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Richard
08-12-2009, 05:51
The end of a $1000/day contract -

JIM MITCHELL A former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman, Dr. Mitchell and his colleague had no expertise on Al Qaeda and had never conducted an actual interrogation. But they had psychological credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists.

DR. BRUCE JESSEN Joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

In an ever more dangerous world, some sere trainers realized that they could market their expertise to corporations and government agencies that send executives and other employees overseas, and a survival-training industry sprang into being.

Mitchell's entry into private contracting began less than three months before September 11 with a scientific consulting company called Knowledge Works, L.L.C. He registered it in North Carolina with the help of another sere psychologist he'd worked with at Fort Bragg, Dr. John Chin. Since then, he has formed several similar companies, including the Wizard Shop (which he renamed Mind Science) and What If, L.L.C.

Rorschach And Awe
Katherine Eban, VF, 17 Jul 2007

And so it goes...

Richard's $.02 :munchin

2 US Architect's Of Harsh Tactics in 9/11s Wake
Scott shane, NYT, 11 aug 2009

Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

So “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen,” as they had been known in the Air Force, helped lead the United States into a wrenching conflict over torture, terror and values that seven years later has not run its course.

Dr. Mitchell, with a sonorous Southern accent and the sometimes overbearing confidence of a self-made man, was a former Air Force explosives expert and a natural salesman. Dr. Jessen, raised on an Idaho potato farm, joined his Air Force colleague to build a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the C.I.A.

Seven months after President Obama ordered the C.I.A. interrogation program closed, its fallout still commands attention. In the next few weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to decide whether to begin a criminal torture investigation, in which the psychologists’ role is likely to come under scrutiny. The Justice Department ethics office is expected to complete a report on the lawyers who pronounced the methods legal. And the C.I.A. will soon release a highly critical 2004 report on the program by the agency’s inspector general.

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring.

With a possible criminal inquiry looming, Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen have retained a well-known defense lawyer, Henry F. Schuelke III. Mr. Schuelke said they would not comment for this article, which is based on dozens of interviews with the doctors’ colleagues and present and former government officials.

In a brief e-mail exchange in June, Dr. Mitchell said his nondisclosure agreement with the C.I.A. prevented him from commenting. He suggested that his work had been mischaracterized.

“Ask around,” Dr. Mitchell wrote, “and I’m sure you will find all manner of ‘experts’ who will be willing to make up what you’d like to hear on the spot and unrestrained by reality.”

A Career Shift

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, Dr. Mitchell had just retired from his last military job, as psychologist to an elite special operations unit in North Carolina. Showing his entrepreneurial streak, he had started a training company called Knowledge Works, which he operated from his new home in Florida, to supplement retirement pay.

But for someone with Dr. Mitchell’s background, it was evident that the campaign against Al Qaeda would produce opportunities. He began networking in military and intelligence circles where he had a career’s worth of connections.

He had grown up poor in Florida, Dr. Mitchell told friends, and joined the Air Force in 1974, seeking adventure. Stationed in Alaska, he learned the art of disarming bombs and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.

Robert J. Madigan, a psychology professor at the University of Alaska who had worked closely with him, remembered Dr. Mitchell stopping by years later. He had completed his doctorate at the University of South Florida in 1986, comparing diet and exercise in controlling hypertension, and was working for the Air Force in Spokane.

“I remember him saying they were preparing people for intense interrogations,” Dr. Madigan said.

Military survival training was expanded after the Korean War, when false confessions by American prisoners led to sensational charges of communist “brainwashing.” Military officials decided that giving service members a taste of Chinese-style interrogation would prepare them to withstand its agony.

Air Force survival training was consolidated in 1966 at Fairchild Air Force Base in the parched hills outside Spokane. The name of the training, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, suggests its breadth: airmen and women learn to live off the land and avoid capture, as well as how to behave if taken prisoner.

In the 1980s, Dr. Jessen became the SERE psychologist at the Air Force Survival School, screening instructors who posed as enemy interrogators at the mock prison camp and making sure rough treatment did not go too far. He had grown up in a Mormon community with a view of Grand Teton, earning a doctorate at Utah State studying “family sculpting,” in which patients make physical models of their family to portray emotional relationships.

Dr. Jessen moved in 1988 to the top psychologist’s job at a parallel “graduate school” of survival training, a short drive from the Air Force school. Dr. Mitchell took his place.

The two men became part of what some Defense Department officials called the “resistance mafia,” experts on how to resist enemy interrogations. Both lieutenant colonels and both married with children, they took weekend ice-climbing trips together.

While many subordinates considered them brainy and capable leaders, some fellow psychologists were more skeptical. At the annual conference of SERE psychologists, two colleagues recalled, Dr. Mitchell offered lengthy put-downs of presentations that did not suit him.

At the Air Force school, Dr. Mitchell was known for enforcing the safety of interrogations; it might surprise his later critics to learn that he eliminated a tactic called “manhandling” after it produced a spate of neck injuries, a colleague said.

At the SERE graduate school, Dr. Jessen is remembered for an unusual job switch, from supervising psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.

Dr. Jessen became so aggressive in that role that colleagues intervened to rein him in, showing him videotape of his “pretty scary” performance, another official recalled.

Always, former and current SERE officials say, it is understood that the training mimics the methods of unscrupulous foes.

Mark Mays, the first psychologist at the Air Force school, said that to make the fake prison camp realistic, officials consulted American P.O.W.’s who had just returned from harrowing camps in North Vietnam.

“It was clear that this is what we’d expect from our enemies,” said Dr. Mays, now a clinical psychologist and lawyer in Spokane. “It was not something I could ever imagine Americans would do.”

(cont'd)

Richard
08-12-2009, 05:52
2 US Architect's Of Harsh Tactics in 9/11s Wake
(cont'd)

Start of the Program

In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Among them was Dr. Mitchell, who attended with a C.I.A. psychologist, Kirk M. Hubbard.

During a break, Dr. Mitchell introduced himself to Dr. Seligman and said how much he admired the older man’s writing on “learned helplessness.” Dr. Seligman was so struck by Dr. Mitchell’s unreserved praise, he recalled in an interview, that he mentioned it to his wife that night. Later, he said, he was “grieved and horrified” to learn that his work had been cited to justify brutal interrogations.

Dr. Seligman had discovered in the 1960s that dogs that learned they could do nothing to avoid small electric shocks would become listless and simply whine and endure the shocks even after being given a chance to escape.

Helplessness, which later became an influential concept in the treatment of human depression, was also much discussed in military survival training. Instructors tried to stop short of producing helplessness in trainees, since their goal was to strengthen the spirit of service members in enemy hands.

Dr. Mitchell, colleagues said, believed that producing learned helplessness in a Qaeda interrogation subject might ensure that he would comply with his captor’s demands. Many experienced interrogators disagreed, asserting that a prisoner so demoralized would say whatever he thought the interrogator expected.

At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchell’s theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemy’s brutal techniques — slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding — into an American interrogation program.

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.”

By the end of March, when agency operatives captured Abu Zubaydah, initially described as Al Qaeda’s No. 3, the Mitchell-Jessen interrogation plan was ready. At a secret C.I.A. jail in Thailand, as reported in prior news accounts, two F.B.I agents used conventional rapport-building methods to draw vital information from Mr. Zubaydah. Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.

With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment. Among those questioning the use of physical pressure, according to one official present, were the Thailand station chief, the officer overseeing the jail, a top interrogator and a top agency psychologist.

Whether they protested to C.I.A. bosses is uncertain, because the voluminous message traffic between headquarters and the Thailand site remains classified. One witness said he believed that “revisionism” in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.

As the weeks passed, the senior agency psychologist departed, followed by one F.B.I. agent and then the other. Dr. Mitchell began directing the questioning and occasionally speaking directly to Mr. Zubaydah, one official said.

In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined his partner in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.

The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.

Lucrative Work

The Zubaydah case gave reason to question the Mitchell-Jessen plan: the prisoner had given up his most valuable information without coercion.

But top C.I.A. officials made no changes, and the methods would be used on at least 27 more prisoners, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times.

The business plans of Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, meanwhile, were working out beautifully. They were paid $1,000 to $2,000 a day apiece, one official said. They had permanent desks in the Counterterrorist Center, and could now claim genuine experience in interrogating high-level Qaeda operatives.

Dr. Mitchell could keep working outside the C.I.A. as well. At the Ritz-Carlton in Maui in October 2003, he was featured at a high-priced seminar for corporations on how to behave if kidnapped. He created new companies, called Wizard Shop, later renamed Mind Science, and What If. His first company, Knowledge Works, was certified by the American Psychological Association in 2004 as a sponsor of continuing professional education. (A.P.A. dropped the certification last year.)

In 2005, the psychologists formed Mitchell Jessen and Associates, with offices in Spokane and Virginia and five additional shareholders, four of them from the military’s SERE program. By 2007, the company employed about 60 people, some with impressive résumés, including Deuce Martinez, a lead C.I.A. interrogator of Mr. Mohammed; Roger L. Aldrich, a legendary military survival trainer; and Karen Gardner, a senior training official at the F.B.I. Academy.

The company’s C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars. In 2007 in a suburb of Tampa, Fla., Dr. Mitchell built a house with a swimming pool, now valued at $800,000.

The psychologists’ influence remained strong under four C.I.A. directors. In 2006, in fact, when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her legal adviser, John B. Bellinger III, pushed back against the C.I.A.’s secret detention program and its methods, the director at the time, Michael V. Hayden, asked Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen to brief State Department officials and persuade them to drop their objections. They were unsuccessful.

By then, the national debate over torture had begun, and it would undo the psychologists’ business.

In a statement to employees on April 9, Leon E. Panetta, President Obama’s C.I.A. director, announced the “decommissioning” of the agency’s secret jails and repeated a pledge not to use coercion. And there was another item: “No C.I.A. contractors will conduct interrogations.”

Agency officials terminated the contracts for Mitchell Jessen and Associates, and the psychologists’ lucrative seven-year ride was over. Within days, the company had vacated its Spokane offices. The phones were disconnected, and at neighboring businesses, no one knew of a forwarding address

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/us/12psychs.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

HowardCohodas
08-12-2009, 06:01
The Holder Justice Department ... an oxymoron. :mad:

Richard
08-12-2009, 06:48
From Der Spiegel, 12 May 2009.

Richard's $.02 :munchin

THE TORTURE BUSINESS
CIA Outsourced Development of Interrogation Plan
John Goetz and Britta Sandberg, Der Spiegel, 12 May 2009

The torture practices used in interrogations of al-Qaida prisoners were not developed by government officials in Washington, but by private security experts. In return for a daily consulting fee, they personally supervised the program at the CIA's secret prisons from the very beginning.

James Mitchell's new life begins with the same ritual every morning: He goes jogging, wearing Adidas shorts and a black tank top, his iPod in his ear. Then he gets into his luxury SUV and drives back to luxury home on Lake Vienna Drive in Pasco County, Florida.

The hacienda-style house, with a natural stone façade, columned walkways and palm trees in front of the door is brand-new. Mitchell has just had it built, in the midst of an upscale, gated community.

The freestanding garage to the right of the house is big enough for three or four cars, and a mountain bike is mounted to the back of the SUV. Mitchell, a tanned man in his late 50s with silver-gray hair, a neatly trimmed beard and trendy sunglasses, spends two hours a day exercising. In fact, exercise plays an important role in his new life under Florida's blue skies.

Mitchell is the man who, on the behalf of the administration of former President George W. Bush, developed the rules of the program that was somewhat shamefacedly referred to as "special interrogation techniques" and was authorized by the president in the summer of 2002. In truth, Mitchell developed a torture manual. His client was the CIA. The American foreign intelligence agency has engaged in its own share of dubious practices over the years, activities it initially treated as praiseworthy and would later come to bitterly regret. But now it has become clear that the CIA, ironically enough, outsourced its torture practices in interrogations during the darkest years of the Bush administration. It entrusted the development and supervision of these interrogations to a private security firm run by James Mitchell and his partner, Bruce Jessen.

The two psychologists, who had never even conducted an interrogation before -- in other words, two amateurs -- were largely responsible for developing the CIA's prisoner interrogation program. The recently published report of the Committee on Armed Services of the US Senate came out with new proof and details about this collaboration, ABC News succeeded in filming both Jessen and Mitchell who both refused to answer any questions concerning their past saying that they were not allow to speak about it.

WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 2001

Three months after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush drove the Taliban out of Afghanistan and assigned the task of interrogating senior al-Qaida prisoners to the CIA. The agency, which had little experience with interrogation, turned to officials at the Defense Department for help. They, in turn, contacted the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, a division of the Defense Department responsible for Americans captured abroad and the US Army's secret SERE training program.

SERE, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, is a program designed to prepare US soldiers, especially pilots, for situations after being taken prisoner. In various training seminars, they learn how to improve their ability to withstand mistreatment by the enemy and, in the worst case, torture.

Most of the methods are based on experiences from the Korean War. During SERE training, US soldiers are stripped naked, exposed to extreme temperatures and loud music and thrown against walls. They are kept in so-called stress positions for hours and were also subjected to waterboarding, at least until 2007.

The CIA request for possible new interrogation methods also reached James Mitchell. He had worked as a military psychologist for years and had trained soldiers in the SERE program. Mitchell deserves a lot of credit in this area, says US Air Force Colonel Steven Kleinman. "Had Dr. Mitchell continued his work in SERE training, his considerable contribution to that noble effort would have served as a lasting legacy to him.," Kleinman said. "Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone at the higher echelons in the Intelligence Community to recognize that his involvement in interrogations would be well outside his area of expertise. They should have stopped it before it began."

When Mitchell learned of the inquiry coming from Washington, he had already been retired from the military for six months. For the first time in his life, he had founded his own, small company: Knowledge Works, a consulting company, at least on paper. He was clearly happy to accept new customers and contracts.

SPOKANE, WASHINGTON, EARLY 2002.

Around the beginning of 2002, Mitchell contacted an old colleague who was still working in the SERE training program as Senior Psychologist. Bruce Jessen was in his early 50s at the time and married with one son. Both Mitchell and Jessen are Mormons. And both men, say colleagues, are deeply religious and ardent patriots -- like so many Mormons.

Mitchell asked Jessen for help. He wanted him to review the al-Qaida resistance training methods. Afterwards, the two men wrote an initial recommendation of measures designed to break the resistance of al-Qaida prisoners. On Feb. 12, 2002 they sent the paper to JPRA Commander Colonel John "Randy" Moulton who forwarded it to his chain of command at JFCOM.

In April, they presented their first draft, "The Exploitation Draft Plan," of a new interrogation program to the CIA and proposed that an "exploitation facility" should be established. The draft already included some of the methods that have since come to light, including sleep deprivation, the use of physical violence and waterboarding. According to someone who was involved in the program at the time, both Mitchell and Jessen were eager to get involved in the War on Terror as advisors to the CIA. And the CIA? According to the informant, it was seeking scientific and psychological justification for what it intended to do.

FAISALABAD, PAKISTAN, MARCH 28, 2002

At 2 a.m., FBI agents and Pakistani police units raided a two-story house on the outskirts of the city, arresting Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaida logistics expert. The Americans had their most important prisoner to date. At the time, they believed that Abu Zubaydah was the number-four man in the al-Qaida hierarchy.

The arrest of Abu Zubaydah was the source of great nervousness in Washington. "Now that we had an undoubted resource in our hands -- the highest-ranking al-Qaida official captured to date -- we opened discussions within the National Security Council as to how to handle him, since holding and interrogating large numbers of al-Qaida operatives has never been part of our plan," former CIA Director George Tenet later wrote in his memoir. "We wondered what we could legitimately do to get that information."

A number of meetings and presentations followed, attended by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director Tenet and his deputy. Tenet explained that, after careful study, the CIA had concluded that the only way to obtain the details of the terrorist organization's future plans from al-Qaida fanatics was to use the SERE methods. Tenet assured the group that these interrogation practices had already been tested in the training of thousands of Americans.

But someone should have told the Washington politicians about the many warnings the Defense Department had received from half a dozen SERE trainers. In a letter written in December, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Baumgartner, who oversaw SERE training, had already requested that the program's methods should not be used in interrogations. Baumgartner noted that they were "less reliable" and could in fact achieve the opposite of the intended effect, that is, increase a prisoner's resistance. He also warned they would have an "intolerable public and political backlash when discovered."

On March 29, 2002, a day after the Zubaydah arrest, James Mitchell closed Knowledge Works, the company he had just founded. He and Bruce Jessen, who would resign from military service a few months later, founded a new company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates. The men became contractors for the CIA, charging a rate of $1,000 (€746) a day, not including special fees.

(cont'd)

Richard
08-12-2009, 06:50
THE TORTURE BUSINESS
CIA Outsourced Development of Interrogation Plan
Der Spiegel
(cont'd)

CIA SECRET PRISON IN THAILAND, APRIL 2002

Only a few days after his arrest, Zubaydah, a Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, was flown to a CIA secret prison in Thailand, accompanied by FBI agents. One of the FBI men, Ali Soufan, a native of Lebanon and a Muslim who speaks fluent Arabic, moved to the United States in 1987. In 2000, he was involved in an investigation of al-Qaeda's role in the attack on the USS Cole, an American destroyer, in Yemen.

Soufan, in his early 30s at the time, was an advocate of the traditional FBI strategy known as "rapport building," which is based on the notion that an interrogation can only produce the desired results once a rapport has been developed with the prisoner. Soufan dressed the fresh gunshot wounds Zubaydah had received during the arrest. He told Zubaydah that he even knew the nickname he had been given by his mother.

For seven years, Soufan remained silent about his role in the interrogation in Thailand. But last week he decided to give an exclusive interview to Newsweek because "I was in the middle of this, and it's not true that these [aggressive] techniques were effective."

Soufan showed Zubaydah photos of al-Qaida members. When he saw a photo of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the prisoner identified him as the man who had planned and organized the Sept. 11 attacks. Later the Bush administration -- with no justification whatsoever -- would celebrate this piece of information from the FBI interrogation as a significant breakthrough and evidence of the effectiveness of its new interrogation techniques.

A few days later, CIA agents arrived in Thailand. They had brought along James Mitchell, the architect of the new interrogation methods. Suddenly the tone changed dramatically. Mitchell gave orders to intensify Zubaydah's treatment if he did not respond to questions.

One day Soufan, seeing that the prisoner was naked, threw him a towel. Later on, he and Mitchell argued heatedly over the prisoner's treatment. "We're the United States of America, and we don't do that kind of thing," Soufan recalls shouting at Mitchell. He also asked Mitchell who had authorized him to use the aggressive methods. Mitchell responded that he had received approval from the "highest levels" in Washington. All this happened in April 2002, four months before the Bush administration issued its first torture memorandum to legally justify the interrogation techniques.

The FBI finally broke with the CIA on the day Soufan discovered a wooden box that looked like a coffin. Was it meant to be used for a mock burial? Soufan called his superior in Washington. The then FBI Director Robert Mueller decided that his staff would no longer take part in these interrogations and ordered Soufan and the rest of the FBI- team to return to Washington. Mitchell and the CIA had free rein from then on.

Zubaydah later told Red Cross staff that he had been repeatedly locked into the box, where he had had difficulty breathing. He said he had also been thrown against a wall repeatedly, prevented from sleeping, doused in ice-cold water and subjected to extremely loud music. He was waterboarded 83 times.

"I was told during this period," he said years later, "that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people."

Zubaydah was Mitchell's laboratory experiment. The psychologist allegedly told FBI agents who were present that Zubaydah had to be kept in a cage like a dog, and that it was indeed like an experiment. If dogs were subjected to electroshocks, Mitchell said, they too would give up in the end.

For a short time, the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah were the most well documented of all interrogations. The CIA once had 92 videotapes of the interrogations, which included waterboarding. But 90 of the videos were destroyed in November 2005. This Wednesday, however, FBI agent Soufan is scheduled to testify before the US Senate Judiciary Committee.

SPOKANE, WASHINGTON, APRIL 2009

Business is still going well for Mitchell Jessen & Associates. The company now has 120 employees, and most of them have security clearances at levels normally reserved for government employees. Many former members of the SERE program now work for the company, which now occupies two floors of an office building in downtown Spokane, including the top floor. It is bugproof and equipped with special, high-security doors -- a standard the CIA requires from its civilian contractors.

Abu Zubaydah's attorney, Brent Mickum, plans to file a civil suit against Mitchell and Jessen, unless US President Barack Obama chooses to file criminal charges against the contractors.

When questioned by journalists recently, Mitchell said that he would be happy to talk about these issues, but that a confidentiality agreement he had signed prevents him from doing so.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,624432,00.html