The CIA's torture teachers

Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House.

By Mark Benjamin
Salon.com

There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military's secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to "reverse-engineer" techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military's use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA's use of such tactics -- working in close coordination with the military -- until now has remained largely unknown.

According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel Dell'Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, sent a "document preservation" order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell'Orto's order was in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody...

MARK BENJAMIN: Yeah, one of the psychologists is a guy named Bruce Jessen, who is apparently an expert on isolation. The reason why that’s interesting is last month the Council of Europe, a human rights agency, came out with a new report sort of explaining what was happening to these CIA detainees when they were in these black sites, as what the President calls them or what they’ve been called. And one of the things that happens with these folks is they're put into a room with no sound, a low white light, air coming in through a hole in the ceiling, and virtually no interaction with other human beings for 120 days. The research seems to show that if that happens, you start to lose your sense of identity, you hallucinate, you hear things, you see things that don't exist, and you breakdown psychologically. It is a form of abuse that leaves no marks. And I think the concern is that because the CIA apparently employed those tactics, that some of these psychologists may have played a role in helping the CIA and the military learn how to do that.