James E. Mitchell

James E. Mitchell was born in 1952. He began his career in the United States Air Force in 1975, initially disarming unexploded ordnance and later working as a hostage negotiator at Lackland Air Force Base. He left the military in the early 1980s to pursue higher education, earning a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Alaska and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of South Florida in 1986. Following his academic pursuits, Mitchell returned to the Air Force. In 1988, he became the chief of psychology at the Air Force survival school at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. In this role, he supervised trainers who role-played as enemy interrogators for military personnel undergoing Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. By 1996, Mitchell served as a psychologist for a unit within the Air Force Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He retired from the Air Force as a Lieutenant Colonel in mid-2001.

After the September 11 attacks, James E. Mitchell became a contractor for the CIA. In 2002, he, along with fellow psychologist John Bruce Jessen, developed an interrogation program based on al-Qaeda documents regarding resistance to interrogation, leading to what were termed “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Mitchell personally applied some of these techniques, notably waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times over 15 days in March 2003. In 2005, Mitchell and Jessen co-founded Mitchell Jessen and Associates to continue this work, receiving $81 million from the CIA before their contract was canceled in April 2009. The CIA Inspector General concluded there were no scientific grounds to believe the program was medically safe or effective. In 2020, Mitchell testified at Guantánamo Bay regarding his role in the interrogation program. He has defended his actions in media and in his 2016 book, “Enhanced Interrogation.”

In 2010, an ethics complaint was filed against Mitchell in Texas, alleging violations of professional rules. The American Psychological Association supported the complaint, stating Mitchell’s alleged actions were “patently unethical.” However, the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists dismissed the complaint in 2011 due to insufficient evidence. In 2014, The New York Times editorial board called for his prosecution, and Human Rights Watch echoed this call in 2015. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against Mitchell and Jessen in October 2015 on behalf of former detainees subjected to these methods. The lawsuit was settled in August 2017.