John Moore/Getty
Dr. James Elmer Mitchell, the psychologist behind the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program, spoke out for the first time Friday. "I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country by people at the highest level of government, and I did the best that I could,” he claimed. Mitchell is singled out in the soon-to-be-released Senate investigation into the CIA’s detention and interrogation program, which reports that torture did not gain useful intelligence. Mitchell says that’s not true. “In the fairyland they live in, all you have to do is give somebody some tea and a cookie, and everything will be OK,” he told The Guardian. He says people have no idea what the methods look like, and that “people who have this Jack Bauer mentality, I think, don't understand how intel networks work … I think this idea that you tape a guy's hands to the steering wheel and break his thumbs and he tells you where the bomb is and you go get it is a fantasy.”