[Ppnews] CIA Torture Teachers

Mon Jun 25 11:46:21 EDT 2007

via ANTIFA tburghardt at igc.org

THE CIA'S TORTURE TEACHERS
Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to 
develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of 
the Bush White House
_________________________________________________________________________

SALON
News & Politics
June 21, 2007
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/21/cia_sere/
By Mark Benjamin

WASHINGTON -- There is growing evidence of high-level coordination 
between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in 
developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist 
suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of 
psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, 
Resistance and Escape program to "reverse-engineer" techniques 
originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if 
captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military's use of 
SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in 
detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA's use of such 
tactics -- working in close coordination with the military -- until 
now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare 
professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with 
Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce 
Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the 
Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are 
currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel 
Dell'Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of 
Defense, sent a "document preservation" order on May 15 to the 
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon 
officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning 
Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, 
Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell'Orto's order was 
in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic 
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating 
the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody.

Mitchell and Jessen have worked as contractors for the CIA since 
9/11. Both were previously affiliated with the military's SERE 
program, which at its main school at Fort Bragg puts elite special 
operations forces through brutal mock interrogations, from sensory 
deprivation to simulated drowning.

A previously classified report by the Defense Department's inspector 
general, made public last month, revealed in vivid detail how the 
military -- in flat contradiction to previous denials -- used SERE as 
a basis for interrogating suspected al-Qaida prisoners at Guantanamo 
Bay, and later in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, the involvement of 
the CIA, which was secretly granted broad authority by President Bush 
days after 9/11 to target terrorists worldwide, suggests that both 
the military and the spy agency were following a policy approved by 
senior Bush administration officials.

Close coordination between the CIA and the Pentagon is referred to in 
military lingo as "jointness." A retired high-level military 
official, familiar with the detainee abuse scandals, confirmed that 
such "jointness" requires orchestration at the top levels of 
government. "This says that somebody is acting as a bridge between 
the CIA and the Defense Department," he said, "because you've got the 
[CIA] side and the military side, and they are collaborating." 
Human-rights expert Scott Horton, who chairs the International Law 
Committee at the New York City Bar Association, also says that the 
cross-agency coordination "reflects the fact that the decision to 
introduce and develop these methods was made at a very high level."

On Wednesday, dozens of psychologists made public a joint letter to 
American Psychological Association president Sharon Brehm fingering 
another CIA-employed psychologist, R. Scott Shumate. Previous news 
reports led the American Medical Association and the American 
Psychiatric Association to ban their members from participating in 
interrogations, but the issue has remained divisive within the 
American Psychological Association, which has not forbidden the 
practice. "We write you as psychologists concerned about the 
participation of our profession in abusive interrogations of national 
security detainees at Guantanamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the 
so-called CIA 'black sites,'" the psychologists wrote. In violation 
of APA ethics, they said, "It is now indisputable that psychologists 
and psychology were directly and officially responsible for the 
development and migration of abusive interrogation techniques, 
techniques which the International Committee of the Red Cross has 
labeled 'tantamount to torture.'"

The letter cites a previously public biographical statement on 
Shumate that listed his position from April 2001 to May 2003 as "the 
chief operational psychologist for the CIA's Counter Terrorism 
Center." The bio also noted that Shumate "has been with several of 
the key apprehended terrorists" who have been held and interrogated 
by the agency since 9/11. At CTC, Shumate reported to Cofer Black, 
the former head of CTC who famously told Congress in September 2002, 
"There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the 
gloves come off." Shumate's bio, obtained by Salon, has been removed 
from the InfowarCon 2007 conference Web site. Shumate did not return 
a phone call seeking comment.

The SERE-based program undermines assertions made for years by Bush 
administration officials that interrogations conducted by U.S. 
personnel are safe, effective and legal. SERE training, according to 
the Department of Defense inspector general's report, is specifically 
designed "to replicate harsh conditions that the service member might 
encounter if they are held by forces that do not abide by the Geneva 
Conventions."

"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," 
says Brad Olson, president of the Divisions for Social Justice within 
the American Psychological Association. "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," he says.

There are striking similarities between descriptions of SERE training 
and the interrogation techniques employed by the military and CIA 
since 9/11. Soldiers undergoing SERE training are subject to forced 
nudity, stress positions, lengthy isolation, sleep deprivation, 
sexual humiliation, exhaustion from exercise, and the use of water to 
create a sensation of suffocation. "If you have ever had a bag on 
your head and somebody pours water on it," one graduate of that 
training program told Salon last year "it is real hard to breathe."

Many of those techniques show up in interrogation logs, human rights 
reports and news articles about detainee abuse that has taken place 
in Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. (The military late last year 
unveiled a new interrogation manual designed to put a stop to 
prisoner abuse.) An investigation released this month by the Council 
of Europe, a multinational human rights agency, added extreme sensory 
deprivation to the list of techniques that have been used by the CIA. 
The report said that extended isolation contributed to "enduring 
psychiatric and mental problems" of prisoners.

Isolation in cramped cells is also a key tenet of SERE training, 
according to soldiers who have completed the training and described 
it in detail to Salon. The effects of isolation are a specialty of 
Jessen's, who taught a class on "coping with isolation in a hostage 
environment" at a Maui seminar in late 2003, according to a 
Washington Times article published then. (Defense Department 
documents from the late 1990s describe Jessen as the "lead 
psychologist" for the SERE program.) Mitchell also spoke at that 
conference, according to the article. It described both men as 
"contracted to Uncle Sam to fight terrorism."

Mitchell's name surfaced again many months later. His role in 
interrogations was referenced briefly in a July 2005 New Yorker 
article by Jane Mayer, which focused largely on the military's use of 
SERE-based tactics at Guantanamo. The article described Mitchell's 
participation in a CIA interrogation of a high-value prisoner in 
March 2002 at an undisclosed location elsewhere -- presumably a 
secret CIA prison known as a "black site" -- where Mitchell urged 
harsh techniques that would break down the prisoner's psychological 
defenses, creating a feeling of "helplessness." But the article did 
not confirm Mitchell was a CIA employee, and it explored no further 
the connection between Mitchell's background with SERE and 
interrogations being conducted by the CIA.

A call to Mitchell and Jessen's firm for comment was not returned. 
The CIA would not comment on Mitchell and Jessen's work for the 
agency, though the contractual relationship is not one Mitchell and 
Jessen entirely concealed. They advertised their CIA credentials as 
exhibitors at a 2004 conference of the American Psychological 
Association in Honolulu.

In a statement to Salon, CIA spokesman George Little wrote that the 
agency's interrogation program had been "implemented lawfully, with 
great care and close review, producing a rich volume of intelligence 
that has helped the United States and other countries disrupt 
terrorist activities and save innocent lives."

Until last month, the Army had denied any use of SERE training for 
prisoner interrogations. "We do not teach interrogation techniques," 
Carol Darby, chief spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Special Operations 
Command at Fort Bragg, said last June when Salon asked about a 
document that appeared to indicate that instructors from the SERE 
school taught their methods to interrogators at Guantanamo.

But the declassified DoD inspector general's report described 
initiatives by high-level military officials to incorporate SERE 
concepts into interrogations. And it said that psychologists 
affiliated with SERE training -- people like Mitchell and Jessen -- 
played a critical role. According to the inspector general, the Army 
Special Operations Command's Psychological Directorate at Fort Bragg 
first drafted a plan to have the military reverse-engineer SERE 
training in the summer of 2002. At the same time, the commander of 
Guantanamo determined that SERE tactics might be used on detainees at 
the military prison. Then in September 2002, the Army Special 
Operations Command and other SERE officials hosted a "SERE 
psychologist conference" at Fort Bragg to brief staff from the 
military's prison at Guantanamo on the use of SERE tactics.

The chief of the Army Special Operations Command's Psychological 
Directorate was Col. Morgan Banks, the senior SERE psychologist, who 
has been affiliated with the training for years and helped establish 
the Army's first permanent training program that simulated captivity, 
according to a 2003 biographical statement. Banks also spent the 
winter of 2001 and 2002 at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan "supporting 
combat operations against Al Qaida and Taliban fighters," according 
to one of his bios, which also said that Banks "provides technical 
support and consultation to all Army psychologists providing 
interrogation support."

In 2005, Banks helped draft ethical guidelines for the APA that say a 
psychologist supporting an interrogation is providing "a valuable and 
ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and 
innocent civilians from harm." But as Salon reported last summer, six 
of the 10 psychologists who drafted that policy, including Banks, had 
close ties to the military. Some psychologists worry that the APA 
policy has made the organization an enabler of torture. Those ethics 
guidelines "gave the APA imprimatur to any of these techniques," says 
Steven Reisner, an APA member who has been closely tracking 
psychologists' role in interrogations. The policy, Reisner says, was 
developed by "psychologists directly involved in the interrogations."

Another of the six psychologists on the panel that drafted the 
guidelines who had ties to the military was Shumate. His bio for that 
APA task force said he worked as a "director of behavioral science" 
for the Defense Department. It never mentioned that he also worked for the CIA.

Mark Benjamin is a national correspondent for Salon based in Washington, D.C.

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