That's what it took for two military psychiatrists to serve as cheerleaders and overseers for the torture program.
The NYTimes article Senate Torture Report Shows C.I.A. Infighting Over Interrogation Program describes the following series of events:
On the other side were James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two former military psychologists who had advised the agency to use waterboarding and other coercive methods. With the support of C.I.A. headquarters, they repeatedly insisted that Mr. Nashiri and other prisoners were still withholding crucial information, and that the application of sufficient pain and disorientation would eventually force them to disclose it. They thought the other faction was “running a ‘sissified’ interrogation program,” the report says.If those questioning Mr. Nashiri just had “the latitude to use the full range of enhanced exploitation and interrogation measures,” including waterboarding, Dr. Jessen wrote, they would be able to get more information. Such treatment, he wrote, after the two previous months of extremely harsh handling of Mr. Nashiri, would produce “the desired level of helplessness.
And Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, identified by pseudonyms in the report, had not conducted a single real interrogation. They had helped run a Cold War-era training program for the Air Force in which personnel were given a taste of the harsh treatment they might face if captured by Communist enemies. The program — called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — had never been intended for use in American interrogations, and involved methods that had produced false confessions when used on American airmen held by the Chinese in the Korean War.So of course, they did that quintessentially American thing, they quit their jobs and founded a startup.
Yet the program allowed the psychologists to assess their own work — they gave it excellent grades — and to charge a daily rate of $1,800 each, four times the pay of other interrogators, to waterboard detainees. Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen later started a company that took over and ran the C.I.A. program from 2005 until it was closed in 2009. The C.I.A. paid it $81 million, plus $1 million to protect the company and its employees from legal liability.Hey, what could be more wholesome, they're saving the country from terrorists and creating jobs at the same time. So what if a few "terrorists" die of hypothermia, or are rectally fed, or hung from the ceiling by chains.
Better yet, it's another win for defense sub-contracting championed by Cheney. And it's completely irrelevant that he was CEO of a big defense contractor. Can I hear a Huzzah for American ingenuity!
Except for one little pesky detail:
The agency had evidently forgotten its own conclusion, sent to Congress in 1989, that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers,” the report says. The Democratic Senate staff members who studied the post-9/11 program came up with an identical assessment: that waterboarding, wall-slamming, nudity, cold and other ill treatment produced little information of value in preventing terrorism.Or maybe the CIA top brass was just reading the Ramsay Snow chapters of Game of Thrones at the time and decided they wanted to sub-contract some work to the house of Bolton. Yeah, that might be it.