Bruce Jessen, right, and Jim Mitchell, not pictured, worked for U.S. military program called Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, which trained military personnel through mock torture sessions on how to resist enemy interrogations. Jessen is pictured in 1988 at a SERE training camp in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Creative Commons The architects behind the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal torture program were two retired Air Force psychologists considered masters in the art of coercion. Jim E. Mitchell, 63, and Bruce Jessen, 65, were paid upward of $80 million by the U.S. government to devise America’s boldest and most controversial counterterrorism operation in the country’s history that included methods such as mock burials, "rectal feeding" and waterboarding, according to a Senate report released Tuesday. Some of their methods -- based on Korean War-era interrogation tactics used by Chinese Communists -- were even too gruesome for the CIA.
Neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had language skills or expertise on al Qaeda – the chief enemy in the war on terror – when the CIA handpicked Mitchell and Jessen to spearhead its supposed intelligence gathering program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Their psychology backgrounds were in family therapy; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure. The CIA’s methods were described in detail following a five-year investigation by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
"Our goal was to reach the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to resist or deny providing us information (intelligence) to which he had access," Mitchell and Jessen said in a cable published in the report. Not everything the psychologists proposed was approved, however. The CIA rejected the idea of mock burials, among other methods, according to the Senate investigation.
The torture plan mirrored ruthless interrogation techniques used by Chinese Communists to strong-arm false confessions from U.S. prisoners during the Korean War, according to a 2009 report by the New York Times. The admissions were used as propaganda and led to accusations of communist “brainwashing.”
Mitchell and Jessen's catalog of 10 “enhanced interrogation techniques” included sleep deprivation, prolonged constraint, slapping, waterboarding and even insects. Mitchell participated in one of the CIA's first Mitchell-Jessen-style interrogations involving Abu Zubaydah, considered al Qaeda's No. 3 man, in 2002, according to the Times.
While the report only referred to the two psychologists via pseudonyms – Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar – previous reports identified Mitchell and Jessen, whose consulting company Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was contracted by the CIA in 2005 to take over its secret prison program, as its masterminds. “The whole intense interrogation concept that we hear about, is essentially their concepts,” Col. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator, told ABC News in 2009.
Mitchell joined the U.S. Air Force in 1974, where he became a bombs expert and earned two psychology degrees. He later completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, where he studied the roles of diet and exercise in regulating hypertension. He returned to the Air Force two years later.
Meanwhile, Jessen, who grew up in Idaho, was steadily moving up the military ranks as a psychologist with the Air Force Survival School in Spokane, Washington, a program established in the 1960s to train airmen and women dropped behind enemy lines in how to avoid detection and survive off the land, according to the Times. The program, known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, aimed to give Air Force members an idea of the enemies’ brutal methods. When Jessen was promoted to a top psychologist’s position at the school’s graduate sister school, he was replaced by Mitchell.
During his years with the SERE program, Jessen taught a class on “coping with isolation in a hostage environment,” a main component of the training, according to an investigation by Salon in 2007. Mitchell’s expertise was in bringing prisoners to the point of “helplessness.”
“The irony — and ultimately the tragedy — in the migration of SERE techniques is that the program was specifically designed to protect our soldiers from countries that violated the Geneva Conventions,” Brad Olson of the American Psychological Association, told Salon. “The result of the reverse-engineering, however, was that by making foreign detainees the target, it made us the country that violated the Geneva Conventions.”
Neither psychologist has publicly expressed regret for the program they orchestrated. Mitchell on Tuesday defended the CIA interrogations and accused the Senate of releasing the report for political reasons. "I think it's despicable that they cherry-picked all of that stuff," Mitchell told ABC News. "There were a lot of men and women in the CIA who put their lives on the line, and some of them died after 9/11 protecting the United States. And to suggest that they lied to the president, that they lied to the Senate, that they falsified intel reports so they could make a program look better than it was, is despicable."
DECEMBER 10, 2014, 5:23 PM LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2014, 11:57 PM BY MICHAEL DOYLE AND MARISA TAYLOR
WASHINGTON — The well-paid psychologists had a plan and a contract to make terrorists talk.
And when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resisted, a CIA officer confided in 2003 that one of the psychologists promised he was “going to go to school on this guy,” according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.
Private contractors James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen then unleashed the harsh interrogation techniques they had helped design.
Coercive interrogation tools like waterboarding, slapping and sleep deprivation proved lucrative to Mitchell and Jessen, even as they triggered alarms among intelligence professionals over the brutal handling of detainees like Mohammed, according to the report, which the CIA contested in a 136-page rebuttal.
Related: Senate probe unveils CIA brutality [video]
“Although these guys believe that their way is the only way, there should be an effort to define roles and responsibilities before their arrogance and narcissism evolve into unproductive conflict in the field,” a CIA medical professional warned in a June 16, 2003, email, referring to Mitchell and Jessen.
The two psychologists, who collected millions of dollars from the CIA, are among the few identifiable major players whose actions are spotlighted in the report made public Tuesday. Both men could be at the center of a growing call for legal consequences.
“If the allegations are true, their behavior was a clear violation of the profession’s ethical standards, clear violations of human rights and probably violations of U.S. and international laws,” Rhea Farberman, spokeswoman for the American Psychological Association, said in an interview on Wednesday. “They should be held accountable.”
The resulting fallout from the defunct program set up to detain and interrogate terror suspects overseas has already proved costly to taxpayers, as the CIA remains on the hook for covering legal expenses for the men through 2021.
Related: Christie declines to offer opinion on CIA's torture report
Mitchell did not return calls but has denied responsibility for CIA abuses. Jessen could not be reached for comment.
“What I would love the American people to know is that the way the Senate Democrats on that committee described the credentials and background of the two psychologists is just factually, demonstrably incorrect,” Mitchell told The Associated Press before declining to detail the inaccuracies, citing a secrecy agreement with the CIA.
Current and former CIA officials painted Tuesday’s Senate report as a political stunt by Senate Democrats to tarnish a program that saved American lives. It is a “one-sided study marred by errors of fact and interpretation — essentially a poorly done and partisan attack on the agency that has done the most to protect America,” former CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion article.
Hayden was singled out by Senate investigators for what they said was a string of misleading or outright false statements he gave in 2007 about the importance of the CIA’s brutal treatment of detainees in thwarting terrorist attacks. He said any wrongdoing predated his arrival at the CIA.
The CIA’s rebuttal suggests Senate Democrats searched through millions of documents to pull out only the evidence backing up predetermined conclusions.
“That’s like doing a crossword puzzle on Tuesday with Wednesday’s answer’s key,” the CIA said in an emailed statement.
Challenging one of the report’s most explosive arguments — that harsh interrogation techniques didn’t lead to Osama bin Laden — the CIA pointed to questioning of Ammar al-Baluchi, who revealed how an al-Qaida operative relayed messages to and from bin Laden after he departed Afghanistan. Before then, the CIA said, it only knew that the courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, interacted with bin Laden in 2001 when the al-Qaida leader was accessible to many of his followers. Al-Kuwaiti eventually led the U.S. to bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.
Poring over the same body of evidence that the investigators had, the CIA insisted most of the 20 case studies cited in the Senate report actually illustrated how enhanced interrogations helped disrupt plots, capture terrorists and prevent another 9/11-type attack. The agency said it obtained legal authority for its actions from the Justice Department and White House, and made “good faith” efforts to keep congressional leaders informed.
Former CIA officials responsible for the program echoed these points in interviews.
John McLaughlin, then deputy CIA director, said waterboarding and other tactics transformed Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, into a U.S. “consultant” on al-Qaida.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney also pushed back, saying in a Fox News interview that the Senate report “is full of crap.”
Cheney said the CIA’s approach to interrogating terror suspects was necessary after the 9/11 attacks, and the people who carried them out were doing their duty.
“We asked the agency to go take steps and put in place programs that were designed to catch the bastards who killed 3,000 of us on 9/11 and make sure it didn’t happen again, and that’s exactly what they did, and they deserve a lot of credit,” he said, “not the condemnation they are receiving from the Senate Democrats.”
Cheney said after the capture of Mohammed, it was essential to find out what he knew.
“He is in our possession we know he is the architect — what are we supposed to do?” Cheney said. “Kiss him on both cheeks and say please, please tell us what you know?”While White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday that the Justice Department had already examined the interrogation program and declined to prosecute those accused of abuses, some lawmakers called for further action.
“No one has been held to account,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., a member of the Intelligence Committee.
“No one has been held to account,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., a member of the Intelligence Committee.
The 524-page Intelligence Committee report asserts that Mitchell and Jessen played prominent roles in interrogations from the outset of the CIA program.
Formerly employed at the Air Force’s tough Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School in Washington State, neither man had experience as an interrogator or as an expert in terrorism. Both, though, saw a patriotic opportunity after the 9/11 attacks.
“The CIA did not seek out [Mitchell and Jessen] after a decision was made to use coercive interrogation techniques,” the Intelligence Committee report noted. “Rather, [Mitchell and Jessen] played a role in convincing the CIA to adopt such a policy.”
The psychologists’ expertise with waterboarding, a 2004 CIA inspector general report previously stated, “was probably misrepresented at the time,” as their prior work with U.S. airmen at the Air Force school was “almost irrelevant” to the interrogation of suspected terrorists.
Mitchell and Jessen nonetheless flourished as they hired former CIA officers, the new report shows. They traveled the world, consulted with foreign intelligence operatives and briefed officials like Condoleezza Rice, who then was secretary of state.
Their company provided interrogators, psychologists, debriefers and security personnel at CIA detention sites overseas. They ran the Terrorist Think Tank project, which was designed to help understand the terrorist “mind set.” They helped write the history of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
By 2006, a year after Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was founded, the value of the base contract was “in excess of $180 million,” Senate investigators found. All told, the CIA has spent $81 million on the company’s contract.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
But CIA interrogators never understood the utility of torture The Soviet Union was good at torture.
But the Soviets excelled at torture because they understood its usefulness. “Our task is not only to destroy you physically,” a Stalinist interrogator explained to a prisoner in 1948. “But also to smash you morally before the eyes of the society.”
History’s great agents of pain knew what the CIA pretends not to.
Torture is a terrorist act.
On Dec. 9, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a 525-page report documenting the CIA’s torture of alleged terrorists.
The Senate report admits that torture was not an effective way of gathering intelligence. “At no time did the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques lead to the collection of imminent threat intelligence,” stated committee chair Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat.
The CIA and its allies say the opposite. “The documents will demonstrate that the program was effective in saving American and allied lives and in preventing another mass casualty attack on American soil,” former CIA director George J. Tenet shot back.
Both miss the point. Torture isn’t about secretly collecting information. It never has been. Torture only works when it isn’t secret. Fear is only effective when it spreads. Terrorism only works when it happens in public.
The Nazis and Soviets understood this. The world’s most brutal dictators—to whom the CIA outsourced some of its torture—also understand it.
At right—Polish victims of Soviet secret police in a mass grave in 1943. Photo via Wikimediacommons. At left—Polish victims of the Soviets at Lvov in 1941. Photo via Wikimediacommons. At top—a captured North Vietnamese prisoner awaits interrogation by U.S. forces in 1967. David Epstein photo via Wikimediacommons
Dialectics of pain The Soviet army chased the Nazis into Poland in 1945—and stayed there when World War II ended. The Polish resistance movement switched from fighting Nazis to battling communists. They were heroes to everyday Poles. Moscow sent secret police to help deal with them.
A decade of torture, mock trials and public confessions followed. Polish historian Marek Jan Chodakiewicz documented that dark period in The Dialectics of Pain.
The Soviets in Poland captured thousands of insurgents. Often, they didn’t bother charging them with a crime.
“Instead, the secret policemen simply forced them to reveal the infrastructure of their organization, to divulge the whereabouts of their confederates and to confess to general charges like ‘killing Jews’ or ‘killing communists,’” Chodakiewicz wrote.
The confessions—even though they weren’t true—soured the public on the resistance.
“The objective of the … endeavor,” Chodakiewicz explained, “was to break the spirit of the individual under interrogation and then to destroy his image in the eyes of the public.” Soviet methods of extraction were brutal. Polish resistance fighter Kazimierz Moczarski went into great detail about the “49 types of torture and battery” his tormentors used.
They beat him all over his body, ripped hair from his beard and crotch and forced him to sit naked on a bolt. The secret police also subjected Moczarski to several punishments the CIA employed decades later.
The Stalinists stripped Moczarski naked and left him in solitary confinement for days. They deprived him of sleep for more than a week, forcing him to stand up in his cell and slapping him awake when he dozed. He recalled powerful and terrifying hallucinations.
They denied Moczarski medical care and threatened his family with harm. They claimed his wife was a whore.
Sound familiar? According to the Senate report, the CIA kept its captives awake for upwards of 180 hours. The prisoners hallucinated. The spooks forced captives to stand for hours on broken limbs.
Abu Zubaydah—one of the CIA’s first prisoners—got shot during his capture. The Americans let the wound fester.
They threatened to rape the mother of another captive. One interrogator played Russian roulette with a detainee. That’s a deadly game where two people take turns aiming a loaded pistol at their own heads. The winner gets to live. The CIA did all this—it said—to gain intelligence. It claimed these prisoners knew things about ongoing terror plots.
In truth, the Agency extracted next to no actual intelligence. Seven of the 39 victims gave no information at all. The other 32 made up stories about terrorist plots in order to end their torment.
The KGB would have spun that information into propaganda. If the CIA did the same, it isn’t owning up to it.
The Senate report reveals that the CIA figured out early on that torture wasn’t resulting in useful intel. After all, the Agency derived its torture tactics on reports from American airmen who had been captured in North Vietnam. The Vietnamese had designed these techniques to extract false confessions for propaganda purposes.
The North Vietnamese—learning from their Soviet backers—understood torture. The CIA did not. They wanted to change the old Soviet model. They wanted intelligence, not confessions.
The CIA “need[ed] a different working model for interrogating terrorists,” an Agency torturer explains in the Senate report. “Where confessions are not the ultimate goal.”
Jews being forcibly removed from dug-outs in Warsaw in 1943. Photo via Wikimediacommons ‘Verschärfte Vernehmung’ Like the CIA, the Nazis carefully explained that torture was only for extracting intelligence. They called it verschärfte Vernehmung, or “sharpened interrogation.”
“The sharpened interrogation may not be applied in order to induce confessions,” according to a June 1942 directive from S.S. Gruppenführer and Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller.
“[The techniques] may only be applied if … it has been ascertained that the prisoner can give information about important facts, connections or plans hostile to the state.”
“The sharpening can consist of the following,” the memo continued. “Hard bed, dark cell, sleep deprivation [and] exhaustive exercise.” Nazis were also allowed to beat the prisoners with a stick.
“In a case of more than 20 blows,” Müller wrote. “A doctor must be present.” But the Gestapo in the field didn’t abide by the memo. Nazi officer Richard Bruns tortured citizens of occupied Norway. After the war, that country’s supreme court tried him for war crimes.
The descriptions of Bruns’ sharpened interrogation techniques will sound familiar to anyone who’s been reading the Senate report.
“Leg screws were fastened to his legs and he was beaten with various implements,” one witness testified, describing the Nazis’ torture of a comrade. “Later he was thrown unconscious into a cellar, where he remained for four days before receiving medical attention.”
“Multiple CIA detainees were subjected to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques despite their medical conditions,” the Senate report states.
“Between 1942 and 1945, Bruns used the method of verschärfte Vernehmung on 11 Norwegian citizens,” noted the trial record. “This method involved the use of various implements of torture, cold baths and blows and kicks in the face and all over the body.”
“Abu Hudhaifa was subjected to ice water baths and 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation,” according to the Senate report. “He was released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be.”
Officially, the Third Reich only tortured to gain information. In practice, torture served as a warning to civilians who might cause problems.
Survivors of the Ohrdruf concentration camp demonstrate Nazi torture methods. Photo via Wikimediacommons “The purpose of the camps was twofold,” Nikita Kusnezov wrote in her memoir Reeds in the Wind. “The spreading of terror and organized liquidation of individuals.”
Kusnezov grew up in Eastern Europe and survived both Hitler and Stalin. “To enforce blind obedience of the multitudes,” she wrote, “the concentration camps were established.”
“No attempt was made to hide what was happening in the camps. These camps were there to terrorize the population and one could not do so in secret.”
In The Dialectics of Pain, Chodakiewicz explained that by 1948, many of the anti-Soviet Polish insurgents were so terrified of capture and torture that they would rather die on the battlefield.
“Some even committed suicide,” he wrote. “Or upon request dispatched their seriously wounded comrades to spare them from being captured. At least on one occasion the underground press praised the suicide of a disabled insurgent as ‘heroic.’”
Torture is a terrible method of interrogation but it’s a great way of spreading terror.
Iran knows this. Tehran sends dissidents to the Evin House of Detention for torture and abuse. The prison is well-known. It’s located on the northern outskirts of Tehran across the street from Shahid Beheshti University.
North Koreans know that rebels often end up in the infamous Camp 22. Syrians are well aware of the methods of torture the regime employs at Tadmor prison.
U.S. Sen. John McCain knows. The Arizona Republican was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for more than five years.
“I know from personal experience that the abuse of prisoners will produce more bad than good intelligence,” McCain said on Dec. 9 while defending the Senate’s torture report. “I know that victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it,” he continued. “I know they will say whatever they think their torturers want them to say if they believe it will stop their suffering.”
Torture doesn’t save lives. The CIA either didn’t know this or isn’t admitting to it. The Agency’s attempts to cover its tracks by burning evidence and stonewalling investigators reveals it for what it’s been all along.
A group of sadists flogging prisoners in the dark while no one watched.
Among the many revelations in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the use of torture by the CIA is this crucial detail: The CIA delegated much of its “enhanced interrogation” to others.
The report discloses that in 2008, 85 percent of the workforce in the CIA’s Rendition, Detention and Interrogation Group was made up of contractors. Former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who was at the center of the Sept. 11 investigations, told FRONTLINE that he believes that the CIA’s most troubling interrogation practices can be traced to the agency’s decision to hand over key responsibilities to these outsiders.
“They hired people from outside,” said Soufan, who testified to Congress in 2009 about what he saw as the many flaws in the CIA’s procedures. “We hire the best and the brightest to work for the government, and then we outsourced to people who we have no clue who they are.”
According to the report, the CIA paid out $81 million to a company led by two military psychologists whose previous experience was at the U.S. Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school. They are not named in the report, but they have been identified by The New York Times as Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell.
Neither had experience as an interrogator or with Al Qaeda, but they developed theories based on the concept of “learned helplessness,” according to the report. “Learned helplessness” is a psychological phenomenon in which people under duress effectively abandon hope. The original 1960s research on it involved shocking dogs into a state of passivity and surrender.
The CIA also paid out $1 million to indemnify their company against legal claims. Their contract ended in 2009.
Mitchell told CBS News that the report is “not balanced” and called it an attempt to “smear” the CIA. He said he could not confirm he was one of the psychologists described in the report. Jessen has previously said that a confidentiality agreement prevents him from discussing his work with the agency, but in a 2007 statement he and Mitchell said, “The advice we have provided, and the actions we have taken have been legal and ethical. We resolutely oppose torture.”
Former CIA agents, meanwhile, say the report’s contention that the agency’s techniques were not successful is inaccurate.
CIA director John Brennan, who took over last year, said in a news conference Thursday that so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” were used by the agency on “several dozen detainees over the course of five years before they ended in December of 2007.” He said the techniques had been deemed legal by the Bush administration’s Justice Department, but that President Obama “unequivocally” banned them when he took office.
Brennan also said it was “unknowable” whether information gleaned through enhanced interrogation techniques could have been gotten through routine interrogations.
Soufan, the subject of the FRONTLINE documentary The Interrogator, has said a good interrogator should try to develop rapport and trust with his or her subject.
The Senate report details how the CIA and its contractors often took a sharply different approach, using techniques like waterboarding, solitary confinement, sleep deprivation and physical violence to get people to talk.
The report concludes that it didn’t work.
Soufan said the case of Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda logistics planner, underlines the flaws with the hardline “enhanced interrogation” approach.
In March 2002, Zubaydah was wounded and captured in a raid in Pakistan, making him the first high-profile terror suspect to come into U.S. custody after 9/11. During debriefings with Soufan from March through late May, Zubaydah gave up Khalid Sheikh Mohammad as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and spoke about an alleged dirty bomb plot to be carried out by Jose Padilla.
“This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives,” Soufan wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times in 2009.
Despite Soufan’s progress with Zubaydah, the CIA began using tougher tactics, eventually waterboarding him at least 83 times, according to the report. Soufan said the CIA used threats of imminent danger to justify harsh tactics. They also put Zubaydah in solitary confinement for 47 days, the report said.
“They always try to sell the idea that they started the program because of a ticking bomb. The report clearly shows this is not true,” Soufan said. ”The only high-value detainee that the government has in their hands in 2002 — who just identified the mastermind of 9/11, who just gave us actionable information on an alleged dirty bomb plot — they put him in isolation for 47 days. No one talked to him for 47 days. … That is scary.”
The U.S. needs to put a permanent stop to the failed torture tactics, Soufan says.
“I think we need to put some administrative policies in place that will prevent these tactics from ever being used again,” he said. “As long as there in no sense of accountability, I fear we will be on this disastrous path again.”
There are a few health care angles on the Senate report on the George W. Bush administration’s interrogation and detention program, most prominently the role of two psychologists in its development and implementation. It’s not the only one — there’s the medical advisability of “rectal feeding,” and how the report will affect the reputation of other health care professionals.
The above video is one of many occasions since the report’s release Tuesday where James Mitchell, one of the two psychologists, has commented. He isn’t directly commenting on his role, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
The American Psychological Association applauded the release of the report (widely known as the torture report) and distanced itself from those involved.
Two psychologists mentioned prominently in the report under pseudonyms, but identified in media reports as James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, are not members of the American Psychological Association. Jessen was never a member; Mitchell resigned in 2006. Therefore, they are outside the reach of the association’s ethics adjudication process. Regardless of their membership status with APA, if the descriptions of their actions are accurate, they should be held fully accountable for violations of human rights and U.S. and international law.
One group, Physicians for Human Rights, worried about how the report would affect all medical professionals.
“For more than a decade, the U.S. government has been lying about its use of torture,” said Donna McKay, PHR’s executive director. “The report confirms that health professionals used their skills to break the minds and bodies of detainees. Their actions destroyed trust in clinicians, undermined the integrity of their professions, and damaged the United States’ human rights record, which can only be corrected through accountability.”
And the rectal feeding that has gotten so much attention? Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden told Wolf Blitzer it’s not as bad as it sounds — it’s a medical procedure, not torture.
Hayden: No, it’s a medical procedure is what it is. Now, Wolf, I’m learning about this somewhat too, because as you know, almost all of this took place before I became director. But I have learned that in some instances, one way that you can get nourishment into a person is through this procedure as opposed to intravenous feeding which involves needles and a whole bunch of other dangerous things. Let’s not forget, as we speak, the current government of the United States is using force-feeding on detainees at Guantanamo who also are refusing to eat.
Blitzer: Is that rectal though?
Hayden: No, it’s not. And I’m not prepared to tell you why one method was chosen over another at some point in the past. I would think, though, that before making that kind of accusation, somebody may have wanted to go talk to someone and actually get their explanation as to why and when and for what purpose it was done.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
The U.S. Senate report on the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”that was released on Tuesday said a firm identified only as “Company Y” was responsible for developing many of the tactics used during the questioning of terrorism suspects in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks.
Following the release of the details of the Senate probe, NBC News reported the company that worked to develop these techniques and received over $US80 million from the government for its work was a firm based in Spokane, Washington called Mitchell, Jessen & Associates.
While much of the attention on Mitchell, Jessen & Associates has focused on the two owners of the company who gave it its name, the firm actually had seven co-owners. Documents exclusively obtained by Business Insider on Wednesday confirmed the names of these seven people as well as their roles at the company. The records also detailed when Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was first established.
According to a document filed with the state of Washington in 2008, the seven owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates were: James Mitchell, John Bruce Jessen, David Ayers, Randall Spivey, James Sporleder, Joseph Matarazzo, and Roger Aldrich.
Records show Mitchell, Jessen & Associates became inactive in October 2009. However, four of the company’s owners appear to work at other firms that currently consult with the US government. Three of them, Spivey, Sporleder, and Aldrich, are still working together at a company called the Center For Personal Protection & Safety, which counts both the Department of Defence and FBI among its clients.
Their company reportedly developed interrogation techniques the Senate report described as “brutal” including forced rectal feedings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, mock executions, and intense psychological manipulation. Late Wednesday evening, a CIA spokesperson said the agency would not be able to comment on this story until the following morning, at the earliest.
Reverse Engineering Torture The majority of the owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates previously worked with the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which trains American service members to survive and resist interrogation by enemy forces. In this program they worked with soldiers who survived being captured and abused in foreign countries. The SERE trainers studied the effects of this torture. They also engaged in role playing scenarios where they taught soldiers to face these techniques.
Participation in the SERE program gave the owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates firsthand experience in what torture techniques were most effective and the psychology behind them. The CIA later reverse engineered these tactics to use on terrorism suspects at so-called “black sites” placed in foreign countries outside of US legal jurisdiction due to the fact the practices employed during these “enhanced” interrogations were clearly prohibited by American law.
In 2011, Truthout obtained a series of handwritten notes it claimed were written by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, who Business Insider has learned was the president of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. In these notes, which were written during his time working at the SERE program, Jessen described what he referred to as the “psychological aspects of detention.” CIA Jessen A diagram showing conflicting psychological pressures pressuring a prisoner who is held captive by an enemy, included in a paper written by Dr. Bruce Jessen. Jessen’s notes described how torture could be effective and gave US soldiers strategies to withstand abuse. He warned detainers would “manipulate and control your external environment almost at will.” These notes outlined some of the very same strategies CIA interrogators would later use on terrorism suspects at black sites where the Senate report said they subjected detainees to loud rock music and severe cold temperatures.
NBC reported that Mitchell, Jessen & Associates presented the CIA with 20 techniques, and the agency passed on a few “because some of proposed techniques were considered too harsh even for terrorists.”
From A Fortified Facility To A Quiet Office Building SERE is based at the Air Force Survival School, which is located at an Air Force base just outside of Spokane. The program is overseen by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which conducts more secretive work and is located at a facility adjacent to the base that reportedly has a barbed wire fence, armed guards, and “3-foot thick, blast-proof concrete walls.” Through their work with the CIA, these experts from Mitchell, Jessen & Associates seem to employed their expertise on the torture techniques used by America’s enemies to develop tactics that the US subsequently used on its own prisoners. Airmen Fairchild An airman at Fairchild Air Force Base, where the SERE program is based, being tazed during his training in 2012. The CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were initially employed during the administration of President George W. Bush, who authorised them in the wake of the September 11th attacks. The Senate report argued the interrogations that employed these techniques led to questionable intelligence and were so violent they disturbed members of both the CIA and FBI who were involved in US counterterrorism efforts.
President Barack Obama has acknowledged some terrorism detainees were tortured while being questioned by the CIA. He banned the enhanced interrogations shortly after he took office in 2009.
A company registration filed in Washington in 2007 showed Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was originally formed in Delaware on September 9, 2004 and began doing business in Washington in 2005. The company was operated out of a suite in a nondescript office building in downtown Spokane. In the handwritten registration, which was signed by Jessen, it said the company “provides consulting and training to U.S. government.”
Read about the seven owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and their connections to the CIA torture program below.
James Mitchell:A limited liability company licence renewal filed with the state of Washington in 2008 identifiedMitchell as the CEO of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates.
He has been widely described as the “architect” of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program.
According the 2009 New York Times story that first publicized his role in the CIA torture program, Mitchell joined the Air Force in 1974 and was initially stationed in Alaska where “he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.” Mitchell, who was from Florida, went on to work with the SERE program in the 1980s at the Air Force Survival School outside of Spokane with Dr. John Bruce Jessen.
Both Mitchell and Jessen were close during their time at the Air Force Survival School. The Times said the two men “took weekend ice-climbing trips together” and became “part of what some Defence Department officials called the ‘resistance mafia,’ experts on how to resist enemy interrogations.”
Initially, Jessen was the SERE psychologist at the school. In this capacity, he vetted instructors who portrayed interrogators at the school’s mock prison camp that was used to train soldiers who might end up in enemy hands.
In 1988, the Times said Jessen left his position at the survival school and took “the top psychologist’s job at a parallel ‘graduate school’ of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school.” He was replaced by Mitchell.
According to the Times, Mitchell retired from the military shortly before the September 11th attacks in 2001 and that he began consulting for the CIA by “the start of 2002.”
In March of 2002, when Abu Zubaydah, who was suspected of being the third ranked member of Al Qaeda, was captured in Pakistan, the Times said Mitchell traveled to a CIA “black site” in Thailand to oversee the interrogation.
Zubaydah’s questioning reportedly included him being sleep deprived, waterboarded, held in a box stripped naked, exposed to cold temperatures, and beaten. The Senate report that was released Tuesday identified Zubaydah as something of a guinea pig for the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques. The Times said Jessen joined Mitchell in Thailand a few months after he arrived in order to observer Zubaydah’s questioning.
After the Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques was released, Mitchell told Bloomberg he could not confirm or deny whether he was involved with the program due to a non-disclosure agreement.
“I’m in a box — I’m caught in some Kafka novel,” Mitchell said. “Everyone is assuming it is me, but I can’t confirm or deny it. It is frustrating because you can’t defend yourself.”
Mitchell did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on Wednesday. JPRA The seal of the military’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which oversees the SERE program. Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen: In the document filed with Washington state, Jessen was named as the president of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates.
Jessen, who was once a Mormon bishop, became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School outside of Spokane in the 1980′s. According to the Times story, while at the survival school, Jessen made an “unusual job switch” and went “from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.” The Times reported Jessen became “so aggressive” in his staged interrogations that he actually frightened some colleagues.
NBC’s Robert Windrem, who first connected Mitchell, Jessen & Associates to the Senate report, published a story on Tuesday that said “former intelligence officials and congressional investigators” confirmed the CIA began consulting with both Jessen and Mitchell about interrogation techniques in July 2002.
“Jessen immediately resigned from the Air Force and, along with Mitchell, another recently retired colleague, founded Mitchell, Jessen & Associates,” Windrem wrote.
In 2009, the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted an inquiry into the “treatment of detainees in U.S. Custody.” Both Jessen and Mitchell testified before the committee about their work advising the government on interrogation techniques. The committee’s report noted many of their tactics were developed based on their work with SERE and the JPRA. It also said Mitchell, Jessen & Associates had seven co-owners and “between 55 and 60 employees, several of whom were former JPRA employees.”
The report did not name the other co-owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. On Wednesday, committee staffer told Business Insider the report was the only public record from the inquiry and further details of Jessen and Mitchell’s testimony were not released. Jessen could not be reached for comment on this story.
David Ayres: Records for Mitchell, Jessen & Associates show David Ayres was the firm’s CFO.
In January, a press release from a Virginia-based defence contractor, TATE, Incorporated, identified a man named David Ayres as the company’s president. According to its website, TATE “is the preeminent firm focusing exclusively on personnel recovery.”
“We provide unparalleled expertise in PR training to the Department of Defence (DoD), other U.S. Government agencies and government contractors,” the site says.
In 2009, ProPublica reported TATE, Incorporated was headquartered at an address in Alexandria, Virginia that was also shared by Mitchell, Jessen & Associates.
Ayres did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Randall Spivey Randall Spivey: The website of the Center for Personal Protection & Safety, a firm based in Spokane and Virginia, identifies Randall Spivey as the company’s CEO and founder. CPPS’s site says it provides “scalable training and consulting solutions in the U.S. for Workplace Violence Prevention, Active Shooter Response, and High Risk Travel” to businesses and several government agencies including the FBI and Department of Defence.
The document filed in Washington state in 2008 listed Spivey as a partner at Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. His biography on the CPPS website says Spivey is a former DOD executive who “provided oversight to all Hostage Survival training programs in the Department of Defence from 1997 to 2002 and co-authored multiple hostage-related policy and doctrine documents.”
According to the CPPS website, two other former owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, James Sporleder and Roger Aldrich, currently work with Spivey at the company. Spivey did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Business Insider on Wednesday.
James Sporleder James V. Sporleder: A 2007 article in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review newspaper described James V. Sporleder as a former official with the secretive JPRA, which oversees the SERE program where Mitchell and Jessen both worked.
On the CPPS website, Sporleder is identified as the company’s “president and co-founder.” In this capacity, the site says he “is responsible for directly training more than 5,000 high-risk-of-capture personnel from some of the most elite units in the military.”
“During his government career, he was responsible for planning, preparation, support, and execution of numerous repatriation operations reaching back to 1993. He served as team chief in repatriation preparations for three U.S. Army soldiers held in Kosovo in 1999 and also led the debriefing team for that effort,” the CPPS site says of Sporleder. “He was additionally assigned as the Repatriation Team Chief, Forward, for the return and debrief of 24 United States Navy EP-3 Crew members detained for 13 days in the People’s Republic of China.”
The record for Mitchell, Jessen & Associates filed with the state of Washington listed Sporleder as one of the company’s partners. He did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Joseph Matarazzo: In a statement emailed to the Spokesman-Review in 2007, Joseph Matarazzo said he owned one per cent of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. In spite of admitting partial ownership, Matarazzo, a former psychology professor who was once president of the American Psychological Association, told the newspaper he “is not and never has been involved in the company’s operational decisions” and only “attends brief and infrequent company meetings.”
Matarazzo also disavowed the torture of terrorism suspects.
“I have never been involved in the use either of torture or the legal or illegal interrogation of prisoners or anyone else. And I would strongly advise against it,” said Matarazzo. “I also have no knowledge of anyone who has been involved in such torture or interrogation.”
On the document filed with Washington State, Matarazzo was described as a partner at Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. Matarazzo, who is nearly 90-years-old, could not be reached for comment on this story. An Oregon phone number listed in his named was disconnected.
Roger Aldrich Roger Aldrich: The Times report on Mitchell and Jessen called Roger Aldrich a “legendary military survival trainer.”
On the CPPS website he is listed as the company’s chief communications officer. According to CPPS, Aldrich spent 33 years working for the DOD at the JPRA where he was “an instructor, instructor trainer, curriculum developer, and director of the U.S. Government’s only specialised, foreign governmental detention and hostage survival program.”
Aldrich was identified as a Mitchell, Jessen & Associates partner in the record filed with Washington state. He did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider on Wednesday.
View the Mitchell, Jessen & Associates records obtained by Business Insider below. Some personal information has been redacted.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 500-page executive summary of its report on the CIA’s torture program offers some horrifying details about U.S. treatment of detainees captured in the post-9/11 years. It also highlights and adds some details about the important role two psychologists had in both developing the “enhanced interrogation” program and carrying it out.
Within the report, the duo in question are referred to with the pseudonyms "Grayson Swigert" and "Hammond Dunbar." But both the New York Times and NBC News have identified them as Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two psychologists who have been previously singled out for their roles in developing and legitimizing the torture program.
Both men came from an Air Force background, where they worked on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program in which military personnel are trained to resist enemy questioning by enduring oftentimes brutal mock interrogations. Beyond that, though, they seemed otherwise poorly suited for the task of interrogating al-Qaeda detainees. “Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator,” the report notes, “nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa'ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.” Despite their lack of experience in these key areas, Mitchell and Jessen “carried out inherently governmental functions, such as acting as liaison between the CIA and foreign intelligence services, assessing the effectiveness of the interrogation program, and participating in the interrogation of detainees in held in foreign government custody.”
So how did these two men come to play such an outsized role in developing and enacting the CIA’s torture program? Much of the story is captured in a 2009 Times article by Scott Shane. Shane writes that Mitchell, who after retirement “had started a training company called Knowledge Works” to supplement his income, realized that the post-9/11 military would provide business opportunities for those with his kind of experience and started networking with his contacts to seek them out.
Eventually, Shane writes, Mitchell got himself an audience with the CIA, won some of its members over with his toughness-infused ideas for dealing with terrorists, brought his old friend Jessen onboard, and developed a proposed interrogation method of dealing with al-Qaeda detainees that would grow into the frequently brutal program described in the Senate report summary. Shane writes that Mitchell participated in the 2002 CIA interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda’s purported third in command, in Thailand:
With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.
From there, the business would only grow. “In 2005,” the Senate report states, “the psychologists formed a company specifically for the purpose of conducting their work with the CIA. Shortly thereafter, the CIA outsourced virtually all aspects of the program.” And while the company’s contract was terminated in 2009 amid a growing national outcry over government-sanctioned torture, by then Mitchell and Jessen’s years-long relationship with the CIA had already proven extremely profitable. The Senate report notes:
In 2006, the value of the CIA's base contract with the company formed by the psychologists with all options exercised was in excess of $180 million; the contractors received $81 million prior to the contract's termination in 2009. In 2007, the CIA provided a multi-year indemnification agreement to protect the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program. The CIA has since paid out more than $1 million pursuant to the agreement.
One of the strangest subplots here is the unwitting role of Martin Seligman, a psychologist viewed as one of the leading modern researchers on human happiness. As the Times reported, Mitchell attended a small gathering at Seligman’s house two months after 9/11 conceived of as a brainstorming session to fight Muslim extremism. There he “introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on ‘learned helplessness.’ Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night.”
The concept of learned helplessness, a psychological phenomenon in which people who face persistent adversity effectively give up and lose the capacity to attempt to improve their situations — Seligman’s original research on the subject, from the 1960s, involved shocking dogs — was put to use by Mitchell and Jessen in their dealings with the CIA, and it echoes in the report: “SWIGERT had reviewed research on 'learned helplessness,' in which individuals might become passive and depressed in response to adverse or uncontrollable events. He theorized that inducing such a state could encourage a detainee to cooperate and provide information.” Many interrogation experts vehemently disagree: This level of detainee mistreatment, they argue, increases the risk that the subject will simply say whatever the interrogator wants to hear, leading to unreliable intelligence.
Seligman, for his part, has repeatedly expressed sorrow that his research was used in this manner. Reached via email by Science of Us, he responded with a statement that he’s used previously when questioned about his research’s role in the torture program: "I am grieved and horrified that good science, which has helped so many people overcome depression, may have been used for such bad purposes.”
Mark Benjamin, National correspondent for Salon.com.
Katherine Eban, Investigative reporter and writer for several national publications. Her July 2007 article for Vanity Fair, "Rorschach and Awe."
Karen Dorn Steele, a local investigative reporter who covered Mitchell and Jessen for The Spokesman-Review. She won a George Polk Award for a 1994 newspaper series on squandered money in the $50 billion Hanford Nuclear Reservation cleanup, the nation’s most polluted nuclear weapons production site.
We broadcast from Spokane, Washington, less than three miles from the headquarters of a secretive CIA contractor that played a key role in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation methods. The firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded the company, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Beginning in 2002, the CIA hired the psychologists to train interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain. We speak with three journalists who have closely followed the story. [includes rush transcript]
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re on the road in Spokane, Washington, less than three miles from the headquarters of a secretive CIA contractor that played a key role in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation methods. The firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded the company, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Beginning in 2002, the CIA hired the psychologists to train interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain. Both of the men had years of military training in a secretive program known as SERE — Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape — which teaches soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics taught in SERE training for use on prisoners held in the CIA’s secret prisons. The declassified torture memos released last week relied heavily on the advice of Mitchell and Jessen. In one memo, Justice Department attorney Jay Bybee wrote, quote, “Based on your research into the use of these methods at the SERE school and consultation with others with expertise in the field of psychology and interrogation, you do not anticipate that any prolonged harm would result from the use of the waterboard.” Well, today we’re going to take a detailed look at Mitchell Jessen’s role. We’re joined now by three journalists who have closely followed this story. Katherine Eban joins us from New York. Her 2007 article in vanityfair.com, “Rorschach and Awe,” gave a detailed account of the role of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Mark Benjamin joins us from Washington, DC, national correspondent for Salon.com. He wrote about Mitchell and Jessen in his 2007 article called “The CIA’s Torture Teachers.” And here in Spokane, I’m joined by Karen Steele. She is a former reporter at The Spokesman-Review, where she covered this story. We called Mitchell Jessen & Associates, based here in Spokane, not far from these studios, to invite them on the show, but, well, we did not hear back from them. Mitchell and Jessen have avoided speaking to the media for years. Two years ago, they released a statement to Vanity Fair that read, quote, "We are proud of the work we have done for our country.” Well, why don’t we begin first with Mark Benjamin in Washington. How did you first hear of Mitchell and Jessen, Mitchell Jessen & Associates? MARK BENJAMIN: I first heard of those two psychologists when I was doing my reporting a couple of years ago from — frankly, from some of their associates and people that worked with them in the military. And their associates were concerned, because this SERE training that you referred to, it’s not designed to be an interrogation tool. It’s designed to teach soldiers to resist, frankly, what are tools developed by communists, used by the Koreans, for example, during the Korean War to force false confessions out of soldiers. And so, we were teaching our soldiers how to — the SERE training teaches soldiers how to resist that kind of abuse. The reason it was brought to my attention is some of these Mitchell and Jessen’s colleagues were very, very concerned that these guys had, quote, “gotten their hands dirty,” unquote, by reverse-engineering these things. Frankly, their colleagues thought it was a very stupid idea, for obvious reasons. AMY GOODMAN: Katherine Eban, tell us a little about these two men, exactly who they are, and what you found in this very comprehensive piece that you did called "Rorschach and Awe," the first piece. KATHERINE EBAN: Thanks very much, and it’s nice to be here, Amy. You know, these were guys who have been described to me as op-docs. They were, you know, Ph.D.s who wanted to be sort of in the operational arena, which is a very seductive arena to be in. But effectively, they were teachers and overseers of a SERE program where they were just monitoring, you know, the well-being of troops. They weren’t scientists. They had no data, according to my sources, to show that if you reverse-engineered these tactics, they would be effective in eliciting information. So, you know, the description that I got, also from colleagues of theirs, is that these guys were wannabes. You know, they were wannabe operational psychologists, like, you know, Jodie Foster’s character in Silence of the Lambs. And they weren’t. But apparently — and now we really see the extent of it — they were very convincing in selling the use of these tactics to the CIA. And I guess it was a moment in time when our government was really desperate for any kind of solutions. But the fact that they landed on this without any data to justify its use, without any proof of effectiveness, is really what was remarkable to me in my reporting. AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin — well, both of you, actually, have now written new pieces. Mark, as you look to the torture memos, how does Mitchell Jessen fit in? These new documents that have been released, well, pretty much unredacted; there are — you know, it is blacked out especially around the names of the people involved. MARK BENJAMIN: Well, we already knew, because of reporting like mine and Katherine’s, how crucial these psychologists were in developing the CIA’s torture program. I think what the documents show is how crucial they were in carrying it out. In other words, if you look through these memos, these Justice Department memos, the whole rationale, you know, or the defense of the program from the Justice Department is that it’s safe. You know, in other words, it’s not torture according to doctors, and there are doctors there to monitor what’s going on, and there are doctors there to make sure that the person being interrogated doesn’t die on them. And they have data allegedly showing that, you know, SERE, this training, when we do it to soldiers, it doesn’t — you know, it doesn’t kill them, and it doesn’t make them crazy from the abuse they do during training. And so, it must be OK. I mean, in other words, I think that —- I don’t think you can overemphasize the extent to which the Justice Department relied on the advice and consent and participation of these psychologists, not just in designing the program, but carrying it out and arguing that it was safe and that it wasn’t torture. I mean, they were an absolutely vital part of this program, either in the room while these people were being tortured or watching on videotape. AMY GOODMAN: Karen Dorn Steele, you were writing for The Spokesman-Review, and after Mark Benjamin’s piece came out, you did your first. Of course, this is a local story. We’re broadcasting here at the PBS station in Spokane, KSPS, that’s run by the Spokane Public Schools. Not three miles from here is the American Legion Building. Tell us what you learned in the reports that you started to do here in Spokane. KAREN DORN STEELE: Yeah, after we had read Mark’s piece, we did some research, Bill Morlin and I, on who these guys are. We pulled their corporate records and other records, and we found out that they had 120 employees. And they opened their rather large offices here in March of 2005, although they had had contracts with the CIA prior to that. We learned that they came out of the SERE program, as has been discussed, and that they lived here because Spokane is a good place to live. They had many military connections here. These programs are still very big, the SERE program at Fairchild Air Force Base and the -— AMY GOODMAN: How far is Fairchild Air Force Base from here? KAREN DORN STEELE: It’s just about three miles west of town. It’s very, very close. It’s the big Air Force community. And the agency, the overarching agency that runs the SERE program nationwide also has a major facility here. It’s called the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. And sources within JPRA knew a lot about Mitchell and Jessen. They said they were self-promoters, they were cowboys. They disapproved of the kind of techniques and their cozying up to the CIA. But they told us that they live here because it’s a nice place to live. And even though their mailing address is Langley, Virginia, they’re based in Spokane. AMY GOODMAN: I understand Mitchell doesn’t live here anymore, but Jessen does. KAREN DORN STEELE: That’s correct. That’s right. AMY GOODMAN: And why was SERE big at Fairchild? KAREN DORN STEELE: SERE was big at Fairchild because every pilot in the US Air Force is required to go through this Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programming to learn what they might be subject to if they ever fell into the hands of an enemy that didn’t follow the Geneva Accords. And of course we know that these techniques were reversed by Mitchell and Jessen for the CIA and the black sites overseas. We also followed rather closely the debate within the American Psychological Association about the ethics of psychologists participating in sites where they were arguably doing harm, not doing no harm, as their guidelines say. And APA distanced themselves from Mitchell and Jessen, so they were not APA members, but we found out that one of their board members, Joseph Mazzarato [sic.] — Matarazzo, excuse me — who’s an emeritus psychology professor at Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, is a former president of the APA. And so, after we broke that story, then the APA could no longer say there weren’t ties between this organization and their organization. AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break. Then we’re going to come back to this discussion. Our guest in studio is a former reporter with The Spokesman-Review. Like many newspapers in this country, there have been a number of buyouts and layoffs at the paper here. Karen Dorn Steele is a George Polk Award-winning reporter for her work on the Hanford Reservation. We’ll talk about that in a minute. But today we’re talking in light of the memos that have just been released by the US government about Jessen, Mitchell, psychologists who run a firm here, well, that are involved in the coercive interrogations around the world. Our guests in New York, Katherine Eban, and in Washington, DC, Mark Benjamin. We’ll be back in a minute. [break] AMY GOODMAN: Here in Spokane, we’re broadcasting from the PBS station KSPS, run by the Spokane Public Schools, and we’re talking about an institution, a company, not three miles from here, operating out of the American Legion Hall in Spokane. Our guest here in the studio is Karen Dorn Steele, a George Polk Award-winning journalist. She wrote for The Spokesman-Review a series of pieces on Jessen, Mitchell. In Washington, DC, Mark Benjamin. In New York, in our firehouse studio, we’re joined by Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair. I wanted to ask about Dick Cheney’s latest comments. Dick Cheney is demanding that the CIA release memos that show that these enhanced interrogation techniques were effective. He said, “What we authorized wasn’t torture. But it worked. We got actionable intelligence from these techniques.” Katherine Eban, from your research, what did you find? KATHERINE EBAN: Well, from my research, I found exactly the opposite, that there had been an FB — the issue is very active over the detainee Abu Zubaydah, and there had been an FBI interrogation team with him initially, which had basically nursed him back to health after gunshot wounds and used rapport-building, classic rapport-building tactics, which is what the FBI excels at, and it was because of those tactics that he revealed that KSM, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was the architect of 9/11 and also revealed the name of Jose Padilla, and that in fact he was talking to interrogators until Mitchell showed up along with the CIA interrogation team, began imposing these harsh tactics, and Zubaydah clammed up. So, in response to that, they made a request to accelerate these tactics. I think they refer to it in the memos that were just released as an “intense pressure phase.” You know, basically, what my sources say is, “Sure, these tactics, these coercive tactics, can get you to talk. But about what? So how do you verify the legitimacy of the information?” Well, apparently, under torture, Zubaydah gave investigators a lot of false leads, which ate up the time of American intelligence back at home. So, you know, the debate is a very live one. There are people in the CIA who say these tactics absolutely worked, and I do think that this is going to be a central question of investigations as they go forward, is the effectiveness of these tactics. And people are now — yeah. AMY GOODMAN: You know, I thought it was very interesting, Katherine Eban, how you describe what happened. The FBI there, they’re getting intelligence that they think is actually useful. George Tenet, then Director of Central Intelligence, hears about this. He’s very proud that intelligence is coming out from the interrogation. And then he’s informed it’s not coming from CIA interrogators, it’s coming from FBI interrogators. And he hits the roof. And that’s when they send in Jessen and the other CIA interrogators. You could take it from there. KATHERINE EBAN: Right. You know, and let me just say that they sent in Mitchell. I don’t believe that Jessen was there at that point. But it was interesting —- AMY GOODMAN: I mean Mitchell. KATHERINE EBAN: —- that Mitchell Jessen — Mitchell’s company at that point closed up shop about a day before — the day after Zubaydah was captured, and then he was deployed to Thailand to the safe house where they were interrogating Zubaydah. But what you had in this situation was a classic turf war. You know, you had the CIA wanting to take the credit for getting actionable intelligence. As soon as they started using these coercive tactics, it had a rather profound effect, which is that the FBI felt compelled to withdraw their investigators from the scene. The effect of that, the end result, is that the CIA had total control over these interrogations. So, by using these coercive tactics, they also won a turf war. AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin, as you look at these torture memos right now and the whole cachet around Mitchell Jessen, if you can call it that, around getting effective intelligence when, as Katherine Eban was saying, it was the opposite. MARK BENJAMIN: Well, that’s right. And when you look at the memos, there are even some hints there that show what interrogators have long believed, which is that these are not effective ways to gather intelligence, what Mitchell and Jessen were doing is just — it’s just not an effective way of running an intelligence operation. And I would just add, you know, my reporting suggests that when the CIA put together this interrogation program, this torture program, they didn’t involve any experienced interrogators. There were no interrogators involved. Nobody who knows how to question — effectively question a suspect set this thing up. The CIA didn’t have anybody on board that knew how to do this stuff. I mean, it was people who just frankly didn’t know what they were doing. I mean, you know, they knew how to train soldiers how to resist torture, but not how to get effective intelligence. And, in fact, if you look at the memos that came out last week, there is a reference in one of the memos to a CIA inspector general report. And according to the reference, the CIA inspector general criticized the CIA’s own interrogation program, saying essentially they didn’t know when somebody was being recalcitrant and wouldn’t talk and when they just didn’t know anything. That’s the problem with torture. And so, they ended up torturing people even though they had already said everything they know. I mean, it was just — and that’s the problem with torture. You don’t know — I mean, how do you know when to torture somebody and when not to? How do you know when they’re telling you the truth and when they’re not? It’s just, you know — and I think the memos, you know, while they’re meant to back up and say that this torture program is defensible, I think if you look at them pretty closely, that that facade starts to fall apart pretty fast. AMY GOODMAN: Karen Dorn Steele? KAREN DORN STEELE: Yes, we interviewed two former SERE instructors here in Spokane, who — one person who’s now a lawyer, another who’s a psychologist. And the psychologist, Mark Mays, told us that the most important function of the psychologist in the legitimate SERE program is to make sure that the interrogators aren’t going out of bounds, because when they do, you get bad information. AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin, we were both covering in 2007 the APA national convention that was taking place in San Francisco. At that time, the dissident psychologists who wanted the APA to impose a ban on members participating in coercive interrogations lost. They ultimately found this loophole in the bylaws and found that they could put out the referendum to the membership instead of keep getting it voted down by the leadership. But what about the APA and — well, and Mitchell Jessen? MARK BENJAMIN: Well, you know, as we mentioned, Mitchell and Jessen were not members of the APA. But I think the sort of, you know, Reader’s Digest version is that I think it’s safe to say that the psychologists have been traditionally very, very close to the military. You know, they’ve been working with the military and the CIA for years and are closer than, say, psychiatrists and other doctors. I think it’s fair to say that the APA, the psychologists, as opposed to psychiatrists and doctors, have been much more willing since September 11th to play ball, essentially, to not remove themselves from interrogations as doctors and psychiatrists did, to continue to participate. And I think that’s reflected in the way Mitchell and Jessen, you know, were so important here. I think the psychologists saw a way to be players at the table, and that was reflected in their association, in the APA. And the APA essentially allowed their — you know, wrote rules, year after year after year, that would allow the continued participation of psychologists in these brutal interrogations. And now that these memos have come out, I think it’s really clear how important the government saw those psychologists were, in having them in the room or watching on video or designing the program or carrying it out. AMY GOODMAN: Katherine Eban, I think you’d like to chime in here, as you talk with a number of top military psychologists and even those at the beginning who were recruited into an APA committee that would investigate whether psychologists should continue, people like Kleinman and others who you quote saying, “I think Mitchell and Jessen have caused more harm to American national security than they’ll ever understand.” KATHERINE EBAN: Yeah. I mean, what was interesting is, is that there was suspicion initially that the psychologists who participated on this APA committee that basically sort of approved participation in interrogations, that they were somehow behind these coercive tactics. What you really had was almost what I describe as a Wizard of Oz scenario. You had Mitchell and Jessen behind the curtain driving, you know, the sort of good name of psychologists, as it were, into this very murky, dark area. And I think, you know, what’s really important in the debate going forward among psychologists is the extent to which psychologists loaned their names and loaned their credentials and their Ph.D.s to this kind of activity and essentially were used by the Bush administration to provide a kind of “get out of jail free” card for the people who were, you know, doing these interrogations, because the logic, which I think Mark had mentioned, is, you know, this circular logic. So long as there are trained psychologists from the SERE program who are on site at these interrogations who are saying that these detainees can withstand this treatment, are not being harmed psychologically, then it’s not torture. So, you know, you’ve got this sort of [inaudible] tortured — tortured logic, which is the phrase that has come up, but it’s this sort of self-justifying loop in which professionals are loaning their credentials to this kind of activity. And you see the same thing in the Office of Legal Counsel, where you have, you know, lawyers loaning their credentials to approving what are clear violations of the Geneva Conventions. AMY GOODMAN: Karen Dorn Steele, this is both a global issue and, as is usually the case, a local one, because Mitchell Jessen is right here in Spokane. There were local protests after your reports came out. Describe what happened. KAREN DORN STEELE: Yes, they were about a month after our first stories and some of the follow-ups on the APA debate. There was a street protest. Maybe three dozen people showed up. Many of them were psychology students from local colleges who said, “Not in our names should this be done, and this is a violation of everything we’ve been taught in schools.” And there were intelligence agents there. We couldn’t determine who they were, but they were photographing everybody in the crowd. But Spokane is not a place that’s given to street protests normally, although there have been some anti-Iraq war protests. But this was an unusual event, and it triggered some passion here. AMY GOODMAN: And yet, they continue, and they not only have Mitchell Jessen, but little other companies that are right in the American Legion Hall. KAREN DORN STEELE: Yeah. There’s a cluster of national security companies that all come out of the SERE and JPRA program that are still here and functioning. AMY GOODMAN: I went over to The Spokesman-Review
yesterday and was speaking to the editor. I said, “Have you ever been able to speak to Mitchell Jessen? I mean, they’re a local company.” And he said, “No, they do not respond.” KAREN DORN STEELE: No, they just gave us the same response that you read earlier on the program, that they condemn torture. AMY GOODMAN: Mark Benjamin, do you think we’re going to see any arrests? Do you think — well, President Obama has said they’re not going after CIA interrogators, questioners. What do you think? MARK BENJAMIN: No, I don’t think we’re going to see any arrests. And I think that the significance of what the Obama administration has done over the last few days or announced over the last few days has been largely missed, which is, if you look at the President’s statements and you combine them with the statements of Rahm Emanuel, the Chief of Staff, and Eric Holder, the Attorney General, if you put those together, you will see that over the last couple of days the Obama administration has announced that no one, not the people who carried out the torture program or the people who designed the program or the people that authorized the program or the people who said that it was legal even though they knew that it frankly wasn’t, none of those people will ever face charges. The Attorney General has announced that not only that, the government will pay the legal fees for anybody who is brought up on any charges anywhere in the world or has to go before Congress. They will be provided attorneys. And not only that, they have given this blanket immunity, if you will, in return for nothing. I mean, in other words, you know, as you said at the top of the program, Obama yesterday — President Obama was at the CIA and called these things “mistakes,” even though they were very carefully designed, and hasn’t demanded anything in return for this immunity. I mean, you know, in other words, it’s not like the Obama administration said, “Hey, let’s take a close look at this, and let’s have some people come forward and testify, and let’s take a close look at this program and see if the claims of former Vice President Dick Cheney are really true, that we really did get some good information out of this program, it really was effective.” The Obama administration has demanded nothing and has announced, you know, effectively that the story is over and nobody will be held to account ever. AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you, Mark Benjamin of Salon.com in Washington, DC; Katherine Eban in New York at the firehouse studio, vf.com, your pieces appear. But before I say goodbye to you, Karen Dorn Steele, I wanted to ask you about one other issue that is very close to here in Spokane, and it’s the issue of the Hanford Reservation, for which your coverage, “Wasteland,” won a George Polk Award.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
It's time for a civilian Star Chamber. These people are above the law but need to be removed from the population. Seems like there would be some wealthy people who would actually want to fund something like that, but maybe there are simply no people of means who have any moral fiber combined with common sense.
"He who wounds the ecosphere literally wounds God" -- Philip K. Dick
Leading group of psychologists faces a reckoning following repeated denials that its members were complicit in Bush administration-era torture
The American Psychological Association asked a former US attorney to investigate ‘collusion with the Bush administration to promote, support or facilitate’ torture. Illustration: The Guardian
The largest association of psychologists in the United States is on the brink of a crisis, the Guardian has learned, after an independent review revealed that medical professionals lied and covered up their extensive involvement in post-9/11 torture. The revelation, puncturing years of denials, has already led to at least one leadership firing and creates the potential for loss of licenses and even prosecutions.
For more than a decade, the American Psychological Association (APA) has maintained that a strict code of ethics prohibits its more than 130,000 members to aid in the torture of detainees while simultaneously permitting involvement in military and intelligence interrogations. The group has rejected media reporting on psychologists’ complicity in torture; suppressed internal dissent from anti-torture doctors; cleared members of wrongdoing; and portrayed itself as a consistent ally against abuse.
Now, a voluminous independent review conducted by a former assistant US attorney, David Hoffman, undermines the APA’s denials in full – and vindicates the dissenters.
Sources with knowledge of the report and its consequences, who requested anonymity to discuss the findings before public release, expected a wave of firings and resignations across the leadership of an organization that Hoffman finds used its extensive institutional links to the CIA and US military to facilitate abusive interrogations.
Several officials are likely to be sacked. Already out, a past APA president confirmed to the Guardian, is Stephen Behnke, the APA’s ethics chief and a leading figure in recasting its ethics guidelines in a manner conducive to interrogations that, from the start, relied heavily on psychologists to design and implement techniques like waterboarding.
But the reckoning with psychologists’ institutional complicity in torture may not stop there.
Evidence in the Hoffman report, sources believe, may merit referral to the FBI over potential criminal wrongdoing by the APA involvement in torture. The findings could reopen something human rights groups have urged for years: the potential for prosecutions of people involved in torture. The definition of “collusion” adopted by Hoffman is said to be similar to language used in the federal racketeering statute known as Rico.
If so, however, it would not be American military or intelligence interrogators themselves under investigation, nor the senior officials who devised torture policy in the Bush administration, but the psychologists who enabled them.
Additionally, sources believe there will be grounds to initiate ethics charges against responsible individuals both within the APA and in the states in which they operate, which would be the first step toward the loss of a professional license.
Sources familiar with Hoffman’s report said the APA, knowing that the findings will undermine years of its public positions, is negotiating with its dissenters and critics to deliver a public apology. Recommendations for structural reform are said to be likely ahead of the organization’s 123rd annual convention, scheduled to begin on 6 August in Toronto.
Manipulating the opposition: three doctors and torture tactics
Substantial sections of the report focus on the APA ethics chief and describes Behnke’s “behind-the-scenes attempts to manipulate Council of Representatives actions in collusion with, and to remain aligned with DoD” – a reference to the Department of Defense.
A University of Michigan-pedigreed psychologist, Behnke has held his position within the APA since 2000, and, according to sources, used it to stifle dissent. Hoffman’s report found Behnke ghostwrote statements opposing member motions to rebuke torture; was involved in voter irregularity on motion passings; spiked ethics complaints; and took other actions to suppress complaints.
Nadine Kaslow, a former APA president, told the Guardian that Behnke’s last day at the APA was 8 July, after the APA received Hoffman’s report. She would not say if Behnke resigned or was fired. She indicated that further firings and resignations are likely in the coming weeks.
For now, the APA is grappling with a number of institutional changes to salvage its credibility.
“I am certainly apologizing on behalf of APA for what occurred – in terms of the fact that there was any collusion that occurred, and the fact that this may have paved the way for abusive interrogation,” Kaslow said on Friday.
Behnke was hardly the only psychologist involved in the establishment and application of torture.
According to two landmark Senate reports, one from the armed services committee in 2009 and the other from the intelligence committee in 2014, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were instrumental in persuading the CIA to adopt stress positions, temperature and dietary manipulation, sleep deprivation and waterboarding in interrogations. (Neither man is an APA member.)
Psychologists assigned to the CIA’s office of medical services assisted abusive interrogations, which the Guardian revealed in June appear to violate longstanding CIA rules against human experimentation.
Those tactics, save waterboarding, spread from the CIA to the military. Psychologists joined “behavioral science consultation teams” that advised interrogations at Guantánamo Bay.
“For the APA officials who played the lead role in these actions, their principal motive was to curry favor with the Defense Department for two main reasons: because of the very substantial benefits that DoD had conferred and continued to confer on psychology as a profession, and because APA wanted a favorable result from the critical policy DoD was in the midst of developing that would determine whether and how deeply psychologists could remain involved in intelligence activities,” Hoffman found.
Human rights-minded psychologists railed for years that the APA had created an environment that was conducive to medical professionals effectively participating in torture. Critically, in 2005, a prominent and highly controversial APA taskforce ruled that members could perform “consultative roles to interrogation- or information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes”.
Yet the organization withstood all public criticism, until New York Times reporter James Risen revealed, based in part on a hoard of emails from a deceased behavioral-science researcher named Scott Gerwehr, the behind-the-scenes ties between psychologists from the APA and their influential counterparts within the CIA and the Pentagon.
In 2002 – the critical year for the Bush administration’s embrace of torture – the APA amended its longstanding ethics rules to permit psychologists to follow a “governing legal authority” in the event of a conflict between an order and the APA ethics code.
Without the change, Risen wrote in his 2014 book Pay Any Price, it was likely that psychologists would have “taken the view that they were prevented by their own professional standards from involvement” in interrogations, making it “far more difficult for the Justice Department to craft opinions that provided the legal approvals needed for the CIA to go ahead with the interrogation tactics”.
In 2004, after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal burst into public view, the emails detailed a private meeting of APA officials with CIA and military psychologists to “provide input on how the APA should deal with the growing furor”, Risen wrote.
Ethics chief Behnke emailed: “I would like to emphasize that we will not advertise the meeting other than this letter to the individual invitees, that we will not publish or otherwise make public the names of attendees or the substance of our discussions, and that in the meeting we will neither assess nor investigate the behavior of any specific individual or group.”
Risen went on to report that six of the 10 psychologists on the seminal 2005 APA taskforce “had connections with the defense or intelligence communities; one member was the chief psychologist for US Special Forces”. The subject of tremendous internal controversy, the APA ultimately rescinded the taskforce report in 2013.
Collusion to promote torture: a reckoning finally arrives
In October, the APA called Risen’s account “largely based on innuendo and one-sided reporting”. Yet the next month the association announced it had asked Hoffman to investigate potential “collusion with the Bush administration to promote, support or facilitate the use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques by the United States in the war on terror”.
Throughout the controversy, the APA has preferred to treat criticism of its involvement in torture, either from journalists or from human rights-minded psychologists, with dismissal. Its internal investigations of the criticisms have typically ended up exonerating its members.
“A thorough review of these public materials and our standing policies will clearly demonstrate that APA will not tolerate psychologist participation in torture,” the APA communications chief, Rhea Farberman, told the Guardian in January 2014, after the Guardian revealed that an APA inquiry declined to pursue charges against a psychologist involved in the Guantánamo Bay torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani.
The psychologist, former US army reserve major John Leso, took part in a brutal interrogation of Qahtani, the suspected intended 20th 9/11 hijacker, according to a leaked interrogation log and investigation by the Senate armed services committee.
Interrogators extensively deprived Qahtani of sleep, forced him to perform what the log called “dog tricks”, inundated him with loud music for extended periods, and forcibly hydrated him intravenously until he urinated on himself.
“The concern that APA’s decision to close the matter against Dr John Leso will set a precedent against disciplining members who participate in abusive interrogations is utterly unfounded,” the APA’s Farberman told the Guardian in January 2014.
By Eric Tucker | AP October 13 at 12:00 PM WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday sued two former Air Force psychologists who designed a CIA program that used harsh interrogation techniques to elicit intelligence from suspected terrorists, saying the pair endorsed and taught torture tactics under the guise of science.
The lawsuit comes 10 months after the release of a damning Senate report that said the interrogation techniques had inflicted pain on al-Qaida prisoners far beyond the legal limits and did not yield lifesaving intelligence.
The suit accuses the psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, of developing an interrogation program that relied on beatings, sleep deprivation, starvation, waterboarding and other methods that caused physical and psychological suffering on prisoners in CIA custody.
A lawyer who has represented the pair did not immediately return messages seeking comment on Tuesday.
The suit was filed in federal court in Washington state on behalf of three former CIA prisoners. One, Gul Rahman, was interrogated in a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison called the Salt Pit, subjected to isolation, darkness and extreme cold water, and was later found dead of hypothermia. The other two men, Suleiman Abdullah Salim and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, are now free.
The lawsuit was brought under the Alien Tort Statute, which allows noncitizens to sue in U.S. courts over human-rights violations. A 2010 Associated Press report, citing former U.S. officials, said the CIA had promised to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for the psychologists if the program ran into trouble.
“They claimed that their program was scientifically based, safe and proven, when in fact it was none of those things. The program was unlawful and its methods barbaric,” Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program, said in a statement.
The suit repeats many of the allegations that surfaced in an exhaustive Senate investigation issued last year. It found sweeping flaws with the CIA’s approach to interrogations.
The complaint alleges that the psychologists, despite having no practical interrogation experience or specific background in al-Qaida, devised a program for the CIA that drew from 1960s experiments involving dogs and the theory of “learned helplessness.” In making their case to the CIA, the psychologists argued that just as abused dogs will ultimately become passive and compliant, humans subject to “uncontrollable pain” would “become helpless and unable to resist an interrogator’s demand for information,” according to the lawsuit.
The pair, who worked as independent contractors for the CIA, formed a company that was ultimately paid $81 million and which as of April 2007 directly employed 11 of the 13 interrogators used by the agency, the complaint states. The contract was ended in 2010.
The ACLU also says the men themselves were involved in some of the interrogations, including of Abu Zubaydah, a captured al-Qaida operative who was waterboarded dozens of times in 2002.
The Justice Department approved the use of harsh interrogation methods proposed by the CIA in legal memos that were subsequently withdrawn and discredited.
Following release of the Senate report last year, Mitchell told The Associated Press that he could not confirm his involvement with the CIA because of a secrecy agreement. But he challenged the report’s conclusion that the interrogation tactics did not produce otherwise unobtainable intelligence.
“I completely understand why the human rights organizations in the United States are upset by the Senate report,” Mitchell said at the time. “I would be upset by it too, if it were true.”
“What they are asking you to believe is that multiple directors of the CIA and analysts who made their living for years doing this lied to the federal government, or were too stupid to know that the intelligence they were getting wasn’t useful.”
CIA officials grew concerned by 2003 that the psychologists had a potential financial and ethical conflict of interest since they were being paid both to design interrogation techniques and assess their effectiveness, the lawsuit says. In its response to the Senate report, the CIA acknowledged that the conflict “raised concern and prompted deliberation.” But it also defended hiring the two men.
“We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program,” the agency said.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
The right to a remedy is fundamental under international law and must be accessible to victims irrespective of where the violation occurred or whether the State exercising jurisdiction is the perpetrator. … The United States Torture Victims Protection Act in fact provides an example of how States parties can carry out their obligations under article 14 of the Convention. … An essential component of this obligation to provide redress is that States do not block or obstruct access to effective remedies by invoking “State secrets” or other doctrines to dismiss lawsuits in limine litis.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Washington - Two former detainees and the family of a third who died in custody filed a lawsuit Tuesday against the American psychologists who designed the CIA's torture techniques, in the first legal action to rely on the Senate Intelligence Committee's investigation of the government's interrogation program.
The plaintiffs accused James Elmer Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen of torture, cruel and degrading punishment, war crimes and conducting an "experimental torture program" as part of a "joint criminal enterprise" with the nation's top intelligence agency.
The pair earned more than $80 million for developing a set of brutal interrogation methods, including simulated drowning known as waterboarding, beatings, starvation and confinement in "coffin-like boxes," for supervising their use on detainees in secret overseas CIA prisons and for personally applying them to detainees, according to the suit.
"Mitchell and Jessen conspired with the CIA to torture these three men and many others," said Steven Watt, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union Human Rights Program. "They claimed that their program was scientifically based, safe and proven, when in fact it was none of those things. The program was unlawful and its methods barbaric."
The ACLU-led lawsuit was brought in U.S. District Court in Washington state - Jessen and Mitchell founded a firm in Spokane that the CIA contracted to run the program - and seeks unspecified monetary damages for each plaintiff. The two survivors still suffer serious psychological and physical problems as a result of the abuses they underwent, the lawsuit said.
The action was brought on behalf of Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a Tanzanian fisherman and trader who was abducted from Somalia, and Mohammad Ahmed Ben Soud, a former Libyan opposition activist who was seized in Pakistan. Neither was ever charged with a crime.
The third plaintiff is a relative of Gul Rahman, an Afghan who died in CIA custody in November 2002 from suspected hypothermia and other complications after being "slapped, punched and dragged naked, hooded and bound," doused in cold water and left in freezing temperatures. His family was never notified of his death and was never given his body.
A CIA spokesman declined to comment and Mitchell didn't return a telephone call. Jessen could not immediately be reached for comment.
The lawsuit represents a new approach to seeking accountability for the CIA's Rendition, Detention and Interrogation program. It is the first to rely extensively on the Senate Intelligence Committee's five-year, $40 million investigation into the agency's top-secret effort to unearth terrorist plots after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
"This is the first attempt to bring some justice to the survivors of torture since the Senate's report," Watt said in an interview. "The victims deserve an apology and some sort of accountability to help them recover from what they were put through."
The lawsuit also cited the CIA's official response to the Senate report, a 2004 declassified CIA inspector general's report and a review of the torture program by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility.
Previous suits filed by former detainees were brought against the CIA. All were thrown out after the government cited official immunity and the state secrets privilege - a government claim that contends the disclosure of certain evidence would harm national security.
While the Senate report detailed the roles of CIA officers, Jessen and Mitchell may be the only key participants in the torture program held accountable if the plaintiffs prevail in their lawsuit.
Their participation in the program led the American Psychological Association to vote in August to ban psychologists from participating in national security interrogations.
The Senate report found that the program, authorized by former President George W. Bush, failed to generate any significant information on terrorist plots and that the CIA misrepresented the results of the brutal interrogation techniques to the Bush administration, Congress and the public.
Salim, Ben Soud and Rahman were among 39 people identified by name in the Senate report, which was released Dec. 9, 2014, as undergoing what the agency called enhanced interrogation techniques.
Mitchell, former Bush administration officials and the CIA rejected the committee's findings. They denied using torture, asserting that the interrogation methods were legal and produced information that helped disrupt terrorist attacks and led the agency to Osama bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan, where he died in a May 2, 2011, U.S. special forces raid.
"I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country by people at the highest level of the government and I did the best that I could," Mitchell said in an April 2014 interview with Britain's The Guardian newspaper.
The two psychologists were involved with a U.S. military program that teaches service members how to evade capture and resist torture. They developed their methods for grilling detainees after the CIA asked them in December 2001 to review an al Qaida document recovered by British police that outlined strategies for resisting interrogations.
The pair "proposed a pseudo-scientific theory of countering resistance that justified the use of torture," said the lawsuit, adding that they based their approach on studies in which dogs were induced into helplessness and passivity through "random and repeated electric shocks."
They first personally applied their techniques to Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a senior al Qaida operative who used the nom de guerre Abu Zubaida and was captured in Pakistan in March 2002.
Mitchell and Jessen, who had no training or experience as interrogators, used the detainee's capture as an "opportunity to test (their) 'learned helplessness theory.'"
The lawsuit described in horrifying detail the accounts given by Salim and Ben Soud of their abductions, detentions and interrogations in secret CIA prisons in which they were held - Salim for 17 months and Ben Soud for 28 months - in Afghanistan. Doctors monitored their conditions while the pair was abused.
Both were stripped, starved and held in darkness while being chained and suspended from ceilings by their arms, the lawsuit said.
They were subjected to sleep deprivation, loud music, beatings and cramped confinement in large and small boxes, said the lawsuit. Salim "became so hopeless and despondent," it said, that he attempted suicide with painkillers that he was given for broken fingers that he sustained during his CIA abduction.
Salim repeatedly was doused with freezing water. Ben Soud underwent "water torture" in which he was stripped, "placed in the center of a large plastic sheet" and partially submerged in ice-cold water.
Ben Soud also claimed he was subjected to a waterboarding-like technique in which he was strapped to a wooden board that could spin 360 degrees. Cold water was poured over his body and his head covered in a hood, said the lawsuit, which included a sketch Ben Soud made of the device.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
My heartbreaking journey to Gitmo: A widow, a military prison & the enigma of human compassion
Jan. 11, 2016, marked the 14th anniversary of “the national shame” called Guantánamo Bay. As of this writing, there are still 91 men in the prison, down from its highest point of 779. Some of them have been there since 2002, several months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Even before being brought to Guantánamo, many were held at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, or were interrogated and tortured in offsite CIA detention facilities. Many of them were suspected of being low-level staff working for al-Qaida, once our ally in Afghanistan against the Russians. A number of men were captured and brought to U.S. agents by bounty hunters, eager to obtain the handsome ransoms being offered by the United States, eager post-tragedy to reflect a great show of strength in leading the War on Terror.
For the last 14 years, I have followed whatever information was accessible about the routine kidnapping (rendering), detention (imprisonment) and treatment (torture and other brutal practices) of the hundreds of detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Striking during that time has been the range of reactions from various military personnel, ranging from unconditional support to indifference to the torture and cruel treatment of men whose guilt has been in serious doubt.
For six months, I had tried to obtain permission to enter Guantánamo to view the prison facilities. Finally, after a series of mishaps caused by impossible application procedures, on Dec. 31, 2014, I was invited to observe a military commission instead of the prison. Anxious to get to the base, I accepted the invitation, which meant I would fly on a military plane from Washington, D.C., rather than on a charter plane out of Miami. My trip was set for three weeks later. I was elated, as was my husband, who notified nearly every acquaintance or friend or family member he could think of. He seemed to believe that the invitation was the result of personal perseverance on my part rather than happenstance.
On Jan. 24, 2015, I kissed my husband and partner of 27 years goodbye as I began my trek to Guantánamo Bay Naval Facilities from the Springfield, Massachusetts, Amtrak station. As a columnist for Salon.com, I had obtained permission to observe a trial of an Afghan detainee, Abd Hadi al Iraqi, who had been rendered by the U.S. government from Turkey in 2006 and brought to Guantánamo to face a military tribunal for war crimes. He was not part of the original group of detainees who had been brought to Guantánamo in 2002 when the prison facility was first re-opened.
At 8:30 a.m. on Jan. 27, after being unable to contact him since arriving on the base two days earlier, I received word that my husband had been found at home in our bed. He had died of a brain aneurysm sometime after I left that weekend during the great blizzard that blanketed the Northeast. It was the beginning of a snowstorm that, through the lens of my dimmed eyes, seemed to continue unabated for months.
With me in the press room when I learned of his death were two other people: One was C, a longtime war journalist and only reporter who has nearly daily, consistently, covered the goings-on at Guantánamo Bay since its opening 14 years ago. She was a remarkable person to observe in operation. From the moment we reached Guantánamo, she was busy making phone calls, getting the scoop on some latest story, casually finding out hot details, chatting up people for confirmation. The other was J, a lawyer who was covering the trial for a small newsletter. J and I shared a sense of humor, similar political views, and we had hit it off immediately. I think she, like me, was in awe of C.
By the time I got off the phone, C informed me that there happened to be a plane leaving within the hour and that I needed to be on that plane. My mind, suddenly completely numb, resisted her suggestion with a range of semi-rational, if not utterly irrational thoughts. I needed to call my in-laws, my family, his friends, others. I needed to call his employer, his colleagues. I needed to figure out how to organize the services. There was no way that I could get onto that plane.
C persisted. She insisted that I needed to get on that plane, because there was no telling when another would be leaving for the mainland. We were on a naval base, not an airport. Numbly I agreed, but remained sitting, still stunned and unsure how to move. C, securing my assent, packed my bags while I made two more phone calls to friends who would set the machinery of post-death preparations in motion while I was in flight for the rest of the day — informing immediate family of my spouse’s death, organizing times for friends to visit and drop off meals, coordinating who would stay close by once I arrived back home, arranging time off from my classes.
While I made those phone calls, other machinery on the Naval Base was being set in gear, machinery that reflected a certain kind of urgency, a kind of institutional compassion that I did not anticipate, but for which I was deeply grateful. Someone, most likely C, had informed the Public Affairs Office, which was hosting my trip, of the news that I had received. When I got off the phone, J made sure I had all my gear, and, holding my hand firmly in hers, led me outside the air-conditioned office to the hangar that served as a garage for press vehicles. I was composed, and my mind was meticulously organizing the list of things I needed to do once I got home: funeral arrangements, food, asking Bob why he dared to die on me. There was a press van waiting to take me to… somewhere. I wasn’t sure where, and my mind didn’t have the necessary components at that moment to ask. All I knew is that we were waiting and couldn’t leave right away. Somehow, it was communicated to me that the proper paperwork had to be prepared to allow me to leave the base; the plane was waiting for both that and my physical presence.
Waiting in the hangar to escort me and J (who held on to me all the way to the airport) was an Air Force officer named Maj. Wayne Capps. I don’t remember much, but I was struck by his sincerity. He expressed his deep sorrow to me.
Finally, the paperwork to allow me to exit the naval base had come through. My sense of time is skewed, but it might have been anywhere between 30 minutes to one hour later. It was clear that the plane, which was scheduled to take off at 9 a.m., was still grounded.
We climbed into the air-conditioned van, along with the major and several more of his colleagues. I stared out the window silently, barely grasping the flashes of greenery, surrounded by man-made dividers and cones to guide our vehicle. We drove through a series of checkpoints through the base, our driver flashing papers and IDs until we finally arrived at a small dock where a Coast Guard speedboat was waiting. Even in my grief-induced haze, I marveled at the remarkably tight track-and-trolling surveillance procedures that the military had perfected. There was nowhere to go without having one’s movement tracked, at least if one was, like me, an interloper.
Equipping us with life jackets, Capps and his colleagues escorted J and myself onto the boat. My legs moved of their own accord, independently of my impulse to collapse on the dock and moan until Bob was back in this world again. Once we sat down, the boat whisked us to the other part of the island where the airport was. The incoming ride on the ferry had probably taken at least an hour, if not more. Yet this ride must have been much shorter than it felt to me. As Capps remarked to me, “In all my time on this base, I’ve never gotten from this side to that side as quickly as we did today.”
Finally, we arrived at the hangar, and the pilot arranged our places on the small C-12 Navy plane, organizing us by weight and size so as to ensure that the tiny aircraft would be able to maintain its balance. He warned the women to make a last rest stop, as it would be virtually impossible for women to relieve themselves during the flight, given the absence of facilities. (I managed to defy that restriction quite valiantly, if I say so myself. But that’s a story best told over a drink.) Some time later, we took off for what would be a four-hour flight to Mayport Naval Base, which was approximately one hour from Jacksonville Airport in Florida. Realizing that those four hours would be the last time that I would have any quiet to consider my loss, to try to understand how in 72 short hours my entire world had been upended, I crawled into that corner of my mind that still believed a tiny bit that Bob was not dead, or at least that he could still hear me, and remained there for the rest of the flight. I talked to my darling, promising to finish his last two books, cursing him for leaving me, asking him how I would ever breathe again without him.
Arriving in Mayport, I was approached by a female military press officer who had been instructed to drive me to Jacksonville to catch the flight to New England via Atlanta, which C had booked for me. I felt a strange unexpected relief. I had not expected to be met by anyone, anticipating instead that I would be catching a taxi to the airport alone.
During that hour, the press officer and one other passenger, a woman who had helped me defy the restroom restrictions on my flight, silently listened as I cried on the phone with various relatives and friends, apologizing to my mother-in-law for his death and uttering other sorts of inanities of grief. As we arrived at the airport, each woman hugged me goodbye. The press officer pressed a piece of paper in my hand with her name and number in case I needed anything (although I’ve since lost that precious paper) as I made my way back home in the midst of the blizzard that had refused to cease even in the face of world’s biggest tragedy. At least it was for me, in that moment.
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Credit: Associated Press
Over the last several decades, the public reputation and image of the military has been burnished or tarnished by turns, depending upon the news item. As support for the War on Terror has ebbed and flowed and the last two presidential administration have realized that support for the military would diminish in the event of a draft, the military has been continually remade. On the one hand, political officials and their spouses, eager to exploit a range of tragedies—9/11, WMD, nuclear weapons, bringing democracy to the uncivilized–have pushed hard to appoint the military the world’s police force. On the other hand, as the ever increasing television ads for the Navy, the Army, the Air Force proudly boast—the military has a complex existence as a humanitarian enterprise: saving babies, rescuing flood victims, digging wells, offering widespread emergency medical assistance. It is clear that military personnel are proud that they have been integral in alleviating the suffering of their fellow countrymen, as well as denizens of other countries.
Clearly, the humanity with which the military treated my tragedy will come as no surprise to some, be they members of the military or family members or others who are familiar with them. It is clear that men and women in the military understand suffering. They seem to empathize deeply with others who suffer. They understand death, perhaps in a way that most of us who have not been in combat or in war zones, or victims of drones or bombs or subject to warfare, may not ever quite get a handle on. The capacity of individual members of the military to understand suffering has never been in doubt, at least not for me. But I wonder whose suffering they understand—or, more important, whose suffering they don’t understand… and why.
It seems that for a very long time, there hasn’t been much of a will or interest—at least in the upper echelons of military decision makers, whether the commander-in-chief or his advisers, to be attentive to the deep distress of other groups who have suffered deeply, like the Guantánamo detainees. Consider, for example, the plight of Shaker Aamer, who was detained in Guantánamo for 14 years, even though he had been cleared for release since 2007, five years after he was turned over to the U.S. by bounty hunters who had captured him in Afghanistan. From there, Aamer was held in Baghram Jail on a U.S. Air Force Base, where he was acutely tortured for two months before being sent to Guantánamo, where the torture continued. As a result, Aamer suffered deep health problems. Many of these stemmed from his treatment in Bagram and Guantanamo. As the doctor who examined him stated:
He reported severe maltreatment by guards, interrogators, and medical personnel working in concert, by means of humiliation, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, manipulation offood and water, stress positions, threats of sexual assault against his young daughter, and beatings.
As Amer describes:
One interrogator talked about what he would do to my five-year-old daughter in details that destroyed me. He said ‘They are going to screw her. She will be screaming, ‘Daddy! Daddy’’ You are completely disorganized. You are completely destroyed.
The medical report is intensely graphic and detailed. I recommend that you read it. There can be no doubt that he suffered deeply. There is every reason to believe that the upper echelons of the Bush administration and the Obama administration were aware of it, even if not the commanders-in-chief themselves. Still, there was little interest in releasing him, despite the Bush administration’s admission that they had no evidence against him.
Why, in the face of such clear indifference to the cruelty and brutality, to the suffering to which someone like Shaker Aamer–imprisoned without any justifiable evidence–was subjected, was there such a humane response to my suffering? What are the limits of compassion for the U.S. military? Clearly, mine was relatively modest suffering in terms of the scale that military personnel have seen. I was in Guantánamo as a journalist–a class of people that, I suspect, the military doesn’t like or trust very much, no matter the declarations to the contrary. From its perspective, the press maligns the U.S. military, misstates the facts, embarrasses them frequently, and is relatively unaccountable.
Yet, despite this presumable dislike, when the press office learned of my news, they made every effort to treat me humanely–to ensure that I was able to return home with minimal disruption or intervention to my already frayed mind. Their humanity, their kindness, their compassion was deeply welcomed, if striking.
It will seem ridiculously obvious to many readers why I was treated humanely. I am a U.S. citizen, an academic and political writer, and I haven’t been accused of wrongdoing. Like me, many of these detainees are dark and from a similar part of the world. Unlike me, they are accused of (but neither charged or shown to have committed) crimes. Still, the difference in treatment is worth considering; I want to make what seems obvious a little more unfamiliar: I want to ask when and how the military recognizes deserved versus undeserved suffering. I understand that the military’s job is to destroy, kill, to conquer the enemy. But these men are not in any position to threaten us in their jail cells, even when untortured. And we know that torture leads to no good information, to little else but an outlet for frustration and hate.
One can argue that it didn’t take much for the military personnel I was surrounded by to care for me: They merely had to process the papers and get me on a plane off the Naval Base. Yet, the efficiency with which they were able to organize themselves in order to get me home indicates that, if not a procedure in place, there is certainly a particular comportment that enables the alleviation of suffering.
Hannah Arendt argues that human beings rarely have the capacity to negotiate with institutions or nation-states in their status as mere human beings. We require political protection—a mantle of sorts: to be a citizen of a specific nation-state that is willing to recognize us, extend us legal protections, defend us. Of course, when Arendt wrote about this in 1948, she was referring to stateless refugees. They not only had no nation-state to which to appeal for protection, but they were by many nations considered the victims of wrongdoing, subject to enmity, hatred, and racism through no fault of their own. And despite those circumstances, despite the Minority Treaties, beginning in 1919 and extending into the 1920s, whereby European nations agreed to extend hospitality to the stateless, the unwanted populations of Europe in the 1930s were neither encouraged nor welcomed to seek refuge among the signatory countries.
The detainees of Guantánamo, meanwhile, have been unceasingly under a public cloud of suspicion since their initial capture, despite the fact that the United States government, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has rarely offered substantial charges nor public evidence against the detainees. In a famous challenge to the U.N. Geneva Conventions about how to treat prisoners of war, the Bush administration decided to treat the detainees as unlawful enemy combatants, a new category altogether, which left the detainees in a legal limbo. The entire scenario reflected a Kafkaesque reality: It was a no-man’s status in a no-man’s land, Guantánamo Bay Naval Base—territory leased from Cuba, considered American, and not easily part of any national jurisdiction or legal territory when questions of accountability arose.
Besides the treatment of Amer, there were multiple accounts of widespread abuse and torture so extreme and so graphic that it sickened various officials who observed it. And yet it continued for years. It continued despite multiple reports pointing to the futility of torture in obtaining solid information. In fact, as Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye report in a stunning article that shares the handwritten notes on the torture program by one of its original designers—a psychologist under contract with the CIA, Dr. Bruce Jessen–the program was created not to extract information, but to produce compliance among the detainees.
Despite these reports and the horrific counterfactuals that betrayed the injustice of the indefinite imprisonment and horrific treatment of these men in Guantánamo Bay, there was indifference—both among U.S. military troops and their commanding officers, as well as in the upper echelons of both the Bush and Obama presidential administrations. The torture continued—if not through outright savagery as experienced by Shaker Aamer, then by medically and militarily unjustifiable practices such as force-feeding–despite the initial statements and executive order by President Obama to end it.
In my case, I suspect that I was extended a certain easy humanity because I wasn’t particularly suspicious. I had been vetted before being cleared to travel to Guantánamo, and this revealed me to be a quiet if occasionally vocal and irritating academic, with no interesting ties to Islam or to many political organizations. But these are procedural answers. The question that I am really asking is what distinguishes my entitlement to be treated compassionately from that of the detainees? Why, when I am seen to suffer through the loss of a loved one, does the U.S. military recognize my suffering and respond humanely to it, even as it is fundamentally unable to offer a similar kind of attention to men who—even if once under suspicion—have not been found to have done anything, except perhaps by loose affiliation with suspected bad boys, as retiring Commander of the Southern Command, Gen. John Kelly called the remaining men in Guantánamo in his final remarks to the press?
I’m not sure that I can convincingly argue for some link between the individual capacity to empathize and the expression or extension of that ability to a bureaucratic organization. I’m not suggesting that institutions have emotions or passions. But the policies that institutions adopt can reflect any one of a number of mind-sets: defensiveness (obviously this can be seen through various combat situations or decisions to go to war), compassion and humanity (as in utilizing troops to repair or build infrastructure, offer medical assistance, organize supply chains and pipelines to bring nourishment to people). At some level, the difference in treatment might lie in the difference in the value of these lives, or the difference in their political worth, or just a mere question of recognition: Who gets to be seen as worthy of respect in the face of trauma? And why?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
WASHINGTON — Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.
They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.
But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.
Interrogation Inc.: A Window Into C.I.A.’s Embrace of Secret JailsAUG. 12, 2009 So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.
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DR. BRUCE JESSEN Joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A. Credit ABC News Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.
Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.
Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.
“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”
For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”
The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.
With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors’ colleagues and present and former government officials.
In a brief e-mail exchange in June, Dr. Mitchell said his nondisclosure agreement with the C.I.A. prevented him from commenting. He suggested that his work had been mischaracterized.
“Ask around,” Dr. Mitchell wrote, “and I’m sure you will find all manner of ‘experts’ who will be willing to make up what you’d like to hear on the spot and unrestrained by reality.”
A Career Shift
At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Mitchell had just retired from his last military job, as psychologist to an elite special operations unit in North Carolina. Showing his entrepreneurial streak, he had started a training company called Knowledge Works, which he operated from his new home in Florida, to supplement retirement pay.
But for someone with Dr. Mitchell’s background, it was evident that the campaign against Al Qaeda would produce opportunities. He began networking in military and intelligence circles where he had a career’s worth of connections.
He had grown up poor in Florida, Dr. Mitchell told friends, and joined the Air Force in 1974, seeking adventure. Stationed in Alaska, he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.
Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with him, remembered Dr. Mitchell stopping by years later. He had completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, comparing diet and exercise in controlling hypertension, and was working for the Air Force in Spokane.
“I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations,” Dr. Madigan said.
Military survival training was expanded after the Korean War, when false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist “brainwashing.” Military officials decided that giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.
Air Force survival training was consolidated in 1966 at Fairchild Air Force Base in the parched hills outside Spokane. The name of the training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, suggests its breadth: airmen and women learn to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner.
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JIM MITCHELL A former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman, Dr. Mitchell and his colleague had no expertise on Al Qaeda and had never conducted an actual interrogation. But they had psychological credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. Credit ABC News In the 1980s, Dr. Jessen became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School, screening instructors who posed as enemy interrogators at the mock prison camp and making sure rough treatment did not go too far. He had grown up in a Mormon community with a view of Grand Teton, earning a doctorate at Utah State studying “family sculpting,” in which patients make physical models of their family to portray emotional relationships.
Dr. Jessen moved in 1988 to the top psychologist’s job at a parallel “graduate school” of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school. Dr. Mitchell took his place.
The two men became part of what some Defense Department officials called the “resistance mafia,” experts on how to resist enemy interrogations. Both lieutenant colonels and both married with children, they took weekend ice-climbing trips together.
While many subordinates considered them brainy and capable leaders, some fellow psychologists were more skeptical. At the annual conference of SERE psychologists, two colleagues recalled, Dr. Mitchell offered lengthy put-downs of presentations that did not suit him.
At the Air Force school, Dr. Mitchell was known for enforcing the safety of interrogations; it might surprise his later critics to learn that he eliminated a tactic called “manhandling” after it produced a spate of neck injuries, a colleague said.
At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.
Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his “pretty scary” performance, another official recalled.
Always, former and current SERE officials say, it is understood that the training mimics the methods of unscrupulous foes.
Mark Mays, the first psychologist at the Air Force school, said that to make the fake prison camp realistic, officials consulted American P.O.W.’s who had just returned from harrowing camps in North Vietnam.
“It was clear that this is what we’d expect from our enemies,” said Dr. Mays, now a clinical psychologist and lawyer in Spokane. “It was not something I could ever imagine Americans would do.”
Start of the Program
In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Among them was Dr. Mitchell, who attended with a C.I.A. psychologist, Kirk M. Hubbard.
During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was “grieved and horrified” to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.
Dr. Seligman had discovered in the 1960s that dogs that learned they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks would become listless and simply whine and endure the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.
Helplessness, which later became an influential concept in the treatment of human depression, was also much discussed in military survival training. Instructors tried to stop short of producing helplessness in trainees, since their goal was to strengthen the spirit of service members in enemy hands.
Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.
Continue reading the main story RECENT COMMENTS
Trish August 12, 2009 I see no valid reason to *not* investigate the torture performed by Americans in official capacity. Just because some American officials... Jiggssma August 12, 2009 These men are a disgrace to their profession - but not that unusual in a country that seems to have many people who lost their ethical... j crane August 12, 2009 Thanks NYT for bringing this story to light. I hope it will encourage all professions, especially psychology, to put much more emphasis on... SEE ALL COMMENTS At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.
Photo Air Force Survival School students on a training mission to learn how to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner. Credit Jeff Green/Associated Press By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”
By the end of March, when agency operatives captured Abu Zubaydah, initially described as Al Qaeda’s No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen interrogation plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used conventional rapport-building methods to draw vital information from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.
With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.
Whether they protested to C.I.A. bosses is uncertain, because the voluminous message traffic between headquarters and the Thailand site remains classified. One witness said he believed that “revisionism” in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.
As the weeks passed, the senior agency psychologist departed, followed by one F.B.I. agent and then the other. Dr. Mitchell began directing the questioning and occasionally speaking directly to Mr. Zubaydah, one official said.
In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined his partner in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.
The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.
Lucrative Work
The Zubaydah case gave reason to question the Mitchell-Jessen plan: the prisoner had given up his most valuable information without coercion.
But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.
The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.
Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)
In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military’s SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of Mr. Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.
The company’s C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.
The psychologists’ influence remained strong under four C.I.A. directors. In 2006, in fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, pushed back against the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and its methods, the director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, asked Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen to brief State Department officials and persuade them to drop their objections. They were unsuccessful.
By then, the national debate over torture had begun, and it would undo the psychologists’ business.
In a statement to employees on April 9, Leon E. Panetta, President Obama’s C.I.A. director, announced the “decommissioning” of the agency’s secret jails and repeated a pledge not to use coercion. And there was another item: “No C.I.A. contractors will conduct interrogations.”
Agency officials terminated the contracts for Mitchell Jessen and Associates, and the psychologists’ lucrative seven-year ride was over. Within days, the company had vacated its Spokane offices. The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address.
Correction: August 15, 2009 An article on Wednesday about two former military psychologists who designed the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation program in 2002 misstated the credentials of an Air Force officer who criticized the interrogation methods but suggested that the two psychologists had acted out of patriotic motives. The officer, Steven M. Kleinman, is a career intelligence officer and former interrogator; he is not a psychologist and is not “Dr. Kleinman.” (He has master’s degrees in strategic intelligence and forensic sciences, but does not have a doctorate.)
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
Torture was the rule Laura Durkay reports on new evidence of CIA torture during the "war on terror."
June 18, 2015 CIA headquarters A NEW set of declassified documents obtained by the ACLU and published by The Guardian continues to shed light on the dark recesses of the CIA's detention and torture programs during the early years of the U.S. "war on terror."
The latest internal documents contain a creepily banal memo discussing the agency's own regulations on "research on human subjects"--in other words, human experimentation. The memo specifies that such research must meet ethical standards set out by the Department of Health and Human Services; must be approved by the director of Central Intelligence, the head of the CIA; and must be conducted with "the subject's informed consent."
These constraints seem laughable in the face of what we already know about the CIA's torture program--and what we know is surely only the tip of the iceberg. The CIA's entire menu of torture tactics was designed by psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell.
Interrogations in the CIA's black sites were overseen by medical professionals from the agency's Office of Medical Services--who documented the violent interrogations and offered advice on how to improve them, advising on such details as "acceptable lower ambient temperatures" and how to keep detainees from choking on their own vomit during waterboarding sessions (pro tip: feed them Ensure).
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BUT IT'S worth asking why the agency has such guidelines in the first place. The CIA has a long history of human experimentation, going back to the first years of its existence, much of it centered around torture.
As part of the MK-Ultra program half a century ago, the CIA both funded academic research and conducted its own experiments on ways to control the human psyche. This included the "brainwashing" experiments of Dr. Ewan Cameron in the 1950s and '60s, which are described vividly in the opening chapter of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.
Cameron's experiments involved subjecting institutionalized mental patients to repeated electric shocks, extreme sensory deprivation and sensory overload, sleep and temporal manipulation. They often reduced his patients to an infantile state and left deep psychological scars. The agency used the research to build up its library of "clean" torture techniques, which were psychologically and often physically destructive, but left no marks.
As part of MK-Ultra, the CIA also conduced numerous experiments with LSD and other powerful drugs. Some of the test subjects were willing volunteers, including the agnecy's own employees. But others were suspected Soviet double agents held in a secret CIA prison in the Panama Canal Zone--the agency's first black site, opened in the late 1940s.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA continued its "brainwashing" experiments on Vietnamese prisoners of war, including sending two agents to a Vietnamese prison to test out the effects of Ewen Cameron's electroshock machine in the field.
The agency's worst abuses were exposed at the close the Vietnam War. In the mid-1970s, the Church Commission--a congressional committee that was the precursor to today's Senate Select Intelligence Committee--exposed massive CIA covert operations, assassination plots, horrific torture in Vietnam and extensive spying by the CIA inside the U.S. against U.S. citizens, something that was supposed to be outside the bounds of its mandate as an organization.
The revelations of the Church Commission led to some formal restrictions on the power of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, including Executive Order 12333, which these current CIA documents claim to be following.
But the process following the Church Committee's findings showed a pattern that should by now be distressingly familiar. The new restrictions didn't stop the CIA from committing or colluding with massive human rights abuses in Latin America in the 1980s, for example.
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IN THE case of the "war on terror," the agency's own regulations should have prevented it from creating its detention, rendition and interrogation program at all. But it's clear that the paper regulations proved meaningless in the face of what Bush administration politicians and agency officials thought were the political imperatives of the worldwide "war on terror." Just weeks after the September 11 attacks, they had decided they wanted to torture, and they built the legal rationale to do it.
In a series of secret memos, later dubbed the "Torture Memos," Bush administration lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee crafted a twisted legal rationale in which an interrogation tactic could only be considered torture if it caused "severe pain" similar to that associated with "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death."
They argued that under this exceedingly narrow definition, a whole range of "enhanced interrogation techniques" weren't torture, and were therefore permissible. They also argued that prisoners captured as part of the war on terror were not legally prisoners of war, and therefore not subject to the Geneva Conventions standards of minimum humane treatment and freedom from indefinite detention without trial.
While the Torture Memos were being written, CIA officers were already torturing at black sites in Afghanistan--even though their actions had just been arbitrarily legally defined as not-torture. And torture involves human experimentation by definition.
As much as torturers may wish their work were an exact science--where the exact right combination of techniques would always yield timely, perfectly accurate intelligence--human beings don't really work that way. Torture is a craft that always gets refined through practical application and improvisation.
Assuming that you have actually captured a prisoner who had intelligence to give--an assumption that was not true for a huge number of the CIA's detainees--extracting it through torture is much harder than Jack Bauer makes it look on 24. But rather than admit torture is not the foolproof, fast-acting weapon that television makes it look like, torturers are much more likely to believe that if they haven't gotten the information they need, it's because they simply aren't torturing violently or creatively enough.
So torturers have a strong drive to improvise--which is why it's not surprising that the Torture Report reveals numerous examples of CIA officers doing things that were outside the limits of the CIA's pre-approved list of not-torture torture techniques, including mock executions, waterboarding prisoners almost to the point of death and the now-infamous "rectal feeding."
The latest cache of documents reveals a fundamental truth about the working of U.S. imperialism--that legislative or regulatory efforts to restrain its barbarity are never going to be effective in the long run. An agency's power can be temporarily curtailed, but it always resurfaces when the U.S. state has a need for it.
Efforts to inject just a little torture into the U.S. war machine led to an epidemic of abuse that spread extremely rapidly through the entire U.S. war-making apparatus in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo and at black sites in other countries. The internal controls against such behavior in both the CIA and the military were simply ignored in the name of "fighting terrorism."
After the release of the Torture Report, new efforts may be made to rein in these institutions. But there's only one way to permanently stop them from torturing and killing--and that's to dismantle U.S. imperialism.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
In an unprecedented move a federal judge will allow a lawsuit filed against two psychologists who were contracted to help the US spy agency develop an interrogation regime for suspected terrorists.
The suit alleges that despite having no expertise on Al Qaeda, the two Washington state psychologists devised an interrogation program that drew from 1960s experiments involving dogs and a theory called “learned helplessness.” The interrogation techniques included slamming prisoners into walls, stuffing them inside coffin-like boxes, exposing them to extreme temperatures, starving them, and depriving them of sleep for days. The torture inflicted suffering and trauma that the victims continue to endure up to this day, the lawsuit claims.
The decision to allow the lawsuit, filed last October on behalf of three former CIA prisoners, gives an initial victory to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which has long sought justice for the dozens of victims of the interrogation techniques.
But more notable in rulling was the Justice Department noninterference in the lawsuit, marking the first time such a lawsuit has gone forward. Previously, both the Obama and Bush administrations have blocked similar lawsuits from proceeding by often invoking the state-secrets privilege, which allows the government to block release of any information in a lawsuit that, if disclosed, would be dangerous to national security. The Justice Department did however submit a filing saying it wanted to make sure that certain classified information including, the identities of interrogators and locations of detention sites, remained secret.
The Justice Department noninterference isn’t exactly because it chose to do so. The government’s ability to invoke the state-secrets privilege is now limited due to a Senate Intelligence Committee 2014 report – now public – that details the extent of the CIA methods and mentions the three prisoners as well as the psychologists that were responsible for developing the methods. The 500-page executive summary also reveals that the torture program was more extreme than thought, and yet didn’t yield any helpful intelligence.
“There have been so many cases brought by torture victims ... and not one of them has been able to go forward, for shameful reasons,” Hina Shamsi, an ACLU lawyer on the case, told reporters outside the courtroom after the hearing, the Huffington Post reported. “This is a very big deal for our clients.”
Though President Barack Obama outlawed the use of torture when he took office, his administration hasn’t prosecuted any individuals that were responsible for developing and implementing the CIA program. The interrogation program came under scrutiny in the final years of President Bush. The ACLU says that the program tortured up to 119 men from 2002 until 2008.
The defense team argued that the two psychologists should be granted immunity, because CIA agents have immunity but ACLU lawyers point out that the two were contractors, not CIA employees, and shouldn't get immunity.
The ACLU seeks $75,000 in damages for the victims, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, a Tanzanian abducted by the CIA and Kenyan security forces in Somalia in 2003 and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud, a Libyan captured in a US-Pakistani raid, and Gul Rahman, an Afghan national who died in 2002 in CIA custody.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
I've just been re-reading Levenda's Unholy Alliance and was struck by some overlooked details. Referencing the 1980 book "Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier," there is a discussion of how the soundproof chambers at Colonia Dignidad were designed on contract by American electronics expert and torture consultant Michael Vernon Townley. I'm just mentioning this here because the bullshit psychologist credentials of Mitchell & Jessen et al remind me somewhat of Colonia head Paul Schäfer's claims that he was a clinical psychologist, and also because the involvement of Townley is super fucking weird!
A fever dream for a sloppy researcher with a pet hypothesis, gratis:
Michael Townley (born December 5, 1942 in Waterloo, Iowa) is an American professional assassin currently living under terms of the US federal witness protection program.
Michael De Santa (born Michael Townley) is one of the three playable protagonists of Grand Theft Auto V. [...] Michael's death was faked and that he is living in Los Santos under witness protection with his family.
By Rebecca Gordon | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – Intro: Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish quality of those [Bush] years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single mistreated human being. It should make Americans shudder. She has also just published a new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, that couldn’t be more relevant. It’s a must-read for a country conveniently without a memory. Tom Engelhardt | – The allegations against the man were serious indeed. * Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in al-Qaeda. * The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps… He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.” * CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25% of all the information his agency had gathered about al-Qaeda from human sources “originated” with one other detainee and him. * George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” claiming that “he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” and that “he helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan” so they would not be captured by U.S. military forces. None of it was true. And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah — with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials — is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror. So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname, Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in Guantánamo. A Saudi national, in the 1980s Zubaydah helped run the Khaldan camp, a mujahedeen training facility set up in Afghanistan with CIA help during the Soviet occupation of that country. In other words, Zubaydah was then an American ally in the fight against the Soviets, one of President Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.” (But then again, so in effect was Osama bin Laden.) Zubaydah’s later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature. He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA “firsts”: the first post-9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the Agency’s “ghost prisoners” (detainees hidden from the world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush administration on what the CIA could “legally” do to a detainee without supposedly violating U.S. federal laws against torture. Zubaydah’s story is — or at least should be — the iconic tale of the illegal extremes to which the Bush administration and the CIA went in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And yet former officials, from CIA head Michael Hayden to Vice President Dick Cheney to George W. Bush himself, have presented it as a glowing example of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to extract desperately needed information from the “evildoers” of that time. Zubaydah was an early experiment in post-9/11 CIA practices and here’s the remarkable thing (though it has yet to become part of the mainstream media accounts of his case): it was all a big lie. Zubaydah wasn’t involved with al-Qaeda; he was the ringleader of nothing; he never took part in planning for the 9/11 attacks. He was brutally mistreated and, in another kind of world, would be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of America’s top leaders and its major intelligence agency. Yet notorious as he once was, he’s been forgotten by all but his lawyers and a few tenacious reporters. He shouldn’t have been. He was the test case for the kind of torture that Donald Trump now wants the U.S. government to bring back, presumably because it “worked” so well the first time. With Republican presidential hopefuls promising future war crimes, it’s worth reconsidering his case and thinking about how to prevent it from happening again. After all, it’s only because no one has been held to account for the years of Bush administration torture practices that Trump and others feel free to promise even more and “yuger” war crimes in the future. Experiments in Torture In August 2002, a group of FBI agents, CIA agents, and Pakistani forces captured Zubaydah (along with about 50 other men) in Faisalabad, Pakistan. In the process, he was severely injured — shot in the thigh, testicle, and stomach. He might well have died, had the CIA not flown in an American surgeon to patch him up. The Agency’s interest in his health was, however, anything but humanitarian. Its officials wanted to interrogate him and, even after he had recovered sufficiently to be questioned, his captors occasionally withheld pain medication as a means of torture. When he “lost” his left eye under mysterious circumstances while in CIA custody, the agency’s concern again was not for his health. The December 2014 torture report produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (despite CIA opposition that included hacking into the committee’s computers) described the situation this way: with his left eye gone, “[i]n October 2002, DETENTION SITE GREEN [now known to be Thailand] recommended that the vision in his right eye be tested, noting that ‘[w]e have a lot riding upon his ability to see, read, and write.’ DETENTION SITE GREEN stressed that ‘this request is driven by our intelligence needs [not] humanitarian concern for AZ.’” The CIA then set to work interrogating Zubaydah with the help of two contractors, the psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Zubaydah would be the first human subject on whom those two, who were former instructors at the Air Force’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training center, could test their theories about using torture to induce what they called “learned helplessness,” meant to reduce a suspect’s resistance to interrogation. Their price? Only $81 million. CIA records show that, using a plan drawn up by Jessen and Mitchell, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogators would waterboard him an almost unimaginable 83 times in the course of a single month; that is, they would strap him to a wooden board, place a cloth over his entire face, and gradually pour water through the cloth until he began to drown. At one point during this endlessly repeated ordeal, the Senate committee reported that Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” Each of those 83 uses of what was called “the watering cycle” consisted of four steps: “1) demands for information interspersed with the application of the water just short of blocking his airway 2) escalation of the amount of water applied until it blocked his airway and he started to have involuntary spasms 3) raising the water-board to clear subject’s airway 4) lowering of the water-board and return to demands for information.” The CIA videotaped Zubaydah undergoing each of these “cycles,” only to destroy those tapes in 2005 when news of their existence surfaced and the embarrassment (and possible future culpability) of the Agency seemed increasingly to be at stake. CIA Director Michael Hayden would later assure CNN that the tapes had been destroyed only because “they no longer had ‘intelligence value’ and they posed a security risk.” Whose “security” was at risk if the tapes became public? Most likely, that of the Agency’s operatives and contractors who were breaking multiple national and international laws against torture, along with the high CIA and Bush administration officials who had directly approved their actions. In addition to the waterboarding, the Senate torture report indicates that Zubaydah endured excruciating stress positions (which cause terrible pain without leaving a mark); sleep deprivation (for up to 180 hours, which generally induces hallucinations or psychosis); unrelenting exposure to loud noises (another psychosis-inducer); “walling” (the Agency’s term for repeatedly slamming the shoulder blades into a “flexible, false wall,” though Zubaydah told the International Committee of the Red Cross that when this was first done to him, “he was slammed directly against a hard concrete wall”); and confinement for hours in a box so cramped that he could not stand up inside it. All of these methods of torture had been given explicit approval in a memo written to the CIA’s head lawyer, John Rizzo, by Jay Bybee, who was then serving in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. In that memo Bybee approved the use of 10 different “techniques” on Zubaydah. It seems likely that, while the CIA was torturing Zubaydah at Jessen’s and Mitchell’s direction for whatever information he might have, it was also using him to test the “effectiveness” of waterboarding as a torture technique. If so, the agency and its contractors violated not only international law, but the U.S. War Crimes Act, which expressly forbids experimenting on prisoners. What might lead us to think that Zubaydah’s treatment was, in part, an experiment? In a May 30, 2005, memo sent to Rizzo, Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, discussed the CIA’s record keeping. There was, Bradbury commented, method to the CIA’s brutality. “Careful records are kept of each interrogation,” he wrote. This procedure, he continued, “allows for ongoing evaluation of the efficacy of each technique and its potential for any unintended or inappropriate results.” In other words, with the support of the Bush Justice Department, the CIA was keeping careful records of an experimental procedure designed to evaluate how well waterboarding worked. This was Abu Zubaydah’s impression as well. “I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques,” Zubaydah would later tell the International Committee of the Red Cross, “so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.” In addition to the videotaping, the CIA’s Office of Medical Services required a meticulous written record of every waterboarding session. The details to be recorded were spelled out clearly: “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.” Again, these were clearly meant to be the records of an experimental procedure, focusing as they did on how much water was effective; whether a “seal” was achieved (so no air could enter the victim’s lungs); whether the naso- or oropharynx (that is, the nose and throat) were so full of water the victim could not breathe; and just how much the “subject” vomited up. It was with Zubaydah that the CIA also began its post-9/11 practice of hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross by transferring them to its “black sites,” the secret prisons it was setting up in countries with complacent or complicit regimes around the world. Such unacknowledged detainees came to be known as “ghost prisoners,” because they had no official existence. As the Senate torture report noted, “In part to avoid declaring Abu Zubaydah to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which would be required if he were detained at a U.S. military base, the CIA decided to seek authorization to clandestinely detain Abu Zubaydah at a facility in Country _______ [now known to have been Thailand].” Tortured and Circular Reasoning As British investigative journalist Andy Worthington reported in 2009, the Bush administration used Abu Zubaydah’s “interrogation” results to help justify the greatest crime of that administration, the unprovoked, illegal invasion of Iraq. Officials leaked to the media that he had confessed to knowing about a secret agreement involving Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who later led al-Qaeda in Iraq), and Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein to work together “to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.” Of course, it was all lies. Zubaydah couldn’t have known about such an arrangement, first because it was, as Worthington says, “absurd,” and second, because Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all. In fact, the evidence that Zubaydah had anything to do with al-Qaeda was beyond circumstantial — it was entirely circular. The administration’s reasoning went something like this: Zubaydah, a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” ran the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan; therefore, Khaldan was an al-Qaeda camp; if Khaldan was an al Qaeda camp, then Zubaydah must have been a senior al Qaeda official. They then used their “enhanced techniques” to drag what they wanted to hear out of a man whose life bore no relation to the tortured lies he evidently finally told his captors. Not surprisingly, no aspect of the administration’s formula proved accurate. It was true that, for several years, the Bush administration routinely referred to Khaldan as an al-Qaeda training camp, but the CIA was well aware that this wasn’t so. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, for instance, made this crystal clear, quoting an August 16, 2006, CIA Intelligence Assessment, “Countering Misconceptions About Training Camps in Afghanistan, 1990-2001” this way: “Khaldan Not Affiliated With Al-Qa’ida. A common misperception in outside articles is that Khaldan camp was run by al-Qa’ida. Pre-11 September 2001 reporting miscast Abu Zubaydah as a ‘senior al-Qa’ida lieutenant,’ which led to the inference that the Khaldan camp he was administering was tied to Usama bin Laden.” Not only was Zubaydah not a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant, he had, according to the report, been turned down for membership in al-Qaeda as early as 1993 and the CIA knew it by at least 2006, if not far sooner. Nevertheless, the month after it privately clarified the nature of the Khaldan camp and Zubaydah’s lack of al-Qaeda connections, President Bush used the story of Zubaydah’s capture and interrogation in a speech to the nation justifying the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. He then claimed that Zubaydah had “helped smuggle Al Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan.” In the same speech, Bush told the nation, “Our intelligence community believes [Zubaydah] had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” (a reference presumably to Khaldan). Perhaps the CIA should have been looking instead at some of the people who actually trained the hijackers — the operators of flight schools in the United States, where, according to a September 23, 2001 Washington Post story, the FBI already knew “terrorists” were learning to fly 747s. In June 2007, the Bush administration doubled down on its claim that Zubaydah was involved with 9/11. At a hearing before the congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, discussing why the Guantánamo prison needed to remain open, explained that it “serves a very important purpose, to hold and detain individuals who are extremely dangerous… [like] Abu Zubaydah, people who have been planners of 9/11.” Charges Withdrawn In September 2009, the U.S. government quietly withdrew its many allegations against Abu Zubaydah. His attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf; that is, a petition to excercise the constitutional right of anyone in government custody to know on what charges they are being held. In that context, they were asking the government to supply certain documents to help substantiate their claim that his continued detention in Guantánamo was illegal. The new Obama administration replied with a 109-page brief filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which is legally designated to hear the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees. The bulk of that brief came down to a government argument that was curious indeed, given the years of bragging about Zubaydah’s central role in al-Qaeda’s activities. It claimed that there was no reason to turn over any “exculpatory” documents demonstrating that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, or that he had no involvement in 9/11 or any other terrorist activity — because the government was no longer claiming that any of those things were true. The government’s lawyers went on to claim, bizarrely enough, that the Bush administration had never “contended that [Zubaydah] had any personal involvement in planning or executing… the attacks of September 11, 2001.” They added that “the Government also has not contended in this proceeding that, at the time of his capture, [Zubaydah] had knowledge of any specific impending terrorist operations” — an especially curious claim, since the prevention of such future attacks was how the CIA justified its torture of Zubaydah in the first place. Far from believing that he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person in” al-Qaeda, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once claimed, “the Government has not contended in this proceeding that [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.” And so, the case against the man who was waterboarded 83 times and contributed supposedly crucial information to the CIA on al-Qaeda plotting was oh-so-quietly withdrawn without either fuss or media attention. Exhibit one was now exhibit none. Seven years after the initial filing of Zubaydah’s habeas petition, the DC District Court has yet to rule on it. Given the court’s average 751-day turnaround time on such petitions, this is an extraordinary length of time. Here, justice delayed is truly justice denied. Perhaps we should not be surprised, however. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, CIA headquarters assured those who were interrogating Zubaydah that he would “never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.” In fact, “all major players are in concurrence,” stated the agency, that he “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” And so far, that’s exactly what’s happened. The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is the perfect example of the U.S. government’s unique combination of willful law-breaking, ass-covering memo-writing, and what some Salvadorans I once worked with called “strategic incompetence.” The fact that no one — not George Bush or Dick Cheney, not Jessen or Mitchell, nor multiple directors of the CIA — has been held accountable means that, unless we are very lucky, we will see more of the same in the future.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
The architect of the CIA’s brutal interrogation program was hired for the job through a secret contract in late 2001 that outlined the assignment with Orwellian euphemism.
The agency “has the need for someone familiar with conducting applied research in high-risk operational settings,” the document said. The consultant would be in a unique position to “help guide and shape the future” of a vaguely described research project “in the area of counter-terrorism and special operations.”
In fact, the CIA already had a specific consultant in mind, and the agreement to pay $1,000 a day to psychologist James E. Mitchell subsequently expanded into an $81 million arrangement to oversee the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other harrowing techniques against al-Qaeda suspects in secret agency prisons overseas.
[Newly released CIA files expose grim details of agency interrogation program]
The abuses of that program have been documented extensively over the past decade, but the initial contracts between the CIA and the psychologists it hired to design the torturous interrogation regimen were surrendered by the agency for the first time earlier this month as part of an ACLU lawsuit.
The documents trace the origins of a clandestine program that became one of the most controversial in CIA history, one that was dismantled by President Obama in 2009 and widely condemned as torture.
The contracts, copies of which were obtained by the Post, show how Mitchell and his partner Bruce Jessen — Air Force veterans with no significant expertise in interrogation — were given wide rein to design punishing interrogation regimens for dozens of detainees and then evaluate whether their methods worked, all while securing increasingly lucrative follow-on contracts.
[Read the CIA contracts for James E. Mitchell]
[Read the CIA contracts for John B. Jessen]
The contracts “substantiate that these guys had significant latitude in the design and implementation of the program,” said Steven Watt, a senior attorney with the ACLU’s human rights program. “The CIA incentivized these guys to profit from torture.”
Henry F. Schuelke III, an attorney for Mitchell and Jessen, declined to comment. The men are defendants in a lawsuit filed on behalf of former CIA detainees alleging that they were subjected to torture in violation of international laws against war crimes and the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.
The newly released files show that Mitchell had been hired by the agency months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks for an assignment that had nothing to do with face-to-face interrogation methods. Instead, the CIA sought to enlist his help developing psychological profiles in cases when the agency had “limited access to the individual being assessed.”
The nature of the work isn’t specified, though CIA analysts are frequently asked to assemble profiles of foreign leaders and U.S. adversaries.
But within weeks of 9/11, Mitchell’s assignment was morphing and expanding through a series of escalating contracts. Instead of innocuous profiles, he would serve as “a consultant to CTC special programs,” a reference to the agency’s Counterterrorism Center.
One of Mitchell’s objectives would be to “adapt and modify the Bandura social cognitive theory for application in operational settings,” a cryptic reference to a theory that learning is largely driven by rewards and punishments.
The methods embraced by Mitchell and Jessen were adapted from training programs designed to enable U.S. Special Operations forces to withstand torture if they were taken prisoner. A principal aim of the CIA program was to reduce detainees to a state of “learned helplessness.”
The contracts repeatedly describe the work as a form of “research” even though the objective was far from academic. At the time, the CIA was desperately seeking any intelligence that might help avert other al-Qaeda plots, and Mitchell was in some cases directly involved in subjecting prisoners to waterboarding sessions to induce the panic of near-drowning.
The first detainee to be waterboarded was al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002. A month later, Mitchell’s contract surged in size and scope, from $10,000 to more than $100,000.
His consultation rate remained $1,000 when he was in the United States, but jumped to $1,800 overseas — a sum he would earn each day he served as an adviser or interrogator at a secret CIA facility in Thailand or other so-called black sites.
By 2005, Mitchell and Jessen had formed a company based in Spokane, Wash., to handle the expanding workload. They hired dozens of employees, including former CIA officers who returned to the black sites as contractors to an agency eager to outsource the interrogation work.
In 2006, Mitchell Jessen and Associates had secured a CIA contract worth $180 million, according to an extensive investigation of the interrogation program by the Senate Intelligence Committee, although the firm ultimately collected about half that amount.
As early as 2003, CIA employees had expressed concerns about the ethical conflicts of an arrangement in which Mitchell and Jessen were both administering harsh interrogation measures and repeatedly affirming their “effectiveness.”
In its response to the Senate investigation, the CIA acknowledged that the two men “should not have been considered for such a role given their financial interest in continued contracts.” The contract was severed in 2009, but not before the CIA agreed to a $5 million indemnification contract to protect Mitchell from legal expenses.
The CIA disputes that Mitchell and Jessen had no relevant experience, citing their backgrounds with military resistance training and academic research. In its response to the Senate report, the CIA said it would have been “derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.”
The government’s use of brutal interrogation methods came up during a public appearance on Wednesday at the Brookings Institution in Washington, where CIA Director John O. Brennan took a veiled jab at Trump, who has called for the agency to renew the use of waterboarding.
Brennan repeated his vow that he would refuse any executive order to resume the use of those methods, and said that senior officers at the agency would face a stark moral dilemma if such instructions came from a future occupant of the White House. “If a president were to order” the resumption of waterboarding or other methods, Brennan said, “it will be up to the director of the CIA [and others] to decide whether they can carry out that order in good conscience.”
Brennan also used sharper language than he has previously to cast doubt on the effectiveness of such methods, saying “you cannot establish cause and effect between the application of these [techniques] and credible information that came out of these individuals.”
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started. They could still get him out of office. But instead, they want mass death. Don’t forget that.
