We're Paying Legal Bills for Torturers!!

Taxpayers Paying Torture Contractors' Legal Bills

Dec. 17, 2010 - Taxpayers are currently paying the legal bills for Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two CIA contractors who reportedly helped plan and execute the Bush administration's "enhanced interrogation" program, the Associated Press' Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo reported Thursday night. The CIA agreed to pay up to $5 million to cover legal fees for the two men—far more than the standard amount that would be covered for employees of the agency (during the Bush administration, it was standard practice for CIA officers to pay half of the cost of insuring themselves against possible legal action).

Mitchell and Jessen were reportedly at the center of the effort to reverse-engineer interrogation methods from the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training. The SERE training itself was based on interrogation methods that Chinese communists used to extract confessions from American prisoners during the Korean War. Many, if not most, of those confessions were false. In other words, Mitchell and Jessen developed interrogation methods based on training that was based on Chinese techniques the US had described as torture. (The Bush administration reportedly paid them between $1,000 and $2,000 per day to do it.) {continued}