When the CIA devised an interrogation programme that could be used to question al Qa'eda suspects without breaking US laws that prohibit torture, the solution to this legal conundrum came from clinical psychologists. If medical experts could vouch that subjects of the programme would suffer no lasting physical or mental harm then the legal charge of torture could be resisted - or so the architects of the plan assumed. Two psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, provided the CIA with the guidance it needed based on a military training programme called Sere. Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, was created in the early 1950s to teach American pilots and soldiers how to resist a variety of torture methods that might be used against them by captors seeking false confessions for propaganda purposes. As The New York Times reported: "Dr Mitchell... became a persuasive player in high-level agency discussions about the best way to interrogate Qa'eda prisoners. Eventually, along with another former Sere psychologist, Bruce Jessen, Dr Mitchell helped persuade CIA officials that Qa'eda members were fundamentally different from the myriad personalities the agency routinely dealt with. " 'Jim believed that people of this ilk would confess for only one reason: sheer terror,' said one CIA official who had discussed the matter with Dr Mitchell." In 2007, Katherine Eban gave the first detailed account of the two psychologists' role as the architects and teachers of the coercive interrogation methods used by the CIA and, later, the US military. She asked: "But what, if anything, did Mitchell and Jessen - both devout Mormons - know about real-world interrogations and the art of eliciting accurate, actionable intelligence from hostile foreign fighters? Absolutely nothing, according to Steve Kleinman, an air force reserve colonel and expert in human-intelligence operations. In 2007, Kleinman told Vanity Fair he found it astonishing that the CIA 'chose two clinical psychologists who had no intelligence background whatsoever, who had never conducted an interrogation ... to do something that had never been proven in the real world.' "Others called their methods a 'voodoo science'. In fact, their techniques were simply reverse-engineered versions of those believed to be used by the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China." On Wednesday, the US Senate Committee on Armed Services released a report on its inquiry into the treatment of detainees in US custody. Among its findings was evidence that the Bush administration had a particular interest in using coercive techniques to gather testimony that supported a long-standing belief inside the administration's leadership that Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qa'eda had worked together. McClatchy Newspapers reported: "The Bush administration put relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of co-operation between al Qa'eda and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's regime, according to a former senior US intelligence official and a former army psychiatrist. "Such information would've provided a foundation for one of former President George W Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Saddam's regime." The newly released "torture memos" that outlined the Bush administration's effort to provide legal cover for the use of torture indicated that the detainee, Abu Zubaydah, was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Mohammed 183 times in March 2003. A former senior US intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue told McClatchy that a reason for the persistent use of "extreme methods" was that the former vice president Dick Cheney and the former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld were "demanding proof of the links between al Qa'eda and Iraq". In Salon, Mark Benjamin noted that the Senate report, "torpedoes the notion that the administration only chose torture as a last resort. Bush officials have long argued that they turned to coercive interrogations in 2002 only after captured al Qa'eda suspects wouldn't talk, but the report shows the administration set the wheels in motion soon after 9/11. The Bush White House began planning for torture in December 2001, set up a programme to develop the interrogation techniques by the next month, and the military and the CIA began training interrogators in coercive practices in early 2002, before they had any high-value al Qa'eda suspects or any trouble eliciting information from detainees. "As the report puts it, 'The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorised their use against detainees.' The report undercuts the Obama administration's case for leniency against the CIA, since the agency was pursuing abusive techniques even before Department of Justice lawyers had issued their supposed legal justification for the techniques in August 2002." The Washington Post reported on Wednesday: "President Obama yesterday declined to rule out legal consequences for Bush administration officials who authorised the harsh interrogation techniques applied to 'high-value' terrorism suspects, saying the attorney general should determine whether they broke the law. "Obama also said that if Congress is intent on investigating the enhanced interrogation practices, an independent commission might offer a better means to do so than a congressional panel, which he indicated is more likely to split along partisan lines than to produce constructive results. "Obama last week released a statement that left open the possibility of legal jeopardy for those who formulated the interrogation policy, which critics say amounted to torture, but his comments marked the first time that he has explicitly raised the prospect. They also reversed his administration's apparent opposition to prosecuting those officials - a stance taken Sunday by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel." Dan Balz said: "The legacy of George W Bush continues to haunt President Obama's administration. Try as he might, the president is finding it difficult to close the books on Bush's presidency. "That's the underlying message of the uproar over the release of Justice Department interrogation memos and the question of whether to prosecute Bush administration officials responsible for authorising use of those harsh techniques. Having tried to find a way through this legal and political thicket, Obama has learned that cleaning up after Bush will be an ongoing challenge." In The Guardian, Michael Tomasky wrote: "One of great political questions of the Bush years here in America was: How much do we not yet know? That is, there were explosive revelations on a continual basis about the Bush gang's terrorism policies, from the exposure of Abu Ghraib to reports about surveillance without warrants to leaks of memos on torture. But still there were holes. "Now they're starting to fill in. Barack Obama wants to move on, which is an understandable if not exactly courageous political posture to assume. But the feeling grows that as we learn more, the American people are going to decide that we were governed by criminals, and we can't just move on."
pwoodward@thenational.ae
