Internal Rifts on Road to Torment

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Interviews Offer More Nuanced Look At Roles of CIA Contractors, Concerns Of Officials During Interrogations
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/18/AR2009071802065_pf.html


In April 2002, as the terrorism suspect known as Abu Zubaida lay in a Bangkok hospital bed, top U.S. counterterrorism officials gathered at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., for a series of meetings on an urgent problem: how to get him to talk.

Put him in a cell filled with cadavers, was one suggestion, according to a former U.S. official with knowledge of the brainstorming sessions. Surround him with naked women, was another. Jolt him with electric shocks to the teeth, was a third.

One man's certitude lanced through the debate, according to a participant in one of the meetings. James E. Mitchell, a retired clinical psychologist for the Air Force, had studied al-Qaeda resistance techniques.

"The thing that will make him talk," the participant recalled Mitchell saying, "is fear."

Now, as the Senate intelligence committee examines the CIA's interrogation program, investigators are focusing in part on Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, former CIA contractors who helped design and oversee Abu Zubaida's interrogation. These men have been portrayed as eager proponents of coercion, but the former U.S. official, corroborated in part by Justice Department documents, said they also rejected orders from Langley to prolong the most severe pressure on the detainee. The former official's account, alongside the recollections of those familiar with events at the CIA's secret prison in Thailand, yields a more nuanced understanding of their role than has previously been available.

Interviews with nearly two dozen current and former U.S. officials also provide new evidence that the imposition of harsh techniques provoked dissension among the officials charged with questioning Abu Zubaida, from the time of his capture through the period when the most grueling torments were applied.