Fascinating interview with the guy who literally taught the CIA how to torture.
One of the most interesting nuggets is James Mitchell’s point on the efficacy of torture and whether it yielded intelligence.
But Mitchell is largely responsive to Larsen’s questions, and perhaps the most striking moment is when he reacts to the intelligence committee’s findings that torture had not yielded actionable intelligence. It wasn’t supposed to, he says. It was supposed to make detainees more responsive to other questioning.
“It’s almost like a good cop, bad cop kind of set-up,” he says, “with a really bad cop.”
The point, he says, “was to facilitate getting actionable intelligence by making a bad cop that was bad enough that the person was engage with the good cop,” Mitchell continues. “I would be stunned if they found any kind of evidence that EITs, as they were being applied, yielded actionable intelligence.”
Watch the video.
