The CIA secretly agreed to pay over $5million in legal fees to shield two of it's employees accused of waterboarding terror suspects.
Psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen are well-known to have invented the brutal interrogation programme, now classed in the US as torture.
But former U.S. intelligence officials said Mitchell and Jessen also repeatedly subjected terror suspects inside CIA-run secret prisons to waterboarding personally.
They are now facing a federal investigation over their exact roles in the simulated drowning tactic.
It is the first time those who carried out the waterboarding have been publicly identified.
CIA spokesman George Little said: 'It's been nearly eight years since waterboarding, an interrogation method used on three detainees, was last used as part of a terrorist detention program that no longer exists.'
Normally, CIA officers buy insurance to cover possible legal bills. It costs about $300 a year for $1 million in coverage.
Today, the CIA pays the premiums for most officers, but at the height of President George W. Bush's war on terror, officers had to pay half.
But because Mitchell and Jessen were contractors, they received an 'indemnity promise', should legal proceedings ever arise.
Mitchell and Jessen were today unavailable for comment.
After the terrorism attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mitchell and Jessen sold the government an interrogation program for high-value al-Qaida members after years training military officials to resist interrogation techniques such as forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.
Those interrogations always had been training sessions at the military's school known as SERE: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. They never had conducted actual interrogations.
That changed in 2002 with the capture of suspected al-Qaida facilitator Abu Zubaydah.
The agency believed tougher-than-usual tactics were necessary to squeeze information from him, so Mitchell and Jessen flew to a secret CIA prison in Thailand to do the job themselves, according to previously released records and former intelligence officials.
Former intelligence officials claimed the psychologists also waterboarded USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Nashiri twice in Thailand and September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in Poland in 2003, according to documents and former intelligence officials.
In a top secret report in 2004, the CIA inspector general said: 'One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the agency's use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the agency's technique is different because it is 'for real' and is more poignant and convincing.'
Justice Department prosecutor John Durham is investigating whether any CIA officers or contractors, including Mitchell and Jessen, should face criminal charges.
0 comments:
Post a Comment