Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings

Noa Yachot, Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings. American Civil Liberties Union, 16 October 2015. From How the ACLU Came to Publish a Powerful Piece of Investigative Journalism, Longreads, 27 October 2015: “‘Out of the Darkness’ is not an easy story to read. It chronicles how two psychologists who had previously devoted their careers to training US troops to resist abusive interrogation tactics teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings.”

The CIA used the music of an Irish boyband called Westlife to torture Suleiman Abdullah [Salim] in Afghanistan [in March 2003]….

A putrid smell that reminded Suleiman of rotting seaweed permeated the prison. His cell was pitch black; he couldn’t see a thing. The U.S. government refers to the prison as “COBALT.” Suleiman calls it “The Darkness.”

For more than a month, Suleiman endured an incessant barrage of torture techniques designed to psychologically destroy him. His torturers repeatedly doused him with ice-cold water. They beat him and slammed him into walls. They hung him from a metal rod, his toes barely touching the floor. They chained him in other painful stress positions for days at a time. They starved him, deprived him of sleep, and stuffed him inside small boxes. With the torture came terrifying interrogation sessions in which he was grilled about what he was doing in Somalia and the names of people, all but one of whom he’d never heard of.

After four or five weeks of this relentless pain and suffering, Suleiman’s torturers assessed him as psychologically broken and incapable of resisting them. Suleiman could take no more. He decided to end his life by consuming painkillers he had stockpiled. But as he began to take the pills, guards stormed into his cell to stop him. He was then shackled, hooded, and driven a short distance to another CIA prison close by — a prison Suleiman came to know as the “Salt Pit.” Although Suleiman’s torture would continue for many years more, the very worst of it was over.

A year and two months later [July 2004], the CIA handed Suleiman over to the U.S. military, which imprisoned him at Bagram, also in Afghanistan. Finally, in 2008, after more than five years in U.S. custody, with no charges ever leveled against him, he was sent home with a document confirming he posed no threat to the United States. His family had heard nothing of him since his disappearance, and they had presumed him dead.

But even once home in his native Zanzibar, Suleiman felt far from free. Constant flashbacks transported him back to his torture at the hands of his CIA captors. After years of near-starvation he was unable to eat normally. He suffered splitting headaches and pain throughout his body from the torture. Prolonged isolation left him unaccustomed to human interaction….

Suleiman’s trauma is not just a consequence of his ordeal in American prisons. It was the CIA’s goal, through a program designed and executed by two psychologists the agency contracted to run its torture operations, to break his mind. Integral to the program was the idea that once a detainee had been psychologically destroyed through torture, he would become compliant and cooperate with interrogators’ demands. The theory behind the goal had never been scientifically tested because such trials would violate human experimentation bans established after Nazi experiments and atrocities during World War II. Yet that theory would drive an experiment in some of the worst systematic brutality ever inflicted on detainees in modern American history. Today, three of the many victims and survivors of that experiment are seeking justice through a lawsuit against the men who designed and implemented that program for the CIA.

[James] Mitchell and [Bruce] Jessen were two former U.S. military psychologists contracted by the CIA to design, develop, and run the agency’s detention, rendition, and interrogation operations. As psychologists in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program, the two men had devoted their careers to training U.S. troops to resist abusive treatment in case of capture by governments that violate the Geneva Conventions. SERE teaches resistance by subjecting students to carefully controlled versions of harsh techniques used by China, North Korea, and the former Soviet Union, often to extract false confessions from captives for propaganda purposes. During training, psychologists like Mitchell and Jessen are on hand to monitor trainees’ psychological well-being and to ensure that SERE instructors don’t go too far.

But Mitchell and Jessen intensified and manipulated SERE techniques so they bore little relation to those used on SERE recruits. Whereas SERE training was intended to help strengthen the resolve of American recruits, Mitchell and Jessen’s techniques were designed to achieve the exact opposite result: to break detainees and turn their minds into putty in interrogators’ hands.

The foundation of Mitchell and Jessen’s experiment in torture began taking shape shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001….

Neither psychologist had ever conducted a real-world interrogation. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirms this in its landmark report on the CIA detention and interrogation program, the executive summary of which was released at the end of last year [2014]. “Neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in terrorism, or any relevant regional, cultural, or linguistic expertise,” the Senate report notes….

Mitchell and Jessen were interested in applying the psychological concept of “learned helplessness” to interrogation. Psychologist Martin Seligman pioneered studies on the phenomenon in experiments he conducted on dogs in the 1960s. Seligman used the term “learned helplessness” to describe the state of utter passivity prompted by a series of negative events that leads subjects to believe there is nothing they can do to escape their suffering. Seligman conducted his experiments by administering electric shocks to different groups of dogs. When given the chance to avoid their pain, the dogs in his experiment that had been able to escape the shocks did so quickly. Those that couldn’t stop the pain didn’t even try to avoid it, even when given the opportunity. They believed they had no ability to control their fates. They had learned helplessness.

Mitchell and Jessen posited that this theory could be applied to interrogation — that harsh measures could be used to break any resistance of al-Qaida captives by inducing a state of learned helplessness….

No legitimate science backs up this assumption. Research on inducing a sustained state of learned helplessness in humans through abuse, or on the role of learned helplessness in eliciting truthful information, does not exist for the simple reason that it can’t be legally or ethically conducted…. [T]orture was a key component of Mitchell and Jessen’s plan from the outset.

The CIA program violated not only international and U.S. prohibitions on torture — it also violated the well-established ban on non-consensual human experimentation. The Nuremberg Code, in place since 1947, was the basis for the prosecution and convictions of World War II Nazi doctors. It forbids any research on human subjects without their informed consent. Numerous other treaties and ethics codes include similar bans, recognizing that any experimentation, however benign, on human subjects without their consent or on prisoners, is inherently cruel, inhuman, or degrading.

Mitchell and Jessen, however, were undeterred by law, ethics, or the lessons of history. The torture program they designed and implemented at the behest of the CIA by its very design required ongoing experimentation on its human subjects….

The CIA knew it needed legal cover to torture — to “work,” as Dick Cheney characterized it, “the dark side.” By early 2002, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the National Security Council were debating whether the legal and humanitarian protections of the Geneva Conventions would apply to captives suspected to be members of al-Qaida or the Taliban. After weeks of debate, and over objections from the State Department, President George W. Bush ultimately issued the final word on the matter. In a February 2002 memo, he stated that al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

With the decision to set aside one of the most important rights instruments in international law, the U.S. government officially broke ground for the CIA’s torture experiment….

[On August 1, 2002, the] Justice Department ‘torture memos’ [were] finalized, re-interpreting anti-torture laws to authorize the use of 10 torture techniques….

On August 4, 2002, Mitchell and Jessen, who at this point were paid $1,800 per day by the CIA, began personally administering the torture techniques approved in the memos. Over the course of three weeks, they repeatedly slammed Abu Zubaydah [‘a Palestinian national born in Saudi Arabia, who, at the time, the CIA thought to be a senior-level al-Qaida operative who possessed detailed knowledge of the organization’s plans’] into walls, forced him into coffin-like boxes for hours at a time, beat and waterboarded him, and more….

While Mitchell and Jessen eventually achieved their goal of psychologically destroying Abu Zubaydah, he did not provide significant intelligence after the enhanced techniques were applied, according to the Senate report.

Still, Mitchell and Jessen would ultimately deem the interrogation a success, telling the CIA that the “aggressive phase… should be used as a template for future interrogation of high value captives.” This wasn’t, however, because Abu Zubaydah had provided information, but because they proved he wasn’t withholding important intelligence….

Today [16 October 2015], Abu Zubaydah is imprisoned at Guantánamo. He continues to suffer as a result of the torture. He has permanent brain damage. He suffers from searing headaches, sensitivity to noise, and seizures. He can’t recall his father’s name or his own date of birth….

THE TORTURE OF MOHAMED Ben SOUD

Mohamed [Ben Soud] saw James Mitchell several times while he was imprisoned at COBALT, where the CIA held him for a year following his capture in April 2003 during a joint U.S.-Pakistani raid on his home. Mohamed fled his native Libya in 1991, fearing his persecution for his opposition to the Gaddafi regime.  He was living in Pakistan with his wife and infant child at the time of his disappearance. As Human Rights Watch has detailed, a rapprochement between Washington and Gaddafi resulted in Libya supplying the United States with the names of citizens it claimed were terrorism suspects.

The course of Mohamed’s torture adhered closely to the “procedures” the CIA laid out in a 2004 memo to the Justice Department. Even before arriving at COBALT, Mohamed was subjected to “conditioning” procedures designed to cause terror and vulnerability. He was rendered to COBALT hooded, handcuffed, and shackled. When he arrived, an American woman told him he was a prisoner of the CIA, that human rights ended on September 11, and that no laws applied in the prison.

Quickly, his torture escalated. For much of the next year, CIA personnel kept Mohamed naked and chained to the wall in one of three painful stress positions designed to keep him awake. He was held in complete isolation in a dungeon-like cell, starved, with no bed, blanket, or light. A bucket served as his toilet. Ear-splitting music pounded constantly. The stench was unbearable. He was kept naked for weeks. He wasn’t permitted to wash for five months….

His torturers introduced water torture into their regimen some two weeks after Mohamed arrived in COBALT. They would submerge him naked in ice water, his cuffed hands forced over his head, until a doctor deemed his temperature dangerously low and warm water would be thrown on him….

After some two months of torture in COBALT, Mohamed’s captors stopped the most aggressive phase of his torture, deeming him sufficiently “broken” and “cooperative.” Eight months later, April 2004, Mohamed was transferred to a second CIA-run prison, codenamed ORANGE in the Senate report. He spent the next several months in solitary confinement, chained to the wall when he wasn’t being interrogated. In August 2004, the United States rendered him into the hands of the same Gadaffi government he had fled fearing persecution more than a decade previously. Sentenced to life in prison following an unfair trial, Mohamed eventually won his freedom in February 2011, a day after the start of the revolution that led to Gadaffi’s overthrow. Today, he lives in Misrata, Libya, together with his wife and three young children. Mohamed continues to suffer the effects of his torture at COBALT.  He suffers from hearing loss, a damaged sense of taste and smell, and regular pains in his leg, which he can’t walk on for a significant length of time….

The torture program designed and implemented by Mitchell and Jessen ensnared at least 119 men, and killed at least one — a man named Gul Rahman who died in November 2002 of hypothermia after being tortured and left half naked, chained to the wall of a freezing-cold cell….

No one has been held accountable for his murder. An unnamed CIA officer who was trained by Jessen and who tortured Rahman up until the day before he was found dead, however, later received a $2,500 bonus for “consistently superior work.”

Mitchell and Jessen made out handsomely too. From 2001 until 2005, as consultants to the CIA, they made $1.5 and $1.1 million, respectively. In 2005, they formed a company, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, to supply the CIA with more personnel to help implement and expand their program. Until the termination in 2010 of the CIA’s contract with Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, the company received $81 million for its torture services, financed by the American taxpayer….

The Senate report fills in many holes in the public record resulting from years of excessive secrecy. But it is not accountability. The government has prosecuted only a handful of very low-level soldiers and one CIA contractor for prisoner abuse. The architects of the CIA’s torture program, Mitchell and Jessen among them, have so far escaped any form of accountability. In fact, many have gone on to lucrative careers or comfortable retirements.

“We tortured some folks,” President Obama famously said a few months before the release of the Senate torture report summary. “I understand why it happened. It’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were. People did not know whether more attacks were imminent. And there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this.”

This analysis is misguided. To be sure, we lived in a time of fear. But the ban against torture is universal and fundamental, applying in times of fear and courage, insecurity and security. And the decision to torture was made deliberately, in a program characterized by human experimentation, intentional brutality, and the painstaking manipulation of the law. It was as clinical as it was cruel. It resulted in the perpetration of terrible crimes completely at odds with U.S. law, international law, and basic humanity.

Accountability is critical for the victims and survivors whose lives were undone, and for all of us who value being part of a nation of laws, one strong enough to acknowledge wrongdoing and make amends.

If this country’s recent experiment in torture continues to be marked by impunity, we risk going down that path again.