He also testified that the CIA contractors had no interrogation experience.
In the recently released Justice Department memos defining torture, there is no mention of CIA contractors, and that may help explain why there have been no lawsuits against them. Another is the secrecy that has traditionally enveloped all CIA activities, including its interrogation program.
President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have granted immunity to CIA operatives who believed they were acting under legal opinions approved by the Justice Department. But the Obama Administration has said nothing about contractors.
CIA Director Leon Panetta has now barred contractors from carrying out interrogations. But even if the identities of the CIA contract interrogators were known, suing them might present formidable legal challenges. For example, the Military Commissions Act passed by Congress in 2006 includes a provision that immunizes contractors from lawsuits.
While some in the human rights community believe that provision to be unconstitutional, it has not yet been tested in any U.S. court. However, there are a number of civil lawsuits ongoing or pending against military contractors, including Blackwater and CACI.
What is known is that CIA contract interrogators attended the school used by the Army to conduct a program known as SERE, an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. The SERE program was designed to train Army Special Forces personnel to resist torture if they were captured
It is also known that two military psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who were key figures in designing the SERE program, left the CIA to create a private company called Mitchell Jessen & Associates, located in Spokane, Washington. That company then won a contract from the CIA to help it "reverse engineer" SERE so that it could be used to interrogate suspected terrorists
There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the Mitchell-Jessen program - which employed most of the techniques now considered to be torture - was initiated before the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) issued its memos confirming the legality of these techniques.
That evidence suggests that while the Bush White House, the Vice President's office and Justice Department lawyers were beginning to build the legal framework for torture, the two psychologists were already designing the interrogation techniques.
In an article on Vanity Fair's Web site reported that the high-value detainee Mitchell appears to have helped interrogate in March 2002 was Abu Zubaydah. Similar reports have appeared elsewhere; for example, in an article by Mark Benjamin in Salon.com, and by The New Yorker magazine's Jane Mayer, in her book, "The Dark Side."
The Vanity Fair article says that, "as Zubaydah clammed up, Mitchell seemed to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence. With that goal in mind, the CIA team began building a coffin in which they planned to bury the detainee alive."
It continues: "CIA superiors reportedly overruled the suggestion to bury Zubaydah." But according to Vanity Fair, Mitchell, along with fellow psychologist, Bruce Jessen, "reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on SERE trainees":
"The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including waterboarding at its network of "black sites," the magazine says. In a statement, Mitchell and Jessen are quoted as saying, "We are proud of the work we have done for our country," the magazine reported.
Allegedly under Mitchell's guidance, interrogators used waterboarding with "far greater frequency than initially indicated" -- a total of 183 times in a month for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks -- and 83 times in a month for Abu Zubaydah.
And media reports suggest that the main focus of the Zubaydah interrogation was to establish a connection betweeen al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
The CIA was secretly granted broad authority by President Bush days after 9/11 to target terrorists worldwide. Both the military and the spy agency were therefore following a policy approved at the highest levels of the Bush Administration.
The roles played by Mitchell, Jesson and other health professionals in the CIA interrogation programs have caused a firestorm in the psychologist community. Under pressure from many of its members, the American Psychological Association has passed a resolution barring its members from participating in similar programs in the future.
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