Interrogators were still getting nowhere, so on October 11, 2002, the head of the Southern Command, General James Hill, was asked to approve an enhanced interrogation schedule, divided into three categories of coercion beyond those covered in the U.S. Army field manual:

Category I, yelling and deception.

Category II, stress positions for up to four hours, light deprivation, removal of clothing, shaving of facial hair (very shaming to a Muslim male), and exploitation of fear phobias, including fear of dogs.

Category III, “the use of scenarios” to convince the detainee that his life is in danger, including waterboarding.

On November 15, against FBI objections, Hill approved the use of Categories I and II, but not Category III. He also approved a plan for applying them to Qahtani by degrees on a thirty-day schedule beginning on November 23. On December 2, Rumsfeld weighed in with his own authorization, which, again, did not include waterboarding. Rumsfeld had his doubts in any case, and on January 15 rescinded his authorization pending further review.

Still, that proved to be enough time to break Qahtani. He was subjected to 20-hour interrogation sessions, being tied to a dog leash (no actual dogs were involved), having water poured continually on his head (but no waterboarding), while women’s clothes were dropped on his face and a bra strapped across his clothed chest. These and other humiliations, including turning up the air-conditioning to uncomfortable levels, did result in Qahtani’s brief hospitalization in early December with brachyocardia. However, none remotely approached the definition of torture defined by the OLC’s August 2002 memo as administering physical pain equal to the intensity “accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death,” or psychological harm “lasting for months or even years.”

By then, Qahtani had confessed that he worked for al Qaeda. One by one, without hesitation, he picked out pictures of all nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers and called out their names—and admitted that he, not Zacarias Moussaoui, had been slated to be the twentieth hijacker. He also revealed that the true mastermind of the attack was Osama bin Laden’s deputy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Qahtani also fingered another Saudi al-Qaeda operative, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who was in the United States organizing another 9/11-style attack for the summer of 2004. Khalid Mohammed’s subsequent capture in Pakistan in March 2003 revealed still more details which, we now know, enabled the Bush administration to foil a second wave of suicide attacks directed at Los Angeles.

Dat ain’t nuttin’.