Psyche, Science, and Society

US military brig was ordered to follow Guantanamo SOP, injuring detainee mental health

This week saw the release by the ACLU of documents showing that military officials were afreaid that the brutal, Guantanamo-based, conditions of detenetion under which three Americand were being held in a US brig were causing irremediable mental harm to one of the detainees. These documents show that the brig which held Yaser Hamdi, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri was ordered to follow the Standard Operating Procedures [SOP] for Guantanamo, despite the fact that the brig held US citizens on US soil and Guantanamo, according to tortured administration legal analysis, was outside of US or international law.

The documents also reveal that a military official was concerned about the effects the harsh treatment was having on one mental health of one of the detainees, Yaser Hamdi, after 14 months of isolation. After three years in detention he was released to Saudi Arabia without charges ever having been filed.

An ACLU comment is available here, and the documents here. Here is an Associated Press story:

US Detainee Abuse Drove Prisoner To Brink Of Insanity, New Documents Show

By Pamela Hess

A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of human rights complaints and court scrutiny, the documents shed new light on how two American citizens and a legal U.S. resident were treated in military jails inside the United States.

The Bush administration ordered the men to be held in military jails as “enemy combatants” for years of interrogations without criminal charges, which would not have been allowed in civilian jails.

The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home and contact with anyone other than guards and their interrogators. They were deprived of natural light for months and for years were forbidden even minor distractions such as a soccer ball or a dictionary.

“I will continue to do what I can to help this individual maintain his sanity, but in my opinion we’re working with borrowed time,” an unidentified Navy brig official wrote of prisoner Yaser Esam Hamdi in 2002. “I would like to have some form of an incentive program in place to reward him for his continued good behavior, but more so, to keep him from whacking out on me.”

Yale Law School’s Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic received the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request filed by two attorneys Jonathan Freiman and Tahlia Townsend, representing another detainee, Jose Padilla. The Lowenstein group and the American Civil Liberties Union said the papers were evidence that the Bush administration violated the 5th Amendment’s protections against cruel treatment. The U.S. military was ordered to treat the American prisoners the same way prisoners at Guantanamo were treated, according to the documents.

However, the Guantanamo jail was created by the Bush administration specifically to avoid allowing detainees any constitutional rights. Administration lawyers contended the Constitution did not apply outside the country.

“These documents are the first clear confirmation of what we’ve suspected all along, that the brig was run as a prison beyond the law. There was an effort to create a Gitmo inside the United States,” Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU’s National Security Project in New York said, using the slang word for the U.S. naval facility in Cuba.

The 91 pages of e-mails and documents produced by U.S. Fleet Forces Command, which runs the military brigs in Norfolk, Va., and Charleston, S.C., detail daily decisions made about the treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, then both American citizens, and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, a legal resident. All were designated as by the White House as “illegal enemy combatants.”

The paperwork show uniformed officials at the military brigs growing increasingly uncomfortable and then alarmed that they were being directed to handle their prisoners under the rules that governed Guantanamo.

The authors and recipients of the e-mails are censored from the documents. They appear to be going to either military or Pentagon legal counsel and policy offices.

The documents show that some officials at the Charleston brig were deeply skeptical about the mandate that Guantanamo rules should apply in the United States, a decision made by the defense secretary’s office, according to the documents.

“You have every right to question the ‘lash-up’ between GTMO and Charleston _ it was the first thing I ask (sic) about a year ago when I checked on board,” wrote one official to another in 2006. “In a nutshell, they gave the Charleston detainee mission to (Joint Forces Command) who promptly gave it to (Fleet Forces Command) with a ‘lots of luck’ and nothing else.”

An officer was still raising alarms about Hamdi’s mental state after 14 months of jail with no contact with lawyers, his family or even other prisoners.

“I told him the last thing that I wanted to have happen was to send him anywhere from here as a ‘basket case,’ of use to no one, to include himself,” the officer wrote in an e-mail to undisclosed government officials in June 2003. “I fear the rubber band is nearing its breaking point here and not totally confident I can keep his head in the game much longer.”

The frustrated officer wrote that he had “to have the ability to exercise some discretion when I believe it best for the health and welfare of those assigned to my facility … Know … we are to remain consistent with the procedures that were/are in place at Camp X-Ray” a reference to the Guantanamo jail. He pointed out that imposing those conditions in the brig had a far harsher effect on his prisoners because they had no contact with any other detainees, which was allowed at Guantanamo.

Scores of pages of once-secret legal opinions regarding detainee rights and treatment have been released under the Freedom of Information Act. At least two apparently crucial memos about enemy combatant treatment inside the U.S. have yet to be made public.

Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan in 2001, shipped to Guantanamo and then moved to the U.S. after his citizenship was discovered. He was held and interrogated for three years without charges. The Supreme Court in 2004 rejected the government’s attempt to hold him indefinitely without charge. He was released to Saudi Arabia on the condition he give up his U.S. citizenship.

Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was a legal resident studying for a master’s degree in Illinois when he was arrested in December 2001 by the FBI as a material witness to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He was charged with credit card fraud in 2002. A month before his trial in 2003, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant and al-Marri was transferred to the consolidated naval brig in Charleston. There he was held in isolation for 16 months, denied shoes and socks for two years, and was not allowed any contact with his family for five years. He remains in the military brig but is appealing his detention to the Supreme Court.

Padilla was arrested in 2002 under suspicion he was collaborating with al-Qaida to build a radioactive or “dirty” bomb. He was held as an enemy combatant for more than three years. He was held totally incommunicado for 21 months. His mother was only allowed to see Padilla after she agreed not to alert the media to the visit, according to the documents.

The government dropped the dirty bomb charges and Padilla’s case was moved to civilian court where in 2007 he was convicted of supporting terrorism in Kosovo, Bosnia and Chechnya.

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Guantanamo prosecutor resignation raises specter of yet unrevealed horrors

The Los Angeles Times reports on the Guantanamo prosecutor who resigned last month, citing failures of the prosecution to turn over exculpatory evidence to the defense. This article only makes us wonder what horrors are still being hidden:

Guantanamo prosecutor who quit had ‘grave misgivings’ about fairness

Convinced that key evidence was being withheld from the defense, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld went from being a ‘true believer to someone who felt truly deceived’ by the tribunals.

By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, October 12, 2008

WASHINGTON — Darrel J. Vandeveld was in despair. The hard-nosed lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a self-described conformist praised by his superiors for his bravery in Iraq, had lost faith in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals in which he was a prosecutor.

His work was top secret, making it impossible to talk to family or friends. So the devout Catholic — working away from home — contacted a priest online.

Even if he had no doubt about the guilt of the accused, he wrote in an August e-mail, “I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country….

“I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they suffer, I’ll lose a lot of friends.”

Two days later, he took the unusual step of reaching out for advice from his opposing counsel, a military defense lawyer.

“How do I get myself out of this office?” Vandeveld asked Major David J.R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who represented the young Afghan Vandeveld was prosecuting for an attack on U.S. soldiers — despite Vandeveld’s doubts about whether Mohammed Jawad would get a fair trial. Vandeveld said he was seeking a “practical way of extricating myself from this mess.”

Last month, Vandeveld did just that, resigning from the Jawad case, the military commissions overall and, ultimately, active military duty. In doing so, he has become even more of a central figure in the “mess” he considers Guantanamo to be.

Vandeveld is at least the fourth prosecutor to resign under protest. Questions about the fairness of the tribunals have been raised by the very people charged with conducting them, according to legal experts, human rights observers and current and former military officials.

Vandeveld’s claims are particularly explosive.

In a declaration and subsequent testimony, he said the U.S. government was not providing defense lawyers with the evidence it had against their clients, including exculpatory information — material considered helpful to the defense.

Saying that the accused enemy combatants were more likely to be wrongly convicted without that evidence, Vandeveld testified that he went from being a “true believer to someone who felt truly deceived” by the tribunals. The system in place at the U.S. military facility in Cuba, he wrote in his declaration, was so dysfunctional that it deprived “the accused of basic due process and subject[ed] the well-intentioned prosecutor to claims of ethical misconduct.”

Army Col. Lawrence J. Morris, the chief prosecutor and Vandeveld’s boss, said the Office of Military Commissions provides “every scrap of paper and information” to the defense. Morris said that Vandeveld was disgruntled because his commanding officers disagreed with some of his legal tactics and that he “never once” raised substantive concerns.

Morris said last week that he had no idea why Vandeveld had become so antagonistic toward the tribunal process, adding that the lieutenant colonel’s outspokenness angered him because it was unfair and was a “broad blast at some very ethical and hardworking people whose performances are being smudged groundlessly.”

Vandeveld, who was prosecuting seven tribunal cases — nearly a third of pending cases — has declined to be interviewed about the particulars of the Jawad case. But he did engage in a series of e-mails with The Times about his general concerns, before being “reminded” last week that he could not talk to the press until his release from active duty was final. In the future, he said, he plans to speak out.

“I don’t know how else the creeping rot of the commissions and the politics that fostered and continued to surround them could be exposed to the curative powers of the sunlight,” he said. “I care not for myself; our enemies deserve nothing less than what we would expect from them were the situations reversed. More than anything, I hope we can rediscover some of our American values.”

Some tribunal defense lawyers are preparing to call Vandeveld as a witness, saying that his claims of systemic problems at Guantanamo, if true, could alter the outcome of every pending case there — and force the turnover of long-sought information on coercive interrogation tactics and other controversial measures used against their clients in the war on terrorism.

For years, defense lawyers and human rights organizations have raised similar concerns in individual cases. “But we never had anyone on the inside who could validate those claims,” said Michael J. Berrigan, the deputy chief defense counsel for the commissions.

Before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Vandeveld led a relatively placid life outside Erie, Pa., with his wife and four children. He worked as a senior deputy state attorney general in charge of consumer protection in the region, and he served on his local school board in Millcreek Township.

Anyone who knows him, Vandeveld, 48, told The Times, “will probably tell you that I’ve been a conformist my entire life, and [that] to speak out against the injustice wrought upon our worst enemies entailed a weather shift in my worldview.”

Mark Tanenbaum, an English teacher whose children are friends with Vandeveld’s, remembers talking to him while sitting around campfires at high school gatherings. “We talked a lot about religion. I’m Jewish. We’d talk about faith, value-based philosophy. We were kindred spirits in this.

“With him, it is all about doing the right thing.”

Vandeveld, called to active duty after 9/11, received glowing evaluations as a Pentagon legal advisor and judge advocate in Bosnia, the Horn of Africa and Iraq. “An absolutely outstanding, first-class performance by an extraordinarily gifted, intelligent, knowledgeable and experienced judge advocate, whose potential is utterly unlimited,” his commanding officer, Gen. Charles J. Barr, wrote in his June 2006 evaluation. “One of the corps’ best and brightest. Save the very toughest jobs in the corps for him.”

From his Iraq assignment, Vandeveld went to Guantanamo, where he began locking horns over the Jawad case with Frakt — a law professor at Western State University in Fullerton and a former active-duty Air Force lawyer who volunteered for the tribunals.

Frakt believed that his Afghan client was, at worst, a confused teen who had been brainwashed and drugged by militant extremists who coerced him into participating in a grenade-throwing incident with other older — and more guilty — men. He insisted that the prosecution was withholding key information or not obtaining it from those at the Pentagon, CIA and other U.S. agencies that had investigated and interrogated Jawad.

Vandeveld believed that Jawad was a war criminal who had been taught by an Al Qaeda-linked group to kill American troops and, if caught, to make up claims he had been tortured and was underage. Vandeveld insisted that he had been providing all evidence to the defense.

But by July, Vandeveld told The Times, he had grown increasingly troubled. He kept finding sources of information and documents that appeared to bolster Frakt’s claims that evidence was being withheld — including some favorable to the defense, such as information suggesting that Jawad was underage, that he had been drugged before the incident and that he had been abused by U.S. forces afterward.

Vandeveld also was having difficulty obtaining authorization to release documents in his possession to the defense.

On Aug. 5, he e-mailed Father John Dear, a well-known Jesuit peace activist. Dear, who boasts of being arrested 75 times in protests, encouraged him to act, saying he might “save lives and change the direction of the entire policy.”

With Frakt pressing for the charges against Jawad to be dismissed due to “outrageous government misconduct,” Vandeveld proposed a plea agreement under which Jawad, now thought to be 22, could return to Afghanistan for rehabilitation. But his superiors rejected it, Vandeveld said.

By late August, he had told Frakt that there were other “disquieting” things about Guantanamo and that his superiors were refusing to address them or to let him quietly transfer out, Frakt said in an interview.

“Now might be a good time to take a courageous stand and expose some of the ‘disquieting’ things that you have alluded to, whatever they may be,” Frakt replied in a Sept. 2 e-mail, noting that there would soon be a change of administrations in Washington.

“It wouldn’t be a bad idea to distance yourself from a process that has become largely discredited, or at least distinguish yourself as one of the good guys, an ethical prosecutor trying to do the right thing,” Frakt wrote.

On Sept. 9, Vandeveld e-mailed Dear to say he had resigned from the Guantanamo military tribunals: “The reaction was the expected outrage and condemnation. I have and will maintain my equanimity and, while scared for me and for my family, know that Christ will watch over me.”

That, however, was only the beginning. In late September — after the military, according to Frakt, initially tried to block it — Vandeveld testified by video link for the defense, saying he believed that insurmountable problems with the tribunals might make them incapable of meting out justice fairly.

Morris said that Vandeveld is not qualified to speak about systemwide problems at Guantanamo. But Frakt said that he is and that Vandeveld’s testimony and declaration only scratched the surface of his concerns, judging by their extensive conversations and hundreds of e-mail exchanges.

“There is a lot more that he knows,” Frakt said.

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