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SO IT WAS that KSM continued to range free until long after 9/11. His terrorist career would end only in the early hours of March 1, 2003, when a joint team of Pakistani and American agents cornered him at a middle-class home in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. A photograph taken at the scene of the arrest showed the prisoner bleary-eyed and unshaven, wearing an undershirt. “Nothing like James Bond,” CIA director George Tenet noted, and saw to it that that was the image fed to the media.

Accounts differ as to how KSM had been tracked down. Suggestions have included betrayal by an al Qaeda comrade—there was by then a $25 million reward—an intercept by the National Security Agency of one of the terrorist’s rumored ten mobile phones, or information gleaned from a high-level prisoner.

The capture of KSM was “wonderful,” its importance “hard to overstate,” said President Bush’s press secretary. “This,” House Intelligence Committee cochair Porter Goss exalted, “is equal to the liberation of Paris in the Second World War.” “No person other than perhaps Osama bin Laden,” the CIA’s Tenet has said, “was more responsible for the attacks of 9/11 than KSM.”

Sources let it be known that U.S. authorities “began an urgent effort to disorient and ‘break’ Mohammed.” For the first two days in captivity, still in Pakistani custody, KSM had reportedly “crouched on the floor in a trance-like state, reciting verses from the Koran.” He started talking only later, in the hands of the CIA.

The story the 9/11 Commission gave to the public of how the 9/11 plot evolved depended heavily on the accounts provided by KSM—and some other captives—in response to interrogation. The notes in the Commission Report reference his responses to interrogation 211 times. What readers had no way of knowing, though, is that most if not all of those responses were extracted by using measures the Bush Justice Department defined—in the words of a legal opinion provided to the CIA—as “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Vice President Cheney had hinted right after 9/11 at what was to come. The authorities, he said on Meet the Press, intended to work “sort of the dark side … It’s going to be vital for us to use any means necessary at our disposal … we have to make certain that we have not tied the hands, if you will, of our intelligence communities.”

A year after 9/11, a senior Justice Department official asserted in a memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales that “certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within Section 2340A’s proscription against torture.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross, which monitors the Geneva and U.N. Conventions on the treatment of “prisoners of war,” long asked in vain for access to KSM and thirteen other detainees. When finally allowed to see them in 2006, the Red Cross reported that the prisoners had indeed been subjected to “torture.” Two years later, when its report was leaked, the public learned the details.

Between them, the detainees alleged ill treatment that included “suffocation by water”—better known as waterboarding; prolonged stress standing naked, arms chained above the head for days at a time, often with toilet access denied; beatings and kicking; use of a neck collar to bang the head and body against a wall; confinement in a coffinlike box; enforced nudity for periods up to months; deprivation of sleep by enforcing stress positions, repetitive loud noise or music, or applications of cold water; exposure to cold; threats to harm a detainee’s family; restriction of food; and—serious for Muslim men—forced shaving of the head and beard.

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In the event of being taken prisoner, a captured al Qaeda manual showed, operatives had been advised to “complain of mistreatment … insist on proving that torture was inflicted.” Though alert to false claims, however, the Red Cross was impressed by the consistency of the prisoners’ allegations. A then-secret CIA inspector general