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CIA Terror Interrogations Were Not Torture
by John M. Curtis
(310) 204-8700
Copyright
December 11, 2014
All Rights Reserved.
Ripping the CIA on the Senate floor,
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who takes over Chairman of the Armed Services
Committee Jan. 1, 2015, agreed with President Barack Obama that “enhanced
interrogation techniques” amount to “torture.”
While spending six years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp,
McCain has his own issues with harsh interrogation techniques but has jumped the
gun branding the Senate Select Committee’s Dec. 9 report as proof of CIA
torture. “I think it is a terrible
report, deeply flawed,” said former Vice President Dick Cheney, calling the
Senate’s findings of torture “full of crap.”
Cheney rejects the idea the CIA went rogue trying to coax actionable
human intel out of “enemy combatants.”
“It’s a classic example of where politicians get together and throw
professionals under the bus,” said Cheney, rejecting the biased Senate report.
Cheney’s main objection stems for the idea that the CIA went rogue
applying “enhanced interrogation techniques,” involving controversial ways
developed by former Air Force psychologists Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen and Dr.
James Mitchell to extract intel from “enemy combatants.” Partners in Spokane,
Washington-based Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, Mitchell and Jessen reverse
engineered SERE-training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, developed
from Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual published in 1963. SERE emerged in the early 1960s to
combat the effects of “Chinese Though Reform” and “brainwashing” from the Maoist
revolution and Korean War.
Conducting “mind control” experiments in the 1960s, the CIA carefully catalogued
from returning prisoners of war the techniques used by the Chinese and North
Koreans to brainwash U.S. soldiers.
Studying the Chinese and North Korean brainwashing methods, Mitchell,
Jessen and Associataes were paid $81 million of a $160 million CIA contract to
develop “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
At no time were they considered “torture,” except by stretching the
definition to involve creative ways used to extract information from enemy
combatants. “The notion that the
agency was operating on a rogue-basis was just a flat-out lie,” said Cheney,
referring to the methodical way the Bush administration authorized and vetted
the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used at Guantanamo Bay and Black Sites
around the globe. Cheney admitted
that “rectal hydration” used to keep enemy combatants from dying of self-imposed
starvation “was not one of the authorized or approved techniques,” attesting to
how military de-briefers got zealous applying CIA-approved “enhanced
interrogation techniques.”
Contrary to the Senate’s report, Cheney insisted that the “enhanced
interrogation techniques” were in fact inconsistent with torture, not designed
to inflict pain, suffering or imminent death on detainees. Developing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the wake of Sept. 11, Mitchell and
Jessen tried to give military de-briefers the best possible way of collecting
actionable intelligence on enemy combatants.
U.N. officials have recently condemned CIA practices, urging transfer to
the Hague’s International Criminal Court to prosecute CIA or Bush administration
officials. Yet those same U.N. officials do nothing to prosecute or stop the waves of beheadings,
torture and mafia-style executions of Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews
and others persecuted by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, al-Qaeda and other
extremist groups, seizing swaths of sovereign land, wreaking havoc in the Middle
East.
Whether or not some overly zealous practitioners of “enhanced
interrogation techniques” crossed the line is anyone’s guess. Five-hundred pages of declassified
material expose for posterity some ambitious ways to extract information from
battlefield detainees. Cheney
rejected the idea that former President George W. Bush was duped by rogue
elements in the CIA. “He knew
everything he needed to know and wanted to know about the program,” said Cheney,
debunking the ideal that the CIA operated a rogue operation. Reverse-engineering SERE training
and calling on past experience with brainwashed prisoners of war, Mitchell &
Jessen tried to help CIA interrogators get the most out of recalcitrant
battlefield detainees. Bush
officials vetted every legal option to determine that every terrorists plucked
off the battlefield were not accorded rights under the Geneva Convention.
Cheney’s point about
the Senate Select Committee report is that all CIA tactics were vetted and
approved in the wake of Sept. 11.
He thinks the committee forgets the context of the Bush administration dealing
with the worst terrorist attack on the homeland in U.S. history. More brutal than Pearl Harbor before
WWII, Sept. 11 blindsided U.S. intelligence agencies, proving extreme
vulnerability to foreign terror attacks.
Watching nearly three thousand U.S. citizens slaughtered by Bin Laden’s
programmed assassins, the Bush White House had no choice by to take extreme
measures to defend U.S. national security.
Reflecting on the brutal interrogation of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh
Mohammad, Cheney admitted the U.S. had no choice. “He is in our possession, we know
he’s the architect [of the attacks], what are we suppose to do? Kiss him on the cheeks?” admitting
he would do things the same way again.
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