A couple of weeks ago, journalist Katherine Eban published an article with more detail on the subject. Her article, Rorschach and Awe, appeared in Vanity Fair on 17 July 2007.
Democracy Now recently aired an interview (transcript, MP3) with Eban, in which she describes how she came to learn more about the topic...
From the interview:
I began to probe their allegations. It didn't quite line up from an investigative point of view. It seemed very fishy. There were accusations that the task force had been stacked with military psychologists, that the conclusions were preordained, and while there seemed to be a reasonable case for that, it didn't quite explain to me what psychologists were up to, because some of the military psychologists on the task force had actually protested the role of psychologists in interrogations.
And the more I investigated, the more I heard about a different set of psychologists, a set of psychologists who worked for the CIA, who were involved in some of the interrogations of high-valued detainees...
From the Vanity Fair article:
...The agency [CIA] 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...
...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....
The whole thing is disgusting. There simply isn't anything more to say about it.
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