‘The psychologist behind the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program has said that the waterboarding technique was so gruesome even CIA officials cried when witnessing the act.
During Wednesday’s pretrial hearing in the case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, psychologist James Mitchell claimed that the officials started crying when he performed a modified waterboarding technique.
Abu Zubaydah was one of the first prisoners to be waterboarded. The technique was used 83 times on him in August 2002.
Mitchell said that once he started cooperating with interrogators at a secret prison in Thailand in 2002, he and his colleague psychologist John ‘Bruce’ Jessen tried to get officers in the CIA to stop the program. But Mitchell says the pair were met with scrutiny.
‘They said that we were p*****s, that we had lost our spine,’ Mitchell testified. If another attack were to occur, Mitchell and Jessen were told that they ‘would have blood of dead Americans on their hands’.
Mitchell told the officials he would only continue with the program if they came to see it in action, telling them to ‘bring their rubber bots and come on down.’ ‘
