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<h3><b>The War on Terror<br>
</b></h3><h1><b>Rorschach and
Awe</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/torture200707?printable=true¤tPage=all" eudora="autourl">
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/torture200707?printable=true¤tPage=all<br>
<br>
</a></font><h2><b>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. <br><br>
<br>
</b></h2><h4><b>by Katherine Eban VF.COM EXCLUSIVE July 17, 2007
</b></h4><font size=3>Al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah. <i>The New York
Times/Redux.<br><br>
</i>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed shortly after his capture,
2003. <i>Corbis.<br><br>
</i>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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
While the methods were certainly unorthodox, there is little evidence
they were necesssary, given the success of the rapport-building approach
until that point.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <i>Gerald Herbert/A.P.
Photo.<br><br>
</i>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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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
<i>designed</i> the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on
contract to the C.I.A.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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).<br><br>
Former director of central intelligence George Tenet, 2002. <i>© Ron
Sachs/CNP/Corbis.<br><br>
</i>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.<br><br>
"I think [Mitchell and Jessen] have caused more harm to American
national security than they'll ever understand," says
Kleinman.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <i>Enterprise</i> 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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
The sere tactics aren't just morally and legally wrong, critics say;
they're <i>tactically</i> 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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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 <i>The Silence of the Lambs.</i>)
But they <i>wanted</i> to be, according to several former
colleagues.<br><br>
"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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
For a 2005 article in <i>The New Yorker</i> 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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
Abu Zubaydah had been captured in Pakistan the day before.<br><br>
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).<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <i>The New York
Times</i> reported last year.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
In response to detailed questions from <i>Vanity Fair,</i> 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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.)<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.)<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
"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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <i>more dangerous</i> interrogations
<i>safer.<br><br>
</i>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.<br><br>
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
<i>The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.</i> 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.<br><br>
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
<i>24.</i> "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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 <i>Vanity Fair,</i> 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."<br><br>
Mitchell and Jessen have become a focus of the investigation. In June,
the online news magazine <i>Salon</i> 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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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."<br><br>
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.<br><br>
<b>Katherine Eban</b> is a Brooklyn-based journalist and Alicia Patterson
fellow who writes about issues of public health and homeland security.
Her book, <i>Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and
the Contamination of America's Drug Supply,</i> was excerpted in the May
2005 issue of <i>Vanity Fair.<br><br>
<br><br>
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