James Mitchell, who designed the CIA’s torture program, and who tortured people himself, has a sad over the prospect of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report describing how f%$#evil and twisted he is:

Mitchell insists the torture techniques he developed had produced results, and is dismissive of critics of the CIA program. Photograph: US Department of Defense/AP

The psychologist regarded as the architect of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program has broken a seven-year silence to defend the use of torture techniques against al-Qaida terror suspects in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

In an uncompromising and wide-ranging interview with the Guardian, his first public remarks since he was linked to the program in 2007, James Mitchell was dismissive of a Senate intelligence committee report on CIA torture in which he features, and which is currently at the heart of an intense row between legislators and the agency.

The committee’s report found that the interrogation techniques devised by Mitchell, a retired air force psychologist, were far more brutal than disclosed at the time, and did not yield useful intelligence. These included waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation for days at a time, confinement in a box and being slammed into walls.

But Mitchell, who was reported to have personally waterboarded accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, remains unrepentant. “The people on the ground did the best they could with the way they understood the law at the time,” he said. “You can’t ask someone to put their life on the line and think and make a decision without the benefit of hindsight and then eviscerate them in the press 10 years later.”

It’s nice to know that your alibi would apply to Nazi war criminals as well.

BTW, he continues to claim that torture worked, but as whistleblower Steve Keinman observes:

Steven Kleinman, an air force colonel who participated in interrogations in Iraq and who is credited with blowing the whistle on abuses taking place there, told the Guardian he did not understand how Mitchell could still believe torture methods that generated false confessions could also produce “reliable, accurate and timely intelligence”.

“Why would anybody think that a model that would produce those outcomes would also be effective in producing the opposite?” Kleinman said.

Charlie Pierce correctly derided him as, “another monster“:

Let us be quite clear. Nobody in the torture chambers — and certainly not Mitchell — was being asked to “put his life on the line.” If you have someone fastened to a plank, and you’re pouring water into his mouth to make him believe he’s drowning, he is in no position to threaten your life. James Mitchell was not in any kind of danger, unless whatever vestigial conscience he had came to life and ate him alive, which I sincerely doubt. There is no excuse for what we did. September 11 is no excuse. It wasn’t a matter of the “people on the ground” not understanding the law. It was a matter of them not caring what the law was because they had a thin legal excuse ginned up for them by pet lawyers in the employ of sociopaths. Mitchell should be facing a tribunal for war crimes, not whining about an unflattering Senate committee report.

He should be sharing a cell with John Yoo, who said that it was OK to crush the testicles of a child to get their parent to talk.

The problem with, “Looking forward, not backward,” as Obama is wont to say is that these people continue to poison our national culture.

Of course, looking backward, and charging the malefactors of the Bush administration would set a precedent that might lead to Obama charged for the excesses of his murder by drone program, but I really don’t care if any of them, from either administration, do some well-deserved time in a deep dark hole.