James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a key role in developing the Air Forces sere program, which was administered in Spokane, Washington. Dr. Bryce Lefever, command psychologist on the U.S.S. Enterprise and a former sere trainer who worked with Mitchell and Jessen at the Fairchild Air Base, says he was waterboarded during his own training. It was terrifying, he remembers. I said to myself, They cant kill me because its only an exercise. But youre strapped to an inclined gurney and youre in four-point restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and they pour water between your nose and your mouth, so if youre likely to breathe, youre going to get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic. In Spokane, several survival companies share space with Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. The firms executive offices sit behind a locked door with a security code that the receptionist shields from view. There, Mitchell, Jessen maintains a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or scif, for handling classified materials under C.I.A. guidelines, says a person familiar with the facility. But instead of training C.E.O.s to survive capture, the company principally instructs interrogators on how to break down detainees. ... One of the first on-the-ground tests for Mitchells theories was the interrogation of Zubaydah. When he and the other members of the C.I.A. team arrived in Thailand, they immediately put a stop to the efforts at rapport building (which would also yield the name of José Padilla, an American citizen and supposed al-Qaeda operative now on trial in Miami for conspiring to murder and maim people in a foreign country).
Posted on: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 06:46:27 +0000
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