In the April of 2006, American Donald Vance was imprisoned by the American military in Iraq for 97 days, without access to an attorney. An FBI informer on arms smuggling by the company he worked for, Vance was himself accused of aiding insurgents, he eventually found out. He was held at the infamous Camp Cropper prison near the Baghdad airport. Dateline NBC Sunday reported on the Vance case yesterday.
In addition to the outrage of Vance being held on charges he was himself informing the FBI about, his case is important because it demonstrates that SERE-type techniques are still Standard Operating Practice in US detention facilities in Iraq. SERE, of course, is the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program for those military units at highest risk of capture, such as special forces and aviators. During SERE training, the trainees are subjected to torture (prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sexual and cultural humiliation, painful “stress positions,” etc.,), with the idea that this will inoculate trainees against breaking if they are captured and maltreated. A recently declassified Department of Defense report has confirmed earlier reports that SERE techniques were “reverse-engineered” to develop the abusive interrogation techniques so familiar from the Abu Ghraib photos and numerous media accounts of abuses to US detainees at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan.
US officials have given the impression that the use of these techniques has ceased. however, Donald Vance’s experiences, as described by NBC, demonstrate that these techniques were in routine use at Camp Cropper as recently as last summer:
Here’s what Vance and Ertel say happened in that prison: They were strip-searched and each put in solitary confinement in tiny, cold cells. They were deliberately deprived of sleep with blaring music and bright lights. They were hooded and cuffed whenever moved. And although they were never physically tortured, there was always that threat.
“The guards employ what I would like to call as verbal Kung-Fu,” says Vance. “It’s ‘do as we say or we will use excessive violence on you.’”
Since he’s an American, Vance got out after only97 days. Many Iraqis are not so lucky. Vance recognizes the absurdity and counterproductive nature of American military practices:
“What doesn’t need to happen is throw people in a cell, we’ll figure out the answers later. That’s not the way to do things.”
The question is, when will the US military, and those they are supposed to be defending, the American public, realize the counterproductive nature of brutalizing tens of thousands of Iraqis?
Meanwhile, I have been writing about the support of the American Psychological Association for psychologists’ participation in interrogations of US detainees. The APA obsessively chants its mantra that psychologists keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” Now we don’t know how many psychologists there are at Camp Cropper, though an earlier New York Times account mentions Vance seeing a psychologist, though not as part of interrogation. [Oddly enough, the psychologist counseled him to remember every detail of his ordeal, but neglected to intervene to stop his abuse or to get him released.] However, Vance’s experience shows that interrogations of those in US custody are anything but “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”
June 23rd, 2007
Colonel Larry James has written to President Sharon Brehm of the American Psychological Association, objecting to our characterization of him in our recent Open Letter to President Brehm regarding psychologists’ participation in interrogations in the wake of the declassification of the DoD Office of the Inspector General report detailing the central role of psychologists in designing the US torture regime. [See pdf: Larry James Letter to APA President Sharon Brehm.]
We have in turn replied to Colonel James [See, in pdf format: Reply to Colonel Larry James.] Here is the text of our reply:
June 21, 2007
Sharon Brehm, Ph.D.
President
American Psychological Association
Dear President Brehm:
We write to you as the principal authors of the June 6, 2007 Open Letter to President Sharon Brehm of the American Psychological Association, now signed by over 350 psychologists. Colonel Larry James has written a letter to you objecting to statements in the Open Letter.
To be clear, the Open Letter simply reproduces information that has long been on the public record. Principally, we drew upon the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General [OIG] revelations that BSCT psychologists were involved in SERE-based interrogation methods at Guantánamo, and on other government documents, that Colonel James, reporting to Major General Geoffrey Miller, had command responsibility for the BSCTs during the period documented in the OIG’s report (Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse).
These facts, which Colonel James did not refute in his letter, raise serious and valid questions about the role of psychology and psychologists in abusive interrogations. (In this case, the application “abusive” to these interrogation tactics comes from the OIG report.) It would indeed be irresponsible for those of us in the APA to leave these and many other questions unanswered. As the open letter acknowledges, we do not know precisely what role(s) Colonel James or other military/intelligence psychologists played in the abusive interrogation regime documented by numerous sources over the past half decade, and which, we cannot emphasize enough, have now been definitively confirmed by the Department of Defense’s own Inspector General based on years of internal Pentagon investigations.
The facts in the public record speak for themselves, highlighting the continued need for an independent inquiry by Congress and the APA itself.
In that letter we stated:
“Colonel Larry James, a second PENS member, “was the Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba” (PENS Task Force member biographies) starting in January 2003. Col. Larry James has often been cited by Gerald Koocher, Stephen Behnke, and others, as the one who ‘cleaned up’ Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The OIG report, however, makes it clear that Guantánamo BSCTs played an essential role in transforming SERE techniques into standard operating interrogation procedure; that the Commander of Guantánamo detainee operations requested official approval for the use of these torture techniques in October, 2002; and that permission was granted by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in December 2002. Additionally, as stated in his PENS biography, in 2003 James “was the Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba.” In 2004, James was Director, Behavioral Science Unit, Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. It should be noted that that in 2004, according to many sources, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, Guantánamo Commander, too, went from Guantánamo to Iraq, and brought the SERE techniques with him. James was the commander of the BSCTs at the time the FBI and other law enforcement agents were reporting that severe abuses were occurring at Guantánamo. The FBI and other Criminal Investigative Task Force agents reporting these abuses referred to them as “SERE” and “counter-resistance” tactics in documents obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act.”
In his reply, Colonel James states that he was always opposed to torture. He asserts:
“I strongly object to, have never used, and will never use torture, cruel, or abusive treatment or punishment of any kind, for any reason, in any setting.”
He further states:
“I do not use nor have I ever used ‘SERE’ techniques in any aspect of my work related to interrogations. Dr. Morgan Banks has emphasized repeatedly that in addition to being unethical, using a ‘SERE’ approach in an interrogation would be counterproductive to obtaining useful information. I strongly suspect that using a ‘SERE’ approach to an interrogation would yield data worthless for investigative and destructive for adjudicatory purposes.”
The OIG report, which should be read by all psychologists, documents in detail the central role of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) techniques in the development of interrogation doctrine at Guantanamo:
“Counterresistance techniques taught by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency [the agency responsible for SERE training] contributed to the development of interrogation policy at the U.S. Southern Command [i.e., Guanatanamo].” OIG Report, p. 24)
“[These] Counterresistance techniques were introduced because personnel believed that interrogation methods used were no longer effective in obtaining useful information from some detainees.” (OIG Report, p. 24)
“JTF-170 [the command overseeing interrogations at Guantánamo] requested that Joint Personnel Recovery Agency instructors be sent to Guantánamo to instruct interrogators in SERE counterresistance interrogation techniques. SERE instructors from Fort Bragg responded to Guantánamo requests for instructors trained in the use of SERE interrogation resistance techniques” (OIG Report, p. 26).
Further, the OIG report clarifies the central role of military psychologists in this process:
“On September 16, 2002, the Army Special Operations Command and the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency co-hosted a SERE psychologist conference at Fort Bragg for JTF-170 interrogation personnel. The Army’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team [BSCT] from Guantánamo Bay also attended the conference. Joint Personnel Recovery Agency personnel briefed JTF-170 representatives on the exploitation techniques and methods used in resistance (to interrogation) training at SERE schools. The JTF-170 personnel understood that they were to become familiar with SERE training and be capable of determining which SERE information and techniques might be useful in interrogations at Guantánamo. Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team personnel understood that they were to review documentation and standard operating procedures for SERE training in developing the standard operating procedure for the JTF-170, if the command approved those practices. The Army Special Operations Command was examining the role of interrogation support as a ‘SERE Psychologist competency area.’” (OIG Report, p. 25, emphasis added.)
Colonel James arrived at GTMO [Guantánamo] in January of 2003. The OIG report reveals the continued use of SERE-type “counterresistance” techniques well past this point:
“In response to Service-level concerns, a Working Group was formed to examine counterresistance techniques, leading to the Secretary of Defense, April 16, 2003, memorandum that approved counterresistance techniques for U.S. Southern Command.” (OIG Report, p. 26)
“Application of these interrogation techniques is subject to the following general safeguards: (i) limited to use only at strategic interrogation facilities; (ii) there is a good basis to believe that detainee possesses critical intelligence; (iii) the detainee is medically and operationally evaluated as suitable (considering all techniques to be used in combination); (iv) interrogators are specifically trained for the techniques; (v) a specific interrogation plan (including reasonable safeguards. limits on duration, intervals between applications, termination criteria and the presence or availability of qualified medical personnel) has been developed; (vi) there is appropriate supervision; and, (vii) there is appropriate, specified senior approval for use with any specific detainee(after considering the foregoing and receiving legal advice).”
(Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s “Memorandum for the Commander, US Southern Command. Subject: Counter-Resistance Techniques in the War on Terrorism (S). April 16, 2003, p. 5.)
Colonel James asserts that great progress was made against torture and abusive treatment during his tenure at Guantanamo, progress which, he assures us, is continuing. Why then, did two inspections of Guantanamo by International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) team in January 2003 and June 2004, at the beginning and end of Colonel James’ time as Chief Psychologist with the intelligence group, find that abuse ‘tantamount to torture” was occurring? [Neil Lewis: Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo, New York Times, November 30, 2004.] In January, 2003, the New York Times reports, the ICRC “raised questions of whether ‘psychological torture’ was taking place.”
While Colonel James claims progress against abuse, the ICRC in June 2004, as reported by the New York Times, “said investigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through ‘humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.’ Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly ‘more refined and repressive’ than learned about on previous visits.” So, during Colonel James’ tenure as Chief Psychologist, the interrogations, rather than becoming more humane, became, as the ICRC alerted, “more refined and more repressive.”
This evidence in the public record clearly disputes Colonel James’ claims that abuses at Guantánamo ended by the time that he was there as Chief Psychologist with the interrogation group, including BSCT psychologists. If Colonel James wishes to dispute these facts, it would seem his most effective outlet would be the Office of the Inspector General, the Red Cross, and the press, all of which flatly contradict his unsupported claims.
The OIG report confirms what should have been apparent when the PENS task force report was written: that members of the PENS Task Force were in the chain of command precisely when abusive techniques were translated for use in detainee interrogations.
We do acknowledge one error of fact in the Open Letter. It was in the summer of 2003, while Colonel James was Chief Psychologist at Guantánamo, that General Geoffrey Miller was sent to Abu Ghraib to “Gitmoize” the prison, bringing the harsh SERE-type techniques from Guantánamo to Abu Ghraib. It was in 2004 that the same General Miller who brought the harsh techniques to Abu Ghraib returned to Iraq to “oversee the military’s prisons in Iraq” [Sewell Chan, Rage is on Display During Prison Tour, Washington Post, May 6, 2004].
The history of America’s abusive detentions in the War on Terror is a history of evasion and denial. Every government and military official states that he or she is “against torture.” We are well aware that this administration claims never to have engaged in “torture” or in “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” But we are aware, too, that to make this claim, this administration has undertaken a campaign to redefine these terms such that they are completely unrecognizable. Over and over again, every media article, every account by detainees or their attorneys, every report by a human rights organization claiming abuse or torture has been met by denial. Yet, repeatedly these articles, these reports, these accounts have proven true. A denial is not evidence.
It is long past time for Colonel James and all the other psychologists involved in interrogations at Guantánamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan to stop asserting what they “did not” do and start telling us what they did do and what they do know about what transpired in the interrogation rooms. It is time, too, for the APA to be working with governmental and non-governmental investigative organizations to facilitate the collection of such critical pieces of information.
We close by noting two points where we believe we are in complete agreement with Colonel James:
First, we believe that SERE interrogation methods constitute torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and should be prohibited, as should any involvement of psychologists in their use. We agree with the OIG that many of the techniques approved by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld for use at Guantánamo, in his memos of December 2002 and April 2003, constitute such abuse. We hope in the coming months that Colonel James clarifies whether he, too views these techniques as abuse and if he will join us in working to ensure a complete end to these tactics and similarly abusive interrogation techniques by all branches of the US Government.
Second, we also welcome the imminent Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) hearings on US interrogation practices. We hope that during the course of those hearings, if not before, Colonel James will tell Congress and the American public all he knows about the interrogation techniques at Guantanamo, the role of SERE methods, the involvement of SERE psychologists in developing those techniques, the specific directives on these techniques given to BSCTs under his command, and the conduct of BSCTs during these interrogations.
We would also like to take this opportunity to call your attention to a new report by Mark Benjamin in Salon [CIA’s Torture Teachers: Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House]. This article documents the central role of psychologists from the Department of Defense’s SERE program in implementing abusive interrogation tactics for the CIA.
We continue to hope that APA will, at last, make a break with its recent history of turning a blind eye to repeated accounts of abuse involving psychologists. We look forward to your leadership on this critical issue and remain open to a meeting to discuss these matters further.
Sincerely,
Stephen Soldz
Steven Reisner
Brad Olson
Contact:
Stephen Soldz
ssoldz@bgsp.edu
Steven Reisner
SReisner@psychoanalysis.net
Brad Olson
b-olson@northwestern.edu
June 21st, 2007
Mark Benjamin today on Salon has a major article explicating the role of CIA psychologists in the development of US torture techniques. [The CIA's torture teachers: Psychologists helped the CIA exploit a secret military program to develop brutal interrogation tactics -- likely with the approval of the Bush White House] He documents a joint Defense Department–CIA program that, by its inter-departmental nature, almost certainly had to be approved at the highest levels of our government, namely the White House.
Benjamin also talks in detail about our recent Open Letter to President Sharon Brehm of the American Psychological Association. [Go here to read and sign our letter.]
Here is an excerpt from Benjamin’s article:
June 21, 2007 | WASHINGTON — There is growing evidence of high-level coordination between the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. military in developing abusive interrogation techniques used on terrorist suspects. After the Sept. 11 attacks, both turned to a small cadre of psychologists linked to the military’s secretive Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program to “reverse-engineer” techniques originally designed to train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if captured, by exposing them to brutal treatment. The military’s use of SERE training for interrogations in the war on terror was revealed in detail in a recently declassified report. But the CIA’s use of such tactics — working in close coordination with the military — until now has remained largely unknown.
According to congressional sources and mental healthcare professionals knowledgeable about the secret program who spoke with Salon, two CIA-employed psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were at the center of the program, which likely violated the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of prisoners. The two are currently under investigation: Salon has learned that Daniel Dell’Orto, the principal deputy general counsel at the Department of Defense, sent a “document preservation” order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials forbidding the destruction of any document mentioning Mitchell and Jessen or their psychological consulting firm, Mitchell, Jessen and Associates, based in Spokane, Wash. Dell’Orto’s order was in response to a May 1 request from Sen. Carl Levin, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who is investigating the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Mitchell and Jessen have worked as contractors for the CIA since 9/11. Both were previously affiliated with the military’s SERE program, which at its main school at Fort Bragg puts elite special operations forces through brutal mock interrogations, from sensory deprivation to simulated drowning….
On Wednesday, dozens of psychologists made public a joint letter to American Psychological Association president Sharon Brehm fingering another CIA-employed psychologist, R. Scott Shumate. Previous news reports led the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association to ban their members from participating in interrogations, but the issue has remained divisive within the American Psychological Association, which has not forbidden the practice. “We write you as psychologists concerned about the participation of our profession in abusive interrogations of national security detainees at Guantanamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the so-called CIA ‘black sites,’” the psychologists wrote. In violation of APA ethics, they said, “It is now indisputable that psychologists and psychology were directly and officially responsible for the development and migration of abusive interrogation techniques, techniques which the International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled ‘tantamount to torture.’”
The letter cites a previously public biographical statement on Shumate that listed his position from April 2001 to May 2003 as “the chief operational psychologist for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center.” The bio also noted that Shumate “has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists” who have been held and interrogated by the agency since 9/11. At CTC, Shumate reported to Cofer Black, the former head of CTC who famously told Congress in September 2002, “There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves come off.” Shumate’s bio, obtained by Salon, has been removed from the InfowarCon 2007 conference Web site. Shumate did not return a phone call seeking comment.
The SERE-based program undermines assertions made for years by Bush administration officials that interrogations conducted by U.S. personnel are safe, effective and legal. SERE training, according to the Department of Defense inspector general’s report, is specifically designed “to replicate harsh conditions that the service member might encounter if they are held by forces that do not abide by the Geneva Conventions.”
“The irony — and ultimately the tragedy — in the migration of SERE techniques is that the program was specifically designed to protect our soldiers from countries that violated the Geneva Conventions,” says Brad Olson, president of the Divisions for Social Justice within the American Psychological Association. “The result of the reverse-engineering, however, was that by making foreign detainees the target, it made us the country that violated the Geneva Conventions,” he says.
Now go read the whole article!
June 21st, 2007
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.
June 18th, 2007
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.”
June 18th, 2007
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.
June 18th, 2007
Alexander Cockburn, in CounterPunch compares the American Psychological Association to Tony Soprano:
Was Tony Soprano the Teacher or the Taught?
The Psychopathology of Shrinks
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Summer’s hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Traditionally, many Boston shrinks take their seaside weeks on Cape Cod, around Truro, sunning and gossiping while their patients muster on their beach towels a few hundred yards away. The touching scene is duplicated further south around the Hamptons on Long Island.
Undoubtedly beach chat among both analysts and analysands will ripple over the June excitements of the psychoanalytic trade, starting with the gallant efforts of Paris Hilton’s psychiatrist, Dr Charles Sophy, to engineer what her costly but incompetent lawyers failed to do, namely spring her from L.A. County Jail where – given the triviality of her offenses - she is grotesquely pent. But of course the prime topic will surely be the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco’s Jennifer Melfi – Tony Soprano’s analyst — has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in The Three Faces of Eve.
Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the “breach of professional ethics” at a shrinks’ dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr Melfi’s patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren’t seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud’s chambers in Vienna.
It’s true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr Tony David as the collision of “the superego of Melfi’s civilised values and the intellect… with the murky id that is Soprano’s stock in trade.” “The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association”, wrote one APA member furiously, “do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unless there is danger to the therapist).”
It so happens that these same “strict ethical principles” of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke which probably won’t be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA.
These techniques — as has been recently described here by Stephen Soldz have been “reverse-engineered” from the Pentagon’s SERE (“Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape”) program in which US military and intelligence personnel are taught how to withstand harsh interrogation. Psychologists have always been central to this enterprise and are now similarly central to the use of sleep deprivation, sexual and cultural humiliation and waterboarding in grilling America’s enemies. “Reverse-engineered” simply means the Pentagon is using the techniques to torture suspected terrorists.
In 2002 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that “interrogation methods used were no longer effective in obtaining useful information from some detainees” and, as the Inspector General’s report details, “recommended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation Behavioral Science Unit, the Army’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team, the Southern Command Psychological Operations Support Element, and the JTF-170 clinical psychologist develop a plan to exploit detainee vulnerabilities.” The use of dogs, sexual humiliation, and kindred tortures were only a couple of months away.
Amid furious protests from such APA members as Soldz and others the APA leadership has piously maintained that “psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective.” The Pentagon Inspector General’s Report make clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano’s brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag. The August meeting of the APA’s “Council of Representatives” will be stormy as the members vote on a motion introduced by Neil Altman urging “A moratorium on psychologist involvement in interrogations at US detention centers for foreign detainees.”
June 17th, 2007
Physicians for Human Rights has sent a Letter to American Psychological Association Regarding Psychologists and Interrogations. The letter follows in the wake of the recent Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report detailing the central role of psychologists in designing and implementing abusive interrogation techniques (”torture”) at Guantanamo and among certain units in Iraq and Afghanistan. PHR calls upon APA to go beyond general statements against torture to implement specific policy changes that will reduce the potential for future psychologists participation in such abuses:
June 14, 2007
Sharon Stephens Brehm, PhD, President
American Psychological Association.
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4242
Dear Dr. Brehm:
As you know, Physicians for Human Rights has been engaged in a long-term dialogue with the American Psychological Association over our strenuous objections to the APA’s policy on psychologists and interrogations. PHR deeply respects and values the rich legacy of vital contributions made by psychology and the APA to human health and well-being, and to human rights in particular. We also welcomed the policy the Association passed last summer affirming the centrality of human rights for psychologists.
We have also been concerned that neither that policy, nor the PENS Task Force report and recommendations, adequately assure guidance to psychologists in interrogation settings. New revelations from the Department of Defense about the role of psychologists in designing and implementing interrogation methods that amount to torture increase the urgency for action, particularly a clear statement that psychologists should not support these and related techniques in any way.
The revelations come from a recently declassified report by the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”).1 The report confirms that psychologists with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (“SERE”) program, in collaboration with the Guantanamo interrogation command and the Army Special Forces Command, transformed torture methods used in “resistance training” for US personnel into procedures for interrogations at Guantanamo. It appears likely, moreover, that at least one and possibly more of the PENS Task Force members were involved in
these activities.
These methods include stress positions, prolonged sleep deprivation, isolation, “noise stress” (including sensory bombardment with loud music and strobe lights), sexual humiliation, forced nudity, exposure to extreme cold, exploitation of detainees’ fears and phobias, and much more. In a September 21, 2006 letter to Senator John McCain, the APA’s then-president, Dr. Gerald Koocher, joined other mental health experts in warning that such practices “can have a devastating impact on the victim’s physical and mental health” and condemned them as “torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.”
According to the Pentagon report, SERE psychologists trained Guantanamo interrogators and other military psychologists on “Behavioral Science Consultation Teams”, or “BSCTs”, in the use of these interrogation methods. BSCT psychologists were tasked with transforming abusive SERE methods into standard operating procedure at Guantanamo and, at least twice, SERE psychologists were sent to Guantanamo to teach “SERE counter-resistance techniques” to interrogation teams. SERE methods were brought to Afghanistan and to Iraq, where SERE psychologists taught the techniques to interrogators with Task Force-20, a special forces unit, which also adopted them as standard operating procedure. SERE psychologists were even authorized “to actively participate in ‘one or two demonstration’ interrogations” with Task Force-20 personnel.
These revelations by the Pentagon, confirming that military psychologists served as chief architects of torture, demand forceful and definitive action by the APA, particularly to reject these interrogation methods and prohibit any role of psychologists in designing, implementing, training, or observing their use or evaluating detainees subjected to them. Reiteration of the Association’s general policy against torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment is not enough. The psychological profession and the nation as a whole are now looking to the APA for more – for explicit, operational guidance that will help put an end to the abusive SERE interrogation methods and to psychologists’ involvement in their use. More broadly, they look to the APA for concrete measures that will fully protect psychology and its practitioners from being used to “break”detainees down.
We therefore urge that, at a minimum, the APA immediately take the following steps:
1. Adopt an organizational policy that explicitly condemns all of the following interrogation methods as torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment and affirming that it is unethical to participate in any way, directly or indirectly, in their use. These methods include:
- Mock executions
- “Water-boarding” or any other form of simulated drowning or suffocation
- Threats of harm or death to the detainee or a member of his or her family
- Isolation used for the purpose of interrogation
- Sensory deprivation (particularly of light and auditory stimuli)
- Sensory bombardment (particularly with loud noise or music, bright lights, or flashing strobe lights)
- Hooding
- Sleep deprivation
- Forced nakedness
- Sexual humiliation
- Cultural or religious humiliation
- Exploitation or exacerbation of fears, phobias or psychopathology such as anxiety or depression
- Stress positions (including “short shackling” and prolonged standing)
- Use of animals, including dogs, to instill fear
- Physical assault, including slapping and shaking
- Exposure to extreme heat or cold
- Induced hypothermia
- The threatened use of any of these techniques
- Use of psychotropic drugs or any other mind-altering substances in support of interrogations
2. Adopt an organizational policy calling on all relevant branches and agencies within the US government – including Congress, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency – to explicitly prohibit the use of these methods in all interrogations and informing them that in any event psychologists are prohibited from participating in them.
3. Open an investigation into the role of psychologists, whether APA members or not, in the use of the techniques listed above.
4. Urge all relevant oversight bodies, including the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, to engage in comprehensive investigations and to hold public hearings into all aspects of the development, authorization, and use of these interrogation methods by military and intelligence personnel.
Adoption of these recommendations would be an important first step toward ending the use of methods amounting to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment by US interrogators, as well as psychologists’ complicity in designing or implementing them. In our view, however, explicitly prohibiting psychologists’ participation in these techniques will not fully protect psychological ethics from the risks inherent in the interrogation setting. We believe the only way to create a fully ethical policy, consistent with the principle of minimizing harm, is for the APA to prohibit the direct participation of psychologists in any individual interrogations.
The nature of the interrogation process is such that any participation invites the possibility of serious ethical breaches. A fundamental purpose of interrogation, even when lawful, is to break the resistance of unwilling or uncooperative subjects. In the stressful and isolated national security interrogation environment, where the pressure to intensify “counter-resistance” measures only increases over time, psychologists have little or no protection from becoming complicit in the infliction of psychological distress, pain, and suffering. We therefore suggest the following ethical guidance:
Psychologists do not participate directly in the interrogation of an individual prisoner or detainee. Direct participation includes being present in the interrogation room; asking questions; suggesting questions; providing any advice, consultation, or assistance regarding the use of interrogation techniques with a specific interrogation subject; or monitoring an interrogation for the purpose of offering advice, consultation, evaluation or assistance in the use of techniques with a particular subject.
Psychologists do not offer general advice or training, research, experimentation, facilitation, or any other general assistance, outside the context of an interrogation of a specific subject, regarding use of interrogation methods that are intended to, or that the psychologist has reason to believe will, result in increased levels of psychological distress or harm to the subject. [emphasis added]
Consistent with these recommendations, PHR also continues to support the resolution currently before the Council of Representatives calling for a “Moratorium on Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations at US Detention Centers for Foreign Detainees.” We believe that all these recommendations, taken together, can help restore the legacy the American psychological community expects and deserves.
We would be happy to meet with you at a convenient time to discuss these matters further. Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Leonard S. Rubenstein, JD
Executive Director
1 “Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse,” Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General. Accessed June 7, 2007 at http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/abuse.pdf.
June 16th, 2007
Among the few press sources that covered the recent bombshell revelations about SERE techniques being translated into abusive interrogation tactics at Guantanamo and elsewhere is this article in the Fayetteville Observer:
Memo: Interrogators learned from SERE
By Kevin Maurer
Staff writer
A declassified Defense Department investigation of detainee abuse released this week outlines how Fort Bragg survival instructors shared techniques with American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.
The Guantanamo interrogation techniques then made their way to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where they eventually contributed to a prisoner-abuse scandal that severely damaged U.S. credibility in the Arab world.
But, Army officials argue — in a letter that accompanies the 131-page investigation — that information provided to interrogators from Army survival school trainers did not play a role in the harsher interrogation techniques. The survival program — called SERE for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape — is at Fort Bragg.
“It is important to understand that the United States Army Special Operations Command has neither used SERE instructors nor condoned SERE techniques for interrogation purposes,” said Lt. Col. Tim Nye, a spokesman for the command.
Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with Human Rights Watch, said the investigation shows a conscious decision by the U.S. military to violate the Geneva Convention, international rules governing the treatment of war prisoners.
“SERE is designed to replicate detention by an enemy that is violating the laws of armed conflict,” he said. “The decision to use these methods in Gitmo (Guantanamo Bay) and Abu Ghraib was a decision to break the law and the long tradition of lawful interrogation by U.S. Army interrogators.”
According to the investigation, in 2002 interrogators at Guantanamo Bay believed their techniques were no longer effective because the al-Qaida and Taliban detainees were familiar with the Army’s interrogation manual and trained to resist.
“As a result, interrogation techniques and procedures used exceeded the guidelines established in the Army FM 34-52,” the investigation says.
Army Field Manual 34-52 was the old interrogation manual published in 1992.
In September 2006, the Army released a new interrogation manual — FM 2-22.3 — in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
On Sept. 16, 2002, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency — which oversees the SERE program — held a conference at Fort Bragg for the Guantanamo Bay interrogators, according to the investigation.
“USASOC initiated this conference in order to establish guidelines and formalize training consistent with U.S. law and the ethical guidelines for psychologists,” Nye said. “The conference did not train interrogation personnel in the use of SERE techniques.”
The Army’s 19-day SERE course was created in 1986 and is based on the experiences of Nick Rowe, who was captured by the Viet Cong in 1963 when he was a lieutenant. The purpose of the course is to train special operations soldiers to live up to the Military Code of Conduct and to survive and resist abuse in captivity. The course does not train soldiers to be interrogators.
At the 2002 conference, according to the investigation, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency showed the interrogators “exploitation techniques and methods used in resistance (to interrogation) training at SERE schools,” according to the investigation. The interrogators were told to determine which techniques might be used at Guantanamo Bay.
Nye said the conference led to a policy on the use of mental health professionals in interrogations.
A few days after the conference, a Joint Personnel Recovery Agency representative recommended to his commander that the SERE program not get involved with interrogation operations.
“The memorandum states that the agency had no actual experience in real world prisoner handling, developed concepts based on past enemies, and assumes that procedures we use to exploit our personnel will be effective against the current detainees,” the representative wrote.
Mike Ritz, who was a SERE instructor at Fort Bragg in the 1990s, said he knew when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke that interrogators had used SERE techniques on detainees.
“Anybody who looks at the pictures can start to see when it happened,” he said.
Ritz now is the chief executive officer of Team Delta, a private company that teaches interrogation techniques.
According to the investigation, the commander at Guantanamo Bay filed a investigation in October 2002 that set loose guidelines for the use of SERE techniques, but only by trained interrogators.
At least twice, SERE instructors from Fort Bragg went to Guantanamo Bay to instruct interrogators on SERE counter-resistance techniques, the investigation says. Nye said Friday that the Special Operations Command could find no evidence of SERE instructors going to Guantanamo.
Disagreement
Charles “Cully” Stimson, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, disagreed with the investigation’s conclusions.
Stimson resigned in February after making controversial statements about lawyers who represent detainees.
“I believe the historical record supports the opposite conclusion — that SERE did not play a determinative role in the development of counterresistance interrogation tactics,” Stimson wrote in comments included in the investigation.
Stimson points to several other detainee abuse investigations that concluded that the conference at Fort Bragg and the briefs by the SERE instructors to Army interrogators were brainstorming exercises and did not lead to a shift in policy.
Stimson points to Vice Adm. Albert T. Church’s investigation of detainee abuse, which found no policy “that condoned or in any way encouraged abuse of detainees.”
When the war in Iraq started, interrogators that served at Guantanamo Bay took the harsher methods to Iraq.
“Counterresistance interrogation techniques migrated to Iraq because operations personnel believed that traditional interrogation techniques were no longer effective for all detainees,” the investigation says.
The use of these techniques at Abu Ghraib and other prisons prompted Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona to draft an anti-torture amendment, which President Bush signed into law in January 2006.
It also led to major revisions in the Army’s interrogation field manual. The new manual bans many of the practices covered in the investigation — including waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning. Interrogators also are prohibited from depriving detainees of food, water and medical care.
Psychological techniques are always better than muscle, Ritz said, but the Army has few talented interrogators.
Only about 5 percent of military interrogators are any good, Ritz said.
“You’re talking about only 40 to 100 interrogators that really get human behavior,” he said. “Interrogation is about charisma, observation skills and intuition.”
June 13th, 2007
The Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology at Yeshiva University is sponsoring a conference:
War, Torture and Terror: The Role of Psychology
Friday, June 22, 2007,
9 AM – 4 PM at the
Geraldine Schottenstein Center
239-241 East 34th Street, NYC
Schedule:
9 – 9:35 AM Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:35 – 10 AM Welcome
Shara Sand, PsyD, Chair;
Assistant Director of Clinical Training,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
Opening Remarks
Lawrence J. Siegel, PhD
Dean,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
10 – 10:45 AM Invited Address
The Development of Psychological Torture: A Modern
History of Coercive Interrogation and Its Effectiveness
Shara Sand, PsyD *
Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology;
Assistant Director of Clinical Training,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
10:45 – 10:55 AM Questions and Answers
10:55 – 11 AM Abraham Givner, PhD, Conference Co-Chair;
Director, School-Clinical Child Psychology Program,
Ferkauf Graduate School of Psychology, Yeshiva University
11 – 11:45 AM Invited Address
The Role of Psychologists in the Global War on Terror;
Professional and Ethical Considerations
Michael Gelles, PsyD *
Consultant, Washington, DC; Former Chief Psychologist,
Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS)
11:45 – 12 NOON Questions and Answers
12 NOON – 1 PM Lunch
1:15 – 2 PM Invited Address
Torture, Ethics and the Consequences of Complicity
Leonard Rubenstein, JD
Executive Director, Physicians for Human Rights
2:15 – 3:30 PM Concurrent Workshops:
I. Torture Across the Generations: The Chilean Project of
Theater Arts Against Political Violence
Steven Reisner, PhD, International Trauma Studies Program,
Columbia University; New York University, Psychoanalytic Institute
This workshop will present videotapes and discussion from a theater Arts Against Political Violence project addressing the experience of two generations of Chileans who experienced torture under Pinochet. Theater Arts Against Political Violence consisted of a psychoanalyst, a director, and an international group of actors; its mandate was to work with survivors of severe human rights violations to create works of theater derived from such experiences. In the material presented, the needs of the younger generation for revenge are positioned along with the needs of the older generation to find meaning. The presentation will offer a live performance
attempting to represent and give meaning to the complex interface of trauma between generations. It will also offer tapes of the dialogue
between the members of the two generations of survivors
that inspired the artists.
II. Human Rights Violations in Homophobic Persecution
Leanh Nguyen, PhD, Senior Psychologist at the Bellevue/
NYU Program for Survivors of Torture; Candidate at the
NYU Postdoctoral Program for Psychoanalysis; Independent
Practice in NYC
Homophobic persecution is a global epidemic that has not been discussed in the context of torture or human rights violation. Often categorized as a “bias” crime, it is treated as having cultural/religious roots and is not considered in the politics of human rights advocacy. The author, who has been involved over the past five
years with victims of homophobic persecution, will present clinical data on homophobic violence from various parts of the world, on the psychic injuries sustained by its victims, and on the implicit conceptions of their human rights in the hands of advocates, law enforcers, and healthcare providers.
III. Therapeutic Responses to Displaced African Female
Survivors of Sexual Violence
Adeyinka M. Akinsulure-Smith, PhD, Assistant Professor,
The City College of New York; Psychologist at the Bellevue/
NYU Program for Survivors of Torture
Sexual violence against women has been used as a weapon in numerous recent conflicts (Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Darfur). This workshop will focus on the nuances and extent of the crime of rape. Establishing an environment of trust and safety is essential, and because individual therapy can be a foreign concept, group therapy is frequently employed. Clinical aspects of working with survivors of sexual violence, war trauma survivors, refugees, asylees and asylum seekers will be explored.
IV. Riding Two Horses: The APA’s Support for Interrogations,
Psychological Ethics, and Human Rights
Edward J. Tejirian, PhD, Independent Practice,
New York City
In 2005, the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics in National Security Investigations (PENS) was formed and opposed any participation by psychologists in torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The report also said that psychologists could play a vital role in interrogations in settings such as Guantanamo that have been denounced as being in violation of the UN Convention Against Torture. The APA Board of Directors invoked a little-used rule to adopt the PENS report as APA policy without consultation with the membership, resulting in a complex controversy within the APA. This workshop will invite participants to
look at and discuss both sides of that controversy.
V. From Trauma to Tragedy: How Holocaust Survivors
Rebuilt Shattered Lives
Carl Auerbach, PhD** and Shoshana Mirvis, PsyD*
During the Holocaust, six million Jews were systematically annihilated in Nazi-run concentration camps and ghettos. Despite enduring years of incomprehensible horror, many survivors managed to begin anew and lead apparently normal lives. This workshop will focus on exploring this question of survival and resiliency. The survivors’ experience will be explored through the lens of a theory of structural dissociation.
VI. Defining Evil, the Depravity Standard and War Crimes
Michael Welner, MD, Chairman, The Forensic Panel;
Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine;
Adjunct Professor of Law, Duquesne University School of Law;
Special Consultant, ABC News
Judges and juries both across the United States and in other countries who decide that a crime is “depraved,” “heinous,” or “horrible” can assign more severe sentences. There is no standardized definition for such dramatic words. The Depravity Scale research aims to establish societal standards of what makes a crime depraved, and to develop a standardized instrument based on specific characteristics of a crime that must be proven in order to merit more severe sentences. This instrument distinguishes not who is depraved, but rather what aspects of a given crime are depraved and the degree of a specific crime’s depravity.
3:30 – 4 PM Open Forum Discussion
Shara Sand, PsyD, Moderator
Download a brochure here, register online here.
June 12th, 2007