- According to 274 partially redacted documents, two psychologists were hired by the CIA to devise torture mechanisms
- The two helped create 'Cobalt', where prisoners were kept in darkness and tortured until they lose "any will or ability...to resist or deny providing...information"
- The prisoners were shackled in cells with cold temperatures and blaring music, causing one to die of hypothermia
- The psychologists were sued by two prisoners who were released by the CIA, but the case was settled
Shocking details have emerged about 'Cobalt', a CIA black site created by a pair of contracted psychologists who literally wrote the manual on torture.
In August, John 'Bruce' Jessen and James Mitchell, authors of "Countermeasures to Al Qaeda Resistance to Interrogation Techniques," settled out of court with two survivors of Cobalt, known to prisoners as "the Darkness."
But while their story will not see the inside of a court, the 274 partially redacted documents released in the case have been obtained by The Guardian, and reveal the grim reality of life - and death - in the prison.
They include prisoners becoming so broken they voluntarily climb onto waterboards, and one prisoner freezing to death in the prison because Jessen told guards that complaining of cold was a "resistance strategy."
Jessen and Mitchell were contract psychologists, hired to produce the 2002 paper "Countermeasures to Al Qaeda Resistance to Interrogation Techniques."
To produce it, they reverse-engineered the Manchester Manual, a handbook for extremists that, in part, explained the torture that can be expected in authoritarian regimes.
Unfortunately, the pair regarded all advice in the book as "resistance strategies" that reveal a prisoner to be putting up a front to their interrogators. That included things like requesting a lawyer, asking for medical aid and reporting torture - that is, the kinds of things practically any prisoner might be expected to do.
As a result, Cobalt - under their guidance - responded to prisoners' requests for clemency, pain, and fear of death with continued brutality.
Despite admitting at the very beginning of their paper that they 'are not experts in Arab culture or the organization of al-Qaida,' Jessen and Mitchell successfully sold their techniques to the CIA and U.S. government in PowerPoint presentations in the spring of 2002.
They would go on to receive $80 million from the CIA for their consultancy on torture.
By April, they were proposing that captives be placed in soundproof cells out of the reach of the Red Cross, national or international observers, or the press. And in June they wrote a list of 'techniques' that would be used to torture prisoners. They included 'walling' - slamming people into flexible walls - confining people in cramped boxes for hours, and waterboarding.
The aim, they said, was "to reach the stage where we have broken any will or ability of subject to resist or deny providing us information."
Before Cobalt was opened, that theory was tested out on Abu Zubaydah, who was waterboarded at least 83 times and placed in confinement boxes, according to documents that make his brutalization sound like a science experiment.
On day six of the 'aggressive phase' of his interrogation, Mitchell and his team wrote that they watched as "the interrogators pointed to the small box and said, 'You know what to do.'"
"The subject sat on the floor and scooted himself into the small box at 1000 hours without protest or additional instructions,' they said.
For eight hours he was placed in confinement boxes, walled and waterboarded, each time following their demands.
When told he could end it all by telling them what he knew, the subject said he had nothing.
Mitchell recommended that the techniques used on Zubaydah at the Thailand-based facility "should be used as a template for future interrogation of high-value captives".
Zubaydah remains in captivity, in Guantanamo Bay. It was later noted that his responses "did not correlate well with his waterboarding sessions."
When he did speak up, the later report said, it was because "questioning had changed to subjects on which he had information".
In September 2002, Cobalt opened for business outside Kabul, Afghanistan - and its 20 cells were quickly filled to capacity.
In the regular cells, they were shackled to a metal ring in the wall and given a bucket to use as a toilet. In the sleep deprivation cells, they were shackled by their hands to the ceiling and made to defecate in diapers.
When diapers were not available, they stood bare from the waist down or defecated into makeshift diapers created using duct tape.
The cells were unheated, and subjected to blaring music every second of every day - an improvisation by the site's manager, identified as Matthew Zirbel in a report submitted to Congress, who bought the stereo himself.
The site was known as "the Darkness" by inmates - something explained by a CIA investigator who wrote up a report on the site for James Pavitt, the agency's deputy director for operations, in Jan. 2003.
"As to darkness," the report said, "that again was [Zirbel's] decision."
All of the lights were connected to a single switch, and "[f]aced with the choice to keep them on all the time or off all the time, he chose the latter".
Jessen told an investigator he had been impressed with the site - and these divergences from the initial directions. "The atmosphere was very good," he said. "Nasty, but safe."
But he was wrong on that last count. Jessen had been at the site to oversee the interrogation of Gul Rahman, a detainee who was interrogated for several weeks in November.
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Rahman, who was wearing only socks and a diaper in the unheated cells, was subjected to 48 hours of sleep deprivation and cold showers, and despite concerns by one supervisor that he might develop hypothermia, nothing was done.
In fact, it was suggested that he be subjected to "continued environmental deprivations with interrogations 18 out of 24 hours daily."
Jessen - who took part in six interrogations - was notified that Rahman "claimed inability to think due to [cold] conditions," "complained about poor treatment," and "complained about the violation of his human rights."
But Jessen said those were just "resistance strategies" from Rahman, who had spent two weeks in increasingly severe cold; the average temperature at night in Kabul in November is 29.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
Jessen left Cobalt on Nov. 14, 2002, but advised Rahman continue to undergo such extreme deprivation. Five days later, Rahman was dead of hypothermia. He had been left in his cell naked from the waist down.
Six months on, Mohamed Ben Soud and Suleiman Abdullah Salim were among 39 men placed in Cobalt, which now had a handful of electric heaters installed.
The men were beaten, walled, placed nude in plastic sheets surrounded by ice, and placed in confinement boxes for hours. They were eventually released after officials decided that they posed no threat.
They - and Rahman's family - would go on to sue Mitchell and Jessen, resulting in the release of the redacted documents detailing the horror at Cobalt.
But in 2003 they could not know of that; all they knew was that they were to spend the rest of their natural lives in agony, incapable of giving up the information that could set them free - or at least end the torture.
Meanwhile, Mitchell and Jessen were proving unpopular in CIA offices as their increasing prominence in the Agency's affairs began to stick in people's craws.
"Although these guys believe that their way is the only way, there should be an effort to define roles and responsibilities before their arrogance and narcissism evolve into unproductive conflict in the field,” a June 2003 memo said.
Their request to evaluate their own methods' effects was answered with: "no professional in the field would credit their later judgment as psychologists assessing the subjects of their enhanced measures."
And when they suggested helping to draft a new code of ethics for the CIA, it was remarked that they had "both shown blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues."
In May 2003, they were moved to "mostly strategic consulting work, research, and program development projects."
Over the next four years, increasing scrutiny on the pair's "enhanced interrogation techniques" saw them pushed further and further from the CIA's center.
In 2006, four of the techniques were thrown out in accordance with the new Military Commissions Act.
After the settlement was obtained between Mitchell, Jessen, Ben Soud, Salim and Rahman's family, the consultants' main lawyer, James Smith, said that the treatment endured at the camp, while "regrettable," was not the fault of his clients.
"If this case had gone forward, the facts would have borne out that while the plaintiffs suffered mistreatment by some of their captors, none of that mistreatment was conducted, condoned or caused by Drs. Mitchell and Jessen," Smith said.
This article has been adapted from its original source.
