Bruce Jessen

Documents reveal the CIA was allowed to deny detainees sleep upward of 80 to 180 hours at a time.

Marcy Wheeler has a typically excellent post going through a remarkable annex to the 2004 CIA inspector general’s torture report: the psychological profile prepared (probably by former SERE psychologist James Mitchell) of Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee to be subjected to what would become the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. (As Marcy was the first to [...]

In order to learn more about the mysterious “prolonged diapering” technique formerly employed by the CIA — possibly the technique nebulously referred to in the 2004 inspector general report as an eleventh and previously unacknowledged interrogation method — I turned to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s February 2007 report on the treatment of [...]

Joby Warrick and Peter Finn’s Washington Post account of the 2002 torture of Abu Zubaydah is the most detailed and nuanced journalistic report to date of how two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were experienced in the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape program, ended up decisively influencing the interrogation of the highest-value al-Qaeda [...]

This is my favorite rejection under the Freedom of Information Act ever.
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 [...]

As I mentioned, Marcy has a question about something from retired FBI agent Ali Soufan’s op-ed in The New York Times. Soufan’s whole op-ed is about how a joint FBI/CIA team interrogating Abu Zubaydah from March to June 2002 yielded valuable intelligence. But Jay Bybee’s Office of Legal Counsel memo from August 1, 2002 is [...]

A wealth of new information emerged Tuesday on interrogation practices.