© AFP Photo / Michelle Shephard
The Guantanamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba
A psychologist considered integral to crafting the CIA's post-9/11 "enhanced interrogation" tactics slammed an unreleased Senate report on CIA torture as inaccurate while defending his role in working with the spy agency amid a volatile era in US history.
In his first
interview in seven years, James Mitchell told freelance reporter Jason Leopold,
writing for the
Guardian, that he has nothing to apologize for regarding his place in the post-9/11 abuse of prisoners that, as he points out, was legal at the time.
"The people on the ground did the best they could with the way they understood the law at the time," he said.
"You can't ask someone to put their life on the line and think and make a decision without the benefit of hindsight and then eviscerate them in the press 10 years later."According to the Senate Intelligence Committee's vast, unreleased
report on the CIA's capture and interrogation program, Mitchell, along with another contractor, psychologist Bruce Jessen, is responsible for developing the torture program by
"reverse engineering" coercive interrogation tactics that US airmen are taught to resist through the military's survival evasion resistance escape (SERE) training.
"The whole Guantánamo issue that came up...all of the abuses that they did in Guantánamo they tried to attribute to me and Bruce," Mitchell said.
"It wasn't us. We didn't do any of that stuff. We didn't have a damn thing to do with that. I think that what happened was the Senate armed services committee believed that the agency [CIA] was behind it."Mitchell denies involvement in abusive practices, as was alleged by a Senate Armed Services Committee report in 2009.
"We didn't have a damn thing to do with that," Mitchell said. He blames Pentagon contractors and civilian staff
"who wanted to help out and made some dumb mistakes."
Mitchell, a retired Air Force psychologist, said he does not put stock in the Senate Intelligence Committee's 6,600-page, $40 million report or its findings. The study, according to leaked accounts of its details by those in the know, says the CIA's interrogation techniques were more brutal than advertised, that the CIA lied about them to gain legal cover and eschew proper oversight, and that the tactics didn't yield much, if any, actionable intelligence.
"I'm skeptical about the Senate report, because I do not believe that every analyst whose jobs and promotions depended upon it, who were professional intelligence experts, all them lied to protect a program? All of them were wrong? All of these [CIA] directors were wrong? All of the people who were using the intel to go get people were wrong? And 10 years later a Senate staffer was able to put it together and finally there's clarity? I am just highly skeptical that that's the truth."Based on non-disclosure agreements signed with the US, Mitchell could not discuss much about his place in the CIA's program, though he said he believes it was an overall success.
"I don't get annoyed about the program," he said.
"I get annoyed the way the good parts, and the bad parts, have been glossed over and how some good parts have been vilified."The tactics used against detainees held in CIA
"black sites" around the world are what many, including those party to the Geneva Conventions, consider torture. The techniques include waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation for days, confinement in a box, and wall slammings. Some detainees were subject to dozens of waterboarding sessions. Mitchell was reportedly active in the waterboarding of so-called 9/11
"mastermind" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Yet Mitchell claims the torture tactics he helped develop worked and provided analysts with vital information - despite what the latest Senate report claims.
He is also dismissive of statements made by former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, who has said that his standard, rapport-based interrogation style had yielded intelligence. That is, until the CIA butted in to use far more brutal methods while taking credit for Soufan's work.
"You're asked to believe he (Soufan) was getting all of this great information and the CIA said: 'Well, never mind. We're not interested in that information. We're not interested in the truth. We're going to do this other thing. Why? Because we're mean?' I worked for a lot of different organizations and they really care about results," Mitchell said.
Mitchell also pointed out that the post-September 11, 2001 atmosphere was one of frantic paranoia amongst intelligence and security analysts.
"The big fear was some sort of a radiological device...It's really easy, 13 years later, when there's been no device, when all those people who were trying to build them were either killed or captured...to come along later and say 'I could have done it better, this stuff was illegal.' It was not illegal based on the law at the time," he said.
Steven Kleinman, a whistleblower who pointed out abuses taking place in Iraq when he was an Air Force colonel there, told the Guardian that he could not understand Mitchell's position in believing that torture which ultimately produced false confessions could also yield
"reliable, accurate and timely intelligence.""Why would anybody think that a model that would produce those outcomes would also be effective in producing the opposite?" Kleinman said.
Overall, Mitchell denounces the
"lies" spread in the mass media about the torture program and his role in it. He plans to write a book about his experiences
"just to get my point of view out there."He said he is a supporter of Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy group that is very critical of the CIA torture program. He added that he wanted to support the group at a fundraiser to combat child abuse by volunteering to sit in a dunk tank.
Mitchell calls himself a political independent.
"I'm not a Republican or a Mormon or a gun nut or power hungry." His Wikipedia page, he said, had erroneously listed him as a Mormon.
All in all, Mitchell said he is proud of his service to the US.
"I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country by people at the highest level of government, and I did the best that I could."
Reader Comments
Two Words: Adolf Eichman.
Which could be rewards of monetary nature, prestige, power and some perverse gratification which normal humanity could never understand. They are worse than sick because nothing and I mean nothing can heal such sick groups and individuals.
Meanwhile there is nothing but suffering for man, beast and everything else that lives in this reality because of psychopaths.
I recently wrote a paper partly on this topic for an ethics class. Having been in the military and experienced the mindset, it isn’t surprising. It is the mindset of the person above that protecting America is all that matters and the gloves needed to come off (ie Cheney) to deal with them evil terrorists that did 9/11 and want to harm the US. Doesn’t matter to them, because they have this mindset and military group think drilled into them, that the people tortured might be innocent and really have no information give. What matters to them are the ends justifying the means and a few innocents being harmed are worth it if it protects the US. They just have no idea that they are selling their souls down the line and buying into the big lie of the war on terror. So I don’t think they are born psychopaths, but are really something different even if it looks like psychopathy. They suppress any conscience or goodness they might have or had it drilled out of them. Maybe they turn into STS dark souls or something for what they’ve done. The term functional sociopath comes to my mind after thinking about a little. They are zealots that have turnoff any goodness in relation to what they believe and accept what they see as a dog eat dog world where you need to use evil to combat supposed evil out there. Nazis were executed after the Nuremburg Trials for such ends justified the means and just following orders thinking.
Here is an interview with one of the military psychologists - [Link]
This is how they think: “psychologists were supposed to be do-gooders. You know, the idea that they would be involved in producing some pain just seems to be, you know, at first blush, something that would be wrong because we do no harm. But the real ethical consideration would say, well, by producing pain or questioning of somebody, if it does the most good for the most people, it’s entirely ethical, and to do otherwise would be unethical.”
Here is an example and an experience I had while in the US Navy that I think shows this well and kind of American exceptionalism on the micro scale:
I was once asked a question by the commanding officer of my ship during an oral examination for the most important qualification, the Surface Warfare Officer (SWO) qualification, a Naval Officer on a ship could attain. The question asked without any other qualifiers was, “If you had to choose between the life and death of one American and the life and death of 1,000,000 people from another country, say China, who would choose to keep alive?” After some thought and nervousness, I indicated I would save the lives of the 1,000,000 people. Due to my answer and further discussion on my reason and justification for such a stance, I failed the oral examination and the commanding officer chairing the examination board questioned whether I would ever be qualified and was visibly disturbed by the situation, as was I.
The American Psychological Association is corrupted by the influence as well. They went right along with the Bush gang and did nothing to but sanction that the gov’t is right. Sure they said torture isn’t ethical, but they haven’t held anyone accountable. There are other sordid twists and turns with the APA and maybe after I’m done with the semester I’ll try the paper into something that might be of worth for others to read. Also strangely enough some concepts connect with the new ‘Captain America’ movie, but this is long enough already.
The US is really turning into the new Nazis and people just don’t realize it.
The above statement is very true. All you have to do is see, what Project Paperclip did by importing all the top Nazi brass and scientists, such a Verner Von Braun who went on to develop NASA 's rocket program. These Nazi's then basically infiltrated all areas of the US government, not to mention all the data mining the USA did to get their hands on as much Nazi technology as they could.
One last comment, a longtime ago my father told me, as I began to see the enormous hegemony of the USA worldwide as a young adult, " that the USA was the BULLY of the world". Well there is no disputing that !!