The Central Intelligence Agency is revealed to have paid USD 1,000 a day to former military trainers to integrate torture into the body’s interrogation methods.
Beating the whistleblowers on the CIA’s torture of ‘terrorist suspects’, on Thursday, the ABC News named two army psychologists and former military staffers as the officials receiving the steroidal paycheck to devise and administer the ‘advanced’ grilling methods.
Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, medics of questionable interrogation background, were enlisted to ensure the methods would guarantee pain but would not kill.
The two reportedly engineered the CIA’s 10-step interrogation plan. The final step was waterboarding or near drowning during which the victim would be laid on his back with half of his head dipped into water.
They had an “important role in developing what became the CIA’s torture program,” an American Civil Liberties Union attorney, Jameel Jaffer was quoted as saying.
A last month report by the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmed that the interrogation methods also included forcing the suspect “to bark and perform dog tricks”, subjecting him to “religious disgrace” and “invading his space by a female.”
The methods, extracted from Chinese torture manuals, were the converted forms of those meant to raise the troops’ tolerance threshold under interrogation by the hostile forces who do not subscribe to the Geneva Conventions’ ban on torture.
Jessen and Mitchell had formerly been teaching US pilots to resist interrogation but, before their well-paid mission, “had no interrogation experience” said Air Force inquisitionist, Col. Steven Kleinman.
The daily revelations stare the agency in the face threatening to take down officials from the former US administration.
President Barack Obama has given Attorney General Eric Holder discretion to decide on the prosecution of the officials held accountable for the ill-treatment of the suspects nabbed on allegations of terrorism after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.
