Scott Shane’s new article in the New York Times on the background to the Mitchell-Jessen story may work as a prosecutorial brief, but it presents a narrative about the origins of the SERE-inspired torture program that is misleading in its particulars. As a result, though the article has some interesting new bits of information, and appears to be the result of a great deal of work, it presents an overly simplistic

James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, the ex-military psychologists identified as primary architects of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogations techniques” torture program, apparently did not spend all their time on the battlefield. As the Bush administration-approved coercive interrogation techniques spread from Guantanamo and Afghanistan to the new war in Iraq, Mitchell and Jessen were cashing in on their new-found influence.

Leon Panetta’s latest filing in the ACLU FOIA lawsuit had this curious revelation:

Officials of the National Security Council (NSC) determined it… essential to limit access to the information in the program. NSC officials established a special access program governing access to information relating to the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program….

There’s been plenty of news and journalistic investigation on the torture enablers George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, John Yoo, Alberto Gonzalez, David Addington, and a host of other Bush administration figures. The CIA, too, has come in for its share of investigation and scutiny. But while the Senate Armed Services Committee conducted a months-long investigation and published last April a 200+ page report on Department of Defense abuse of