[News] Involvement of CIA Psychologists in Torture

[Anti-Imperialist News]

The War on Terror


Rorschach and Awe

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/torture200707?printable=true&currentPage=all


America's coercive interrogation methods were 
reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists 
who had spent their careers training U.S. 
soldiers to endure Communist-style torture 
techniques. The spread of these tactics was 
fueled by a myth about a critical "black site" operation.




by Katherine Eban VF.COM EXCLUSIVE July 17, 2007

Al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah. The New York Times/Redux.

Abu Zubaydah was a mess. It was early April 2002, 
and the al-Qaeda lieutenant had been shot in the 
groin during a firefight in Pakistan, then 
captured by the Special Forces and flown to a 
safe house in Thailand. Now he was experiencing 
life as America's first high-value detainee in 
the wake of 9/11. A medical team and a cluster of 
F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents stood vigil, all fearing 
that the next attack on America could happen at 
any moment. It didn't matter that Zubaydah was 
unable to eat, drink, sit up, or control his bowels. They wanted him to talk.

A C.I.A. interrogation team was expected but 
hadn't yet arrived. But the F.B.I. agents who had 
been nursing his wounds and cleaning him after 
he'd soiled himself asked Zubaydah what he knew. 
The detainee said something about a plot against 
an ally, then began slipping into sepsis. He was probably going to die.

The team cabled the morsel of intelligence to 
C.I.A. headquarters, where it was received with 
delight by Director George Tenet. "I want to 
congratulate our officers on the ground," he told 
a gathering of agents at Langley. When someone 
explained that the F.B.I. had obtained the 
information, Tenet blew up and demanded that the 
C.I.A. get there immediately, say those who were 
later told of the meeting. Tenet's instructions 
were clear: Zubaydah was to be kept alive at all 
costs. (Through his publisher, George Tenet declined to be interviewed.)

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, 
and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using 
its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent 
showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda 
members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting 
out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had 
planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the 
details of the plot. America learned the truth of 
how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had 
come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed shortly 
after his capture, 2003. Corbis.

It was an extraordinary success story. But it was 
one that would evaporate with the arrival of the 
C.I.A's interrogation team. At the direction of 
an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to 
conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get 
Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his 
sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

This is the approach President Bush appeared to 
have in mind when, in a lengthy public address 
last year, he cited the "tough" but successful 
interrogation of Zubaydah to defend the C.I.A.'s 
secret prisons, America's use of coercive 
interrogation tactics, and the abolishment of 
habeas corpus for detainees. He said that 
Zubaydah had been questioned using an 
"alternative set" of tactics formulated by the 
C.I.A. This program, he said, was fully monitored 
by the C.I.A.'s inspector general and required 
extensive training for interrogators before they 
were allowed to question captured terrorists.

While the methods were certainly unorthodox, 
there is little evidence they were necesssary, 
given the success of the rapport-building approach until that point.

I did not set out to discover how America got 
into the business of torturing detainees. I 
wasn't even trying to learn how America found out 
who was behind 9/11. I was attempting to explain 
why psychologists, alone among medical 
professionals, were participating in military 
interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

Both army leaders and military psychologists say 
that psychologists help to make interrogations 
"safe, legal and effective." But last fall, a 
psychologist named Jean Maria Arrigo came to see 
me with a disturbing claim about the American 
Psychological Association, her profession's 
148,000-member trade group. Arrigo had sat on a 
specially convened A.P.A. task force that, in 
July 2005, had ruled that psychologists could 
assist in military interrogations, despite angry 
objections from many in the profession. The task 
force also determined that, in cases where 
international human-rights law conflicts with 
U.S. law, psychologists could defer to the much 
looser U.S. standards­what Arrigo called the 
"Rumsfeld definition" of humane treatment.

President George W. Bush delivers a speech 
acknowledging the existence of secret C.I.A. 
prisons such as those where Abu Zubaydah and 
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were interrogated, 
September 2006. Gerald Herbert/A.P. Photo.

Arrigo and several others with her, including a 
representative from Physicians for Human Rights, 
had come to believe that the task force had been 
rigged­stacked with military members (6 of the 10 
had ties to the armed services), monitored by 
observers with undisclosed conflicts of interest, 
and programmed to reach preordained conclusions.

One theory was that the A.P.A. had given its 
stamp of approval to military interrogations as 
part of a quid pro quo. In exchange, they 
suspected, the Pentagon was working to allow 
psychologists­who, unlike psychiatrists, are not 
medical doctors­to prescribe medication, 
dramatically increasing their income. (The 
military has championed modern-day psychology 
since World War II, and continues to be one of 
the largest single employers of psychologists 
through its network of veterans' hospitals. It 
also funded a prescription-drug training program 
for military psychologists in the early 90s.)

A.P.A. leaders deny any backroom deals and insist 
that psychologists have helped to stop the abuse 
of detainees. They say that the association will 
investigate any reports of ethical lapses by its members.

While there was no "smoking gun" amid the stack 
of documents Arrigo gave me, my reporting 
eventually led me to an even graver discovery. 
After a 10-month investigation comprising more 
than 70 interviews as well as a detailed review 
of public and confidential documents, I pieced 
together the account of the Abu Zubaydah 
interrogation that appears in this article. I 
also discovered that psychologists weren't merely 
complicit in America's aggressive new 
interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in 
secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and 
trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.

Two psychologists in particular played a central 
role: James Elmer Mitchell, who was attached to 
the C.I.A. team that eventually arrived in 
Thailand, and his colleague Bruce Jessen. Neither 
served on the task force or are A.P.A. members. 
Both worked in a classified military training 
program known as sere­for Survival, Evasion, 
Resistance, Escape­which trains soldiers to 
endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and 
Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted 
on sere trainees for use on detainees in the 
global war on terror, according to psychologists 
and others with direct knowledge of their 
activities. The C.I.A. put them in charge of 
training interrogators in the brutal techniques, 
including "waterboarding," at its network of 
"black sites." In a statement, Mitchell and 
Jessen said, "We are proud of the work we have done for our country."

The agency had famously little experience in 
conducting interrogations or in eliciting 
"ticking time bomb" information from detainees. 
Yet, remarkably, it turned to Mitchell and 
Jessen, who were equally inexperienced and had no 
proof of their tactics' effectiveness, say 
several of their former colleagues. Steve 
Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and expert 
in human-intelligence operations, says he finds 
it astonishing that the C.I.A. "chose two 
clinical psychologists who had no intelligence 
background whatsoever, who had never conducted an 
interrogation 
 to do something that had never been proven in the real world."

The tactics were a "voodoo science," says Michael 
Rolince, section chief of the F.B.I.'s 
International Terrorism Operations. According to 
a person familiar with the methods, the basic 
approach was to "break down [the detainees] 
through isolation, white noise, completely take 
away their ability to predict the future, create dependence on interrogators."

Interrogators who were sent for classified 
training inevitably wound up in a Mitchell-Jessen 
"shop," and some balked at their methods. Instead 
of the careful training touted by President Bush, 
some recruits allegedly received on-the-job 
training during brutal interrogations that 
effectively unfolded as live demonstrations.

Mitchell and Jessen's methods were so 
controversial that, among colleagues, the 
reaction to their names alone became a litmus 
test of one's attitude toward coercion and human 
rights. Their critics called them the "Mormon 
mafia" (a reference to their shared religion) and 
the "poster boys" (referring to the F.B.I.'s 
"most wanted" posters, which are where some 
thought their activities would land them).

Former director of central intelligence George 
Tenet, 2002. © Ron Sachs/CNP/Corbis.

The reversed sere tactics they originated have 
come to shatter various American communities, 
putting law enforcement and intelligence 
gathering on a collision course, fostering 
dissent within the C.I.A., and sparking a war 
among psychologists over professional identity 
that has even led to a threat of physical 
violence at a normally staid A.P.A. meeting. The 
spread of the tactics­and the photographs of 
their wild misuse at Abu Ghraib­devastated 
America's reputation in the Muslim world. All the 
while, Mitchell and Jessen have remained more or 
less behind the curtain, their almost messianic 
belief in the value of breaking down detainees 
permeating interrogations throughout the war effort.

"I think [Mitchell and Jessen] have caused more 
harm to American national security than they'll 
ever understand," says Kleinman.

The bitterest irony is that the tactics seem to 
have been adopted by interrogators throughout the 
U.S. military in part because of a myth that 
whipped across continents and jumped from the 
intelligence to the military communities: the 
false impression that reverse-engineered sere 
tactics were the only thing that got Abu Zubaydah to talk.

Each branch of the U.S. military offers a variant 
of the sere training curriculum. The course 
simulates the experience of being held prisoner 
by enemy forces who do not observe the Geneva 
Conventions. The program evolved after American 
G.I.'s captured during the Korean War made false 
confessions under torture. Sure enough, those in 
sere training found that they would say anything to get the torment to stop.

During a typical three-week training course, 
participants endure waterboarding, forced nudity, 
extreme temperatures, sexual and religious 
ridicule, agonizing stress positions, and 
starvation-level rations. Some lose up to 15 
pounds. "You're not going to die, but you think you are," says Rolince.

James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a key role 
in developing the Air Force's sere program, which 
was administered in Spokane, Washington. Dr. 
Bryce Lefever, command psychologist on the U.S.S. 
Enterprise and a former sere trainer who worked 
with Mitchell and Jessen at the Fairchild Air 
Base, says he was waterboarded during his own 
training. "It was terrifying," he remembers. "I 
said to myself, 'They can't kill me because it's 
only an exercise.' But you're strapped to an 
inclined gurney and you're in four-point 
restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and 
they pour water between your nose and your mouth, 
so if you're likely to breathe, you're going to 
get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic."

sere psychologists such as Mitchell and Jessen 
play two crucial roles. They screen the trainers 
who play interrogators, to ensure that they are 
stable personalities who aren't likely to drift 
into sadism, and they function as psychic safety 
officers. If a trainer emerges from an exercise 
unable to smile, for example, he is viewed as 
"too into the problem," says Dr. Lefever, and is likely to be removed.

In an ever more dangerous world, some sere 
trainers realized that they could market their 
expertise to corporations and government agencies 
that send executives and other employees 
overseas, and a survival-training industry sprang into being.

Mitchell's entry into private contracting began 
less than three months before September 11 with a 
scientific consulting company called Knowledge 
Works, L.L.C. He registered it in North Carolina 
with the help of another sere psychologist he'd 
worked with at Fort Bragg, Dr. John Chin. Since 
then, he has formed several similar companies, 
including the Wizard Shop (which he renamed Mind Science) and What If, L.L.C.

In Spokane, several survival companies share 
space with Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. The 
firm's executive offices sit behind a locked door 
with a security code that the receptionist 
shields from view. There, Mitchell, Jessen 
maintains a Secure Compartmented Information 
Facility, or scif, for handling classified 
materials under C.I.A. guidelines, says a person 
familiar with the facility. But instead of 
training C.E.O.'s to survive capture, the company 
principally instructs interrogators on how to break down detainees.

The sere methods it teaches are based on 
Communist interrogation techniques that were 
never designed to get good information. Their 
goal, says Kleinman, was to generate propaganda 
by getting beaten-down American hostages to make 
statements against U.S. interests.

The best and most reliable information comes from 
people who are relaxed and perceive little 
threat. "Why would you use evasive training 
tactics to elicit information?" says Dr. Michael 
Gelles, former chief psychologist of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The sere tactics aren't just morally and legally 
wrong, critics say; they're tactically wrong. 
They produce false leads and hazy memories. 
"[Mitchell and Jessen] argue, 'We can make people 
talk,'" says Kleinman. "I have one question. 
'About what?'" As one military member who worked 
in the sere community says, "Getting somebody to 
talk and getting someone to give you valid 
information are two very different things."

And yet, when it came time to extract 
intelligence from suspected al-Qaeda detainees, 
sere experts became "the only other game in 
town," according to a report, "Educing 
Information, Interrogation: Science and Art," put 
out last December by the Intelligence Science 
Board of the National Defense Intelligence College.

Exactly how that happened remains unclear. Many 
people assume that Special Forces operatives 
looked around for interrogation methods, recalled 
their sere training, and decided to try the 
techniques. But the introduction and spread of 
the tactics were more purposeful, and therefore 
"far more sinister," says John Sifton, a senior 
researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Mitchell and Jessen, Sifton says, offered a 
"patina of pseudo-science that made the C.I.A. 
and military officials think these guys were 
experts in unlocking the human mind. It's one 
thing to say, 'Take off the gloves.' It's another 
to say there was a science to it. sere came in as the science."

The use of "scientific credentials in the service 
of cruel and unlawful practices" harkens back to 
the Cold War, according to Leonard Rubenstein, 
executive director of Physicians for Human 
Rights. Back then, mental-health professionals 
working with the C.I.A. used hallucinogenic 
drugs, hypnosis, and extreme sensory deprivation 
on unwitting subjects to develop mind-control 
techniques. "We really thought we learned this 
lesson­that ambition to help national security is 
no excuse for throwing out ethics and science," Rubenstein says.

Some of those who encountered Mitchell and Jessen 
at the annual conference of all the military's 
sere programs were skeptical of their assertions. 
"Jim would make statements like, 'We know how 
people are responding to stress,'" one sere 
researcher recalls. "He always said he would show 
us data, but it would never arrive."

In truth, many did not consider Mitchell and 
Jessen to be scientists. They possessed no data 
about the impact of sere training on the human 
psyche, say former associates. Nor were they 
"operational psychologists," like the profilers 
who work for law enforcement. (Think of Jodie 
Foster's character in The Silence of the Lambs.) 
But they wanted to be, according to several former colleagues.

"It's a seductive role if you work with [elite] 
combat-type guys," says the military member who 
works in the sere community. "There is this 
wannabe kind of phenomenon. You lose role identity."

Dr. Gelles, who had been at the forefront of 
trying to stop coercive interrogations at 
Guantánamo, calls it the "op-doc syndrome": 
"These sere guys, who were essentially like 
school counselors, wanted to be in a position 
where they had the solution to the operational 
challenge. They cannot help themselves."

But in the incestuous world of the Special 
Forces, where all psychologists are referred to 
as "Doc" and revered as experts, "no one ever 
questions that you might not have a clue what 
you're talking about," says an intelligence 
expert who opposed the use of sere tactics.

For a 2005 article in The New Yorker that raised 
the question of whether sere tactics had been 
reverse-engineered, Jane Mayer asked Mitchell if 
he was a C.I.A. contractor. He refused to confirm 
or deny the claim. But the newly minted op-docs 
Mitchell and Jessen had been among the experts 
who gathered at a daylong workshop in Arlington, 
Virginia, in July 2003, to debate the 
effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive 
techniques. The conference, titled "Science of 
Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory," 
was funded by the C.I.A. and co-hosted by the 
American Psychological Association and the Rand 
Corporation. One of its organizers was Kirk 
Hubbard, then chief of the C.I.A.'s Research and 
Analysis Branch. Mitchell and Jessen were named 
on the attendance list as C.I.A. contractors.

A key participant said that, before the 
conference, Hubbard called and warned him not to 
publicly identify attendees from the C.I.A. or 
ask them what they do, saying, "These people have 
jobs where deception and interviewing is very important."

Hubbard, who recently retired from the C.I.A., 
told me when I called him at his home in Montana 
that he has "no use for liberals who think we 
should be soft on terrorists." Asked about the 
work of Mitchell and Jessen, he was silent for a 
long time, then said, "I can't tell you anything about that."

Mitchell left one clue to his activities in 
corporate records. In 2004, he filed a notice 
with North Carolina's secretary of state formally 
dissolving Knowledge Works. In it, he wrote, "All 
members of this LLC moved out of the state of NC 
in March 2002, and subsequently Knowledge Works, 
LLC ceased to do business 29 March 2002."

Abu Zubaydah had been captured in Pakistan the day before.

One of the first on-the-ground tests for 
Mitchell's theories was the interrogation of 
Zubaydah. When he and the other members of the 
C.I.A. team arrived in Thailand, they immediately 
put a stop to the efforts at rapport building 
(which would also yield the name of José Padilla, 
an American citizen and supposed al-Qaeda 
operative now on trial in Miami for conspiring to 
murder and maim people in a foreign country).

Mitchell had a tougher approach in mind. The 
C.I.A. interrogators explained that they were 
going to become Zubaydah's "God." If he refused 
to cooperate, he would lose his clothes and his 
comforts one by one. At the safe house, the 
interrogators isolated him. They would enter his 
room just once a day to say, "You know what I want," then leave again.

As Zubaydah clammed up, Mitchell seemed to 
conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he 
had been reduced to complete helplessness and 
dependence. With that goal in mind, the C.I.A. 
team began building a coffin in which they planned to bury the detainee alive.

A furor erupted over the legality of this move, 
which does not appear to have been carried out. 
(Every human-rights treaty and American law 
governing the treatment of prisoners prohibits 
death threats and simulated killings.) But the 
C.I.A. had a ready rejoinder: the methods had 
already been approved by White House lawyers. 
Mitchell was accompanied by another psychologist, 
Dr. R. Scott Shumate, then chief operational 
psychologist for the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism 
center. Surprisingly, Shumate opposed the extreme 
methods and packed his bags in disgust, leaving 
before the most dire tactics had commenced. He 
later told associates that it had been a mistake 
for the C.I.A. to hire Mitchell.

With Shumate gone, the interrogators were free to 
unleash what they called the "sere school" 
techniques. These included blasting the Red Hot 
Chili Peppers at top volume, stripping Zubaydah 
naked, and making his room so cold that his body 
turned blue, as The New York Times reported last year.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. pulled its agents from the 
scene and ruled that they could not be present 
any time coercive tactics were used, says Michael 
Rolince. It was a momentous decision that 
effectively gave the C.I.A. complete control of interrogations.

While it was the F.B.I.'s rapport-building that 
had prompted Zubaydah to talk, the C.I.A. would 
go on to claim credit for breaking Zubaydah, and 
celebrate Mitchell as a psychological wizard who 
held the key to getting hardened terrorists to 
talk. Word soon spread that Mitchell and Jessen 
had been awarded a medal by the C.I.A. for their 
advanced interrogation techniques. While the 
claim is impossible to confirm, what matters is 
that others believed it. The reputed success of 
the tactics was "absolutely in the ether," says 
one Pentagon civilian who worked on detainee policy.

In response to detailed questions from Vanity 
Fair, Mitchell and Jessen said in a statement, 
"The advice we have provided, and the actions we 
have taken have been legal and ethical. We 
resolutely oppose torture. Under no circumstances 
have we ever endorsed, nor would we endorse, the 
use of interrogation methods designed to do physical or psychological harm."

The C.I.A. would not comment on Mitchell's and 
Jessen's role. However, a C.I.A. spokesman said 
the agency's interrogation program was 
implemented lawfully and had produced vital intelligence.

Dr. Shumate, who now works in the Defense 
Department as director of the Behavioral Sciences 
Directorate within the Counterintelligence Field 
Activity (cifa), did not respond to interview 
requests. But a cifa spokesman said that Dr. 
Shumate, who served on the A.P.A.'s task force, 
supported the association's "guidelines that 
psychologists conduct themselves in an ethical 
and professional manner regardless of mission assignment or activity."

Colonel Brittain P. Mallow, 51, was the ultimate 
straight-up soldier: blue-eyed and poker-faced, 
with a winning if seldom-seen smile. After 9/11, 
he was put in command of the Defense Department's 
Criminal Investigative Task Force (C.I.T.F.), 
which was charged with assessing which detainees 
at Guantánamo Bay should be prosecuted. Mallow, 
who has an advanced degree in Middle East studies 
and a working knowledge of Arabic, foresaw that 
the interrogations would be culturally difficult. 
So his team called on Dr. Michael Gelles, of the 
Naval Criminal Investigative Service, to form a 
Behavioral Science Consultation Team (bsct, 
pronounced "biscuit") of non-clinical 
psychologists. Its mission was to help establish rapport with detainees.

By the summer of 2002, Mallow was hearing 
disturbing reports of blasting music and strobe 
lights coming from the interrogation booths. This 
was the work of Task Force 170, the Pentagon unit 
in charge of intelligence gathering in the 
Southern Command. According to one of Mallow's 
deputies, the members of Task Force 170 
considered the C.I.T.F. to be soft on detainees. 
They were "hell-bent" on using harsher tactics, another C.I.T.F. official says.

"There were a number of claims that coercive 
methods had achieved results" during 
"interrogations in other places," Mallow says. 
The other C.I.T.F. official recalls that a Task 
Force 170 officer told him, "Other people are 
using this stuff, and they're getting praised." 
(A Pentagon spokesman said all questioning at 
Guantánamo is lawful and falls within the limits set by the army field manual.)

At a Pentagon meeting where Mallow protested the 
methods, he says that a civilian official named 
Marshall Billingslea told him, "You don't know 
what you're talking about." Billingslea insisted 
that the coercive approach worked.

Just months after Zubaydah's interrogation, the 
myth of Mitchell and Jessen's success in breaking 
him had made its way from Thailand to Guantánamo 
to Washington, and the reversed sere tactics had 
become associated with recognition and inside knowledge.

In late spring, Mallow met with Major General 
Michael E. Dunlavey, who was about to take over 
as commander of the newly combined JTF-GTMO 170 
(Joint Task Force Guantánamo). Mallow briefed 
Dunlavey on his bsct team's rapport-building 
efforts and offered him full access to the 
psychologists. About a month later, he claims, 
Dunlavey had appropriated the acronym but set up 
a separate bsct team, cobbled together in part 
from clinical psychologists already at 
Guantánamo. Before activating the new bsct team, 
Dunlavey sent its members to Fort Bragg for a 
four-day sere-school workshop. (Dunlavey, now a 
juvenile-court judge in Erie, Pennsylvania, did 
not respond to requests for comment.)

On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald 
Rumsfeld granted JTF-GTMO 170's request to apply 
coercive tactics in interrogations. The only 
techniques he rejected were waterboarding and 
death threats. Within a week, the task force had 
drafted a five-page, typo-ridden document 
entitled "JTF GTMO 'SERE' Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure."

The document, which has never before been made 
public, states, "The premise behind this is that 
the interrogation tactics used at US military 
sere schools are appropriate for use in 
real-world interrogations" and "can be used to break real detainees."

The document is divided into four categories: 
"Degradation," "Physical Debilitation," 
"Isolation and Monopoliztion [sic] of 
Perception," and "Demonstrated Omnipotence." The 
tactics include "slaps," "forceful removal of 
detainees' clothing," "stress positions," 
"hooding," "manhandling," and "walling," which 
entails grabbing the detainee by his shirt and 
hoisting him against a specially constructed wall.

"Note that all tactics are strictly non-lethal," 
the memo states, adding, "it is critical that 
interrogators do 'cross the line' when utilizing 
the tactics." The word "not" was presumably omitted by accident.

It is not clear whether the guidelines were ever 
formally adopted. But the instructions suggest 
that the military command wanted psychologists to 
be involved so they could lead interrogators up 
to the line, then stop them from crossing it.

In a bizarre mixture of solicitude and sadism, 
the memo details how to calibrate the infliction 
of harm. It dictates that the "[insult] slap will 
be initiated no more than 12–14 inches (or one 
shoulder width) from the detainee's face 
 to 
preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut." 
And interrogators are advised that, when 
stripping off a prisoner's clothes, "tearing 
motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the 
detainee off balance." In short, the 
sere-inspired interrogations would be violent. 
And therefore, psychologists were needed to help 
make these more dangerous interrogations safer.

Soon, the reverse-engineered sere tactics that 
had been designed by Mitchell and Jessen, 
road-tested in the C.I.A.'s black sites, and 
adopted in Guantánamo were being used in Iraq as 
well. One intelligence officer recalled 
witnessing a live demonstration of the tactics. 
The detainee was on his knees in a room painted 
black and forced to hold an iron bar in his 
extended hands while interrogators slapped him 
repeatedly. The man was then taken into a bunker, 
where he was stripped naked, blindfolded, and 
shackled. He was ordered to be left that way for 12 hours.

At the Abu Ghraib prison, military policemen on 
the night shift adopted the tactics to hideous 
effect. In what amounted to a down-market parody 
of the praise heaped on Mitchell and Jessen, 
Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a former prison 
guard from Pennsylvania, received a commendation 
for his work "softening up" detainees, according 
to the documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. He 
appears repeatedly in photographs, smiling and 
giving thumbs-up before human pyramids of naked 
detainees. In 2005, he was convicted on charges 
of abuse. In their statement, Mitchell and Jessen 
said that they were "appalled by reports" of 
alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and 
had not been involved with them in any way.

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia recently 
made his case for heavy-handed interrogation 
tactics via a surprisingly current pop-culture 
reference. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles," he 
told a panel of judges, referring to the torturer 
protagonist of the Fox series 24. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

In the real world, however, it is increasingly 
clear that the U.S. has sacrificed its global 
image for tactics that are at best ineffective. 
"We are not aware of any convincing evidence that 
coercive tactics work better than other methods 
of obtaining actionable intelligence," said 
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Under Levin's leadership, the Senate Armed 
Services Committee has been probing the 
military's alleged mistreatment of detainees and 
intends to hold hearings. In a statement to 
Vanity Fair, Levin says that he finds the 
reported use of sere tactics in interrogations 
"very troubling," and that his committee is 
looking specifically at "the accountability of 
officials for actions or failures to act."

Mitchell and Jessen have become a focus of the 
investigation. In June, the online news magazine 
Salon reported that the Defense Department, 
responding to a request from Levin's committee, 
ordered top Pentagon officials to preserve any 
documents mentioning the two psychologists or their company in Spokane.

Meanwhile, business appears to be booming at 
Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. It has 120 
employees and specializes in "understanding, 
predicting, and improving performance in 
high-risk and extreme situations," according to a 
recruitment ad at a recent job fair for people with top security clearances.

The principals of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates 
are raking in money. According to people familiar 
with their compensation, they get paid more than 
$1,000 per day plus expenses, tax free, for their 
overseas work. It beats military pay. Mitchell 
has built his dream house in Florida. He also 
purchased a BMW through one of his companies. 
"Taxpayers are paying at least half a million 
dollars a year for these two knuckleheads to do 
voodoo," says one of the people familiar with their pay arrangements.

Last December, the nation's best-known 
interrogation experts joined together to release 
a report, called "Educing Information," that 
sought to comprehensively address the question of 
which methods work in interrogations.

Scott Shumate served as an adviser to the report, 
which concluded that there is no evidence that 
reverse-engineered sere tactics work, or that 
sere psychologists make for capable 
interrogators. One chapter, authored by Kleinman, 
concludes: "Employment of resistance 
interrogators­whether as consultants or as 
practitioners­is an example of the proverbial 
attempt to place the square peg in the round hole."

But it is one of the features of our war on 
terror that myths die hard. Just think of the 
al-Qaeda–Iraq connection, or Saddam Hussein's 
W.M.D. In late 2005, as Senator John McCain was 
pressing the Bush administration to ban torture 
techniques, one of the nation's top researchers 
of stress in sere trainees claims to have 
received a call from Samantha Ravitch, the deputy 
assistant for national security in Vice President 
Dick Cheney's office. She wanted to know if the 
researcher had found any evidence that 
uncontrollable stress would make people more likely to talk.

Katherine Eban is a Brooklyn-based journalist and 
Alicia Patterson fellow who writes about issues 
of public health and homeland security. Her book, 
Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, 
Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of 
America's Drug Supply, was excerpted in the May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair.




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