1 Boring Old Man

Rorschach and Awe

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
Vanity Fair

 July 17, 2007

This article should be read in its entirety. It’s one I hadn’t seen.  I was traveling in Eastern Europe when it came out, but I’m surprised I didn’t run across it along the way. It’s about two Psychologists [James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen] who went to work for the C.I.A. and devised the torture techniques used on Abu Zubaydah in 2002. They are the contractors who replaced the F.B.I.’s Ali Soufon in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse recently made a speech on the Senate floor and then appeared on the Rachel Maddow show talking about the interrogations, particularly of Zubaydah. He’s seen all the documentation as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that is investigating the Torture Policy. He says:

I want my colleagues and the American public to know that, measured against the information I’ve been able to gain access to, the story-line that we have been led to believe, the story-line about waterboarding that we have been sold, is false in every one of its dimensions, and I ask that my colleagues be patient and be prepared to listen to the evidence when all is said and done before they wrap themselves in that story-line.

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… Both worked in a classified military training program known as sere—for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—which 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, former 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."

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 interrogators — whether as consultants or as practitioners—is 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.

The Experiment

The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo?

New Yorker
by Jane Mayer

July 11, 2005

Outsourcing Torture

The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

New Yorker

by Jane Mayer

February 14, 2005

and she’s back again today…

The Secret History

Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?

New Yorker

Jane Mayer

June 22, 2009

The Senate Intelligence Committee recently embarked on its own, closed-door investigation of the torture program; Panetta told me that he has been assured that the committee members’ work “would be about lessons learned, as opposed to going after people.” So the C.I.A. is “coöperating with them, giving them whatever information they need to try to conduct their review.” He says that the committee has already identified some ten million relevant documents. “It’s going to take a while,” he said.

The Senate investigation will, among other things, probe the question of torture’s efficacy. Dick Cheney has repeatedly claimed that “enhanced” interrogations yield results. Opponents say that torture is counterproductive. Panetta is more agnostic. He told me, “The bottom line would be this: Yes, important information was gathered from these detainees. It provided information that in fact was acted upon. Was this the only way to obtain this information? I think that will always be an open question.” But he is certain that “we did pay a price for using those methods.”

A number of recently released documents call into question the notion that the C.I.A. played a passive role in relation to torture policy. A 2008 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee indicates that the agency hired contract psychologists who went on to design and implement specific forms of abuse—such as locking a detainee, doubled up, in a tiny, airless cage—months before August, 2002, when the Justice Department granted legal authorization with its infamous “torture memo.” More troublingly, footnotes in the Office of Legal Counsel memos suggest that some C.I.A. interrogators may have egregiously exceeded the legal boundaries set down by the Justice Department and the White House—which seemingly puts them outside the legal safety zone demarcated by Obama and Panetta. In 2002, the Bush Administration authorized interrogators to re-create the ostensibly safe waterboarding techniques used in military training. But, instead of limiting the sessions to a maximum of two twenty-second bouts of controlled drowning, as prescribed in military training, the C.I.A. interrogators forced one detainee to undergo at least a hundred and eighty-three sessions, and another at least eighty-three. And, instead of using a very small amount of water, as the Justice Department stipulated, the C.I.A. interrogators subjected the detainees to “large volumes” of water. The memos quote Inspector General Helgerson’s finding, in his secret 2004 report on coercive techniques, that the interrogators amplified the pain deliberately, in order to make the sensation of drowning “more poignant and convincing.” Helgerson also found that the psychologists and interrogators who designed the agency’s protocols—and who claimed that their judgments were based on knowledge of military standards—had “probably misrepresented” their “expertise.” In addition, the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services found that there was “no reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators . . . was either efficacious or medically safe.”

In April, Panetta fired all the C.I.A.’s contract interrogators, including the former military psychologists who appear to have designed the most brutal interrogation techniques: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. The two men, who ran a consulting company, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, had recommended that interrogators apply to detainees theories of “learned helplessness” that were based on experiments with abused dogs. The firm’s principals reportedly billed the agency a thousand dollars a day for their services. “We saved some money in the deal, too!” Panetta said…

Other legal actions threaten to expose yet more secrets of the C.I.A.’s torture program. A prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department, John Durham, has convened a grand jury in Washington to weigh potential criminal charges against C.I.A. officers who were involved in the destruction of ninety-two videotapes documenting the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and other detainees. Mickum told me that he has met several times with Durham, and believes that the scope of his inquiry may have expanded to include a review of whether the C.I.A. began using brutal methods on Zubaydah before it received written authorization from the Justice Department. [This would provide an extra motive for destroying the videotapes.] Mickum said, “I got the sense he was very serious.” [Durham declined to comment.] The A.C.L.U., meanwhile, is suing to get access to classified descriptions of what was on the destroyed videotapes. Last week, Panetta filed an affidavit opposing the disclosure, which he said “could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” Once again, he was protecting Bush-era interrogation secrets.

^{For much of the last century America’s defense relied on the cold war doctrines of deterrence and containment. In some cases those strategies still apply. But new threats also require new thinking. Deterrence, the promise of massive retaliation against nations, means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nation or citizens to defend. Containment is not possible when unbalanced dictators with weapons of mass destruction can deliver those weapons on missiles or secretly provide them to terrorist allies.}

^{We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. We cannot put our faith in the word of tyrants who solemnly sign nonproliferation treaties and then systematically break them. If we wait for threats to fully materialize we will have waited too long. Homeland defense and missile defense are part of a stronger security. They’re essential priorities for America.}

^{Yet the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered the only path to safety is the path of action. And this nation will act.}

^{Our security will require the best intelligence to reveal threats hidden in caves and growing in laboratories. Our security will require modernizing domestic agencies, such as the F.B.I., so they are prepared to act and act quickly against danger. Our security will require transforming the military you will lead. A military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice in any dark corner of the world. And our security will require all Americans to be forward looking and resolute, to be ready for preemptive action when necessary to defend our liberty and to defend our lives…}

^{Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September 11, but we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.}

^{Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.}

^{Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.}

^{States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.}

2002 was a secret year until the Fall, when the campaign rapidly picked up speed, culminating in the march to war in early 2003. I never saw it then. Most of us that opposed the Invasion of Iraq had no idea of the duplicity and deceit that was behind the campaign. We just thought it was a rash and unwarranted idea. I recall being confused. Had I missed something? I recall watching Colin Powell’s U.N. speech waiting for the punch line [that never came]. And when the U.N. Inspectors said they couldn’t find anything in Iraq, I didn’t get it why we kept to our timetable.

^{"the British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa"}

These days, I get up in the morning and read the New York Times and the Washington Post. Then I check out the blogs, then I go about my day. Some time in the afternoon, I check them all again, and often have to be called twice to supper because I’ve gotten hooked on running down some document or article [usually from or about 2002] to add just a small piece to what I know about that secret year. I wade through emptywheel‘s "weedy" dissections of the latest document releases, and I keep up with Mary [the left coaster] and Digby [Hullabaloo]. If Josh Marshall has written anything I haven’t read in the last few years, I’d be surprised.

I think I feel so guilty about being oblivious in the secret year that I’m trying to make up for it – like I can pay back for an opportunity missed along the way. I know that’s crazy, but I expect I’ll get up tomorrow and try to find the detainee statements that the C.I.A. said they were releasing today but I haven’t been able to locate. It’ll never be the like it was in 2002 when I trusted what I read. I didn’t know it was a secret year…

THE TORTURE TIMELINE: 2002

Bibi’s conditions
The New ForeignPolicy.com
06/12/2009

The Washington Times’s Eli Lake reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will say in his speech this weekend that he is prepared to accept Palestinian statehood under the following conditions:

• Any Palestinian state must be demilitarized, without an air force, full-fledged army or heavy weapons.
• Palestinians may not sign treaties with powers hostile to Israel.
• A Palestinian state must allow Israeli civilian and military aircraft unfettered access to Palestinian airspace, allow Israel to retain control of the airwaves and to station Israeli troops on a future state’s eastern and southern borders.
• Palestinians must accept Israel as a Jewish state, a nod to the hawkish side of Mr. Netanyahu’s governing coalition that has raised concerns that the Palestinian Authority, which nominally governs the West Bank, does not recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

Lake characterizes this recognition by Netanyahu as a "major shift," while Spencer Ackerman quips that the prime minister is "stepping boldly into 1993." The third paragraph is likely to be the most contentious condition, and creates a brand new issue for negotiations that didn’t really really need any new issues. I think accepting a Palestinian state is indeed a major shift from Netanyahu, though crucially, it’s one that doesn’t really require him to do very much while deflecting attention away from the one active thing that Israel hasn’t done since 1993, freezing settlement growth in the West Bank…

The Scope of the SSCI Investigation and Where It Leads
emptywheel
June 12, 2009

… This is Sheldon Whitehouse, former Rhode Island Attorney General and US Attorney, explaining how you build a case. This former prosecutor is thinking clearly of establishing a case, and then either pursuing it in SSCI – or referring it, as he suggested with his reference to an executive branch investigation. And in both this exchange and in his speech the other day, Whitehouse told both viewers and his colleagues to stand by.

As I said, I was skeptical about this investigation. But Whitehouse, at least, seems to think that after the questions we already know the answers to – did the interrogators exceed guidelines, did it produce worthwhile intelligence, did the committee get fully briefed – it will lead in other directions, including, potentially, forcing a DOJ investigation.

Time to give kudos where they’re deserved. If you’re so inclined, why not give Senator Feinstein a call – [202] 224-3841 – and thank her for leading this investigation [it’s not often we give DiFi thanks around here, but it appears deserved, and carrots often work much better than sticks].

Decline and Fall
Donald Rumsfeld’s Dramatic End
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post
june 14, 2009

Face time with the president is political gold in Washington, so Donald Rumsfeld moved quickly after taking charge at the Pentagon to secure weekly private meetings with President George W. Bush. Now, nearly six years and many meetings later, the defense secretary arrived in the Oval Office prepared to raise a delicate, and personal, matter…

"We said there’s no way he would stay if either the House or the Senate went Democratic because he would be the issue," Joyce recounted months later. The criticism "would have been relentless until he was gone." Sitting with Bush, Rumsfeld broached the possibility of his departure. A "fresh pair of eyes" on Iraq might not be a bad thing, the secretary said. He made no explicit offer to resign. Still, his inference was unmistakable…

Rumsfeld is in many respects an honorable man, deeply patriotic, a good friend to many and unfailingly loyal to those he has served and to a number who have served him. He is smart, cunning and capable of great geniality, all highly desirable qualities in a leader with such power. And the challenges he faced as secretary were considerable. But in the end, Rumsfeld’s biggest failings were personal – the result of the man himself, not simply of the circumstances he confronted. While he was unwilling to profess regrets to me, it is unlikely that he doesn’t have some. Nor do I expect him simply to fade away. That has never been his style. Withdrawal is not on his list of Rumsfeld’s Rules.

Rumsfeld had innumerable failings from where I sit. He was an ideologue, a signer of the PNAC letter to President Clinton and a neocon. He went along with what his old colleague, Dick Cheney, said [an affliction sort of like cancer]. He made many other mistakes – entering a war with no Cassis Belli, sending way too few troops, listening to Paul Brenner, rigidly adhering to a failed plan, relying on wishes rather than strategy, frowning all the time, and being arrogant. Donald Rumsfeld thought he knew what to do, but he didn’t. And he never figured it out. He was a know-it-all curmudgeon rather than a wise old man.

Confrontation Looming
Talking Points Memo
By Josh Marshall

There’s been a lot of talk about how Prime Minister Netanyahu will respond to President Obama’s insistence on a settlement freeze and whether he’ll announce a new position in his upcoming security speech. This article in today’s Ha’aretz says Netanyahu has come up with his answer. And it’s basically to tell Obama to go screw himself, though it’s couched in a lot of bilateral happy talk. He’s embracing the ‘road map’ but with a description that doesn’t sound like the actuall road map that everyone else is talking about and no freeze on settlements. Here’s an article which gives some sense of the pressures within his coalition which likely make it impossible to do anything else.

Netanyahu’s hope seems to be that he can square the circle by working out ‘informal understandings’ which will satisfy Obama while refusing a formal settlement freeze, and probably any settlement freeze at all. Meanwhile Israel President Peres [largely a ceremonial position — but of some consequence in this case because of who Peres is] is saying the parties should move immediately to stage two of the road map which would mean agreeing on the declaration of a Palestinian state with provisional borders.

With Netanyahu, I doubt he has the skills or vision to manage this. And it’s hard to see how his government survives long.

• There is only one possible solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict – two states, Israel and Palestine.
• Unrestricted "settlement" of Palestine by the Israelis is not compatible with a two state solution.

Special Investigations

Congress has embarked on specialized investigations of the executive throughout most of the legislature’s 200-year history. Beginning in 1792, such investigations have become some of the most visible, dramatic, and sometimes traumatic of congressional activities.

In 1792, the House created a special committee to investigate the ignominious and unexpected defeat of an Army expedition force, led by General Arthur St. Clair, at the hands of the confederated Indian tribes in the Ohio Territory a year before. The committee was "empowered to call for such persons, papers, and records, as may be necessary to assist their inquiries.” President George Washington, in a highly unusual meeting, conferred with all of his Cabinet officers about the unprecedented investigation. They agreed that the House had a right to conduct such an inquiry but that the President should release only such papers as the “public good would permit and ought to refuse those the disclosure of which would injure the public.” While retaining custody of the original documents with the executive, Washington honored the panel’s request for information by sending copies of the pertinent records; a House clerk verified them for accuracy and completeness.

As it turned out, the St. Clair episode set two important, although competing, precedents with regard to overseeing the executive. Congress established that it could conduct specialized inquiries and secure the executive-held information, even in highly sensitive, secret matters and, implicitly, involving the President’s constitutional power as commander-in-chief. At the same time, the President established that he could control the release of the official documents, a harbinger of executive privilege.

During the intervening two centuries, Congress has embarked on a number of major investigations of the executive. These have often arisen because of allegations of executive misconduct, significant policy disputes between the two branches, and/or intense political conflicts between the dominant parties of the day or between and among factions within the majority party. In 1861, for instance, Congress created a Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War to examine the Lincoln Administration’s handling of the Civil War. Other notable probes included investigations into the Credit Mobilier (1872-1873), the Money Trust (1912), the Teapot Dome scandal (1923), and defense spending during World War II (1943-1944).

The early cold war era witnessed major investigations into alleged disloyalty and espionage by executive personnel. These efforts — spearheaded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Internal Security, and the Senate Government Operations Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations — however, raised serious concerns about the rights of witnesses and criticisms about unsubstantiated claims which unfairly tainted individuals and entire agencies.

Significant congressional investigative efforts over the past quarter century and their impact include the following examples:

• The war in Vietnam during the Johnson, Nixon, and Ford Administrations, with hearings conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and House Foreign Affairs Committee as well as by other panels. These, in part, led to a reduction and eventual cutoff in funding for the war effort and to new statutory controls over war powers.

• Watergate and the impeachment of President Nixon in 1973-1974, with hearings conducted by a select committee in the Senate, chaired by Sam Ervin, and by the House Judiciary Committee. These efforts helped to bring about the resignation of President Nixon, following the resignation and criminal indictment of top Administration officials. These investigations and subsequent hearings also prompted the Ethics in Government Act, which included provision for a special prosecutor (later renamed the independent counsel) to investigate suspected criminal conduct by high-ranking executive officials.
• Intelligence agency abuses in 1975-76, with inquiries by temporary select committees on intelligence in both Chambers. These prompted changes in statutory controls and new executive orders on the intelligence agencies as well as to the creation of permanent Select Committees on Intelligence in the House and Senate.
• Financial scandal in the General Services Administration in 1977-1978, with inquiries conducted by the Senate Public Works Committee and House and Senate Government Operations Committees. These efforts led to new statutory controls over GSA contracting procedures and to the Inspector General Act of 1978, establishing independent IGs in GSA and eleven other Federal establishments.
• Abscam in 1981-1982, with hearings held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights and by a bipartisan Senate select committee, chaired by Charles Mathias. These efforts, in part, helped to promote and solidify changes in Justice Department procedures governing undercover operations.
• Defense procurement fraud, cost-overruns, and waste in the early- to mid-1980s, with hearings and investigations conducted largely by the House and Senate Committees on Armed Services and the Appropriations Subcommittees on Defense. These efforts served as catalysts to several legislative initiatives: to install a statutory office of inspector general in the Department of Defense, to establish a procurement “czar” for DoD, and to broaden the jurisdiction of the Defense Investigative Service, allowing it to investigate the highly classified special access programs.
• The Iran-contra affair in 1986-1987, with probes undertaken initially by the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence and later by specially created select committees on the affair itself, among others. These helped to produce changes in executive procedures for covert action, to amend statutory reporting requirements in this field, and to install a statutory office of inspector general in the CIA.
• Program abuses and mismanagement in the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1989-1990, with hearings conducted by the specially created HUD/MOD REHAB Investigation Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and by the Subcommittee on Employment and Housing of the House Government Operations Committee. These efforts promoted improvements in reporting by the HUD Inspector General to Congress, administrative reforms within the Department, and legislative changes in relevant programs.