Scott Shane writes about the two former military psychologists who built the C.I.A.’s torture program from the ground up — and made a bundle doing so:
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.
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.
That “intimate knowledge” came from their experience with “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape” — or SERE — an Air Force program conceived as a way to condition Air Force personnel to withstand the special brand of torture used by North Korean and Chinese Communists in the 1950s:
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.
[…]
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.”
Funny, nobody in Washington asked me if I wanted to subsidize these guys’ retirement business. And it did take a lot of dollars to subsidize it:
The torture biz worked out pretty well for these guys. Million dollar homes, $1,000-2,000 per person per day from the CIA, even spinoff startups — one bizarrely named “Wizard Shop.” As one person familiar with their pay arrangements told Vanity Fair in 2007, “Taxpayers [were] paying at least half a million dollars a year for these two knuckleheads to do voodoo.”
I don’t understand why the C.I.A. thought that it was okay to use Americans’ hard-earned money to pay for two yahoos who didn’t possess one shred of professional ethics between them to teach government employees to torture other human beings. I guess maybe it has something to do with the facts that Jessen and Mitchell are not poor single women, and the human beings they tortured were not fertilized eggs.
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