Most of the owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates previously worked with the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which trains American service members to survive and resist interrogation by enemy forces. In this program, they worked with soldiers who survived being captured and abused in foreign countries. The SERE trainers studied the effects of this torture. They also engaged in role-playing scenarios in which they taught soldiers to face these techniques.
Participation in the SERE program gave the owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates firsthand experience in identifying which torture techniques were most effective and the psychology behind them. The CIA later reverse-engineered these tactics to use on terrorism suspects at so-called black sites placed in foreign countries outside of US legal jurisdiction, because the practices employed during these "enhanced" interrogations were clearly prohibited by US law.
In 2011, Truthout obtained a series of handwritten notes it said were written by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, who Business Insider has learned was the president of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. In these notes, written during his time working at the SERE program, Jessen described what he referred to as the "psychological aspects of detention."
CIAA diagram showing conflicting psychological pressures on a prisoner, included in a paper written by Dr. Bruce Jessen.
Jessen's notes described how torture could be effective and gave US soldiers strategies to withstand abuse. He warned detainers would "manipulate and control your external environment almost at will." These notes outlined some of the same strategies CIA interrogators would later use on terrorism suspects at black sites, where the Senate report said detainees were subjected to loud rock music and severe cold temperatures..."
No comments:
Post a Comment