Dr. James E. Mitchell

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  www.americantorture.com/labels/DDD.html - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/5/2008    Last Visited: 9/13/2009  

  It's been a year since SERE military psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen were accused, in an article by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair, of teaching SERE techniques to interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere. (I covered the "nuts and bolts" of how SERE procedures were taught at Guantanamo in a recent essay.) According to a different article by Jane Mayer last year, Mitchell utilized the theories of "learned helplessness" in implementing his interrogation lessons. (Mr. Mitchell denied this assertion.) Mayer wrote:
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  It's been a year since SERE military psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen were accused, in an article by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair, of teaching SERE techniques to interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere. (I covered the "nuts and bolts" of how SERE procedures were taught at Guantanamo in a recent essay.) According to a different article by Jane Mayer last year, Mitchell utilized the theories of "learned helplessness" in implementing his interrogation lessons. (Mr. Mitchell denied this assertion.) Mayer wrote:
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  Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that "learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.
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  Mitchell, he said, "draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle.
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  [Mayer] traces the development of the torture techniques to the work of two contractors, Mitchell and Jessen, and disclosed the specific techniques they developed.
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  Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were present in the audience of about 50 others at my speech, and that was, to the best of my knowledge, the sum total of my "assisting them in the process."
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  About seven months later, as further revelations about SERE and torture surfaced, including admissions by the Pentagon Office of Inspector General (in a report publicly released in May 2007) that SERE reverse-engineering had taken place, and that Mitchell and Jessen were involved, I revisited the issue with Dr. Seligman in August 2007:
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  Labels: American Psychological Association, CIA, DDD, Ethics, James Mitchell, Jane Mayer, Martin Seligman, Red Cross, Robert Jay Lifton, SERE, Torture

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  ktwbtv.trb.com/news/politics/sns-200908131854tmswpfafft - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 8/13/2009    Last Visited: 8/26/2009  

  The other of the two successive head psychologists at the course was Jim Mitchell, a poor boy from Florida who joined the Air Force in 1974 for adventure, became an explosives expert, and earned bachelor's and master's degrees in psychology, which he completed with a doctorate obtained at the University of South Florida with a dissertation comparing diet and exercise plans in controlling hypertension.
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  The tortures sold to the CIA by Mitchell and Jessen were made up in the U.S.A.

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  www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/07/19-1 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 7/20/2009    Last Visited: 7/20/2009  

  James E. Mitchell, a retired clinical psychologist for the Air Force, had studied al-Qaeda resistance techniques.
  
  "The thing that will make him talk," the participant recalled Mitchell saying, "is fear."
  
  Now, as the Senate intelligence committee examines the CIA's interrogation program, investigators are focusing in part on Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen, former CIA contractors who helped design and oversee Abu Zubaida's interrogation.
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  If Mitchell and his team eased up and then al-Qaeda attacked the United States again, agency managers warned, "it would be on the team's back," recalled the former U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information.
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  Mitchell, 58, who remained a CIA contractor until this spring, declined to be interviewed. In conversations with close colleagues in recent months, he has rejected the popular portrayal of his role, maintaining that he steered the agency away from far more brutal methods toward practices that would not cause permanent harm to detainees.
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  Yesterday, Mitchell issued a brief statement: "It may be easy for people who were not there and didn't feel the pressure of the threats to say how much better they could have done it. But they weren't there. We were and we did the best that we could."
  
  The 'Manchester Manual'
  
  A silver-maned, voluble man, Mitchell had retired from the Air Force before the Sept. 11 attacks and won several government contracts, including one from the CIA to study ways to assess people who volunteered information to the agency. While still in the military training program known as SERE -- for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape -- he and his colleagues called themselves "Masters of the Mind [Expletive]," according to two military officials who worked in the program.
  
  In December 2001, the CIA asked Mitchell to analyze the "Manchester Manual," a document seized in a raid in Britain that described al-Qaeda resistance techniques.
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  Mitchell asked Jessen, a senior SERE psychologist, to help prepare the assessment, according to Senate investigators.
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  "It is not realistic to think someone who is hardened will talk unless they fear that something bad is going to happen to them," said the former U.S. official, describing Mitchell and Jessen's thinking. "They didn't think rapport-building techniques would work. But they also didn't [advocate] using waterboarding right away."
  
  Mitchell told acquaintances that he also drew important lessons from the theory of "learned helplessness," a term psychologists use to describe people or animals reduced to a state of complete helplessness by some form of coercion or pain, such as electric shock. Mitchell insisted, however, that coercive interrogation should not reduce a prisoner to despair. Instead, he argued, "you want them to have the view that something they could say would hold the key to getting them out of the situation they were in," according to the former official.
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  Details of their experience and that of the CIA officials who followed them to Thailand with Mitchell were gleaned from public testimony, official documents and interviews with current and former intelligence and law-enforcement officials with access to confidential files.
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  In Mitchell, the CIA found an authoritative professional who had answers, despite an absence of practical experience in interrogating terrorism suspects or data showing that harsh tactics work.
  
  "Here was a guy with a title and a shingle," recalled the participant in the Langley meeting, "and he was saying things that others in the room already believed to be true."
  
  Mitchell boarded a CIA plane for Bangkok with R. Scott Shumate, a CIA psychologist; two agency officers who worked undercover; and a small team of analysts and support staff, including security personnel to control Abu Zubaida.
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  When Mitchell and the CIA team arrived in Thailand, Abu Zubaida was still in the hospital.
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  Although senior CIA officials in Bangkok were nominally in charge, they deferred to Mitchell, according to several sources familiar with events at the prison.
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  Later, Mitchell added sleep deprivation and a constant bombardment of loud music, including tracks by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
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  Abu Zubaida was lying but eventually would disclose everything, Mitchell asserted to his colleagues, citing his backers at the Counterterrorist Center.
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  Mitchell and his partner continued to ratchet up the pressure on Abu Zubaida, although Bush administration lawyers had not yet authorized the CIA's harshest interrogation measures.
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  Abu Zubaida was waterboarded 83 times over four or five days, and Mitchell and Jessen concluded that the prisoner was broken, the former U.S. official said.
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  Mitchell and Jessen now found themselves in the same position as Soufan, Shumate and others.
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  >>Yesterday, Mitchell issued a brief statement: "It may be easy for people who were not there and didn't feel the pressure of the threats to say how much better they could have done it.

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  www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/05/01-9 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 5/8/2009    Last Visited: 5/8/2009  

  Despite Red Flags, CIA Followed Interrogation Program of Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell
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  Both men, doctors Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, assured the CIA that their methods could 'break' a terrorist and would be safe, according to two former high-ranking CIA officials and a collection of recently declassified Bush administration memos.
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  And yet, more than anyone else, Mitchell and Jessen, long-time friends and colleagues, shaped the CIA's interrogation program, according to the two former CIA officials.
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  In addition to questions of legality investigations have begun in Congress into the effectiveness of Mitchell and Jessen's program.
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  Carl Levin (D-MI), chair of the Armed Services Committee, whose report identifies Mitchell and Jessen as important to the creation of interrogation policies, little could have been gained by the harsh methods.
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  As to the private contractors used by the CIA to create and oversee the 10-step brutal interrogation program, two former high-ranking CIA officials confirm to ABC News that Mitchell and Jessen were the architects of the CIA's interrogation program, and were hired as independent contractors to administer and direct the so-called "high value detainee" interrogation.
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  Mitchell recently built a dream home in Florida, purchased a Lexus and BMW. And as early as 2002, Mitchell and Jessen opened a consulting business that employed as many as 60 people.
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  Although Mitchell and Jessen had been previously identified as being CIA contractors who influenced the CIA's controversial interrogation techniques, the recently released government documents reveal how deeply the pair were involved in developing an interrogation program based on their expertise as psychologists in classified military training regimen intended to help U.S. soldiers and pilots resist coercion and torture in the event of capture, called SERE.
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  Dr. Mitchell, though assigned to the special operations unit of the Air Force, worked closely with Dr. Jessen for nearly two decades at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, WA.
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  The report describes the influence Dr. Jessen had as chief psychologist of JPRA, and his colleague, Dr. Mitchell on the role of SERE tactics in shaping interrogation policy.
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  According to the report, Mitchell and Jessen's SERE expertise, "lies in training U.S. military personnel who are at risk for capture, how to respond and resist interrogations (a defensive mission), not in how to conduct interrogations (an offensive mission)."
  
  Despite a flurry of red flags from Mitchell and Jessen's colleagues, senior Pentagon and CIA officials agreed to adopt their program.
  
  Col. Kleinman says Mitchell and Jessen were way out their league advocating and creating an interrogation model.
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  Now, investigators will look to see if the harsh techniques worked and the ACLU and Jameel Jaffer are interested in determining if Mitchell and Jessen misled the U.S. government about the intensity of their interrogation program.
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  Mitchell and Jessen declared their torture regime safe, but both are psychologists with no medical credentials whatsoever.
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  Jessen and Mitchell, like Yoo, Bybee, Bradbury and Haines are just another couple of What Makes Sammy Runs of The Torture Regime.
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  Both doctors Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen have created a lifetime's work picking up the shattered pieces of broken minds.
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  Mitchell and Jessen should lose their licenses and be tried for malpractice.
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  One element left out of this analysis is the notion that Jessen and Mitchell are simply weak, incompetent boobs, 'Monica Goodlings,' just like many of the followers of Bush.

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  truthwire.wordpress.com/page/2/ - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 6/15/2008    Last Visited: 6/29/2008  

  But as Salon's investigative reporter, Mark Benjamin has documented, the SERE program was "reverse-engineered" by CIA contract psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen as a tool for torture.
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  The effects of isolation are a specialty of Jessen's, who taught a class on "coping with isolation in a hostage environment" at a Maui seminar in late 2003, according to a Washington Times article published then. (Defense Department documents from the late 1990s describe Jessen as the "lead psychologist" for the SERE program.) Mitchell also spoke at that conference, according to the article.

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  www.democrats.com/torture-update-090423 - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 4/23/2009    Last Visited: 5/13/2009  

  * Two psychologists played key roles in creating the Bush System of Torture: James E. Mitchell, a psychologist with the SERE program who had monitored many mock interrogations but had never conducted any real ones, and Bruce Jessen, another former SERE psychologist.
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  "Jim believed that people of this ilk would confess for only one reason: sheer terror," said one C.I.A. official who had discussed the matter with Dr. Mitchell.

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  hotair.com/archives/2009/04/30/abc-outs-psychologists-w - [Cached Version]
  Last Visited: 5/18/2009  

  Follow the link and you'll find a whiff of a revenge motive here by ABC: They got burned two years ago when an agent wrongly told them Zubaydah had been waterboarded only once and now it smells like they're trying to atone by throwing Mitchell and Jessen to the wolves.
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  Update: Larry Johnson e-mails to say that Mitchell and Jessen were already named by Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side.
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  You wrote as if you trust ABC and CIA not to misrepresent Mitchell and Jessen's representations as misrepresentative.
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  [classification redaction] In December 2001 or January 2002, a retired Air Force SERE psychologist, Dr. James Mitchell, [redaction ] asked his former colleague, the senior SERE psychologist at JPRA, Dr. John "Bruce" Jessen, to review documents describing al Qaeda resistance training.
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  The two psychologists (Jensen and Mitchell) reviewed the materials,and generated a paper on al Qaeda resistance capabilities and countermeasures to defeat that resistance.
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  One could argue that Jensen and Mitchell were uniquely qualified for this task.
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  If the reporter had simply read the unclassified Senate report (linked to above) they would have been clear on both the qualifications of Jensen and Mitchell and their role in developing the methodologies used. It is clear to my mind that both Jensen and Mitchell were in fact uniquely qualified to develop the program and that seems to be substantiatiated by internal communications between JPRA (SERE) and JFCOM (joint forces command).
  
  Furthermore, within the body of the report Jensen, Mitchell and JPRA's Colonel John "Randy" Moulton, make note of the specific limitations of their skill sets relative to the needs of the govt to disgorge information from the bad guys.
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  The fact that Jensen and Mitchell are named in the unclassified report also makes it clear that Jensen and Mitchell were not outed by ABC but rather by the senatorial staffers who drafted the report.
  
  Jensen and Mitchell are unfortunately just more names added to the list who will pay for the sins of the Bush administration while it was trying to get its arms around a massive asymetrical war that was dumped on its doorstep by the previous administration.
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  I read about Mitchell and Jessen a week or two ago.
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  I don't like the fact that ABC ran the report but it is the Senate report in which Mitchell and Jensen's names appear.

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  www.americantorture.com/labels/Torture.html - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/5/2008    Last Visited: 9/13/2009  

  Spencer Ackerman has looked at the possibility that former SERE psychologist James Mitchell wrote the report, and the conflict of interest that arises from having the interrogator/torturer write the report upon which the approach to the subject will be based.
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  While it's a reasonable guess that Mitchell wrote the evaluation, I'm going to proceed as if I don't know who wrote it.
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  Towards the end of the psychological evaluation, less its last redacted paragraphs, the author -- and it was an Agency or Agency contract psychologist, since only psychologists write these reports (and it was likely either James Mitchell or Bruce Jessen, who arrived in Thailand in July) -- notes the following, allowing that Zubaydah is "well-versed" in Al Qaeda resistance techniques (emphasis added):
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  Labels: Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaida, CIA, James Mitchell, Marcy Wheeler, Military Psychologists, Office of Legal Counsel, Torture, Waterboarding
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  In parts one and two of this series on the origins of the SERE torture program, we examined how unlikely it was that James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, relying on entrepreneurial guile and chutzpah alone, convinced a passive Pentagon and CIA, eager to find some way to get terror intelligence, to buy into their "learned helplessness" interrogation paradigm.
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  It seems plausible that others were in on the scheme, and in part two, we examined the idea that Mitchell and Jessen's superior, Col.
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  David Ayers, head of Tate, Inc., was the other MJA shareholder, along with Joseph Matarazzo, yet another former president of the American Psychological Association who crossed Mitchell and Jessen's path.
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  Matarazzo, who Jane Mayer recently reported worked for the CIA, had been hired by Mitchell and Jessen years earlier, in 1996, along with other prominent U.S. psychologists -- Charles Speilberger, Richard Lazarus, and Albert Bandura -- for an internal review of SERE training procedures, according to a SERE internal document.
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  Nor should we consider this a conspiracy between only Aldrich, Mitchell and Jessen.
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  In this scenario, Mitchell and Jessen can best be understood as agents in the operation, and not brain trusters.
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  The chain of command for the torture program appears to have run from Bush-Cheney, to leaders of JSOC and their CIA supporters, to the "legendary" Roger Aldrich, and on down to his trusted men, Mitchell, Jessen, Baumgarten and others at Aldrich's agency, JPRA.
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  The main problem with analyses of the Mitchell-Jessen program thus far is the failure to plausibly link the top layers of the administration, which we know were involved in approving torture, to such lowly players as Mitchell and Jessen.
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  Whatever actually happened, whether Scott Shane, who wrote the recent New York Timesarticle on Mitchell and Jessen, is right, or my scenario, or some other, we must have investigations with real teeth to get to the truth, followed by prosecutions of those who were responsible for crimes of war, of crimes against humanity.
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  Labels: Bruce Jessen, James Mitchell, JPRA, military contractors, Roger Aldrich, SERE, Special Forces, Torture
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  This is essentially the way the story was presented in a 12 August New York Timesarticle by Scott Shane, leaving the question unanswered: how did Mitchell and Jessen get involved in constructing an offensive torture program to begin with?
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  The documentary record demonstrates that Mitchell and Jessen were not alone in proposing that military survival and resistance (SERE) psychologists and trainers be used to lead interrogations of the flood of prisoners in the new "war on terror."
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  How could Mitchell and Jessen be seen as the prime proponents for the program when in December 2001, according to released materials in the Senate Armed Services Committee's report on prisoner abuse, the Chief of Staff of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), Lt.
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  While the New York Times article makes almost no attempt to link the Mitchell-Jessen episode to the larger spread of torture throughout the U.S. armed forces, or to describe the actual role of the CIA in fostering it, Mitchell and Jessen's influence is assumed.
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  No doubt, Mitchell and Jessen will pursue just such a defense. (See the recent Joby Warrick/Peter Finn article in the Washington Post, which describes the persistent "permissions" for each torture interrogation secured by Abu Zubaydah's interrogators.)
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  He took Mitchell and Jessen and promoted them.
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  Labels: Bruce Jessen, Daniel Baumgartner, James Mitchell, JPRA, Roger Aldrich, Senate Armed Services Committee, SERE, Torture
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  In order to make these connections, we must first consider the established narrative thus far, exemplified by Scott Shane's new article on Mitchell and Jessen in the 12 August New York Times.
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  By all accounts, James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen have a lot to answer for.
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  In Shane's version, an entrepreneurial James Mitchell "impressed" the CIA's Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez, Jr. "by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon.
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  Mitchell had developed a theory, so Shane explains, that a psychological doctrine called "learned helplessness" could be used to make resistant Al Qaeda prisoners comply with interrogator demands.
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  While more experienced interrogators criticized this view, somehow Mitchell prevailed.
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  Shane remarks that Mitchell met and fawned over Seligman, who was the originator of the "learned helplessness" theory.
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  But nothing is reported about Mitchell retailing his own theories on reverse-engineering SERE training at this event, and Seligman reports he knew nothing of what Mitchell was planning.
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  In fact, the entire connection between special operations forces and Mitchell and Jessen, or their parent SERE agency, is neglected in the article.
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  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.... One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear....
  ...
  Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.
  
  This explanation of the origins of the torture program leaves a lot to be desired (and really offers nothing new). How did Mitchell's "theories" come to the attention of the CIA? Why did they give Mitchell the assignment of "reviewing" the so-called Al Qaeda manual, which had been in Western hands for at least six months?
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  Labels: Bruce Jessen, CIA, James Mitchell, Martin Seligman, New York Times, SERE, Torture
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  The spotlight has mainly fallen on the activities of former SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who together spearheaded the implementation of a prisoner "exploitation plan" that became known later as "enhanced interrogation techniques," and included a number of torture techniques, including isolation, sleep deprivation, stress positions, sensory deprivation and overload, forced nudity, waterboarding, and much more.
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  Sometime in late 2001, former SERE psychologist and contractor wannabe, James Mitchell, had received a copy of a purported Al Qaeda manual, which included instructions on how to withstand interrogation. According to an anonymous source who claims some knowledge of the individuals involved, and who has been credible on other matters pertaining to JPRA, Mitchell obtained the document from his superiors inside JPRA's Personnel Recovery Academy (PRA).
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  For those prone to speculate, the appearance of the Al Qaeda Resistance Manual in the hands of James Mitchell and the capture of al-Libi in mid-December 2001 seems awfully coincidental.)
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  Labels: Bruce Jessen, Iraq war, James Mitchell, JPRA, Lyle Koenig, Senate Armed Services Committee, SERE, Special Forces, Task Force 121, Thomas Moore, Torture

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  www.lawandsecurity.org/get_article/?id=130 - [Cached Version]
  Last Visited: 6/27/2009  

  At the center of the rush job were two retired Air Force psychologists turned CIA contractors: Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. John "Bruce" Jessen, who went from training U.S. servicemen to resist torture to training CIA officers to carry out the same techniques.
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  "Not everything [Mitchell and Jessen] proposed was part of the final menu," said a former senior intelligence official.
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  Calls to Mitchell and Jessen were not returned.

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  www.americantorture.com/labels/CIA.html - [Cached Version]
  Published on: 1/5/2008    Last Visited: 9/13/2009  

  Spencer Ackerman has looked at the possibility that former SERE psychologist James Mitchell wrote the report, and the conflict of interest that arises from having the interrogator/torturer write the report upon which the approach to the subject will be based.
  ...
  While it's a reasonable guess that Mitchell wrote the evaluation, I'm going to proceed as if I don't know who wrote it.
  ...
  Towards the end of the psychological evaluation, less its last redacted paragraphs, the author -- and it was an Agency or Agency contract psychologist, since only psychologists write these reports (and it was likely either James Mitchell or Bruce Jessen, who arrived in Thailand in July) -- notes the following, allowing that Zubaydah is "well-versed" in Al Qaeda resistance techniques (emphasis added):
  ...
  Labels: Abu Zubaydah, Al Qaida, CIA, James Mitchell, Marcy Wheeler, Military Psychologists, Office of Legal Counsel, Torture, Waterboarding
  ...
  In order to make these connections, we must first consider the established narrative thus far, exemplified by Scott Shane's new article on Mitchell and Jessen in the 12 August New York Times.
  ...
  By all accounts, James Mitchell and John "Bruce" Jessen have a lot to answer for.
  ...
  In Shane's version, an entrepreneurial James Mitchell "impressed" the CIA's Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez, Jr. "by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon.
  ...
  Mitchell had developed a theory, so Shane explains, that a psychological doctrine called "learned helplessness" could be used to make resistant Al Qaeda prisoners comply with interrogator demands.
  ...
  While more experienced interrogators criticized this view, somehow Mitchell prevailed.
  ...
  Shane remarks that Mitchell met and fawned over Seligman, who was the originator of the "learned helplessness" theory.
  ...
  But nothing is reported about Mitchell retailing his own theories on reverse-engineering SERE training at this event, and Seligman reports he knew nothing of what Mitchell was planning.
  ...
  In fact, the entire connection between special operations forces and Mitchell and Jessen, or their parent SERE agency, is neglected in the article.
  ...
  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.... One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear....
  ...
  Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived.
  
  This explanation of the origins of the torture program leaves a lot to be desired (and really offers nothing new). How did Mitchell's "theories" come to the attention of the CIA? Why did they give Mitchell the assignment of "reviewing" the so-called Al Qaeda manual, which had been in Western hands for at least six months?
  ...
  Labels: Bruce Jessen, CIA, James Mitchell, Martin Seligman, New York Times, SERE, Torture
  ...
  It's been a year since SERE military psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen were accused, in an article by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair, of teaching SERE techniques to interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere. (I covered the "nuts and bolts" of how SERE procedures were taught at Guantanamo in a recent essay.) According to a different article by Jane Mayer last year, Mitchell utilized the theories of "learned helplessness" in implementing his interrogation lessons. (Mr. Mitchell denied this assertion.) Mayer wrote:
  ...
  It's been a year since SERE military psychologists James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen were accused, in an article by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair, of teaching SERE techniques to interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere. (I covered the "nuts and bolts" of how SERE procedures were taught at Guantanamo in a recent essay.) According to a different article by Jane Mayer last year, Mitchell utilized the theories of "learned helplessness" in implementing his interrogation lessons. (Mr. Mitchell denied this assertion.) Mayer wrote:
  ...
  Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that "learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.
  ...
  Mitchell, he said, "draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle.
  ...
  [Mayer] traces the development of the torture techniques to the work of two contractors, Mitchell and Jessen, and disclosed the specific techniques they developed.
  ...
  Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were present in the audience of about 50 others at my speech, and that was, to the best of my knowledge, the sum total of my "assisting them in the process."
  ...
  About seven months later, as further revelations about SERE and torture surfaced, including admissions by the Pentagon Office of Inspector General (in a report publicly released in May 2007) that SERE reverse-engineering had taken place, and that Mitchell and Jessen were involved, I revisited the issue with Dr. Seligman in August 2007:

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