The corporate crooks behind the US torture program

Waterboarding and Price Gouging

By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

The shameful revelations in the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA torture program are, as the New York Times editorial board put it, “a portrait of depravity.” At the same time, they constitute one of most serious federal contracting scandals of all time.

Although it sounds like an idea dreamed up by the writers of the TV series Homeland, it turns out that the creation of the “enhanced interrogation” system was left to a pair of contractors, neither of whom, as the report states, “had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa’ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”

The contractors had previously worked with the U.S. Air Force’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) school, which was created to helped military personnel deal with coercive interrogation techniques to which they might be exposed if taken prisoner by a country that did not adhere to the Geneva Convention. That was before the U.S. became one of those countries.

Referred to in the report by the pseudonyms Dr. Grayson Swigert and Dr. Hammond Dunbar, the two are psychologists whose real names are reported to be James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen. Their firm, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates of Spokane, Washington, is said to have been paid $81 million by the CIA for its dubious services. 

The agency thoughtfully provided the firm “a multi-year indemnification agreement to protect the company and its employees from legal liability arising out of the program.”

Among the brutal methods promoted by Mitchell and Jessen was waterboarding, which the report says they described as an “absolutely convincing technique.”

It may have been the case that the water used for that torture was provided by another rogue contractor. The Justice Department recently announced that Supreme Group BV would pay $288 million in criminal fines and a $146 million civil settlement in connection with allegations that it grossly overcharged the federal government while supplying food and bottled water to U.S. personnel in Afghanistan, one of the countries where the torture took place.

Supreme Group, which is based in the Netherlands but has its main operating base in Dubai, had been awarded an $8.8 billion supply contract that was extended twice before coming to an end in 2013. 

The fraud was uncovered thanks to a whistleblower inside the company. Despite the egregious nature of the charges and the hefty penalties, Supreme is not, according to the Wall Street Journal, being barred from seeking new federal business.

The abuses of Mitchell and Jessen deserve to be judged more harshly than those of Supreme Group, but they are both examples of the loose morals of many of the parties selling their services to the federal government. Each in its own way serves as a rebuttal to those who extol outsourcing and the superiority of the private sector.