Today's must-read: the first, jaw-dropping article in the Times' important two-part series "Interrogation, Inc." Bear with me as I quote at some length:

Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were military retirees and psychologists, on the lookout for business opportunities. They found an excellent customer in the Central Intelligence Agency, where in 2002 they became the architects of the most important interrogation program in the history of American counterterrorism.They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.(...)At the C.I.A. in December 2001, Dr. Mitchells theories were attracting high-level attention. Agency officials asked him to review a Qaeda manual, seized in England, that coached terrorist operatives to resist interrogations. He contacted Dr. Jessen, and the two men wrote the first proposal to turn the enemys brutal techniques slaps, stress positions, sleep deprivation, wall-slamming and waterboarding into an American interrogation program.By the start of 2002, Dr. Mitchell was consulting with the C.I.A.s Counterterrorist Center, whose director, Cofer Black, and chief operating officer, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., were impressed by his combination of visceral toughness and psychological jargon. One person who heard some discussions said Dr. Mitchell gave the C.I.A. officials what they wanted to hear. In this persons words, Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings.

What a colossally foolish notion. By the spring of '02, Scott Shane reports, the United States had captured Abu Zubaydah. In Thailand, the FBI used traditional--and legal--"rapport-building methods" to gain information from Zubaydah. "Then the C.I.A. team, including Dr. Mitchell, arrived," Shane writes. "With the backing of agency headquarters, Dr. Mitchell ordered Mr. Zubaydah stripped, exposed to cold and blasted with rock music to prevent sleep. Not only the F.B.I. agents but also C.I.A. officers at the scene were uneasy about the harsh treatment." According to one official Shane interviewed, within weeks Mitchell was directly questioning Zubaydah.By the end of July, Mitchell's partner arrived in Thailand to assist in the interrogation. "On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times." Shane reports that it was only when Mitchell and Jessen decided they had gotten all the information Zubaydah would give up that the torture stopped. Even though Zubaydah surrendered the most valuable information before the Mitchell-Jessen techniques were tried, their methods were used on "at least 27 other prisoners," including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed--who was waterboarded 183 times.How much were these psychologists with no real-world interrogation experience and degrees in "family sculpting" and controlling hypertension paid for their services? One to two grand per day. According to Shane, "The companys C.I.A. contracts are classified, but their total was well into the millions of dollars."Not bad retirement work, if you can get it. Well, not bad financially, at least. Read the rest right here.