The CIA's torture teachers

There are striking similarities between descriptions of SERE training and the interrogation techniques employed by the military and CIA since 9/11. Soldiers undergoing SERE training are subject to forced nudity, stress positions, lengthy isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exhaustion from exercise, and the use of water to create a sensation of suffocation. "If you have ever had a bag on your head and somebody pours water on it," one graduate of that training program told Salon last year "it is real hard to breathe."

Many of those techniques show up in interrogation logs, human rights reports and news articles about detainee abuse that has taken place in Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. (The military late last year unveiled a new interrogation manual designed to put a stop to prisoner abuse.) An investigation released this month by the Council of Europe, a multinational human rights agency, added extreme sensory deprivation to the list of techniques that have been used by the CIA. The report said that extended isolation contributed to "enduring psychiatric and mental problems" of prisoners.

Isolation in cramped cells is also a key tenet of SERE training, according to soldiers who have completed the training and described it in detail to Salon. The effects of isolation are a specialty of Jessen's, who taught a class on "coping with isolation in a hostage environment" at a Maui seminar in late 2003, according to a Washington Times article published then. (Defense Department documents from the late 1990s describe Jessen as the "lead psychologist" for the SERE program.) Mitchell also spoke at that conference, according to the article. It described both men as "contracted to Uncle Sam to fight terrorism."

Mitchell's name surfaced again many months later. His role in interrogations was referenced briefly in a July 2005 New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, which focused largely on the military's use of SERE-based tactics at Guantánamo. The article described Mitchell's participation in a CIA interrogation of a high-value prisoner in March 2002 at an undisclosed location elsewhere -- presumably a secret CIA prison known as a "black site" -- where Mitchell urged harsh techniques that would break down the prisoner's psychological defenses, creating a feeling of "helplessness." But the article did not confirm Mitchell was a CIA employee, and it explored no further the connection between Mitchell's background with SERE and interrogations being conducted by the CIA.

A call to Mitchell and Jessen's firm for comment was not returned. The CIA would not comment on Mitchell and Jessen's work for the agency, though the contractual relationship is not one Mitchell and Jessen entirely concealed. They advertised their CIA credentials as exhibitors at a 2004 conference of the American Psychological Association in Honolulu.

In a statement to Salon, CIA spokesman George Little wrote that the agency's interrogation program had been "implemented lawfully, with great care and close review, producing a rich volume of intelligence that has helped the United States and other countries disrupt terrorist activities and save innocent lives."

Until last month, the Army had denied any use of SERE training for prisoner interrogations. "We do not teach interrogation techniques," Carol Darby, chief spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, said last June when Salon asked about a document that appeared to indicate that instructors from the SERE school taught their methods to interrogators at Guantánamo.

But the declassified DoD inspector general's report described initiatives by high-level military officials to incorporate SERE concepts into interrogations. And it said that psychologists affiliated with SERE training -- people like Mitchell and Jessen -- played a critical role. According to the inspector general, the Army Special Operations Command's Psychological Directorate at Fort Bragg first drafted a plan to have the military reverse-engineer SERE training in the summer of 2002. At the same time, the commander of Guantánamo determined that SERE tactics might be used on detainees at the military prison. Then in September 2002, the Army Special Operations Command and other SERE officials hosted a "SERE psychologist conference" at Fort Bragg to brief staff from the military's prison at Guantánamo on the use of SERE tactics.

The chief of the Army Special Operations Command's Psychological Directorate was Col. Morgan Banks, the senior SERE psychologist, who has been affiliated with the training for years and helped establish the Army's first permanent training program that simulated captivity, according to a 2003 biographical statement. Banks also spent the winter of 2001 and 2002 at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan "supporting combat operations against Al Qaida and Taliban fighters," according to one of his bios, which also said that Banks "provides technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists providing interrogation support."

In 2005, Banks helped draft ethical guidelines for the APA that say a psychologist supporting an interrogation is providing "a valuable and ethical role to assist in protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm." But as Salon reported last summer, six of the 10 psychologists who drafted that policy, including Banks, had close ties to the military. Some psychologists worry that the APA policy has made the organization an enabler of torture. Those ethics guidelines "gave the APA imprimatur to any of these techniques," says Steven Reisner, an APA member who has been closely tracking psychologists' role in interrogations. The policy, Reisner says, was developed by "psychologists directly involved in the interrogations."

Another of the six psychologists on the panel that drafted the guidelines who had ties to the military was Shumate. His bio for that APA task force said he worked as a "director of behavioral science" for the Defense Department. It never mentioned that he also worked for the CIA.

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