You might have seen the Jonathan Mann Paul Krugman song. Well Mann is back with a musical reading of the first of the recently released OLC memos (written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee, aka the Techniques Memo) providing retroactive legal justifications for the US torture program.
The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick reports today that
At least two dozen other former and current detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere say they were given drugs against their will or witnessed other inmates being drugged, based on interviews and court documents.
Warrick’s WaPo article gives a vivid account from Adel al-Nusairi, one of the detainees who has come forward.
Nusairi is among a handful of former detainees who directly allege the use of drugs in interrogations at the military prison in Guantanamo. Others described being forcibly given sedatives that knocked them out or made them groggy before being transferred, or being forced to take pills or receive shots for unclear reasons and suffering unusual symptoms afterward. At least one detainee has alleged in a written statement through his attorney that he was drugged after being “renditioned” or transferred by U.S. officials to a prison in Morocco.
Nusairi, in prison interviews in 2005 with Anant Raut, his attorney, described a six-month period in which he says his captors subjected him to drugs and temperature extremes to extract information about al-Qaeda connections they believed he had.
“They thought he was hiding something,” said Raut, who represented Nusairi and other Saudi detainees in 2005 and 2006 while working for the Washington office of the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges. “He was injected in the arm with something that made him tired — that made his brain cloudy. When he would try to read the Koran, his brain would not focus. He had unusual lethargy and would drool on himself.”
It was during one such episode, in an interrogation room Nusairi remembers as ice-cold, that he became so desperate for sleep that he signed a confession professing to involvement in al-Qaeda, according to his attorney’s notes. The interrogator watched him sign his name, and “then he smiled and turned off the air conditioner. And I went to sleep,” Nusairi said, according to the notes.
After the confession– which Nusairi later said was a lie — the Saudi remained at Guantanamo Bay for another three years before being turned over to his home country, which released him. “He signed the statement, and they declared him an enemy combatant,” Raut said, “yet they released him anyway with no explanation.” The Saudi Embassy declined to comment.
Nusairi and other detainees’ allegations that they were drugged have enormous ramifications.
“The use of drugs as a form of restraint of prisoners is both unlawful and unethical,” said Leonard Rubenstein, an expert on medical ethics and the president of Physicians for Human Rights. “These allegations demand a full inquiry by Congress and the Department of Justice.”
Scott Allen, a physician and co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights in Providence, R.I, noted that there are no accepted medical standards for the use of drugs to subjugate prisoners. Thus, any such use in interrogations “would have to be considered an experimental use of medicine.”
Medical experimentation on detainees is a violation of the Nuremberg Code. Physicians for Human Rights elaborated on this in a statement today:
The Helsinki Declaration and the Nuremberg Code establish standards for the protection of individual rights in human experimentation, which are largely codified in US law. They absolutely prohibit human experimentation without the consent of the subject. These ethical rules, the Nuremberg Code in particular, were created in response to human experiments conducted by German health professionals on prisoners during World War II. The doctors involved in those human rights abuses were later convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
It is all the more telling, then, that one of the Yoo memos released this month contains justifications of drugging:
Written to provide legal justification for interrogation practices, the memo by then-Justice Department lawyer John C. Yoo rejected a decades-old U.S. ban on the use of “mind-altering substances” on prisoners. Instead, he argued that drugs could be used as long as they did not inflict permanent or “profound” psychological damage. U.S. law “does not preclude any and all use of drugs,” Yoo wrote in the memo.
George Bush has recently acknowledged that he knew his senior advisors approved the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Did the Bush advisors also approve a program of drug experimentation on detainees? Is the President directly implicated in violations of the Nuremberg Code’s prohibitions on human experimentation?
Last Sunday, the New York Times reported that among hundreds of recently declassified intelligence documents from the 1950s was a 1950 proposal by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty….
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I would “apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous” to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under “a master warrant attached to a list of names” provided by the bureau.
“In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus,” it said.
The revelation was noted briefly by a couple of major blogs and discussed at some length by smintheus at DailyKos. All have been quick to note the parallels between Hoover’s attempt to suspend Habeas Corpus and the current travails of our fair and essential writ. Both the NY Times and smintheus emphasize that there is no evidence Hoover’s plan was approved.
Smintheus argues that horrible though it was that Truman created loyalty boards, it was to preempt
something even more abusive of civil liberties. Truman also feared that something truly evil might be stirred up by Hoover, whom he loathed. Truman told Clark Clifford on May 2, 1947 that he “wants to be sure and hold FBI down, afraid of ‘Gestapo’”. Truman believed, rightly I think, that Hoover had assembled enough dirt on members of Congress that they would give in to almost any of Hoover’s demands. In fact within hours of taking the oath of office in 1945, the President had his eye on the manipulative Hoover (Hoover had sent over to the White House a young FBI agent from Truman’s home town, to chat the new President up).
So the background to this notorious decision from 1947 illustrates that Truman, far from indifferent to the Bill of Rights, instead believed that he was fighting as best he could on its behalf. His profound skepticism of the FBI Director was both a personal as well as a politically savvy judgment. For all his faults (including cronyism, occasional ineptitude, stubbornness), Truman was at least a very sharp, self-reflective, and principled man. Such a person has the potential to rise above his times.
The impression one gets from reading the Times and smintheus is that though those were dark times, we averted something potentially much worse, in no small part because of Truman’s leadership.
Smintheus may be correct about Truman’s motive and strategy, but I don’t think halting mass detentions actually ameliorates the dangerousness of Hoover’s activities. Then and now, the news that the mass detentions did not occur is something of a red herring.
Actually, Hoover’s proposed suspension of Habeas Corpus and mass detentions is not news. The document reported on in the NY Times is new, but the plans have been known since The Church Committee’s famous 1976 Congressional report on “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans.”
Mass detentions—as well as illegal surveillance practices by the NSA—should be vigorously opposed, of course. But the fundamental problem is data mining as an approach to intelligence. Data mining is the basis for mass detentions and the emphasis on data mining as a method leads to illegal surveillance activities.
§ Read the rest of this entry…
Breaking news on the ‘Skeeter Bites Report:
A letter by a Virginia-based U.S. attorney to a federal appeals court appears to contradict CIA Director Michael Hayden’s public statements on the destruction of hundreds of hours of video footage of “extreme” interrogations of suspected al-Qaida operatives by strongly indicating that at least two of the videos still exist, The ‘Skeeter Bites Report has learned.
Charles Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, wrote that his office viewed two videotapes of CIA interrogations of al-Qaida suspects as recently as September 19 and October 18 of this year — contrary to Hayden’s statement that the tapes were destroyed in 2005.
Disclosure of the continued existence of these two videos is almost certain to intensify the controversy over the tapes that were destroyed — and accusations that the CIA is engaging in a cover-up of evidence that its operatives employed interrogation tactics outlawed as torture under both U.S. and international law.
Rosenberg’s five-page letter, addressed to Judge Karen Williams, chief judge of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia and to Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court in nearby Alexandria, was referring to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the lone suspect convicted in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Brinkema was the presiding judge in the Moussaoui trial. A copy of the letter, dated October 27, was obtained by The ‘Skeeter Bites Report.
Rosenberg wrote that his office was informed on September 13 by the CIA that the agency “obtained three recordings — two videotapes and one short audiotape — of interrogations” of suspected al-Qaida terrorists.
(More at the link.)
Glenn Greenwald explains.
Numerous Senate Democrats delivered dramatic speeches from the floor as to why Mukasey’s confirmation would be so devastating to the country. The Washington Post said the “vote came after more than four hours of impassioned floor debate.”
“Torture should not be what America stands for . . . I do not vote to allow torture,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy. Russ Feingold said: “we need an attorney general who will tell the president that he cannot ignore the laws passed by Congress. And on that fundamental qualification for this office Judge Mukasey falls short.” Feingold added: “If Judge Mukasey won’t say the simple truth — that this barbaric practice is torture — how can we count on him to stand up to the White House on other issues?”
Wow — it sounds as though there was really a lot at stake in this vote. So why would 44 Democratic Senators make a flamboyant showing of opposing confirmation without actually doing what they could to prevent it? Is it that a filibuster was not possible because a large number of these Democratic Senators were willing to symbolically oppose confirmation so they could say they did — by casting meaningless votes in opposition knowing that confirmation was guaranteed — but were unwilling to demonstrate the sincerity of their claimed beliefs by acting on them?
The Post said the vote “reflected an effort by Democrats to register their displeasure with Bush administration policies on torture and the boundaries of presidential power.” Apparently, they wanted to oh-so-meaningfully “register their displeasure” but not actually stop confirmation.
[The most amazing quote was from chief Mukasey supporter Chuck Schumer, who, before voting for him, said that Mukasey is "wrong on torture -- dead wrong." Marvel at that phrase: "wrong on torture." Six years ago, there wasn't even any such thing as being "wrong on torture," because "torture" wasn't something we debated. It would have been incoherent to have heard: "Well, he's dead wrong on torture, but . . . "
Now, "torture" is not only something we openly debate, but it's something we do. And the fact that someone is on the wrong side of the "torture debate" doesn't prevent them from becoming the Attorney General of the United States. It's just one issue, like any other issue -- the capital gains tax, employer mandates for health care, the water bill -- and just because someone is "dead wrong" on one little issue (torture) hardly disqualifies them from High Beltway Office.]
Over and over again this year, Republican filibusters were depicted (both by Senate Democrats and the media) as nothing more the routine need to obtain the “60 votes required” for passage of any measure in the Senate. That “requirement” was said to apply to everything, including immigration (“The Senate voted 52-44 for the DREAM Act, but 60 votes were required to end debate“); Iraq withdrawal timetables (“Support is expected to top 50 votes but fall short of the 60 required“); troop leave requirements (“Webb’s Iraq bill inches closer to 60 . . . . Winning at least three of those Republicans over could give the Democrats the 60 votes they need“); and warrantless surveillance (“Democratic-sponsored bill failed to reach the 60-vote majority“).
(Whole thing.)
I became aware of Naomi Klein’s work in the first month after Hurricane Katrina, when she had made a remarkable discovery about New Orleans: in neighborhoods that had been declared habitable by Mayor Nagin there were 23, 267 uninhabited apartments that could be rented to evacuees. I said then:
If each unit houses three people, that’s 70,000 out of the estimated 200,000 left permanently homeless in the aftermath of Katrina. That’s over one third. Bringing them home is only a matter of political will.
Klein argued that there was indeed political will, but it was hell bent on a far different outcome.
“Reconstruction,” whether in Baghdad or New Orleans, has become shorthand for a massive uninterrupted transfer of wealth from public to private hands, whether in the form of direct “cost plus” government contracts or by auctioning off new sectors of the state to corporations.
This vision was laid out in uniquely undisguised form during a meeting at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters on September 13. Present were members of the House Republican Study Committee, a caucus of more than 100 conservative lawmakers headed by Indiana Congressman Mike Pence. The group compiled a list of thirty-two “Pro-Free-Market Ideas for Responding to Hurricane Katrina and High Gas Prices,” including school vouchers, repealing environmental regulations and “drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Admittedly, it seems farfetched that these would be adopted as relief for the needy victims of an eviscerated public sector. Until you read the first three items: “Automatically suspend Davis-Bacon prevailing wage laws in disaster areas”; “Make the entire affected area a flat-tax free-enterprise zone”; and “Make the entire region an economic competitiveness zone (comprehensive tax incentives and waiving of regulations).” All are poised to become law or have already been adopted by presidential decree.
Klein had been developing this theme since before Hurricane Katrina and has now published her book on the subject, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Klein makes provocative connections between disaster capitalism and US torture policy.
In one of his most influential essays, [Milton] Friedman articulated contemporary capitalism’s core tactical nostrum, what I have come to understand as “the shock doctrine”. He observed that “only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change”. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. Some people stockpile canned goods and water in preparation for major disasters; Friedmanites stockpile free-market ideas. And once a crisis has struck, the University of Chicago professor was convinced that it was crucial to act swiftly, to impose rapid and irreversible change before the crisis-racked society slipped back into the “tyranny of the status quo”. A variation on Machiavelli’s advice that “injuries” should be inflicted “all at once”, this is one of Friedman’s most lasting legacies.
Friedman first learned how to exploit a shock or crisis in the mid-70s, when he advised the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Not only were Chileans in a state of shock after Pinochet’s violent coup, but the country was also traumatised by hyperinflation. Friedman advised Pinochet to impose a rapid-fire transformation of the economy – tax cuts, free trade, privatised services, cuts to social spending and deregulation.
It was the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere, and it became known as a “Chicago School” revolution, as so many of Pinochet’s economists had studied under Friedman there. Friedman coined a phrase for this painful tactic: economic “shock treatment”. In the decades since, whenever governments have imposed sweeping free-market programs, the all-at-once shock treatment, or “shock therapy”, has been the method of choice….
Torture, or in CIA parlance, “coercive interrogation”, is a set of techniques developed by scientists and designed to put prisoners into a state of deep disorientation.
Declassified CIA manuals explain how to break “resistant sources”: create violent ruptures between prisoners and their ability to make sense of the world around them. First, the senses are starved (with hoods, earplugs, shackles), then the body is bombarded with overwhelming stimulation (strobe lights, blaring music, beatings). The goal of this “softening-up” stage is to provoke a kind of hurricane in the mind, and it is in that state of shock that most prisoners give their interrogators whatever they want.
The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely. The original disaster – the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown – puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies. Like the terrorised prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would otherwise fiercely protect.
These connections between Friedmanite “shock doctrine” and US torture policy are made quite vivid in this short film, based on Klein’s book.
Recent reports say that the Senate is investigating detainee abuses by CIA and DoD personnel. It is therefore all the more important to keep public attention focused on US torture policy to ensure that there is a full accounting of the abuses that occurred and that there is a total ban on the twenty interrogation techniques, reportedly used by the CIA, which amount to torture and are illegal under US and international law. Check out this video from Physicians for Human Rights and use it to help spread the word.
In a surprising turn of events, Texas Governor Rick Perry granted clemency to death row inmate Kenneth Foster. Foster’s death sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment. Until the reprieve came, things were not looking good. As the San Francisco Bay View put it in an email message a few days ago:
Five of the seven members of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles must recommend clemency for Perry to even consider granting it. But Perry appointed the board members and, while it officially operates independently, the board is known to respond to pressure from the governor’s mansion.
“It’s my belief that if this does not become a political issue, then I have no chance,” Kenneth wrote shortly after receiving his execution date.
He’s right. Rick Perry won’t spare Kenneth out of the kindness of his heart. Having overseen 159 executions since he took office in 2001, Perry has outdone even his predecessor George W. Bush. This summer, Texas will carry out its 400th execution.
In rejoicing over the saving of Kenneth Foster’s life, we should remember two things:
After being moved to Polunsky, the men on Texas’ death row lost virtually all the privileges they enjoyed at the Ellis Unit. The new facility keeps the inmates in 23-hour administrative segregation inside 60 square foot cells with sealed steel doors. They have lost all group recreation, work programs, television access (some inmates are allowed radios), and religious services. There are no contact visits allowed at Polunsky, meaning that the men on death row will never make physical contact with anyone other than prison staff as they move toward their execution date. Inmates are only allowed one five minute phone call every six months, their mail is often censored, the quality of food is particularly low, and they are given inadequate health and dental services.
For a detailed account of life in the Polunsky death row unit in Texas, read “Actions and Re-actions” by inmate Derrick Jackson:
I am an insulin dependent diabetic and I am forced to be administered my shots in areas where chemical agents are being sprayed and body waste of others is thrown and not cleaned. If one man is gassed all those in the immediate area suffer as I have at many times. Often the chemical agents used are in excess and are not necessary and protocol in use is not followed. Inmates who are secure in their cells, at the whim of an official can be subject to the use of chemical agents by simply refusing to be harassed by officials in any number of ways. I have been forced to live in cells with the body waste of the previous occupant (and not allowed nothing to clean with as all personal property had been confiscated and held in the property room and no cleaning supplies were made available to me). I have been forced to live in cells that flood when it rains outside (and leak as well). I am forced to live in cells where the ventilation system doesn’t work, plumbing doesn’t work – all because of my aggressive behavior (writing this is the most aggression I’ve shown about all of this thus far). I have a big box on my cell door (designed to keep inmates from throwing on guards) and my food is placed in this box for me to eat. I am not supposed to be allowed to clean it and the guards won’t clean it but it is filthy with food, juices, coffee, etc. from previous meals – very unsanitary. My aggressive behavior merits this I guess.
(Read the rest.)
Jane Mayer has a remarkable article in the latest New Yorker. It is a deeply disturbing companion piece to Katherine Eban’s recent article in Vanity Fair. This is harrowing reading for anyone; I can hardly imagine how doctors and psychologists must feel to see a regime of torture so dependent on the participation and collusion of their colleagues.
A person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry, referring to cavity searches and the frequent use of suppositories during the takeout of detainees, likened the treatment to “sodomy.” He said, “It was used to absolutely strip the detainee of any dignity. It breaks down someone’s sense of impenetrability. The interrogation became a process not just of getting information but of utterly subordinating the detainee through humiliation.” The former C.I.A. officer confirmed that the agency frequently photographed the prisoners naked, “because it’s demoralizing.” The person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said that photos were also part of the C.I.A.’s quality-control process. They were passed back to case officers for review….
In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as [Khalid Sheikh] Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”…
He has alleged that he was attached to a dog leash, and yanked in such a way that he was propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say that he also claimed to have been suspended from the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching the ground. The pressure on his wrists evidently became exceedingly painful.
Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.
According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”
Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities….
Professor Kassem said his Yemeni client, Kazimi, had told him that, during his incarceration in the Dark Prison, he attempted suicide three times, by ramming his head into the walls. “He did it until he lost consciousness,” Kassem said. “Then they stitched him back up. So he did it again. The next time, he woke up, he was chained, and they’d given him tranquillizers. He asked to go to the bathroom, and then he did it again.” This last time, Kazimi was given more tranquillizers, and chained in a more confining manner.
The case of Khaled el-Masri, another detainee, has received wide attention. He is the German car salesman whom the C.I.A. captured in 2003 and dispatched to Afghanistan, based on erroneous intelligence; he was released in 2004, and Condoleezza Rice reportedly conceded the mistake to the German chancellor. Masri is considered one of the more credible sources on the black-site program, because Germany has confirmed that he has no connections to terrorism. He has also described inmates bashing their heads against the walls. Much of his account appeared on the front page of the Times. But, during a visit to America last fall, he became tearful as he recalled the plight of a Tanzanian in a neighboring cell. The man seemed “psychologically at the end,” he said. “I could hear him ramming his head against the wall in despair. I tried to calm him down. I asked the doctor, ‘Will you take care of this human being?’
(Read the whole thing.)
I made a bad decision when I used the phrase “Voodoo Scientists” in the title of my post on Katherine Eban’s latest article. I was picking up on a quote from Michael Rolince, section chief of the F.B.I.’s International Terrorism Operations, who said that US torture tactics are based on “voodoo science.”
Voodoo as an adjective evokes classic mischaracterizations of the many thousands of years old religion as a grotesque form of black magic involving dark skinned witch doctors who preside over zombies and dolls and stick pins.
He is always a sinister figure with supernatural powers operating on temporal margins of normal society. His supernatural powers come from ancient, suppressed, occult traditions often of a non-western origin.
Add to this the African origins of Vodou (or Vodoun), and its deep roots in Haiti, and the racist overtones are all too evident. Many of the persistent racist tropes projected onto Vodou were spelled out in 1929 in The Magic Island by William Buehler Seabrook:
And now the literary-traditional white stranger who spied from hiding in the forest, had such a one lurked nearby, would have seen all the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction justified: in the red light of torches which made the moon turn pale, leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.
I really should have known better and I apologize.
More information on Vodou:
Over at Physicians for Human Rights (where I work), we have issued a statement concerning the disturbing evidence disclosed today in Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair article, “Rorschach and Awe.”
In today’s statement, PHR Executive Director Len Rubenstein compares the current CIA torture program to the infamous US Public Health Service use of 400 Black men as human guinea pigs for experiments with syphilis and to the CIA’s original human experiments, when it first began to develop psychological torture techniques in the 1950s.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) urgently reiterated its call today for the White House and Congress to prohibit the use of all SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) techniques in interrogations by US agencies, especially those conducted by the CIA at the agency’s “Black Sites” and other secret facilities. SERE techniques include water-boarding, the use of stress positions, isolation, exploitation of phobias, and cultural and sexual humiliation, among other tactics. The group’s statement follows Vanity Fair’s shocking revelations about the alleged involvement of CIA and US military psychologists in torturing detainees in US custody, as well as its disclosure of a standard operating procedure for use of the SERE tactics that appears to have been employed at Guantanamo. PHR has been calling for the Administration to prohibit tactics used in these and other interrogations for nearly three years.
The report in Vanity Fair details the key role in detainee abuse played by psychologists, particularly CIA contractors Drs. James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, from US military SERE schools-training programs designed to instruct service personnel in physical and psychological torture resistance. These psychologists were contracted by the CIA to use these SERE techniques on high value detainees-a practice that is unethical, ineffective and illegal. This new information about the alleged involvement of psychologists in the development and implementation of psychological torture techniques for the CIA was preceded on May 18th by similar revelations about Department of Defense (DoD) psychologists using these tactics at DoD sites, according to a recently declassified DoD Inspector General’s report.
“The indisputable evidence disclosed today that the US government, with the assistance of psychologists, was engaged in psychological torture tactics for the CIA is as morally reprehensible as Tuskegee and the MK-Ultra program of the 1950’s and 60’s,” stated Leonard S. Rubenstein, Executive Director of PHR. “It is imperative that both White House and Congress explicitly prohibit the use of these specific tactics once and for all. They have no place in lawful and honorable military and intelligence communities.”
Senator Carl Levin, Chair of Senate Armed Services Committee, has announced publicly that he intends to call hearings on the use of the SERE tactics by the US. PHR called today for immediate Congressional investigative hearings to learn how these methods came to be used and who was responsible for approving them. “Extensive and exhaustive hearings are required to conclusively and fully understand whether the regime of psychological torture documented at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, CIA Black Sites and elsewhere was authorized at the highest levels of the government, as it appears, and if so, to hold those civilian officials accountable for these gross violations of human rights,” stated Rubenstein.
Read Katherine Eban’s article.
Take action: Ask Congress to Fully Investigate CIA and DoD Interrogation Methods.
It wasn’t bad apples, folks. I’ve said it before, but the proof is in. Read Kathrine Eban’s jaw dropping exposé in Vanity Fair.
Eban’s article provides the first ever eye witness accounts of a CIA interrogation at a “black site”; it explains the role of two psychologists, James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, in devising the techniques that proliferated all combat operations of the War on Terror; it explains how those techniques were reverse engineered from the SERE military training program to condition soldiers to resist torture by enemies who do not follow the Geneva Conventions; and it provides documentation of Standard Operating Procedures that began at Gitmo, which include specific instructions for how to avoid leaving physical marks while torturing detainees.
Some key points:
Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that “Moktar,” or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.
It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A’s interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they’d get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.
Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.Both [Mitchell and Jessen] worked in a classified military training program known as SERE—for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—which trains soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on SERE trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror, according to psychologists and others with direct knowledge of their activities. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including “waterboarding,” at its network of “black sites.” In a statement, Mitchell and Jessen said, “We are proud of the work we have done for our country.”
The agency had famously little experience in conducting interrogations or in eliciting “ticking time bomb” information from detainees. Yet, remarkably, it turned to Mitchell and Jessen, who were equally inexperienced and had no proof of their tactics’ effectiveness, say several of their former colleagues. Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and expert in human-intelligence operations, says he finds it astonishing that the C.I.A. “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.”
The tactics were a “voodoo science,” says Michael Rolince, section chief of the F.B.I.’s International Terrorism Operations. According to a person familiar with the methods, the basic approach was to “break down [the detainees] through isolation, white noise, completely take away their ability to predict the future, create dependence on interrogators.”
Just months after Zubaydah’s interrogation, the myth of Mitchell and Jessen’s success in breaking him had made its way from Thailand to Guantánamo to Washington, and the reversed sere tactics had become associated with recognition and inside knowledge.
In late spring, Mallow met with Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, who was about to take over as commander of the newly combined JTF-GTMO 170 (Joint Task Force Guantánamo). Mallow briefed Dunlavey on his bsct team’s rapport-building efforts and offered him full access to the psychologists. About a month later, he claims, Dunlavey had appropriated the acronym but set up a separate bsct team, cobbled together in part from clinical psychologists already at Guantánamo. Before activating the new bsct team, Dunlavey sent its members to Fort Bragg for a four-day sere-school workshop. (Dunlavey, now a juvenile-court judge in Erie, Pennsylvania, did not respond to requests for comment.)
On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted JTF-GTMO 170’s request to apply coercive tactics in interrogations. The only techniques he rejected were waterboarding and death threats. Within a week, the task force had drafted a five-page, typo-ridden document entitled “JTF GTMO ‘SERE’ Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure.”
The document, which has never before been made public, states, “The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics used at US military sere schools are appropriate for use in real-world interrogations” and “can be used to break real detainees.”
The document is divided into four categories: “Degradation,” “Physical Debilitation,” “Isolation and Monopoliztion [sic] of Perception,” and “Demonstrated Omnipotence.” The tactics include “slaps,” “forceful removal of detainees’ clothing,” “stress positions,” “hooding,” “manhandling,” and “walling,” which entails grabbing the detainee by his shirt and hoisting him against a specially constructed wall.
“Note that all tactics are strictly non-lethal,” the memo states, adding, “it is critical that interrogators do ‘cross the line’ when utilizing the tactics.” The word “not” was presumably omitted by accident.
UPDATE
I should not have used “Voodoo” as a pejorative term. Go here to read why.
As members of the Presidential Scholars class of 2007, we have been told that we represent the best and brightest of our nation. Therefore, we believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions. We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants.
[youtube]FAe_jrYBQ9w[/youtube]
h/t Stephen Soldz
A recently declassified report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General confirms what many have long been deducing from the available evidence. Interrogation tactics seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere—such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions— “were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.” Adam Zagorin reports today in Time Magazine:
Many of the controversial interrogation tactics used against terror suspects in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo were modeled on techniques the U.S. feared that the Communists themselves might use against captured American troops during the Cold War, according to a little-noticed, highly classified Pentagon report released several days ago. Originally developed as training for elite special forces at Fort Bragg under the “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape” program, otherwise known as SERE, tactics such as sleep deprivation, isolation, sexual humiliation, nudity, exposure to extremes of cold and stress positions were part of a carefully monitored survival training program for personnel at risk of capture by Soviet or Chinese forces, all carried out under the supervision of military psychologists.
This troubling disclosure was made in the blandly titled report, “Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse“, which for the first time sets forth the origins as well as new details of many of the abusive interrogation techniques that led to scandals at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and elsewhere — techniques that some critics contend the Pentagon still has not gone far enough in explicitly banning. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called the findings “deeply troubling,” and signaled his intention to hold hearings later this year on the interrogation methods it describes.
The report, completed last August but only declassified and made public on May 18, suggests that the abusive techniques stemmed from a much more formal process than the Defense Department has previously acknowledged. By 2002 the Pentagon was looking for an interrogation paradigm to use on what it had designated as “unlawful combatants” captured in the “war on terror.” These individuals, many taken prisoner in Afghanistan, were initially brought to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo, although others were subsequently hidden away in CIA secret prisons or turned over to U.S.-allied governments known to practice torture. That same year, the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo began using the abusive “counter resistance” techniques adopted from SERE on prisoners at the base, and according to the Pentagon report SERE military psychologists were on hand to help.
In response to fallout over the well-documented cases of prisoner abuse — which included prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation (visual and auditory), forced removal of clothing, exploiting prisoners phobias (notably fear of dogs), and threats against family members — the Pentagon began scaling back the use of SERE tactics in 2002 and eventually banned them altogether. The Army Field Manual, which serves as a primary guide for U.S. military interrogation, now specifically rules out the use of a variety of SERE-founded techniques including water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning, as well as the use of dogs.
The Washington Post elaborates in a hard hitting editorial:
Techniques such as prolonged sleep deprivation, exposure to temperature extremes and death threats were taught to interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison in 2002 and to special Army teams in Iraq a year later by military trainers whose normal duty was to school U.S. soldiers on resisting torture in the event they were captured by a lawless regime. No studies were done to determine whether the methods were effective or whether other interrogation practices might get better results. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training, according to the report, “replicate[s] harsh conditions that the [U.S.] Service member might encounter if they are held by forces that do not abide by the Geneva Conventions. . . . The SERE expertise lies in training personnel how to respond [to] and resist interrogations — not in how to conduct interrogations.” Yet many of the methods used on “high-value” detainees in both Guantanamo and Iraq came from SERE.
Mr. Bush and other administration officials argue that those methods got results from such al-Qaeda prisoners as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a claim that cannot be independently verified because the records of those interrogations have been kept secret. What administration officials don’t mention is that at least two top prisoners, Mohamed Qatani and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, are now known to have provided false information to interrogators after being tortured — in Mr. al-Libi’s case, by Egyptian jailers. Moreover, an extensive report by the Intelligence Science Board, sponsored by the Pentagon, concluded that there is no scientific evidence to back up the administration’s contention that the techniques it adopted are effective. In fact, the intelligence experts concluded that some painful and coercive treatment could prevent interrogators from getting good information.
Those Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, which Senator Carl Levin is promising, cannot come soon enough. US Torture was not the product of a few bad apples. It was planned. There was expert supervision. There was a chain of command.
You should also read Mark Benjamin’s report on Salon.com.
Photo
Caption: A Guantanamo detainee peers out through the so-called “bean hole” which is used to allow food and other items into detainee cells.
Credit: Brennan Linsley / AP
Really, he said that. Article at the link says more than 25,000 FEMA trailers are still in service in Mississippi.
Judge give me life this mornin’ down on Parchman Farm (2x)
I wouldn’t hate it so bad, but I left my wife in mournOh, goodbye wife, all you have done gone (2x)
But I hope some day, you will hear my lonesome songOh listen you men, I don’t mean no harm (2x)
If you wanna do good, you better stay off old Parchman FarmWe got to work in the mornin’, just at dawn of day (2x)
Just at the settin’ of the sun, that’s when the work is doneI’m down on Parchman Farm, but I sho’ wanna go back home (2x)
But I hope some day I will overcome
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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