The admitted mastermind of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mocked his Central Intelligence Agency captors by signaling that he knew exactly how long they were permitted to carry out a harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, a Bush White House official said Monday.
"KSM figured out waterboarding. He figured out the limits," Marc Theissen, a speechwriter for President George W. Bush, said during a panel discussion at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. KSM "actually mocked his interrogators by holding out his arm and counting off the seconds with his hand. He knew exactly how far we could go and when the terrorists know how far you can go it’s very very hard to break them."
Justice Department memos released by President Barack Obama indicate that the maximum duration for a single application of water to a terror suspect in the program authorized by President George W. Bush was 40 seconds. Only three prisoners are known to have been waterboarded in the program. Many human rights activists view waterboarding, which involves pouring water over a cloth on a restrained prisoner's face, as a form of torture. The United States viewed the practice as such when a form of it was carried out by the Japanese during World War II.
The disclosure that KSM "figured out" the approved contours of the waterboarding technique he was subjected to may not be totally surprising since he was waterboarded 183 times, according to a Justice Department memo declassified in 2009.
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