CIA's $1,000 a Day Waterboarding Specialists

[george_maniakes]

Source: abcnews

As the secrets about the CIA's interrogation techniques continue to come out, there's new information about the frequency and severity of their use, contradicting an 2007 ABC News report, and a new focus on two private contractors who were apparently directing the brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=7471217&page=1

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I think Ross wants to make up for the fact he may have inadvertently been carrying the bush admins water on this issue 2 years ago.

[benld74]

1. ALL my years in college, I NEVER saw ANY Waterboarding Specialist Classes

[L. Coyote]

12. Did you attend the Young Republican meetings?

Obviously NOT!

[Spazito]

2. Good article, thanks for posting it...

There is a lot of 'backpedaling' and 'I knew nothing' coming out of those who once spoke freely. They KNOW they are in deep shit.

[RamboLiberal]

3. The CIA's $1,000 a Day Specialists on Waterboarding, Interrogations

Source: ABC News

As the secrets about the CIA's interrogation techniques continue to come out, there's new information about the frequency and severity of their use, contradicting an 2007 ABC News report, and a new focus on two private contractors who were apparently directing the brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture.

According to current and former government officials, the CIA's secret waterboarding program was designed and assured to be safe by two well-paid psychologists now working out of an unmarked office building in Spokane, Washington.

Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, former military officers, together founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates.

Both men declined to speak to ABC News citing non-disclosure agreements with the CIA. But sources say Jessen and Mitchell together designed and implemented the CIA's interrogation program.


Psychologists Bruce Jessen, left, and Jim Mitchell shaped the CIA's interrogation program of al Qaeda detainees, including Abu Zubaydah. Both refused to speak to ABC News citing confidentiality agreements with the U.S. government.

Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=7471217&page=1

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Geez, if I was casting torturers these guys looks would sure fit.

[LiberalFighter]

4. Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell need to lose their license as pyschologists.

As well as any other punishment.

[Snazzy]

5. How APA Made a Pact with DoD & CIA over Torture Interrogations

How APA Made a Pact with DoD & CIA over Torture Interrogations
By: Jeff Kaye Tuesday April 28, 2009 4:10 pm

Dr. Steven Miles, the author of Oath Betrayed - America's Torture Doctors, and a prominent bioethicist at the University of Minnesota, has released the text of an open letter he has written to Dr. Stephen Behnke, Ethics Director of the American Psychological Association (APA), and Dr. Gerald Koocher, 2006 APA President.

Miles asks Behnke and Koocher "to publically urg the APA to conduct a transparent review of how" it came to give a platform to "senior Department of Defense officials who were intimately involved in the support, protection, and implementation of corrupted interrogation standards." Behnke and Koocher are singled out as having "leadership roles in the APA’s relationship to... interrogations."

Miles is speaking most specifically about the PENS Task Force, established by the American Psychological Association in Spring 2005. PENS stands for Psychological Ethics and National Security. The Task Force was formed by the APA bureaucracy, with the following charge:

xamine whether our current Ethics Code adequately addresses , whether the APA provides adequate ethical guidance to psychologists involved in these endeavors, and whether APA should develop policy to address the role of psychologists and psychology in investigations related to national security.

Dr. Miles asks Koocher and Behnke:

What were the formative contacts between DoD and APA that led to the creation of the PENS Task Force?

Who nominated and selected the members of the PENS Task Force?

What were the back channel communications between APA and DoD officials as the PENS Task Force Report was drafted and modified?

The answers to these questions cannot undo the damage but they are needed for those who can work to prevent such recruitment of a health professional organization in the future.

Miles has called for the APA to form its own "Truth Commission," joining the call of Psychologists for Social Responsibility for an investigation into the use of SERE, DoD, and CIA psychologists for Bush's torture program, and ties between APA and the implementation of the controversial interrogations policy.

PENS' Role in the Interrogation Scandal

The APA and the PENS Task Force may be a linchpin between the use of psychologists in the torture program and the higher-ups who were determined to implement such a program. In a way, DoD showed their hand, anxious to stamp down any dissent within the ranks of organized psychology, by stacking the composition of the PENS Task Force with military personnel, with Koocher and Behnke their willing accomplices. In the end, six of the nine members of the PENS TF were related to military activities, a clear majority.

...

http://firedoglake.com/2009/04/28/how-apa-made-a-pact-w... /

(so as usual, whoever is in charge of accountability is actually in on it, this case the APA)

[EFerrari]

7. No effing kidding. I hope this ruins the rest of their miserable lives. n/t

[Locrian]

11. Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell need to be in PRISON. nt

[Downwinder]

6. Just a few bad apples, but we all take the rap.

It's time to upset the apple cart!!

[LynnTheDem]

8. Sigh. "brutal sessions that President Obama calls torture."

As does US LAW. And INTERNATIONAL LAW via the GENEVA CONVENTIONS.

And simple human decency.


Fuck this US "media" bullshit of "critics call torture" and "Obama calls torture".

FACT: It IS torture.

[TheMachineWins]

9. Torture is the defining issue of our day

It's the highest of war crimes other than genocide which can be argued that the U.S. partook in as well. Due to the severe nature of the crimes they will never just go away with a recognition that they occurred. Prosecutions must occur and will no matter how long it takes, it always does occur in every culture even if it takes 30 years.

[Blue_Tires]

14. welcome to the site!

[Vidar]

10. And we have the gall to accuse Cuba of sponsoring terrorism.

[Joanne98]

13. Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell are Mormons

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

Although the decisions which put us in the grim business of torture, body-snatching, extraordinary renditions, making people disappear, indefinite confinement without charges and warrantless wiretapping were made by the president and vice president, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints served as helpful enablers. Not only did they provide the legal architecture, they provided the "scientific" patina for the plunge into the barbaric business of torture.

.......................

Two devout Mormons also engineered the more grisly wet work. Because the CIA lacked personnel in 2001 with interrogation expertise, the agency turned to two psychologists, James E. Mitchell and John B. Jessen, who had worked with the Air Force's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs. Neither had an intelligence or interrogation background or had experience with Muslim terrorists, but, according to the FBI, they had experience in designing, testing, implementing and monitoring torture techniques that were illegal in the United States and elsewhere in the civilized world...

Mitchell advised that suspects must be treated like dogs in a cage. "It's like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while, he's so diminished, he can't resist."