Mitchell & Jessen - The Guys Who Came Up With The Torture Program: The Young Turks

Posted by Mark Ristaino, AlterNet at 12:30 PM on August 13, 2009.

How about this for a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags story? Dr. Jessen and Dr. Mitchell: two military retirees and psychology professors, have been revealed to be the architects behind the Bush-era torture programming.  Though apparently under-qualified for the job, (their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy) what Mitchell & Jessen lacked in experience they made up for in moxie, gusto and sadistic desire for money by any means necessary.

From The New York Times:

Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

Are you queasy yet? No? Let's add some mind-alteringly high government salaries to the mix...

[Jessen & Mitchell's] methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times... [Their] business plans... meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.

Absolutely gut-wrenching. But wait, there's a scent of a happy ending, or closure or something:

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors’ colleagues and present and former government officials.

Watch the accompanying video for more analysis from TYT's Cenk Uygur.

Tagged as: news, political, torture, troops, arrest, gitmo, waterboarding, analysis, brutality, commentary, the young turks, cenk uygur, barack obama, commercial, grassroots outreach, george bush, dick cheney, karl rove, iraq war, doctor jessen mitchell , enhanced interrogation, new york times, chinese, stress positions, slamming sadists