Jeff Stein reports: “The CIA,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, had “historical experience using coercive forms of interrogation.” Indeed, it had plenty, said the committee’s report released Tuesday: about 50 years’ worth. Deep in the committee’s 500-page summary of a still-classified 6,700-page report on the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11 there is a brief reference to KUBARK, the code name for a 1963 instruction manual on interrogation, which was used on subjects ranging from suspected Soviet double agents to Latin American dissidents and guerrillas.

The techniques will sound familiar to anybody who has followed the raging debate over interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA to break Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons around the world. When the going got tough, the CIA got rough.

The 1963 KUBARK manual included the “principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis and induced regression,” the committee wrote. [Continue reading…]

Katherine Eban writes: I was the first reporter to enumerate the roles of the two key psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, as architects of the coercive interrogation tactics, in a 2007 story in Vanity Fair. The pair had previously been Air Force trainers in a program called SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), which subjected military members to mock interrogations—interrogations that ironically had been used by the Communist Chinese against American servicemen during the Korean war in order to produce false confessions.

Historically, the C.I.A. knew the tactics would not be useful. In 1989, the C.I.A. informed Congress that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” In the desperate months after 9/11, the C.I.A. willfully ignored its own findings.

The agency threw in its lot with Mitchell and Jessen, who are identified in the report by the pseudonyms Swigert and Dunbar. As the report notes, “Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.” Nonetheless, the psychologists played a role in convincing the administration that if they were allowed to reverse engineer the SERE tactics, they could break down detainees, resulting in useful intelligence.

With no previous evidence of success, they were given the greenlight to use the training techniques on actual detainees. The F.B.I. had used rapport-building techniques to extract vital intelligence from Abu Zubaydah, one of the first detainees in our war on terror. From a hospital bed in Thailand, he disclosed to F.B.I. interrogators that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was actually the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks.

But subsequently, Mitchell showed up in Thailand, and began to oversee the work of breaking down Zubaydah: keeping him in a coffin-shaped box, blasting music at him, locking him in a freezing room. The C.I.A. falsely claimed credit for the intelligence he provided, and, ultimately, the use of the tactics spread like wildfire through C.I.A. and military interrogation sites. In short, Mitchell and Jessen sold the C.I.A. an argument it wanted to hear: namely, that the use of coercive interrogation techniques would produce groundbreaking intelligence and thereby prevent another attack. It was well known within the SERE community that the use of such techniques was better designed to produce false information. There was seemingly no legitimate argument for its utility. [Continue reading…]

Patrick M. Skinner writes: As a former CIA case officer, it’s particularly maddening to read the report. Throughout the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, the reader can see where CIA Headquarters overruled the assessments of its own staff personnel that were at the various “black sites,” conducting—or, more often, witnessing—interrogations done by contractors. At numerous times throughout the interrogations of Abu Zubayda, Abd al-Rahman al-Nashiri, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, agency officers communicated back to headquarters their assessment that the subject was cooperating or had no more information of value that warranted additional pressure. And virtually every time, headquarters came back with a more definitive assessment that they knew the subject was withholding more vital information.

Where did this certainty come from?

Part of the answer is that it wasn’t CIA personnel actually running the program, even if they were ultimately responsible for it. As noted in the Senate report, the overwhelming majority (80%) of the people directly involved in the disastrous program were contractors, with the initial and primary responsibility resting on two contractors who had zero relevant experience, as well as those in the Agency who vouched for them. While the most shameful details of the report involve the indefensible tactics, another shame is that the Agency — at great effort and expense — hired and trained some of the most capable people in the country to collect needed intelligence; and after the worst terrorist attack in our nation’s history, the agency outsourced one of its most important tasks.

Of course, no CIA personnel had the “relevant experience” in running detention programs because the agency wasn’t, and shouldn’t be, in that business. Once the decision was made for indefinite detention and interrogation, the agency decided to contract out this new mission to people who had even less experience, but who weren’t as bound to the agency code of ethics. This doesn’t excuse the agency from what happened; it actually makes it much more inexcusable, even allowing for the understandable fear and chaos after 9/11. [Continue reading…]