Documents expose internal CIA feud

Highlighted sections in email exchanges among CIA personnel.

WASHINGTON — Newly released CIA documents expose a bitter internal feud over the qualifications and ethics of two former military psychologists who pushed the agency to adopt interrogation methods widely condemned as torture.

A series of internal emails reveal that the CIA’s own medical and psychological personnel expressed deep concern about an arrangement that put two outside contractors in charge of subjecting detainees to brutal measures including waterboarding, then also evaluating whether those methods were working or causing lasting harm.

In one of the more prescient warnings, an agency official wrote that “if some untoward outcome is later to be explained, their sole use in this role will be indefensible.” The message was dated June 2003, but seemed to anticipate the controversy that would engulf the agency when the details of the interrogation program were exposed.

The files, which also include documents that shed light on the death of a CIA prisoner in Afghanistan, were made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against the two contract psychologists, James Mitchell and J. Bruce Jessen, by the American Civil Liberties Union.

“Jim and Bob have both shown blatant disregard for the ethics shared by almost all of their colleagues,” a second CIA memo concluded.

The records reveal that internal opposition to the agency’s reliance on the two men was more extensive and intense than has been previously disclosed. More than 13 years after those emails were sent — and eight since the program was dismantled — the controversy has yet to fully subside.

Just last week, the nominee to be the next director of the CIA, Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., was asked during a Senate confirmation hearing whether he would comply if ordered by Presidentelect Donald Trump to resume the use of waterboarding and other methods on terrorism suspects.

“Absolutely not,” Pompeo said in the hearing, adding that he could not “imagine that I would be asked that by the presidentelect.” But Trump sent exactly that signal several times during the presidential campaign, and Pompeo has previously suggested that the United States went too far in banning coercive interrogation methods.