No, the "team" did not include "experienced interrogators"
As the Senate report makes clear, we shunted aside experienced interrogators (like Ali Soufan) in favor of torturers who had never interrogated anyone. As I said, the now-wealthy contractors had indeed worked at SERE, and they did indeed reverse-engineer the illegal methods modeled there into a full-blown torture program, over the objection of people who actually were experienced interrogators. Among the great many things that the contractors didn't understand was that many of those they tortured weren't employing any "resistance techniques". Instead, they were producing no intelligence because they were entirely innocent. And even the guilty, like Abu Zubaydah, gave up all they had before they were tortured, but were nevertheless tortured at length until the contractors concluded that they really did have nothing more to give.
You say Mitchell put aside his moral objections to torture. But this assumes that he had moral objections in the first place. I see no evidence that this is so. He looks like an amoral greedhead to me. That guy is War Crimes, Inc.
