James Mitchell, the psychologist who with his business partner Bruce Jensen designed and implemented the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program used on suspected terrorists after the September 11 attacks, was talking it up at the American Enterprise Institute on Tuesday. In fact, the two men brought in oodles of CIA cash with their program. Your dollars and mine, $81 million worth.
Mitchell isn’t advocating torture, he told the AEI audience. He just thinks we should have a “civil debate” about it. Legal coercion, he said, should be part of our arsenal. But he’s not advocating torture. Nuh-uh. He said he’s not even advocating waterboarding, a practice he personally employed against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the mastermind of the attacks 15 years ago. Ali Watkins reports:
“The word ‘torture’ has become like the word ‘racist.’ It’s been used so many times it loses its meaning,” [Mitchell] said. “If this political correctness continues, we’re going to be standing on a moral high ground looking down into a smoking hole that used to be Los Angeles.”
The program engineered by Mitchell employed the use of tactics like waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions and rectal feeding on detained terror suspects in secret overseas prisons run by the CIA. Agency interrogators are documented to have slammed suspects into walls, chained them from the ceiling and played loud music to keep them from sleeping. Those tactics have been condemned by critics who say they’re inhumane and illegal, and the 2014 Senate investigation found the tactics were ultimately ineffective at eliciting intelligence.
When his role was discovered, the American Psychological Association blasted Mitchell for designing the torture program. But the accusations made no never-mind to him.
“Those people are not part of my life. I don’t care what they think,” Mitchell said of a scathing APA report that condemned the collusion of psychologists with the CIA. “It has zero impact on my life and I don’t care.
What could those APA pantywaists possibly have to say worth listening to, eh?
Mitchell quite possibly sees more dollar signs in his future with the swearing in of a president who thinks waterboarding isn’t the worst the U.S. should do. Well, sure. If you’re going to violate the Geneva Accords, why be half-assed about? And Mitchell figures he’d have more than one high-level ally if he were to return to padding his income stream with torture money.
Among them, in his view, is retired Gen. James “Mad Dog” Mattis, the former Marine general President-Elect Trump has chosen for secretary of Defense. Mitchell says press reports most likely exaggerated Mattis’s opposition to torture by taking his words out of context.
Whatever his boss says, it would be encouraging to hear Mattis forcefully and unequivocally reject Mitchell’s claim.