TORTURE BUSINESS
CIA Outsourced Development of Interrogation Plan
By John Goetz and Britta Sandberg
Spiegel (
May 12, 2009
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,624432-2,00.html
The torture practices used in interrogations of al-
Qaida prisoners were not developed by government
officials in
experts. In return for a daily consulting fee, they
personally supervised the program at the CIA's secret
prisons from the very beginning.
James Mitchell's new life begins with the same ritual
every morning: He goes jogging, wearing Adidas shorts
and a black tank top, his iPod in his ear. Then he gets
into his luxury SUV and drives back to luxury home on
The hacienda-style house, with a natural stone façade,
columned walkways and palm trees in front of the door
is brand-new. Mitchell has just had it built, in the
midst of an upscale, gated community.
The freestanding garage to the right of the house is
big enough for three or four cars, and a mountain bike
is mounted to the back of the SUV. Mitchell, a tanned
man in his late 50s with silver-gray hair, a neatly
trimmed beard and trendy sunglasses, spends two hours a
day exercising. In fact, exercise plays an important
role in his new life under
Mitchell is the man who, on the behalf of the
administration of former President George W. Bush,
developed the rules of the program that was somewhat
shamefacedly referred to as "special interrogation
techniques" and was authorized by the president in the
summer of 2002. In truth, Mitchell developed a torture
manual. His client was the CIA. The American foreign
intelligence agency has engaged in its own share of
dubious practices over the years, activities it
initially treated as praiseworthy and would later come
to bitterly regret. But now it has become clear that
the CIA, ironically enough, outsourced its torture
practices in interrogations during the darkest years of
the Bush administration. It entrusted the development
and supervision of these interrogations to a private
security firm run by James Mitchell and his partner, Bruce Jessen.
The two psychologists, who had never even conducted an
interrogation before -- in other words, two amateurs --
were largely responsible for developing the CIA's
prisoner interrogation program. The recently published
report of the Committee on Armed Services of the
Senate came out with new proof and details about this
collaboration, ABC News succeeded in filming both
Jessen and Mitchell who both refused to answer any
questions concerning their past saying that they were
not allow to speak about it.
Three months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11,
2001, Bush drove the Taliban out of
assigned the task of interrogating senior al-Qaida
prisoners to the CIA. The agency, which had little
experience with interrogation, turned to officials at
the Defense Department for help. They, in turn,
contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, a
division of the Defense Department responsible for
Americans captured abroad and the US Army's secret SERE
training program.
SERE, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance,
Escape, is a program designed to prepare US soldiers,
especially pilots, for situations after being taken
prisoner. In various training seminars, they learn how
to improve their ability to withstand mistreatment by
the enemy and, in the worst case, torture.
Most of the methods are based on experiences from the
Korean War. During SERE training, US soldiers are
stripped naked, exposed to extreme temperatures and
loud music and thrown against walls. They are kept in
so-called stress positions for hours and were also
subjected to waterboarding, at least until 2007.
The CIA request for possible new interrogation methods
also reached James Mitchell. He had worked as a
military psychologist for years and had trained
soldiers in the SERE program. Mitchell deserves a lot
of credit in this area, says US Air Force Colonel
Steven Kleinman. "If he had kept on doing what he was
doing, you could even have said that he did a lot for
his country. Unfortunately, no one stopped him after that."
Getting Involved in the War on Terror When Mitchell
learned of the inquiry coming from
already been retired from the military for six months.
For the first time in his life, he had founded his own,
small company: Knowledge Works, a consulting company,
at least on paper. He was clearly happy to accept new
customers and contracts.
Around the beginning of 2002, Mitchell contacted an old
colleague who was still working in the SERE training
program as Senior Psychologist. Bruce Jessen was in his
early 50s at the time and married with one son. Both
Mitchell and Jessen are Mormons. And both men, say
colleagues, are deeply religious and ardent patriots --
like so many Mormons.
Mitchell asked Jessen for help. He wanted him to review
the al-Qaida resistance training methods. Afterwards,
the two men wrote an initial recommendation of measures
designed to break the resistance of al-Qaida prisoners.
On Feb. 12, 2002 they sent the paper to JPRA Commander
Colonel John "Randy" Moulton who forwarded it to his
chain of command at JFCOM.
In April, they presented their first draft, "The
Exploitation Draft Plan," of a new interrogation
program to the CIA and proposed that an "exploitation
facility" should be established. The draft already
included some of the methods that have since come to
light, including sleep deprivation, the use of physical
violence and waterboarding. According to someone who
was involved in the program at the time, both Mitchell
and Jessen were eager to get involved in the War on
Terror as advisors to the CIA. And the CIA? According
to the informant, it was seeking scientific and
psychological justification for what it intended to do.
At 2 a.m., FBI agents and Pakistani police units raided
a two-story house on the outskirts of the city,
arresting Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaida logistics expert.
The Americans had their most important prisoner to
date. At the time, they believed that Abu Zubaydah was
the number-four man in the al-Qaida hierarchy.
The arrest of Abu Zubaydah was the source of great
nervousness in
undoubted resource in our hands -- the highest-ranking
al-Qaida official captured to date -- we opened
discussions within the National Security Council as to
how to handle him, since holding and interrogating
large numbers of al-Qaida operatives has never been
part of our plan," former CIA Director George Tenet
later wrote in his memoir. "We wondered what we could
legitimately do to get that information."
A number of meetings and presentations followed,
attended by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director
Tenet and his deputy. Tenet explained that, after
careful study, the CIA had concluded that the only way
to obtain the details of the terrorist organization's
future plans from al-Qaida fanatics was to use the SERE
methods. Tenet assured the group that these
interrogation practices had already been tested in the
training of thousands of Americans.
But someone should have told the
about the many warnings the Defense Department had
received from half a dozen SERE trainers. In a letter
written in December, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel
Daniel Baumgartner, who oversaw SERE training, had
already requested that the program's methods should not
be used in interrogations. Baumgartner noted that they
were "less reliable" and could in fact achieve the
opposite of the intended effect, that is, increase a
prisoner's resistance. He also warned they would have
an "intolerable public and political backlash when discovered."
On March 29, 2002, a day after the Zubaydah arrest,
James Mitchell closed Knowledge Works, the company he
had just founded. He and Bruce Jessen, who would resign
from military service a few months later, founded a new
company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates. The men became
contractors for the CIA, charging a rate of $1,000
(?746) a day, not including special fees.
CIA SECRET PRISON IN
Only a few days after his arrest, Zubaydah, a
Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, was flown to a CIA
secret prison in
One of the FBI men, Ali Soufan, a native of
a Muslim who speaks fluent Arabic, moved to the United
States in 1987. In 2000, he was involved in an
investigation of al-Qaeda's role in the attack on the
USS Cole, an American destroyer, in
Soufan, in his early 30s at the time, was an advocate
of the traditional FBI strategy known as "rapport
building," which is based on the notion that an
interrogation can only produce the desired results once
a rapport has been developed with the prisoner. Soufan
dressed the fresh gunshot wounds Zubaydah had received
during the arrest. He told Zubaydah that he even knew
the nickname he had been given by his mother.
For seven years, Soufan remained silent about his role
in the interrogation in
decided to give an exclusive interview to Newsweek
because "I was in the middle of this, and it's not true
that these [aggressive] techniques were effective."
Soufan showed Zubaydah photos of al-Qaida members. When
he saw a photo of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the prisoner
identified him as ", the man who had planned and
organized the Sept. 11 attacks. Later the Bush
administration -- with no justification whatsoever --
would celebrate this piece of information from the FBI
interrogation as a significant breakthrough and
evidence of the effectiveness of its new interrogation techniques.
A few days later, CIA agents arrived in
had brought along James Mitchell, the architect of the
new interrogation methods. Suddenly the tone changed
dramatically. Mitchell gave orders to intensify
Zubaydah's treatment if he did not respond to questions.
One day Soufan, seeing that the prisoner was naked,
threw him a towel. Later on, he and Mitchell argued
heatedly over the prisoner's treatment. "We're the
thing," Soufan recalls shouting at Mitchell. He also
asked Mitchell who had authorized him to use the
aggressive methods. Mitchell responded that he had
received approval from the "highest levels" in
months before the Bush administration issued its first
torture memorandum to legally justify the interrogation techniques.
The FBI finally broke with the CIA on the day Soufan
discovered a wooden box that looked like a coffin. Was
it meant to be used for a mock burial? Soufan called
his superior in
Robert Mueller decided that his staff would no longer
take part in these interrogations and ordered Soufan
and the rest of the FBI- team to return to
Mitchell and the CIA had free rein from then on.
Zubaydah later told Red Cross staff that he had been
repeatedly locked into the box, where he had had
difficulty breathing. He said he had also been thrown
against a wall repeatedly, prevented from sleeping,
doused in ice-cold water and subjected to extremely
loud music. He was waterboarded 83 times.
"I was told during this period," he said years later,
"that I was one of the first to receive these
interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt
like they were experimenting and trying out techniques
to be used later on other people."
Zubaydah was Mitchell's laboratory experiment. The
psychologist allegedly told FBI agents who were present
that Zubaydah had to be kept in a cage like a dog, and
that it was indeed like an experiment. When dogs are
treated with electroshocks, Mitchell said, they too
would give up in the end.
For a short time, the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah
were the most well documented of all interrogations.
The CIA once had 92 videotapes of the interrogations,
which included waterboarding. But 90 of the videos were
destroyed in November 2005. This Wednesday, however,
FBI agent Soufan is scheduled to testify before the
Senate Judiciary Committee.
Business is still going well for Mitchell Jessen &
Associates. The company now has 120 employees, and most
of them have security clearances at levels normally
reserved for government employees. Many former members
of the SERE program now work for the company, which now
occupies two floors of an office building in downtown
equipped with special, high-security doors -- a
standard the CIA requires from its civilian contractors.
Abu Zubaydah's attorney, Brent Mickum, plans to file a
civil suit against Mitchell and Jessen, unless US
President Barack Obama chooses to file criminal charges
against the contractors.
When questioned by journalists recently, Mitchell said
that he would be happy to talk about these issues, but
that a confidentiality agreement he had signed prevents
him from doing so.
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
RELATED SPIEGEL ONLINE LINKS:
* Will Germany Take
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,624278,00.html
* Europe's 'Special Interrogations': New Evidence of Torture Prison in
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,621450,00.html
* The Rendition of Khaled el-Masri: Judgment Day May Be Approaching for CIA
Agents (05/04/2009) http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,622757,00.html
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