The CIA extracted false information about terrorist plots against Heathrow airport and London’s Canary Wharf business district from al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and then used it to justify its use of waterboarding, the US Senate intelligence committee report on the CIA’s use of torture concluded.

While a different prisoner said there had been a fledgling plan to attack each of the London targets, this had not been developed because those responsible had been apprehended, the report says.



Despite this, Mohammed began to deliver up elaborate details of the plots once his interrogators began to subject him to waterboarding, according to the committee’s examination of secret CIA files. The agency then decided to increase the number of times that Mohammed was subjected to the torture technique in order to induce him to confess to supposed plots within the US.



The CIA waterboarded Mohammmed at least 183 times after he was “rendered” to a CIA prison at Stare Kiejkuty in northern Poland.



In London, meanwhile, the British army had been despatched to Heathrow in response to the initial threat report, and headlines such as “War Zone Heathrow” and “Heathrow Facing Twin Towers Hit” were appearing on the front page of some newspapers. The Daily Telegraph reported that prime minister Tony Blair had been given details of a “specific and chillingly credible” threat of a terrorist attack which was probably imminent.



The CIA then began to highlight the “intelligence” about the London attacks to argue that waterboarding had not only proved invaluable, but must be allowed to continue.



This went on for several years, according to the report. “The CIA provided similar inaccurate representations regarding the Heathrow and Canary Wharf Plotting in 20 of the 20 documents provided to policymakers and the Department of Justice between July 2003 and March 2009,” it concludes.

The information extracted from Mohammed had played no role in alerting the CIA to the threat, the report says, and the CIA and other intelligence agencies were already “alerted” to al-Qaida’s efforts to target Heathrow Airport.



Drawing upon the CIA’s reports on the waterboarding of Mohammed, the report describes how CIA doctors oversaw the torture as the agency increased its use.



By 12 March 2003, Mohammed’s statements about Heathrow and Canary Wharf were deemed by CIA interrogators to be an attempt by the prisoner to avoid “discussion of plotting inside the United States”, the report says. As a consequence, the CIA decided to waterboard him twice that day.



The report says that “during the sessions, KSM ingested a significant amount of water”. The agency’s records noted that KSM’s “abdomen was somewhat distended and he expressed water when the abdomen was pressed”.



It goes on: “KSM’s gastric contents were so diluted by water that the medical officer present was ‘not concerned about regurgitated gastric acid damaging KSM’s esophagus’. The officer was, however, concerned about water intoxication and dilution of electrolytes and requested that the interrogators use saline in future waterboarding sessions.



“The medical officer later wrote to [redacted] OMS [the CIA’S Office of Medical Services] that KSM was ‘ingesting and aspiration [sic] a LOT of water’ and that ‘in the new technique we are basically doing a series of near drownings.’”

Once the waterboarding ceased, Mohammed felt able to admit that the details he had provided about the plots against London had been false.



“By late June 2004, KSM had retracted much of the varied reporting he had provided on the Heathrow plotting, most importantly the information KSM provided on tasking potential operatives to obtain flight training. KSM stated that during March 2003 – when he was being subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques – ‘he may have given false information’, and that, in many cases, the information he provided was ‘just speculation’.”

