Everything they were doing to the trainees at SERE they did to you as well?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.
As Mitchell put it, “A lot of people spent time in that barrel.” At the time, that was part of the standard course.
Mitchell: I also took the advanced course. If you think the basic course is rough.…Dude.
3.
This is where the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program came from. The CIA came to Mitchell and Jessen and asked for their advice. The two of them had been working for years, designing and implementing what they believed to be the most effective interrogation technique imaginable, and the agency wanted to know what worked. So Mitchell and Jessen made a list, at the top of which was sleep deprivation, walling, and waterboarding. Waterboarding is where you’re placed on a gurney with your head lower than your feet, a cloth is placed over your face, and water is poured into your mouth and nose to produce the sensation of drowning. As it happened, waterboarding was one of the few techniques Mitchell and Jessen didn’t use at SERE. From the Air Force’s perspective, waterboarding was too good. They were trying to teach their people that resisting torture was possible, so it made little sense to expose them to a technique that, for most people, made resistance impossible.1 But to use on suspected terrorists? To many in the CIA, it made sense. As a precautionary step, he and Jessen tried it out on themselves first, each waterboarding the other—two sessions in total for each of them, using the most aggressive protocol, the forty-second continuous pour.
“We wanted to be sure the physicians could develop safety procedures and the guards knew what they were going to do, and we wanted to know what [the detainees] were going to experience,” he said.
MG: So describe what it was like.
Mitchell: You ever been on a super tall building and thought you might jump off? Knowing you wouldn’t jump off, but thought you might jump off? That’s what it felt like to me. I didn’t feel like I was going to die, I felt like I was afraid I was going to die.
When the Justice Department sent two senior attorneys to the interrogation site to confirm the legality of the techniques under consideration, Mitchell and Jessen waterboarded them too. One of the lawyers, he remembers, sat up afterward, dried her hair, and said simply, “Well, that sucked.”
Mitchell and Jessen developed a protocol. If a detainee was reluctant to answer questions, they would start with the mildest of “enhanced measures.” If the detainee persisted, they would escalate. Walling was a favorite, as was sleep deprivation. The Justice Department’s rules were that seventy-two hours of sleep deprivation was the maximum, but Mitchell and Jessen found that unnecessary. What they preferred to do was to let someone sleep, but not sleep enough; to systematically break up their REM cycles.
Waterboarding was the technique of last resort. They used a hospital gurney, tilted at 45 degrees. The Justice Department allowed them to pour at twenty- to forty-second intervals, separated by three breaths, for a total of twenty minutes. They preferred one forty-second pour, two twenty-second pours, and the remainder at three to ten seconds. “The main point,” Mitchell said,
is you don’t want it to go in their lungs, you just want it to go in their sinuses. We had no interest in drowning the person. We originally used water out of a one-liter bottle, but the physicians wanted us to use saline because some people swallowed the water and they didn’t want [them] to have water intoxication.
Before the first pour, they took a black T-shirt and lowered it over the subject’s face, covering their nose. “The cloth goes like this,” Mitchell said, miming the lowering of the shirt.
And then you lift the cloth up, and then you put the cloth down, and then you lift the cloth up, and then you put the cloth down, and you lift the cloth up, and you put the cloth down.
Literally, when you lift the cloth up, the pourer stops pouring. There’s a guy up there with a stopwatch and he’s counting the seconds so I know how many seconds it’s going on. We’ve got a physician right there.
The room was crowded. Typically, the chief of base would be there, the intelligence analyst responsible for the case, and a psychologist, among others. Another group was outside, watching the proceedings on a large TV monitor: more CIA experts, a lawyer, guards—a big group.