Heck of a job, capitalism!

Capitalists of the world, unite! Viktor Deni, 1920. Via.

Gail Collins writes:

One of the most unnerving parts involves the fact that the waterboarding, ice baths and wall-slamming were conducted under the direction of an outside contractor. It isn’t the first time the government turned to private enterprise and wound up with a human rights disaster — think Abu Ghraib. Or Blackwater.

Actually Abu Ghraib is a part of it (torturers there were trained by torturers from Guantánamo from the private enterprise torture-training program)—it represents, perhaps, the very beginning of the Bush administration drive to privatize everything they could from State Department security (that's where Blackwater came in) to Social Security (sorry, not privatization but the proposed "introduction of private accounts" which is totally not privatization except to the extent that it is that did not actually get done anyhow, though the former president persists in regarding it as his top achievement in domestic policy).

It's been known since FBI agent Ali Soufan testified before the Senate in May 2009 that this began after the March 2002 capture in Pakistan of the Saudi mujahid Abu Zubaydah, as reported at the time on NPR:

Mr. ALI SOUFAN (FBI Agent): I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as enhanced interrogation techniques - a position shared by professional operatives including CIA officers who were present at the initial phases of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation.

SHAPIRO: Abu Zubaydah was the first high-value detainee taken into U.S. custody after 9/11. Ali Soufan helped question him. Now, many people have described the debate over harsh interrogations as a split between the FBI and the CIA. Today, Soufan said that was not true, in his experience. He said the push for abusive techniques came from private contractors....

Soufan eventually left the prison, calling the contractors' methods borderline torture. In written testimony, Soufan described the contractors as having no experience in intelligence operations, investigations, terrorism or al-Qaida. And, he said, the contractors had no experience in the art of interview and interrogation.

A report from the Senate Armed Services Committee suggests the contractors were people who trained American service members to resist talking under torture. Soufan said Zubaydah gave important intelligence under traditional interrogation methods.

As further details have emerged over the year, culminating with the Senate report on CIA torture practices in the so-called Global War on Terrorism, we have a clearer idea of who these contractors were, starting with two retired Air Force psychologists, both Mormons as it happens, Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell, veteran instructors in the famous SERE program (Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape) that is used to teach American troops how to deal with being captured by enemy forces:

At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator. Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his “pretty scary” performance, another official recalled. (Scott Shane, New York Times, August 11 2009)

(Jessen was also called to serve as bishop of the congregation of Latter-Day Saints in the 6th ward of Spokane, Washington, in 2012, but resigned a week later because it was "controversial".)

Jessen was largely responsible for the design for one part, "Psychological Aspects of Detention", of a 1989 revision of the SERE course, SV-91, and his notes and syllabus have somehow survived—they appeared in a piece in Truthout, March 22 2011, by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, and it's startling to see how he conceived things from the enemy interrogator's point of view almost 20 years before he began preparing a program to train interrogators:

“This issue of collaboration is ‘the most prominent deliberately controlled force against the (prisoner of war),” Jessen wrote. “The ability of the (prisoner of war) to successfully resist collaboration and cope with the obviously severe approach-avoidance conflict is complicated in a systematic and calculated way by his captors.

“These complications include: Threats of death, physical pressures including torture which result in psychological disturbances or deterioration, inadequate diet and sanitary facilities with constant debilitation and illness, attacks on the mental health via isolation, reinforcement of anxieties, sleeplessness, stimulus deprivation or flooding, disorientation, loss of control both internal and external locus, direct and indirect attack on the (prisoner of war’s) standards of honor, faith in himself, his organization, family, country, religion, or political beliefs … Few seem to be able to hold themselves completely immune to such rigorous behavior throughout all the vicissitudes of long captivity. Confronted with these conditions, the unprepared prisoner of war experiences unmanageable levels of fear and despair.”

Mitchell, meanwhile, is remembered (in Shane's 2009 report) for having paid a call in December 2001 with a CIA psychologist, Kirk Hubbard, and some other people, on U. Penn's Martin Seligman, best known as the founder of "positive psychology", but also for his work of the 1960s on "learned helplessness":

During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was “grieved and horrified” to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.

We can see here how it was that Mitchell and Jessen started getting these contracts—entrepreneurially: Mitchell (newly retired as a lieutenant colonel and available for work) was openly hustling for them, hanging out with CIA personnel and pushing his ideas.

As Michael Kearns, a SERE colleague of Jessen's and Mitchell's, told Leopold and Kaye, there's no mistaking how they've given up the idea of getting truthful information out of their victims; they want to "exploit" them, as Japanese interrogators exploited American POWs in the Pacific War, and the object is to get a confession regardless whether it's true or not:

“The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered – not just ‘enhanced interrogation techniques,’ but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar,” he said. “What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen’s instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to ‘reverse-engineer’ a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.”

This way of thinking is how people become torturers: if the object is to extract true information out of a prisoner, the method of interrogation has to be of the kind Ali Soufan described practicing in the black site in Thailand on Abu Zubaydah in the early spring of 2002:

They nursed his wounds, gained his confidence and got the terror suspect talking. They extracted crucial intelligence—including the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as the architect of 9/11 and the dirty-bomb plot of Jose Padilla—before CIA contractors even began their aggressive tactics. (Michael Isikoff, Newsweek, April 24 2009)

Then on April 15 Mitchell and Jessen showed up with the bright lights and loud rock music, and unspeaking guards dressed entirely in black down to gloves, balaclavas, and goggles, a program designed to weaken Zubaydah and "enhance his sense of hopelessness". It wasn't torture yet, but they wanted it to be: they went to Washington to get the authorization from attorney general John Ashcroft and returned in the beginning of audience to try out the techniques they'd been dreaming about since 1989:

Shortly before noon on Aug. 4, Zubaydah was stripped naked, shackled, hooded and slammed into a concrete wall. He was then placed in a coffin-like box. At 6:20 that night, he was waterboarded for the first time.

He coughed, vomited and had "involuntary spasms of the torso and extremities," the CIA noted. In an email titled "So it begins," a medical officer wrote to headquarters that Zubaydah "seems very resistant" to waterboarding and had provided "NO useful information so far."

Those tactics — combined with face slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation and other painful techniques — continued in "varying combinations, 24 hours a day" for 17 days. He was waterboarded a total of 83 times.

When he was left alone, Zubaydah "was placed in a stress position, left on a waterboard with a cloth over his face, or locked in one of two confinement boxes."

In all, he spent 266 hours — 11 days and two hours — locked in the pitch-dark coffin, and 29 hours in a much smaller box. In response, he "cried," "begged," "whimpered" and grew so distressed that "he was unable to effectively communicate," the interrogation team reported. (Joseph Tanfani and W.J. Hennigan, Los Angeles Times)

So it begins.

At around the same time, US authorities were paying private contractors to build the Salt Pit in Afghanistan where Jessen helped out with interrogations as his trainees slowly murdered Gul Rahman in November 2002, and the rest is history, in which Jessen and Mitchell built a company launched in 2005 with a contract for $180 million, running interrogations at Guantánamo among other dark prisons and getting $1800 per day for participating in person. The company got closed down by the Obama administration (looking forward, not back), though, after having collected only $81 million.

Until then they always had explicit support from the White House; Ali Soufan, protesting against the incompetent and violent interrogators that had been foisted on his team was told so, according to Isikoff's report:

The official even waved a document in front of Soufan, saying the approvals "are coming from Gonzales," a reference to Alberto Gonzales, then the White House counsel and later the attorney general. (A lawyer for Gonzales declined to comment.)

And vampire Dick Cheney, the Fourth Branch of government, made sure he kept a monitory eye on things, acccording to Vicki Divoll, former counsel for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and former assistant general counsel to the CIA, where she was an adviser to the Counterterrorist Center:

One of the things Vice President Cheney also did is go to the CIA headquarters and talk to analysts about links between Iraq and al-Qaida. That kind of hands-on vice presidential attention is very unusual. The concept of the vice president sitting around a table with young analysts is inappropriate. And the National Security Agency briefing on wiretapping was held in his office. (Liz Halloran/NPR)

I don't think it's right to say Jessen and Mitchell were incompetent, however. That's based on an unwarranted assumption, that getting valuable intelligence was what they were there to do. Since they didn't get any, as the Senate report demonstrates in detail, they didn't know what they were doing. But the evidence suggests pretty clearly that valuable intelligence wasn't what they were after; they were well aware that their techniques wouldn't do it. What they were after was that experience of rendering somebody helpless, that and a shit-ton of cash, and they did it very well.

They're heroes, in fact, of entrepreneurialism, taking the government for a ride with sheer nerve and fast talk. Heck of a job!

Via Azhar at egmr.

Check out the valuable take from BooMan on the torture program as representing (GOP) lowered standards.