Dr James Mitchell is alleged to have devised the agency’s advanced interrogation system. Source: Supplied

Former US Air Force psychologist Dr James Mitchell is believed to have devised the agency’s “advanced interrogation” methods.

The ten central techniques include confinement with insects, sleep deprivation, exposure, stress positions and, most disturbing of all, partial drowning through waterboarding.

Dr Mitchell is alleged to have personally applied these tactics on alleged terrorists including 9/11 suspects Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, an al-Qaeda facilitator who was allegedly waterboarded 83 times in a month.

Dr Mitchell has signed a non-disclosure agreement, which means he cannot say whether he was one of the two contract psychologists who devised the Enhanced Interrogation Tactics program for the CIA.

But he met with Vice in Tampa, Florida, to talk about his views on the techniques used.

Dr Mitchell is the father of the Air Force’s Survival Evasion Resistance Escape program, which taught men and women to avoid giving intelligence to the enemy. Many believe SERE was reverse-engineered to create the EIT program.

When asked if waterboarding constitutes torture, Dr Mitchell said: “I don’t think it’s the right thing to do, I don’t think it’s the wrong thing to do.

“I think can you can do it in a way that it constitutes torture, I think can you can do it in a way that it constitutes training, I think can you can do it in a way that it helps a person shift their priorities so they experience less abuse later on.

“It’s like every tool in the toolbag. You can underuse it, you can overuse it.”

Dr Mitchell believes there has to be a debate over interrogation tactics.

The retired Air Force psychologist is said to have come up with the techniques outlined in the shocking report on CIA torture. Source: Supplied

“To me it seems completely insensible that slapping KSM (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) is bad, but sending a hellfire missile into a family’s picnic and killing all the children and killing granny and killing everyone is OK, for a lot of reasons, and one of those reasons is what about that collateral loss of life and the other one is, if you kill them you can’t question them.

“I don’t really want to go into the details of it, but there will be some people who will withhold information, and some of those will be responsive to coercive ... The suggestion that no coercion is ever used by our law enforcement or by the FBI is just silly.”

He refers to two books on EIP — Hard Measures by Jose Rodriguez and Courting Disaster by Marc Thiessen.

“What they said in their books was the purpose was to get the detainee to be willing to engage with the debriefer or a targeter who was asking the question, and it wasn’t designed so you would ask questions about actual intelligence while the detainee was experiencing the EIP.

“It was almost like a good cop bad cop kinda setup, with a really bad cop.

“I would be stunned if they found any kind of evidence to suggests that EITs as they were being applied yielded actionable intelligence.

Dr Mitchell is alleged to have personally used such techniques on terror suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind. Source: AP

“I’m not going to say if it was me or wasn’t me, but if you read Jose Rodriguez’s book, he says that the contractor they sent’s job was to look at the resistance strategies the detainee was employing and make suggestions to the FBI and CIA team.”

Dr Mitchell’s name was first mentioned in association with EIT in a 2005 New Yorker article. Human rights advocates and a congressional committee have tried to hold him accountable.

Joseph Margulies, Abu Zubaydah’s lawyer, tried to petition the Texas State Board of Psychologists to strip him of his licence to practice, claiming he violated his profession’s ethics.

Zubaydah was the only detainee subjected to all ten techniques Dr Mitchell allegedly developed.

“There was no foundation in science or psychology for that,” Margulies told Vice. “What he engaged in was torture and there should be consequences ... What he did was wrong and something no psychologist should ever do. He clearly needs to be held accountable.”

Abu Zubaydah, another 9/11 terror suspect, was a guinea-pig for these techniques, and was allegedly subjected to all ten of the EITs, being waterboarded 83 times in a month. Source: AP

In the video, the retired military man shows Vice reporter Kaj Lersen a floor to ceiling bookshelf in his home filled with books on Islam.

He said he became got interested in the religion around 1995, when a very close friend, Don Hutchings, was captured by Kashmiri separatists under the control of Omar Sheikh.

Sheikh was convicted of beheading reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, although some believe it was KSM who actually murdered the journalist, including Dr Mitchell.

“I started trying to figure out, what is this about, who are these people?” he said.

“I can understand why people would think, OK, I sort of deserve that kind treatment if I get rolled up, but Don was the most gentle man on the planet.

“I don’t give a damn whether you worship, what god you worship which way you face when you worship what kind of building you worship in, I don’t care, but literally when you want to kill my friends you want to kill my family and you want to destroy my way of life, you’ve got my full attention.”

Dr Mitchell says waterboarding is “like every tool in the toolbag.” Source: AAP

Of jihadists, he says: “One thing that’s clear is it’s not a mental health disorder, they’re not crazy, they’re not part of some cult.

“We tend to think of them as suicidal fanatics, as people who have some kind of problem with their identity and somehow are brainwashed.

“What I would say is it’s less like becoming some kind of suicidal maniac and more like becoming a Jedi warrior.”

The New York Times has alleged that waterboarding was used on IS captive James Foley, who was later beheaded on video.

“I feel horrible about that I really do,” says Dr Mitchell. “But I think the primary responsibility for that lies with the media. Because the program was classified, they’re the ones that spread it out in public, made it a hotbed issue ... so they kind of highlighted it as something you would want to do and I’m surprised more people aren’t doing it.

“Do we stop shooting people because the bad guys shoot people?

“To be candid with you, if you’re going to break someone’s legs or waterboard someone, they’d probably prefer you break their legs because it’s less distressing, oddly enough. But if you’re rescuing them you would probably prefer them be waterboarded.

“You could take any technique and turn it into torture ... real torture as legally defined.”

All Dr Mitchell wants is to tell his story. “I think I should be 100 per cent responsible for everything I did. I think I should be zero per cent responsible for all those things people dream up that I did.”