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
Vanity Fair
07/17/07 "Vanity
Fair" -- -- 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.
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,
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." -
Continued here
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