New Report Accuses CIA Doctors of Experimenting on Detainees

Physicians for Human Rights, an anti-torture non-governmental association, synthesizes a bunch of publicly available information to draw a gruesome conclusion: Medical personnel who participated in the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogations” for terrorism detainees are guilty of “complicity in intentionally harmful interrogation practices [that] were not only apparently intended to enable More…

Mitchell & Jessen Wanted Abu Zuabydah to Think He Was Being Buried Alive

Marcy Wheeler conducts an invaluable close reading of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility report, released on Friday, and finds that the SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen whom CIA contracted in 2001 to advise them on how to interrogate al-Qaeda detainees recommended a horrific technique:

The

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DOJ Advice on Sleep Deprivation Varied Widely

Among the many revelations in the CIA inspector general’s report released last week is this curious fact: the CIA did not have a coherent or consistent policy about the use and legality of sleep deprivation as an interrogation tactic. And it was More…

Abu Zubaydah, Torture and Conflicts of Interest

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. More…

Diapering, as Observed by the Red Cross

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 More…

Mitchell, Jessen & Abu Zubaydah: ‘You’ve Lost Your Spine’

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 More…

Interrogation Contracts That the CIA Won’t Let You See

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 More…

SERE Suckers (Cont’d): Send Lawyers, Waterboards and Money

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 More…

Report Details Origins of Bush-Era Interrogation Policies

A wealth of new details emerged Tuesday about how techniques designed to help captured U.S. troops resist torture formed the basis for the post-9/11 interrogation policies of the Bush-era Pentagon.

Instructors of those techniques proved to be eager in 2002 and 2003 to disseminate them to an emerging crop of More…