Two psychologists' role in CIA torture program comes into focus - Latimes

 In the "Salt Pit," a then-secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, John "Bruce" Jessen watched carefully in late 2002 as five agency officers rushed into a darkened cell and grabbed an Afghan detainee named Gul Rahman.

"It was thoroughly planned and rehearsed," Jessen later explained, according to a CIA investigator's report. "They dragged him outside, cut off his clothes and secured him with Mylar tape," before beating him and forcing him to run wearing a hood. When he fell, they dragged him down dirt passageways, leaving abrasions up and down his body.

Jessen added a critique. "After something like this is done, interrogators should speak to the prisoner to give [him] something to think about," he told the investigator.

On Nov. 20, 2002, Rahman was found dead in his unheated cell. He was naked from the waist down and had been chained to a concrete floor. An autopsy concluded that he probably froze to death.

The death in custody did little to slow the "enhanced interrogation techniques" that Jessen and another psychologist, James E. Mitchell, helped design and apply for the CIA between 2002 and 2009, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report released last week. A company they formed in 2005 was paid a total of $81.1 million.  Read More
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