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The “separate” interrogation program was essential, he had said in 2006, because it helped “take potential mass murderers off the streets before they were able to kill.” KSM, he said by way of example, had provided information that helped stop a further planned attack on the United States. According to Vice President Cheney, “a great many” attacks had been stopped thanks to information obtained under the program.

Had only conventional interrogation techniques been used on KSM, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said in 2008, he “would not have talked to us in a hundred years.” Former CIA director Porter Goss has said the use of “enhanced” techniques produced “provable, extraordinary successes.”

Others did not agree. FBI agents involved in the investigation thought ill treatment achieved little or nothing that skilled conventional questioning could not have achieved. Cheney’s claim that the program obtained hard intelligence was “intensely disputed.” On his first day in office, President Obama banned “alternative procedures.”

Coerced admissions, meanwhile, are probably inadmissible in a court of law. “The use of torture,” said Professor Mark Danner, who was instrumental in publishing the details of the Red Cross report on the prisoners’ treatment, “deprives the society whose laws have been so egregiously violated of the possibility of rendering justice. Torture destroys justice.”

THERE IS SOMETHING else, something especially relevant to the information extracted from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “Any piece of intelligence which is obtained under duress,” said Lieutenant General John Kimmons, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, “would be of questionable credibility.”

Is that the case with KSM, on whose statements much of the 9/11 Commission Report relies? The prisoner positively spewed information, and that is a part of the problem. At a rough count, he confessed to having carried out or plotted some thirty crimes—more than is plausible, surely, even for a top operative.

Transcripts of interrogation sessions with KSM were reportedly transmitted to Washington accompanied by the warning: “Detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead.” In a combined confession and boast, the prisoner himself told the Red Cross: “I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop.… I’m sure that the false information I was forced to invent … wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.”

A parallel issue is what torture may have done to KSM’s mental condition. His defense attorney at the initial military tribunal proceedings at Guantánamo in 2008, Captain Prescott Prince, thought KSM appeared to have suffered “some level of psychological impairment” as a result of the mistreatment.

When the 9/11 Commission was at work, KSM had yet to admit that he had lied under torture. Nor, at that time, did the Commission know that he or others had been tortured. “We were not aware, but we guessed,” executive director Philip Zelikow has said, “that things like that were going on.”

If Zelikow and senior colleagues guessed it, they seem not to have shared their guess with Commission members. “Never, ever did I imagine that American interrogators were subjecting detainees to waterboarding and other forms of physical torture,” Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste has said. “No one raised such a possibility at a Commission meeting. In hindsight we were snookered.”

The 9/11 commissioners were not told that “enhanced techniques” were used to interrogate prisoners. The brutal treatment they received taints the prisoners’ admissions.

The commissioners asked the CIA to allow its own staff access to detainees, only to meet with a flat refusal. If security was the issue, they then offered, staff could be taken to the prisoners’ location wearing blindfolds. Could Commission people at least observe CIA interrogation sessions through a one-way