Psychologist who designed CIA's post-9/11 torture program insists he has nothing to apologise for – and attacks 'people with a Jack Bauer mentality who don't understand how intel works'

James Mitchell: 'I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country'

Dr James Elmer Mitchell has been called a war criminal and a torturer. He has been the subject of an ethics complaint, and his methods have been criticized in reports by two congressional committees and by the CIA’s internal watchdog.

But the retired air force psychologist insists he is not the monster many have portrayed him to be.

“The narrative that’s out there is, I walked up to the gate of the CIA, knocked on the door and said: ‘Let me in, I want to torture people, and I can show you how to do it.’ Or someone put out an ad on Craigslist that said, ‘Wanted: psychologist who is willing to design torture program.’ It’s a lot more complicated than that,” Mitchell told the Guardian in his first public comments since he was linked to the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program seven years ago.

“I’m just a guy who got asked to do something for his country by people at the highest level of government, and I did the best that I could.”

John Mitchell: ‘I did the best that I could.’

Mitchell is featured prominently in a new report prepared by the Senate select committee on intelligence, which spent five years and more than $40m studying the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

The findings, according to a summary leaked to McClatchy, are damning: that the agency misled the White House, Congress and the American people; that unauthorised interrogation methods were used; that the legal opinions stating the techniques did not break US torture laws were flawed; and perhaps most significant, that the torture yielded no useful intelligence.

But Mitchell said the program’s successes had been deliberately ignored.

“I’m sure there are people out there who believe that if the United States acknowledged that coercion worked, there is an increased probability that people would use coercion against our people,” Mitchell said. “Never mind that they do anyway. In the fairyland they live in, all you have to do is give somebody some tea and a cookie, and everything will be OK.”

He added: “The people who have this Jack Bauer mentality, I think, don’t understand how intel networks work, how threat matrixes are put together, and how intel is used. I think this idea that you tape a guy’s hands to the steering wheel and break his thumbs and he tells you where the bomb is and you go get it is a fantasy. That’s something you see on TV. That’s not what really happens.”

Mitchell spoke to the Guardian by phone from his home in Land O’Lakes, Florida for two hours last Friday – the “longest conversation I had with any reporter,” he said. He mounted a full-throated defense of the Bush administration’s counter-terrorism policies and attacked “partisan Democrats” for “throwing me under the bus” and “rewriting history.”

He also criticized Obama’s healthcare policy – a “shit sandwich” – and his administration’s approach to global warming. Mitchell believes it’s a myth.

He identified himself politically as an independent. “I’m not a Republican or a Mormon or a gun nut or power hungry.”

He would not discuss specific details about “the program” because he is bound by a non-disclosure agreement. Despite repeated requests, he said, the government won’t free him from his secrecy obligations.

“I would be happy to tell my entire story,” Mitchell said. “But I have been told numerous times that if I violate the non-disclosure agreement there would be criminal and civil penalties. I am interested in having an active and honest debate, but only if the Justice Department and federal government release me from my agreement.”

Mitchell, however, did talk about the torture program in general terms. He sees it as a huge success and is upset it has gotten such a bad rap.

“I don’t get annoyed about the program,” Mitchell said. “I get annoyed the way the good parts, and the bad parts, have been glossed over and some good parts have been vilified. That frustrates me. But I’m not going to talk about the program.”



Long before the Senate intelligence committee began its review, Mitchell was identified in a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report that examined the efficacy of the agency’s torture program. A heavily redacted copy of the IG report was released five years ago. It said Mitchell and Jessen had “probably misrepresented” their “expertise” as experienced interrogators when pitching coercive techniques to the CIA as a way to obtain actionable intelligence from prisoners.

But Mitchell defended his credentials and said the IG report, “like my Wikipedia page”, was riddled with errors.

“Ninety percent of the stuff written about me is untrue,” he said, believing “fat guys in the basement” blogging about him are partially responsible. “People make up stuff about me. They say I’m a Mormon. I’m actually an atheist.”

Mitchell said his credentials are impeccable. He has spent his career studying the terrorist mindset first as a bomb disposal specialist, then as a hostage negotiator, a clinical psychologist and an instructor at the Air Force’s elite survival school.

“I know it may be hard for you to believe this, but in bomb disposal school they do talk to you about the various organizations that use bombs, and the mentality of the people, and the sort of thinking that goes into the target selection. You know, the kind of things terrorists might be interested in,” Mitchell said.

“In survival school, you have to understand the various interrogation approaches. Oddly enough, if you spend years and years and years watching people try to lie and tell the truth under various circumstances where coercion exists, you get some sense of what people are like when they’re lying or telling the truth.”

Moreover, Mitchell said that he was assigned to the Air Force Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg “inside the fence” and that “I helped develop protocol for profiling war criminals, and people who were likely to do things where there would be mass casualties.”

Mitchell also noted that he’s a big supporter of Amnesty International and wanted to help the human rights organization raise money for child abuse by volunteering to sit in a dunk tank.

Detainees in Guantánamo. Photograph: /AP





Mitchell blamed an unnamed staffer on the Senate armed services committee for spreading “lies” about him to the media. In 2009, the committee released a scathing report about the treatment of detainees in custody of the US military at Guantánamo, Afghanistan and Iraq.

The panel concluded that the coercive interrogation methods had been “reverse engineered” for use on terror detainees by Mitchell and another psychologist under contract to the CIA, Bruce Jessen, from resistance training techniques taught to airmen known as survival evasion resistance escape (Sere).

“The whole Guantánamo issue that came up … all of the abuses that they did in Guantánamo they tried to attribute to me and Bruce,” Mitchell said. “It wasn’t us. We didn’t do any of that stuff. We didn’t have a damn thing to do with that. I think that what happened was the Senate armed services committee believed that the agency [CIA] was behind it.”





Jessen did not respond to requests for comment.

Mitchell said it was clear that post-9/11 prisoners in custody of the Department of Defense should have been treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. He attributed the abuse that took place at Guantánamo to “some people who were familiar with the [air force survival program] who wanted to help out and made some dumb mistakes.”

“I think what’s easy to forget in 2014 is that in 2002 we were hearing that the next attack was coming soon, because all of the chatter and all of the indicators were pointing in that direction,” Mitchell said. “The threat matrix was just on fire. Everyone involved was coming up with ways to circumvent that. Think about how you felt the morning after [9/11] and the idea that it was going to happen again.”

Mitchell said during the course of the committee’s probe he was contacted by an investigator on the panel “who told me I needed to come in and talk with them, and if I didn’t, they would contact their friends in the press and spin these malicious stories about me in an effort to pressure me to come forward and tell the truth. And that’s what happened.”

But Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for the armed services committee, disputed Mitchell’s claims.

“He agreed to be interviewed for the committee’s inquiry,” Long said. “We do not believe that information included in the report is inaccurate, or that we provided statements to the media that were not supported by information included in the report.”

Mitchell also singled out a former colleague: air force colonel Steven Kleinman, who had participated in interrogations in Iraq and knew Mitchell and Jessen from the air force survival school where he worked as an instructor.

Mitchell alleged that Kleinman contacted him in 2005 for a job. At the time, Mitchell and Jessen had set up their own shop in Spokane, Washington, and were under contract to the CIA to provide training to interrogators.

Mitchell said he turned Kleinman down and “within six months he was in front of the TV telling everyone what an evil person I was”. (Mitchell was not identified by name until 2005, when his name surfaced in a New Yorker article that examined the roles psychologists played in the torture program.)

Kleinman is also featured in the Senate committee report, notably for blowing the whistle on the abusive interrogation methods detainees in Iraq were subjected to. He also warned his superiors against using Sere techniques during interrogation sessions because it would result in false confessions.

Mitchell said Kleinman “did the right thing [reporting abuse]”.

“The Geneva Conventions applied, and when he saw the Department of Defense using techniques that weren’t authorized by the Geneva Conventions, he said we shouldn’t be doing this, and that’s what he should have done,” Mitchell said. “But I don’t know how he could have possibly gone to the Senate armed services committee and said I had something to do with it. I didn’t do any training for them.”

Kleinman, in an interview with the Guardian, recounts the episode differently. He said Mitchell contacted him in 2005 and asked him to travel to Spokane to interview for a job. During the interview, Kleinman said Mitchell asked him if he witnessed prisoners being abused would he report it. Kleinman told Mitchell that he would.

“I found out later that I wasn’t offered the job, because Mitchell thought I was too inflexible with my views,” Kleinman said.

Kleinman added that while there is no question Mitchell and Jessen were the “backbones of the nation’s Sere program”, he could not understand how they could believe interrogation methods used to generate propaganda and/or false confessions could somehow be used to elicit “reliable, accurate and timely intelligence.”

“Why would anybody think that a model that would produce those outcomes would also be effective in producing the opposite?”

But that is exactly what Mitchell believes. And he said the standard rapport building techniques used to interrogate high-value targets, such as the CIA’s first prisoner, accused terrorist facilitator Zain Abidin Mohammed Husain Abu Zubaydah, did not produce results.

He was particularly critical of Ali Soufan, a former FBI special agent who first interrogated Abu Zubaydah at a CIA black site in Thailand. Soufan said the rapport-building techniques he used when he questioned Abu Zubaydah resulted in a huge intelligence score: the identity of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. When Mitchell started using “borderline torture” techniques, Abu Zubaydah clammed up, Soufan wrote in his book, The Black Banners.

“Here is the thing you’re asked to believe,” Mitchell said. “You’re asked to believe he [Soufan] was getting all of this great information, and the CIA said: ‘Well, never mind. We’re not interested in that information. We’re not interested in the truth. We’re going to do this other thing. Why? Because we’re mean?’ I worked for a lot of different organizations and they really care about results. They care about results that produce. It wouldn’t matter to them if it were the FBI or PTA. They wouldn’t care who was getting the results as long as they were getting the results.”

Perhaps one day, Mitchell said, he will write a book, “just to get my point of view out there”. In the meantime, he said, he’s not losing any sleep over the Senate intelligence committee’s report.

“I don’t care what [Dianne] Feinstein thinks about me,” Mitchell said. “I’m retired. I do a lot of adventurous stuff now. I served my country and now I’m done. I did what I did for whoever I did it for, and now I’m done with that stuff.”