The U.S. Senate report on the CIA’s so-called “enhanced interrogation
techniques”that was released on Tuesday said a firm identified only
as “Company Y” was responsible for developing many of the tactics used during
the questioning of terrorism suspects in the aftermath of the September 11th
attacks.
Following the release of the details of the Senate probe, NBC News reported the company that worked to
develop these techniques and received over $US80 million from the government
for its work was a firm based in Spokane, Washington called Mitchell, Jessen
& Associates.
While much
of the attention on Mitchell, Jessen & Associates has focused on the two
owners of the company who gave it its name, the firm actually had seven
co-owners. Documents exclusively obtained by Business Insider on Wednesday
confirmed the names of these seven people as well as their roles at the
company. The records also detailed when Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was
first established.
According to
a document filed with the state of Washington in 2008, the seven owners of
Mitchell, Jessen & Associates were: James Mitchell, John Bruce Jessen,
David Ayers, Randall Spivey, James Sporleder, Joseph Matarazzo, and Roger
Aldrich.
Records show
Mitchell, Jessen & Associates became inactive in October 2009. However,
four of the company’s owners appear to work at other firms that currently
consult with the US government. Three of them, Spivey, Sporleder, and Aldrich,
are still working together at a company called the Center For Personal Protection
& Safety, which counts both the Department of Defence and FBI among its
clients.
Their
company reportedly developed interrogation techniques the Senate report described as “brutal”
including forced rectal feedings, waterboarding, sleep deprivation, mock
executions, and intense psychological manipulation. Late Wednesday evening, a
CIA spokesperson said the agency would not be able to comment on this story
until the following morning, at the earliest.
Reverse Engineering Torture
The majority
of the owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates previously worked with the
military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program, which trains
American service members to survive and resist interrogation by enemy forces.
In this program they worked with soldiers who survived being captured and
abused in foreign countries. The SERE trainers studied the effects of this
torture. They also engaged in role playing scenarios where they taught soldiers
to face these techniques.
Participation
in the SERE program gave the owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates
firsthand experience in what torture techniques were most effective and the
psychology behind them. The CIA later reverse engineered these tactics to use
on terrorism suspects at so-called “black sites” placed in foreign countries outside of US legal
jurisdiction due to the fact the practices employed during these
“enhanced” interrogations were clearly prohibited by American law.
In 2011,
Truthout obtained a series of handwritten notes it
claimed were written by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, who Business Insider has learned
was the president of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. In these notes, which
were written during his time working at the SERE program, Jessen described what
he referred to as the “psychological aspects of detention.”
Jessen’s
notes described how torture could be effective and gave US soldiers strategies
to withstand abuse. He warned detainers would “manipulate and control your
external environment almost at will.” These notes outlined some of the very
same strategies CIA interrogators would later use on terrorism suspects at black
sites where the Senate report said they subjected detainees to loud rock music
and severe cold temperatures.
NBC reported
that Mitchell, Jessen & Associates presented the CIA with 20 techniques,
and the agency passed on a few “because some of proposed techniques were
considered too harsh even for terrorists.”
From A Fortified Facility To A Quiet Office Building
SERE is
based at the Air Force Survival School, which is located at an Air Force base
just outside of Spokane. The program is overseen by the Joint Personnel
Recovery Agency, which conducts more secretive work and is located at a
facility adjacent to the base that reportedly has a barbed wire fence, armed
guards, and “3-foot thick, blast-proof concrete walls.” Through their work with
the CIA, these experts from Mitchell, Jessen & Associates seem to employed
their expertise on the torture techniques used by America’s enemies to develop
tactics that the US subsequently used on its own prisoners.
Base, where the SERE program is based, being tazed during
his training in 2012.
The CIA’s
enhanced interrogation techniques were initially employed during the
administration of President George W. Bush, who authorised them in the wake of
the September 11th attacks. The Senate report argued the interrogations that
employed these techniques led to questionable intelligence and were so violent
they disturbed members of both the CIA and FBI who were involved in
US counterterrorism efforts.
President
Barack Obama has acknowledged some terrorism detainees were
tortured while being questioned by the CIA. He banned the enhanced
interrogations shortly after he took office in 2009.
A company
registration filed in Washington in 2007 showed Mitchell, Jessen &
Associates was originally formed in Delaware on September 9, 2004 and began
doing business in Washington in 2005. The company was operated out of a suite
in a nondescript office building in downtown Spokane. In the handwritten
registration, which was signed by Jessen, it said the company “provides
consulting and training to U.S. government.”
Read about
the seven owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and their connections to
the CIA torture program below.
James
Mitchell:A limited liability company licence renewal filed with the state of
Washington in 2008 identifiedMitchell as the CEO of Mitchell, Jessen &
Associates.
He has been widely
described as the “architect” of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation
program.
According the 2009 New York Times story that first
publicized his role in the CIA torture program, Mitchell joined the Air Force in 1974 and was initially
stationed in Alaska where “he learned the art of disarming bombs and
earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology.” Mitchell, who was from
Florida, went on to work with the SERE program in the 1980s at the Air Force
Survival School outside of Spokane with Dr. John Bruce Jessen.
Both Mitchell
and Jessen were close during their time at the Air Force Survival School. The
Times said the two men “took weekend ice-climbing trips together”
and became “part of what some Defence Department officials called the
‘resistance mafia,’ experts on how to resist enemy interrogations.”
Initially,
Jessen was the SERE psychologist at the school. In this capacity, he vetted
instructors who portrayed interrogators at the school’s mock prison camp that
was used to train soldiers who might end up in enemy hands.
In 1988, the
Times said Jessen left his position at the survival school and took “the top
psychologist’s job at a parallel ‘graduate school’ of survival training, a
short drive from the Air Force school.” He was replaced by Mitchell.
According to
the Times, Mitchell retired from the military shortly before the September 11th
attacks in 2001 and that he began consulting for the CIA by “the start of
2002.”
In March of
2002, when Abu Zubaydah, who was suspected of being the third ranked member of
Al Qaeda, was captured in Pakistan, the Times said Mitchell traveled to a CIA
“black site” in Thailand to oversee the interrogation.
Zubaydah’s
questioning reportedly included him being sleep deprived, waterboarded, held in
a box stripped naked, exposed to cold temperatures, and beaten. The Senate report
that was released Tuesday identified Zubaydah as something of a guinea pig
for the CIA’s harsh interrogation techniques. The Times said Jessen joined Mitchell in Thailand a few months after he
arrived in order to observer Zubaydah’s questioning.
After the
Senate report on CIA interrogation techniques was released, Mitchell told
Bloomberg he could not confirm or deny whether he was involved with the program
due to a non-disclosure agreement.
“I’m in a
box — I’m caught in some Kafka novel,” Mitchell said. “Everyone is assuming it
is me, but I can’t confirm or deny it. It is frustrating because you can’t
defend yourself.”
Mitchell did
not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on Wednesday.
Dr.
John “Bruce” Jessen: In the document filed with Washington state, Jessen was
named as the president of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates.
Jessen, who
was once a Mormon bishop, became the SERE
psychologist at the Air Force Survival School outside of Spokane in the 1980′s.
According to the Times story, while at the survival
school, Jessen made an “unusual job switch” and went “from supervising
psychologist to mock enemy interrogator.” The Times reported Jessen became “so
aggressive” in his staged interrogations that he actually frightened some
colleagues.
NBC’s Robert
Windrem, who first connected Mitchell, Jessen & Associates to the Senate
report, published a story on Tuesday that said “former intelligence officials
and congressional investigators” confirmed the CIA began consulting with both Jessen and
Mitchell about interrogation techniques in July 2002.
“Jessen
immediately resigned from the Air Force and, along with Mitchell, another
recently retired colleague, founded Mitchell, Jessen & Associates,” Windrem
wrote.
In 2009, the
Senate Armed Services Committee conducted an inquiry into the “treatment of
detainees in U.S. Custody.” Both Jessen and Mitchell testified before the
committee about their work advising the government on interrogation techniques.
The committee’s report noted many of their tactics were developed based on
their work with SERE and the JPRA. It also said Mitchell, Jessen &
Associates had seven co-owners and “between 55 and 60 employees, several of whom
were former JPRA employees.”
The report
did not name the other co-owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. On
Wednesday, committee staffer told Business Insider the report was the only
public record from the inquiry and further details of Jessen and Mitchell’s
testimony were not released. Jessen could not be reached for comment on this
story.
David
Ayres: Records for Mitchell, Jessen & Associates show David Ayres was the
firm’s CFO.
In January, a
press release from a Virginia-based defence contractor, TATE,
Incorporated, identified a man named David Ayres as the company’s president.
According to its website, TATE “is the preeminent firm focusing exclusively on
personnel recovery.”
“We provide
unparalleled expertise in PR training to the Department of Defence (DoD), other
U.S. Government agencies and government contractors,” the site says.
In 2009, ProPublica reported TATE, Incorporated was
headquartered at an address in Alexandria, Virginia that was also shared by
Mitchell, Jessen & Associates.
Ayres did
not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Randall
Spivey: The website of the Center for Personal Protection & Safety, a firm
based in Spokane and Virginia, identifies Randall Spivey as the company’s CEO
and founder. CPPS’s site says it provides “scalable training and
consulting solutions in the U.S. for Workplace Violence Prevention, Active
Shooter Response, and High Risk Travel” to businesses and several government
agencies including the FBI and Department of Defence.
The document
filed in Washington state in 2008 listed Spivey as a partner at Mitchell,
Jessen & Associates. His biography on the CPPS website says Spivey is a
former DOD executive who “provided oversight to all Hostage Survival training
programs in the Department of Defence from 1997 to 2002 and co-authored multiple
hostage-related policy and doctrine documents.”
According to
the CPPS website, two other former owners of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates,
James Sporleder and Roger Aldrich, currently work with Spivey at the company.
Spivey did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Business Insider
on Wednesday.
James
V. Sporleder: A 2007 article in Spokane’s Spokesman-Review newspaper
described James V. Sporleder as a former official with the secretive JPRA,
which oversees the SERE program where Mitchell and Jessen both worked.
On the CPPS
website, Sporleder is identified as the company’s “president
and co-founder.” In this capacity, the site says he “is responsible for
directly training more than 5,000 high-risk-of-capture personnel from some of
the most elite units in the military.”
“During his
government career, he was responsible for planning, preparation, support, and
execution of numerous repatriation operations reaching back to 1993. He served
as team chief in repatriation preparations for three U.S. Army soldiers held in
Kosovo in 1999 and also led the debriefing team for that effort,” the CPPS site
says of Sporleder. “He was additionally assigned as the Repatriation Team
Chief, Forward, for the return and debrief of 24 United States Navy EP-3 Crew
members detained for 13 days in the People’s Republic of China.”
The record
for Mitchell, Jessen & Associates filed with the state of Washington listed
Sporleder as one of the company’s partners. He did not respond to a request for
comment from Business Insider.
Joseph
Matarazzo: In a statement emailed to the Spokesman-Review in 2007,
Joseph Matarazzo said he owned one per cent of Mitchell, Jessen &
Associates. In spite of admitting partial ownership, Matarazzo, a former
psychology professor who was once president of the American Psychological
Association, told the newspaper he “is not and never has been involved in the
company’s operational decisions” and only “attends brief and infrequent company
meetings.”
Matarazzo
also disavowed the torture of terrorism suspects.
“I have
never been involved in the use either of torture or the legal or illegal
interrogation of prisoners or anyone else. And I would strongly advise against
it,” said Matarazzo. “I also have no knowledge of anyone who has been involved
in such torture or interrogation.”
On the
document filed with Washington State, Matarazzo was described as a partner at
Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. Matarazzo, who is nearly 90-years-old, could
not be reached for comment on this story. An Oregon phone number listed in his
named was disconnected.
Roger
Aldrich: The Times report on Mitchell and Jessen called Roger Aldrich a “legendary military
survival trainer.”
On the CPPS website he is listed as the
company’s chief communications officer. According to CPPS, Aldrich spent 33
years working for the DOD at the JPRA where he was “an instructor, instructor
trainer, curriculum developer, and director of the U.S. Government’s only
specialised, foreign governmental detention and hostage survival program.”
Aldrich was
identified as a Mitchell, Jessen & Associates partner in the record filed
with Washington state.
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