The shameful revelations in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA torture program are, as the New York Times editorial board put it, “a portrait of depravity.” At the same time, they constitute one of most serious federal contracting scandals of all time.
Although it sounds like an idea dreamed up by the writers of the TV series Homeland, it turns out that the creation of the “enhanced interrogation” system was left to a pair of contractors, neither of whom, as the report states, “had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”
The contractors had previously worked with the U.S. Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school, which was created to helped military personnel deal with coercive interrogation techniques to which they might be exposed if taken prisoner by a country that did not adhere to the Geneva Convention. That was before the U.S. became one of those countries.
Referred to in the report by the pseudonyms Dr. Grayson Swigert and Dr. Hammond Dunbar, the two are psychologists whose real names are reported to be James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen. Their firm, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates of Spokane, Washington, is said to have been paid $81 million by the CIA for its dubious services. The agency thoughtfully provided the firm “a multi-year indemnification agreement to protect the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program.”