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 "It's a bunch of hooey," James Mitchell told Reuters from his home
in Florida when asked for his response to the Senate Intelligence
Committee's findings released on Tuesday. "Some of the things are
just plain not true."
A day after the Senate report was issued, the U.S. Defense
Department said it was shutting its detention facility at Bagram and
no longer has custody of any prisoners in Afghanistan, closing
another controversial chapter of Washington's long fight against
Islamic militancy.
The United States faces mounting criticism from the United Nations
as well as foreign governments that Washington often reprimands for
human rights violations.
The Senate report concluded CIA interrogation tactics were
ineffective and often too brutal.
The CIA paid $80 million to a company run by the two former Air
Force psychologists without experience in interrogation or
counter-terrorism who recommended waterboarding, slaps to the face
and mock burial for prisoners captured after the Sept. 11, 2001
attacks, according to the Senate investigation.
 Mitchell and his colleague, Bruce Jessen, are referred to in the
report by pseudonyms but intelligence sources have identified them
by name. Jessen could not be reached for comment.
The report accused them of violating professional ethics as
architects of a system that committee chair Dianne Feinstein said
amounted to the torture of some CIA detainees.
In a brief telephone interview, Mitchell declined to specify what he
considered wrong in the report, citing a non-disclosure agreement
with the government.
But he suggested political bias was behind the report, which was put
together by the committee's Democratic majority and which he said
sought to "smear" those involved in the program.
The CIA outsourced more than 80 percent of its interrogation program
to the company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates of Spokane, Washington,
for its work from 2005 until the termination of the arrangement in
2009.
The American Psychological Association called the details in the
report "sickening and reprehensible" and while saying that Jessen
and Mitchell were not members and therefore outside the reach of its
disciplinary process, it said they should be held "fully
accountable" for violations of human rights and laws.
U.S. JAIL AT BAGRAM CLOSED
Also on Wednesday, the Pentagon said it had closed its last
detention facility at Bagram airfield, the largest U.S. base in
Afghanistan, with the transfer to Afghan custody of two Tunisians
and the release of a Jordanian.
The U.S. military had rushed to empty the small jail of prisoners it
would no longer be allowed to keep in Afghanistan when the mission
for U.S.-led force there ends later this month.
A U.S. official said the prisoner transfers was a legal requirement
under a U.S.-Afghan security pact and was not related to the Senate
report.
But among those handed over to Afghan authorities was Redha
al-Najar, a Tunisian who is one of the longest-serving detainees
from the U.S. "war on terror." He was captured as a suspected
bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden in May 2002.
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Najar was one of the first objects of harsh interrogation techniques
in a CIA "dungeon" near Kabul, his lawyer told Reuters, and the
Senate report said his treatment became a model for other detainees
at secret CIA prisons. Some U.S. allies either condemned the CIA's
methods or played down any involvement, fearing embarrassment or
legal liability for any role in the CIA's "enhanced interrogations"
during the administration of former President George W. Bush.
"The CIA's practice of torture is gruesome," German Justice Minister
Heiko Maas told German newspaper Bild. "Everybody involved must be
legally prosecuted."
Zeid Ra'ad Al-Hussein, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights,
said according to the Convention Against Torture, not even a state
of war justified torture.
The White House said the Justice Department had reviewed the
interrogations and found no reason to indict anyone.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney told Fox News the report was "full
of crap." "How nice do you want to be to murderers of 3,000
Americans on 9/11?" Cheney asked. "We were perfectly justified in
doing it and I'd do it again in a minute."
China, Iran and North Korea, regularly under fire for their human
rights records, prodded Washington on its methods.
"China has consistently opposed torture," Foreign Ministry spokesman
Hong Lei said. "We believe that the U.S. side should reflect on
this, correct its ways and earnestly respect and follow the rules of
related international conventions."
A Twitter account associated with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah
Ali Khamenei said the report showed the U.S. government was a
"symbol of tyranny against humanity."
North Korea's Foreign Ministry accused the United Nations of
ignoring "inhuman torture practiced by the CIA" while focusing too
much on Pyongyang's human rights practices.
(Additional reporting by Frank Jack Daniel in Kabul and Peter Cooney
in Washington; Editing by James Dalgleish and Lisa Shumaker)
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