Qualifications

The New York Times has the first of a two-part series out on the psychologists who helped design the Bush administration's interrogation program, and as I wrote on Monday about Xe/Blackwater, it's really not clear that the two men who designed the program were actually qualified for the jobs they were given:

They had never carried out a real interrogation, only mock sessions in the military training they had overseen. They had no relevant scholarship; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy. They had no language skills and no expertise on Al Qaeda.

But they had psychology credentials and an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists. For an administration eager to get tough on those who had killed 3,000 Americans, that was enough.

Once again, totally irrespective of whether you think the interrogation tactics used by the C.I.A. on prisoners were torture, or justified, it seems astonishingly unwise to have chosen people with those scant qualifications to design an interrogation program at all.