Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Psychic Demolition

It's widely known that the enhanced interrogation techniques used at Gitmo and in the CIA's black site prisons were reverse-engineered from the military's Cold War-era training programs for resisting torture at the hands of Communist interrogators. Now in a must-read article in Vanity Fair, Katherine Eban reveals that two CIA-contracted psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, have been central to the development of the techniques, which are likened to a "psychic demolition" designed to get a detainee "... to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death":

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."

But the Communist interrogation tactics on which the new methods are based were designed to generate useful propaganda (ie. false confessions and anti-American declarations), not useful intelligence. Why, then, were the new methods adopted so wholeheartedly? Eban traces the explanation to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaeda lieutenant who under interrogation revealed the identities of Sheikh Khalid Mohammed and José Padilla, among others:

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.

Since then, Mitchell and Jessen have set up a series of private consultant companies that provide training for interrogators. And according to Eban, business ain't bad:

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.

The fact that psychologists are getting rich off of a method designed to demolish psyches is chilling. The fact that it's the United States government writing the checks is glacial.

Posted by Judah in:  Global War On Terror   Human Rights   

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