Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  But stating the obvious—that torture was the direct result of official American policy—was an uncomfortable truth, one that could lead to war crimes trials for top government officials. And so it was not long before the calls for justice led the White House, Pentagon, and CIA to search for scapegoats. After Abu Ghraib, the army suddenly took renewed interest in the deaths of two detainees at Bagram in December 2002, while Corsetti and the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion had been assigned to the prison. The two detainees, Dilawar and Habibullah, were found dead in their cells after being manacled in stress positions and beaten for days on end. The case of Dilawar, a young Afghan taxi driver who had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, ultimately became the basis for Taxi to the Dark Side, the documentary in which Corsetti made his first public appearance.

  The probes of the two deaths eventually led to a wider investigation of prisoner abuse at Bagram and finally to charges against Corsetti. He had not been directly involved with the two prisoners when they died, and he was not charged in connection with their deaths. But statements from other interrogators about Corsetti’s actions, as well as from another detainee who had been interrogated by Corsetti at Bagram, led military prosecutors to target him. In 2005, Corsetti was hit with a long series of charges related to specific acts he allegedly did to prisoners. He was charged with maltreating prisoners by sitting on them, striking them, throwing garbage on them, putting cigarette ashes on them, pulling on their beards, forcing them to be exposed in front of women interrogators, and, most embarrassing of all for Corsetti, pulling out his penis, putting it up to a detainee’s face, and then telling him, “This is your God.” To top it off, he was also charged with alcohol and drug use.

  While Corsetti and other enlisted personnel from his unit faced courts-martial, no senior army officers or other senior government officials were held to account for what happened at Bagram or later at Abu Ghraib. (Capt. Carolyn Wood, who was in command of Corsetti’s interrogation unit at both Bagram and Abu Ghraib, was investigated but not charged, and remained in the army.)

  But the fact that the Bagram investigation targeted a group of enlisted personnel, just like the investigation of Abu Ghraib, backfired on the army when Corsetti’s case went to trial before a military jury at Fort Bliss, Texas, in 2006. After deliberating for less than half an hour, the jury acquitted Corsetti on all charges, even on those for drinking and drug use. The jury was clearly sending a message to the army that it should stop the scapegoating.

  But while the scandal slowly faded from the headlines, Corsetti’s life spun out of control, clouded by his raging PTSD and worsening drug problem. An outpatient drug rehab program finally helped him to shake off heroin, but getting help for his PTSD was much more difficult. While he was facing prosecution, he was afraid to open up to army psychologists and psychiatrists because he knew they could be subpoenaed to testify against him in his court-martial. After he left the army, he was admitted to a VA hospital in West Virginia with an in-patient PTSD treatment center. He said that the program was divided between older Vietnam veterans and younger veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, and that at night, after the clinic staff went home, arguments and battles broke out between the two sides—different generations, different wars. Nothing much helped Corsetti, and after three months he left and began drifting again.

  The letter his parents sent to the VA in 2009, pleading for help for their son, describes in sorrowful detail how deeply Corsetti had sunk in the years after he left the army. Corsetti lost his house and car because he was unable to hold a job, his parents wrote.

  At the time, Corsetti was living with his parents, and so they saw his behavior on a daily basis. “On numerous occasions, he has called us both at work, in a panicked state and totally out of control. There have been many times he has stated he cannot take it anymore. We immediately leave our offices and come home to take him to the VA hospital. Of course halfway there he asks, why are you taking me to the hospital, what is wrong?”

  They added that “he has panic attacks a couple of times a week that prohibit him from taking public transportation and dealing with crowds. . . . In the TV room he insists on keeping all the shutters closed for fear that someone is looking in on him. The room is kept dark, no lights are ever on and when we let some light in he either has a panic attack or gets totally abusive. . . . He has attempted to take his life on multiple occasions. Fortunately he has not succeeded, however we are in constant fear of what we will find when we get home every day.”

  Corsetti and his parents had to wage a prolonged battle with the VA to win full disability benefits for his PTSD, but there is no doubt that he was completely disabled by the trauma and ghosts that still haunt him. He has made some progress, in part by trying to come to terms with what he did and finding ways to make amends. One opportunity came in 2010, when he testified for the defense of Omar Khadr, a fifteen-year-old Canadian captured in Afghanistan, interrogated at Bagram, and then sent to Guantánamo Bay.

  Corsetti finally had the chance to testify about the constant pressure for new intelligence that was placed on his unit while assigned to Bagram. The pressure came from the top, he said, from the secretary of defense, and worked its way down until it created an environment in Bagram in which the demands for intelligence reports outweighed the need to treat prisoners in a humane way. The pressure led directly to the abuse of prisoners.

  But even though Corsetti can now talk about what he did and what he witnessed in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and can also discuss in excruciating detail the symptoms and consequences of his PTSD, he does not believe that he will ever be free of his illness. He simply understands his plight better. He thinks that he will never be able to hold a job again. On his worst days, he doesn’t try to leave his apartment; he now can tell when he is liable to launch into an angry confrontation with a store clerk or another driver. He has been left handicapped by the war on terror, just as surely as if he had been blasted by an IED.

  The American archipelago of torture in which Damien Corsetti was trapped was built on a myth. It was a myth built despite strong evidence to the contrary. It was a myth enabled by a community of supposed experts, many of whom now admit they knew better. It was a powerful myth that gained traction as it became clear that careers and riches could be had by those who endorsed it, and as a result, many who knew it was fiction from the first went along with it. Like many myths throughout history, its real resonance came from the fact that it helped powerful men justify what they wanted to do.

  The myth was the assertion that the government could reverse-engineer the U.S. military’s survival program to create “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would allow the United States to get prisoners to provide accurate information without torturing them.

  The military’s SERE program (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) was originally designed to give American pilots and other personnel a taste of what it might be like to be captured and become prisoners of war. One part of the SERE training program included the simulated use of torture techniques that had been inflicted on American soldiers captured by North Korea and China during the Korean War in the 1950s, when American POWs were tortured, broken, and then paraded before television cameras to spout anti-American propaganda.

  After 9/11, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, psychologists who had been trainers in the air force’s version of SERE, worked as outside contractors to the CIA to help the agency turn the simulated torture tactics into offensive weapons—enhanced interrogation techniques—for use in obtaining intelligence from detainees held by the CIA. Mitchell and Jessen claimed that their interrogation methods would get recalcitrant prisoners to talk but would not be legally considered torture, because the U.S. military already used the same techniques in training its own soldiers.

  Mitchell and Jessen were advocating torture tactics that had been originally designed to break men and force them to spout lies and propaganda, but they claimed that these techniques were not torture, an
d that they would elicit the truth, not lies and propaganda. In the upside-down world of the global war on terror, their explanations were widely accepted.

  They not only received millions of dollars in classified CIA contracts through their Spokane, Washington, firm, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, but they also gained power and status in the U.S. intelligence community as the architects of the CIA’s torture program.

  They were successful because they had lots of help. Some SERE experts knew the truth. And yet they remained silent during the crucial years when the CIA, led by Mitchell and Jessen, engaged in what is now widely acknowledged to have been torture. In fact, some SERE experts joined in.

  America’s psychologists, who also knew the truth, also remained silent. Psychologists knew there was a broad consensus in behavioral science research that showed that torture did not work. And yet they didn’t complain. Worse, they participated, and quietly changed their profession’s ethics code to allow torture to continue. In return, the psychologists were showered with government money and benefits.

  Because the SERE experts and psychologists remained silent, Mitchell and Jessen were able to make bold claims about the enhanced interrogation program, and have them accepted by the Bush administration, the press, Hollywood, and the public.

  The fact that there was a broad consensus among the professionals who knew best, who knew that SERE was torture and that it could not be used to gather accurate intelligence, has never before been fully explained.

  Mitchell and Jessen’s great achievement was to bend the accepted narrative of how SERE affects the mind and body. They made two important and related claims—that SERE could force prisoners to tell the truth, and that SERE did not constitute torture.

  The CIA, based in part on the notion that SERE was safe, told the Justice Department that the enhanced interrogation techniques were safe. Based on those assurances, in turn, the Justice Department provided the intelligence community with secret legal opinions stating that the techniques did not constitute torture and were legal.

  America’s psychologists and behavioral scientists quickly accommodated themselves to this new reality. The e-mail archives of one researcher with ties to the CIA, who died on the cusp of becoming a whistleblower, provide a revealing glimpse into the tight network of psychologists and other behavioral scientists so eager for CIA and Pentagon contracts that they showed few qualms about helping to develop and later protect the interrogation infrastructure. The e-mails show the secret, close relationships among some of the nation’s leading psychologists and officials at the CIA and Pentagon. And the e-mails reveal how the American Psychological Association (APA), the nation’s largest professional group for psychologists, put its seal of approval on those close ties—and thus indirectly on torture.

  The SERE community—the instructors and staff at the survival schools, and the psychologists and behavioral scientists who support them—is a tight-knit subculture within the U.S. military. Within that community, there was no question that the most severe of the SERE torture techniques were torture. There was also widespread agreement that the techniques could not be used to obtain accurate intelligence from prisoners. The tactics, even when originally used by the North Koreans, Chinese, and Soviets, had never been designed to collect intelligence.

  They had been designed to break men. They had been used to silence dissidents, to force false confessions out of political rivals and prisoners of war. There was no basis to believe that these methods could be used to get prisoners to tell the truth. When tortured, prisoners will say anything to make the pain stop. What’s more, the intense trauma of enduring abusive tactics damages the memory and leads to even more false statements.

  Perhaps no one knows more about SERE tactics and their impact on the human brain than Yale psychologist Charles “Andy” Morgan. For years, Morgan has been given unique access by the military to study the psychological and biochemical effects of SERE’s simulated torture program on military personnel as they go through the program. As part of his studies, he has been allowed to question the trainees immediately after they have been subjected to harsh tactics, and has been able to collect blood and saliva samples in order to study their biochemical reactions to the use of the tactics. He has regularly presented his findings at conferences of SERE psychologists, and his studies are widely recognized as providing the most conclusive findings on SERE yet written.

  Yet Morgan and his research work were ignored while the CIA and Mitchell and Jessen were creating their torture program, and his research has been ignored ever since by current and former government officials who have sought to defend the use of the SERE tactics in the enhanced interrogation program. Morgan’s studies show that the use of the SERE simulated torture techniques impairs memory and prompts inaccurate answers from those subjected to the tactics. Mitchell and Jessen’s methods, Morgan said, create a mental state that makes it difficult to remember information accurately—making the credibility of all statements suspect.

  “By making people fearful and stressed, they were getting worse information,” Morgan said of Mitchell and Jessen’s techniques. “If you can make me anxious, fearful and alarmed, I am more likely to give you what you want. I will give you a false confession. High stress doesn’t seem good for good data retrieval.”

  “Torture works at some things,” Morgan added. “It’s good for silencing opponents.”

  Morgan also stated that it was long-established conventional wisdom within the SERE community that the simulated torture could not be used to collect accurate information. That simply wasn’t the point of SERE. “The research was well established,” Morgan noted. “The psychologists in the SERE program were all aware of the false memory findings.”

  In fact, Morgan recalls discussing his research on how the SERE tactics prompted false memory with Mitchell. “I bumped into Jim Mitchell once at a SERE conference, and I mentioned my false memory study, and he said, yes, I know about it,” recalled Morgan.

  In response to a request for comment about Morgan’s research and whether it was well known within the SERE community that SERE techniques could not be used in interrogations to elicit accurate intelligence, James Mitchell initially asked to see the written formal results of Morgan’s studies. I replied that I was basing my reporting on interviews with Morgan and others psychologists and former SERE personnel. Mitchell did not respond further.

  “What I couldn’t get my head around is how they thought this would work,” Morgan observed. “It makes no sense.” (Morgan said that he worked for a time for the CIA, in the agency’s unit that conducted medical intelligence, analyzing the medical and mental health conditions of foreign leaders and other prominent foreign figures, but was not involved in interrogations. He said that the CIA behavioral science officials who brought him into the agency misled him about their involvement in the interrogation program, and when he discovered their involvement, he quit.)

  Still, there were plenty of people who agreed both that what Mitchell and Jessen were advocating was torture, and also that it would not work. Shane O’Mara, a professor at Trinity College’s Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin, published a report that corroborated Morgan’s findings. In a 2009 article in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science, O’Mara concluded that there was no scientific basis for the American use of the harsh interrogation techniques based on the SERE program, and that the shock and trauma of being subjected to the tactics harm memory.

  A long-delayed yet detailed report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed such findings, concluding that “enhanced interrogation techniques” did not produce useful counterterrorism intelligence and did not help the United States find Osama bin Laden. In fact, the Senate report shows that the CIA had to deceive the nation about the effectiveness of its torture program in order to keep it going, and also had to mislead the nation about the full extent of its brutality to make sure that no one from the CIA was ever held accountable for engaging in torture.

  The S
enate report concluded that the CIA gave inaccurate information to the Justice Department about its torture program in order to win its stamp of legal approval; misled the White House, Congress, and even the CIA’s own inspector general about the effectiveness of the program; and hid the true brutality of the torture techniques it employed. The Senate report’s main findings, first disclosed by McClatchy Newspapers, also concluded that the agency never conducted a thorough accounting of the people it was holding and torturing, and manipulated the press with calculated leaks designed to make the torture program look good. The report also confirmed that two “contract psychologists” developed the interrogation program and were key to its operations, according to the findings disclosed by McClatchy.

  The Senate report was so damning that it was bitterly contested by the CIA, triggering a feud between the agency and the Senate Intelligence Committee, and leading to accusations by committee chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein that the CIA had spied on committee staffers working on the report. Many of the Senate report’s conclusions echoed Morgan’s research, as well as the broad consensus among behavioral scientists that torture doesn’t work.

  “Absolutely, there is a consensus in the psychological profession that this was no way to gather accurate information,” agreed Saul Kassin, a psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. “There is certainly no scientific basis for believing it.”

  “It was right out of Clockwork Orange,” added Philip Zimbardo, a professor emeritus at Stanford University. Zimbardo is a legend among American psychologists. He developed a worldwide reputation with the so-called Stanford prison experiment, in which students were assigned to be either guards or prisoners in a mock prison set up at Stanford in the 1970s. The experiment had to be ended abruptly after it became clear that the role-playing led the students pretending to be guards to quickly become abusive. No one has a more authoritative voice on issues related to the psychology of detention and interrogation than Zimbardo.