Page 109 - Malcolm Gladwell - Talking to Strangers

thing’s coming up around your neck, it’s coming up around your ears.
MG: You’re in darkness?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.…Maybe it wasn’t an hour, maybe it was less than that. I’m sure it was,
otherwise I’d have some hypothermia. It felt like an hour. Anyway I’m in this thing, and they
lower you down, and I think, “Oh, they’re going to put me in a barrel, see if I’m
claustrophobic. I’m not. No big deal to me.” Oh no. They stick the hose in, put that little metal
lid on, and then cover it up with rocks.

MG: Do they tell you beforehand what they’re going to do?
Mitchell: They tell you as they’re doing it.
MG: Everything they were doing to the trainees at SERE they did to you as well?
Mitchell: Oh yeah.
As Mitchell put it, “A lot of people spent time in that barrel.” At the time, that was part of the
standard course.
Mitchell: I also took the advanced course. If you think the basic course is rough.…Dude.

3.

This is where the CIA’s “Enhanced Interrogation” program came from. The CIA came to Mitchell
and Jessen and asked for their advice. The two of them had been working for years, designing and
implementing what they believed to be the most effective interrogation technique imaginable, and
the agency wanted to know what worked. So Mitchell and Jessen made a list, at the top of which
was sleep deprivation, walling, and waterboarding. Waterboarding is where you’re placed on a
gurney with your head lower than your feet, a cloth is placed over your face, and water is poured
into your mouth and nose to produce the sensation of drowning. As it happened, waterboarding was
one of the few techniques Mitchell and Jessen didn’t use at SERE. From the Air Force’s perspective,
waterboarding was too good. They were trying to teach their people that resisting torture was
possible, so it made little sense to expose them to a technique that, for most people, made resistance
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impossible. But to use on suspected terrorists? To many in the CIA, it made sense. As a
precautionary step, he and Jessen tried it out on themselves first, each waterboarding the other—two
sessions in total for each of them, using the most aggressive protocol, the forty-second continuous
pour.
“We wanted to be sure the physicians could develop safety procedures and the guards knew what
they were going to do, and we wanted to know what [the detainees] were going to experience,” he
said.
MG: So describe what it was like.
Mitchell: You ever been on a super tall building and thought you might jump off? Knowing you
wouldn’t jump off, but thought you might jump off? That’s what it felt like to me. I didn’t feel
like I was going to die, I felt like I was afraid I was going to die.
When the Justice Department sent two senior attorneys to the interrogation site to confirm the
legality of the techniques under consideration, Mitchell and Jessen waterboarded them too. One of
the lawyers, he remembers, sat up afterward, dried her hair, and said simply, “Well, that sucked.”
Mitchell and Jessen developed a protocol. If a detainee was reluctant to answer questions, they
would start with the mildest of “enhanced measures.” If the detainee persisted, they would escalate.
Walling was a favorite, as was sleep deprivation. The Justice Department’s rules were that seventy-
two hours of sleep deprivation was the maximum, but Mitchell and Jessen found that unnecessary.
What they preferred to do was to let someone sleep, but not sleep enough; to systematically break
up their REM cycles.
Waterboarding was the technique of last resort. They used a hospital gurney, tilted at 45 degrees.
The Justice Department allowed them to pour at twenty- to forty-second intervals, separated by
three breaths, for a total of twenty minutes. They preferred one forty-second pour, two twenty-