Sunday, May 03, 2009
Doctors Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were paid $1,000 a day by the CIA to serve as the architects of the agency’s secret interrogation program, during which they assured their bosses that waterboarding was not only safe, but also effective in extracting truthful information from suspected terrorists. But neither Mitchell nor Jessen, both retired military psychologists, had ever conducted a real interrogation or been involved in an intelligence operation.
Air Force Colonel Steve Kleinman, a military interrogator and former colleague of Mitchell and Jessen, told ABC News: “That was their very first experience with [real interrogations]. Everything else was role-play.” The lack of experience with al Qaeda, Islamic extremists or battlefield interrogations did not stop the two men from collecting generous tax-free paychecks while traveling around the world to check on the interrogations of detainees held at “black site” prisons.
Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), chair of the Armed Services Committee, who has investigated the torture program, said little could have been gained by the harsh methods. “These tactics are more likely to produce unreliable evidence than they are to produce any reliable information,” he told ABC News. “The use of these tactics tends to increase resistance on the part of the detainee to cooperating with us. So they have the exact opposite effect of what [the U.S. would] want.”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Psychologists Told CIA Waterboarding Was Safe (by Matthew Cole, ABC News)
The Story of Mitcell Jessen & Associates: How a Team of Psychologist in Spokane, WA, Helped Develop the CIA’s Torture Techniques (Democracy Now!)
Rorschach and Awe (by Katharine Eban, Vanity Fair)
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