Both Swigert and Dunbar lacked previous involvement in any real-world interrogations, the Senate Committee found, and had proposed a policy of torture developed decades earlier by the US based on resisting torture tactics that the North Vietnamese might have used against American troops. Regardless of their inexperience and their insistence on using crude techniques intended to sometimes bring detainees close to death, however, the government gave both contractors millions of dollars over the course of several years to oversee the program they orchestrated under then-President George W. Bush.
“Neither psychologist had experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of Al-Qaeda, a background in terrorism or any relevant regional, cultural or linguistic expertise,” the Senate report reads.
Nevertheless, the contractors "implicitly proposed continued use of the technique – at a daily compensation reported to be $1800/day, or four times that of interrogators who could not use the technique,” the Senate found.
As recently as June 2013, the CIA stood by their decision to contract the two men, telling the Intelligence Committee that Swigert and Dunbar’s “academic research” and “research papers” made them credible architects of the interrogation program. In response, the SIC wrote that the CIA failed to “describe any experience related to actual interrogations or counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural, geographic or linguistic expertise” exhibited by either man.
