CIA torture methods designed by psychologists

From Vanity Fair, where this article is filed, with no apparent intention of irony, under "The War on Terror":

Rorschach and Awe
America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques.
by Katherine Eban
July 17, 2007

Abu Zubaydah was a mess. It was early April 2002, and the al-Qaeda lieutenant had been shot in the groin during a firefight in Pakistan, then captured by the Special Forces and flown to a safe house in Thailand. Now he was experiencing life as America's first high-value detainee in the wake of 9/11. A medical team and a cluster of F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents stood vigil, all fearing that the next attack on America could happen at any moment. It didn't matter that Zubaydah was unable to eat, drink, sit up, or control his bowels. They wanted him to talk.

A C.I.A. interrogation team was expected but hadn't yet arrived. But the F.B.I. agents who had been nursing his wounds and cleaning him after he'd soiled himself asked Zubaydah what he knew. The detainee said something about a plot against an ally, then began slipping into sepsis. He was probably going to die.

The team cabled the morsel of intelligence to C.I.A. headquarters, where it was received with delight by Director George Tenet. "I want to congratulate our officers on the ground," he told a gathering of agents at Langley. When someone explained that the F.B.I. had obtained the information, Tenet blew up and demanded that the C.I.A. get there immediately, say those who were later told of the meeting. Tenet's instructions were clear: Zubaydah was to be kept alive at all costs. (Through his publisher, George Tenet declined to be interviewed.)

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A's interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

This is the approach President Bush appeared to have in mind when, in a lengthy public address last year, he cited the "tough" but successful interrogation of Zubaydah to defend the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, America's use of coercive interrogation tactics, and the abolishment of habeas corpus for detainees. He said that Zubaydah had been questioned using an "alternative set" of tactics formulated by the C.I.A. This program, he said, was fully monitored by the C.I.A.'s inspector general and required extensive training for interrogators before they were allowed to question captured terrorists.

While the methods were certainly unorthodox, there is little evidence they were necesssary, given the success of the rapport-building approach until that point.

I did not set out to discover how America got into the business of torturing detainees. I wasn't even trying to learn how America found out who was behind 9/11. I was attempting to explain why psychologists, alone among medical professionals, were participating in military interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

Both army leaders and military psychologists say that psychologists help to make interrogations "safe, legal and effective." But last fall, a psychologist named Jean Maria Arrigo came to see me with a disturbing claim about the American Psychological Association, her profession's 148,000-member trade group. Arrigo had sat on a specially convened A.P.A. task force that, in July 2005, had ruled that psychologists could assist in military interrogations, despite angry objections from many in the profession. The task force also determined that, in cases where international human-rights law conflicts with U.S. law, psychologists could defer to the much looser U.S. standards—what Arrigo called the "Rumsfeld definition" of humane treatment.

Arrigo and several others with her, including a representative from Physicians for Human Rights, had come to believe that the task force had been rigged—stacked with military members (6 of the 10 had ties to the armed services), monitored by observers with undisclosed conflicts of interest, and programmed to reach preordained conclusions.

One theory was that the A.P.A. had given its stamp of approval to military interrogations as part of a quid pro quo. In exchange, they suspected, the Pentagon was working to allow psychologists—who, unlike psychiatrists, are not medical doctors—to prescribe medication, dramatically increasing their income. (The military has championed modern-day psychology since World War II, and continues to be one of the largest single employers of psychologists through its network of veterans' hospitals. It also funded a prescription-drug training program for military psychologists in the early 90s.)

A.P.A. leaders deny any backroom deals and insist that psychologists have helped to stop the abuse of detainees. They say that the association will investigate any reports of ethical lapses by its members.

While there was no "smoking gun" amid the stack of documents Arrigo gave me, my reporting eventually led me to an even graver discovery. After a 10-month investigation comprising more than 70 interviews as well as a detailed review of public and confidential documents, I pieced together the account of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation that appears in this article. I also discovered that psychologists weren't merely complicit in America's aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.

Two psychologists in particular played a central role: James Elmer Mitchell, who was attached to the C.I.A. team that eventually arrived in Thailand, and his colleague Bruce Jessen. Neither served on the task force or are A.P.A. members. Both worked in a classified military training program known as sere—for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—which trains soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on sere trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror, according to psychologists and others with direct knowledge of their activities. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including "waterboarding," at its network of "black sites." In a statement, Mitchell and Jessen said, "We are proud of the work we have done for our country."

The agency had famously little experience in conducting interrogations or in eliciting "ticking time bomb" information from detainees. Yet, remarkably, it turned to Mitchell and Jessen, who were equally inexperienced and had no proof of their tactics' effectiveness, say several of their former colleagues. Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and expert in human-intelligence operations, says he finds it astonishing that the C.I.A. "chose two clinical psychologists who had no intelligence background whatsoever, who had never conducted an interrogation … to do something that had never been proven in the real world."

The tactics were a "voodoo science," says Michael Rolince, former section chief of the F.B.I.'s International Terrorism Operations. According to a person familiar with the methods, the basic approach was to "break down [the detainees] through isolation, white noise, completely take away their ability to predict the future, create dependence on interrogators."

Interrogators who were sent for classified training inevitably wound up in a Mitchell-Jessen "shop," and some balked at their methods. Instead of the careful training touted by President Bush, some recruits allegedly received on-the-job training during brutal interrogations that effectively unfolded as live demonstrations.

Mitchell and Jessen's methods were so controversial that, among colleagues, the reaction to their names alone became a litmus test of one's attitude toward coercion and human rights. Their critics called them the "Mormon mafia" (a reference to their shared religion) and the "poster boys" (referring to the F.B.I.'s "most wanted" posters, which are where some thought their activities would land them).

The reversed sere tactics they originated have come to shatter various American communities, putting law enforcement and intelligence gathering on a collision course, fostering dissent within the C.I.A., and sparking a war among psychologists over professional identity that has even led to a threat of physical violence at a normally staid A.P.A. meeting. The spread of the tactics—and the photographs of their wild misuse at Abu Ghraib—devastated America's reputation in the Muslim world. All the while, Mitchell and Jessen have remained more or less behind the curtain, their almost messianic belief in the value of breaking down detainees permeating interrogations throughout the war effort.

"I think [Mitchell and Jessen] have caused more harm to American national security than they'll ever understand," says Kleinman.

The bitterest irony is that the tactics seem to have been adopted by interrogators throughout the U.S. military in part because of a myth that whipped across continents and jumped from the intelligence to the military communities: the false impression that reverse-engineered sere tactics were the only thing that got Abu Zubaydah to talk.

Each branch of the U.S. military offers a variant of the sere training curriculum. The course simulates the experience of being held prisoner by enemy forces who do not observe the Geneva Conventions. The program evolved after American G.I.'s captured during the Korean War made false confessions under torture. Sure enough, those in sere training found that they would say anything to get the torment to stop.

During a typical three-week training course, participants endure waterboarding, forced nudity, extreme temperatures, sexual and religious ridicule, agonizing stress positions, and starvation-level rations. Some lose up to 15 pounds. "You're not going to die, but you think you are," says Rolince.

James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a key role in developing the Air Force's sere program, which was administered in Spokane, Washington. Dr. Bryce Lefever, command psychologist on the U.S.S. Enterprise and a former sere trainer who worked with Mitchell and Jessen at the Fairchild Air Base, says he was waterboarded during his own training. "It was terrifying," he remembers. "I said to myself, 'They can't kill me because it's only an exercise.' But you're strapped to an inclined gurney and you're in four-point restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and they pour water between your nose and your mouth, so if you're likely to breathe, you're going to get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic."

sere psychologists such as Mitchell and Jessen play two crucial roles. They screen the trainers who play interrogators, to ensure that they are stable personalities who aren't likely to drift into sadism, and they function as psychic safety officers. If a trainer emerges from an exercise unable to smile, for example, he is viewed as "too into the problem," says Dr. Lefever, and is likely to be removed.

In an ever more dangerous world, some sere trainers realized that they could market their expertise to corporations and government agencies that send executives and other employees overseas, and a survival-training industry sprang into being.

Mitchell's entry into private contracting began less than three months before September 11 with a scientific consulting company called Knowledge Works, L.L.C. He registered it in North Carolina with the help of another sere psychologist he'd worked with at Fort Bragg, Dr. John Chin. Since then, he has formed several similar companies, including the Wizard Shop (which he renamed Mind Science) and What If, L.L.C.

In Spokane, several survival companies share space with Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. The firm's executive offices sit behind a locked door with a security code that the receptionist shields from view. There, Mitchell, Jessen maintains a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or scif, for handling classified materials under C.I.A. guidelines, says a person familiar with the facility. But instead of training C.E.O.'s to survive capture, the company principally instructs interrogators on how to break down detainees.

The sere methods it teaches are based on Communist interrogation techniques that were never designed to get good information. Their goal, says Kleinman, was to generate propaganda by getting beaten-down American hostages to make statements against U.S. interests.

The best and most reliable information comes from people who are relaxed and perceive little threat. "Why would you use evasive training tactics to elicit information?" says Dr. Michael Gelles, former chief psychologist of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The sere tactics aren't just morally and legally wrong, critics say; they're tactically wrong. They produce false leads and hazy memories. "[Mitchell and Jessen] argue, 'We can make people talk,'" says Kleinman. "I have one question. 'About what?'" As one military member who worked in the sere community says, "Getting somebody to talk and getting someone to give you valid information are two very different things."

And yet, when it came time to extract intelligence from suspected al-Qaeda detainees, sere experts became "the only other game in town," according to a report, "Educing Information, Interrogation: Science and Art," put out last December by the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College.

Exactly how that happened remains unclear. Many people assume that Special Forces operatives looked around for interrogation methods, recalled their sere training, and decided to try the techniques. But the introduction and spread of the tactics were more purposeful, and therefore "far more sinister," says John Sifton, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Mitchell and Jessen, Sifton says, offered a "patina of pseudo-science that made the C.I.A. and military officials think these guys were experts in unlocking the human mind. It's one thing to say, 'Take off the gloves.' It's another to say there was a science to it. sere came in as the science."

The use of "scientific credentials in the service of cruel and unlawful practices" harkens back to the Cold War, according to Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. Back then, mental-health professionals working with the C.I.A. used hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, and extreme sensory deprivation on unwitting subjects to develop mind-control techniques. "We really thought we learned this lesson—that ambition to help national security is no excuse for throwing out ethics and science," Rubenstein says.

Some of those who encountered Mitchell and Jessen at the annual conference of all the military's sere programs were skeptical of their assertions. "Jim would make statements like, 'We know how people are responding to stress,'" one sere researcher recalls. "He always said he would show us data, but it would never arrive."

In truth, many did not consider Mitchell and Jessen to be scientists. They possessed no data about the impact of sere training on the human psyche, say former associates. Nor were they "operational psychologists," like the profilers who work for law enforcement. (Think of Jodie Foster's character in The Silence of the Lambs.) But they wanted to be, according to several former colleagues.

"It's a seductive role if you work with [elite] combat-type guys," says the military member who works in the sere community. "There is this wannabe kind of phenomenon. You lose role identity."

Dr. Gelles, who had been at the forefront of trying to stop coercive interrogations at Guantánamo, calls it the "op-doc syndrome": "These sere guys, who were essentially like school counselors, wanted to be in a position where they had the solution to the operational challenge. They cannot help themselves."

But in the incestuous world of the Special Forces, where all psychologists are referred to as "Doc" and revered as experts, "no one ever questions that you might not have a clue what you're talking about," says an intelligence expert who opposed the use of sere tactics.

For a 2005 article in The New Yorker that raised the question of whether sere tactics had been reverse-engineered, Jane Mayer asked Mitchell if he was a C.I.A. contractor. He refused to confirm or deny the claim. But the newly minted op-docs Mitchell and Jessen had been among the experts who gathered at a daylong workshop in Arlington, Virginia, in July 2003, to debate the effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive techniques. The conference, titled "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory," was funded by the C.I.A. and co-hosted by the American Psychological Association and the Rand Corporation. One of its organizers was Kirk Hubbard, then chief of the C.I.A.'s Research and Analysis Branch. Mitchell and Jessen were named on the attendance list as C.I.A. contractors.

A key participant said that, before the conference, Hubbard called and warned him not to publicly identify attendees from the C.I.A. or ask them what they do, saying, "These people have jobs where deception and interviewing is very important."

Hubbard, who recently retired from the C.I.A., told me when I called him at his home in Montana that he has "no use for liberals who think we should be soft on terrorists." Asked about the work of Mitchell and Jessen, he was silent for a long time, then said, "I can't tell you anything about that."

Mitchell left one clue to his activities in corporate records. In 2004, he filed a notice with North Carolina's secretary of state formally dissolving Knowledge Works. In it, he wrote, "All members of this LLC moved out of the state of NC in March 2002, and subsequently Knowledge Works, LLC ceased to do business 29 March 2002."

Abu Zubaydah had been captured in Pakistan the day before.

One of the first on-the-ground tests for Mitchell's theories was the interrogation of Zubaydah. When he and the other members of the C.I.A. team arrived in Thailand, they immediately put a stop to the efforts at rapport building (which would also yield the name of José Padilla, an American citizen and supposed al-Qaeda operative now on trial in Miami for conspiring to murder and maim people in a foreign country).

Mitchell had a tougher approach in mind. The C.I.A. interrogators explained that they were going to become Zubaydah's "God." If he refused to cooperate, he would lose his clothes and his comforts one by one. At the safe house, the interrogators isolated him. They would enter his room just once a day to say, "You know what I want," then leave again.

As Zubaydah clammed up, Mitchell seemed to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence. With that goal in mind, the C.I.A. team began building a coffin in which they planned to bury the detainee alive.

A furor erupted over the legality of this move, which does not appear to have been carried out. (Every human-rights treaty and American law governing the treatment of prisoners prohibits death threats and simulated killings.) But the C.I.A. had a ready rejoinder: the methods had already been approved by White House lawyers. Mitchell was accompanied by another psychologist, Dr. R. Scott Shumate, then chief operational psychologist for the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center. Surprisingly, Shumate opposed the extreme methods and packed his bags in disgust, leaving before the most dire tactics had commenced. He later told associates that it had been a mistake for the C.I.A. to hire Mitchell.

With Shumate gone, the interrogators were free to unleash what they called the "sere school" techniques. These included blasting the Red Hot Chili Peppers at top volume, stripping Zubaydah naked, and making his room so cold that his body turned blue, as The New York Times reported last year.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. pulled its agents from the scene and ruled that they could not be present any time coercive tactics were used, says Michael Rolince. It was a momentous decision that effectively gave the C.I.A. complete control of interrogations.

While it was the F.B.I.'s rapport-building that had prompted Zubaydah to talk, the C.I.A. would go on to claim credit for breaking Zubaydah, and celebrate Mitchell as a psychological wizard who held the key to getting hardened terrorists to talk. Word soon spread that Mitchell and Jessen had been awarded a medal by the C.I.A. for their advanced interrogation techniques. While the claim is impossible to confirm, what matters is that others believed it. The reputed success of the tactics was "absolutely in the ether," says one Pentagon civilian who worked on detainee policy.

In response to detailed questions from Vanity Fair, Mitchell and Jessen said in a statement, "The advice we have provided, and the actions we have taken have been legal and ethical. We resolutely oppose torture. Under no circumstances have we ever endorsed, nor would we endorse, the use of interrogation methods designed to do physical or psychological harm."

The C.I.A. would not comment on Mitchell's and Jessen's role. However, a C.I.A. spokesman said the agency's interrogation program was implemented lawfully and had produced vital intelligence.

Dr. Shumate, who now works in the Defense Department as director of the Behavioral Sciences Directorate within the Counterintelligence Field Activity (cifa), did not respond to interview requests. But a cifa spokesman said that Dr. Shumate, who served on the A.P.A.'s task force, supported the association's "guidelines that psychologists conduct themselves in an ethical and professional manner regardless of mission assignment or activity."

Colonel Brittain P. Mallow, 51, was the ultimate straight-up soldier: blue-eyed and poker-faced, with a winning if seldom-seen smile. After 9/11, he was put in command of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigative Task Force (C.I.T.F.), which was charged with assessing which detainees at Guantánamo Bay should be prosecuted. Mallow, who has an advanced degree in Middle East studies and a working knowledge of Arabic, foresaw that the interrogations would be culturally difficult. So his team called on Dr. Michael Gelles, of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, to form a Behavioral Science Consultation Team (bsct, pronounced "biscuit") of non-clinical psychologists. Its mission was to help establish rapport with detainees.

By the summer of 2002, Mallow was hearing disturbing reports of blasting music and strobe lights coming from the interrogation booths. This was the work of Task Force 170, the Pentagon unit in charge of intelligence gathering in the Southern Command. According to one of Mallow's deputies, the members of Task Force 170 considered the C.I.T.F. to be soft on detainees. They were "hell-bent" on using harsher tactics, another C.I.T.F. official says.

"There were a number of claims that coercive methods had achieved results" during "interrogations in other places," Mallow says. The other C.I.T.F. official recalls that a Task Force 170 officer told him, "Other people are using this stuff, and they're getting praised." (A Pentagon spokesman said all questioning at Guantánamo is lawful and falls within the limits set by the army field manual.)

At a Pentagon meeting where Mallow protested the methods, he says that a civilian official named Marshall Billingslea told him, "You don't know what you're talking about." Billingslea insisted that the coercive approach worked.

Just months after Zubaydah's interrogation, the myth of Mitchell and Jessen's success in breaking him had made its way from Thailand to Guantánamo to Washington, and the reversed sere tactics had become associated with recognition and inside knowledge.

In late spring, Mallow met with Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, who was about to take over as commander of the newly combined JTF-GTMO 170 (Joint Task Force Guantánamo). Mallow briefed Dunlavey on his bsct team's rapport-building efforts and offered him full access to the psychologists. About a month later, he claims, Dunlavey had appropriated the acronym but set up a separate bsct team, cobbled together in part from clinical psychologists already at Guantánamo. Before activating the new bsct team, Dunlavey sent its members to Fort Bragg for a four-day sere-school workshop. (Dunlavey, now a juvenile-court judge in Erie, Pennsylvania, did not respond to requests for comment.)

On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted JTF-GTMO 170's request to apply coercive tactics in interrogations. The only techniques he rejected were waterboarding and death threats. Within a week, the task force had drafted a five-page, typo-ridden document entitled "JTF GTMO 'SERE' Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure."

The document, which has never before been made public, states, "The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics used at US military sere schools are appropriate for use in real-world interrogations" and "can be used to break real detainees."

The document is divided into four categories: "Degradation," "Physical Debilitation," "Isolation and Monopoliztion [sic] of Perception," and "Demonstrated Omnipotence." The tactics include "slaps," "forceful removal of detainees' clothing," "stress positions," "hooding," "manhandling," and "walling," which entails grabbing the detainee by his shirt and hoisting him against a specially constructed wall.

"Note that all tactics are strictly non-lethal," the memo states, adding, "it is critical that interrogators do 'cross the line' when utilizing the tactics." The word "not" was presumably omitted by accident.

It is not clear whether the guidelines were ever formally adopted. But the instructions suggest that the military command wanted psychologists to be involved so they could lead interrogators up to the line, then stop them from crossing it.

In a bizarre mixture of solicitude and sadism, the memo details how to calibrate the infliction of harm. It dictates that the "[insult] slap will be initiated no more than 12–14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee's face … to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut." And interrogators are advised that, when stripping off a prisoner's clothes, "tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance." In short, the sere-inspired interrogations would be violent. And therefore, psychologists were needed to help make these more dangerous interrogations safer.

Soon, the reverse-engineered sere tactics that had been designed by Mitchell and Jessen, road-tested in the C.I.A.'s black sites, and adopted in Guantánamo were being used in Iraq as well. One intelligence officer recalled witnessing a live demonstration of the tactics. The detainee was on his knees in a room painted black and forced to hold an iron bar in his extended hands while interrogators slapped him repeatedly. The man was then taken into a bunker, where he was stripped naked, blindfolded, and shackled. He was ordered to be left that way for 12 hours.

At the Abu Ghraib prison, military policemen on the night shift adopted the tactics to hideous effect. In what amounted to a down-market parody of the praise heaped on Mitchell and Jessen, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a former prison guard from Pennsylvania, received a commendation for his work "softening up" detainees, according to the documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. He appears repeatedly in photographs, smiling and giving thumbs-up before human pyramids of naked detainees. In 2005, he was convicted on charges of abuse. In their statement, Mitchell and Jessen said that they were "appalled by reports" of alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and had not been involved with them in any way.

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia recently made his case for heavy-handed interrogation tactics via a surprisingly current pop-culture reference. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles," he told a panel of judges, referring to the torturer protagonist of the Fox series 24. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

In the real world, however, it is increasingly clear that the U.S. has sacrificed its global image for tactics that are at best ineffective. "We are not aware of any convincing evidence that coercive tactics work better than other methods of obtaining actionable intelligence," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Under Levin's leadership, the Senate Armed Services Committee has been probing the military's alleged mistreatment of detainees and intends to hold hearings. In a statement to Vanity Fair, Levin says that he finds the reported use of sere tactics in interrogations "very troubling," and that his committee is looking specifically at "the accountability of officials for actions or failures to act."

Mitchell and Jessen have become a focus of the investigation. In June, the online news magazine Salon reported that the Defense Department, responding to a request from Levin's committee, ordered top Pentagon officials to preserve any documents mentioning the two psychologists or their company in Spokane.

Meanwhile, business appears to be booming at Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. It has 120 employees and specializes in "understanding, predicting, and improving performance in high-risk and extreme situations," according to a recruitment ad at a recent job fair for people with top security clearances.

The principals of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates are raking in money. According to people familiar with their compensation, they get paid more than $1,000 per day plus expenses, tax free, for their overseas work. It beats military pay. Mitchell has built his dream house in Florida. He also purchased a BMW through one of his companies. "Taxpayers are paying at least half a million dollars a year for these two knuckleheads to do voodoo," says one of the people familiar with their pay arrangements.

Last December, the nation's best-known interrogation experts joined together to release a report, called "Educing Information," that sought to comprehensively address the question of which methods work in interrogations.

Scott Shumate served as an adviser to the report, which concluded that there is no evidence that reverse-engineered sere tactics work, or that sere psychologists make for capable interrogators. One chapter, authored by Kleinman, concludes: "Employment of resistance interrogators—whether as consultants or as practitioners—is an example of the proverbial attempt to place the square peg in the round hole."

But it is one of the features of our war on terror that myths die hard. Just think of the al-Qaeda–Iraq connection, or Saddam Hussein's W.M.D. In late 2005, as Senator John McCain was pressing the Bush administration to ban torture techniques, one of the nation's top researchers of stress in sere trainees claims to have received a call from Samantha Ravitch, the deputy assistant for national security in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. She wanted to know if the researcher had found any evidence that uncontrollable stress would make people more likely to talk.

Katherine Eban is a Brooklyn-based journalist and Alicia Patterson fellow who writes about issues of public health and homeland security. Her book, Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America's Drug Supply, was excerpted in the May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair.

George Tenet: liar, international criminal

Information Clearing House carries this no-nonsense indictment of George Tenet for cooperating with the “supreme international crime” of the war of aggression on Iraq.

Four-letter Word for Tenet: Liar
By Ray McGovern
Information Clearing House
May 16, 2007

If they question why we died,
Tell them because our fathers lied.
Rudyard Kipling

Mercifully, the flurry of media coverage of former CIA director George Tenet hawking his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” has abated. Buffeted by those on both right and left who see through his lame attempt at self-justification, Tenet probably now wishes he had opted to just fade away, as old soldiers used to do.

He listened instead to his old PR buddy and “co-author” Bill Harlow who failed miserably in trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. By this point, they may be having second thoughts. But, hey, the $4 million advance is a tidy sum, even when split two ways. Aside from the money, what else could they have been thinking?

Tenet’s book is a self-indictment for the crimes with which Socrates was charged: making the worse cause appear the better, and corrupting the youth.

But George is not the kind to take the hemlock. Rather, with no apparent shame, he accepted what one wag has labeled the “Presidential Medal of Silence” in return for agreeing to postpone his Nixon-style “modified limited hangout” until after the mid-term elections last November. The $4 million advance that Tenet and Harlow took for the book marked a shabby, inauspicious beginning to the effort to stitch together what remains of Tenet’s tattered reputation.

Here in Washington we are pretty much inured to effrontery, but Tenet’s book and tiresome interviews have earned him the degree for chutzpah summa cum laude. We are supposed to feel sorry for this pathetic soul, who could not muster the integrity simply to tell the truth and stave off unspeakable carnage in Iraq. Rather, when his masters lied to justify war, Tenet simply lacked the courage to tell his fellow citizens that America was about to launch what the post WWII Nuremberg Tribunal called the “supreme international crime”—a war of aggression.

Tenet’s pitiable apologia demonstrates once again not only that absolute power corrupts absolutely, but also that the corruption befouls all those nearby.

Cheney’s Chess

For those of prurient bent, the book offers a keyhole-peep into a White House of ill repute, with Vice President Dick Cheney playing at his chess board, moving sniveling pawns like Tenet from one square to another.

Someone should have told the former CIA director that unprovoked war is not some sort of game. Out of respect for the tens of thousands killed and maimed in Iraq, it is time to start calling spades spades. It was a high crime, a premeditated felony to have taken part in this conspiracy.

Not surprisingly, few of Tenet’s talk-show hosts were armed with enough facts to pierce the smoke and the arrogant now-you-listen-to-me approach from Bill Harlow’s PR toolbox. Whether out of ignorance or just habit, celebrity interviewers kept cutting Tenet more and more slack. Understandable, I suppose, for they, like Tenet, were enthusiastic cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq. And so, affable, hot-blooded George was allowed to filibuster, bob, weave, and blow still more smoke. Tenet should not be behind a microphone; he should be behind bars.

With nauseating earnestness, Tenet keeps saying:

“I believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.”

This is a lie. And no matter how many times he says it (after the axiom of his master, George W. Bush, who has stressed publicly that repetition is necessary to “catapult the propaganda”), Tenet can no longer conceal the deceit. Indeed, the only other possibility—that he is (as he complains) being made the useful “idiot” on whom Vice President Dick Cheney and others mean to blame the war—can be ruled out.

Tenet was indeed useful to Cheney and Bush, but he is no idiot. Those who do not rely exclusively on the corporate media for their information know Tenet for what he is—a charlatan. A willing co-conspirator, he did for Bush and Cheney what propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels did for Hitler. The key difference is that Goebbels and his Nazi collaborators, rather than writing books and taking sinecures to enrich themselves, were held accountable at Nuremberg.

Phantom Weapons of Mass Destruction

Tenet knew there were no WMD. Secret British documents reveal not only that Tenet told his British counterpart the intelligence was being “fixed” around the policy. They also show that Washington and London developed a scheme to “wrongfoot” Saddam Hussein by insisting on the kind of UN inspections they were sure he would reject, thus providing a convenient casus belli.

Saddam outfoxed them by allowing the most intrusive inspection regime in recent history. At the turn of 2002-03 UN inspectors were crawling all over Saddam’s palaces, interviewing his scientists, and pursuing every tip they could get from Tenet—and finding nothing.

What did satellite imagery show? Nothing, save for the embarrassingly inconclusive photos that then-Secretary of State Colin Powell displayed on Feb. 5, 2003 at the UN. Were there any photos of those biological weapons trailers reported by the shadowy Curveball? None. And so “artist renderings” were conjured up to show what these sinister trailers might look like.

At least the renderings produced by the CIA graphics shop were more professional than the crude forgeries upon which the fable about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa was based. And the Cheney-Rice-Judith Miller story about aluminum tubes for uranium enrichment got bent hopelessly out of shape as soon as genuine scientists (as opposed to Tenet’s stable of malleable engineers) got hold of them.

Exactly four years ago, amid the euphoria of Mission Accomplished and the incipient concern over the trouble encountered in finding WMD, then-deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz told writer Sam Tanenhaus of Vanity Fair that Iraq’s supposed cache of WMD had never been the most important casus belli. It was simply one of several reasons:

“For bureaucratic reasons we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on...Almost unnoticed but huge is another reason: removing Saddam will allow the U.S. to take its troops out of Saudi Arabia...”

Absence of Evidence

Who needs real evidence as opposed to allegations of WMD, when the name of the game is removing Saddam? But how to explain the blather about WMD in the lead-up to the war, when not one piece of imagery or other intelligence could confirm the presence of such weapons? Easy. Apply the Rumsfeld maxim: “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” And then explain further that the lack of evidence proves nothing but how clever the Iraqis have become at hiding their weapons. Don’t laugh; that’s what Rumsfeld and the neocons said.

That foolishness had run its course by March 2003 when, despite the best “leads” Tenet could provide and the intrusive inspection regime, the UN inspectors could find nothing. It was getting downright embarrassing for those bent on a belli without an ostensible casus, but by then enough troops were in place to conquer Iraq (or so thought Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz). At that point Bush told the UN to withdraw its inspectors promptly and let them watch the fireworks of shock and awe from a safer distance on TV. (The real shocker is President Bush repeated insistence that Saddam threw out the inspectors. But, again, he has so successfully “catapulted” this piece of propaganda that most Americans do not realize it is a lie.)

How did the White House conspirators think they could get away with all this? Well, don’t you remember Cheney saying we would be greeted as liberators...and Ken Neocon Adelman assuring us that it would be a “cakewalk?” We would defeat a fourth-rate army, remove a “ruthless dictator,” eliminate an adversary of Israel, and end up sitting atop all that oil with permanent military bases and no further need to station troops in Saudi Arabia. At that point, smiled the neocons, what spoilsport will be able to make political hay by insisting: Yes, but you did this on the basis of forgery, fakery; and where, by the way, are the weapons of mass destruction?

Granted that over recent weeks George Tenet has shown himself a bit dense beneath the bluster. Nevertheless, there is simply no defense on grounds of density—or gross ineptitude or momentary insanity. He clearly played a sustained role in the chicanery.

Okay; if you insist: let’s assume for a moment that Rumsfeld did actually succeed in convincing Tenet that the reason there was no evidence of WMD was because the Iraqis were so good at hiding them. What then?

Tenet does not get off the hook. There was, in fact, no absence of well sourced evidence that Saddam’s WMD had all been destroyed shortly after the Gulf War in 1991—yes, all of them.

You Go With the Evidence There Is

In 1995, when Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected with a treasure trove of documents, he spilled the beans on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. There were none. He knew. He was in charge of the chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs and ordered all such weapons destroyed before the UN inspectors could discover them after the war in 1991. He told us much more, and the information that could be checked out was confirmed.

The George-and-Condoleezza-must-have-just-missed-this-report excuse won’t wash, because Newsweek acquired a transcript of Kamel’s debriefing and broke the story on Feb. 24, 2003, several weeks before the war, noting gingerly that Kamel’s information “raises questions about whether the WMD stockpiles attributed to Iraq still exist.”

It was the kind of well-sourced documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts and lawyers positively lust. But the mainstream press dropped it like a hot potato after Bill Harlow (yes, Tenet’s co-author), in his role as CIA spokesperson, angrily protested (a bit too much) that the Newsweek story was “incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.” It was, rather, entirely correct; it was documentary—and not forged this time. Curiously, the name of Hussein Kamel shows up on a listing of Iraqis in the front of Tenet’s book, but nowhere in the text. Tenet and Harlow apparently decided to avoid calling attention to the fact that they suppressed information from a super source, preferring instead to help the White House grease the skids for war.

In late summer 2002 CIA operatives had a signal success. They had recruited Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and had him working in place--for the U.S. Proud of their successful recruitment of a senior Iraqi official, officers of CIA’s clandestine service immediately sought and were given an early meeting with President Bush and his senior advisers.

The information Sabri had already passed to us had checked out well. Naively, the agency officers were expecting sighs of relief as they quoted him saying there were no WMD in Iraq. The information went over like a lead balloon, dispelling all excitement over this high-level penetration of the Iraqi government.

When the CIA officers got back to Headquarters and told colleagues what had just happened at the White House, those who had been tasking Naji Sabri asked whether they should seek additional intelligence from him on the subject. According to Tyler Drumheller, the division chief in charge of such collection, the answer was loud and clear: “Well, this isn’t about intel any more. This is about regime change.”

And then there was Curveball. Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, played a direct role regarding the notorious “Curveball,” a former Iraqi taxi driver and convicted embezzler whom German intelligence deemed a mentally unstable alcoholic, who was "out of control." Unlike the unwelcome reporting from the Iraqi foreign minister, Curveball provided very welcome, if bogus, information on alleged mobile laboratories producing biological weapons in Iraq—grist for the “artist renderings” for Powell’s UN speech.

It was all a crock. And Tenet and McLaughlin both knew it, because Drumheller gave them chapter and verse before Powell's speech, and has now written a book about this sad story.

Moreover, the normally taciturn, but recently outspoken former director of State Department intelligence, Carl Ford, has noted that both Tenet and McLaughlin took a personal hand in writing a follow-up report aimed at salvaging what Curveball had said. Ford spared no words: The report “wasn’t just wrong, they lied...they should have been shot."

Nor can Tenet expunge from the record his witting cooperation in the cynical campaign to exploit the trauma we all felt after 9/11, by intimating a connection with that heinous event and Saddam Hussein. If, as Tenet now concedes, no significant connection could be established between Saddam and al-Qaeda, why did he sit quietly behind Powell at the UN as Powell spun a yarn about a "sinister nexus" between the two? That sorry exhibition destroyed what was left of the morale of honest CIA analysts who, until then, had courageously resisted intense pressure to endorse that evidence-less but explosive canard.

A Cropping Worth a Thousand Words

George Tenet's book includes a photo that is a metaphor for both the primary purpose of his memoir and its unintended result. Most will remember the famous photo of Colin Powell briefing the UN Security Council, with Tenet and then-US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte sitting staunchly behind him. Well, on a centerfold page large enough to accommodate the familiar shot, the photo has been cropped to exclude Tenet altogether and include only Negroponte’s shoulder and nose (which, mercifully, he was not holding at the time.) This is an incredibly adolescent attempt to distance Tenet from that scandalous performance, even though he was the one most responsible for it. The cropping also suggests that Tenet and Harlow are only too aware that by including spurious “intelligence” in Powell’s speech and then sitting stoically behind him as if to validate it, Tenet visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset--credibility.

“It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up,” blithely write Tenet and Harlow, without any trace of acknowledgment of the enormous consequences of the deception. In a Feb. 5, 2003 Memorandum for the President regarding Powell’s speech that day, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) gave him an “A” for presentation, and a “C-” for content. (If we knew then what we know now we would of course have flunked him outright.) In the VIPS memo we warned the president that intelligence analysts were “increasingly distressed at the politicization of intelligence...and finding it hard to be heard above the drumbeat for war.”

That a war of choice was on the horizon was crystal clear—as were the consequences. We urged the president to “widen the discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441,and beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” We take no comfort in having got that one right. Former UN Chief Inspector and U.S. Marine Major, Scott Ritter, was screaming it from the rooftops (and was blacklisted by the domesticated media). It was a no-brainer.

Tenet Breaks Tenet

Tenet’s tell-some-but-not-all book is unwittingly self-incriminating in another key respect, an illustration of what happens when you have a politician, with PR help, running U.S. intelligence. Much of the Tenet/Harlow self-justifying prose is transparent to any observer who has been paying the slightest attention to issues of intelligence on Iraq over the past few years. What may not be fully clear is that, in his zeal to indict others and exculpate himself, Tenet plays fast and loose with a cardinal tenet of intelligence work. You don’t reveal confidential discussions with policymakers—and you especially don’t quote the president. You simply do not do that. For once you violate confidentiality, not only your effectiveness but also that of those who succeed you will be greatly impaired, if not ended.

In normal circumstances presidents have a right to expect that their conversations with advisers will be kept in strictest confidence, and not revealed later by some buffoon pushing a book. And it is the height of irresponsibility for an intelligence director to quote a president still in office. If the president and senior advisers are unable to count on confidences being kept, it becomes impossible to conduct sensible discussions on policy making.

Why do I say “in normal circumstances?” Because no president has the right to plan a war of aggression with high confidence that accomplices, or others that might become privy to such plans, will stay quiet and not blow the whistle. The oath we take to defend the Constitution of the United States supersedes any promise, explicit or implicit, to enable the president to commit crimes in our name. (And someone ought to tell that to Sen. Dick Durbin, who recently confessed that he knew the intelligence justification for war was a crock, but could not tell the American people because it was secret!)

Am I saying there are circumstances in which conscience may require divulging the confidential remarks of the president of the United States? Of course there are, and these circumstances are a case in point. But that, sadly, was/is far from George Tenet’s intent. That he sees fit now to violate the principle of confidentiality in a quixotic attempt at self-justification (and, yes, his share of the $4 million) betokens not only an adolescent narcissism oblivious to the importance of trust, but also a lack of genuine respect for policymakers, including the president. Those of us who have been privileged to brief the president’s father and other senior national security officials—and there must be a hundred of us by now—never violated that trust the way Tenet has done.

Most people do not know that personal access to the president and his top advisers was a rarity during most of the CIA’s first three decades. Regularized personal access by CIA officers did not begin until former director and then-vice president George H. W. Bush persuaded President Ronald Reagan to authorize the sharing of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) in one-on-one morning briefings for the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the president’s national security adviser. (With White House approval, we later added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as a daily consumer.)

These early morning briefings were conducted by us senior analysts who prepared the PDB (and badgered the drafter/analysts with all manner of questions) the day and night before. We were experienced intelligence professionals steeped in substance and just a secure telephone call away from the analysts we knew could provide additional, trustworthy detail if needed. It was a position of great trust.

Our ethos, our job, was to speak unvarnished truth to power, irrespective of the policy agendas of the officials we briefed. We were trusted to do that as honestly and professionally as possible. The last thing we needed was a CIA director looking over our shoulder—particularly one, like Tenet, not well schooled in the need to protect the credibility of intelligence by avoiding policy advocacy like the plague. During the Reagan presidency, the CIA director rarely joined us for the PDB briefings and did no pre-publication review. The director had quite enough on his plate. His was a dual job involving herding the cats of a scarcely manageable, multi-agency intelligence community, while trying to manage one agency (CIA) itself conceived with a serious birth defect.

A Structural Flaw

A most unfortunate flaw in the National Security Act of 1947 gave the CIA director not only responsibility for preparing unvarnished intelligence, but the additional duty “to perform other such functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”—like running secret wars, as in Nicaragua; overthrowing governments, as in Iran, Guatemala, Chile; and applying President Bush-favored “alternative” methods of interrogation in secret prisons in violation of international and U.S. Army law, as in Afghanistan and Iraq.

This was hardly President Harry Truman’s original intent. Long after he left the White House, Truman addressed this directly in an article for the then independent Washington Post on Dec. 22, 1963:

“I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times policy-making arm of the government...I never had any thought of that when I set up the CIA.... I would like to see the CIA restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the president...and its operational duties terminated or properly used elsewhere.


A pity no one listened to Truman. As a result, for the CIA director each of the two scarcely compatible jobs became full-time challenges. During my 27-year career I had a front-row seat watching nine directors, most of whom did their best to act with integrity and honesty, despite that noxious structural fault. And, if that were not enough, this difficult dual task was accompanied by the additional responsibility to manage the entire intelligence community (16 agencies now). This posed a tri-fold management challenge.

Tenet all but admits he was not up to it. I’m “no Jack Welch,” is the way he puts it. Equally unfortunate, he picked inexperienced managers distinguished only by their malleability, their subservience to the perceived wishes of the next level up. Perhaps the best case in point is John McLaughlin, the quintessential affable go-along-to-get-along functionary. McLaughlin very rarely made use of his prerogative as statutory deputy in charge of the intelligence community and did not become much involved in operations. At the top of his sins of commission was staffing substantive analysis with weak-reed supervisors, the easier to bend analytic conclusions to the prevailing winds from the White House and Pentagon.

As for poor misunderstood George, instead of tending to his knitting at CIA headquarters, he decided to hitch a ride downtown with the PDB briefer in the morning, and thus secure regular face time with his pal, the president. From all reports there were many “slam dunks” voiced in those very private discussions. Worse still, Tenet felt free to ignore substantive dissent from other intelligence agencies—a practice that, though occasionally tempting, NEVER makes real sense and was an abnegation of his major responsibility. He knew what the president wanted to hear. And the McLaughlin-protégé analysts knew it too. Not only did they serve it up to recipe, but they actually took steps to conceal from colleagues elsewhere in the intelligence community what their boss was telling the president. On those few occasions when colleagues from other agencies learned via the grapevine what Tenet was telling the president, they were aghast and, understandably, angry. But none of their own bosses, including Colin Powell, dared get crosswise with the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal.

What Tenet should have told Bush? For starters, that:

--State Department analysts had heaped scorn on the Cheney fiction that Iraq had “reconstituted” its nuclear weapons program. They were, of course, right, but why make it harder for the president to keep a straight face when warning of mushroom clouds? Remember, it is not about Intel; it’s about regime change.

--State had described the cockamamie report about Iraq seeking uranium from Africa as “highly suspect” well before it was learned that this choice morsel was based on a forgery.

--Department of Energy analysts were having a riotous laugh at the thought those famous aluminum tubes could be somehow warped into use for uranium enrichment. The laugh, though, was mostly a mechanism to help suppress their rage over Tenet’s recruitment of pseudo-engineers to spin those aluminum artillery tubes into something more menacing.

--US Air Force intelligence experts thought hilarious the specter of Iraqi planes scarcely larger than the models seen on the Washington Monument grounds somehow flying to our shores to spray chemical or biological agents. But the Air Force, too, caved, acquiescing in their dissent being relegated to a footnote in the infamous National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1, 2002 on Iraqi WMD.

But Tenet knew what Bush wanted. And “action officer” Condoleezza could boil down the intelligence estimate into one page and read it to the president, if the opportunity affords itself.

Tenet’s Ave atque Vale in the preface to his book speaks volumes. One need read no further. He looks back unapologetically and with satisfaction on his long career as chief of intelligence, “not always successful, but...“striving to do what is right.”

“Son of immigrants John and Evangelia Tenet, who left their villages in Greece to give me that chance”...and give us George Tenet.

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.
Beware the Greeks bearing gifts.
Virgil

An earlier version of this article appeared on Consortiumnews.com