By late 2001, the agency had contracted with Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist with the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape] program who had monitored mock interrogations but had never conducted any real ones, according to colleagues. He was known for his belief that a psychological concept called "learned helplessness" was crucial to successful interrogation.
Dr. Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology who had developed the concept, said in an interview that he was puzzled by Mitchell's notion that learned helplessness was relevant to interrogation.
"I think helplessness would make someone more dependent, less defiant and more compliant," Seligman said, "but I do not think it would lead reliably to more truth-telling."
Still, Mitchell, who declined to comment for this article, became a persuasive player in agency discussions about the best way to interrogate Qaida prisoners. Eventually, along with another former SERE psychologist, Bruce Jessen, Mitchell helped persuade CIA officials that Qaida members were fundamentally different from the myriad personalities the agency routinely dealt with.
"Jim believed that people of this ilk would confess for only one reason -- sheer terror," said one CIA official.
Overwhelmed with reports of potential threats, and anguished that the agency had failed to stop 9/11, Tenet and his top aides did not probe deeply into the prescription that Mitchell so confidently presented: using the SERE tactics on Qaida prisoners.
Some research on the origin of those methods would have given reason for doubt. Government studies in the 1950s found Chinese Communist interrogators produced false confessions from captured American pilots not with some kind of sinister "brainwashing" but with crude tactics: shackling the Americans to force them to stand for hours, keeping them in cold cells, disrupting their sleep and limiting access to food and hygiene.
"The Communists do not look upon these assaults as 'torture,' " one study concluded. "But all of them produce great discomfort, and lead to serious disturbances of many bodily processes; there is no reason to differentiate them from any other form of torture." Worse, the study found that under such treatment, a prisoner became "malleable and suggestible, and in some instances he may confabulate."
In late 2001, about a half-dozen SERE trainers, according to a report released Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee, began raising stark warnings about plans by both the military and the CIA to use the SERE methods in interrogations. In December 2001, Lt. Col. Daniel J. Baumgartner of the Air Force, who oversaw SERE training, cautioned that physical pressure was "less reliable" than other interrogation methods, could backfire by increasing a prisoner's resistance and would have an "intolerable public and political backlash when discovered." But his memo went to the Defense Department, not the CIA.
(Source: www.heraldtribune.com)
