Ramzi bin al-Shibh is one of the alleged co-conspirators in the September 11 attacks. He has been declared clinically insane by the U.S. Defense Department’s psychiatrist as a direct result of the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of sleep deprivation against him. The Defense Department has, as of late August 2023, stated that he cannot be tried.[1]
Capture, and a correction Kiriakou keeps making
Interviewers routinely credit John Kiriakou with the capture of bin al-Shibh along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, and he corrects it every time. He was chief of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan after 9/11 and led the series of raids in March 2002 that took Abu Zubaydah, on 22 March, along with many dozens of other al-Qaeda fighters. He then returned to headquarters that summer for a different job — executive assistant to the CIA’s deputy director for operations — and bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were caught “six or eight weeks after I had switched over.” His own summary: “I wish I could take credit for those guys, but no.”[2][3][4]
He places bin al-Shibh’s capture at roughly the same time as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s, which he dates from memory to August 2002, and believes bin al-Shibh was taken in Karachi.[4][5] Kiriakou describes him as the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing.[5]
Diverted from trial
Kiriakou’s account of what went wrong is procedural before it is moral. The original design was that prisoners would go to Guantánamo to have their cases evaluated and then be sent on to federal civilian court in Washington, New York or Boston — a plan he thought was a good idea, on the view that anyone against whom there was evidence should get in front of a jury as quickly as possible. Everybody went to Guantánamo except the highest-profile prisoners; bin al-Shibh was among those added to that exception and sent instead to a secret prison, where, in Kiriakou’s words, crimes against humanity took place.[6][5][7]
The techniques used on him were already illegal when they were used. Kiriakou points to a federal statute ratified in 1946 criminalising every technique applied to Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin al-Shibh and the others — noting alongside it that the United States repatriated Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war, and that a U.S. soldier photographed waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner in January 1968 was investigated the same day and imprisoned.[8][9]
Cause of insanity
Just recently — we’re filming this in early September, the last week of August of 2023 — the Defense Department admitted that they cannot try Ramzi bin al-Shibh, one of the 9/11 co-conspirators. They cannot try him because he’s insane. He’s clinically insane. Why is he insane? Because of sleep deprivation … This is the Pentagon’s psychiatrist who’s saying he’s insane, not his defense attorneys.[1][10]
The diagnosis comes from the U.S. government’s own psychiatric staff, not from bin al-Shibh’s defense. The CIA was authorized to keep prisoners awake for up to 12 days continuously — a duration well beyond the seven-day threshold at which the American Psychological Association literature establishes the onset of clinical insanity.[11][12]
Inadmissibility of statements
Independent of his current mental status, no statement bin al-Shibh ever gave can be used against him at trial, because the CIA tortured the statements out of him.[13]
That verdict, Kiriakou stresses, was reached by the government’s own judges rather than by defence counsel. Military judges twice announced trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s nephew Ammar al-Baluchi, and twice the trials did not happen, “because even the military judges recognized that because the CIA had tortured every one of these men, literally nothing that they said to implicate themselves could be used against them.”[14] The confessions themselves he treats as worthless on their face: prisoners in the secret prisons “confessed to everything from the 9/11 attacks to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby.”[7][15]
The intelligence cost
Kiriakou uses bin al-Shibh as one link in a sequence demonstrating that the torture programme destroyed collection rather than producing it. Abu Zubaydah had talked to the FBI, which treated him with respect and built a rapport; the CIA took over and began torturing him and he immediately clammed up; the FBI came back six weeks later and had to start from scratch. Then came Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ammar al-Baluchi, then bin al-Shibh — “started torturing him. All these different guys. As soon as the torture began, they either would stop talking, if they had been talking to the FBI, or they started giving us gibberish.” His conclusion is that the programme “set us back and put Americans in more danger than they had been.”[16][17]