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:

The twelfth [interrogation] technique–which Mitchell and Jessen wanted approved but which Yoo excluded because of the rush to approve waterboarding–is mock burial.

There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the Bybee Two memo, because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out.

We learned last year that the mysterious eleventh technique was prolonged diapering, thanks to the disclosure of the 2004 CIA inspector-general’s report into interrogation and detention. Wheeler’s discovery completes the list of what these two torture enthusiasts advocated.

Still, according to the recently released July 2007 memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the technique was determined not to cause “serious physical pain or suffering” and not to violate the War Crimes Act. The War Crimes Act prohibits torture and “cruel and inhuman treatment.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

A comparison of the inspector general report with legal memos released from the Office of Legal Counsel within the Justice Department, however, reveals that lawyers were so uncertain about how and whether sleep deprivation could be used legally that their advice to the CIA ranged from restricting its use to 48 continuous hours, to allowing it for 180 hours or more. And although the 2007 legal memo specifically mentions that the CIA said it might use the technique for 180 hours, the lawyers restricted their analysis, in footnote 7, to only the legality of its use for up to 96 hours. Meanwhile, the inspector general report discusses the contemplated use of sleep deprivation on Abu Zubaydah for up to 11 days at a time — or 264 hours straight.

None of the former interrogators, physicians, lawyers or government officials could explain to TWI exactly why the CIA and Justice Department lawyers changed the rules so sharply and frequently. A call to Jack Goldsmith, the Harvard Law Professor and director of the Office of Legal Counsel from 2003 to 2004 was not returned.

“How they go from 48 to 100 plus hours is anybody’s guess,” said Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent who worked in the Osama Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 2002. “I think that they were making the rules up as they went along,” he said, adding that “they outsourced a lot of this,” referring to the role, recently revealed by The New York Times, of Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two businessmen-psychologists who developed the interrogation procedures for the CIA but had no interrogation experience themselves.

But the experts on sleep deprivation all appear to agree – and the literature on the subject is remarkably consistent – that sleep deprivation is physically and mentally harmful, and largely ineffective at producing useful information. Still, it’s tempting for government officials desperate to get detainees to talk.

“It will elicit information, that’s true,” said Cloonan. “People will talk. But in point of fact the substance is what separates what works and what doesn’t. Did they provide actionable intelligence, and could you verify what was being told?” asks Cloonan. “There’s a big diff between compliance — giving information to stop what they’re being subjected to — and real cooperation, where they’re giving useful information.”

Scientists, physicians and interrogators all say that because sleep deprivation causes extreme confusion and even psychosis, it’s impossible to know if what the detainee is telling interrogators is true or not.

“Sleep deprivation has been extensively studied,” said Dr. Steven Miles, professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, as well as the author of the book, “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors.” “It will cause people to speak. It does not produce reliable intelligence. It impairs the ability to concentrate in a way that allows the interrogatee to assemble coherent narratives. So it’s counterproductive in terms of information solicitation.”

A December 2006 report from the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College says that sleep deprivation is associated with, among other things, “increased suggestibility,” adding: “On this last point it is worth noting that suggestibility increases specifically under conditions simulating an interrogation. At least one study has found that “the effect on suggestibility of one or two night’s sleep loss is comparable to the difference in suggestibility between true and false confessors.”

That’s such a basic fact for interrogators that in the book, “Introduction to Forensic Psychology,” by Curt and Anne Bartol, the glossary lists “Coerced-compliant false confessions” as “Admissions of guilt most likely to occur after prolonged and intense interrogation experiences, especially in situations where sleep deprivation is a feature. The suspect, in desperation to avoid further discomfort, admits to the crime even knowing that he or she is innocent.”

As Tom Parker, a former British Intelligence agent, now Amnesty International’s Policy Director for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and Human Rights explained: “Sleep deprivation was never designed as an interview tool. It was used by the KGB and its precursors as a way to break people down to give false confessions. These techniques are not about getting people to tell the truth, they’re about breaking people down to kill their spirit.”

The justification for the technique originated with the idea of learned helplessness, based on studies conducted decades ago on dogs.

“They took dogs, tied them in a cage and shocked them,” explained Miles. “They showed that the dogs would act to resist or escape, unless the dogs learned there was nothing they could do to resist. Then they would just lie there and take it.”

The theory, explained Miles, is that “when used with other techniques it will induce dependence on the interrogator, which will cause the person to comply.” But all the research done on this from around the world reveals that “this technique simply does not gather intelligence.”

Sleep deprivation is always part of a package: as described in CIA inspector general report, prisoners were shackled, semi-starved, put in diapers and forced to stand that way. Their hands were cuffed along the wall close to their chins, according to Department of Justice memos. If they nodded off and stopped standing, the chains would pull at their wrists, waking them up.

Andrea Northwood, director of client services at the Center for Victims of Torture in Minneapolis, recently told The Associated Press that her organization considers 96 hours of sleep deprivation to be torture.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured in Vietnam, has also said that prolonged sleep deprivation is torture, and recently denied the claim in the CIA inspector general report that he was among several members of Congress who approved its use.

Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister from 1977-83, tortured by the KGB as a young man, famously described sleep deprivation in his book, White Nights:

“In the head of the interrogated prisoner, a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep… Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it,” he wrote. “I came across prisoners who signed what they were ordered to sign, only to get what the interrogator promised them” — time to sleep.

Although the technique was prohibited by President Obama, some worry it could be revived in the future because it at least gets people to talk, and it’s generally perceived as less offensive than waterboarding, head-slamming or forced nudity. “Sleep deprivation may be seen as a tempting technique to restore,” wrote reporter Greg Miller in the Los Angeles Times recently.

In justifying the use of sleep deprivation in a 2005 memo, Justice Department lawyers argued that it was okay for CIA interrogators to keep terror suspects awake for seven and a half days straight — because “even very extended sleep deprivation does not cause physical pain.” They relied for that claim on the work of university researchers who found that people who were deprived of sleep for just one night had an increased sensitivity to certain types of pain. Justice Department memos dated May 10, 2005 cited this study to support the conclusion that severe sleep deprivation of up to 180 consecutive hours might cause some increased pain but not “severe physical pain” — even when used together with slaps, stress positions, water dousing and “walling” — slamming a detainee’s head repeatedly against a flexible wall.

“Because sleep deprivation appears to cause at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance, the use of these techniques in combination with extended sleep deprivation would not be expected to cause severe physical pain,” wrote Steven Bradbury, a principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, who signed the memos. (Bradbury has since left the department and works at a private law firm in Washington. He did not return calls for comment.)

But those same academic researchers have since called the Justice Department’s use of their work “nonsense.” “To claim that 180 hours [of sleep deprivation] is safe in these respects, is nonsense.” Dr. James Horne, with the Loughborough University Sleep Research Centre, told the blog Obsidian Wings. “Prolonged stress with sleep deprivation will lead to a physiological exhaustion of the body’s defense mechanisms, physical collapse, and with the potential for various ensuing illnesses.”

In their studies, the doctors explained, the subjects were well-fed and could play video games and watch television. Detainees under interrogation, on the other hand, were often semi-starved and chained into place, not even allowed to go to the bathroom.

“In a manner, it’s like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic — and can even kill them,” another of the researchers cited, Dr. S. Hakki Onen, sleep specialist and geriatrician, told Time Magazine.

Although the Justice Department lawyers wrote that “extended sleep deprivation cannot be expected to cause ‘severe mental pain or suffering,’” the doctors vigorously disagree.

After several days, “the mental pain would be all too evident, and arguably worse than physical pain,” Dr. Horne said to Obsidian Wings.

Notably, a combination of techniques similar to those used by the CIA has been ruled unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights. In the case Ireland v. U.K., the court held that a combination of sleep deprivation, hooding, wall-standing, continuous white noise, sleep deprivation and “the bread and water diet” violated international humanitarian law.

What’s odd, say former interrogators, is that the military knew this and for the most part, resisted using these techniques. The CIA, however, relying on inexperienced contractors who developed its interrogation strategies based on the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) training, seems to have completely ignored common knowledge.

“The point is you realize when you’re going through that [SERE] training, they tell you this isn’t about trying to get useful intelligence out of you, it’s about getting propoganda,” said Matthew Alexander, a 14-year veteran of the air force and leader of an elite interrogations team in Iraq and author of “How to Break a Terrorist.” (Matthew Alexander, seen here on The Daily Show, uses a pseudonym.) Sleep deprivation may be used for no longer than 48 hours in SERE training, according to the inspector general report. “They’re just trying to break down your will.”

“I think people misinterpreted that,” Alexander added. “Mitchell and Jessen, the psychologists, they took that learned helplessness theory, but they’d never done an interrogation. They were so off base.”

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.

On how detainees were transfered from one secret detention facility to another:

The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. … The journey times obviously varied considerably and ranged from one hour to over twenty-four to thirty hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate or defecate into the diaper.

That would count as a “standard” technique, according to former CIA Director George Tenet’s January 2003 guidance, as “prolonged diapering” lasted longer than three days.

In a section of the report dealing with so-called “stress positions” — forced bodily contortion used not just for inflicting pain but as a sleep deprivation technique — there’s a section about how some detainees were allowed to defecate in a bucket. Not all were that fortunate.

None of them, however, were allowed to clean themselves afterwards. Others were made to wear a garment that resembled a diaper. This was the case for Mr [Walid] Bin Attash in his fourth place of detention. However, he commented that on several occasions the diaper was not replaced so he had to urinate and defecate on himself while shackled in the prolonged stress standing position. Indeed, in addition to Mr Bin Attash, three other detaineesspecified that they had to defecate and urinate on themselves and remain standing in their own bodily fluids. Of these, only Mr [Mohammed Nazir] Bin Lep agreed that his name be transmitted to the authorities.

That would seem the point of the technique: to compel the psychological stress and physical discomfort caused from forcing a person to wallow in his own human waste for extended periods of time. “[T]he general goal of these techniques is a psychological impact, and not some physical effect, with a specific goal of ‘dislocat[ing] his expectations regarding the treatment he believes he will receive…’,” read the CIA medical office’s Sept. 4, 2003 guidelines on “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Now that I think about it, there’s an element of religious coercion to the diapering as well, as observant Muslims cleanse themselves before they pray.

Then again, it appears that while the diapering may have been continuous, the wallowing-in-filth wasn’t. From Bin Attash’s verbatim account as transcribed by the ICRC:

During the standing I was made to wear a diaper. However, on some occasions the diaper was not replaced and so I had to urinate and defecate over myself. I was washed down with cold water everyday.

How long would this go on for? According to the ICRC:

Prolonged stress standing position, naked, held with the arms extended and chained above the head, as alleged by ten of the fourteen, for periods from two or three days continuously, and for up to two or three months intermittently, during which period toilet access was sometimes denied resulting in allegations from four detainees that they had to defecate and urinate over themselves.

My emphasis. The account of the diapering being used in conjunction with standing stress positions is corroborated by the nebulous account of the “hard takedown” procedure in the CIA 2004 inspector general’s report:

According to [REDACTED] the hard takedown was used often in interrogations at [REDACTED] as “part of the atmospherics.” For a time it was the standard procedure for moving a detainee to the sleep deprivation cell. It was done for shock and psychological impact and signaled the transition to another phase of the interrogation. The act of putting a detainee into a diaper can cause abrasions if the detainee struggles because the floor of the facility is concrete.

The diapering appears from the ICRC report not to have been frequent enough to merit its own discussion as a separate technique, but that could be fragmentary information.

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.

So who lied to Bybee about what facts the CIA had in its possession?

Presuming that Soufan’s account is accurate — and when he testifies, as he inevitably will, before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, it’s going to be as powerful as Jim Comey’s May 2007 public indictment of the Bush legal team, so it better be public is all I’m saying — then someone had to communicate to Bybee a misrepresentation of what was going on during the initial, pre-torture interrogation.

George Tenet’s memoir is unclear on who did this, and probably deliberately, saying only that after Abu Zubaydah’s late-March 2002 capture, “we opened discussions within the National Security Council as to how to handle him, since holding and interrogating large numbers of al-Qa’ida operatives had never been part of our plan.” (That’s page 241 of At The Center Of The Storm.) It’s easy enough to figure that the CIA’s then-top lawyers, Scott Muller and John Rizzo, were the ones communicating directly with Bybee. But someone must have been giving them information about what was happening at the CIA safehouse in Thailand where Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation took place — and suggesting that the interrogation wasn’t going well.

One guess is James Mitchell. Mitchell is a former SERE psychologist whom the Senate Armed Services Committee report says contacted his SERE colleague Bruce Jessen in “December 2001 or January 2002″ to “review documents describing al Qaeda resistance training.” (It’s unclear why Mitchell, then retired from SERE, decided to get into the game that way. Who let him know about those documents?) They prepared a report about what the storehouse of knowledge within SERE — which trains U.S. troops in how to survive and resist torture at the hands of enemy nations — could mean for U.S. interrogations of al-Qaeda. That report, circulated throughout the military — including to the Defense Intelligence Agency — became the basis for seminars that SERE and its overseeing agency at Joint Forces Command held for U.S. interrogators that spring. By April, Jessen prepared an “Exploitation Draft Plan” for “select al Qaeda detainees.” That would be days or weeks after the capture of Abu Zubaydah.

Somehow, a SERE guy was part of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation as soon as CIA officials deployed to interrogate the detainee. It is unclear how exactly the CIA knew to contact SERE experts for assistance in their interrogations of Abu Zubaydah. The August 1, 2002 OLC memo identifies as a “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (”SERE”) training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began.” I initially thought that was Jessen, but public accounts (including those cited in the Senate report) suggest it’s Mitchell. And Mitchell was known to say things like this, as quoted on page 156 of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side:

[O]thers present [at the interrogation] said he seemed to think he had all the answers about how to deal with Zubayda. Mitchell announced that the suspect had to be treated “like a dog in a cage,” informed sources said. “He said it was like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while, he’s so diminished, he can’t resist.”

This horrified the FBI agents on scene, Mayer reports. (“Science is science,” Mitchell retorted. Spoken like Sean Hannity!) They were eventually ordered to leave the interrogation, which became brutal. According to Soufan, some of the CIA people were also uncomfortable with that brutality — but they didn’t have the luxury of leaving. So it’s conspicuous when Soufan writes today:

My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were instructed to continue. (It’s worth noting that when reading between the lines of the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use of these techniques.)

That reads a lot like Soufan is fingering Mitchell as a driving force behind the turn toward brutality. It would make sense, then, that he would be communicating back through whatever channel to CIA superiors that the interrogation’s iterative, rapport-building approach wasn’t working well enough — or leaning on the official point of communication to include his own point of view in the account. This is pure speculation, though. It’ll take an investigation, currently led by the Senate intelligence community, to truly get at the truth.

But is it too cynical to suggest that Mitchell also had an interest in saying that Soufan and the FBI’s (and apparently, in part, CIA’s) non-brutal techniques failed? From page 24 of the Senate Armed Services Committee report:

Subsequent from his retirement from DoD [the Department of Defense], Dr. Jessen joined Dr. Mitchell and other former JPRA [Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, which oversees SERE] officials to form a company called Mitchell Jessen & Associates. Mitchell Jessen & Associates is co-owned by seven individuals, six of whom either worked for JPRA or one of the service SERE schools as employees and/or contractors. As of July 2007, the company had between 55 and 60 employees, several of whom were former JPRA employees.

Science may be science, but money is money.

Update: My mistake. Scott Muller wasn’t CIA general counsel during the spring 2002 Abu Zubaydah debate. I regret the error.

President George W. Bush (WDCpix)

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 inexperienced military interrogators facing the prospect of wresting information out of new captives. “I believe our niche lies in the fact that we can provide the ability to exploit personnel based on how our enemies have done this type of thing over the last five decades,” said Joseph Witsch, an instructor for the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), a component of U.S. Joint Forces Command that oversees the so-called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) program for U.S. special forces, during a 2002 training session for U.S. military interrogators, according to a newly released report.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Details like these came to light when an unclassified version of a Senate Armed Services Committee report on the Pentagon’s treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism (pdf) was made public late Tuesday. An unclassified executive summary of the report, released in December, gave the outlines of the narrative, an account of how extreme interrogation techniques never before considered legal for U.S. personnel to apply became widespread within the military. But the full extent of the story was unclear from the 21-page summary of the 200-page report.

JPRA, a previously obscure outpost inside the military command responsible for making the U.S. military services fight as a single entity, first emerged last year in committee hearings as a key element in the United States’ embrace of physical interrogation methods. Responsible for overseeing the SERE program around the military services, in which instructors in very controlled conditions teach U.S. troops how to endure and resist torture in enemy captivity. Such techniques, used by the Chinese and North Korean communist regimes, include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and forced exposure to extremes of temperature — all of which were recommended by JPRA and SERE officials to U.S. interrogators.

Instructors in the SERE program and their overseers in JPRA are not trained interrogators. Before 9/11, SERE and JPRA never focused on applying their resistance training to interrogate captured enemies. “SERE instructors are not selected for their roles based on language skills, intelligence training, or expertise in eliciting information,” the committee report specifies.

Yet after 9/11, with President Bush’s declaration that the Geneva Conventions would not apply to al-Qaeda and Taliban captives, the Pentagon’s then-general counsel, Jim Haynes, began asking JPRA how SERE’s expertise could assist U.S. interrogators, a relatively small U.S. military cohort. JPRA officials, eager to help with U.S. military efforts against al-Qaeda, sought to help with minimal prompting. Col. John “Randy” Moulton proposed in February 2002 that JPRA send a team to the newly established detention and interrogation facility to create a “short course” about “interrogation from the resistance side.” It would be the first of several such courses developed throughout 2002 and 2003, in which JPRA and its SERE “resistance” experts helped U.S. military and, in some cases, CIA interrogators, “reverse-engineer” SERE procedures for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iraq and, perhaps, the network of CIA secret prisons where the agency held “high-value” al-Qaeda captives.

A key figure is a SERE psychologist named Bruce Jessen. The chief psychologist frequently advised officials at Guantanamo Bay and the emerging cadre of U.S. interrogators in techniques designed to break U.S. soldiers. In April 2002, he created a Guantanamo Bay “exploitation draft plan” to provide SERE training to Guantanamo interrogators under his direction. He proposed the creation of an “exploitation facility” at Guantanamo that would be “off limits to non-essential personnel,” such as the press, the International Committee of the Red Cross, or foreign observers. He advised that “the “the only restricting factor” on what techniques interrogators ought to be permitted to employ “should be the Torture Convention,” though he defended the use of physical force in interrogations. He repeated that message to interrogators and Guantanamo officials throughout 2002.

The influence of Jessen and SERE was not limited to military interrogations. In July 2002, the Senate report discloses, he was sent to “another government agency” to offer advice; and a JPRA team assisted a squad from “another government agency” during the first six months of 2002 that would be “sent to interrogate a high level al Qaeda operative.” “Another government agency” is a widespread euphemism for the CIA. The month after Jessen went to advise the undisclosed agency, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a secret memorandum, disclosed last week, instructing the CIA as to what interrogation techniques it considered to fall short of statutory prohibitions on torture. It summarized what the CIA proposed for its interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, considered to be the highest-ranking al-Qaeda member in U.S. custody. “Zubaydah will have contact only with a new interrogation specialist, whom he has not met previously, and the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (“SERE”) training psychologist who has been involved with the interrogations since they began,” wrote Jay Bybee, the head of OLC, in an August 1, 2002 memorandum. It is unclear but likely that Jessen is the psychologist to which Bybee refers.

JPRA and SERE officials thought of themselves as a unique trove of information and training for U.S. interrogators. The report quotes one official as saying, “JPRA has the sole repository of the required skill set” for interrogating detainees, even though the FBI has interrogated criminals for over 100 years. At an interrogation training session in the summer of 2002, with Guantanamo officials present, SERE officials “drafted a memo proposing the use of physical and psychological pressures at [Guantanamo], including some pressures … that do not follow the Geneva Conventions,” according to the report.

Around that time, an aide to Pentagon chief lawyer Haynes, David Shiffrin, requested JPRA’s deputy commander to send him memoranda outlining what techniques SERE graduates had to endure. The response included “the facial slap, walling, the abdomen slap, use of water, the attention grab and stress positions.” One attached memo used the phrase “physical and/or psychological duress” interchangeably with “torture,” the report says.

By September 2002, Pentagon officials and Guantanamo interrogators had grown “frustrated” with their inability to collect as much useful intelligence from interrogations as they had expected from Guantanamo detainees, according to the report. A JPRA-sponsored training session for interrogators that month introduced the concept of exploiting “phobias” and playing off cultural sensitivities of Arabs and Muslims. JPRA instructor Joseph Witsch warned a superior, “We are out of our sphere when we begin to profess the proper ways to exploit these detainees,” but the training continued. Witsch later acknowledged to a Pentagon working group on interrogations, “The physical and psychological pressures we apply in training violate national and international laws. … I hope someone is explaining this to all these folks asking for our techniques and methodology!”

Several Pentagon officials were asking for precisely that. A “Behavioral Science Consultation Team” established at Guantanamo and in frequent contact with SERE advisers counseled a Guantanamo working group on whether the interrogators had “authorization to use interrogation approaches that had not been taught to interrogators” at the U.S. Army’s intelligence center and were not contained in its Field Manual on interrogations. One SERE adviser told the BSCT, “Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low.” Yet the working group approved a decision — over some BSCT and SERE reservations — to recommend the use of expanded techniques on a high-value detainee named Mohammed al-Qatani that were “influenced by SERE,” according to the report.

That request went up through the chain of command in October, ultimately reaching Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2002. The report documents Haynes’ ability to stop a review of the techniques’ legality by a legal adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, after representatives of the uniformed military made it clear that they considered the techniques to be illegal. As has been documented in numerous Pentagon inquiries stretching back to 2004, Rumsfeld ultimately recommended in April 2003 the use of several extreme interrogation techniques, including stress positions, dietary manipulation, “long time standing” and other techniques that are now revealed to have originated from SERE. Similarly, while Rumsfeld declared that those techniques were applicable only to “military and civilian interrogators assigned to Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the extreme pressure for intelligence in Iraq later that year sent Guantanamo Bay’s commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, to Iraq, where he delivered a list of Guantanamo-approved techniques to the Iraq war commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, with the explicit instruction to “Gitmo-ize” intelligence operations. A 2004 report by former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger found that instruction to be a central cause of the torture at the Abu Ghraib detention facility in late 2003.

The release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report comes on the heels of Thursday’s disclosure of four long-secret Justice Department documents outlining CIA interrogation techniques. Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the committee, explained in a statement that the two rounds of disclosure were coincidental. The Defense Department had been combing through the report since November 20 and only now approved it for release, Levin said, with some significant redactions of operational and other detail.

“The record established by the Committee’s investigation shows that senior officials sought out information on, were aware of training in, and authorized the use of abusive interrogation techniques,” Levin said. “Those senior officials bear significant responsibility for creating the legal and operational framework for the abuses. As the Committee report concluded, authorizations of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials resulted in abuse and conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”