To add one thing to Marcy’s great post on the psychological profile of Abu Zubaydah — probably written by James Mitchell and included in the CIA inspector general report on torture — it’s remarkable that there wasn’t mention in the IG report about how the thing represented a massive conflict of interest for Mitchell, the only psychologist around for AZ’s interrogation. Up at the Washington Independent:

All of these things taken together indicate a brief for torturing Abu Zubaydah, said Steven Reisman, a psychological ethics adviser to Physicians for Human Rights, and not an impartial psychological profile. “If you were trying to experiment [with torture], you would write a psychological report just like this,” he said, as it emphasizes Abu Zubaydah’s alleged resilience, facility with resistance, and knowledge of al-Qaeda’s operations. Indeed, there’s a reference in the report to a presumption that Abu Zubaydah is “probably well-versed regarding al-Qa’ida’s captivity and resistance training.” In late 2001, as the CIA inspector general’s report reminds (and the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 report has already disclosed), CIA contracted with an “independent contractor psychologist” with experience in the SERE program to describe precisely that captivity and resistance training”; that psychologist, James Mitchell, took direct part in Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation.

Now, maybe the criticism is all redacted. I don’t know. But if so, that’s an abuse of redaction. Protecting a (former) contractor? Again, I don’t know if Helgerson does or doesn’t explore Mitchell’s conflicts here, and as you can see my premise — that it was Mitchell who wrote the assessment — is almost-certainly-true but still unproven. The unredacted text does not have any discussion of such conflicts, however. And this is an inspector general‘s report, for golly goodness sakes.