The Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Chairman Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI), published an investigative report on torture by the military and CIA in 2009. As it happens, I wrote about it at the time. And interestingly, the same two psychologists who are currently in the news for having developed the CIA torture program, were named then.
Physicians for Human Rights, in reports still available on its web site, detailed the practices developed by psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, which it said included beating, sexual and cultural humiliation, forced nakedness, exposure to extreme temperatures, exploitation of phobias, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation. These men have once again been named as the men who developed he CIA's torture program.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based PHR, which shared a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, says psychologists “led the way” in legitimizing the Pentagon’s approval and use of the tactics, which were first tried out at Guantanamo. PHR joined the Senate Armed Services Committee in calling on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate who should be held accountable.
And then, nothing happened.
Here is an excerpt from my 2009 article in In These Times, The Psychologists of Torture: Medical professionals designed and helped to implement Bush administration interrogation practices.
Early in the Senate report, we learn that the SERE program’s adaptation began with two senior military psychologists. In December 2001, Dr. James Mitchell, the senior SERE psychologist at the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, asked his former colleague Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen to review a recently obtained al Qaeda interrogation resistance training manual.
“The two psychologists reviewed the materials and generated a paper on al Qaeda resistance capabilities and countermeasures to defeat that resistance,” according to this heavily redacted section of the Senate report. Mitchell and Jessen became CIA interrogation consultants the next year.
In April of 2002, Jessen created an “exploitation draft plan” for Guantanamo detainees. According to this plan, Jessen would direct SERE training of interrogators at the “exploitation facility,” which would be “off limits to non-essential personnel.” The Senate report makes several references to changing conditions at Guantanamo whenever the International Committee of the Red Cross came to visit.
Eventually, the Cuban military base became known as a “Battle Lab for new interrogation techniques,” which were then applied at military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and at CIA detention centers.
Military and law enforcement professionals repeatedly warned against the application of SERE tactics, but the Senate report shows that their use was urged by top Bush administration figures eager to find information linking Al Qaeda and Iraq. (And it concludes that their use at Guantanamo Bay, authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, led to the abuse of detainees there – as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq.)
The Senate report notes that SERE-based interrogation techniques were presented to Guantanamo personnel in September of 2002, despite the objections of instructors from Fort Bragg. In an interview with the Army’s Inspector General, Army psychiatrist Major Charles Burney said “interrogation tactics that rely on physical pressures or torture…do not tend to get you accurate information or reliable information.” According to Burney, instructors repeatedly stressed that harsh interrogations don’t work and that the information gleaned “is strongly likely to be false.”
Nonetheless, the SERE techniques came to be used by members of the newly created “Behavioral Science Consultation Teams” (BSCT), a joint operation of the Army and CIA. The first of those teams worked at Guantanamo.