Psyche, Science, and Society

PHR Analysis: CIA Health Professionals’ Role in Torture Worse Than Previously Known

Cambridge, MA — The extent to which American physicians and psychologists violated human rights and betrayed the ethical standards of their professions by designing, implementing, and legitimizing a worldwide torture program is greater than previously known, according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

A team of PHR doctors authored the new white paper, Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report. The report details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods. PHR is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation and calls for more investigation on this point. If confirmed, the development of a research protocol to assess and refine the use of the waterboard or other techniques would likely constitute a new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists.

“Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation,” says PHR Medical Advisor and lead report author Scott Allen, MD. For example, “Interrogators would place a cloth over a detainee’s face to block breathing and induce feelings of fear, helplessness, and a loss of control. A doctor would stand by to monitor and calibrate this physically and psychologically harmful act, which amounts to torture. It is profoundly unsettling to learn of the central role of health professionals in laying a foundation for US government lawyers to rationalize the CIA’s illegal torture program.”

The Inspector General’s report documents some practices — previously unknown or unconfirmed — that were used to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end. These practices included:

• Mock executions;
• Brandishing guns and power drills;
• Threats to sexually assault family members and murder children;
• “Walling” — repeatedly slamming an unresponsive detainee’s head against a cell wall; and
• Confinement in a box.

“These unlawful, unethical, and ineffective interrogation tactics cause significant bodily and mental harm,” said co-author and PHR Senior Medical Advisor Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD. “The CIA Inspector General’s report confirms that torture escalates in severity and torturers frequently go beyond approved techniques.”

“The required presence of health professionals did not make interrogation methods safer, but sanitized their use, escalated abuse, and placed doctors and psychologists in the untenable position of calibrating harm rather than serving as protectors and healers. The fact that psychologists went beyond monitoring, and actually designed and implemented these abuses – while simultaneously serving as ’safety monitors’ – reveals the ethical bankruptcy of the entire program,” stated co-author Steven Reisner, PhD, PHR’s Psychological Ethics Advisor.

“That health professionals who swear to oaths of healing so abused the sacred trust society places in us by instigating, legitimizing and participating in torture, is an abomination,” states co-author Allen Keller, MD, Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. “Health professionals who aided torture must be held accountable by professional associations, by state licensing boards, and by society.  Accountability is essential to maintain trust in our professions and to end torture, which scars bodies and minds, leaving survivors to endure debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares.”

PHR has called for full investigation and remedies, including accountability for war crimes, and reparation, such as compensation, medical care and psycho-social services. PHR also calls for health professionals who have violated ethical standards or the law to be held accountable through criminal prosecution, loss of license and loss of professional society membership where appropriate.

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To download PHR’s Aiding Torture, visit http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/news-2009-08-31.html.

Since 2005, PHR has documented the systematic use of psychological and physical torture by US personnel against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase, and elsewhere in its groundbreaking reports, Break Them Down, Leave No Marks, and Broken Laws, Broken Lives.

Broken Faith: How a Navy Psychologist Drove A U.S. Prisoner to Attempt Suicide

By Jeffrey Kaye

Los Angeles attorney Robert A. Bailey, formerly a military JAG officer, and one of the lawyers in the Daniel King case, spoke to me a few weeks ago in some detail about the controversial King interrogation. Bailey, now on the Board of the Center for Victims of Torture, described to me how the abusive interrogation King endured, and the betrayal of the military psychologist he thought would help him, led King to a suicidal breakdown.

In articles last month, both at FireDogLake and at The Public Record, I reported on the role of Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) Chief Forensic Psychologist Michael Gelles in the abusive treatment of Chief Petty Officer King, who was forced into giving a false confession of espionage. The story made waves in psychology circles, and was picked up by Truthout and Naomi Wolf, among others.

The story had resonance for anti-torture activists, as Dr. Gelles is a primary spokesperson for the presumed ethical use of psychologists in national security interrogations, and was a prominent member of a 2005 American Psychological Association (APA) task force on the issue. That task force was widely seen as rubber-stamping the military’s position, and backing the use of psychologists in interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere, interrogations later labeled as torture.

King was a cryptanalyst and chief petty officer with twenty years in the Navy when he was held on suspicion of espionage after producing an inconclusive, or “no opinion” polygraph result in September 1999. He was held without charges and interrogated for 29 straight days. He produced a “confession” after seven days of 12 to 19 hour interrogation, sleep deprivation, threats, and 24-hour a day constant surveillance. He quickly recanted this confession, and the interrogation continued, ending after 29 days. King was moved to the brig at Quantico Marine Corps base in Virginia, where he remained in a six by nine foot cell for another 500 days.

Until now, it wasn’t clear why NCIS finally abandoned the interrogation. The interview with Robert Bailey clears up what happened, and the revelation is shocking.

The Gelles Interview and Its Aftermath

During the 29 days of interrogation, NCIS agents had ignored King’s pleas for an attorney. When he broke down crying, and voiced suicidal thoughts, complaining that he was losing contact with reality, agents apparently relented when King asked to see a mental health therapist. It was about three weeks into the interrogation, and King was taken to see Dr. Gelles.

As previously reported, the interview with Gelles was videotaped without the approval of King. Two NCIS agents sat in the room. One was a woman agent who Bailey believed had often been utilized to play “good cop” and provide feminine attention to the divorced and lonely Daniel King. The sleep-deprived King told Gelles he couldn’t tell what was real anymore. Agents had told King he had been found lying on his polygraph tests, which itself was a lie that Gelles did nothing to dispel. King asked Gelles to hypnotize him or give him truth serum, so he could figure out what was real.

According to Bailey, Gelles told King that he would feel better if he confessed. King’s civilian attorney, Jonathan Turley, told a congressional committee how Gelles represented himself as “the doc,” ignored King’s suicidal statements, and “told King to give corroborating evidence as a precondition for the hypnosis that King sought to clear his doubts as to any espionage.”

(In full agreement with King’s JAG attorneys, Turley later filed an ethics complaint against Gelles with the APA, which declined to accept it. At the APA convention in Toronto last week, Turley told an audience that Gelles’s behavior was the most egregious case of medical ethics violation he had ever experienced.)

Bailey first met Dan King in the brig at Quantico, only a few weeks after the Gelles interview. Bailey described how King told him that after the Gelles meeting he became more despondent. King had gone to Gelles for help and therapy, and was only met with another demand to confess. He subsequently became “less certain what was real.” His mental condition deteriorated. He had lost faith in people.

Chief Petty Officer King was a man in his 40s, a career Navy man, falsely accused of espionage, the penalty for which could be death, kept from sleeping more than an hour or two at a time for days on end, holed up in various hotel rooms for weeks, and subjected to near constant interrogation. According to Bailey, King could not stand the pressure anymore.

Approximately a week after his attempt to get psychological help, and — as Bailey explained King told him — “distraught” with the duplicity of “doc” Gelles, King grabbed a knife found in the residence hotel where they were holding him and tried to stab himself in the stomach. Agents quickly grabbed him and prevented King from harming himself. But the NCIS agents worried they could no longer monitor their prisoner under the current circumstances, and he was removed from their custody and placed in the brig.

Once King was put in the brig, he was finally allowed to see a lawyer. When Robert A. Bailey, a young JAG attorney with only six months experience, was the first person assigned to King’s defense, he found his client to be “a wreck, just incomprehensible.” The defense team spent weeks just trying to piece together the story of what had happened to him.

The young military attorneys struggled to defend their client against an overbearing and obstructionist prosecution and Navy bureaucracy. The fears the attorneys had for themselves and their careers were aired in May 2000 court hearing at the time before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, and can still be viewed via C-SPAN video (warning: the Flash video has garbled sound for the first 14 minutes). Coincidentally, the  Chief Judge on the Appeals panel was Susan Crawford, who later was appointed Convening Authority for the military commissions at Guantanamo.

According to Bailey, the two military attorneys in the case realized early on that they would have to decide if they “were going to stick around for a career in the Navy,” or work diligently for their client. Luckily for Daniel King, they made the right choice.

Today, King works at an agency helping veterans access their benefits. He stays in contact with his former attorneys, and reminds them each year how grateful he was that they stood up for him and restored his faith in people. Meanwhile, the APA Ethics Director at the time of the referral of charges against Gelles, Dr. Stephen Behnke, whose office refused to investigate the serious charges noted above, retains his position.

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Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor The Public Record, has been blogging at Daily Kos since May 2005, and maintains a personal blog, Invictus. E-mail Mr. Kaye at sfpsych at gmail dot com.