Mastermind of CIA torture program describes it a ‘success’

The mastermind of the US Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program has hit the headlines after seven years to defend the spy agency’s torture techniques.

In an interview with the Guardian published on Friday, James Elmer Mitchell has described the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program as a “success”.

Mitchell also said that he is skeptical about a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the controversial program.

The 6,300-page report prepared by the committee provides details of torture techniques, including water-boarding, sleep deprivations for several days, confining the suspects in a box and hitting them against walls, used by the CIA under the administration of George W. Bush.

The report says the “enhanced interrogation” methods, which were devised by Mitchell, were far more brutal than what was previously known.

But Mitchell, who was reported to have personally water-boarded one al-Qaeda suspect, remains unapologetic. “The people on the ground did the best they could with the way they understood the law at the time,” he said. “You can’t ask someone to put their life on the line and think and make a decision without the benefit of hindsight and then eviscerate them in the press 10 years later.”

Mitchell was hired by the CIA back in 2002 to develop the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques.

“I’m skeptical about the Senate report, because I do not believe that every analyst whose jobs and promotions depended upon it, who were professional intelligence experts, all them lied to protect a program? All of them were wrong? All of these [CIA] directors were wrong? All of the people who were using the intel to go get people were wrong? And 10 years later a Senate staffer was able to put it together and finally there’s clarity? I am just highly skeptical that that’s the truth,” Mitchell said about the report, which cost $40 million and took nearly four years to compose.

The report is still secret, but a summary of its 20 conclusions and findings, has been published by McClatchy News.

The Senate panel reviewed more than six million pages of CIA documents and other records on the agency’s controversial program in order to compose the report.

The CIA has not accepted some of the report’s conclusions and has resisted the push from some of the Senate panel’s members, like Senator Mark Udall (D-Colorado), for the release of the report.

In a letter to President Barack Obama on March 4, Udall complained about the CIA’s efforts to block the de-classification of the report and its “unprecedented action against the committee,” referring to the agency’s alleged spying on the Senate panel.

“It is essential that the Committee be able to do its oversight work — consistent with our constitutional principles of separation of powers — without the CIA posing impediments or obstacles as it is today,” he wrote.