Our Agency . We give U.S. leaders the intelligence they need to keep our country safe. tortured detainees in ways more brutal, sustained, and gruesome than was previously known. Others said they were "trying to learn what they were doing and how to apply coercion." Another said that before al-Baluchi's interrogation, he had felt he was falling behind "because he needed to practice interrogation techniques." Jim Carrey tells us he was given training from an expert who advised the CIA on dealing with torture to get him prepared to ruin Christmas. He was also denied solid food and given a cold-water bath afterward. Not everyone who works for the Central Intelligence Agency is a secret agent stationed undercover in a foreign country. A senior CIA official did attend that waterboarding, during which — Mitchell testified — Zubaydah was having involuntary body spasms and was crying. But he said CIA officials told him he had "lost his spine" and would be at fault if another mass casualty occurred. According to an article by Shadow Proof about the CIA’s torture program originating in the same department as MKUltra, Seligman is believed to have met … Accounts by detainees in different black sites have differed on how this method … Testifying at the U.S. military court at Guantanamo in a pretrial hearing for al-Baluchi and other Sept. 11 defendants, Mitchell affirmed claims by al-Baluchi's attorneys that CIA employees used the experience to earn certification in the agency's "enhanced interrogation techniques.". "The implication was that if we weren't willing to carry their water, they would send someone else who would do it," Mitchell said, "and they may be harsher than we were.". The former military psychologists who designed the CIA’s torture program are now describing it in their own words for the first time, reopening one of … Shocking by electricity is a traditional method of torture and exposed in the CIA’s secret prisons. hide caption. During a May 2003 interrogation at a secret overseas CIA prison in Afghanistan known as a "black site," al-Baluchi was slammed into a wall, doused with water and slapped multiple times in the face and stomach, according to an unclassified CIA document presented in court. During his testimony this week, Mitchell defiantly defended his role in the CIA's torture program, emphasizing the climate of fear in the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks and the concern that another catastrophic event was imminent. “The implication was that if we weren’t willing to carry their water, they would send someone else who would do it, and they may be harsher than we were,” Mitchell testified. The two psychologists who developed the CIA's torture program - Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen - formed a company called Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and … The CIA paid a company owned by Mitchell and his partner, Bruce Jessen, another psychologist, more than $80 million to develop the torture program ultimately used by the CIA … The reverse-engineered torture techniques used in SERE training were haphazardly engineered back for use in CIA interrogations. As NPR previously reported, one major reason for the slow pace has been the use of torture that happened at the CIA’s overseas sites. “That’s how I got through it.” CIA training wasn’t enough to get him through the shoot, though. Since I caused so much controversy with my support for gays in the military, I decided to tackle a much simpler issue I'm sure we all can get on board with, torture. The statements given by those defendants to the CIA are already inadmissible, because they were not given voluntarily. Added Mitchell: "It looks like they used your client as a training prop. The U.S. Army and CIA interrogation manuals are seven controversial military training manuals which were declassified by the Pentagon in 1996. Breaking the Silence: A Challenge to Executive Use of the State Secrets Privilege to Dismiss Claims of CIA Torture in Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. University of Miami Law Review January 1, 2010 Torture apologists have long cited this fact in defense of the CIA’s past use of torture to interrogate terrorist suspects. Although it forbade torture and assassination on paper, the CIA knew it was happening in Honduras. Architect Of CIA’s Torture Program Says It Went Too Far, ‘Life-Changing’ Stimulus Checks Begin Rolling Out, Some Senators Want Permanent Daylight Saving Time, Rep. 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The CIA's torture teachers Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House. CIA Operations Officer Training. She said six to eight CIA employees took part in al-Baluchi's interrogation session. Indeed, the CIA helped train hundreds of Latin American dictatorships' police officers via both its infamous training manuals and the School of the Americas, now renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). We are looking for people from all backgrounds and walks of life to carry out the work of a Nation. Every vote in Congress related to the investigation into the CIA torture program was bipartisan. Whether it’s members of law enforcement, criminal justice students, veterans, or civilians interested in forensic science, CSI Academy of Florida has classes suited to you. CIA torture does not advance the well being of our world. He says the government was going to do whatever was necessary to prevent that, saying that the CIA was “going to walk right up to the line of what was legal, put their toes on it and lean forward.”. Copyright 2020 NPR. The Senate’s torture report reveals that the C.I.A. Mitchell’s revelations suggest that the CIA was willing to lean forward further than Mitchell himself. “I thought my moral obligation to protect American lives outweighed the temporary discomfort of terrorists who had voluntarily taken up war against us,” he testified. Mitchell has been called as a witness in the Sept. 11 case because defense attorneys want to use him to support their argument that the evidence gathered from the defendants by the FBI should not be presented at trial because it has been tainted by torture. 2) Torturers had to be trained. Janet Hamlin, Pool/AP He has been held at Guantánamo for more than 13 years and has never been charged with a crime. One employee "explained his role as a student doing on-the job training." ... who had little training. Jessen is expected to testify after Mitchell. The CIA contracted with the two psychologists to develop alternative, harsh interrogation techniques. “Those two realities have changed.”. The Senate report explains: The CIA contracted with two psychologists to develop, operate, and assess its interrogation operations. One CIA contractor, designated NX2 by the court, but believed to be former officer Charlie Wise who died in 2003, designed a training programme for trainee torturers. That's according to testimony Thursday from a psychologist who helped design the torture program. In this pool photo of a Pentagon-approved sketch by court artist Janet Hamlin, defendant Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, attends his pretrial hearing along with other Sept. 11 defendants at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in 2014. The defense attorneys have argued that once a person has been tortured, you cannot trust anything they tell any interrogator. He said the CIA told them to keep going because Zubaydah might still be withholding valuable information about an imminent U.S. attack. A man accused of helping finance the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was subjected to "excessive" abuse at the hands of CIA interrogators who used him as a training tool for employees learning the agency's torture techniques. A career at CIA is unlike any other. The pretrial hearings for the Sept. 11 trial, which is scheduled to begin next January, have been going on for years. Mitchell says the CIA was never interested in prosecuting the prisoners. That's according to a classified CIA report, portions of which defense attorneys were permitted by the government to read in open court. According to Mitchell’s testimony, he thought they’d gotten all the information they could from Zubaydah, who had agreed to cooperate. Wise had learned his trade as a torturer on behalf of the CIA-supported Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua in the 1980s. ", Noting that al-Baluchi's interrogation included "one round of walling," Connell asked Mitchell: "How do you know one round of walling didn't last an hour-and-a-half? He was also put in stress positions — forced to lean at an angle against a wall using only his forehead and also to kneel backwards to an extreme degree — for nearly an hour. One of the architects of the CIA’s torture program for the accused Sept. 11 terrorists testified Wednesday in a Guantánamo Bay courtroom that he eventually came to believe that those torture techniques had gone too far and verged on breaking the law. He said some interrogators used his methods in abusive and unauthorized ways, prompting him to try to quit. Stress Positions. Mitchell continued working for the CIA, although the agency eventually cut ties with him and canceled his contract in 2009 as public outrage over the torture program mounted. However, neither of the two psych… “The Agency’s decision to employ waterboarding in the wake of 9/11 was not only lawful, it reflected the circumstances of the time,” the statement read. The employees were already "qualified" in the techniques but needed more hands-on training to become "certified," according to Alka Pradhan, one of al-Baluchi's defense lawyers. The CIA trained Jim Carrey to withstand torture ... Carrey would later refer to his weekend of CIA training as “quite hilarious,” but it’s hard to argue with results. The CSI Academy of Florida offers forensic science education tailored to every background and level of experience. Mitchell says he got to the point where he didn’t want to be involved anymore but says officials above him told him he’d lost his spine and it would be his fault if more people in the U.S. died in a catastrophic attack. Interestingly, the thousand of interviews of no-touch torture involves “stings” and “shocks” to various parts of their bodies over long durations. ", Of the 20 "facial slaps" al-Baluchi was subjected to, Mitchell said: "To me, that seems excessive. CIA Whistleblower John Stockwell on CIA Torture Training in AFRICA-1989. A man accused of helping finance the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was subjected to "excessive" abuse at the hands of CIA interrogators who used him as a training … Then, 92 days in, producer Brian Grazer brought in a man whose job it is to train CIA operatives on how to endure torture in order to help him deal with the pain of the makeup chair. Mitchell and Jessen took a training program meant to teach the U.S. military to resist torture and reverse-engineered it. Evergreen International Aviation, Inc.’s Ties to the CIA, Terrorism, Iraq War … and Fox News (SourceWatch) Corpwatch , Iraq War , Torture General George S. Patton was Deeply Anti-Semitic & Believed in Superiority of the ‘Nordic Race’ Find Your Calling. Once the public learned about the practices, the CIA canceled Mitchell and Jessen’s contract amid international controversy in 2009. ", To underscore his point, Mitchell, who personally waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, added that "in my most contentious time with KSM, he was looking at me like he wanted to cut my head off and I slapped him three times and he stopped glaring.". Still, Mitchell spoke defiantly and unapologetically. Shocking the testicles and nipples are the most common due to their sensitivity. According to a new study, 54 countries helped the CIA outsource torture -- whether by providing foreign prisons for torturing detainees, prisoner transfers or logistics aid. WASHINGTON — For years, the U.S. military used waterboarding, a centuries-old torture technique, to train American troops to resist interrogation if captured. Given those circumstances, he said, the government was willing to do whatever was necessary to prevent that, even if it resulted in "the temporary discomfort of terrorists who had voluntarily taken up war against us.". Mitchell wanted the waterboarding to stop and helped draft a message to CIA headquarters saying that “the intensity of the pressure applied to him thus far approaches the legal limit” and that Zubaydah’s mental state was deteriorating dangerously. CIA torture is for punishment, behavior control and coercion of information out of prisoners. December 12, 2014 NOI Research Articles 3,090. Stockwell is the highest-ranking CIA official ever to leave the agency and go public. Al-Baluchi, the 42-year-old nephew of alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is facing criminal charges in the terror attacks. Architect Of CIA's Torture Program Says It Went Too Far, A Legacy Of Torture Is Preventing Trials At Guantánamo, Guantánamo Has Cost Billions; Whistleblower Alleges 'Gross' Waste. The CIA’s other torture program was known by differing names: Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (CDIA) or Program, the “CTC Program,” or, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence called it, simply, the CIA Detention and Interrogation Program. The FBI did not use torture to gather its statements, but those statements were gathered after the CIA’s use of torture. Over time, the mock torture schools also became sites of experimental study. The manuals in question have been referred to by various media sources as the "torture manuals". Before his interrogation, al-Baluchi was kept in a "standing sleep deprivation position" for about a day, and afterward he was returned to his cell naked and again placed in a standing sleep deprivation position, where he remained until his next interrogation the following day, the document shows. Mitchell said he and others in the room became tearful. In 1997, two additional CIA manuals were declassified in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by The Baltimore Sun. The CIA tortured al-Nashiri extensively through methods including waterboarding, rape (euphemized as “rectal rehydration” or “rectal feeding”), and mock execution with both a handgun and a power drill. Mitchell and Jessen say those methods were meant to be more uncomfortable than painful, but they acknowledge that some interrogations got out of control and say it’s not their fault that other interrogators used the techniques in abusive and unauthorized ways. Mitchell's testimony is expected to continue next week, and his former business partner, Bruce Jessen, will testify after him. He testified that the CIA had been afraid that another attack was imminent, possibly one with the use of nuclear or biological weapons. Mitchell, who personally waterboarded alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, began testifying on Tuesday and is expected to continue through the week. According to CIA records, the interrogation provided little new information. Let' s hope he makes it. The Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program is a report compiled by the bipartisan United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)'s Detention and Interrogation Program and its use of torture during interrogation in U.S. government communiqués on detainees in CIA custody. The CIA paid a company owned by Mitchell and his partner, Bruce Jessen, another psychologist, more than $80 million to develop the torture program ultimately used by the CIA on suspected terrorists: waterboarding, stress positions and mock burials, among others. Yet Mitchell also testified that he came to believe the CIA's torture techniques had gone too far and verged on breaking the law. The authorized "enhanced interrogation" (the originator of this term is unknown, but it appears to be a calque of the German "verschärfte Vernehmung", meaning "intensified interrogation", used in 1937 by Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller ) was based on work done by James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in the Air Force's Survival Evasion Resistance Escape(SERE) program. Al-Baluchi is accused of helping finance the Sept. 11 hijackers. In Mitchell’s words, “They were absolutely convinced he had something cooking.” Mitchell says he agreed to waterboard Zubaydah just one more time, but he wanted a senior CIA official to come see in person what it looked like. … NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar about his tour of a facility where hundreds of unaccompanied teen migrants are being housed. He insisted that he was protecting his country and would do so again if given the chance, despite his own testimony indicating that he tried to draw a line in the sand and despite internal debate within the CIA over whether they were venturing into illegal territory. Also known as Abd al Aziz Ali, he was captured in 2003 and has been held at Guantanamo since 2006. The CIA declined to comment on the testimony. Mitchell says he came to Guantánamo Bay for the Sept. 11 victims and their families, emphasizing the climate of fear after the 2001 terrorist attacks. For those wondering, Matt has been extraordinarily rendered to the very torture training facility I reference. Asked by al-Baluchi's lead attorney, James Connell, if it is customary for people learning interrogation methods to practice on detainees, Mitchell — a former interrogation trainer — replied: "We had them practice on themselves," not on prisoners. The training included an experience in a mock torture and detention setting, purportedly to inoculate U.S. personnel against foreign imprisonment and torture. In a 2008 statement, former CIA Director Mike Hayden said that waterboarding in particular had not been used since 2003. John Stockwell, former CIA Station Chief in Angola spent 13 years in the agency. Testifying publicly under oath for the first time as part of a pretrial hearing for the criminal case against five accused Sept. 11 terrorists, psychologist and interrogator James Mitchell spoke specifically and graphically about one prisoner, Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded more than 80 times at a CIA site overseas. In this pool photo of a Pentagon-approved sketch by court artist Janet Hamlin, defendant Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, also known as Ammar al-Baluchi, attends his pretrial hearing along with other Sept. 11 defendants at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay in 2014. James Mitchell, who co-owned a company that was paid $80 million by the U.S. government to develop what the CIA called "enhanced interrogation techniques," said the prisoner, Ammar al-Baluchi, became an instructional aide for student interrogators. “So a guy that trained CIA operatives how to endure torture was brought in,” he continues. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org. “I thought it was unnecessary, and I felt sorry for him,” Mitchell testified.
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