How the War on Terror Became a Lucrative Business
By Alastair Sloan
January 1, 2015
Speaking about the external contractors who designed the CIA torture program, the recently released report of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee stated: “Neither had any experience as an interrogator, knowledge of Al-Qaeda, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”
What Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Jessen did have was a check for a cool $80 million. For some, the war on terror was already becoming a lucrative business. In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a new company, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, was set up by the two former U.S. air force psychologists to service the CIA’s interrogation program, and rake in the profits.
While in the air force, the pair had trained U.S. troops on how to resist torture. Yet neither had ever conducted a real interrogation. They knew nothing about extracting accurate information from suspects. Instead, they created fantasy torture sessions to harden up their trainees, sessions which they simply reverse-engineered for the CIA torture program.
The Senate report suggests that the two engaged in a proactive sales approach: “After a decision was made to use coercive interrogation techniques ... [Mitchell and Jessen] played a role in convincing the CIA to adopt such a policy.” Were the two snake oil salesmen? The Senate Committee thinks yes. Their techniques, which ranged from waterboarding to forced rectal feeding, produced not a single useful lead.
The FBI warned as much. In 2002, their agents were interrogating Abu Zubaydah at a “black site” in Thailand, when CIA investigators, accompanied by Mitchell and Jessen, suddenly took over. The FBI was amazed: the standard procedure of gentle treatment and clever questioning had already revealed the whereabouts of terrorist leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The FBI was ushered out. Abu Zubaydah was tortured. The FBI’s proven techniques were sidelined, while the CIA claimed credit for the information that had earlier been gleaned by the FBI. The question is what made the CIA choose a radical, violent and ineffective method of interrogation over a proven, entirely legal technique developed by the FBI over decades?
The situation has parallels with a procurement decision at the National Security Agency, America’s signals intelligence agency, also made shortly after 9/11. In the late 1990s, NSA engineers Bill Binney, Thomas Drake, Ed Loomis and Kirk Wiebe were tasked with creating a new telecommunications surveillance program. Their prototype – code-named Thinthread – encrypted all emails and phone calls unless the system automatically detected a possible threat. Thinthread had an audit feature to prevent abuse by analysts, and didn’t permanently store any data unless this was operationally necessary. It was entirely legal.
When tested by the Pentagon between 1998 and 2001, Thinthread performed brilliantly. And it was cheap – having been produced in-house and requiring minimal processing power and data storage.
Yet again, external contractors won the day. An alternative program, “Trailblazer,” was developed by Science Applications International Corporation, a private consortium. Unlike Thinthread, Trailblazer had no legal safeguards. It collected everything – requiring huge levels of processing power and massive data storage facilities. All this would be provided by SAIC – who raked in $280 million from the deal.
Trailblazer was duly implemented shortly after 9/11, and over time, evolved into the infamous mass surveillance program code-named PRISM, which Edward Snowden exposed last year. Like the CIA torture program, PRISM is believed to have been largely ineffective, particularly because it collected too much information for analysts to sift through. The two programs are also alike in being operated almost exclusively by external companies.
The aftermath of 9/11 was a golden opportunity for security contractors. Institutional panic gripped Washington as officials scrambled to upgrade counterterrorism capabilities.
But office politics came into it too. Insiders put it to me this way: If the NSA had implemented Thinthread, or the CIA had adopted standard FBI techniques, they would have had to tell their superiors in Washington, with the panic of 9/11 bubbling around them: “I know we need to get these terrorists, but we’re just going to keep going with what we’ve already got. It works. Okay?”
Instead, savvy political operators, with an eye on their future careers and understanding the paranoia in government at the time, went with an expensive option delivered by outside contractors.
Now the message was: “Don’t worry, we understand the challenge. So we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this swanky new program with every bell and whistle imaginable. And yes, we will get those terrorists!”
The heads of the NSA and CIA surely knew the latter messaging would reassure politicians more, regardless of whether their chosen programs were legal or even productive. But thanks to these choices the world doesn’t appear to be any safer, and America’s reputation will be forever tarnished.
Alastair Sloan is a columnist for Al-Jazeera and Middle East Monitor and regularly contributes to the Guardian. He is based in London and frequently travels the Middle East. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
Source: http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Opinion/Commentary/2014/Dec-31/282704-how-the-war-on-terror-became-a-lucrative-business.ashx#sthash.uW1llRna.dpuf
URL: https://newageislam.com/war-terror/how-war-terror-became-lucrative/d/100789