GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — A clash over the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 2014 report on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program, which the Democratic majority called torture, took center stage throughout a 9/11 court hearing in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Dr. James Mitchell, 68, a psychologist who helped design interrogation techniques for the CIA in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, spent much of his testimony this week defending his actions as legal and arguing that he’d helped stop future attacks.
But defense lawyers for five alleged 9/11 plotters, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, 55, the self-declared mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that left nearly 3,000 Americans dead, disagreed. The attorneys this week repeatedly pointed to a 2014 Senate report that concluded, “the CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.”
The chairwoman of the committee at the time, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, stated that “under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured.” The report criticized Mitchell and his business partner, Dr. Bruce Jessen, referring to them by the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar.
Mitchell, a former Air Force survival school psychologist, helped put together interrogation techniques that stemmed from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program. These included stress positions, sleep deprivation, bouncing detainees off of flexible walls, slaps to the face and stomach, and, most notably, waterboarding. Mitchell said the techniques were authorized by the president in consultation with the National Security Council and Congress, buttressed by Justice Department memos, and closely supervised by the CIA.
The psychologist personally used the simulated drowning technique against Mohammed in 15 sessions using at least 183 water pours in March 2003.
David Nevin, a member of Mohammed’s defense team, pointed to passages from the Senate report showing that some of the information that emerged from interrogations turned out to be fabricated.
“If your point is that sometimes we missed it, I concur,” Mitchell said. “We’re wrong sometimes … but we’re right enough times to stop the next attack.”
Nevin claimed that after his client’s capture in Pakistan and prior to any enhanced interrogations, Mohammed “provided lots of information … including admitting to 9/11.”
“I asked him about information to stop attacks inside the U.S., and he told me, ‘soon you will know’ … and intended to withhold the information,” Mitchell said of Mohammed.
And Mitchell said his goal wasn’t to get Mohammed to admit to past attacks “but rather to stop that second wave of attacks that he planned with Hambali that was real and that we stopped.”
Riduan Isamuddin, aka Hambali, was the leader of the Southeast Asian al Qaeda-linked terror group Jemaah Islamiyah, which carried out the deadly Bali, Indonesia, nightclub bombing in 2002, killing 202 people. The U.S. government alleges Hambali was part of a “second wave” plot to launch follow-up attacks inside the United States in coordination with Mohammed.
Nevin said the Senate report casts doubt on the role of the CIA’s program in stopping Hambali and implied that the CIA interrogations may not have stopped any further attacks.
Mitchell said “that argument is undercut” by the fact that detainees he’d interrogated “provided real information that stopped attacks.”
Mitchell critiqued the Senate report.
“They didn’t let me testify,” Mitchell said, adding that they “didn’t let any other CIA officers involved” testify either.
“This is the biased response of the Senate staffer who framed it,” Mitchell said, referencing the major role played by Dan Jones, the former Senate investigator who authored much of the report. Jones was played by Adam Driver in Amazon’s compelling but flawed film The Report.
“My objection is to the entire report when it is read independent of the Senate minority report, which debunks much of its analysis,” Mitchell said. “Don’t take my word for it, judge,” the psychologist added. ‘Read what the CIA said. Read what the Senate minority report said. They debunked this thoroughly.”
The 499-page summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s more than 6,700-page report concluded that “the CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.”
“The committee reviewed 20 of the most frequent and prominent examples of purported counter-terrorism successes that the CIA has attributed to the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques, and found them to be wrong in fundamental respects,” the report said.
Republicans on the committee, led by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and others, released a 167-page response disputing the majority’s conclusions.
“We have no doubt that the CIA’s detention program saved lives and played a vital role in weakening al Qaeda while the program was in operation,” the GOP rebuttal said. “The rendition, detention, and interrogation program they created, of which enhanced interrogation was only a small part, enabled a stream of collection and intelligence validation that was unprecedented.”
The CIA’s 136-page 2013 response to the Senate majority report did “agree that the agency was unprepared” to “undertake what would be an unprecedented program of detaining and interrogating suspected al Qaeda and affiliated terrorists.” But “the agency disagrees with the study’s unqualified assertions that the overall detention and interrogation program did not produce unique intelligence that led terrorist plots to be disrupted, terrorists to be captured, or lives to be saved.”
The agency said it “continues to assess that the capture of” Hambali in 2003 “resulted in large part from information obtained from Khalid Sheikh Muhammad” and “was a critical factor in the disruption of al Qaeda’s plan to conduct a Second Wave attack involving multiple airplanes crashing into buildings on the U.S. West Coast.”
Former CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden penned a joint Wall Street Journal op-ed pushing back against the Senate majority’s conclusions, claiming the interrogation program led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, disrupted terrorist plots, and informed the agency’s ability to thwart al Qaeda operations.
“The interrogation program formed an essential part of the foundation from which the CIA and the U.S. military mounted the bin Laden operation,” the trio wrote. Their op-ed pointed to a website called “CIA Saved Lives” for more information.
In court at Guantanamo Bay, Mitchell said his book, Enhanced Interrogation, was based on the Senate’s majority and minority reports, the CIA’s response, and the “CIA Saved Lives” website.
“We were at war,” Mitchell wrote. “Our actions were necessary, effective, legal, authorized, and helped save lives.”
