After US President-elect Donald Trump insisted during the campaign that “torture works” and promised to bring back waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse”, it was just a matter of time before the former CIA official Jose Rodriguez and the former Air Force psychologist and CIA contractor James Mitchell resurfaced to defend the indefensible.
Starting in the 1980s, Mitchell helped run a training programme designed to give service members a taste of the harsh treatment they could expect as prisoners of war, including a form of simulated drowning used by the Chinese on American airmen during the Korean War. After the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on US, he and a colleague, Bruce Jessen, developed a theory that “waterboarding” and other brutal interrogation techniques could produce a sense of “learnt helplessness” that would render detainees incapable of withholding information. Neither Mitchell nor Jessen had conducted real-world interrogations and they relied on techniques designed by totalitarian states. Those methods tended to elicit false confessions, as opposed to reliable intelligence — but that did not dissuade CIA officials from paying more than $80 million (Dh294.24 million) to their company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates.
US military and counterterrorism officials have never forgotten where that detour into darkness led — unreliable intelligence, demoralised interrogators, terrorists who still cannot be tried in a court of law because they were tortured and a stench that still clings to America’s counterterrorism reputation these many years later. As the former head of the CIA’s Clandestine Service, Rodriguez was investigated, though not prosecuted, by the Justice Department for destroying videotapes of interrogations of Al Qaida detainees because he worried that the “ugly visuals” might endanger American lives. Yet, he continues to advocate for their use. Mitchell also continues to publicly argue that waterboarding works and that enhanced interrogation techniques were used only when the “tea-and-sympathy” approach failed.
Let the record show that these claims are misleading in the extreme. The most prominent test-case where a single terrorist suspect was interrogated using both the FBI’s traditional approach and the CIA’s enhanced techniques was Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value Al Qaida operative captured after September 11, 2001. Held at a CIA secret “black site” prison, Zubaydah, who was badly wounded during his capture in Pakistan, was initially interrogated by a two-man FBI team consisting of Special Agents Steve Gaudin and Ali Soufan. They went well beyond “tea and sympathy”, to the point of reading the suspect passages from the scripture as he hovered close to death. By building a rapport with the suspect and painstakingly breaking down his cover story, the agents learnt for the first time from Zubaydah that the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks was Khalid Shaikh Mohammad. They also extracted the potentially critical intelligence that an American Al Qaida operative, Jose Padilla, was plotting to explode a radiological “dirty bomb” inside the US. Later, the CIA took over the interrogation, and for the first time a prisoner was subjected to the regime of “learnt helplessness”. In an Orwellian twist, Mitchell and Jessen concluded that their experiment had succeeded because it proved that Zubaydah could not possibly have any additional intelligence to surrender. In a later brief to the president, senior CIA officials summarised some of the “key intelligence” gleaned from Zubaydah as information identifying Khalid as the mastermind of 9/11 and the terrorist suspect Padilla, both of whom were later captured. No mention was made that the critical intelligence was gleaned by FBI agents without using torture.
By that point, the FBI had wisely distanced itself from the CIA’s interrogation programme. The bureau sent profilers from its Behavioural Analysis Unit to interview failed suicide bombers in Afghanistan to better understand their motivations and psychology. Armed with those insights, and using its traditional approach, the bureau gleaned important intelligence from the would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi; the would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad; and the “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, who wanted to bring down a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit.
In calling for a return to waterboarding, Trump was playing to the crowd. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last year found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that torture of terrorism suspects can be justified. But a number of Trump’s Cabinet nominees have recently made it clear that they disagree, including his pick for secretary of defence, General James Mattis; for CIA director, Representative Mike Pompeo; for attorney general, Senator Jeff Sessions; and for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson.
An early test of Trump’s soundness as commander-in-chief will come when he has to choose between relying on the judgement of his Cabinet or following the likes of Rodriguez and Mitchell.
— New York Times News Service
James Kitfield, a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, is the author of Twilight Warriors: The Soldiers, Spies and Special Agents Who Are Revolutionizing the American Way of War.
