Walling is a Central Intelligence Agency interrogation technique in which a detainee, with a rolled towel around the neck as a brace, is pushed or slammed into a wall. As designed by Mitchell and Jessen, the wall was to be constructed of plywood or comparable fiberboard with measurable give, and the towel was to prevent whiplash; the purpose was Pavlovian conditioning — the rolling-up of the towel alone was expected, in time, to cause the prisoner to crumple — a theory the designers termed “learned helplessness.” In practice the technique was administered without the towel and against ordinary concrete-block walls.[1][2][3][4][5]
Theory
The technique was classified within the enhanced interrogation program as “considered to be kind of a mild, no big deal kind of thing.” The theoretical mechanism — “learned helplessness” — was conditioning by repeated controlled-impact exposure, intended to leave the prisoner trained to associate the rolled towel itself with imminent impact. “All they would have to do is roll up the towel and the prisoner would just crumple.”[1][2]
Practice
The technique as actually administered departed substantially from the design:
- The wall was not plywood or fiberboard, but a concrete-block wall
- The towel was not used[6]
Documented harm
Muhammad Atar, the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was subjected to walling. He was “slammed so mercilessly against the wall that he’s now brain damaged to the point where he can’t participate in his own defense” — a permanent, lifelong injury. “Where does it say you were authorized to do that?”[6][7]
In a separate telling of what appears to be the same case, Kiriakou describes the victim as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed’s son-in-law rather than his nephew: interrogators used a concrete-block wall instead of the required plywood and forgot the bath towel meant to brace his neck, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury the Pentagon itself acknowledges makes him unable to participate in his own defense.[8][4]