The Forensic Panel has had a multifaceted role consulting to the United States government in the 9-11 prosecutions, with specialists from forensic psychiatry, neuroradiology, neuropsychology, and physical medicine assuming important evaluation and testifying roles.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Khallad bin-Attash, Mustafa Hawsawi, and Ammar al-Baluchi were captured and ultimately implicated in planning and setting up the 9-11 catastrophe. Muhammad is understood to be the mastermind of the plot and its leader and organizer. Bin al-Shibh passed messages between hijackers in the United States and al-Qaeda leadership; Bin al-Shibh and bin Attash also trained the hijackers before they left for America. Al-Baluchi assisted in financial transfers and hijacker’s logistics getting to America. Hawsawi eventually assisted al-Baluchi with the logistics.
From the point of these conspirators’ captures in 2002 and 2003, the focus of the U.S. Government in a post-9-11, post-anthrax world was to gain information to thwart any future terrorist attacks against American citizens. Upon arrest and thereafter, the detainees were uncooperative and unwilling to discuss other plots and other operatives, including the whereabouts of leader Osama bin-Laden.
The CIA contracted psychologists close to the intelligence community and with experience with al-Qaeda to advise them about how to improve the yield of information from al-Qaeda detainees. That guidance, and CIA editing, led to the development of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EIT).
The EIT were various techniques of physical confrontation that were delivered immediately in the face of a lack of cooperation. Ten EIT techniques were approved by legal authorities within the United States government that vetted them to sign off that they were not torture. These included facial slaps, abdominal slaps, stress of remaining in an uncomfortable position, walling (shoving against a flexible board), sleep deprivation, and ultimately the most controversial of these, waterboarding. The EIT were administered by those who had been trained to exercise proper technique, avoid overreach, and maintain professional comportment to avoid poisoning and prevent future cooperation. Medical and psychological personnel were present to immediately assess and monitor whether medical or psychological injury was happening and if so, to terminate the questioning.
Interrogators who administered the EIT warned uncooperative detainees that conditions would worsen were this lack of cooperation to continue during this indefinite confinement. At the same time, the interrogators paired cooperation with improved conditions of custody. The goal was to prompt defiant detainees to make a calculated decision to cooperate with examiners for their own self-interest. Interrogators would then shift questioning to personable CIA debriefers who were subject matter experts who used sociable relatedness to draw the detainees into easy but extended exchanges. During these extended discussions, information that was gleaned was then funneled to CIA analysts who would assess it for actionable intelligence and use in the field by U.S. military. Once the detainee began cooperating, the CIA no longer reverted to EIT – even if that cooperation waned. The program anchored the detainees in their relationships with the debriefers and the continuing improved conditions of their confinement. Program leaders would check in with the detainees to troubleshoot their concerns if they could not be worked out with debriefers.
Cooperation meant nothing more than an apparent willingness to respond to questions. However, detainees recognized that they could maintain the appearance of cooperation with misleading or dated details, without disclosing truly protected or highly sensitive information. Still, the United States government strategy was to maintain a line of communication, even in the hopes that inconsistencies could lead to critical and actionable intelligence.
In this manner, information gleaned from Mr. Baluchi by his cooperative communication, for example, led CIA analysts to identify the whereabouts and then, the elimination of Osama bin-Laden. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed came to hold “office hours” and “terrorist training classes” for the debriefers, in which he provided a rich understanding of al-Qaeda and its methods.
The Manchester Manual, recovered separately in England, detailed a strategy for captured al-Qaeda terrorists to claim they were tortured. The goal was to use Western countries’ freedoms and laws to handicap them, and to vilify Arab monarchies treatment of their own. In Western countries, this was particularly successful, in part because there was no regulation of the interrogation before the EIT program was instituted, and because the CIA was operating in secret. Major media inherently hostile to then-U.S. President George Bush became champions of al-Qaeda’s media effort to embellish or create altogether false narratives. BBC (a respected network with a well-established anti-American slant) reporting was actually used by Osama bin-Laden to indoctrinate trainees.
The misreporting and creation of propaganda about the EIT program in the vacuum of intelligence secrecy eventually resulted in its termination. With that, the information pipeline dried up, from the KSM “terrorist training” classes to the day-to-day droplets gleaned from the discussions debriefers were having with detainees. Detainees were maintained in custody in the black sites as intelligence gathering evolved into more custodial maintenance of combatants who maintained their commitment to kill Americans if again given the opportunity.
President Bush decided to prosecute the al-Qaeda prisoners as combatants in military court and transferred those who were not otherwise released to Guantanamo Bay in September 2006. The camp was run by the Department of Defense, with considerably relaxed conditions compared to the CIA black sites. This also included monitoring by the International Red Cross, which was therefore also able to identify any prisoner abuse. There was no longer any CIA debriefing, in method or actuality. Intelligence gathering for other cases was no longer active. In preparation for eventual prosecution in military court, the Department of Justice (DOJ) became involved, and arranged for detainees to be interviewed at Guantanamo in early 2007.
Given the now-widespread discomfort about the CIA EITs, the DOJ questioners approached each of the detainees in a dramatically different manner. This included giving detainees the option to not participate in the interview and to end the interview at any time, to avoid discussing anything they did not wish to discuss, the opportunity to take breaks, and an atmosphere in which food was provided. Interviewers identified their affiliation and distinguished it from the CIA and advised the detainees that whatever had been discussed with the CIA in earlier meetings would no longer be considered by them.
Over time, and with the close control of the American and establishment press that emerged during the Obama administration and beyond, the narrative surrounding the EIT became synonymous with torture. President Obama, at one point, expressed “We tortured some folks.” Some of those who had previously defended the al-Qaeda terrorists were appointed to serve in senior Obama administration and DOJ positions governing decision-making toward the Guantanamo detainees.
These developments ultimately resulted in prosecutors agreeing unconditionally that none of the detainees’ statements gathered from inside CIA custody would be used in the prosecution of the 9-11 defendants. Prosecutors made this concession – covering any statement made at any time and regardless of how it was offered -- even without proof of torture in any more than sporadic cases among hundreds of detainees. Moreover, this decision was made despite the fact that the government had available to itself extensive documentation of medical and psychological assessment of each detainee, with which to assess abuse and torture claims on a case-by-case basis.
In 2017, the United States government engaged The Forensic Panel on various forensic science questions relating to individual 9-11 defendants. Each of the 9-11 defendants, in keeping with their terrorist training and the prevailing narrative carried forward in the mainstream press, asserted that they had posttraumatic stress disorder and other physical ailments or brain damage as a result of mistreatment by CIA interrogators. The defendants were each claiming that their admissions in 2007 interviews with FBI and DOJ investigators were coerced because of alleged abuse by CIA interrogators in 2002 or 2003 (depending on when they came into custody).
Medical, psychiatric, and corrections records of the five 9-11 detainees are quite detailed, moreso than what one customarily finds in typical inmates. The Forensic Panel’s specialists were provided classified and unclassified reports from a wide array of defense experts from all over the world to evaluate the merits and foundation of their claims. In all but two detainees, the defense experts did not examine detainees they had access to. In nearly all cases, the defense experts examined only a portion of the record or, were otherwise guided to curated documents by the defense team.
Given the diversity of objective documentation and sources of subjective source materials, The Forensic Panel’s specialists reviewed every available record without selecting what would assist the government or defense. The examination provided clarity about the nature of each of the detainees’ experiences. Ultimately, there was sufficient evidence to inform each of the defendants’ ability to provide knowing, intelligent, and voluntary statements to the authorities in early 2007. The Forensic Panel’s forensic psychiatrist and forensic neuropsychologist testified at a hearing for Mr. Baluchi that, in addition to his records reflecting a fabricated claim of brain damage, that he had no psychiatric diagnosis or other cause that would affect his ability to make voluntary statements in the 2007 meetings.
The military judge disallowed the statements, issuing an opinion reflecting the judge’s strong rejection of the EIT program. The government has appealed, charging that the judge had made up his mind before the case was heard and had ignored all of the many days of testimony and proof of voluntariness, based on his entrenched bias. That testimony included documented and recorded evidence of the 9-11 detainees’ continuing pride in their actions, defiance toward the United States and continuing commitment as al-Qaeda combatants, and ridicule for the military courts that has provided them with due process. The 9-11 case remains a disturbing example of how even admitted terrorists can manipulate political alliances in the free press to reinvent themselves as victims and derail a case as historic as the 2001 destruction of the Twin Towers, Pentagon, and four airliners and their passengers. The case continues to this day.
