WASHINGTON — The well-paid psychologists had a plan and a contract to make terrorists talk.
And when Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resisted, a CIA officer confided in 2003 that one of the psychologists promised he was “going to go to school on this guy,” according to a new Senate Intelligence Committee report.
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Private contractors James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen then unleashed the harsh interrogation techniques they had helped design.
Coercive interrogation tools like waterboarding, slapping and sleep deprivation proved lucrative to Mitchell and Jessen even as they triggered alarms among intelligence professionals over the brutal handling of detainees such as the suspected mastermind of 9/11, the report shows.
“Although these guys believe that their way is the only way, there should be an effort to define roles and responsibilities before their arrogance and narcissism evolve into unproductive conflict in the field,” a CIA medical professional warned in a June 16, 2003, email.
The two psychologists, who collected millions of dollars from the CIA, are among the few identifiable major players whose actions are spotlighted in the report made public Tuesday. That could put them at the center of a growing call for legal consequences.
“If the allegations are true, their behavior was a clear violation of the profession’s ethical standards, clear violations of human rights, and probably violations of U.S. and international laws,” Rhea Farberman, the spokeswoman for the American Psychological Association, said in an interview Wednesday. “They should be held accountable.”
The resulting fallout from the now-defunct program set up to detain and interrogate terror suspects overseas already has proven costly to taxpayers, as the CIA remains on the hook for covering legal expenses for the men through 2021.
Mitchell did not return calls but has denied responsibility for CIA abuses. Jessen could not be reached for comment.
“What I would love the American people to know is that the way the Senate Democrats on that committee described the credentials and background of the two psychologists is just factually, demonstrably incorrect,” Mitchell told The Associated Press before declining to detail the inaccuracies, citing a secrecy agreement with the CIA.
GRUESOME INTERROGATIONS
According to the Senate panel’s report, the CIA held at least 119 people in secret overseas prisons – some of whom turned out to be innocent – and subjected many to gruesome interrogations that didn’t lead to any high-level terrorists, including Osama bin Laden.
Under the program, detainees were interrogated for days on end, hooded and dragged naked across floors while being beaten, threatened with death, deprived of sleep for up to a week, and subjected without medical reason to “rectal rehydration” and to “rectal feeding” with a puree of hummus, raisins, nuts and pasta with sauce, the report said.
While White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday that the Justice Department had already examined the interrogation program and declined to prosecute those accused of abuses, some lawmakers called for further action.
“No one has been held to account,” said Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., a member of the Intelligence Committee.
The 524-page Intelligence Committee report made public Tuesday asserts the psychologists played prominent roles in interrogations from the outset of the CIA program.
Formerly employed at the Air Force’s tovugh Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape School in Washington state, neither man had experience as an interrogator or as an expert in terrorism.
Both, though, saw a patriotic opportunity after the 9/11 terror attacks. Mitchell, a Florida resident, and Jessen, a Washington state resident, are dubbed with code names in the study.
“The CIA did not seek out (Mitchell and Jessen) after a decision was made to use coercive interrogation techniques,” the Senate Intelligence Committee report noted. “Rather, (Mitchell and Jessen) played a role in convincing the CIA to adopt such a policy.”
EXPERTISE ‘PROBABLY MISREPRESENTED’
The psychologists’ expertise with waterboarding, a 2004 CIA Inspector General report previously stated, “was probably misrepresented at the time,” as their prior work with U.S. airmen at the Air Force school was “almost irrelevant” to the interrogation of suspected terrorists.
Mitchell and Jessen nonetheless flourished as they hired former CIA officers, the new report shows. They traveled the world, consulted with foreign intelligence operatives and briefed the likes of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Their company provided interrogators, psychologists, debriefers and security personnel at CIA detention sites overseas.
They ran a project dubbed the “Terrorist Think Tank,” designed to understand the terrorist “mind set.” They helped write the history of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.
All the while, they earned millions of dollars.
By 2006, one year after Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was founded, the value of their base contract was “in excess of $180 million,” Senate investigators found.
All told, the CIA has spent $81 million on the company’s contract.
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