There are so many unsung American heroes out there, but let us sing of just two today: James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.  Selflessly these two psychologists, awarded a government grant of $180 million dollars to help the nation in the desperate times after 9/11, charged only $81,000,000. These two men were the brains behind the coercive interrogation program that some, including them, claim kept us safe in the years after the hellacious attacks of September 11, 2001.  

Mitchell and Jessen, given pseudonyms in the Congressional report, reverse engineered the SERE program, a grueling series of tortures used to train our own special forces to resist enemy torture.  Mitchell and Jessen’s work allowed enemy prisoners to be interrogated in ways that would otherwise have been regarded as torture, wink, wink.   Having psychologists and doctors in the room when prisoners are being subjected to things that can cause death makes all the difference between brutality and civilization, some argue.  Mitchell and Jessen’s key roles as designers of “enhanced interrogation” are detailed in the recently completed five year, $40,000,000,  6,700 page, almost 8% public, report on America’s use of torture in the decade after 9/11.

I will let Vanity Fair contributor Katherine Eban take the wheel:

As the report makes clear, some of the worst corrosion occurred in the ranks of America’s psychologists, who, like many medical professionals, are charged with doing no harm. It was two C.I.A. contract psychologists with no experience with real-life interrogations. Instead, as described in the report, they promoted the tactics to the C.I.A., employed them indiscriminately, earned money to do so, and lied about their effectiveness.

I was the first reporter to enumerate the roles of the two key psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, as architects of the coercive interrogation tactics, in a 2007 story inVanity Fair. The pair had previously been Air Force trainers in a program called SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape), which subjected military members to mock interrogations—interrogations that ironically had been used by the Communist Chinese against American servicemen during the Korean war in order to produce false confessions.

Historically, the C.I.A. knew the tactics would not be useful. In 1989, the C.I.A. informed Congress that “inhumane physical or psychological techniques are counterproductive because they do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers.” In the desperate months after 9/11, the C.I.A. willfully ignored its own findings.

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As the president recently admitted, to the horror of those who support rough treatment of possibly evil bastards, “we tortured some folks.”  Although unsung American heroes James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, now very wealthy men, might beg to differ with Mr. Obama’s characterization of what was done to those folks.