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 VF.COM EXCLUSIVE July 17, 2007
Al-Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah. The New York Times/Redux.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
While the methods were certainly unorthodox, there is little evidence they were
necesssary, given the success of the rapport-building approach until that point.
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.
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. standards-what Arrigo called
the "Rumsfeld definition" of humane treatment.
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. Gerald Herbert/A.P. Photo.
Arrigo and several others with her, including a representative from Physicians
for Human Rights, had come to believe that the task force had been
rigged-stacked 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.
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 psychologists-who, unlike psychiatrists, are not
medical doctors-to 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.)
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.
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 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. Neither served on the task force or are A.P.A. members.
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."
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.
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).
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
tactics-and the photographs of their wild misuse at Abu Ghraib-devastated
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.
"I think [Mitchell and Jessen] have caused more harm to American national
security than they'll ever understand," says Kleinman.
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.
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 Korea War made false confessions under
torture. Sure enough, those in sere training found that they would say anything
to get the torment to stop.
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.
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. Enterprise 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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The sere tactics aren't just morally and legally wrong, critics say; they're
tactically 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."
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.
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.
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."
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 lesson-that ambition to help
national security is no excuse for throwing out ethics and science," Rubenstein
says.
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."
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 The Silence
of the Lambs.) But they wanted to be, according to several former colleagues.
"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."
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."
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.
For a 2005 article in The New Yorker 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.
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."
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."
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."
Abu Zubaydah had been captured in Pakistan the day before.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 The New York Times reported last year.
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.
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.
In response to detailed questions from Vanity Fair, 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."
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.
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."
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.
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.
"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.)
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.
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.
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.)
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."
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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 more dangerous interrogations safer.
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.
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 The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. 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.
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 24. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"
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.
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 Vanity Fair, 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."
Mitchell and Jessen have become a focus of the investigation. In June, the
online news magazine Salon 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.
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.
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.
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 ***** Cheney's office. She wanted to know if
the researcher had found any evidence that uncontrollable stress would make
people more likely to talk.
Katherine Eban is a Brooklyn-based journalist and Alicia Patterson fellow who
writes about issues of public health and homeland security. Her book, Dangerous
Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America's
Drug Supply, was excerpted in the May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair.
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