‘Rorschach and Awe’: HBO's Upcoming TV Movie about the CIA's Torture Methods

HBO Films' Rorschach and Awe, a made-for-TV a movie in development, which will be written and directed by Scott Z. Burns, will be chronicling the origins of the CIA's use of torture in tactical interrogation of suspected enemies of the state. Based on the July 2007 Vanity Fair article by Katherine Eban, the film will be exploring how the CIA hired and retained two psychologists to build a torture program with the full knowledge and cooperation of the American Psychological Association (APA) according to Deadline.

Eban in her article identified the two psychologists as James Elmer Mitchell and his colleague Bruce Jessen who were reportedly rewarded with $180 million in CIA contracts, $81 million of which had been paid before the agreement was terminated in 2009. The two previously worked in a classified military training program known as SERE-for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape-which trains American soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. They "reverse-engineered" the SERE tactics for use captured suspected enemies of the State and were put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal interrogation techniques, including "waterboarding," at the CIA's "black sites." In her article, Eban was told by Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and expert in human-intelligence operations, that he finds it astonishing that the CIA "chose two clinical psychologists who had no intelligence background whatsoever, who had never conducted an interrogation ... to do something that had never been proven in the real world."

Both the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have passed resolutions banning involvement by any of their members in military interrogations. However, as Eban observed, the larger American Psychological Association stand alone in allowing its members to participate in interrogations.

Writer and director Burns will also be executive producing the Rorschach and Awe film project through his Wandering Jew production company alongside Michael Sugar of Anonymous Content. American human rights investigator Nathaniel Raymond will be serving as consultant.