They destroyed the records:
"Omission cited in destruction of interrogation videos; Officer left names of lawyers off note" by Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press / July 26, 2010
WASHINGTON — When the CIA sent word in 2005 to destroy scores of videos showing waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, there was an unusual omission in the carefully worded memo: the names of two agency lawyers.
Related: VCR Ate CIA Videotapes
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The destruction of the tapes wiped away the most graphic evidence of the CIA’s now-closed network of overseas prisons, where suspected terrorists were interrogated for information using some of the most aggressive tactics in US history.
Critics of that George W. Bush-era program point to the tapes’ destruction and say his administration was trying to cover its tracks, but the reality is more complex....
Because it continued into the Obummer administration.
The CIA’s top clandestine officer, Jose Rodriguez, who wasn’t disciplined for what some former officials told prosecutors amounted to insubordination, is frequently back at CIA headquarters as a contractor.
The Associated Press has compiled an account of how the tapes were destroyed, a narrative that among other things underlines the challenges prosecutors face in bringing charges.
That's their job.
Most of the people interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation. Some of the officials directly involved declined comment or were unavailable.
Taping CIA interrogations is unusual, but the 2002 captures of Al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Rahim al-Nashiri were unusual cases. The CIA wanted to unravel Al Qaeda from within and the Bush administration allowed increasingly severe tactics to try to ensure cooperation.
That is so deceptive because Al-CIA-Duh was created by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Putting that aside, the whole official narrative surrounding what all this is based upon is a complete lie. I suppose the destruction of the myth is why we now have brutal ISIS.
Officers began videotaping to prove that Zubaydah arrived in Thailand wounded and to show they were following Washington’s new interrogation rules.
Almost as soon as taping began, officials began discussing whether to destroy the tapes. Dozens of officers and contractors appeared on the tapes. If those videos surfaced, officials feared, nearly all those people could be identified.
In November 2002, CIA lawyer John L. McPherson was assigned to watch the videos and compare them with written summaries. If the reports accurately described the videos, that would bolster the case that the tapes were unnecessary.
Several of the 92 videos had been taped over, so the quality was poor. Others contained gaps. When one tape ran out, documents show, interrogators didn’t always immediately insert a new one. Many contained brief interrogation sessions followed by hours of static.
McPherson concluded in January 2003 that the summaries matched what he saw. With that assurance, the CIA planned to destroy the tapes. But lawmakers who were briefed on the plan raised concerns, and the CIA scrapped the idea, agency documents show.
The White House didn’t learn about the tapes for a year, and even then, it was somewhat by chance.
Near the end of a May 2004 meeting between CIA general counsel Scott Muller and White House lawyers, the conversation turned to the scandal over photos of abuse in the military’s Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Related: Abused Abu Ghraib inmates still waiting for Army compensation
National Security Council lawyer John Bellinger’s question was almost offhand: Does the CIA have anything that could cause a firestorm like Abu Ghraib?
Yes, Muller said.
David Addington, a former CIA lawyer who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s legal counsel, was stunned that videos existed, officials said. But he told Muller not to destroy them, and Bellinger and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales agreed, according to documents and interviews with former officials.
Then a crime was committed. Destruction of evidence.
That order stood for more than a year. Muller’s successor, John Rizzo, received similar instructions from the next White House counsel, Harriet Miers: Check with the White House before destroying the tapes.
Despite the White House orders, momentum for destroying the tapes grew again in late 2005 as the CIA Thailand station chief, Mike Winograd, prepared to retire.
Winograd had the tapes and believed they should be destroyed, officials said. At CIA headquarters, Rodriguez and his chief of staff agreed.
On Nov. 4, 2005, Rodriguez asked CIA lawyer Steven Hermes whether Rodriguez had the authority destroy the tapes. Hermes said Rodriguez did, according to documents and interviews. Rodriguez also asked CIA lawyer Robert Eatinger whether there was any legal requirement to keep the tapes. Eatinger said no.
Both Eatinger and Hermes remain with the agency and were unavailable to be interviewed....
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You wouldn't have seen the flight into the prison, either:
"CIA mission was secret for years; Top terrorists were shifted out of Guantanamo" by Matt Apuzzo, Associated Press / August 7, 2010
WASHINGTON — A white, unmarked Boeing 737 landed in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, before dawn on a CIA mission so secretive, many in the nation’s war on terrorism were kept in the dark.
Four of the nation’s most highly valued terrorist prisoners were aboard.
They arrived at Guantanamo on Sept. 24, 2003, years earlier than the United States has ever disclosed. Then, months later, they were just as quietly whisked away before the Supreme Court could give them access to lawyers.
The transfer allowed the United States to interrogate the detainees in CIA “black sites’’ for two more years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers or challenge their detention in US courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been afforded those rights.
“This was all just a shell game to hide detainees from the courts,’’ said Jonathan Hafetz, a Seton Hall University law professor who has represented several detainees.
Removing them from Guantanamo Bay underscores how worried President George W. Bush’s administration was that the Supreme Court might lift the veil of secrecy on the detention program. It also shows how insistent the Bush administration was that terrorists must be held outside the US court system.
Years later, the program’s legacy continues to complicate President Obama’s efforts to prosecute the terrorists behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Or they might just stand down.
The arrival and speedy departure from Guantanamo were pieced together by The Associated Press using flight records and interviews with current and former US officials and others familiar with the CIA’s detention program. All spoke on condition of anonymity.
Officials at the White House, Justice Department, Pentagon, and CIA were consulted on the prisoner transfer, officials said.
“The so-called black sites and enhanced interrogation methods, which were administered on the basis of guidance from the Department of Justice, are a thing of the past,’’ CIA spokesman George Little said.
They put them out to sea now to avoid the messy legal entanglements.
The American Civil Liberties Union renewed its call for a broad criminal investigation into the detention program yesterday.
“Secret detention constitutes a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, and the officials who authorized the CIA’s secret prisons and torture program should be held accountable,’’ said Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU’s deputy legal director.
Put plain and simple, they are war crimes.
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By late summer 2003, the CIA believed the men had revealed their best secrets. The agency needed somewhere to hold them, but no longer needed to conduct prolonged interrogations.
The US naval facility at Guantanamo Bay seemed a good fit. Bush had selected the first six people to face military tribunals there, and a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that detainees could not use US courts to challenge their imprisonment.
And the CIA had just constructed a new facility, which would become known as Strawberry Fields, separate from the main prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Forever, huh? That's how long the war and detentions were to last?
The prisoner transfer flight, outlined in documents and interviews, visited five CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Morocco, and Guantanamo Bay. The flight logs were compiled by European authorities investigating the CIA program.
The existence of a CIA prison at Guantanamo was reported in 2004, but it has always been unclear who was there.
???????
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At least the interrogators have all been trained right:
"Ex-CIA officer accused of prisoner abuse rehired as a trainer" by Adam Goldman, Associated Press / September 8, 2010
WASHINGTON — A former CIA officer accused of revving an electric drill near the head of an imprisoned terror suspect has returned to US intelligence as a contractor training CIA operatives, the Associated Press has learned.
The CIA officer wielded the drill, which was bitless, and an unloaded handgun — unauthorized interrogation techniques — to menace suspected USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri inside a secret CIA prison in Poland in late 2002 and early 2003, according to several former intelligence officials and a review by the CIA’s inspector general.
It's not funny even if the CIA thinks it is.
Related: The USS Cole bombing against the backdrop of Israeli "Black Propaganda" Operations
Did you also know that Israel did 9/11?
Adding details to the public portions of the review, the former officials identified the officer as Albert, 60, a former FBI agent of Egyptian descent who worked as a bureau translator in New York before joining the CIA. The former officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because many details of the incident remain classified.
Both Albert and his CIA supervisor at the time, a second official known as Mike, were reprimanded for their involvement in the incident, the former officials said. The AP is withholding the last names of the two men at the request of US officials for safety reasons.
Human rights activists say the men’s actions were emblematic of harsh treatment and oversight problems in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, amounting to torture that should have been prosecuted. They also say Albert’s return as a contractor raises questions about how the intelligence community deals with those who used unauthorized interrogation methods.
“The notion that an individual involved in one of the more notorious episodes of the CIA’s interrogation program is still employed directly or indirectly by the US government is scandalous,’’ said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
***************
After leaving the CIA, Albert returned at some point as a contractor, training CIA officers at a facility in northern Virginia to handle different scenarios they might face in the field, according to former officials. Albert has not been involved in training CIA employees for at least two years, but a current US official says he continues to work as an intelligence contractor.
It’s not clear when Albert left the agency and became an intelligence contractor.
His former supervisor, Mike, 56, retired from the CIA in 2003 and now teaches and works in the private sector. Mike declined to comment.
This $elf-$erving revolving door based on lies needs to stop.
The events in Poland were outlined in the CIA inspector general’s special review of the agency’s detention and interrogation program, parts of which were declassified last year. But a full accounting of what happened to Nashiri at the so-called black site and who was involved has never been made public.
The CIA used secret prisons scattered around the world, from Thailand to Poland, where detainees were questioned and subjected to the simulated drowning technique of waterboarding and other harsh methods.
President George W. Bush closed the black sites in 2006, but the government has yet to divulge the full history of the secret program.
Nashiri was captured in Dubai in November 2002 and was taken to another CIA secret prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit. Nashiri was flown to still another secret CIA prison in Thailand, where he stayed briefly, then taken to the Poland prison on Dec. 5, 2002, just days after that facility was opened.
In Poland, Nashiri was subjected to a series of enhanced interrogation techniques, including some not authorized by Justice Department guidelines.
There were heated arguments at CIA headquarters about Nashiri’s treatment, according to a former CIA official. Some CIA officers felt Nashiri was “compliant’’ after two weeks of tough questioning, and additional rough treatment was unnecessary....
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And who was running that prison in Thailand?
"CIA officer linked to waterboarding not chosen for top job" Associated Press May 08, 2013
WASHINGTON — One of the CIA’s highest-ranking women, who once ran a CIA prison in Thailand where terror suspects were waterboarded, has been bypassed for the agency’s top spy job.
Ooooh.
The officer, who remains undercover, was a finalist for the job and would have become the first female chief of clandestine operations.
Yeah, the world would be so much better if women were running it, yup.
As one of the last remaining senior CIA officers who held leadership roles in the agency’s interrogation and detention program, however, she was a politically risky pick.
Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, has criticized the interrogation program and personally urged CIA Director John Brennan not to promote the woman, according to a former senior intelligence official briefed on the call.
Through a spokesman, Feinstein said she ‘‘conveyed my views to Mr. Brennan.’’
CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said the assertion that the officer was passed over because of her involvement in the interrogation program was ‘‘absolutely not true.’’
Well, the CIA is trained to mislead.
More than a decade after it last used waterboarding, the CIA is still hounded by the legacy of tactics that America once considered torture.
Once considered?
Brennan’s ties to the interrogation program delayed for years his nomination to lead the CIA and Feinstein wants the agency to declassify a 6,000-page report on the interrogation program.
While many details about the program have become public, much is still shrouded in secrecy, making it impossible to evaluate its successes.
As if there could be any.
Harsh interrogations led to some information, but also generated a lot of false information.
I'll sign whatever you want.
And whether any of it could have been done without waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forcing people into small boxes is unknowable.
The officer briefly ran a secret CIA prison where accused terrorists Abu Zubayada and Abd al-Nashiri were waterboarded in 2002, according to current and former US intelligence officials. She was also a senior manager in the Counterterrorism Center helping run operations in the war on terror.
She also served as chief of staff to Jose Rodriguez and helped carry out his order that the CIA destroy its waterboarding videos. That order prompted a lengthy Justice Department investigation that ended without charges.
Then she is a criminal!
Instead of picking the female officer, Brennan turned instead to the head of the CIA’s Latin American Division, a former station chief in Pakistan who former officials said once ran the covert action that helped remove Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic from power. That program is regarded inside the CIA as a blueprint for running a successful peaceful covert action.
Look at how blasé the pos propaganda pre$$ puts out such outrage.
The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the CIA’s operations publicly.
The name of the new head of the clandestine service is widely known in intelligence, diplomatic and journalistic circles, as is the name of the woman who was passed over. Both have declared their CIA affiliations with foreign governments around the world. The CIA, however, maintains that the names should not be made public because they are technically undercover.
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Poor CIA:
"CIA report seen damaging US standing globally" by Griff Witte, Washington Post December 11, 2014
LONDON — Born out of the horror over the 9/11 attacks, the CIA’s secret program of detention and interrogation was intended to make the United States safer.
But exposure of the program’s extreme brutality on Tuesday appeared likely to increase the danger for Americans overseas and further constrain US foreign policymaking.
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s portrait of the interrogation program led allies to distance themselves and prompted adversaries to launch cries of hypocrisy.
Yeah, and?
At US embassies, diplomats girded for potentially violent protests, while American troops worldwide stood on high alert.
‘‘It’s obviously very bad for US moral standing in the world,’’ said Jacob Parakilas, a foreign policy analyst with the London-based think tank Chatham House. ‘‘You can expect this to get very, very wide play on Russia Today, [Iran’s] Press TV, and other media that are in the hands of American adversaries.’’
It is not just bad, it totally destroys any shred of credibility when AmeriKan fart-face politicians needle anyone regarding human rights. They are all complicit in war crimes.
Even before the report’s official release, China’s state-run media was gleefully pointing to the findings as a sign of lost American credibility. ‘‘America is neither a suitable role model nor a qualified judge on human rights issues in other countries,’’ read an editorial in the state-run Xinhua news service. ‘‘Yet, despite this, people rarely hear the US talking about its own problems, preferring to be vocal on the issues it sees in other countries, including China.’’
Related: Soviet-Style ‘Torture’ Becomes ‘Interrogation’
US used Chinese methods at base; Detainees faced techniques once labeled 'torture'
Oh, so that's where the US government got the ideas.
In Egypt, a progovernment television commentator struck a similar theme. ‘‘The United States cannot demand human rights reports from other countries since this [document] proves they know nothing about human rights,’’ Tamer Amin said on a private network.
The release of the US report comes at a time when American standing in the world has already been badly harmed by an array of factors, including drone warfare and revelations about warrantless wiretapping, and extensive coverage of racial unrest at home. While many of the abuses in the CIA’s interrogation program were already well known, the graphic nature of the report’s findings could resonate overseas in a way that other disclosures have not.
Parakilas said many of the details were likely to be particularly uncomfortable for US allies, and could inhibit future cooperation at a moment when Washington and other Western capitals are deeply unnerved by the rise of the self-described Islamic State.
‘‘There will be more restrictions in terms of intelligence sharing and operational secrecy,’’ he said.
The report could, however, put pressure on US allies to be more transparent.
Amid global revulsion at the behavior revealed in the Senate’s report, there was also mild praise for the US government.
Writing for the center-right German daily paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, commentator Nikolas Buss said publication of the report was the right thing to do. ‘‘Only by taking steps like this will the USA, a country that considers itself a more moral world power, be able to regain the trust that the Bush administration recklessly gambled away,’’ he wrote.
It's torture reading this delusional garbage.
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"Director defends CIA against torture charges" by Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo, New York Times December 12, 2014
LANGLEY, Va. — John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, speaking from inside the marble lobby of the CIA’s headquarters, Brennan challenged the conclusions of an excoriating report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that concluded the agency’s detention program had yielded little valuable information, and that the CIA repeatedly misled the White House and Congress about the program’s value. Brennan said what the CIA calls enhanced interrogation techniques were effective, even if it is “unknowable” whether useful intelligence was obtained as the direct result of those methods.
Unlike President Obama, Brennan pointedly refused to say that the methods — including waterboarding, shackling prisoners in painful positions, and locking them in coffinlike boxes — amounted to torture.
These guys are sickening psychopaths.
His characterization of the program Thursday was a contrast to the remarks he made in 2009 while serving as Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, when he said that the interrogation methods “led us astray from our ideals as a nation,” and that “tactics such as waterboarding were not in keeping with our values as Americans.” Asked Thursday about those comments, Brennan said he stood by them.
He is in a different role today, leading a CIA workforce that still comprises hundreds of officers who were involved in the detention and interrogation program.
He was unstinting in his praise of the CIA’s response after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, even while agreeing with the conclusions of the Senate Intelligence Committee that the agency was ill prepared for its new role as jailers and conducted poor oversight of the program during its early years.
Although Brennan said the CIA was out of the interrogation business, he offered no assurances that anything prevented the government from authorizing the same techniques in the face of another crisis.
“I defer to the policymakers in future times,” he said.
While Brennan acknowledged that hard work that went into the Senate report — which took five years to complete and involved the examination of millions of documents — he criticized the investigation as flawed, partisan and frustrating, and pointed out numerous disagreements that he had with the report’s damning conclusions about the CIA’s now defunct prison program.
It's a Democrat report and he's from a Democrat administration, and yet he's hollering partisanship!
His position about the efficacy of the interrogation techniques appeared to be an attempt to thread a needle between Senate Democrats who have argued that the brutal techniques played little role in disrupting significant terror plots or hunting down Al Qaeda leaders, and former CIA officials who during a counterattack to the Senate report have said that waterboarding and other interrogation methods were central to counterterrorism successes since 2001.
As Brennan put it, using CIA shorthand for enhanced interrogation techniques, “we have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.”
White House officials insist that Brennan, who has long been one of Obama’s closest advisers, remains in favor with the president. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, called Brennan a patriot and said that Obama retains full confidence in his CIA director.
In his remarks, Brennan acknowledged that in a limited number of cases, CIA officers had used “interrogation methods that had not been authorized, were abhorrent, and rightly should be repudiated by all.” But the “overwhelming majority of officers involved in the program,” he said, carried out their responsibilities “faithfully and in accordance with the legal and policy guidance they were provided.”
The report also details several instances in which interrogators used unauthorized tactics. At a secret prison in Afghanistan known as the Salt Pit, a detainee died of hypothermia after being doused with water and left chained, half-naked, to a cold concrete floor.
That stuff tends to make people mad.
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"Architects of harsh tactics for CIA had little experience" by Ken Dilanian, Associated Press December 12, 2014
WASHINGTON — When the CIA set out to design a program to elicit intelligence from captured terrorists, it turned to two former Air Force psychologists with no practical interrogation experience and no specialized knowledge of Al Qaeda, according to a Senate investigation released this week.
What the two men did have was an understanding of the brutal methods employed on American POWs by governments such as North Korea and Vietnam, methods that were later used to help train US military personnel to resist torture.
The spy agency ended up outsourcing much of its interrogation program to the pair, who formed a company that ultimately was paid $81 million, the Senate report says. The report adds new details to what has long been known about the integral role they played in some of the harshest treatment of CIA detainees.
The report refers to the men using pseudonyms, Grayson Swigart and Hammond Dunbar. But current and former US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity about information that is not public, have identified them as James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.
They got paid how much?
These 7 Men Owned The Company Linked To CIA Torture
Got false confessions and everything!
The CIA told Congress in 1989 that ‘‘inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers,’’ the report notes.
Brennan says you can't know that, so...... aaaaaaaaaaaah!!!
But a little more than a decade later Mitchell and Jessen convinced top officials at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, then run by Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez, that breaking people was the key to unraveling terror plots.
Plots set in motion by the very same intelligence agency.
They reverse-engineered the military training techniques, which had never been studied as a form of interrogation. Their recommendations included humiliation, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding.
‘‘On the CIA’s behalf, the contract psychologists developed theories of interrogation based on ‘learned helplessness,’ and developed the list of enhanced interrogation techniques that was approved for use against Abu Zubaydah and subsequent CIA detainees,’’ the Senate report said, referring to the first significant Al Qaeda figure captured, taken to a secret prison, and subjected to a battery of interrogation techniques after Sept. 11, 2001.
The psychologists personally conducted questioning of Zubaydah and other significant detainees using these techniques. They also evaluated whether detainees’ psychological state allowed for the continued use of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.’’
Some CIA officials were troubled by the conflict of interest, the report notes. One CIA officer e-mailed that they had a ‘‘vested interest’’ in waterboarding. Another accused them of ‘‘arrogance and narcissism.’’
The CIA, in its response to the report, acknowledged that the conflict had ‘‘raised concerns and prompted deliberation,’’ leading to a new rule in 2003 that no contractor could issue a definitive psychological assessment of a detainee.
But the agency defended hiring the two psychologists. ‘‘We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program,’’ the agency said in its written response this week.
Jessen helped interrogate detainee Gul Rahman at a dungeon-like Afghanistan prison called the Salt Pit, the Senate report says, in a session that included ‘‘48 hours of sleep deprivation, auditory overload, total darkness, isolation, a cold shower, and rough treatment.’’ A few days later, after Jessen left, Rahman was found dead of hypothermia.
See: Afghanistan's Salt Pit
And they called Karzai crazy.
The report said both men helped waterboard 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and threatened his family.
Waterboarded something like 180 times, which is insane -- and the threats to his kids is what probably broke him.
Of course, AmeriKa would never engage is such reprehensible tactics, right?
Rodriguez, who has criticized the Senate report, said he had nothing to add beyond the account of his 2012 memoir, ‘‘Hard Measures,’’ which says he asked the psychologists to help interrogate Zubaydah days after he was captured, before it was known whether he would cooperate.
So when does he testify under oath?
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Of course, it was all a haste makes waste situation:
"On path to harsh tactics, CIA chose haste over analysis" by James Risen and Matt Apuzzo, New York Times December 16, 2014
WASHINGTON — Almost immediately after transferring the first important prisoner they had captured since the 9/11 attacks to a secret prison in Thailand, CIA officials met at the agency’s headquarters to debate two questions they had been discussing for months. Who would interrogate Abu Zubaydah, and how?
A CIA lawyer at the April 1, 2002, meeting suggested the name of a psychologist, James Mitchell, who had been on contract for several months, analyzing Al Qaeda for the agency’s Office of Technical Service, the arm of the CIA that creates disguises and builds James Bond-like spy gadgets.
Did you know they also have a venture capital wing?
The lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, had heard the name from someone in the office, and within hours of floating it, counterterrorism officials were on the phone with Mitchell. By that evening, according to the report released last week by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the agency had incorporated Mitchell’s views into a classified cable ordering preparations for the interrogation of Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda operative.
The cable called for constant lighting, loud music, and an all-white room to keep Zubaydah awake. The setup would cause “psychological disorientation, and reduced psychological wherewithal,” the cable read.
With little debate or vetting of Mitchell and his approach, the CIA that day in 2002 started down a road to interrogation practices that Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, last week called “a stain on our values and our history.”
In the months that followed, Mitchell, a former Air Force explosives expert and trainer, and later his partner, Bruce Jessen, another psychologist and former Air Force officer, designed, led and directed the interrogations and became the prime advocates for what is now widely considered to have been torture. In the process, they made tens of millions of dollars under contracts that their critics within the CIA warned at the time gave them financial incentives to repeatedly use the most brutal techniques.
The CIA has said it hired Mitchell and Jessen because their experience with nonstandard interrogation was unparalleled. But the government’s own experts favored the traditional approach to questioning prisoners. And the Senate report makes clear that the speed with which Mitchell was brought into the program — less than 24 hours elapsed between the time his name was floated and that first cable — meant there was no time to analyze whether his approach was best.
Former officials involved in the program attribute the speed to one thing: desperation. With the CIA under pressure to obtain information from its prisoners, Mitchell seemed to have the answer to how to do it.
That eagerness for a new, aggressive approach is reflected elsewhere in the Senate report. One CIA officer said the agency’s best intelligence justifying harsh interrogations came from a “walk-in” source — someone who appeared one day and told the CIA that Allah permitted jihadists to cooperate only if they were threatened. There is no evidence in the report that the CIA ever corroborated those assertions.
Are you f***ing sh**ting me?
In a lengthy interview last week after the CIA released him from an order forbidding his talking about his role in its program, Mitchell said the speed of his hiring surprised him.
“I never knew how that happened,” he said. “I just got a phone call.”
Mitchell said he disagreed with the conclusions of the Senate report and believes he has been unfairly demonized. His role, he said, was more complicated than has been presented.
Mitchell and Jessen had worked as trainers at the Air Force Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program, which subjected US airmen to the kind of interrogation they might face if captured so they could learn to resist it. Building on that experience, Mitchell proposed to the CIA a list of so-called enhanced interrogation tactics, including locking people in cramped boxes, shackling them in painful positions, keeping them awake for a week at a time, covering them with insects, and waterboarding, which simulates drowning and which the United States had considered torture.
They did that to those with phobias and KSM's son -- and did he ever scream.
Although the earliest mention of these tactics in the Senate report is July 2002, Justice Department documents released years ago show that CIA officials began discussing them within days of the April 1 meeting when Mitchell was brought aboard. John Rizzo, the agency’s top lawyer at the time, also placed those discussions in April in his memoir “Company Man.” He described some of the tactics as “sadistic and terrifying” but left it to Justice Department lawyers to decide whether they were legal.
They ultimately decided they were. Doesn't make it moral or right, and as I often hear, everything Hitler did was legal.
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I've got to hurry up and get some lunch.
