Getting Rich While Committing War Crimes

Disgusting but still worth reading: the New York Times writes about Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, two military psychologists who got started a lucrative business torturing "al Qaeda" for the "global war on terror." It's not entirely clear why the CIA used these guys so extensively, for such an officially critical task. Didn't the CIA have their own interrogators? It's almost as if the CIA got these guys because of their lack of relevant knowledge about al Qaeda-- the only thing they seemed to have going for them was knowledge of torture.

By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this person’s words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.”

Uh, yeah.