It's Cruel. It's Useless. It's the CIA.

One of the most unnerving parts involves the fact that the waterboarding, ice baths and wall-slamming were conducted under the direction of an outside contractor. It isn't the first time the government turned to private enterprise and wound up with a human rights disaster - think Abu Ghraib. Or Blackwater. But this seems like an excellent place to demand a cease-and-desist. The specialists' names are James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Like many contractors doing work for the government, they're former government workers themselves - in this case, military psychologists. And like virtually all contractors doing work for the government, they were making a heck of a lot more than they'd have gotten as federal employees. In this case, about $80 million. Mitchell and Jessen had acquired their expertise by teaching Air Force officers how to resist brutal Cold War-style interrogations. Think pilots who get shot down behind enemy lines and get tortured by Communists. And for all we know, they may have done a great job showing their pupils how to withstand pressure to record a statement denouncing the United States when they crash land in North Korea.

But it's not precisely the same thing as trying to get a suspected al-Qaida operative to tell you where Osama bin Laden is hiding. Plus, Mitchell and Jessen had no experience as actual interrogators, did not speak any of the detainees' languages and had no particular knowledge about Islam or al-Qaida.