thenation | Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture
program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention
techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s
executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions
(insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these
laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.
At the helm of this human experimentation project were two
psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They
designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others
applied to people imprisoned in the agency’s secret “black sites.”
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision
to hire the duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would
have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that
CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program.”
Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications did not include interrogation
experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or
linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in
studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as
a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived
from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.
To implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or
personally engaged in techniques intended to produce “debility,
disorientation and dread.” Their “theory” had a particular means-ends
relationship that is not well understood, as Mitchell testily explained
in an interview on Vice News: “The point of the bad cop is to get the
bad guy to talk to the good cop.” In other words, “enhanced
interrogation techniques” (the Bush administration’s euphemism for
torture) do not themselves produce useful information; rather, they
produce the condition of total submission that will facilitate
extraction of actionable intelligence.
Mitchell, like former CIA Director Michael Hayden and others who have
defended the torture program, argues that a fundamental error in the
Senate report is the elision of means (waterboarding, “rectal
rehydration,” weeks or months of nakedness in total darkness and
isolation, and other techniques intended to break prisoners) and ends—manufactured
compliance, which, the defenders claim, enabled the collection of
abundant intelligence that kept Americans safe. (That claim is amply and
authoritatively contradicted in the report.)
