Psyche, Science, and Society

Rowley-McGovern: two big lies and the real reasons behind torture?

Former FBI agent Coleen Rowley and former CIA analyst Ray McGovern challenge many of the myths about US torture.they dispute that it works. But more important, based on their own experience, they dispute that its intent was to “protect America from future terrorist attacks,” as administration defender after defender claims. Here is the section of the article in which they speculate about the reasons for the torture program. While I don’t think their account here is the whoe story, I think it probably plays a larger role than many think:

The Real Reasons Behind Torture?

What, then, accounts for the descent into Inquisition practices of waterboarding and other torture techniques? What accounts for the bizarre decision to round up a whole bunch of people with no provable attachment to terrorism, designate them terrorist suspects, herd them into prisons in New York, New Jersey, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and God knows where else, where they could be — and were — abused?

What accounts for the blithe departure from international and national law — not to mention time-honored civilized procedures for dealing with prisoners and detainees?

What accounts for the marginalization of those military, FBI and other professionals who warned that torture is not only a war crime but also that it doesn’t yield reliable information — that, rather, it is the very best recruiting tool for terrorists?

We suggest four reasons why I-don’t-care-what-the-international-lawyers-say George Bush and dark-side Dick Cheney opted for torture:

1 — Deceit: Granted, torture does not yield truthful information. It can, though, be an excellent way to obtain the untruthful information you may wish to acquire. All you really need to know is what you want the victims to “confess” to and torture them, or render them abroad to “friendly” intelligence services toward the same end.

One case that speaks volumes is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured and rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he told his interrogators precisely what they wanted to hear.

According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, al-Libi had been identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements to prove that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

Without mentioning al-Libi by name, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration officials repeatedly cited information from his interrogation as credible evidence that Iraq was training al-Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

So torture can indeed provide the information you may want to have to grease the skids for war. Al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.

2 — Sadism: Cheney’s open advocacy of waterboarding speaks volumes, but what about the President? Sad to say, as psychiatrist Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, has noted:

“Bush’s certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a BB gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers (explaining that the resulting wound was ‘only a cigarette burn’)…

”His comfort with cruelty is one reason he can be so jocular…Instead of seeing a President in anguish, we watch him publicly joking about the absence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, in the vain search for which so many young Americans died.”

3 — Intimidation: Are you perhaps in some “shock and awe” at the prospect of the President designating you an “enemy combatant” and sending you off to the Navy brig in South Carolina for an indefinite stay? He now has court approval to do precisely that, and we are proceeding on faith that this joint article will not bring us “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Indefinite imprisonment is bad enough, but with the fringe benefit of the kind of torture suffered by Jose Padilla? Well, let us just say that the open advocacy of waterboarding and other “harsh” methods may, just may, be aimed at throwing the fear of Cheney into us, as a way of dissuading those of us who still believe in the Constitution from attempting to hold accountable those who break the law.

4 — Because We Can: Lord Acton was, of course, right. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And closeness to it does the same.

Guided by the principle of an unaccountable unitary executive – not to mention the writings of torture apologist Alan Dershowitz, the acting performances of the torture evangelists on Scalia’s TV favorite, Fox’s “24,” and using the fear factor to a fare-thee-well – torture has become the bellwether of exclusive dominant power.

The very transparency of the excuses for torture serves to demonstrate that this kind of power is in place, and is not to be questioned.

Here is the whole article:

‘Justifying’ Torture: Two Big Lies

By Coleen Rowley and Ray McGovern
July 19, 2008

One can assume that former Attorney General John Ashcroft didn’t mean it to be funny, but his testimony on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee might strike one as hilarious, were it not for the issue at hand — torture.

Ashcroft is the Attorney General who approved torture before he disapproved it, but committee members spared him accusations of flip-flopping.

He explained that he initially blessed the infamous torture memoranda drafted by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and others in mid-2002 because he (Ashcroft) believed it imperative to afford the President “the benefit of genuine doubt” regarding how to protect American lives in the “war on terror.”

But Ashcroft added that, despite this, when concerns about that earlier guidance for interrogations were brought to his attention, changing his mind “was not a hard decision for me.” A very flexible Attorney General.

“The benefit of genuine doubt?” Perhaps Ashcroft thought that this genteel way of looking at things would appeal to the poorly led, motley group calling itself the House Committee on the Judiciary, chaired by Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan.

But the rest of us, whose time does not expire in five minutes, cannot buy his defense of torture.  For it is based on two demonstrable lies.

Lie Number One

According to Ashcroft, “The administration’s overriding goal…was to do everything in its power and within the limits of the law…to keep this country safe from terrorist attack.”

His is merely the latest in a string of torture-exculpating statements adduced to document a myth; namely, that the Bush administration, having failed to prevent the attacks of 9/11, pulled out all the stops to keep us safe from a second attack; and that one of the necessary measures introduced was torture.

It was a situational thing, you see. But even that explanation does not survive close scrutiny.

First, for those with a strong stomach, a sample of recent statements; then proof of their transparency in aiming to create an exculpatory myth:

– On May 22, 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice publicly discussed the use of enhanced interrogation techniques: “After Sept. 11, whatever was legal in the face of not just the attacks of Sept. 11, but the anthrax attacks that happened, we were in an environment in which saving America from the next attack was paramount.”

– On June 5, 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden told Jim Angle of Fox News that it was fear of an imminent attack that led to the controversial interrogation practices — including waterboarding, which Hayden referred to as a “high-end interrogation technique.”

“Keep in mind…you have the nation suffering, reeling from a recent attack in which 3,000 citizens had been killed, until it was the collective judgment of the American government that these techniques would be appropriate and lawful in these circumstances.”

– On June 26, 2008, testifying before the Conyers committee, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington added, with some flair: “Smoke was still rising…3,000 Americans were just killed.” Dana Milbank of the Washington Post used the quote to show how Addington “justified his legal reasoning” regarding enhanced interrogation techniques.

Since members of the Judiciary Committee did little to expose the myth, let us try to help.

Selective Urgency

The sense of pressing urgency conjured up by Bush administration folks to justify torture does not square with Coleen Rowley’s direct personal experience in the FBI.

As some will remember, the FBI’s joint terrorism task force in Minneapolis had detained Zacarias Moussaoui on Aug. 16, 2001. Flight school pilots acting as whistleblowers had notified the FBI, against the wishes of their airline employer, of detailed information making Moussaoui the most suspicious student they had ever encountered.

French intelligence soon supplied further background confirming Moussaoui’s fighting for a “foreign power” — Chechnyan rebels, whose leader was connected to al-Qaeda. By Aug. 23, the case was deemed so suspicious, it went all the way to the top of the intelligence community, to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, in a PowerPoint presentation entitled: “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.”

As Rowley revealed in her letter of May 21, 2002, to FBI Director Robert Mueller, there was considerable frustration in her FBI unit in Minneapolis over the inability of FBI headquarters to get its act together and present these facts pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to obtain the secret FISA Court’s permission to search Moussaoui’s personal effects and laptop computer in the days before 9-11.

Odd Reactions

But once the attacks took place on 9-11, confirming the Minneapolis FBI unit’s worst fears and finally overcoming FBI Headquarters’ reluctance to conduct further searches of Moussaoui’s belongings, there was still little sense of urgency.

At that point, Moussaoui sat atop the list of prime sources for information about any “second wave” of attacks. But the Justice Department persisted in its refusal to allow agents to attempt to interview Moussaoui even after the attacks.

During the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, the acting U.S. Attorney denied the unit permission to interview Moussaoui.

Rowley – having seen what just had transpired due, at least in part, to the FBI unit having accepted No for an answer in August – decided to go a rung higher by calling Justice officials in the FBI’s Command Post in Washington on the morning of Sept. 12.

In that conversation, Rowley repeatedly drew attention to the Supreme Court decision (New York v Quarles, 467 U.S. 649, 1984) granting an “exigent-circumstances” exception to the Miranda rule in cases where an interview is judged necessary to protect public safety.

Rowley was told by Justice Department officials that “no such public emergency existed.” This is what Rowley encountered on 9/11 and 9/12.

Moussaoui remained the only al-Qaeda terrorist in custody for many months, but the Justice Department’s ban on interviewing him remained in place — at huge potential cost by forfeiting the possibility of acquiring information on other terrorist activities about which Moussaoui was very probably aware.

This is not merely theoretical. It appears that Moussaoui almost certainly was acquainted with Richard Reid, the “shoe bomber” who on Dec. 22, 2001, almost succeeded in blowing up American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami with nearly 200 people aboard.

So, in Rowley’s May 21, 2002, letter to FBI Director Mueller, she reminded him that if, as he claimed, priority was now being given to prevention over prosecution, the FBI needed to explore how to apply the Quarles “public safety” exception.

Rowley also reminded Mueller that Minneapolis had not only been prevented from further investigation of Moussaoui before 9/11 but also was prohibited from interviewing him after the attacks on that day.

Muzzling Moussaoui

Rowley tried again in early July 2002, after learning that Moussaoui was hinting he wanted to talk. She called then-Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff to note the opportunity missed by not interviewing Moussaoui — particularly in view of the suggestive information found on his laptop computer regarding crop dusting and wind currents.

Chertoff was not available; one of his assistants gave Rowley the brush-off.

Rowley’s last try came on Feb. 26, 2003, when she wrote the following as part of a longer letter to Director Mueller:

“If, as you have said, ‘prevention of another terrorist attack remains the FBI’s top priority,’ why is it that we have not attempted to interview Zacarias Moussaoui, the only suspect in U.S. custody charged with having a direct hand in the horror of 9/11?… Moussaoui almost certainly would know of other al-Qaeda contacts, possibly in the U.S., and would also be able to alert us to the motive behind his and Mohammed Atta’s interest in crop dusting.

“Similarly, there is the question as to why little or no apparent effort has been made to interview convicted terrorist Richard Reid, who obviously depended upon other al-Qaeda operatives in fashioning his shoe explosive. Nor have possible links between Moussaoui and Reid been fully investigated…

“In short … lack of follow-through with regard to Moussaoui and Reid gives a hollow ring to our ‘top priority.’”

It may be that Mueller, too, felt powerless at that point but, for whatever reason, he did not respond.

In sum, Rowley’s personal experience, and lots else, persuaded her that the please-understand-we-were-just-doing-all-we-could-to-prevent-a-second-wave-of-attacks excuse for torture is bogus — an outrageous lie.

The time is far past when the President and his torture apprentices should be accorded “the benefit of genuine doubt,” to quote again from Ashcroft’s testimony.

(Remember, too, that in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush allowed prominent Saudis, including members of Osama bin Laden’s family, to be whisked out of the United States aboard private jets after only cursory interviews with the FBI.)

The Real Reasons Behind Torture?

What, then, accounts for the descent into Inquisition practices of waterboarding and other torture techniques? What accounts for the bizarre decision to round up a whole bunch of people with no provable attachment to terrorism, designate them terrorist suspects, herd them into prisons in New York, New Jersey, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib and God knows where else, where they could be — and were — abused?

What accounts for the blithe departure from international and national law — not to mention time-honored civilized procedures for dealing with prisoners and detainees?

What accounts for the marginalization of those military, FBI and other professionals who warned that torture is not only a war crime but also that it doesn’t yield reliable information — that, rather, it is the very best recruiting tool for terrorists?

We suggest four reasons why I-don’t-care-what-the-international-lawyers-say George Bush and dark-side Dick Cheney opted for torture:

1 — Deceit: Granted, torture does not yield truthful information. It can, though, be an excellent way to obtain the untruthful information you may wish to acquire. All you really need to know is what you want the victims to “confess” to and torture them, or render them abroad to “friendly” intelligence services toward the same end.

One case that speaks volumes is that of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured and rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he told his interrogators precisely what they wanted to hear.

According to the Defense Intelligence Agency, al-Libi had been identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements to prove that Iraq trained al-Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons.

Without mentioning al-Libi by name, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and other administration officials repeatedly cited information from his interrogation as credible evidence that Iraq was training al-Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

So torture can indeed provide the information you may want to have to grease the skids for war. Al-Libi was practically the poster boy for the Cheney/Bush torture regime; that is, until he publicly recanted and explained that he only told his interrogators what he thought would stop the torture.

2 — Sadism: Cheney’s open advocacy of waterboarding speaks volumes, but what about the President? Sad to say, as psychiatrist Justin Frank, author of Bush on the Couch, has noted:

“Bush’s certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a BB gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers (explaining that the resulting wound was ‘only a cigarette burn’)…

”His comfort with cruelty is one reason he can be so jocular…Instead of seeing a President in anguish, we watch him publicly joking about the absence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, in the vain search for which so many young Americans died.”

3 — Intimidation: Are you perhaps in some “shock and awe” at the prospect of the President designating you an “enemy combatant” and sending you off to the Navy brig in South Carolina for an indefinite stay? He now has court approval to do precisely that, and we are proceeding on faith that this joint article will not bring us “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Indefinite imprisonment is bad enough, but with the fringe benefit of the kind of torture suffered by Jose Padilla? Well, let us just say that the open advocacy of waterboarding and other “harsh” methods may, just may, be aimed at throwing the fear of Cheney into us, as a way of dissuading those of us who still believe in the Constitution from attempting to hold accountable those who break the law.

4 — Because We Can: Lord Acton was, of course, right. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And closeness to it does the same.

Guided by the principle of an unaccountable unitary executive – not to mention the writings of torture apologist Alan Dershowitz, the acting performances of the torture evangelists on Scalia’s TV favorite, Fox’s “24,” and using the fear factor to a fare-thee-well – torture has become the bellwether of exclusive dominant power.

The very transparency of the excuses for torture serves to demonstrate that this kind of power is in place, and is not to be questioned.

Lie Number 2: Torture Saves Lives

It was hard to know whether to laugh or to cry. John Ashcroft insisting that according to “the reports I have heard, and I have no reason to disbelieve them, these techniques are very valuable.”

Ashcroft’s source? He indicated that it is none other than former CIA Director George Tenet, who wrecked the CIA by creating a Gestapo in the operations directorate and cultivating fawning boot-lickers among managers of analysis.

To say Tenet’s reputation for truthfulness leaves much to be desired would be the kind of self-evident revelation that CIA analysts were accustomed to assigning to their tongue-in-cheek “Great Moments in Intelligence” file.

It is, nonetheless, the White House line. Not only Ashcroft and Hayden, but also David Addington and John Yoo rang changes on the theme in their recent testimony before the aging Conyers.

Both Addington and Yoo argued that harsh interrogation methods had been crucial in preventing another terrorist attack on the U.S. after 9/11.

On Thursday, Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee picked up the theme, arguing that waterboarding and other harsh tactics yielded information that saved lives.

Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-California: “Had we not used those, would the probability of another attack not only be a probability but a certainty?”

Ashcroft:  “It could well have been.”

Have you, finally, no shame, Mr. Ashcroft? There is not a scintilla of evidence to support that claim. And, again, we are far past the point where the President and his torture apprentices merit “the benefit of genuine doubt.” Not the way they continue to play fast and loose with the truth.

Quod Est Veritas?

Here it is the President himself, with his remarkable contempt for truth, who sets the tone.

Dr. Frank points out that contempt itself is a defense, a form of self-protection of Bush’s belief system, in which he clings to his beliefs as if they were well researched facts: “Bush’s pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into what he asserts is the whole truth.”

And Cheney, Fox News, and the rest of the fawning corporate media (FCM) follow suit. What is truth? Go ask Pontius Bush.

Trouble is, the truth usually gets out, and the President is beginning to squirm. One highly disturbing fact, from the President’s point of view, emerged Thursday in the questioning of Ashcroft by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-New York.

Nadler noted that “high-value” detainee Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded after his arrest in March 2002, and Nadler asked Ashcroft whether that happened before the memos from John Yoo justifying such activity were drafted. Ashcroft said he didn’t know.

Nadler, at least, had done some homework. The videotapes of Zubaydah’s interrogation were among those destroyed by the CIA, for obvious reasons. Nadler is really asking on whose authority Zubaydah was waterboarded, since Addington and Yoo had not yet completed their ex-post-facto legal acrobatics.

The congressman knows the answer. The reason that CIA interrogators felt comfortable waterboarding is quite simply that the President of the United States cleared the way for such techniques with his Action Memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002.

When FBI agents were taken off the job of interrogating Zubaydah and became aware of the “techniques” being applied by their CIA colleagues, they questioned their use. They were told by CIA interrogators at the scene that the methods were approved “at the highest levels” and that no one would get in any trouble.

But what about the main contention of Lie Number Two? Has torture saved lives? Milt Bearden, a 30-year veteran of CIA’s operations directorate who rose to the most senior managerial ranks, doesn’t believe it for a minute:

“The administration’s claims of having ‘saved thousands of Americans’ can be dismissed out of hand because credible evidence has never been offered — not even an authoritative leak of any major terrorist operation interdicted based on information gathered from these interrogations in the past seven years. … It is irresponsible for any administration not to tell a credible story that would convince critics at home and abroad that this torture has served some useful purpose.”

Bearden said professionals he describes as the “old hands” in the CIA, the ones who know something of interrogation and intelligence, don’t believe administration claims. Worse still, they say, torture is counterproductive:

“This is not just because the old hands overwhelmingly believe that torture doesn’t work — it doesn’t — but also because they know that torture creates more terrorists and fosters more acts of terror than it could possibly neutralize.”

Bearden argues that if the claims of the Bush White House were true, it ought to stop hiding always behind the readily adduced need to protect sources and methods. He notes that in 1986 after the U. S. bombed Libya in retaliation for a Libyan operation that killed U.S. servicemen in Berlin, there was worldwide skepticism and consternation.

The Reagan administration decided it owed the world an explanation and decided it would be worth sacrificing a very sensitive method; namely, the ability to intercept Libyan encoded messages. Ironically, the Libyan message made public spoke of the successful operation, “without leaving a trace behind.”

Frittering Five Minutes With Feith

One might ask why Conyers has not thought of inviting experienced professionals like Milt Bearden to testify.

One might also ask why Conyers continues to let people like Addington, Yoo, Douglas Feith, and now Ashcroft make a mockery of the committee’s attempts to hold hearings on these historically important issues.

How painful it is to watch as the Bush administration’s witnesses quibble about semantics, make sweeping assertions of executive privilege, and run out the five-minute clock on each congressman’s questions.

Impeachment is what the Founders envisioned for the situation we face at present.

Quick, someone download for Congressman Conyers the President’s Action Memorandum of Feb. 7, 2002, which provided the loophole through which George Tenet and Donald Rumsfeld drove the Mack truck of torture.

That memo is all you need, John. It is signed at the bottom with felt-pen strokes one and half inches high. If that’s not good enough for the Judiciary Committee chairman, then please let members and staff go home for an early vacation and spare all of us further humiliation.

Coleen Rowley, a FBI special agent for almost 24 years, was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She retired at the end of 2004, and now writes and speaks on ethical decision-making and balancing civil liberties with the need for effective investigation. Ray McGovern, a former Army Infantry/Intelligence officer and then a CIA analyst for 27 years, now works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.  Both serve on the Steering Committee of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Add comment July 19th, 2008

Democracy Now! Jane Mayer on psychologists and torture

Amy Goodman interviewed Jane Mayer about her new book, The Dark Side, today on Democracy Now! today. About a third of the interview was devoted to the role of psychologists in designing and implementing the Bush administration torture program. I post that portion her. [You can read/listen/watch/download the entire interview here.]”

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest for the hour is Jane Mayer. She is author of the book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Talk about the title, The Dark Side.

JANE MAYER: Well, as we all know, September 11th was a sea change. Everybody says everything changed after that. And it did, but I think one of the most important changes that the country hasn’t really thought about is America became a country that, for the first time in its history, endorsed what is torture in all but name. And since then, it changed, I think, from a war for the country’s security, the war on terror, to a battle for the country’s soul. And we have to really think about whether or not this is what kind of country we want to be.

AMY GOODMAN: You were talking about Abu Zubaydah. Let’s talk about the psychologists involved in his interrogation.

JANE MAYER: Well, they were the ones who showed up there, right by Abu Zubaydah’s side.

AMY GOODMAN: Where?

JANE MAYER: In—well, it’s in an undisclosed location, where Abu Zubaydah was being held by the CIA. Suddenly, a psychologist showed up. And the FBI’s reaction was, “Who is this person?” His name is James Mitchell. He is a contractor to the CIA, a contract interrogator or adviser to the interrogation program. And he started talking about how there were these psychological theories that would help break down the detainees.

And the theories he talked about were experiments with dogs, in which dogs were put in cages and electrocuted and in a random way that completely broke their will to resist. It’s a theory called “learned helplessness,” and it springs from experiments done in the 1970s by a very famous psychologist in America named Martin Seligman, who actually went to lecture at the—a bunch of SERE—people who were involved with the CIA’s program, including this psychologist, James Mitchell. So, James Mitchell and a partner, Bruce Jessen, became advisers to the CIA’s interrogation program.

I think, to step back, what you need to know is that the CIA had no experience really in interrogating prisoners. They had never really held prisoners before. And so, they really had no idea how to go about getting information out of people. So they turned to an incredibly strange place, which is a secret program inside the military that had studied torture, and it had studied torture in order to teach our own soldiers how to survive it if they were ever taken captive by some kind of completely immoral regime. Because they understood torture, the CIA turned to them and said, “Well, so how do you do it?” And basically they reverse-engineered this program in the most ironic way, and what became a program that was defensive became instead a—it was like a blueprint for torture. It was, you know, a rulebook.

And I actually got into this story, because in researching this subject, I started with a question, wondering why is it that all around the world we’re seeing the same really strange kind of mistreatment of prisoners. Is this the work just of freelancing American soldiers? Why do they all have hoods? Why are they shackled in the same stress positions? Why are they being bombarded with these sounds so that their ear drums are, you know, splitting? And why are they being kept up day after day and, you know, exposed to heat and cold and all these things that were particularly odd-seeming? And they were cropping up in Iraq. They were cropping up in Guantanamo and in Afghanistan.

And so, I just went into it without knowing any of the answers and just asking, you know, is there a rulebook to this thing? Is there a curriculum? And, in fact, it turned out there was a curriculum, and the curriculum is from this secret program in the military. It’s known as the SERE program, and the CIA consulted with the SERE program to figure out how to get its methods. And these psychologists that you’re talking about were the ones who basically became the experts in it.

AMY GOODMAN: What was, for example, James Mitchell’s background?

JANE MAYER: He was an instructor. He’s now—he’s a psychologist who oversaw this training program. He had never been an interrogator. He had no background in Islamic fundamentalism. I mean, one of the FBI officers, as they were struggling over what to do with Abu Zubaydah, said, you know, “Do you know anything about Islamic radicals? Do you speak Arabic? Have you got any background in this area?” And he didn’t.

But he felt that because—and I’ve actually talked to Mitchell. He’s a great believer in “Science is science,” as he says, and so he used what he thought was good science, which were experiments that had been done on dogs, to apply them to ways to break down human detainees.

AMY GOODMAN: Alright, let’s go to the—

JANE MAYER: Can I just—wait, Amy. I’ve got to just say one thing, so we don’t wander into some kind of legal problem. A lawyer for Mitchell says that these were not his theories at all and that he never meant to apply them this way. That is absolutely not what colleagues of his have said, and I cite them by name in the book.

AMY GOODMAN: Who?

JANE MAYER: Steve Kleinman, who is a colonel in the Army, and he worked at the SERE program, and he said that James Mitchell would speak continually about using this “learned helplessness” model.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to this “learned helplessness” model.

JANE MAYER: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the former president of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman.

JANE MAYER: OK. Again, and here we have to be careful, but Martin Seligman is one of the most eminent psychologists in America. He teaches at Penn, and—

AMY GOODMAN: University of Pennsylvania.

JANE MAYER: University of Pennsylvania, sorry. And he was the former head of the American Psychological Association, the organization of professional psychologists. And so, very, very prominent man.

He was called in shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured and handed over to the CIA. He was called in to give a lecture, mysterious still exactly what kind of lecture it was. But he spoke for three hours. I talked to him about it by email.

AMY GOODMAN: To whom?

JANE MAYER: I talked to Martin—who the lecture was to? The lecture was to CIA officers, including these psychologists. Both Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell were in the audience. And it took place at the SERE school in San Diego, which is where, again, this unusual program existed.

AMY GOODMAN: Survival, Evasion—

JANE MAYER: Evasion, Resistance, Escape. It’s a program that has sort of kept—that has studied torture in order, supposedly, to inoculate the US soldiers against it. But after 9/11, the same techniques started cropping up around the world, being used by US soldiers.

AMY GOODMAN: You talked to Martin Seligman about this?

JANE MAYER: Yes, I did, and—by email. And he acknowledged he gave a lecture for three hours in April to the—at the SERE school. He has added to that recently, mentioning that these two psychologists were in the audience. He has said he never assisted torture, he is against torture, that his experiments were meant to safeguard US soldiers. It may be that he was just innocently misinterpreted by the CIA.

It’s really hard to tell exactly what happened. But what we do know is that his theories began to be cited by these psychologists, who then oversaw the CIA program and started putting Abu Zubaydah, for instance, in a dog cage and also put a dog collar on another detainee and thrust him into the wall with it headfirst. And these were just the beginning of some of the things these people went through.

AMY GOODMAN: We invited Dr. Martin Seligman to join us on the program. His answer was simple: “I am not available.” But he did respond to what you have written, and I want to read what his statement is—

JANE MAYER: OK.

AMY GOODMAN: —that you have also responded to. This is what he has said, not to us specifically, but his statement to Jane Mayer’s book The Dark Side. He said, quote, “The allegation that I ‘provided assistance in the process’ of torture is completely false.

“I gave a three hour lecture sponsored by SERE (the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape branch of the American armed forces) at the San Diego Naval Base in May 2002. My topic was how American troops and American personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness and related findings to resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors. I was told then that since I was (and am) a civilian with no security clearance that they could not discuss American methods of interrogation with me. I have not had contact with SERE since that meeting.

“I have not worked under government contract (or any other contract) on any aspect of interrogation or any aspect of torture. Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were present in the audience of about 50 others at my speech, and that was, to the best of my knowledge, the sum total of my ‘assisting them in the process.’

“I have had no contact at all with the American Psychological Association about their relevant policies. Most importantly, I strongly disapprove of torture and have never and would never provide assistance in its process.”

Your response, Jane Mayer.

JANE MAYER: Well, I have to say, first, that he—it’s not a contradiction of The Dark Side, because the allegation that he, quote-unquote, “assisted torture” comes from a blogger who was reading my book. It’s not actually what I say in the book. The book is—he confirms all of the facts in the book, which are very accurate. It describes the lecture he gave. It describes his relationship with the SERE program exactly as it was. And so, I actually—you know, the one thing I have to say is, he’s not and has not contradicted any of the facts in the book itself. He’s reacting to accounts by bloggers there. I think he’s just basically confirming it, reconfirming it. I have to say, every—

AMY GOODMAN: What did you learn from that response?

JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, what I learned is there are a lot of unanswered questions that I would really like to put to him, but when I did try to question him further, he said he had no further comment. He’s a very—obviously a very erudite and savvy man. What did he think he was doing when he went to talk to the CIA at their confab at the SERE school? How did he know Mitchell and Jessen were in the audience, unless—did he speak to them? Did he know what their role was, in terms of interrogations? You know, there are a lot of things that would be great to know. It’s hard to tell, because he keeps shutting down the conversation when it gets interesting.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I wanted to go further with the American Psychological Association and a former president. Last year, it was revealed former APA president Joseph Matarazzo is a partner of Mitchell & Jessen, and the New York Times reported the CIA interrogator of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, Deuce Martinez, now works for Mitchell and Jessen’s firm in Spokane, Washington.

JANE MAYER: Right. And it’s—this one firm keeps cropping up again and again. You know, Jessen and Mitchell, I guess, are not members of the APA, from what I understand, but the connections to the APA and this program keep popping up again and again. It may—it’s really interesting. It may say something about why the APA has been so reluctant to take a categorical stance, as psychiatrists have, saying there’s no role for this profession in torture or in coercive interrogations.

Let’s put aside the word “torture”, because it’s a semantic game. But the medical profession takes, you know, an oath. The Hippocratic Oath is “do no harm.” And I think it’s the role of medics, nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, who keep cropping up in reports that you get from detainees about—they’ll be in a moment of extremis, and suddenly a doctor will appear and certify that it’s OK to keep interrogating them. I think it’s an area that is really ripe for investigation.

AMY GOODMAN: On Democracy Now!, we’ve been covering the issue of psychologists, examining the role of psychologists in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation programs for the past two years. During a debate in 2006, the APA president—the then-APA president, Gerald Koocher, mentioned you by name, Jane Mayer. We talked to him on the telephone. This is what he had to say.

DR. GERALD KOOCHER: I wish I had the assurance that Jane Mayer and that Dr. Reisner apparently have that there are APA members doing bad things at Guantanamo or elsewhere, because any time I have asked these journalists or other people who are making these assertions for names so that APA could investigate its members who might be allegedly involved in them, no names have ever been forthcoming.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the former APA president, Gerald Koocher. Your response, Jane Mayer?JANE MAYER: Well, I mean, again, obviously, Martin Seligman was the president of the APA, and he had some role here in lecturing those psychologists who went on and designed this program for the CIA. So, I mean, there are all kinds of things that, if they wanted to be vigilant, they could look into at the APA. They seem to have a reluctance to dig beneath the surface.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, last year, Democracy Now! went to the APA annual convention in San Francisco to cover the debate that they were having around the issue of passing a moratorium on involvement in coercive interrogations. I wanted to play one of the statements. It was by Army Colonel Larry James. He was flown up from Guantanamo, the chief psychologist at Guantanamo and member of the APA governing body, to oppose the proposed moratorium on psychologists’ involvement in coercive interrogations.

COL. LARRY JAMES: Thank God this is a democracy. I actually welcome and support all of the discussion and the debate. That’s why I wear this uniform, because I’m very, very proud of this democracy. So I want to thank Dr. Altman and his colleagues for having the courage to speak out, although I may disagree with many of the things they say. God bless America.

Number two, torture is wrong. How could anyone disagree with that? So, under no conditions, with myself or any of these psychologists you see here today in the uniforms that they wear representing our country, would ever support anything that allows torture or inhumane treatment.

Thirdly and lastly, if we remove psychologists from the front, in any capacity whatsoever, innocent people are going to die. Innocent people are going to get hurt. Phil Zombardo told us this was going to happen thirty years ago. And so, in going back through the chronicles of histories, any detention facilities we’ve set up anywhere in the world, when you don’t have psychologists involved in the policy decision makings, when you don’t have psychologists involved in the day-to-day activity, bad things are going to happen, innocent people are going to die.

UNIDENTIFIED: Dr. James?

COL. LARRY JAMES: Sorry. Thank you, Madame President.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Colonel Larry James. He was head psychologist at Guantanamo, recently hired as dean at Wright State University in Ohio. Interestingly, right after that, another psychologist got up. Her name was Dr. Laurie Wagner, a Dallas psychologist. And she shot back, “If psychologists have to be there in order to keep detainees from being killed, then those conditions are so horrendous that the only moral and ethical thing to do is to protest by leaving.”JANE MAYER: Well, obviously there are a lot of psychologists who are very defensive about this role, and there’s a reason why. Starting in the summer of 2002, there were psychologists from the SERE program going down to Guantanamo and supervising and advising on the interrogations there, which included the interrogation of Mohammed Qahtani, the so-called twentieth hijacker, who was put through the most unbelievable program of psychological abuse. I don’t really know how anybody could defend it. Some of the transcripts have come out.

He was subjected to fifty-four days of only four hours of sleep a night. He had bags of fluid put into his veins, so that he had to urgently go to the bathroom; they wouldn’t let him get up and go, so he had to urinate on himself. They put, you know, the bra on his head. They made him do dog tricks. They put a birthday hat on his head and sang “God Bless America” to him. I mean, looking at the—they told him to bark like a dog. They told him that he was lower than a dog. I mean, it goes on and on and on. People have to see these transcripts to believe it.

And the fact that there were psychologists who were advising on this program is—if the APA doesn’t think that’s worthy of taking a look at, then I don’t know much about the—I don’t know much about the APA, but it makes me really wonder about it.

AMY GOODMAN: The APA is the largest association of psychologists in the world, almost 150,000 psychologists. How does the APA’s stance on involvement compare to the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association?

JANE MAYER: I mean, ever since World War II, during which the Nazis subverted the medical profession in the most horrendous ways, there have been ethical codes passed about what role doctors should play in this. There’s—doctors are supposed to, first, do no harm, and all scientists are supposed to, first, do no harm. And, you know, I’ve interviewed a number of scientists in this book who say that, you know, in particular, there’s a responsibility for psychologists to use their knowledge in good ways, because they have such skills in understanding people’s psyches, they really understand how to break people down, as well as they do how to fix them up. And, you know, used in the wrong way, it’s a powerful tool to really hurt someone.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go to break, then come back to our guest, Jane Mayer. Her new book is out, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. And if you’d like a copy of today’s show, you can go to our website at democracynow.org. Stay with us.

[Read the rest of the interview here.]

1 comment July 18th, 2008

Whom, and what, to believe?

Jeff Stein puzzles over the dilemma of self-styled victims of the CIA’s MKULTRA program. Such claims seem hard to believe. Yet MKULTRA was real, and current abuses are real:

Self-Described CIA ‘Manchurian Candidates’ Gather to Share Fractured Memories

By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

A few years ago, I was talking with a Washington psychiatrist, a Harvard Medical School graduate whom I’ve known and respected for more than 20 years. When, for some reason, our past military service came up, I remembered he’d been in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, but couldn’t recall where he’d been stationed.

“At Andrews,” he said, meaning the air base just outside Washington. “Treating PTSD,” he added — post-traumatic stress disorder.

Vietnam combat veterans, I assumed.

“No,” he said. “Russia.”

No way.

But in the late 1960s, my friend insisted, he’d treated men who said they had been dispatched to Siberia on clandestine reconnaissance operations.

Their mission: to hunker down deep in the forests for weeks at a time with telemetry equipment to monitor Soviet ballistic missile tests.

This was sometime in the very early ’60s, supposedly, a brief period between the end of U-2 overflights and the deployment of spy-in-the-sky satellites.

My friend said his patients described training with drugs and other mind-control techniques to perform the mission — then forget them, like the Manchurian Candidate.

But now they were remembering fragments, they told him, giving them terrifying nightmares about things they could not quite believe they had done.

They thought they were losing their minds. So did any loved ones who they dared tell their looney-sounding tunes to.

But this being America, of course, they — and other self-described victims of CIA mind control experiments — formed self-help groups. And for several years, it turns out, they have been holding yearly conferences, like one just outside Hartford, Conn., next month.

“About a hundred” people usually show up, says Neil Brick , coordinator of “The Eleventh Annual Ritual Abuse, Secretive Organizations and Mind Control Conference.”

Brick, 49, told me that he, too, has “recovered memories of being part of experimental situations — being given to people to go on missions” under the CIA’s mind control experiments program, code-named MKULTRA.

MKULTRA did, in fact, exist. It is described in the CIA’s own internal documents, 16,000 pages worth obtained by John Marks for his ground-breaking 1979 book, “The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control.”

One was an “eyes-only” report on MKULTRA by the CIA’s inspector general, in 1963, which said “there have been major accomplishments both in research and operational employment.”

“Operational employment” would seem to say the zombies were created and dispatched, with great results.
The Truth Is Out There

The late Sidney Gottlieb, who ran MKULTRA , also described the program, which began in the early 1950s and continued at least into the late 1960s, in congressional testimony in 1977.

On the other hand, much remains unknown. CIA Director Richard M. Helms ordered the destruction of boxes upon boxes of documents, including the treatment records of unknown numbers of “patients” agency “doctors” experimented on in psychiatric hospitals (including a wing of Georgetown University Medical Center), and secret locations, including military bases.

So its alledged victims have no records to back up their stories. Books by self-described MKULTRA survivors tend to get thrown into the UFO bin.

Neil Brick grants there’s a stigma that comes from going public with such X-Files-type stories, asking, for example, that I not print his location or occupation.

It’s a conundrum of the first order, isn’t it?

We have extensive documentation of the CIA’s Manchurian Candidate experiments, but when the Manchurian Candidate himself walks up to tell his story, most people shake their heads or laugh.

Brick admits that “some people” attending his past conferences “have psychiatric issues,” but he says he believes “the majority are survivors of MKULTRA.”

For years, of course, the CIA laughed off rumors of drug experiments.

Today, the agency and the Pentagon stoutly deny they have used hallucinogenic and other mind-altering drugs on prisoners at Guantanamo and secret sites elsewhere.

Just as in the 1970s, however, as I wrote in April, evidence to the contrary is mounting.

The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick also tracked down former prisoners at Guantanamo who said their minds were destabilized by repeated drug injections.

Such stories have been told for 40 years now.

Who are you going to believe?

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Add comment July 18th, 2008

Ashcroft: Waterboarding not torture

John Ashcroft defends waterboarding, aka “torture” as not torture:

Add comment July 18th, 2008

Mayer on Seligman

At Andrew Sullivan’s blog Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side,  responds to Martin Seligman’s denial of involvement in the development of CIA interrogation tactics:

Mayer on Seligman

Professor Seligman’s disavowal actually adds a rather interesting new fact to the story of how the psychology profession played a role in the CIA’s “special” interrogation program. In “The Dark Side,” I established by interviewing him, that he had personally spoken for three hours at the Navy’s SERE School in San Diego, in April of 2002, at a somewhat mysterious confab organized in part by the head of Behavioral Science at the CIA.

This was a pretty crucial moment in the development of America’s secret interrogation and detention program. Abu Zubayda had been captured just weeks before, and the CIA was trying to come up with ways to make him talk. They had no patience for the slow, rapport-building methods used by the FBI, whose role in the case they had just superceded. But what to do?     At this very moment, Professor Seligman, it seems, agreed to participate in what he says was an unexplained private high-level CIA meeting, held on the campus of the part of the Navy that runs a secret program emulating torture – the SERE School in San Diego.

Professor Seligman says he has no idea why he was called in from his academic position in Pennsylvania, to suddenly appear at this CIA event. He just showed up and talked for three hours about how dogs, when exposed to horrible treatment, give up all hope, and become compliant. Why the CIA wanted to know about this at this point, he says he never asked.    But somehow- and this is what is news as far as I know – Professor Seligman does know that in his audience were the two psychologists who soon after became the key advisers to the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program: James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.    So, Professor Seligman, must have had some contact with them, since he knew they were in his audience. Did he speak with them? What did they talk about?
According to sources close to the FBI, around the same time, one of those psychologists, James Mitchell, showed up where Abu Zubayda was being held, and started talking about Dr. Seligman’s theories of “Learned Helplessness” as shedding useful light on how to coerce Zubayda into talking. Specifically, he spoke of Seligman’s dog experiments, in which random electric shocks broke the dogs’ will to resist. An FBI agent was appalled – pointing out they were dealing with humans, not dogs. But Mitchell said it was “good science” for both.

(Mitchell declined to elaborate on the treatment of Abu Zubayda, when I interviewed him, but admitted he admired Seligman’s work on Learned Helplessness. A lawyer for Mitchell later claimed that he had not tried to apply the theory to detainees. But a colleague, Col. Steve Kleinman, who worked in the SERE program, said Mitchell talked all the time about how Learned Helplessness provided the blueprint for interrogating detainees).

So- did Seligman assist the U.S. Torture program? I am careful not to say so in “The Dark Side,”- I just recount the facts of his odd visit to the SERE school. So- he is not denying anything in my book.

But now that he brings all of this up again, it would be nice if he’d answer a few more questions. What exactly did he think he was doing that day in April of 2002 with the CIA? How did he know who Mitchell and Jessen were, and, what role did he think they were playing at that time? Maybe he was as clueless as he says he was. But, why doesn’t he then tell us know what he thinks of his theories being used in this way? Does he renounce Mitchell and Jessen? Does he think they used psychology immorally? He was the head of the APA- has he ever spoken out about this? Has he ever complained to the CIA about what they did with his science? Time for some more information here…instead of non-denial denials…

1 comment July 18th, 2008

Manipulation of Military Commisions system revealed in Jawad case

Mohammed Jawad was captured in Afghanistan at age 16 or 17 and has been helld in extremely harsh conditions at Guantanamo ever since.The US has decided to put him on trial forwar crimes for allegedly throwing a grendae which wounded US soldiers.  The pretrial maneuvering in this case has called attention to a number of abuses at Guantanamo, including abusive treatment and abuses of the Military Commissions system.

Last month it was revealed that Jawad was subjected to two weeks of sleep deprivation in 2004 through the then allegedly stopped “Frequent Flyer Program” in which he was moved from cell to cell every couple of hours. In Jawad’s case this treatment appears to have been a punishment of some sort, or simply a sadistic action, as Jawad was not interrogated for months after this abuse. Since the revelation in the Jawad case, new reports have surfaced of similar treatment, albeit, of two detainees not previously known to have suffered under the devilish sleep deprivation program.

This week new evidence emerged through pretrial motion that the Military Commissions were politically manipulated by the commanding Brig. General Thomas Hartman. Ross Tuttle in the Nation reports on these new explosive charges:

More Meddling at Gitmo

By Ross Tuttle

According to a document filed in court by Jawad’s attorney on July 15, Brig. General Thomas Hartmann, the highest-ranking officer and top lawyer overseeing Guantánamo’s military tribunals, has misled the court, the press and the American public, and should be disqualified from the process. Major David Frakt, Jawad’s defense counsel, brings to light new evidence that Hartmann has been deeply involved in prosecutorial matters–a role that contradicts his mandate to provide impartial legal advice to the office of the Convening Authority which runs the Commissions–raising serious doubts about the ability of the Commissions to administer justice.The evidence is a timeline chart prepared by Hartmann that lays out plans for upcoming cases–including which cases would be charged, when they would be charged, when certain charges would be validated and sent to trial and, in some cases, how they would be tried. The problem is that the timeline was created in early November 2007, before many of those decisions should have been made. Those decisions are the purview of the Chief Prosecutor and the Convening Authority, who must arrive at them after lengthy consideration of the evidence and deliberation with advisors and other prosecutors. But, according to Frakt, the timeline suggests that those decisions were preordained by Hartmann.

“As legal advisor General Hartmann’s duty has been to provide independent and impartial advice to the Convening Authority,” says Frakt. (The Convening Authority is a quasi-neutral, quasi-judicial arbiter that oversees the commissions and makes crucial decisions about the allocation of resources, the use of expert witness and which charges are worthy of going to trial and which warrant clemency.) “But his role is made impossible when he is so deeply and partially involved in the strategic planning of prosecutorial efforts, as the chart suggests he is.”

Neither the chart nor the document submitted to the court have yet been released to the public, but Frakt has detailed some of their contents to The Nation.

Reached for comment, Lt. Col. Darrel Vanderveld, lead prosecutor in the Jawad case, disputed Frakt’s description of the chart’s role in the Guantánamo cases. “The chart reflects the Office of Military Commissions’ aspirational goals for moving the legal process forward…. If one were to compare the aspirational goals listed on that chart to reality, the evidence shows there was no influence on the timing of the prosecution of cases,” he said. (The office of military commissions refused to provide a copy of the chart to conduct a comparison.)

According to Frakt, the chart reveals that Hartmann was likely making the decisions about who to charge and when–behavior that contradicts testimony Hartmann had given on the subject just one month ago.

During a pretrial hearing in June on a motion to dismiss charges against Jawad based on unlawful influence, Hartmann said, “In general…I believe it is the Chief Prosecutor’s responsibility to determine who to charge.”

But Frakt says the timeline reveals that Hartmann “had foreknowledge, in one case, seven weeks in advance of the exact day charges would be filed against a detainee.” This was the case of Ahmed al-Darbi, an alleged member of Al Qaeda, who was charged on December 20, 2007–exactly as forecast by the chart. But a new Chief Prosecutor, Col. Lawrence Morris, hadn’t arrived to take control of the prosecutor’s office until mid-November. According to Frakt, the chart suggests that this decision and many others concerning prosecutorial scheduling and strategy have been made by Hartmann.

In the case of Frakt’s own client, Mohammed Jawad, Frakt believes the chart shows that the referral of charges to trial was a foregone conclusion.

The charges were referred to trial by the convening authority in January, 2008–a date set by Hartmann’s timeline, says Frakt. Yet in his June testimony, Hartmann explained that the Convening Authority had waited until January before referring charges in order to review additional evidence. “But in fact, the chart makes it clear that he had already made up his mind that it was going to trial–long before he actually recommended the case be referred to trial, and he was confident it would be [referred].”

In the case of the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators, Frakt believes that Hartmann was not candid with the public about the decision to try defendants jointly. During a February 11 press conference to announce the charges, Hartmann said, “The decision to try them together or the recommendation to try them together was made by the chief prosecutor.” But Frakt says that according to the language in the November chart, Hartmann had already outlined that it would be a joint trial–revealing an involvement in their charges that he’d heretofore attempted to obscure.

Hartmann had also been asked during this and other press conferences about a time frame for charges being referred and when trials would begin. Hartmann was uniformly noncommittal, saying “there is no specific timeline” and “one can never predict.” Yet, according to Frakt, this belies the fact that Hartmann had indeed already made these predictions and was working with the prosecution and convening authority to assure they’d come to fruition.

Frakt’s allegations aren’t the first to claim Hartmann has inappropriately meddled in the affairs of the prosecution. The accusations first arose last year when then-chief prosecutor Col. Morris Davis complained Hartmann was violating the Rules of the Military Commissions, which state that “no person may attempt to coerce or by any unauthorized means influence the exercise of professional judgment” by the prosecution.

Davis’ complaint prompted an internal investigation, after which Hartmann was admonished not to align himself too closely with the prosecutorial function. Davis later resigned in part, he says, because of Hartmann’s continued meddling.

And in May this year, a judge disqualified Hartmann from continuing to provide legal advice in the case of Salim Hamdan, because the judge said he had exerted improper influence over the prosecution. (The Hamdan case is scheduled to go to trial next week, in what will be the first trial of these military commissions.) Davis testified in that hearing on behalf of the defense.

“I don’t know how you’re going to do an independent and objective review of the charges when you’ve already got a date for the referral of charges set on the calendar,” Davis said, upon hearing about this latest piece of evidence.

Davis believes that Hartmann’s intent was clear from the beginning “he once told me, ‘the way we validate this process is to get back into court, present evidence, and get convictions and good sentences.’ ”

But according to Frakt, Hartmann appeared to overstep his role in trying to make that happen.

“He went well beyond attempting to motivate and facilitate the military commissions effort,” says Frakt, “he became actively involved in the prosecution strategy, and that wasn’t his job.”

Hartmann’s stance has “eroded the independence of his own function and the independence of the Convening Authority,” says Eugene Fidell, a professor of military law at Yale Law School and Washington College of Law. “This has been the problem from the beginning.”

Fidell is uncertain if this latest revelation is fatal to the entire commissions, but says “the commissions are already under tremendous pressure and at a certain point, even a battleship can take only so many holes in its hull before it rides lower and lower until it eventually sinks.”

“This development is enormous,” says Frakt, who thinks it should spell the end of Hartmann’s association with the military commissions. He also thinks this could spell the end of the commissions themselves. “They’ve taken a lot of body blows over the past couple months. This could be their knockout punch.”

Ross Tuttle is a documentary filmmaker and freelance journalist based in Los Angeles.

Add comment July 18th, 2008

Torture: Impunity for truth?

Stuart Taylor, Jr. in Newsweek argues for forgetting accountability for torture. He advocates trading pardons for the torturers as a way of getting to the truth:

The Truth About Torture
To get a full accounting of how U.S. interrogation methods were used, the president should give those accused of ‘war crimes’ a pass.

By Stuart Taylor Jr.
NEWSWEEK

Dark deeds have been conducted in the name of the United States government in recent years: the gruesome, late-night circus at Abu Ghraib, the beating to death of captives in Afghanistan, and the officially sanctioned waterboarding and brutalization of high-value Qaeda prisoners. Now demands are growing for senior administration officials to be held accountable and punished. Congressional liberals, human-rights groups and other activists are urging a criminal investigation into high-level “war crimes,” including the Bush administration’s approval of interrogation methods considered by many to be torture.

It’s a bad idea. In fact, President George W. Bush ought to pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution for interrogation methods approved by administration lawyers. (It would be unseemly for Bush to pardon Vice President Dick Cheney or himself, but the next president wouldn’t allow them to be prosecuted anyway—galling as that may be to critics.) The reason for pardons is simple: what this country needs most is a full and true accounting of what took place. The incoming president should convene a truth commission, with subpoena power, to explore every possible misdeed and derive lessons from it. But this should not be a criminal investigation, which would only force officials to hire lawyers and batten down the hatches.

Pardons would further a truth commission’s most important goals: to uncover all important facts, identify innocent victims to be compensated, foster a serious conversation about what U.S. interrogation rules should be, recommend legal reforms, pave the way for appropriate apologies and restore America’s good name. The goals should not include wrecking the lives of men and women who made grievous mistakes while doing dirty work—work they had been advised by administration lawyers was legal, and which they believed was necessary to prevent terrorist mass murder.

A criminal investigation would only hinder efforts to determine the truth, and preclude any apologies. It would spur those who know the most to take the Fifth. Any prosecutions would also touch off years of partisan warfare. The lesson for occupants of the toughest government jobs—if the next administration could find people willing to fill them—would be that saving innocent lives is less important than covering their posteriors. Any hope of a civil conversation about lessons we need to learn would be dead.

Pardons would not be favors to criminals. One can argue that officials could have or should have resigned rather than implement questionable legal judgments, but there is no evidence that any high-level official acted with criminal intent. The officials involved appear to have approved only interrogation methods found legal by administration lawyers, and in particular by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). According to long tradition, the OLC is considered a sort of Supreme Court of the executive branch.

Those who have called for criminal investigations will not be easily persuaded otherwise. They include nearly 60 House Democrats and retired Maj. Gen. Anthony Taguba, who headed the Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib torture scandal. Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to the then Secretary of State Colin Powell, has suggested that administration lawyers could be prosecuted in a foreign court (even though his old boss could find himself vulnerable as well). Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan told ABC News that he now thinks the administration has engaged in torture.

But Congress has defined torture very narrowly. The OLC has advised officials since 2002 that some highly coercive methods—including waterboarding, which is assailed by most of the world as torture—do not violate the federal anti-torture law. Until mid-2006, the OLC also advised that interrogators could ignore the 1949 Geneva Conventions’ far more sweeping ban on all “cruel” and “humiliating and degrading” treatment of prisoners. The lawyers found, and Bush declared, that Geneva did not protect stateless terrorists, such as members of Al Qaeda.

Then five Supreme Court justices gave the administration a nasty surprise. Rejecting the views of a federal appeals court, President Bush, the OLC and four other Supreme Court justices, the majority held that Geneva does protect Qaeda members and other Guantánamo detainees. This brought into play the federal War Crimes Act, under which Geneva violations can be prosecuted as federal crimes.

But any such prosecutions would probably fail. Congress has retroactively amended the War Crimes Act to block any prosecutions for brutal interrogation methods short of torture. And officials could raise a nearly airtight defense of good-faith reliance on advice of counsel—OLC memos on approved methods would be like “get out of jail free” cards.

Of course, if he carries out pardons, Bush will be attacked for cronyism and accused of a cover-up. But one of the main beneficiaries would be the next president. Absent pardons, pressure to go after GOP “war criminals” would make it very hard to unite Americans of all stripes behind solutions to the many economic and social challenges facing the country. No new president—especially if he turns out to be Barack Obama, who has made such a point of getting beyond partisan bickering—needs that.

Add comment July 16th, 2008

American Psychological Association tries to make money off of open access research depository, backs down

To many academics and researchers the American Psychological Association is largely known as the publisher of many high quality, and high status, journals. the National Institutes of Health recently required that all research funded y the NIH deposit publications in an open source depository. APA evidently tried to make money off this process, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reported yesterday:

July 15, 2008
Psychological Association Will Charge Authors for Open-Access Archiving

By Lila Guterman

In what appears to be a new policy, the American Psychological Association will require authors who publish in its journals to let it deposit their papers in open-access repositories — and it will charge them $2,500 to do so.

Researchers who have grants from the National Institutes of Health must deposit their published articles in the institutes’ online archive, PubMed Central. Last week the journal Nature and many of its offshoots announced that they would deposit their authors’ articles for them. Free.

Now the psychological association says that its authors “should NOT deposit” their own manuscripts, and instead should allow the group to do so. “The deposit fee of $2,500 per manuscript for 2008 will be billed to the author’s university,” the policy says.

Because the NIH does not charge a fee, that money is apparently going to the psychological association.

Open-access advocates like Peter Suber, a research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, expressed outrage. “It’s as bad as it looks,” he told The Chronicle. “This is not a good use of anybody’s money.” Depositing an article in PubMed Central, he said, is a “clerical job that can be done by a machine.”

The psychological association did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Chronicle.

This report, or other negative reaction appears to hve led the APA to back down. When one follows the link to their web site, one now sees:

Document Deposit Policy and Procedures for APA Journals

A new document deposit policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) requiring a publication fee to deposit manuscripts in PubMed Central based on research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is currently being re-examined and will not be implemented at this time. This policy had recently been announced on APA’s Web site. APA will soon be releasing more detailed information about the complex issues involved in the implementation of the new NIH Public Access Policy.

APA will continue to deposit NIH-funded manuscripts on behalf of authors in compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy.

To continue with these charges could lead many more academics and researchers to leave the APA, as any such fees would be taken, directly or indirectly, by their universities out of the grants, reducing already limited research funds. And non-APA journals would instantly become more attractive publishing venues.

1 comment July 16th, 2008

Obama: Idealization and devaluation

Social Worker Hal Brown on the idealization of Obama and the resultant disillusionment:

Idealization of Obama: The higher the pedestal the harder they fall

By Hal Brown

This is a column about the psychology of idealization and how it effects our feelings and our opinions about others when they disappoint us: case in point Barack Obama. Our wishes led many of us to think of Obama as a realization of our hopes for the perfect candidate, the ideal president. The same goes for Hillary Clinton’s supporters.

“Idealization is a process which concerns the person; by it that person, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the subject’s mind.” Sigmund Freud*

After Freud other famous early analysts considered this to be a defense mechanism It is important to note two things. All people have and use defense mechanisms and they are often unconscious.

In the case of Obama, I think his supporters consciously had the highest hopes for him, but some may have unconsciously idealized him in the psychological sense.

Before you say “not me” realize that if you did this you wouldn’t necessarily know it.

A difficulty in writing about this is that there are two ways to use the word idealization, and most people outside of the field of psychology understand the word to mean simply to attribute ideal characteristics to someone.

There are numerous defense mechanisms (list), everybody uses them. Some may be harmful, most are not. In fact, some like humor and altruism actually are healthy. (See level 4 defense mechanisms on Wikipedia.) Most students of psychology today consider idealization one of the more benign defense mechanisms. It is a level 2 defense mechanism, defined (on the above link) as follows:

“These mechanisms are often present in adults and more commonly present in adolescence. These mechanisms lessen distress and anxiety provoked by threatening people or by uncomfortable reality. People who excessively use such defenses are seen as socially undesirable in that they are immature, difficult to deal with and seriously out of touch with reality. These are the so-called “immature” defenses and overuse almost always lead to serious problems in a person’s ability to cope effectively. These defenses are often seen in severe depression and personality disorders. In adolescence, the occurrence of all of these defenses is normal.”

Before people jump down the page to the comments section, I want to be clear, I am not suggesting that anyone’s idealization of Obama was unhealthy; unwise, perhaps, unrealistic for sure, but not unhealthy.

Most of those who reacted in negative ways to Obama’s changed positions, from disappointment to anger to outrage, made good points. I suggest that those whose feelings were particularly harsh are more likely than others to have idealized Obama.

Many of us, perhaps all of us, want people we look up to, whether in politics or the celebrity world, to reflect our own personal ego ideal (another term from psychoanalysis defined here. We want them to be everything we wished we could be, plus more.

Grown-ups aren’t supposed to have personal heroes in public life but we do. We often bend over backwards psychologically (through the defense mechanism of rationalization) to maintain our positive image of them, excusing and explaining their faults and failings until their behavior becomes so out of line with our expectations that our reason prevails. Then idealization can easily turn to outraged because we feel a very personal betrayal.

This is not to say that everyone who has experienced these feelings about Obama idealized him rather than simply had high hopes for him. Some readers may be curious about why they can’t seem to step back from their initial disappointment, anger or rage over, say, Obama’s FISA vote.

In order to have an accurate perception of anyone, whether a parent, friend, lover, spouse or politician, you have to recognize the extent to which you are idealizing them. Sometimes this is difficult to do because the roots of your tendency to idealize may go back to your relationship with one or both parents. Children have a strong need to believe that their parents are good, are perfect, that they end up blaming themselves for parental abuse or emotional neglect rather than deal with the facts. Some people spend years in analytic therapy to gain insights as to how their childhood experiences influence them.

If you were so enraged at Obama’s FISA vote that you wanted to not only throw him under the proverbial bus, but drive back and forth over him yourself, you may not have unconscious and unresolved issues with your parents.

But you might.

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* ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) (Standard Edition, XIV, pp. 73–102, at p. 94).Note: I’ve changed British spelling to American spelling in some quotes.

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Hal Brown, LICSW, has been a clinical social worker and psychotherapist since 1961. He often writes about politics from a psychological perspective.

Add comment July 15th, 2008

Britain accussed of outsourcing torture to Pakistan

An article in the Guardian reports that two MPs — one Labor, one Conservative — are calling for an investigation of charges that British citizens were tortured by Pakistan and then either interrogated by British intelligence or flown to Britain for trial.

McDonnell says he wants to know whether British officials colluded in the abuse of one of his constituents.

The man, a medical student, said he was abducted at gunpoint in August 2005 and held for two months at the offices of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau opposite the British Deputy High Commission in Karachi. The student, who has not spoken out before, has described how he was whipped, beaten, deprived of sleep, threatened with execution and witnessed other inmates being tortured.

He was questioned about the suicide attacks on London’s transport network in July of that year, and says that after being tortured by Pakistani agents he was questioned by British intelligence officers. He was released to his father, who says he received a personal apology from the director of the Intelligence Bureau.

The student returned to his London teaching hospital, qualified last year, and is now working in a hospital in the south-east of England. He remains terrified of both Pakistani and British intelligence agencies, however, and has asked not to be identified. A second Briton, Tariq Mahmood, 35, a taxi driver from Sparkhill, Birmingham, has said he was abducted in Rawalpindi in October 2003 and released without charge about five months later.

He is thought to have been held in a prison run by a different agency, Inter-Service Intelligence, where a number of other Britons have also been held and allegedly tortured before being flown to the UK to stand trial. Mahmood’s family say he was tortured, and that MI5 officers and American intelligence officers had a hand in his mistreatment. They have declined to issue any detailed allegation, however, apparently fearing for the safety of relatives in Pakistan.

Notice that “American intelligence” are alleged to have had a hand in the last incident. Is this a new version of US-British collusion on “extraordinary rendition?”

Add comment July 15th, 2008