A couple of weeks ago the New York Times published an Op-Ed byMichael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack that claimed the Iraq “surge” was working. Glenn Greenwald interviewed Michael O’Hanlon and uses his responses to demolish the credibility of the Op-Ed, and of its authors.
Add comment August 13th, 2007
Over at Daily Kos, Valtin summarizes the state of affairs in the American Psychological Association as the convention looms at the end of this week: Moment of Truth Arrives: APA & Participation in U.S. Torture.
The introductory paragraph:
On August 16, the American Psychological Association (APA) opens a five day convention in beautiful San Francisco. Behind the mise en scene of cable cars, wind-whipped fog, hot sourdough bread, and old Victorian gingerbread homes, a crucial political struggle is taking place over the future of coercive interrogation techniques and inhumane detention conducted by U.S. forces in the wrongly-named “war on terror”.
Valtin goes on to explain the deciding role that APA President Sharon Brehm will play as she decides whether to pull a parliamentary maneuver to prevent a resolution proposing a Moratorium on psychologist participation from coming to a vote. Brehm will decide within the week how she wants to be remembered when the history of psychologists and torture gets written.
Add comment August 13th, 2007
Followers of this blog, or of the role of psychologists in abusive interrogations, will be familiar with the Names of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, reported by Mark Benjamin, Katherine Eban, and Jane Mayer to be the CIA’s principal torture teachers. Evidently these two psychologists, through CIA contract to their firm Mitchell Jessen & Associates, was key in the translation of SERE techniques into the routine torture utilized in the CIA black sites. Eban further describes how these brutal interrogation techniques were copied at Guantanamo and elsewhere, becoming standard operating procedure for US torturers.
Now the Spokesman Review reports that former American Psychological Association President Joseph Dominic Matarazzo is ” one of five ‘governing people’ in the Mitchell Jessen firm,” and owns a 1% stake in the torture company. Of course Matarazzo denies knowing what the company did, but apparently declined to say what he thought they did.
The evidence increases that many key psychologists were involved in America’s torture regime. Now that reporters are looking, this may be but the first of many revelations.
Here is the complete article:
Expert has stake in cryptic local firm
Consultants tied to CIA interrogationsby Bill Morlin
The former president of the American Psychological Association is a partner in a Spokane-based firm linked to the CIA’s reported use of harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists at secret detention centers around the world.Joseph Dominic Matarazzo, an 81-year-old former psychology professor at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, said in a statement Friday that he serves on the board of Mitchell Jessen & Associates and owns 1 percent of the firm.
According to public records, Matarazzo is one of five “governing people” in the Mitchell Jessen firm, which does secret interrogation consulting work for the CIA.
Matarazzo refused repeated interview requests but said in an e-mailed statement that he “is not and never has been involved in the company’s operational decisions,” and that he only “attends brief and infrequent company meetings.”
Matarazzo added in the e-mailed statement: “I have never been involved in the use either of torture or the legal or illegal interrogation of prisoners or anyone else. And I would strongly advise against it. I also have no knowledge of anyone who has been involved in such torture or interrogation.”
The statement was relayed by a spokesman at the Portland medical school where Matarazzo taught behavioral neuroscience for 50 years before his retirement in June.
The nationally renowned psychologist helped establish the University of Oregon’s Department of Medical Psychology before the school evolved and was renamed. The program became Oregon Health & Science University’s Department of Behavioral Neuroscience.
“He is very well respected at OHSU and among his peers in the area of neuro-behavioral science,” said university spokesman Jonathan Modie.
The ethics surrounding the issue of psychologists involved in torture interrogations will be a prime topic of debate next weekend when the 90,000-member American Psychological Association that Matarazzo once headed holds its national conference in San Francisco. Matarazzo isn’t expected to attend, nor are the two psychologist-managers of the Spokane firm, James E. Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen.
“This news of our former APA president being closely tied with the notorious Mitchell and Jessen group is shocking and distressing,” said Brad Olson, chairman of the APA Divisions for Social Justice.
“This leads to, more than anything else, many, many more questions,” said Olson, a Northwestern University psychology research professor who will be at the forefront of the conference debate.
APA President Sharon Brehm and Stephen Behnke, the director of APA’s Ethics Directorate, both declined comment last week when asked about Matarazzo’s ties to the private psychology firm working for the CIA.
“Dr. Matarazzo was president of APA 18 years ago,” Rhea Farberman, the organization’s director of public affairs, said in a prepared statement.
“Since that time, he has had no active role in APA governance but has been actively involved in the American Psychological Foundation (APF), the charitable giving arm of APA. Dr. Matarazzo currently holds no governance positions in either APA or APF,” the statement said.
Matarazzo’s “professional activities are outside and independent of any role he has played within APA and APF,” the statement said. “We have no direct knowledge about the business dealing of Mitchell’s and Jessen’s company; however, APA’s position is clear – torture or other forms of cruel or inhuman treatment are always unethical.”
Matarazzo, in his e-mailed statement, said, “I firmly subscribe to and abide by the APA Code of Ethics that torture or other forms of cruel and inhumane treatment are unethical.”
James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen, who once claimed APA ties, are both former Department of Defense psychologists who taught and monitored SERE training – survival, evasion, resistance and escape – for military and other government personnel at Fairchild Air Force Base.
According to various published reports, Mitchell Jessen & Associates specializes in “reverse engineering” of SERE techniques such as sleep and sensory deprivation, starvation and simulated drowning. The techniques are reportedly used on detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and other “black sites,” or secret prisons.
The Senate Armed Services Committee is expected to hold hearings this fall into whether the techniques violate anti-torture provisions of the Geneva Conventions.
Mitchell Jessen has business offices in Alexandria, Va., and in the American Legion Building in downtown Spokane where work goes on behind key-carded security doors monitored by video cameras. The top floor of the building is off-limits to the public and reportedly is used by Mitchell Jessen and three affiliated businesses.
It’s not known how Mitchell Jessen established its business relationship with Matarazzo.
Mitchell and Jessen have refused interview requests but haven’t denied their company’s contract work for the CIA, which they likely would be prohibited from discussing. Through a spokeswoman, Mitchell, who now lives in Florida, and Jessen, who lives in Spokane, say they are proud of their work for the U.S. government and deny any connection to torture interrogations.
They formed their consulting business in 2005. Although they didn’t register their limited liability corporation as required with the Washington secretary of state’s office, they did file necessary documents with the state Department of Licensing and the Department of Revenue.
Those documents list the “governing people” of the company as Mitchell, Jessen, Matarazzo, David M. Ayres, Randall W. Spivey and Roger L. Aldrich. Spivey, who lives in Spokane, has declined comment on his work with Mitchell Jessen. Ayres, who lives in Alexandria, Va., and Aldrich, who lists a Spokane Valley address, couldn’t be reached for comment.
Matarazzo’s link to Mitchell Jessen will come as a surprise to his fellow APA members, said Olson, of the organization’s Divisions for Social Justice.
The University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Psychology has a scholarship named after Matarazzo, who attended Brown University before getting his master’s and doctoral degrees from Northwestern University.
Matarazzo was an assistant professor of medical psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and was a research associate in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School before moving to Oregon.
Olson said a recent Vanity Fair article portrayed Mitchell Jessen as amateurs lacking APA credentials, who weren’t perceived as scientists possessing data.
But the Vanity Fair report and other published accounts, Olson said, “suggest that SERE connections to interrogations were all about science, or at least some form of it.”
Add comment August 13th, 2007
Soldiers in Iraq are suffering exhaustion on a daily basis, the Guardian reports:
The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.
Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad’s international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.
Where once the war in Iraq was defined in conversations with these men by untenable ideas - bringing democracy or defeating al-Qaeda - these days the war in Iraq is defined by different ways of expressing the idea of being weary. It is a theme that is endlessly reiterated as you travel around Iraq. ‘The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,’ says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the ’surge’ in Baghdad began.
They are not supposed to talk like this. We are driving and another of the public affairs team adds bitterly: ‘We should just be allowed to tell the media what is happening here. Let them know that people are worn out. So that their families know back home. But it’s like we’ve become no more than numbers now.’
This exhaustion has implications for the troops, and for the Iraqis. The troops will suffer the short- and long-term consequences: divorces, illness, mental illness, botyh in Iraq and long after they return. The Iraqis, however, will suffer the consequences of poor decision-making by the troops: quicker firing at roadblocks, less accurate aim, more rage during home searches, overwhelming firepower called in quicker, and a general increase in the daily brutality of occupation.
US decision-makers, of course, care about neither consequence. For them the US troops, primarily working class, matter no more than do the Iraqis they attempt to control. Their all just pawns in a game of control and of image. To these decision-makers, looking strong is more important than any number of lives.
Add comment August 12th, 2007
From a 1994 Giuliani speech:
“Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.”
[h/t Daily Kos.]
Add comment August 12th, 2007
The Boston Globe today brings word that many of those held at Guantanamo Concentration Camp are not even accused of anti-US “terrorism”, but are simply Afghans, possibly corrupt ones, who got in the way of US plans to control the country post-Taliban:
When US special forces wanted to defeat the Taliban, they befriended Abdullah Mujahid, the police chief of this mountainous province. They visited his home with a gift of chocolates, and gave money and equipment to his fighters.
Mujahid met frequently with US troops, and even arrested and handed over a suspect the US military sent to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But as the threat of the Taliban receded, US forces sought to replace Mujahid — an illiterate leader who had been accused of corruption — with a professionally trained police chief. Soon, Mujahid was accused of being responsible for an attack on US forces. He was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he languishes not far from the man he arrested.
The fall of Mujahid offers a rare glimpse into the trials of postwar Afghanistan, where US special forces struggled to rein in the warlords they once wooed.
But it also reveals the extent to which the military is using the Guantanamo Bay detention center for a starkly different purpose than the one outlined by President Bush: to keep the worst terrorism suspects behind bars.
A Globe investigation found that the military has used Guantanamo Bay not just for terrorists “picked up on the battlefield” — as Bush has repeatedly asserted — but also for uncooperative or unruly tribal chieftains, many of whom had been key supporters of the US-led invasion.
The use of Guantanamo Bay for purposes other than fighting international terrorism could have legal significance, because Bush has tried to justify creating a place where detainees can be held without normal legal protections on the grounds that the prisoners are enemy combatants who might launch a terrorist attack if they are released.
Despite Bush’s assertions, at least 52 detainees who had been held at Guantanamo Bay were not accused of ties to the Taliban or Al Qaeda, according to publicly released military records detailing the accusations against nearly 500 prisoners. At least a dozen were once officials in the post-Taliban government, arrested in their homes or offices during a broader US campaign to rein in warlords.
Mujahid was one. The former head of the United Nations office in Gardez, Thomas Ruttig, said he urged the Afghan government to remove Mujahid from his post because he was seen as an uneducated, disruptive, and corrupt figure. But Ruttig said he expected Mujahid to be fired or tried for corruption in Afghanistan, not held indefinitely in Cuba without a trial.
“I never dreamed he would be sent to Guantanamo,” Ruttig said in a recent interview in Kabul.
John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch researcher, helped write a 2003 report that accused Mujahid and his inner circle of allowing their fighters to set up illegal checkpoints to take money from truck drivers. But he, too, said Mujahid should not have been sent to Guantanamo Bay.
“Guantanamo is not even vaguely the appropriate place for him,” he said, adding that the administration shouldn’t use its power to hold accused terrorists at Guantanamo to solve political or criminal problems in Afghanistan.
The distinction between Guantanamo and a regular military or civilian prison is significant because Guantanamo detainees are stripped of most of their rights, and can be held on unspecified charges without being given a chance to mount a normal legal defense.
For a year after Mujahid’s arrest in July 2003, the military refused to release any information about why he was arrested. But in 2004, after a Supreme Court ruling forced the government to reveal why people were being held, the military accused Mujahid of “being responsible for” an attack in which a US soldier was killed, though UN and Afghan officials say Mujahid was not in Gardez at the time.
Then, in 2005, the military accused him of being a senior leader of a militant group operating in India-held Kashmir. But Pakistani news accounts suggest that another man by the same name who died last fall was a senior leader of that group.
Now, even the military has stopped saying that Mujahid belongs in Guantanamo Bay. In February, Pentagon officials informed his lawyers that he was among a group of at least 12 detainees who had been cleared to return to Afghanistan, either for release or further detention.
Pentagon spokesman Jeffrey Gordon declined to discuss the accusations against Mujahid, but said the decision to clear him for transfer does not “change the fact that he still poses a threat to the United States.”
Presumably many of those held pose “a threat to the United States” beacuse they resent being imprisoned without charges or trial for years on end. And the potential that they might describe their treatment at US hands certainly makes them a danger to the government that subjected them to abuse for those long years.
Evidently, Mujahid’s major “crime” was refusing to cooperate in hiding torture and murder by US special forces:
Relations between Mujahid and the special forces deteriorated further in March 2003. US soldiers in Gardez had severely beaten a group of Afghan prisoners during an interrogation, and one of them had died, according to several former Afghan police and a report by the Afghan attorney general’s office, which investigated the case.
The second Commander Mike ordered that the seven living prisoners be transferred to Mujahid’s jail, according to the attorney general’s report and Raz Mohammad Dalili, the Afghan governor at the time who helped make the arrangements for the transfers.
At a joint security meeting, Commander Mike threatened to kill Mujahid if he released the prisoners, according to the Crimes of War Project, a Washington human rights group that investigated the alleged abuse.
The Americans who dropped off the prisoners spoke briefly to Mujahid in his office behind a closed door and then drove away, said Mehboob Ahmad, Mujahid’s personal driver.
Some of the prisoners were unconscious, and their bodies had turned black and blue, Ahmad said. Mujahid ordered that they be given medical treatment and mattresses, Ahmad said.
“Mujahid was upset. We all were,” he said. “I think anyone who would have seen them in that condition would be upset.”
Mujahid described the prisoners’ injuries to Afghan military prosecutors, who later wrote a report recommending that the American soldiers be punished. In January of this year, two special forces soldiers received administrative punishments in connection with the prisoners’ treatment. Major James Gregory, a spokesman, said at the time that the special forces command “takes all allegations of abuse seriously.”
Weeks after the prisoners were dropped off at Mujahid’s jail, the Afghan government decided to remove Mujahid from his post. Dalili, the governor, said in a recent interview in Kabul that the second Commander Mike helped persuade him — and Afghanistan’s central government — to replace Mujahid with a professionally trained police chief.
And the American abusers still run rampant across Afghanistan:
But a few things have not changed, according to the people of Gardez: Americans who use only their first names still broker deals, make arrests, and detain people across the restive countrywide.
The insurgency they are fighting rages on.
Add comment August 12th, 2007
Thanks to the Guardian, we have yet another account of a Guantanamo detainee who alleges torture at US hands:
Guantánamo man’s family release ‘torture’ dossier
by Vikram Dodd
A British resident held by the US as an alleged terrorist has claimed his captors repeatedly tortured him, subjecting him to beatings, sexual abuse and threats of execution.Omar Deghayes, 37, is one of five British residents who the United Kingdom government last week asked the US to release from Guantanámo Bay, after years of refusing to help them because they were not UK citizens.
Yesterday the family of Mr Deghayes decided to release a detailed dossier of alleged torture which the former law student dictated to a lawyer who visited him in the Cuban internment camp.
He is a Libyan national whose family fled to the UK after their trade unionist father was murdered by the Gadafy regime in 1980.
Mr Deghayes was captured in Pakistan - his family claim by bounty hunters - after the US attacked Afghanistan. They say he had gone there to start a business exporting dried fruit to a leading supermarket.
In the dossier, he claims to have seen US guards kill people, witnessed prisoners being partially drowned, and saw the Qur’an thrown into a toilet by a US guard.
The new claims come after earlier Guardian reports of Mr Deghayes’s ill treatment, including allegations that he was left blinded in one eye after a soldier plunged his finger into it, and claims that he had human excrement smeared on his face.
Mr Deghayes grew up in Brighton and studied law at Wolverhampton University and then studied in Huddersfield. His family say he is not a terrorist and opposed violence.
The US says al-Qaida tells its operatives to allege ill treatment, though parts of Mr Deghayes’ account are consistent with those from former detainees.
The dossier contains far more allegations and detail than previously made public. Mr Deghayes says “sexual abuse did occur”, but says he can not bear to relive the details until he is released: “It is very distressing and sad to go through and remember again.”
He says he was threatened with being sent back to Libya where his family fear he would be killed.
He was first arrested in Lahore, Pakistan, in late 2001-early 2002, then taken to Bagram in Afghanistan, before being sent to Guantánamo Bay.
The allegations challenge President George Bush’s repeated claims that the US does not use torture.
He says that in Lahore prison he was subjected to electric shocks: “The more I scream they will laugh and do it again … my screams all in vain.”
He says that in Pakistan he was handed over to the Americans who hooded him and placed him on plane in a torture position.
“Two soldiers locked their arms into mine and lifted me off the ground. All my [weight] borne by my arms which were shackled behind my back.
“I was thrown in the plane. There were many others in the torture position.”
After he was moved to Bagram in Afghanistan, he says he saw electric shocks used on other detainees and here he also saw death threats, with guards pointing their rifles at the Muslim men.
He says he also witnessed a prisoner shot dead after he had gone to the aid of an inmate who was being beaten and kicked by the guards: “The American said he tried to take the gun.”
Another inmate was beaten to death: “One by the name of Abdaulmalik, Moroccan and Italian, was beaten until I heard no sound of him after the screaming.
“There was afterwards panic in prison and the guards running about in fear saying to each other the Arab has died. I have not seen this young man again.”
Another inmate, Mr Deghayes claims, was beaten until blood dripped on the cell floor and he was left “paralysed and mentally damaged”.
In Bagram he says he was chained in a cage “with hands stretched above [my] head …causing suffocation”.
In Bagram he says he went without food for 45 days and was subjected to water torture: “They hold me naked in the night, freezing cold, and throw buckets of water and fill the bucket and throw [it] again. I shiver and shake badly and try to sit down to gain warmth. They kick and punch and say stand up until I fall to the ground in weakness.”
While moving from Bagram to Guantánamo, he says he was so ill he suffered hallucinations that he was back in the UK and travelling on a train, after beatings and 45 days without food.
In Guantánamo Mr Deghayes says he was beaten on his first day. Special teams which tackle allegedly disruptive prisoners repeatedly beat him up, he claims.
Prisoners were also given mystery injections. He says an FBI interrogator called Craig said he would face execution, and that he would not get a proper trial.
He says: “Many times one FBI interrogator by the name of Craig said, ‘Omar, it is nothing like the law you studied in the UK. There will never be a proper court and lawyers etc, it would be only a military tribunal to determine your future and your life. Your best choice is to cooperate with me.”
He says he was subjected to taunts insulting his religion and during his first year in Guantánamo a Qur’an was thrown in a toilet, causing a riot among inmates. As a punishment his head and beard were shaved.
In Guantánamo, he says, “they would pretend to search and want to put their hands on people’s genitalia”.
His brother, Abubaker Deghayes, 39, said: “I cannot believe how the Americans can do this to him, and astonished how he could survive this.”
Mr Deghayes’s mother, Zohra Zewawi, said she feared for her son’s mental health if he ever is released.
“I worry that something has happened to his mind.
“He is being tortured. I read his diary. When he gets out I fear he will not be normal Omar. I’m sure he will have changed.”
It should be noted that military interrogators intentionally said they were from the FBI in order that the FBI would be blamed for the military’s abuses. So we should take the reference to the FBI with a grain of salt.
We also should note the “mystery injections.” Virtually every prisoner who has had the opportunity to communicate has referred to these mysterious drug injections. One of the great mysteries at Guantanamo concerns what drugs were/are being injected, why they are being injected, and by whom. These injections raise the question as to whether the US government is continuing its long-standing policy of seeking truth serums and other behavior control drugs. One wishes that Congress would look into this important question.
Add comment August 12th, 2007
Physicians for Human Rights has recently sent a letter to American Psychological Association President Sharon Bhrem responding to the APA Boar’s substitute motion that would replace the proposed Moratorium on psychologists participation in interrogation of “enemy combatants” with a resolution banning use of specific SERE-based techniques, but would allow continued psychologist participation in interrogations. PHR supports the intent of the Board proposal, but suggests closing loopholes in the Board’s resolution and indicates that this substitute resolution is, in fact, not a substitute for the original Moratorium. Thus, PHR calls for passing both the Moratorium and the “substitute motion.” Though they don’t discuss this, both motions can be considered if the Moratorium is voted upon and then the Board moves to suspend the rules to allow consideration of their motion as a new motion.
Here is the PHR letter:
August 6, 2007
Sharon Stephens Brehm, PhD, President
American Psychological Association.
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4242
Dear Dr Brehm:
We have had a chance to review the proposed resolution regarding torture put forward by the Board of the American Psychological Association (referred to as substitute motion #2). We appreciate the Board’s adoption, albeit in language we believe needs to be tightened, of one of the key recommendations contained in my letter of June 14: condemning certain specific interrogation techniques and psychologists’ direct or indirect participation in them.
With changes in wording I describe below, and adoption of the proposal for a moratorium (substitute motion #1), which we see as a companion to the Board’s proposal, we believe the APA has the opportunity to provide leadership both to the profession, in protecting psychologists from unethical practice, and to the nation, by providing its expertise to policy-makers regarding the harm these tactics bring. We are confident that a process can be devised to adopt the substance of these complementary resolutions.
The listing of specific techniques in the Board’s proposed resolution comes at a critical time. The President recently issued a new Executive Order concerning the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation methods that, the White House confirms, authorizes the continued use of severe interrogation techniques;1 many of these tactics amount to torture.2 We have recently learned, too, that some psychologists at the CIA and the Department of Defense have played a central role in the development and use of these abusive techniques (others adamantly opposed them).3 Calling for an end to torture and cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment is therefore no longer enough; it is essential to identify and prohibit the brutal tactics that have been at the heart of the abuses conducted by our government, and in which psychologists have been implicated. We are pleased to see the Board’s proposal take this stance.
We understand, of course, that the list of techniques in the proposed resolution is, by the very nature of a list, incapable of addressing all possible forms of torture; but the list does cover virtually all abusive psychological techniques used by the military and CIA and the Department of Defense since 2002. Firm and decisive condemnation of these tactics on account of their devastating impact on health and unequivocal opposition to psychologists’ participation in them would help policy-makers understand the importance of ending the use of these techniques and also assure that psychologists have the ethical guidance they need to avoid being drawn into supporting them.
To avoid creating loopholes, we urge that the resolution be amended in certain key respects that should not be objectionable:
A. Assure that the description of prohibited techniques leaves no room for ambiguity. To accomplish that, the language listing the techniques should be changed to state that
1. The use of isolation and sleep deprivation in interrogation is never permissible (thus eliminating the qualifier that they are condemned only if there is a detriment to health; these tactics always cause such a detriment);
2. The use of psychotropic drugs is prohibited;
3. Any exploitation of fears or psychopathology (not just phobias) is unacceptable; and
4. Participation “during” interrogation is expanded to include “or in connection with detention,” because we now know that practices such as isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of persistent loud music have been used as part of a strategy to break down individuals both inside and outside the interrogation room.4
B. Eliminate any ambiguity by an explicit statement that no reason, including a claim of legal authorization, can justify a psychologist’s violation of the ethical prohibition on engaging in or otherwise supporting interrogation methods that the resolution condemns.
C. Where the resolution refers to torture and cruel and inhuman and degrading treatment, accompany it by a reference to both international and domestic law.
D. Assure that the resolution not only commends psychologists who have opposed torture but will support those who resist complicity, while also committing the organization to investigate the credible allegations of all psychologist involvement in torture, whether APA members or not, and hold those psychologists to public account.
The Board’s resolution serves to underscore the importance of other actions we urged in my letter of June 14, especially adopting a stance that psychologists not participate in the interrogation of individual detainees by performing pre-interrogation assessments, designing interrogation plans, assisting in interrogation, monitoring interrogation, or otherwise. The Board’s proposed resolution is premised on the obligation of psychologists to avoid, or at least minimize, harm to individuals where no therapeutic purpose is present. But it is indisputable that, even the most benign interrogation is designed to induce distress and anxiety. Interrogations conducted by the United States in the context of detention of terrorist suspects significantly exacerbate this distress, and the potential for long-term harm, because they take place in a closed environment where human rights violations, including no due process and indefinite confinement, remain overwhelming. Engaging in any interrogation support in these circumstances, we believe, is inconsistent with core ethical values of the profession. Accordingly, we urge the Association to adopt both the proposal the Board has put forward condemning particular tactics (as amended) and the proposed resolution calling for a moratorium on psychologist participation in any interrogations of “enemy combatants.”
Thank you very much for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Leonard S. Rubenstein
1 Mark Mazetti, Rules Lay Out C.I.A.’s Tactics In Questioning, New York Times, July21, 2007. 2 Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First have just issued a report demonstrating how ten interrogation techniques used by the CIA are war crimes under U.S. law. Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and Risk of Criminality. http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/documents/reports/leave-no-marks.pdf 3 Jane Mayer. The Black Sites. The New Yorker August 5, 2007 (web version). http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/08/13/070813fa_fact_mayer. Katherine Eban, Rorschach and Awe Vanity Fair July 17, 2007 (web version) http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/07/torture200707; Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General, Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse (2006).. Available at http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/abuse.pdf.
4 We acknowledge that our letter of June 14 was not explicit on this point, but it is of course clear that many of the techniques, by their very nature, took place outside the confines of the interrogation room and in a broader temporal context.
Add comment August 8th, 2007
Last month Vanity Fair online published Katherine Eban’s account of the psychologist-designed torture of Abu Zubaydah, designed and conducted by CIA consultants Mitchell and Jessen, former Suvival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) psychologists. This week, the New Yorker publishes a companion piece by Jane Mayer on the CIA torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [The Black Sites]. In the course of a long piece, the article sheds more light on the role of psychologists in US torture.
Here are a few excerpts on the role of psychologists:
The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”
The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”
Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)
Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”
As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that “if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”
Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that “they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that “after the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”
The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”
Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair articlerevealed the existence of a December 10, 2002 document — SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure — establishing certain of these SERE-derived torture techniques as standard Operating procedure for US abuse at Guantanamo. Mayer reveals a bit more of the contents of this chilling document which shows the degree to which torture became routinized and bureaucratically organized in American gulags:
A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”
Mayer also reveals the important role of doctors in US torture:
In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”
Mayer also makes clear that we are talking about “torture” here, not any supposed “torture-lite”:
Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.
According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”
Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.
In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”
And:
Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said, “It all comes down to individual moral barometers.” Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for “enemy combatants,” it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.
But the psychological disorientation was paramount:
Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like the soundtrack from a horror film,” to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”
Some US interrogators with SERE training claim that this treatment can’t be torture because its nothing more than is done to US troops during SERE training. They can’t seem to distinguish a couple of days of abuse under known limited conditions from the never-ending tortures inflicted upon real detainees:
One of these former [CIA] officers defends the C.I.A.’s program by noting that “there was absolutely nothing done to K.S.M. that wasn’t done to the interrogators themselves”—a reference to SERE-like training. Yet the Red Cross report emphasizes that it was the simultaneous use of several techniques for extended periods that made the treatment “especially abusive.” Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been a prominent critic of the Administration’s embrace of harsh interrogation techniques, said that, particularly with sensory deprivation, “there’s a point where it’s torture. You can put someone in a refrigerator and it’s torture. Everything is a matter of degree.”
As Mayer makes clear, the US torture regime became more systematic, more routinized, more bureaucratic over time. Eventually Mohammed was moved to the US’s state-of-the-art secret torture facility in Poland:
But, according to well-informed sources, it was a far more high-tech facility than the prisons in Afghanistan. The cells had hydraulic doors and air-conditioning. Multiple cameras in each cell provided video surveillance of the detainees. In some ways, the circumstances were better: the detainees were given bottled water. Without confirming the existence of any black sites, Robert Grenier, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, said, “The agency’s techniques became less aggressive as they learned the art of interrogation,” which, he added, “is an art.”
Mohammed was kept in a prolonged state of sensory deprivation, during which every point of reference was erased. The Council on Europe’s report describes a four-month isolation regime as typical. The prisoners had no exposure to natural light, making it impossible for them to tell if it was night or day. They interacted only with masked, silent guards. (A detainee held at what was most likely an Eastern European black site, Mohammed al-Asad, told me that white noise was piped in constantly, although during electrical outages he could hear people crying.) According to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he was shackled and kept naked, except for a pair of goggles and earmuffs. (Some prisoners were kept naked for as long as forty days.) He had no idea where he was, although, at one point, he apparently glimpsed Polish writing on a water bottle.
In the C.I.A.’s program, meals were delivered sporadically, to insure that the prisoners remained temporally disoriented. The food was largely tasteless, and barely enough to live on. Mohammed, who upon his capture in Rawalpindi was photographed looking flabby and unkempt, was now described as being slim. Experts on the C.I.A. program say that the administering of food is part of its psychological arsenal. Sometimes portions were smaller than the day before, for no apparent reason. “It was all part of the conditioning,” the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said. “It’s all calibrated to develop dependency.”
The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”
“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”
The article also shows the moral complexity of America’s torture regime as a former CIA official insists the program is “safe” for the detainees but speaks of the psychological damage to the interrogators”:
The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”
This article again raises the issue of the centrality of psychology to America’s torture regime. It was the supposed knowledge, expertise, credentials, and legitimacy of psychologists that was important to the CIA torture-planners.The psychological profession will be stained by this association, and by its silence while these abuses occurred in our name. Not untill the profession fully investigates and condemns these abuses will the stain begin to be lifted. No simple “banning” of specific torture techniques by the American Psychological Association (APA) can possibly be an adequate reply to these horrors. The profession must loudly and collectively cry “Shame!” and “Never again!”
Further, the critical collaboration and silence of the APA leadership during this profound moral crisis cannot go unchallenged. In the interests of maintaining their ties to the military and the CIA, these leaders were more than willing to turn a blind eye to the torture being designed and conducted by our psychological colleagues. They never uttered a peep of concern for these abuses, but, rather, parsed words to try and evade responsibility. In the final accounting for US torture, the APA leadership will certainly bear a measure of the responsibility.
1 comment August 5th, 2007
As the American Psychological Association argues that military psychologists involved in interrogations are military officers first, responsible to follow orders, whether or not they conflict with psychological ethics, many medical doctors are arguing the opposite. “A military physician needs to be a physician first and a military officer second, in my opinion” Dr. Sondra Crosby of Boston University is quoted in this article opposing physician involvement in force feeding hunger strikers:
US Military Doctors Criticized Over Force-Feeding
by AP staffwriters
CHICAGO- Military doctors violate medical ethics when they approve the force-feeding of hunger strikers at the U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, according to a commentary in a medical journal.The doctors should attempt to prevent force-feeding by refusing to participate, the three authors write in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association. “In medicine, you can’t force treatment on a person who doesn’t give their voluntary informed consent,” said Dr. Sondra Crosby of Boston University, one of the authors. “A military physician needs to be a physician first and a military officer second, in my opinion.”
As of yesterday, 20 of 23 fasting detainees at Guantanamo were being fed liquid meals through flexible tubes inserted through their noses and throats, said Guantanamo spokesperson navy Cmdr. Rick Haupt. The strikers are protesting conditions at the camp and their confinement.
A few physicians have declined to participate in force-feeding, although the specific number has not been tracked, Haupt said.
Last year, the military started strapping detainees in restraint chairs during tube feedings to prevent the prisoners from resisting or making themselves vomit.
About 360 men, including Canadian Omar Khadr, are still held at Guantanamo on suspicion of links to Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
In contrast, evidently, psychologists are for sale to the highest bidder, whether that bidder be the military or corporate employers. At this point, “psychological ethics” is an oxymoron.
Add comment August 3rd, 2007
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