Psyche, Science, and Society

American tortured by US in Iraq speaks out

Donald Vance, worked for an American contractor in Iraq. He came to suspect his company, Shield Group Security, were crooks involved with weapons deals and violence against Iraqi civilians. Vance acted as an informer for the FBI. Rather than lauded, Vance, along with co-worker Nathan Ertel was arrested by American forces and imprisoned and tortured for months. After his release, Vance recently received the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling at the National Press Club.

Vance’s testimony is important as the United States prepares to imprison as many as 40,000 Iraqis, as it demonstrates that torture of American detainees in Iraq is routine.

Vance and Ertel accuse their U.S. government captors of subjecting them to psychological torture day and night. Lights were kept on in their cell around the clock. They endured solitary confinement. They had only thin plastic mattresses on concrete for sleeping. Meals were of powdered milk and bread or rice and chicken, but interrupted by selective deprivation of food and water. Ceaseless heavy metal and country music screamed in their ears for hours on end, their legal complaint alleges.

They lived through “conditions of confinement and interrogation tantamount to torture”, says the lawsuit filed in northern Illinois U.S. District Court. “Their interrogators utilised the types of physically and mentally coercive tactics that are supposedly reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”

Vance does not consider his treatment to be atypical. Rather, he was treated as have thousands upon thousands of Iraqis:

“My name used to be 200343,” Vance said recalling his prisoner ID. “If they can do this to a former Navy man and an American, what is happening to people in facilities all over the world run by the American government?” [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, Shield Group Security renamed itself National Shield Security and still receives millions of dollars in US government contracts.

UPDATE:

For more information on Vance, see an article in the December 18, 2006 New York Times: Former U.S. Detainee in Iraq Recalls Torment:

The fluorescent lights in his cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted at random times without explanation and made to stand in his cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.

Detainee 200343 was among thousands of people who have been held and released by the American military in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the few detailed views of the Pentagon’s detention operations since the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib.

In addition to the continuous psychological torture, detainees are stripped of all rights:

At Camp Cropper, he took notes on his imprisonment and smuggled them out in a Bible.

“Sick, very. Vomited,” he wrote July 3. The next day: “Told no more phone calls til leave.”

Nathan Ertel, the American held with Mr. Vance, brought away military records that shed further light on the detention camp and its secretive tribunals. Those records include a legal memorandum explicitly denying detainees the right to a lawyer at detention hearings to determine whether they should be released or held indefinitely, perhaps for prosecution.

The Times further describes their treatment:

Five times in the first week, guards shackled the prisoners’ hands and feet, covered their eyes, placed towels over their heads and put them in wheelchairs to be pushed to a room with a carpeted ceiling and walls. There they were questioned by an array of officials who, they said they were told, represented the F.B.I., the C.I.A., the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

“It’s like boom, boom, boom,” Mr. Ertel said. “They are drilling you. ‘We know you did this, you are part of this gun smuggling thing.’ And I’m saying you have it absolutely way off.”

The two men slept in their 9-by-9-foot cells on concrete slabs, with worn three-inch foam mats. With the fluorescent lights on and the temperature in the 50s, Mr. Vance said, “I paced myself to sleep, walking until I couldn’t anymore. I broke the straps on two pair of flip-flops.”

Asked about the lights, the detainee operations spokeswoman said that the camp’s policy was to turn off cell lights at night “to allow detainees to sleep.”

Unlike the psychologists inbvolved in interrogations, a psychologist, not involved in interrogations, helped him:

One day, Mr. Vance met with a camp psychologist. “He realized I was having difficulties,” Mr. Vance said. “He said to turn it into a game. He said: ‘I want you to pretend you are a soldier who has been kidnapped, and that you still have a duty to do. Memorize everything you can about everything that happens to you. Make it like you are a spy on the inside.’ I think he called it rational emotive behavioral therapy, and I started doing that.”

Note, however, the psychologist did not, as far as we know, report the torture going on there or take any affirmative steps to stop it.

Their so-called hearing were as Kafkaesque as those at Guantanamo:

Their legal rights, laid out in a letter from Lt. Col. Bradley J. Huestis of the Army, the president of the status board, allowed them to attend the hearing and testify. However, under Rule 3, the letter said, “You do not have the right to legal counsel, but you may have a personal representative assist you at the hearing if the personal representative is reasonably available.”

Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel were permitted at their hearings only because they were Americans, Lieutenant Fracasso said. The cases of all other detainees are reviewed without the detainees present, she said. In both types of cases, defense lawyers are not allowed to attend because the hearings are not criminal proceedings, she said.

Lieutenant Fracasso said that currently there were three Americans in military custody in Iraq. The military does not identify detainees.

Mr. Vance and Mr. Ertel had separate hearings. They said their requests to be each other’s personal representative had been denied.

At the hearings, a woman and two men wearing Army uniforms but no name tags or rank designations sat a table with two stacks of documents. One was about an inch thick, and the men were allowed to see some papers from that stack. The other pile was much thicker, but they were told that this pile was evidence only the board could see.

The men pleaded with the board. “I’m telling them there has been a major mix-up,” Mr. Ertel said. “Please, I’m out of my mind. I haven’t slept. I’m not eating. I’m terrified.”

Mr. Vance said he implored the board to delve into his laptop computer and cellphone for his communications with the F.B.I. agent in Chicago.

And:

On June 17, Lt. Col. Keir-Kevin Curry, a spokesman for the American military’s detention unit, Task Force 134, wrote to tell Ms. Schwarz that Mr. Vance was still being held. “The detainee board reviewed his case and recommended he remain interned,” he wrote. “Multi-National Force-Iraq approved the board’s recommendation to continue internment. Therefore, Mr. Vance continues to be a security detainee. We are not processing him for release. His case remains under investigation and there is no set timetable for completion.” Over the following weeks, Mr. Vance said he made numerous written requests — for a lawyer, for blankets, for paper to write letters home. Mr. Vance said that he wrote 10 letters to Ms. Schwarz, but that only one made it to Chicago. Dated July 17, it was delivered late last month by the Red Cross….

The military has never explained why it continued to consider Mr. Vance a security threat, except to say that officials decided to release him after further review of his case.

“Treating an American citizen in this fashion would have been unimaginable before 9/11,” said Mike Kanovitz, a Chicago lawyer representing Mr. Vance.

As with virtually every other case of US detention, US officials use the alleged lack of complaints from those held in terrifying, near hopeless, conditions as an argument that they were treated “humanely”:

A spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s detention operations in Iraq, First Lt. Lea Ann Fracasso, said in written answers to questions that the men had been “treated fair and humanely,” and that there was no record of either man complaining about their treatment.

Surely, there is no point in regularly reporting American government denials, aka, “lies.”

April 7th, 2007

Iraq Body Count trashes Lancet Iraq mortality study yet again

The Iraq Body Count (IBC) folks have written a letter to the World Socialist Web Site critiquing the site for having referred in a recent article to the 600,000+ excess Iraqi deaths estimated in the October 2006 Lancet Iraq mortality study. The IBC letter is rather silly, objecting, for example, to the fact that the mortality study was a “cluster survey”:

Secondly, the Lancet researchers visited 47 neighbourhoods and conducted interviews in 40 adjoining households in each neighbourhood. Only about 1,800 households containing 12,000 Iraqis were surveyed. These households reported a total of 302 violent deaths, each of which has been multiplied by two thousand to provide an estimate of how many of Iraq’s estimated 26 million population would have died if this proportion of deaths were representative of the country as a whole.

The IBC folks contrast the dead counted in the mortality survey with the dead reported in the media that they count:

The Lancet researchers documented only 300 violent deaths. Iraq has reached such a sorry state that IBC records 300 deaths every few days.

Correct. So what’s the point here? Is it better to precisely count the wrong thing (deaths reported in the media) than to use survey methodology to somewhat imprecisely count what one is interested in knowing? The IBC folks sure seem to think so.

IBC also repeats another faulty argument they have previously made:

The study’s central estimate of over 600,000 violent deaths seems exceptionally high. Even its lower bound 95 percent confidence interval of 426,000 violent deaths is shockingly high. It is very unlikely that incidents of this scale would be so consistently discounted by the various media in Iraq. Although IBC technically requires only two sources for every corroborated death in its database, we actually collect, archive and scrutinize every single report we can find about each incident before it is added to our database. For larger incidents, the number of reports can run into the dozens, including news published in English, in the original, and others, mostly the Iraqi press, published in translation. In IBC’s news archive for August 2006, the average-size attack leaving 5 civilians killed has a median number of 6 reports on it.

Their argument on the number of press reports for large incidents would only be valid if the press covered the whole country. Yet, there is a disproportionate proportion of the press around Baghdad and, to a certain extent, a few other cities. So, their claim here can also be understood as being due to this press running to the same few incidents to which they have access.

Further, the IBC claim here ignores the Lancet mortality study finding that the largest cause of deaths, indeed 56% of them, were due to gunshot wounds, which, by their nature, are not necessarily grouped in large incidents with multiple press reports.

The IBC folks make another rather odd point:

We would hope that, before accepting such extreme figures, serious consideration is given to the possibility that the population estimates derived from the Lancet study may be flawed. The most likely source of such a flaw is some bias in the sampling methodology such that violent deaths were vastly over-represented in the sample. The precise potential nature of such bias is not clear at this point. But to dismiss the possibility of such bias out of hand is surely both hasty and irresponsible.

I agree that “serious consideration is given to the possibility that the population estimates derived from the Lancet study may be flawed.” I further agree that studies with “extreme figures” should be examined closely. I also agree that sampling bias is the most likely place to find potential bias. And of course, one should not “dismiss the possibility of such bias out of hand.” But I further believe that seeking to dismiss a major study by pointing to”some bias in the sampling methodology” when “the precise potential nature of such bias is not clear at this point” is indeed “surely both hasty and irresponsible.”

The main sampling bias that has been raised so far is the so-called main street bias (MSB), having to do with alleged oversampling of streets intersecting main streets. It is possible that there may be some degree of such sampling bias, though the mortality study authors strenuously deny this. . But the MSB authors derive a bias factor of three by making extreme, unsupported, assumptions regarding their mathematical model’s basic parameters. Even if one were to make these extreme assumptions, a bias of three would still leave excess Iraqi deaths at over 200,000, way above the 60,000 that these authors from IBC appear to be defending. Any reasonable estimate of these parameters would lead to a much smaller bias factor and an estimate of excess deaths considerably higher.

It is possible, of course, that there are other, so far undiscovered, sampling biases in the Lancet study. As every scientist knows, any study may have unknown biases. But the possibility of unknown biases is not a plausible nor honorable reason to dismiss an apparently well-conducted study.

While encouraging skepticism about the Lancet mortality study figures, these IBC authors neglect to mention the virtual certainty that the IBC numbers are too small. After all, it strains credulity that, in circumstances of war, that all deaths would be reported in the media. In fact, IBC founder John Sloboda said in an April 2006 BBC interview:

We’ve always said our work is an undercount, you can’t possibly expect that a media-based analysis will get all the deaths. Our best estimate is that we’ve got about half the deaths that are out there.

I guess the fact that IBC counts are underestimates doesn’t fit the “message” IBC so carefully strives to create and so can safely be neglected when criticizing others. As far as can be told, IBC makes almost no effort to correct mainstream media’s routinely missing the fact of IBC’s numbers being undercounts of the true number of deaths. IBC routinely pleads lack of resources to correct such misinterpretations. It is to be wished that IBC would spent even a tiny fraction of the energy they’ve devoted to attacking the Lancet mortality study (see, e.g., here, here, and here), its authors and supporters, to correcting media misrepresentations of the meaning of IBC figures.

Skepticism, debate, and careful examination of potential biases is the heart of science. I maintain somewhat skeptical about the results of the Lancet mortality study. The results are so extreme that they deserve to be carefully examined. But I see no grounds to dismiss the study; the possibility of possible unknown bias is far from a reasonable basis for such dismissal. Amazingly, given the horrific conditions, other groups still are routinely conducting surveys in Iraq. It strains understanding why none of them has used the opportunity to provide an independent assessment of excess mortality. For replication is the only way that scientific debates are ultimately resolved. In the meantime, given all the evidence available at this point, it seems very likely that Iraqi excess deaths are in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps the high hundreds of thousands. Far too many have died as a result of the invasion and occupation and far too many will continue dying as the occupation and resultant resistance and civil war grind on.

NOTE: Tim Lambert at Deltoid has too additional items of interest. First, Les Roberts and Gilbert Burnham respond to a critical article in Nature. Second, there is an announcement that Lancet mortality study author Riyadh Lafta will speak this month at Simon Fraser on Friday, April 20, at 7 pm. Evidently, the United States denied Dr. Lafta a visa. I sure hope that his talk will be made available on the web.

12 comments April 7th, 2007