Psyche, Science, and Society

Special Forces, specially brutal?

Spencer Ackerman on TPMMuckraker raises the question as to whether Special Forces have their own, especially brutal, rules (Standard Operating Procedure) for treatment of detainees. (The recent Defense Department Office of Inspector General  (OIG) report emphasized the key role of Special Forces, in collaboration with military psychologists, in adapting the SERE torture techniques for US use on detainees):

Separate Interrogation Rules For Special Forces?
By Spencer Ackerman - June 18, 2007, 3:58 PM Sy Hersh’s piece on the stifling of General Antonio Taguba’s inquiry into Abu Ghraib begs a big question: What would Taguba have uncovered if he had been free to investigate?

Buried within three of the Pentagon’s official investigations into torture, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the answer is a separate, harsher set of rules for detainee and interrogation operations led by Special Operations Forces — the elite units specializing in unconventional warfare — than those that apply for the rest of the U.S. military. Yet none of the inquiries follows through on how highly trained SOF units, increasingly important in the war on terrorism, could have created detention facilities so brutal as to give them the motto “No Blood, No Foul” absent official guidance.

In 2004, in order to undercut calls for an independent inquiry into Abu Ghraib, Donald Rumsfeld appointed a panel chaired by ex-defense secretary James Schlesinger to investigate the Defense Department’s detainee operations. Schlesinger found (pdf) that, essentially, there were two distinct sets of rules for interrogating detainees in Defense Department custody: one for the detainee population at Guantanamo Bay, where the Bush administration decreed that the Geneva Conventions don’t apply, and another for department operations everywhere else. Outside of Guantanamo Bay, military interrogators were supposed to rely on an Army field manual, known as FM 34-52, that complied with the Geneva Conventions. For years, the Pentagon’s line was that the only set of authorizations for interrogations were FM 34-52, or the enhanced techniques to be used only at Guantanamo — nothing else. (Last year, the Army updated FM 34-52, rechristening it FM 2-23.2 and intending the Geneva-compliant manual to apply in Guantanamo as well.)

Except that Schlesinger’s report hinted at another set of rules for interrogations. During December 2002 and January 2003, Rumsfeld furiously reviewed and revised the procedures for interrogations in Guantanamo Bay — but it turned out that those techniques didn’t remain in the island prison. In late January 2003, intending to facilitate Rumsfeld’s review, the U.S. command staff in Afghanistan provided to U.S. Central Command “a list of techniques being used in Afghanistan, including some not explicitly set out in FM 34-52.” Schlesinger never specified what the techniques were. But he wrote that they were subsequently “included in a Special Operations Forces (SOF) Standard Operations Procedures document published in February 2003.”

That February 2003 document was never included in the appendix of the Schlesinger report. A later investigation, by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, didn’t shed any additional light on the February 2003 SOF procedures, either. Yet Church reported that some interrogation procedures that deviated from FM 34-52 were “developed independently” by interrogators in Afghanistan. Both Church and Schlesinger sidestepped the question of how or why interrogators in Afghanistan would have come up with an alternative set of interrogation measures absent orders from the Pentagon, especially since Church described those measures as “similar to the counter resistance techniques that the Secretary had approved for GTMO” in an early — and quickly rescinded — iteration. Among those approved GTMO techniques: “deprivation of light/auditory stimuli”; “mild, non-injurious physical contact, e.g., grabbing, poking or light pushing”; “stress positions, like standing”; “removal of clothing” and more.

To date, the role of what Special Operations Forces are allowed to do in detention and interrogation operations remains opaque. The only Pentagon investigation into Special Operations’ role in detainee abuse, led by Brigadier General Richard Formica in 2004, focused (pdf) only on specific allegations of abuse, not on what standard detention and interrogation procedures are for SOF. Formica nevertheless found that for four months in 2004, interrogators used techniques “including sleep management, stress positions, dietary manipulation, and yelling/loud music that were not specifically authorized” by the U.S. command in Iraq — and which the command had, in October 2003, expressly foresworn. Formica attributed the use of those techniques to a misunderstanding.

Even if Formica had broadened his focus, however, there’s no guarantee that he would have been able to determine anything. Hersh reports that in one investigation by the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division into a SOF task force suspected of abusing detainees, task force members used fake names and took other measures to obstruct the inquiry. Similarly, Rep. David Obey (D-WI), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, told Hersh that he distrusts the classified reports he receives from the Pentagon about what SOF forces are up to around the globe.

Knowing whether SOF plays by a different set of detention and interrogation rules would help explain how Human Rights Watch could have documented a SOF detention facility rife with abuse, down to the gruesome motto, “No Blood, No Foul.” As Hersh writes, SOF activities have massively expanded worldwide in the years since 9/11, with little oversight into the rules under which they operate. In particular, three big questions remain outstanding:

* What additional interrogation techniques are contained in the February 2003 Standard Operation Procedure?
* Are they still in place?
* And is there any other guidance differentiating what SOF task forces can do from that of the rest of the U.S. military?

Taguba wasn’t able to get the answers. Neither has the new Democratic Congress. Even without Rumsfeld in charge, the Pentagon wants to keep it that way.

Unresolved is whether the new Army Field Manual setting rules for interrogations applies to Special Forces. We already know that it doesn’t apply to the CIA.

Add comment June 18th, 2007

Chris Hedges: A culture of atrocity

Chris Hedges reminds us that a war of occupation is itself:

A Culture of Atrocity

by Chris Hedges

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing-the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm-to murder-the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war-the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis-is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.

The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation.

Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee.

Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country.

Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed “tens of thousands” of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire.

Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces.

“It’s a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance,” Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects-objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.

Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence.

It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.

Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless.

The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them.

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.

We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.

Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits-there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.

Chris Hedges, who graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, is the author of “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

Add comment June 18th, 2007

Monterey Bay Psychological Association: Psychologists have no role in military interrogations

Here is op ed written by members of the Monterey Bay Psychological Association and published in the Santa Cruz (CA) Sentinel:

Jennifer Kaupp: Psychologists have no role in military interrogations

The Monterey Bay Psychological Association is among the outraged American Psychological Association members that Amy Goodman refers to in her opinion piece in the June 9 Sentinel. A year ago, we published a statement denouncing the role of psychologists in military interrogations. We have been in contact with like-minded psychologists, and will continue to voice our growing alarm over this situation. Many local psychologists and allied mental health professionals will join our colleagues in protest at the APA convention in San Francisco this August. We abide by the APA ethical standard to “first, do no harm” In this matter, the APA does not speak for all psychologists, and certainly not for us.

What follows is the position of the Monterey Bay Psychological Association on the role of psychologists in military interrogations.

The members of the Monterey Bay Psychological Association feel compelled to speak out, unequivocally and without further delay, against the unethical, immoral and illegal practices taking place in military prisons around the world. As psychologists, we would like to stand with all those who have protested the use of psychologists as consultants to torture, degradation, cruelty and/or inhumane treatment of military prisoners.

In its structured examination of the ethics of this practice, the American Psychological Association Psychological Ethics and National Security Task Force took a small step in the right direction. However, in the intervening time, we do not believe that the APA leadership has gone far enough in identifying the denouncing the misuse of psychological theory and practice in military interrogations and on rendition teams.

Both the APA and the CPA have asked for member psychologists’ input. We find that the response from the APA leadership does not represent us as psychologists, and is in fact detrimental to our profession. Within the context of ongoing media reports of cruel, inhumane and degrading practices used in military interrogations and on rendition teams, the APA’s focus on responsibilities to society rings hollow. To participate, even as consultants, in unethical practices under the guise of protecting the general social welfare is simply wrong. As an organization, the Monterey Bay Psychological Association believes that the APA Ethics Code is clear in its prohibition of the use of torture, and clear that psychologists should have no part in this aspect of military operations. Further, we recognize the dilemma of military psychologists forced to choose between their role as psychologists and their role as military officers.

We fervently believe that if we do not speak out against practices that violate human rights and dignity, we are complicit in those practices.

We would hope that the APA administration understands the fundamental admonition in the APA Ethics Code to “do no harm,” and continue to question their current interpretation.

This article was co-written by psychologist Jennifer Kaupp, president of the Monterey Bay Psychological Association; psychologist John Girvetz, the group’s former president; and Junell Silver, Diane Bridgeman and Meg Sandow, members of the MBPA Contemporary Issues in Psychology Forum.

2 comments June 18th, 2007