The United States government paid two military psychologists $80 million to develop torture tactics that were used against suspected terrorists in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

In 2002, two former Air Force psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, became the masterminds of the CIA’s torture program, according to a report released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The two men, identified in the report under the pseudonyms Grayson Swigert and Hammond Dunbar, devised and performed torture tactics–including waterboarding and mock burial on some of the CIA’s most significant detainees.”

The report noted that neither of the men had previous experience as professional interrogators, nor did they have “specialized knowledge of al Qaeda, counterterrorism or any relevant cultural or linguistic experience.”
Even if one could get past the idea of paying someone to come up with new ways to torture people, the outrageous amount of taxpayer dollars spent on two individuals is simply unacceptable—especially when they didn’t seem to “invent” anything.

Still, they were in charge of developing the techniques and analyzing their effectiveness.