- Lid
- Feb 18, 2005
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And the mercy seat is awaiting,
And I think my head is burning,
And in a way I'm yearning,
To be done with all this measuring of proof.
An eye for an eye
And a tooth for a tooth,
And anyway I told the truth,
And I'm not afraid to die.
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It's not illegal if the government does it.
Speaking of which the CIA spent $1 million dollars making sure the psychiatrists they outsourced the torture to could not be prosecuted for it. How binding will this be?
quote:The Money Behind The CIA's Torture Program
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The report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s program to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday documents some of the gruesome techniques like waterboarding the CIA employed in the years after the 9/11 attacks. The lengthy and detailed report that took five years to put together also makes clear that big money was involved in building a CIA detention and interrogation program that relied on private-sector contracts and cash payments.
In total, the report claims that the CIA’s detention and interrogation program cost “well over $300 million in non-personnel costs.” One individual associated with the CIA program on the ground level told U.S. government investigators that the program had “more money than we could possibly spend we thought, and it turned out to be accurate.” The CIA program was devised by two contract psychologists, who had retired from the U.S. Air Force and played a “central role in the operation, assessment, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” the report says.
The two psychologists, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, are identified in the report under the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar. They set up a company in 2005 in order to facilitate their CIA work, around the time the CIA effectively outsourced operations related to its detention and interrogation program, the report says. In 2006, the company got a CIA contract valued at more than $180 million and the contractors received $81 million before the contract was terminated in 2009. The CIA also provided the company and its employees with an indemnification agreement as protection from lawsuits and has paid out $1.1 million under the deal to cover legal expenses. The company hired former CIA officers and under the contract the company provided interrogators, operational psychologists, debriefers, and security personnel at CIA detention sites.
But the contractors were not the only players who received large payments under the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. According to the report, “the CIA provided millions of dollars in cash payments to foreign government officials” to get foreign governments to host and support secret CIA detention sites. For example, the report says that one country that hosted a secret CIA detention facility rejected the transfer of Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, but the decision was reversed after the U.S. ambassador to that country intervened. The next month the CIA provided more than $1 million to an unidentified party in that country, the report says. According to a cable referenced in the report, “the CIA Station speculated that the change of position was ‘at least somewhat attributable… to our gift of $ [redacted] million….” Khalid Shaykh Muhammad was reportedly held by the CIA in Poland and Romania before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay.
CIA officials were keenly aware about how easy it would be for them to use money to get certain countries to facilitate the CIA interrogation program. “Do you realize you can buy [Country Redacted] for $,” one chief of station is quoted as saying in the report. Coincidentally, the payments to foreign government officials to facilitate torture occurred at the same time that the U.S. Justice Department was operating the biggest enhanced Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement effort ever, going after dozens of U.S. companies that had allegedly made payments to foreign government officials for business purposes. CIA headquarters also encouraged CIA Stations to construct “wish lists” and “think big” in terms of proposed financial assistance to the arms of foreign governments that could help with the program, the report says.
The CIA also provided millions of dollars to build and maintain secret detention sites in foreign countries, including two facilities that were never used. In 2002, the CIA provided $200,000 of funding for the construction of a detention site located in Afghanistan, although the report does not identify the country. The report calls the detention site Cobalt, but it has previously been referred to as the Salt Pit. The manager of Cobalt was recommended by the CIA Station in Afghanistan for $2,500 as a “cash award” for his “consistently superior work” four months after a terror suspect, Gul Rahman, died at the facility after being shackled to a cold cement wall.
According to the report, terrorism suspects that were mistakenly detained were paid after they were released and instructed not to speak about the experience. For example, Sayeb Habib, Modin Nik Mohammed and Ali Saeed Awadh, were paid by the CIA after being kept in solitary confinement, the report says. As part of a rendition program, German citizen Khalid al-Masri was rendered to an unidentified country, the report says. He was paid 14,500 euros at the time of his release. The CIA also had to spend more than $1 million to three third-party countries for the medical care of five detainees with acute ailments.
One person associated with the CIA program told government investigators that payments of more than $1 million were made without any paperwork, in cash, and out of boxes containing hundred dollar bills. “We never counted it. I’m not about to count that kind of money for a receipt,” the unidentified individual is quoted as saying by the report.
In a statement, CIA Director John Brennan said on Tuesday that the CIA acknowledges “that the detention and interrogation program had shortcomings and that the Agency made mistakes.” He added that “the intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa’ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”
Some more on these men
quote: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.
...
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.
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.
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