Psyche, Science, and Society

Masculine insecurity runs our government

Listen to VP Richard Cheney and Rep. Rahm Emanuel:

Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell (Mich.) and John P. Murtha (Pa.).

In a 40-minute interview with Politico, he scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the big spending and energy debates of the year.

Murtha “and the other senior leaders … march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker,” Cheney said. “I’m trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn’t have happened.”

But his implication was clear: When asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, “They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected.”

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), who as Democratic Caucus Chair is the party’s fourth-ranking House leader, replied: “Some of us were surprised that the president didn’t have a bigger stick when he could have stood up to Dick Cheney.”

Perhaps we need more secure people down there.

Add comment December 6th, 2007

CIA destroyed torture videotapes

In unsurprising but chilling news today the New York Times reports that, in 2005, the CIA destroyed videotapes of the torture of two Al Qaeda detainees. One of these detainees was including Abu Zubaydah, whose torture, aided by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen was described by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair last summer.

One particularly chilling sentence describing the purpose of the tapes gives further evidence of the degree to which US torture is standardized and carefully administered:

A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said the videotaping was ordered as a way of assuring “quality control” at remote sites following reports of unauthorized interrogation techniques.

This sentence also indicates that officials who claim they didn’t know what was occurring at the CIA black sites are lying as much as those high officials who claimed to be “shocked” when Abu Ghraib torture was exposed.

Here is the Times article:

C.I.A. Destroyed Tapes of Interrogations

By Mark Mazzetti

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and their destruction raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information from the courts and from the presidentially appointed Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program. It was not clear who within the C.I.A. authorized the destruction of the tapes, but current and former government officials said it had been approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The New York Times informed the C.I.A. on Wednesday evening that it planned to publish an article in Friday’s newspaper about the destruction of the tapes. Today, the C.I.A. director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote a letter to the agency workforce explaining the matter.

The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.

C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case. It was unclear whether the judge had explicitly sought the videotape depicting the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah.

Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui — showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.

General Hayden’s statement said that the tapes posed a “serious security risk,” and that if they were to become public they would have exposed C.I.A. officials “and their families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers.”

“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” he said. He said in his statement that he was informing agency employees because “the press has learned” about the destruction of the tapes.

General Hayden said in a statement that leaders of Congressional oversight committees were fully briefed on the matter, but some Congressional officials said notification to Congress had not been adequate.

“This is a matter that should have been briefed to the full Intelligence Committee at the time,” an official with the House Intelligence Committee said. “This does not appear to have been done. There may be a very logical reason for destroying records that are no longer needed; however, this requires a more complete explanation. “

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes existed until 2005.

“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” he said.

Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.

If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.

General Hayden said the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” General Hayden said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

“The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages,” his statement read

In October, federal prosecutors in the Moussaoui case were forced to write a letter to the court amending those C.I.A. declarations. The letter stated that in September, the C.I.A. notified the United States attorney’s office in Alexandria, Va., that it had discovered a videotape documenting the interrogation of a detainee. After a more thorough search, the letter stated, C.I.A. officials discovered a second videotape and one audio tape.

The letter is heavily redacted and sentences stating which detainees’ interrogations the recordings document are blacked out. Signed by the United States attorney, Chuck Rosenberg, the letter states that the C.I.A.’s search for interrogation tapes “appears to be complete.”

There is no mention in the letter of the tapes that C.I.A. officials destroyed in 2005. Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.

John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the destruction of the tapes could carry serious legal penalties.

“If anybody at the C.I.A. hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he said.

A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said the videotaping was ordered as a way of assuring “quality control” at remote sites following reports of unauthorized interrogation techniques. He said the tapes, along with still photographs of interrogations, were destroyed after photographs of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public in May 2004 and C.I.A. officers became concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos.

He said the worries about the impact a leak of the tapes might have in the Muslim world were real.

It has been widely reported that Mr. Zubaydah was subjected to several tough physical tactics, including waterboarding, which involves near-suffocation. But C.I.A. officers judged that the release of photos or videos would nonetheless provoke a strong reaction.

“People know what happened, but to see it in living color would have far greater power,” the official said.

Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing legislation in Congress to have all detainee interrogations videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple times to glean better information.

Mr. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A. does not record the interrogation of detainees. “When I would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to better understand the intelligence, they said ‘What tapes?’,” he said.

Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane contributed reporting.

Add comment December 6th, 2007

A modest proposal and the need for Empirically-Based Torturer Treatment

In the New Statesman, John Gray lauds the great progress being made in the United States in the legalized regulation of torture, allowing the torturers to regain their self-respect. In the process, Gray has good news for psychologists. In addition to increased opportunities designing and supervising the legally-applied torture techniques, they have yet another crucial role to play

It would be wrong to forget the needs of the interrogators themselves. In the past, torturers were shunned as outcasts - a tacit admission that they acted as the servants of tyrants. If we are to put interrogators to work in defence of liberal values, their role in the community must receive proper recognition. They will require intensive counselling to overcome the inevitable traumas that this difficult work involves. They must be enabled to see themselves as dedicated workers in the cause of progress. Psychotherapy must be available to help them avoid the negative self-image from which some torturers have suffered in the past. Unlike torturers who violated human rights at the behest of tyrants, interrogators who apply their skills to terrorists today are in the vanguard of human progress. In effect, they are practitioners of a new profession. Those who enter it must feel that society values them.

Surely the American Psychological Association will rise to the challenge. They must form a task force (the task force on the Psychological Evidence-base for Counseling Interrogators Legally or PENCIL) to develop the best empirically-based treatments for torturers. The APA has great experience getting just the right people onto its task forces, as when it formed the Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force, the APA can use its wisdom to search long and hard for those psychologists with first-hand experience of the needs of torturers. Most likely, those with personal experience in the CIA’s black sites, at Guantanamo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan can be enticed to provide this additional service to our profession. Surely this effort will be rewarded by the government with much-needed funding for research and practice into EBTT (Empirically-Based Torturer Treatment). The APA’s research and practice communities can then unite in developing this vital service in support of our modern regime of human rights and torture under law.

Here is Gray’s proposal in full:

A Modest Proposal For Preventing Torturers in Liberal Democracies From Being Abused, and For Recognising Their Benefit to The Public. By John Gray (with apologies to Jonathan Swift)

by John Gray

A new phase in the evolution of liberal values is under way in the United States. America’s most celebrated defender of civil liberties has initiated a new debate on torture. The context of Professor Alan Dershowitz’s argument is American, but its meaning - like that of all true liberal principles - is universal. The force of his argument promises to transform liberal institutions throughout the world.

Using impeccable scholarship and the most rigorous logic, the distinguished Harvard legal scholar has demonstrated that nothing in the US Constitution forbids the use of torture. In interviews with the American media, Dershowitz has noted that while the Fifth Amendment prohibits self-incrimination, that means only that statements elicited by torture cannot be used as evidence against the person who has been tortured. It does not prohibit torture itself. Neither does the Eighth Amendment, since the ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” applies only after an individual has been convicted. The belief that torture is unconstitutional in America may be widespread, but it is a fallacy - the product of rudimentary errors in legal reasoning.

So torture is permitted by the American Constitution. But it remains legally unregulated. To fill this gap, Dershowitz advocates the introduction of “torture warrants”. Just as the FBI applies to the courts for search warrants, so it should be able to apply for torture warrants. At present, there is nothing in the law that explicitly authorises the use of torture to extract information from terrorists. If it is used, as it often is, it is used extra-legally. As Dershowitz has pointed out, this is a highly unsatisfactory state of affairs. The rule of law is a core liberal value. It cannot be compromised in the fight against terrorism. Torture, therefore, must cease to be something practised beyond the law; it must become part of normal judicial procedure.

If liberal thinkers in the past have shied away from rigorous thinking about torture, it is because they have been unduly influenced by history. Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu and Voltaire campaigned indefatigably against judicial torture, and viewed its abolition as a vital step in human progress. In their own time, no doubt, they were right. These partisans of liberty were locked in conflict with the entrenched tyrannies of Europe’s ancien regime. In attacking judicial torture, they were aligning themselves with the cause of progress and humanity.

The present situation is quite different. In the despotic, reactionary states against which Montesquieu and Voltaire struggled, torture was used to bolster arbitrary power. Now the liberal civilisation of which they dreamt actually exists - in the United States of America. Today torture is used to defend free societies from attack by their enemies. Many liberals - especially in Europe - seem unable to grasp this distinction. Mired in the past, they are blind to the emerging new regime of universal rights.

Where European thinkers have allowed recourse to torture at all, they have allowed it only in extreme situations. For Hobbes, justice was a set of conventions that societies adopted in order to achieve what he called “commodious living” - a peaceful, civilised existence. When order breaks down, in this view, the conventions of justice lapse. If a radiological bomb has been planted on the London Underground, torture may be the only way of disarming the device in time and thereby saving hundreds of thousands of lives. No government can avoid recourse to torture in such circumstances. Human beings turn to the state for security. If the state fails to provide it, it will be overthrown.

The trouble with this view of torture is that it remains stuck in the blood-soaked history of old Europe. It assumes that any act of torture leaves an indelible moral stain - even when the alternative, the destruction of many innocent lives, is unthinkable. It reduces torture to a desperate expedient whose rightful place, if any, is in darkened cellars. Seeing the struggle against terrorism in this way only weakens our resolve. Rather than wallowing in pessimism, we need to view the reintroduction of judicial torture as the next step in human progress.

Bringing torture out of the cellar into the clear light of day will require a far-reaching modernisation of the law, but before that can be achieved we need a parallel reform in our thinking about human rights. Fortunately, we can draw on the most advanced thinking in contemporary liberal philosophy - the theory of justice elaborated by the late John Rawls. The eminent Harvard philosopher seems not to have grasped the full implications of his theory; but one of its central features is the insight that basic liberties cannot conflict. For European thinkers such as Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, one liberty collides with another; even the same freedom exercised by one person can conflict with that of another. Freedom of expression clashes with freedom from hate speech; one person’s freedom of association (in a whites-only club, for example) is another’s wrongful discrimination. Hobbes and Mill saw these as conflicts that we cannot hope to resolve completely; the best we can do is to strive for a compromise in which the competing claims are balanced against one another.

American liberal philosophers have rejected this messy and uninspiring view. They have shown that all our liberties belong in a single, unified system. When they are properly “contoured” - that is, defined so that they cannot collide with one another - human rights need never conflict. Thus, when freedom of speech clashes with freedom from hate speech, it is denied that the latter is a genuine freedom.

The relevance of this insight to the question of torture should be self-evident. The belief that torture is always wrong is a prejudice inherited from an obsolete philosophy. We need to shed the belief that human rights are violated when a terrorist is tortured. As Rawls and others have shown, basic freedoms must form a coherent whole. Self-evidently, there can be no right to attack basic human rights. Therefore, once the proper legal procedures are in place, torturing terrorists cannot violate their rights. In fact, in a truly liberal society, terrorists have an inalienable right to be tortured.

This is what demonstrates the moral superiority of liberal societies over others, past and present. Other societies have degraded terrorists by subjecting them to lawless and unaccountable power. In the new world that is taking shape, terrorists, although they themselves degrade human rights by practising terrorism, will be afforded the full dignity of due legal process, even while being tortured. We can look forward to a time when this right will be available universally.

It is clear that the new regime of human rights that is emerging will not be confined to the United States. The US will not rest until other states have also adopted it. Developing a modern, liberal regime for the practice of torture will require reform of international treaties. The UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights embodies the discredited view that torture is inherently incompatible with respect for human rights. Along with other international treaties, it needs modernisation. Securing agreement on the changes that are required may seem a daunting task. Our experience during the Iraq crisis suggests it is not impossible, however. Using its formidable resources, the US has persuaded a number of refractory states of the wisdom of launching a pre-emptive attack to dislodge the rights-violating regime of Saddam Hussein. It can surely be relied upon to secure a similar agreement around reform of the international law on torture.

There is a deeper reason for believing that the new regime of rights will be universal. Dershowitz’s contention that torture is not forbidden by the US Constitution may look like a purely local argument; but that is to disregard the universal validity of the principles on which the Constitution is founded. Human rights are not just cultural or legal constructions, as fashionable western relativists are fond of claiming. They are universal values. To deny the benefits of the new regime of rights to other cultures is to patronise them in a way that is reminiscent of the colonial era. If the new regime on torture is good enough for the US, who can say that it is not good for everyone?

In practice, there will be countries that resist the new order. Rogue states are nothing new. Those that choose to defy the emerging consensus, however, must accept that they thereby place their legitimacy in question. States that refuse to modernise their laws on torture cannot expect the protection afforded them in the past by old-fashioned notions of sovereignty. They must expect increasing pressure to conform to global norms. If, despite all attempts at persuasion, they persist in opposing the international community, they will face action to enforce regime change.

No one will deny that the reintroduction of torture into the legal process will present some difficult problems. At present, torture is normally contracted out to less developed countries; but sending terrorists to friendly dictatorships for interrogation is hypocritical - and possibly inefficient. Surely it is far better that we do the job ourselves. If we do, however, we will need a trained body of interrogators, backed up by a staff of doctors, psychiatrists and other specialists. A new breed of lawyer will have to deal with the tricky cases that are bound to arise when people suffer injury or death under interrogation. We shall need expert social workers, trained to help the families of subjects under interrogation. Universities in particular must show they are capable of delivering the skills that will be required.

It would be wrong to forget the needs of the interrogators themselves. In the past, torturers were shunned as outcasts - a tacit admission that they acted as the servants of tyrants. If we are to put interrogators to work in defence of liberal values, their role in the community must receive proper recognition. They will require intensive counselling to overcome the inevitable traumas that this difficult work involves. They must be enabled to see themselves as dedicated workers in the cause of progress. Psychotherapy must be available to help them avoid the negative self-image from which some torturers have suffered in the past. Unlike torturers who violated human rights at the behest of tyrants, interrogators who apply their skills to terrorists today are in the vanguard of human progress. In effect, they are practitioners of a new profession. Those who enter it must feel that society values them.

Changing the law on torture may seem to be only one more item on the agenda of modernisation - part of the ongoing process of law reform, in which archaic notions about double jeopardy and trial by jury have already been swept away. Still, the problems posed by changing our policies on torture are undoubtedly more challenging than those we have confronted and overcome in other areas of reform. Especially in Europe, the reforms that are so urgently needed run up against an ingrained conservatism that treats inherited patterns of thought as sacrosanct.

We need nothing less than a fundamental advance in moral thinking. Liberals have often stressed that we must question the values we inherit from the past. The debate initiated by Alan Dershowitz shows that - in America, at least - they are not afraid to apply this lesson. The world’s finest liberal thinkers are applying themselves to the design of a modern regime of judicial torture. At a time when civilisation is under daily threat, there can be no more hopeful sign.

John Gray’s next book, Al-Qaeda and What It Means To Be Modern, will be published by Faber and Faber in May

Add comment December 6th, 2007