Through the collection of  ”detailed medical information” from detainee interrogations that physicians and mental-health experts used to shape subsequent interrogation regimens, Physicians for Human Rights charges that medical personnel involved in the torture violated their professional ethics and long-standing legal restrictions on human experimentation. Those violations “could rise to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity,” the group writes in its report. It calls for an “immediate criminal investigation” into its charges, as well as a host of oversight mechanisms to determine that no such biological experimentation continues.

Just months after 9/11, the CIA hired two psychologists with experience in a training program to help U.S. servicemembers survive enemy torture, known as SERE, to help design an interrogation program for hard-to-crack al-Qaeda detainees. Those psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, set to work on a detainee in CIA custody, Abu Zubaydah, and under their guidance in the summer of 2002, Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times. Their work contributed to the establishment of several other interrogation methods not permitted under decades-long understandings of the Geneva Conventions, like keeping a detainee’s body so painfully contorted as to prevent him from falling asleep.

Jim Risen of The New York Times has the CIA’s rebuttal:

“The report is just wrong,” said Paul Gimigliano, an agency spokesman. “The C.I.A. did not, as part of its past detention program, conduct human subject research on any detainee or group of detainees. The entire detention effort has been the subject of multiple, comprehensive reviews within our government, including by the Department of Justice.”

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture emailed reporters a statement on the report: ”These revelations are profoundly disturbing and raise for us the question of what more remains hidden.  The spiritual health of our nation will continue to suffer until the full truth opens a path to the justice and healing that our nation so desperately needs.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights calls on the Obama administration to certify that its new interrogation team, known as the HIG, does not engage in any similar human experimentation:

CCR also demands that the new intra-agency interrogation unit that was disclosed in February 2010 explain the nature of the “scientific research” it is conducting to improve the questioning of suspects. The current government may attempt to take advantage of ambiguity in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, added by the Bush administration and left in place by the Obama administration, to justify the ongoing use of some “enhanced” interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation in the new interrogation guidelines. Any ongoing unlawful human experimentation to “perfect” such techniques must immediately cease.

For more, see Jeff Kaye, who first disclosed the existence of Appendix M.

Update: Check out this video about the report:

Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, Mr. Goss told Mr. Rodriguez that he “agreed” with the decision, according to the document. He even joked after Mr. Rodriguez offered to “take the heat” for destroying the tapes.

“PG laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat,” according to one document, an internal C.I.A. e-mail message.

The CIA’s ex-acting general counsel, John Rizzo, told The New York Times he was surprised to hear about Goss’ approval and jocular tone. “Porter never once indicated to me that he agreed with the decision… I thought he was as upset as I was for not being told.”

Rodriguez still appears to have presented Goss with a fait accompli. Nothing in the document indicates Goss himself ordered the tapes to be destroyed. But John Durham, the Justice Department’s special prosecutor investigating the tape destruction, might seek to clarify matters with Goss himself.

Mark Benjamin at Salon backs Nance up. Benjamin dug through some recently-disclosed CIA documents and found what waterboarding actually involved, as practiced by CIA:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

This is all detailed in Abu Zubaydah’s account to the International Committee of the Red Cross of how he was tortured. But it’s one thing for a terrorist to testify to ill treatment. It’s another for CIA documentation to corroborate his account. Clearly Abu Zubaydah was drowned. As Benjamin observes, this is not the “dunking” that Dick Cheney describes. Whatever apologists like Marc Thiessen might say, the people who performed this torture knew full well that they were torturing people like Abu Zubaydah.

Recall that it came out last year that in a classified August 2002 memoranda, Yoo and Bybee approved such tortures to captured al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah as placing insects inside a “confinement box” along with the detainee, who was to be led to believe the insects were poisonous. They concluded such a move wouldn’t be torture. Here’s a snippet of how they reached such a conclusion. They use the bizarre nickname “Boo-Boo” for Abu Zubaydah:

On June 30 [2002], Yoo asked [NAME REDACTED] by email, “[D]o we know if Boo-boo is allergic to certain insects?” [NAME REDACTED] replied, “No idea, but I’ll check with [NAME REDACTED]” Although there is no record of a reply by [NAME REDACTED] the final version of the classified Bybee memo included the following, “Further, you have informed us that you are not aware that Zubaydah has any allergies to insects.”

These were grown men sworn to uphold the law.

Both Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, a federal judge, object to several findings listed in the report.

Update, 7:48 a.m., Feb. 20: My apologies for a hasty initial misread. Justice Department ethics officials found that Yoo and Bybee were professionally negligent, but OPR itself — while still treating their work harshly — found their misconduct didn’t rise to that standard.

[W]e also learned about a proposal advanced by certain officials from the FBI and DoJ in late 2002 to change the circumstances of [Mohammed] Al-Qahtani‘s interrogation. A draft letter prepared for the purpose of presenting this proposal to the National Security Council indicated that this proposal involved subjecting Al-Qahatani to interrogation techniques of the sort that had previously been used by the CIA on Zubaydah and another detainee. DOJ and FBI officials involved with this proposal stated to us that the rational for this proposal was to bring more effective interrogation techniques to bear on Al-Qahtani than the ineffective interrogation techniques that the military had been using up to that time. The techniques that had been previously used by the CIA on Zubaydah included methods that did not remotely resemble the rapport-based techniques that are permitted under FBI policy.

Serwer writes, “It’s unclear who within the FBI recommended that the CIA torture Al-Qahtani after the military had already done so, but it seems to me that this is a pretty harrowing example of how torture can’t be contained once its use is legitimized.”

The profile makes reference to a number of personality factors. First, not only is Abu Zubaydah a senior member of al-Qaeda, but he’s “a highly self-directed individual who prizes his independence,” possessing “narcissistic features” and who “wrestles with issues regarding the killing of civilians.” A “private person,” Abu Zubaydah is said to be “skeptical of others’ intentions and alert for ulterior motives.” He possesses an eschatological view of the inevitable victory of al-Qaeda, which makes him determined “to delay, mislead and lie to protect what is most critical to the success of his cause.” And he’s “remarkably resilient and confident to overcome adversity.”

All of these things taken together indicate a brief for torturing Abu Zubaydah, said Steven Reisner, a psychological ethics adviser to Physicians for Human Rights, and not an impartial psychological profile. “If you were trying to experiment [with torture], you would write a psychological report just like this,” he said, as it emphasizes Abu Zubaydah’s alleged resilience, facility with resistance, and knowledge of al-Qaeda’s operations. Indeed, there’s a reference in the report to a presumption that Abu Zubaydah is “probably well-versed regarding al-Qa’ida’s captivity and resistance training.” In late 2001, as the CIA inspector general’s report reminds (and the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 report has already disclosed), CIA contracted with an “independent contractor psychologist” with experience in the SERE program to describe precisely that captivity and resistance training”; that psychologist, James Mitchell, took direct part in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation.

All this represents an often-overlooked conflict of interest, Reisner said: “They’re providing research that justifies the use of the techniques [advocated] and they’re being paid for it. It’s opportunism.” It’s not known how much Mitchell and his colleague, Bruce Jessen, ultimately benefited from the CIA, but in 2002 the two started a company that made “millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.,” according to a recent New York Times profile.

There is no evident indication from the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that John Helgerson, the former inspector general who conducted the review, factored in the conflict of interest into his assessment. It’s possible that such treatment occurred in the still-classified parts of the review.

Update: This post has been corrected to fix the misspelling of Steve Reisner’s name, for which I am very sorry.

• “Agency senior managers believe that lives have been saved as a result of the capture and interrogation of terrorists who were planning attacks, in particular, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Hambali, and Al-Nashiri.” page 88 para 217.

Read the sentence that precedes it: “This Review did not uncover any evidence that these plots were imminent.” There’s a difference between belief and reality — and if you read the section of the report on “Effectiveness” (it begins at page 85) in context, it’s clear that the former CIA inspector general, John Helgerson, took great pains to distinguish the two and provide explicit skepticism on those claims. The CIA’s detention program “has been effective,” he writes, insofar as it got the terrorists apprehended. “Measuring the effectiveness of EITs [enhanced interrogation techniques], however, is a more subjective process and not without some concern.” He then spends two pages providing a dispassionate account of information detainees “provided… on al-Qa’ida and other terrorist groups” that “assisted” in the “identification of terrorists.” He does not vouch for the information.

But starting on page 89, at paragraph 220, Helgerson pours cold water — you’ll pardon the pun, right? — on the GOP memo’s claims:

Inasmuch as EITs have been used only since August 2002, and they have not all been used with every high value detainee, there is limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness. This Review identified concerns about the use of the waterboard, specifically whether the risks of its use were justified by the results, whether it has been unnecessarily used in some instances, and whether the fact that it is being applied in a manner different from its use in SERE training brings into question the continued applicability of the DoJ opinion to its use. Although the waterboard is the most intrusive of the EITs, the fact that precautions have been taken to provide on-site medical oversight in the use of all EITs is evidence that their use poses risks.

[REDACTED] Determining the effectiveness of each EIT is important in facilitating Agency management’s decision as to which techniques should be used and for how long. Measuring the overall effectiveness of EITs is challenging for a number of reasons including: (1) the Agency cannot determine with any certainty the totality of the intelligence the detainee actually possesses; (2) each detainee has different fears of and tolerance foe EITs; (3) the application of the same EITs by different interrogators may have different results; and [REDACTED].

With admirable intellectual honesty, Helgerson analyzes the waterboarding cases of the three detainees on whom the technique was used. With the first, Abu Zubaydah, the number of intelligence reports provided before and after his waterboarding is redacted, and there is no attempt at adjudicating the claims of those reports. “It is not possible to say definitively that the waterboard is the reason for Abu Zubaydah’s increased production, or if another factor, such as the length of detention, was the catalyst,” he writes, but still says that “since the use of the waterboard” Abu Zubaydah has “appeared to be cooperative,” which will convince everyone who believes the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacy that waterboarding worked.

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, Helgerson writes, was initially compliant after waterboarding, but then his interrogators thought he was holding out on him, so he was tortured further but not waterboarded. “Because of the litany of techniques used by different interrogators over a relatively short period of time, it is difficult to identify why exactly al-Nashiri became more willing to provide information,” he writes, but — again with the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc construction — Helgerson does write that after being tortured, al-Nashiri “provided information about his most operational planning.” So I’ll cede that one to be charitable.

Then there is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, whom the CIA says is its “preeminent source” about al-Qaeda. Helgerson says that KSM wasn’t compliant before his waterboarding, providing “outdated, inaccurate or incomplete” information. But the rest of the paragraph detailing what Helgerson judges about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed is redacted.

This is also context that the GOP memo, perhaps unsurprisingly, omits and ignores. Similarly, Helgerson follows the “effectiveness” section with an extensive discussion of the policy implications of embracing torture, beginning with the flat statement that “the EITs used by the Agency under the CTC [Counterterrorist Center] Program are inconsistent with the public policy positions that the United States has taken regarding human rights.” He continues to provide the dreaded Equivalence, citing examples of the State Department criticizing foreign countries for performing their own “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It’s laughable, but perhaps not surprising, that those who defend the torture program the loudest and misrepresent its contents the greatest consider themselves to be stalwart advocates of liberty.

That’s what the 2004 CIA inspector general report, released this afternoon, says.

Discussing the “extreme interrogation techniques” including waterboarding, the report acknowledges that “with respect to two detainees at those [secret CIA] sites, the use and frequency of one EIT, the waterboard, went beyond the projected use of the technique as originally described to DOJ.”  No matter.  Because the CIA went ahead and obtained DOJ’s permission to go ahead and use the more extreme versions of the technique, with more frequency than it had previously approved.

The reports says: “The Agency, on 29 July 2003, secured oral DOJ concurrence that certain deviations are not significant for purposes of DOJ’s legal opinions.”

The Justice Department, then, approved the more extreme and frequent use of the technique — the one that Holder, President Obama and most legal experts have called “torture.” How will Holder be able to limit those prosecutions to only CIA officials?  This is exactly the type of evidence that I think will take the investigation not only up the chain of command at the CIA, but should shift it over to the Justice Department as well.

The report supports a lot but not all of retired FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan’s account of the torture. Soufan testified in May that both the FBI and the CIA members of the team interrogating Abu Zubaydah came to oppose Mitchell’s abusive techniques. Warrick and Finn report that most of the team were appalled by what Mitchell proposed — inducing a state of “learned helplessness” through making Abu Zubaydah terrified of the team — but it took a long time for opposition to congeal; and even then, not many people aside from Soufan actively tried to stop the torture. But The Post’s account supports Soufan’s testimony that the harsher techniques produced less valuable information than Soufan’s attempts to build an emotional bond with Abu Zubaydah.

The Post’s report also introduces an often overlooked element to the torture: the degree to which CIA headquarters — and, it seems, the Bush White House — directed Abu Zubaydah’s torture from halfway around the world. Owing in large part to the heated post-9/11 climate, there were institutional pressures against stopping the torture. When Mitchell and Jessen were convinced that Abu Zubaydah had nothing to further to tell after four or five days’ worth of 83 waterboarding sessions, this was the reply:

“Headquarters was sending daily harangues, cables, e-mails insisting that waterboarding continue for 30 days because another attack was believed to be imminent,” the former official said. “Headquarters said it would be on the team’s back if an attack happened. They said to the interrogation team, ‘You’ve lost your spine.’ “

This, of course, was the implicit message that Mitchell and Jessen gave to the FBI and CIA interrogators who didn’t endorse Mitchell’s fear-based interrogation approach. And this is something that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence appears to be exploring: how the widespread state of fear in the United States after 9/11 led the Bush administration to embrace an interrogations regimen that presumed its conclusions: al-Qaeda have bombs ready to go off at any minute; al-Qaeda members possess the information necessary to stop the attacks; al-Qaeda members will only respond to physical and psychological horror.

These premises turned out not to be true. But in the climate that existed after 9/11, when the intelligence community appeared to have missed warning signs for the attacks (never mind the August 2001 “bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” presidential briefing), knowledgeable interrogators like Ali Soufan who tried to introduce calm professionalism to the interrogations were marginalized.

Postscript: one thing the piece doesn’t answer is how Mitchell and Jessen came to the CIA’s attention in the first place. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to find this out and was summarily rejected.

In May, following a wealth of disclosures about the role of the Survival Evasion Resistence Escape program, which trains U.S. troops to resist torture, in shaping the Defense Department and the CIA’s interrogation programs under the Bush administration, it appeared that one of the biggest unanswered questions was how and why the CIA under George Tenet knew to turn to contract psychologists with SERE experience like James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen for assistance in devising interrogation programs. Retired FBI agent Ali Soufan testified that one such contractor — identified by Jane Meyer as Mitchell — on the Abu Zubaydah interrogation, the wellspring from which all future CIA “enhanced interrogation” emerged, overrulled all his FBI and CIA colleagues in order to experiment with SERE techniques.

That raised an additional concern: how deeply did CIA interrogation involvement with Mitchell and Jessen, who started a consulting firm after leaving SERE, actually run? Apparently pretty deeply: CIA Director Leon Panetta canceled all contractor involvement in interrogations in the spring, although Mayer reports there are some caveats to that. But it’s unclear, and so I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA for “all contracts signed between the CIA and the firm of Mitchell Jessen & Associates between September 2001 and April 2009″ including those where M-J are subcontractors. After I filed it, I realized it was imprecisely worded: since there was no Mitchell Jessen & Associates in late 2001, I probably wouldn’t be able to answer my first question anyway.

As it happens: moot point! Today I got my response, courtesy of Delores M. Nelson, the CIA’s information and privacy coordinator:

… [T]he CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or nonexistence of requested records is currently and properly classified and is intelligence sources and methods information that is protected from disclosure by section 6 of the CIA Act of 1949, as amended. Therefore, your request has been denied pursuant to FOIA exemptions (b)(1) and (b)(3).

Now, the fact of Mitchell Jessen & Associates contracting for CIA is not a secret. In addition to Mayer’s reporting, Katherine Eban delved deeply into the company’s history with CIA for Vanity Fair in 2007. The company even replied to her questions. And yet the CIA contends that even confirming the existence of any contracts it signed with the company would jeopardize national security. There’s an appeals process for my rejected FOIA request; I’ll be taking full advantage of it.