STARBUCKS GOES GITMO

By: Herald Sun

UNLIMITED food and frappuccinos replaced waterboarding and sleep depravation in order to build a case against the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

FBI and military investigators gave Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and five other men, who have been charged with murder, food whenever they were hungry and Starbucks coffee as part of their interrogations as part of “rapport-building” methods, the Washington Post has reported.

Officials told the newspaper that investigators used friendly methods – including letting the men decide when interviews would start – in the hope of the prisoners confirming information they had already given to CIA officials through “coercive methods”.

US law prohibits the admission of any evidence obtained through torture, which includes waterboarding - a controversial interrogation method used by the CIA to simulate the experience of drowning.

"The (investigators) went in and said that they'd love to talk to them, that they knew what the men had been through, and that none of that stuff was going to be done to them," one official told the Washington Post.

“It was made very clear to them that they were in a very different environment, that they were not with the CIA anymore.

“There was an extensive period of making sure they understood it had to be voluntary on their part.”

According to the newspaper, the FBI and the military wanted to distance themselves from any CIA interrogation methods and treated the men as near-equals.

Experts were not sure if the men would have given the same information to prosecutors if they had not been interrogated by the CIA first.

The six men will face murder and conspiracy charges stemming from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre.