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 Qaeda 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 Qaeda.

They did have some theories about other psychologists’ work subjecting dogs to random electric shocks until their will to resist was completely broken. Maybe, the two men thought, you could torment human beings into the same state of “learned helplessness.” Worth a try, right? Mitchell and Jessen set about applying the theory to prisoners the C.I.A. had collected. Some of them had already been cooperating with interrogators. Others turned out later to have had no involvement with Al Qaeda whatsoever.

Others, undoubtedly, were bad people with information the C.I.A. needed, who had resisted talking under nonviolent interrogation. The question then becomes whether they cooperated better under “learned helplessness” or simply made up stories to placate their torturers and send the C.I.A. off in the wrong direction.

There’s a lot of precedent for the making-up approach. During World War II, an American pilot was shot down over Japan just after the Hiroshima attack and was tortured repeatedly for information about the atomic bomb, of which he knew nothing. Threatened with beheading, the pilot told his captors that the U.S. had 100 atomic bombs and that Tokyo was next on the target list. The bogus information was immediately shared with the war minister and the Japanese cabinet.

The Intelligence Committee report concludes that all the torturing produced very little information that was useful and possibly quite a bit that was made-up. While we would love to believe that the human rights angle would be most effective in shocking the American people, polls show that when it comes to suspects with possible terror involvement, the public attitude toward torture is kind of meh. So, wisely, the committee’s big point was useless/counterproductive.

“It’s wrong enough that one shouldn’t do it period. But wrong and useless is a tough combination,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island. He was on the Intelligence Committee when the report was being prepared and now leads a Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism.

And why the private contractors? Maybe because the actual government interrogators didn’t believe torture worked either. Some complained that, after Mitchell and Jessen arrived, reasonably cooperative prisoners were suddenly brutalized under the theory that the original approach had been too “sissified.”

What made the C.I.A. decide that these guys were a good plan? Have they not watched “Homeland” this season? (Ever since Saul left the C.I.A. to become a private consultant, he’s been a disaster.) “I do think there’s something about the culture of purchase: ‘We don’t have the answer, but we can buy it,’ ” said Baher Azmy, the legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Tim Shorrock, the author of “Spies for Hire,” believes it’s just a way to hide things: “The activities of contractors are so easy to conceal in budgets.”

Naturally, defenders of the C.I.A. are rising up to challenge the report’s findings. The Associated Press got hold of James Mitchell himself, who said that the report was “just factually, demonstrably incorrect,” then declined to say exactly what the inaccuracies were.

Citing a secrecy agreement with the C.I.A., Mitchell didn’t share much else, except that beingwaterboarded was still better than being killed by a drone.

By Gail Collins of the NY Times

The lapses could waste taxpayer money and place U.S. personnel at risk, according to the audit by the Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG).

Kabul embassy guards have warned of security weaknesses and management problems in a series of reports by the Project On Government Oversight.

The federal audit’s findings contrast with congressional testimony by Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, who last year told lawmakers: “Currently in Kabul we have a well-managed, effectively functioning contract that provides security to protect our people and facilities.”

The government has outsourced security for diplomatic posts in dangerous parts of the world to private contractors, and the State Department is responsible for making sure the contractors comply with requirements. The Department in 2010 selected a firm called Aegis Defense Services to protect the embassy compound in Kabul under a contract that began in 2012 and is potentially worth $723 million over five years.

However, the recently completed audit report by the OIG said the Department “did not ensure that Aegis maintained records documenting contract-required training and security screening for all employees” working on Kabul embassy security.

“[I]ncomplete documentation that guards are properly vetted places embassies and personnel at risk,” the OIG wrote.

The audit questioned millions of dollars of State Department payments to Aegis, saying certain labor charges for Aegis employees were not supported by the required time and attendance records, and that Department contracting officers approved certain Aegis invoices without adequately checking them.

The audit also said the Department had not done what it was supposed to do to uphold standards related to “Trafficking in Persons,” which are meant “to reduce the risk of abusive labor practices.”

Employees from Nepal make up much of Aegis’s security force in Kabul. Nepalese guards told auditors that their passports were being held by Aegis, in some instances for as long as four months for every six-month visa, the report said.

“Individuals who have their identity or travel documents forcibly removed from their person are rendered highly vulnerable,” the OIG report said. “Although OIG found no evidence that Aegis intended to prevent TCN [third-country national] workers from leaving Afghanistan by holding passports, holding them for such extended periods of time could negatively affect TCNs,” the report said.

The goal of the OIG audit was to determine how well the State Department was managing and overseeing Aegis’s contract. It focused mainly on administrative processes and paperwork—for example, how well certain matters were documented. As a result, it only indirectly addressed the actual security of the embassy. It did not get to the bottom of some basic questions such as whether Aegis personnel lacked security clearances, or whether the documentation of their clearances was merely missing from the files.

“We are not in a position to state with certainty why documentation was missing as we did not explore that specific question,” OIG spokesman Douglas Welty said in a statement to POGO.

Nor did the audit report address a variety of problems that POGO has documented and that guards have described since Aegis took over security at the Kabul embassy.

Guards have complained of working long hours for days on end with inadequate training. Records obtained by POGO have shown staffing shortfalls on certain shifts. Guards have sued Aegis, alleging that the firm has at times edited their time sheets and directed them to underreport the number of hours they worked to avoid revealing that they were on the job up to 18 hours per day. In addition, a State Department document published by POGO last year described a “mutiny” within the guard force that “undermined the chain of command” and “put the security of the Embassy at risk.”

Aegis spokesman Michael Gulino declined to comment when contacted by POGO, and he referred questions to the State Department. A State Department spokesman provided this statement by email, complete with anonymous attribution:

“’The department is on track toward strengthening security abroad and the inspector general’s report offers useful guidance for continuing that work. This is a timely snapshot of the progress being made, and we welcome and agree with the IG’s further recommendations for diplomatic security,’ said a department spokesman on background.”

As of February 2014, the State Department had expended about $224 million under the Aegis contract, the audit report said. As of April, Aegis was required to have 933 workers providing security for the embassy and other U.S. diplomatic facilities in Kabul, including 880 on “static security” (in other words, guard duty), the OIG report said

The report raised questions about the qualifications of people Aegis has hired to provide security. According to the report, the State Department had issued a “deficiency notice” to Aegis in November 2012, requiring remedial action to address “issues with Aegis’s candidate screening and recordkeeping.”

Among the problems the OIG identified in the files it reviewed, seven U.S. citizens employed by Aegis in Kabul “had no documented security clearance investigations.” In addition, fourteen Aegis explosive detection dog handlers “did not have documents showing they had completed required training.” The OIG reported that nine of the fourteen dog handlers with missing documents were “still active.”

The report said a deputy regional security officer at the State Department told the OIG that he had conducted a qualification and training checklist review of all contractor personnel before they began work on the contract. In written response to the OIG, the State Department’s Bureau of Administration said that Aegis “states that they are prohibited from sending clearance data to post and that is why it is stored separately.”

The OIG also examined a random sample of time and attendance data for Aegis workers from June 15, 2012, to December 31, 2013. It found that 6.5 percent of billable hours and 7.9 percent of billable days “were not supported.” The OIG said the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security told it that a time and attendance tracking system was not always working during the first five months of the contract.

The OIG said documentation of those matters improved significantly after the first six months of Aegis’s contract. In its response, State’s Bureau of Administration said early personnel musters “did have issues,” and it said it had reached a financial settlement with Aegis over those.

Based on its review of Aegis invoices, the OIG said that $8.6 million, about 4 percent of costs, were “possibly unallowable or not supported.” The Department “approved the invoices without adequately verifying the contractor’s invoices against the supporting documentation,” the report said. The questionable invoices included charges for training and travel.

In its response, State’s Bureau of Administration said Aegis invoices reflected acceptable travel agent costs. “A comprehensive review is not required because invoices are scrutinized routinely and our review of those invoices did not yield any discrepancies,” the Bureau of Administration added.

Lost or incomplete contracting files are nothing new at State. There are repeated examples of poor contract file administration. The result could be "substantial financial losses," according to a March 20, 2014 “Management Alert” from the OIG. Over the past six years, the management alert said, the OIG has identified State Department contracts with a total value of more than $6 billion in which contract files were incomplete or could not be located at all, the OIG reported. According to the OIG report on the Kabul embassy security contract, the State Department’s Bureau of Administration disagreed with some of the audit’s findings. In some instances, the OIG said the Bureau of Administration “did not identify any corrective actions to address the intent of the recommendation.”

The audit serves as another argument for the government to focus on the concerns of people who have served on the Kabul embassy guard force. The questions the Department and its congressional overseers should investigate run deeper than the paperwork in the files. Is the embassy at undue risk? Are taxpayer dollars being wasted? Is the contractor fulfilling its obligations? And is the State Department holding the contractor accountable?

 As reported by Project on Government Oversight