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WASHINGTON — James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen, two psychologists whose firm made at least $81 million designing torture techniques for the CIA, “did not create or establish the CIA enhanced interrogation program,” their lawyers have argued. It’s a strange claim — especially now that promotional material for Mitchell’s forthcoming book calls him the “creator of the CIA’s controversial Enhanced Interrogation Program” and brags that the book offers “a dramatic firsthand account of the design, implementation, flaws and aftermath of the program.”
Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying To Destroy America could complicate Mitchell and Jessen’s efforts to block a civil lawsuit brought against them by two former CIA black-site detainees and the family of a third prisoner who died in CIA custody. Arguing that Mitchell and Jessen were not key architects of the interrogation program will be “a major focus” of their defense, the psychologists’ lawyers wrote in an April court filing.
The book’s promotional material — which also describes Mitchell as having “a leading role in the development of the CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation Program” and being “one of the primary terrorist interrogators” — isn’t the only potential obstacle to the defense’s strategy. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s December 2014 report on the interrogation program also details the involvement of the psychologists.
The two men “developed the list of enhanced interrogation techniques” and “personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA’s most significant detainees using these techniques,” according to a declassified summary of report. Mitchell and Jessen are identified in the report by the code names Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, respectively.
