong” approach); and convincing a detainee that his interrogator is not from the U.S.

Note that none of the treatments shown in the Abu Ghraib photos, such as nudity or the use of dogs, was included in the techniques certified for the unlawful combatants held in Cuba. And those mild techniques that were certified could only be used with extensive bureaucratic oversight and medical monitoring to ensure “humane,” “safe,” and “lawful” application.

The three major aspects of criminal investigation are (1) to identify the criminal, (2) to locate and apprehend him (3) and to prove his guilt in the court. During the course of investigation an investigator depends on three major tools available to him which are instrumentation, information and, interview and interrogation. Instrumentation helps him to identify or eliminate a suspect by the use of scientific technology thereby analyzing the collected physical evidences whereas the information is transformed

into intelligence to identify, locate and apprehend him. But the significance of interview and interrogation cannot be discarded as it plays major role in investigation whenever there is little or no physical evidence.

The difference between interview and interrogation is that an interview is conducted in a cordial atmosphere where a witness is more comfortable physically and psychologically. On the other hand, whenever a person is questioned in an uncomfortable atmosphere (interrogation room) where he is under the psychological pressure, it is an interrogation. Interrogator, in this case, has more psychological advantage than his suspect. Interrogation is a kind of psychological warfare between interrogator and suspect. Only when an interrogator overpowers a suspect psychologically, he gets a confession or the fact of a case which is not possible otherwise.

Interrogation is an art. You can master it through your study and experience. A good investigator is not necessarily a good interrogator. To be a good interrogator you need to be a good actor and must have an insight of human psychology. You should be able to act according to age, profession and intellect of the individual suspect because a suspect could be a lawyer, doctor, scientist, professor, manager or an unskilled laborer and, could be a child, teenager, adult and senior.

Prerequisites of an interrogation:

Before conducting interrogation an interrogator should have the information about:

Suspect:
(i) Name, age, profession, occupation
(ii) Social and financial situation
(iii) Criminal history
(iv) Relation with the victim if any

Victim:
(i) Name, age, profession, occupation
(ii) Social and financial situation
(iii) Criminal history if any

Scene of crime:
(i) Time and place of occurrence
(ii) Modus operandi
(iii) Physical evidence collected
(iv) Information collected

Approach

Place of Interrogation:
(i) At the spot when a suspect is apprehended at the scene of crime
(ii) In an interrogation room where the interrogator has more psychological advantage.
Time of Interrogation:
(i) As soon as the suspect is apprehended and information collected

You should always remember that a suspect is innocent and not a criminal unless his guilt is proved in court.
Don't ever use third degree method.
Always maintain courtesy.
Be a good listener.
Control your anger because in anger you loose reasoning and the judgment made without reasoning is mostly incorrect.
Never be in hurry to finish the interrogation.
Method of Interrogation

We can classify criminals into two major categories:

emotional offender
non-emotional offender
The purpose of classification is to vary your approach and methods during the interrogation of a suspect.

Interrogation of emotional offender:

Interrogation of an emotional offender is much easier than non-emotional offender.

1) An emotional offender is usually a first time offender and can be broken down easily when played with his emotion, ie, love, hatred, anger, frustration etc.

i) By showing sympathy towards him.

ii) By telling him that anybody could do what he has done in the similar situation.

iii) Blaming the society for his action.

iv) Being friendly with him and offering him coke or cigarettes, which an offender never expects from a police officer.

v) Observe his physical reaction to the crime related and non-related questions. When someone is lying he will be under tension. The anti-diuretic bio-chemical substance released by his body leads to the dryness of his mouth and lips. Again in tension he may be tapping his foot, playing with his fingers, looking blankly somewhere else.


2) Emotional offender easily come clean when confronted by the evidence.


Interrogation of non-emotional offender:


Non-emotional offenders are hardened criminals. They are professional who have gained experience committing series of crime and either subsequently have evaded the apprehension or served many jail terms. They don't like to talk much or at all.

Question and Answer Method: This is a common form of interrogation where an interrogator ask several questions to get the facts of a case. He develops his questions based on the fact of the case and the answers given to him by the suspect.
Narrative Method: Let the suspect tell his side of story without interruption. Ask him to repeat it three or four times. He will have to tell more and more lies just to cover up one lie. The more he lies, the more you have a chance to detect untruthfulness of his story. Verify his story and re-interrogate him.
Alibi: Ask where he was and what he was doing at the time of occurrence of the crime. Verify his alibi and re-interrogate him.
Factual method: The best way to interrogate a hardned and professional criminal is to confront him with the physical and circumstantial evidence, which will eventually lead to his confession.
Sweet and sour method: Interrogation conducted by two different interrogators, one being soft spoken and other being harsh towards the suspect could be fruitful in some case.
Overheard conversation method: Whenever there is more than one offender this method works well. One suspect while being interrogated should be viewed but not heard by another suspect from outside of the interrogation room. When his turn of interrogation starts, tell the offender that his associate has already confessed about the crime and now it is his turn to confess.
Hypothetical situation: Ask a suspect that even he has not done it, how would he have done it in the similar situation. May be some important clue could come out of this.
Telling the story backward: Sometimes you could ask a suspect his side of story backward. If he has told you what he has done from yesterday 6AM to today 10PM, then let him start from today 10PM to yesterday 6AM
Bluff Method: Interrogators have used this method for extracting truth from suspects.In this method an interrogator tells a suspect that he has been seen by witness while committing crime or that his fingerprint, footprint or physical evidence have been found at the scene of crime, so there is no choice but to tell the truth. You may be successful extracting the fact in exceptional case but this is not the right method because if the suspect is innocent, the situation is ridiculous.
There is no hard and fast rule as to what method you apply to extract the fact or the confession. It is upto you and, your experience will guide you to interrogate various kind of suspects. But one should always keep in mind that a confession even in writing is nothing more than a piece of paper unless it is supported or corroborated by other independent physical or circumstantial evidence.

Interview of Witnesses

There are various kinds of witnesses such as indifference witness, interested witness, hostile witness and child witness. Indifference witness is the best kind of witness for a case because the witness does not have any interest in success or failure of the case. He will always prefer to tell whatever he knows about the case without lying, whereas the interested witness may be a friend, a relative or a potential beneficiary in the case and may exaggerate the fact. As for the hostile witness, he may have close relation or friendship with the suspect and do want to lie to protect the suspect. You may need to interrogate him rather than interview him. Child is a volatile witness who does not lie but is prone to the suggestions.

It is worth to have an eyewitness to support a case but you should also know that his education, technical knowledge, physical condition, profession and emotion influence his observation. Don't expect him to tell everything of what happened when the incident took place. He does not observe as what a police officer needs to observe. His information is valuable if it corroborates to the physical or circumstantial evidence collected. Reconstruction of a case is important to verify the truthfulness of the information of an eyewitness.

Detecting a lie

Polygraph and Computer Voice Stress Analyzer are being used to detect lies. While the Polygraph measures changes in person's body associated with stress of deception- alterations in heart rate, breathing, emoional sweating, the Computerized Voice Stress Analyzer measures changes in voice frequency in the human voice that occur whenever someone is lying. The use of both of these tools are helpful to an investigator to narrow down the area of investigation even though the results are not admissible in the court of law due to the probability of evading a deception.

The Dark Art of Interrogation

The most effective way to gather intelligence and thwart terrorism can also be a direct route into morally repugnant terrain. A survey of the landscape of persuasion
By Mark Bowden

Rawalpindi, Pakistan

On what may or may not have been a Saturday, on what may have been March 1, in a house in this city that may have been this squat two-story white one belonging to Ahmad Abdul Qadoos, with big gray-headed crows barking in the front yard, the notorious terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was roughly awakened by a raiding party of Pakistani and American commandos. Anticipating a gunfight, they entered loud and fast. Instead they found him asleep. He was pulled from his bed, hooded, bound, hustled from the house, placed in a vehicle, and driven quickly away.

Here was the biggest catch yet in the war on terror. Sheikh Mohammed is considered the architect of two attempts on the World Trade Center: the one that failed, in 1993, and the one that succeeded so catastrophically, eight years later. He is also believed to have been behind the attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and on the USS Cole two years later, and behind the slaughter last year of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, among other things. An intimate of Osama bin Laden's, Sheikh Mohammed has been called the operations chief of al-Qaeda, if such a formal role can be said to exist in such an informal organization. Others have suggested that an apter designation might be al-Qaeda's "chief franchisee." Whatever the analogy, he is one of the terror organization's most important figures, a burly, distinctly modern, cosmopolitan thirty-seven-year-old man fanatically devoted to a medieval form of Islam. He was born to Pakistani parents, raised in Kuwait, and educated in North Carolina to be an engineer before he returned to the Middle East to build a career of bloody mayhem.

Some say that Sheikh Mohammed was captured months before the March 1 date announced by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Abdul Qadoos, a pale, white-bearded alderman in this well-heeled neighborhood, told me that Sheikh Mohammed was not there "then or ever." The official video of the takedown appears to have been faked. But the details are of minor importance. Whenever, wherever, and however it happened, nearly everyone now agrees that Sheikh Mohammed is in U.S. custody, and has been for some time. In the first hours of his captivity the hood came off and a picture was taken. It shows a bleary-eyed, heavy, hairy, swarthy man with a full black moustache, thick eyebrows, a dark outline of beard on a rounded, shaved face, three chins, long sideburns, and a full head of dense, long, wildly mussed black hair. He stands before a pale tan wall whose paint is chipped, leaning slightly forward, like a man with his hands bound behind him, the low cut of his loose-fitting white T-shirt exposing matted curls of hair on his chest, shoulders, and back. He is looking down and to the right of the camera. He appears dazed and glum.

Sheikh Mohammed is a smart man. There is an anxious, searching quality to his expression in that first post-arrest photo. It is the look of a man awakened into nightmare. Everything that has given his life meaning, his role as husband and father, his leadership, his stature, plans, and ambitions, is finished. His future is months, maybe years, of imprisonment and interrogation; a military tribunal; and almost certain execution. You can practically see the wheels turning in his head, processing his terminal predicament. How will he spend his last months and years? Will he maintain a dignified, defiant silence? Or will he succumb to his enemy and betray his friends, his cause, and his faith?

If Sheikh Mohammed felt despair in those first hours, it didn't show. According to a Pakistani officer who sat in on an initial ISI questioning, the al-Qaeda sub-boss seemed calm and stoic. For his first two days in custody he said nothing beyond confirming his name. A CIA official says that Sheikh Mohammed spent those days "sitting in a trancelike state and reciting verses from the Koran." On the third day he is said to have loosened up. Fluent in the local languages of Urdu, Pashto, and Baluchi, he tried to shame his Pakistani interrogators, lecturing them on their responsibilities as Muslims and upbraiding them for cooperating with infidels.

"Playing an American surrogate won't help you or your country," he said. "There are dozens of people like me who will give their lives but won't let the Americans live in peace anywhere in the world." Asked if Osama bin Laden was alive, he said, "Of course he is alive." He spoke of meeting with bin Laden in "a mountainous border region" in December. He seemed smug about U.S. and British preparations for war against Saddam Hussein. "Let the Iraq War begin," he said. "The U.S. forces will be targeted inside their bases in the Gulf. I don't have any specific information, but my sixth sense is telling me that you will get the news from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Kuwait." Indeed, in the following months al-Qaeda carried out a murderous attack in Saudi Arabia.

On that third day, once more hooded, Sheikh Mohammed was driven to Chaklala Air Force base, in Rawalpindi, and turned over to U.S. forces. From there he was flown to the CIA interrogation center in Bagram, Afghanistan, and from there, some days later, to an "undisclosed location" (a place the CIA calls "Hotel California")—presumably a facility in another cooperative nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier. It doesn't much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. Place and time, the anchors of sanity, were about to come unmoored. He might as well have been entering a new dimension, a strange new world where his every word, move, and sensation would be monitored and measured; where things might be as they seemed but might not; where there would be no such thing as day or night, or normal patterns of eating and drinking, wakefulness and sleep; where hot and cold, wet and dry, clean and dirty, truth and lies, would all be tangled and distorted.

Intelligence and military officials would talk about Sheikh Mohammed's state only indirectly, and conditionally. But by the time he arrived at a more permanent facility, he would already have been bone-tired, hungry, sore, uncomfortable, and afraid—if not for himself, then for his wife and children, who had been arrested either with him or some months before, depending on which story you believe. He would have been warned that lack of cooperation might mean being turned over to the more direct and brutal interrogators of some third nation. He would most likely have been locked naked in a cell with no trace of daylight. The space would be filled night and day with harsh light and noise, and would be so small that he would be unable to stand upright, to sit comfortably, or to recline fully. He would be kept awake, cold, and probably wet. If he managed to doze, he would be roughly awakened. He would be fed infrequently and irregularly, and then only with thin, tasteless meals. Sometimes days would go by between periods of questioning, sometimes only hours or minutes. The human mind craves routine, and can adjust to almost anything in the presence of it, so his jailers would take care that no semblance of routine developed.

(to continue)