As fears spread that music downloading will destroy the music industry, a new British study finds that those who illegally download music spend more on purchasing music than do others who follow the letter of the law. Perhaps downloaders should declare a boycott of the music industry until that industry call off its vicious enforcement efforts.
October 31st, 2009
In a new expansion of the total surveillance state, the University of Akron is now reserving the right to demand DNA samples from all new employees, CBS News reports:
But the University of Akron has taken this to a surprising new level.
The Ohio school now reserves the right to require any prospective faculty, staff, or contractor to submit a DNA sample, which genetic-testing experts say makes it the first employer in the nation to take such an extreme and potentially intrusive step.
The new policy, which says a “DNA sample for purpose of a federal criminal background check” may be collected, took the campus by surprise after it was announced last week. An adjunct faculty member has resigned in protest and is contemplating a lawsuit, and the local chapter of the American Association of University Professors says that genetic testing violates a collective bargaining agreement.
It is interesting and disturbing that a university is the site for launching this first-in-the-nation attack on our liberties. Universities resemble businesses more every day.
October 31st, 2009
A new article in the Psychiatric Times by attorney John Thomas summarizes the involvement of psychologists in the CIA’s and Defense Department’s “enhanced interrogation” torture programs.Thomas describes four roles that psychologists played in the torture program.
While describing the role of psychologists fairly accurately, Thomas somewhat underplays the roles of psychiatrists. For example, despite what Thomas claims, the military did not totally stop using psychiatrists as members of their Behavioral Science Consultation Teams in 2004, as Marks and Bloche reported in 2008. He also would have helped round out the picture by mentioning that non-psychological health professional also played major roles in monitoring the health and ability to survive torture in the CIA’s black sites.
Further, despite the better policies on involvement of their members in interrogations, neither the medical and psychiatric professions resemble psychology in their failure to take any action against profession members who aided the torture program. No health profession comes out looking good from our nation’s recent venture into torture.
Here is the Thomas article. [Here is a Commentary by psychologist Ken Pope.]:
Mental Health Professionals in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Room
By John Thomas, JD
On Monday, August 24, 2009, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a “Top Secret,” highly redacted May 7, 2004, report, Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001 – October 2003).1 The report’s opening pages concede that the activity it divulges “diverges sharply from previous Agency policy and rules that govern interrogation.”
The report outlines “standard interrogation techniques” that “do not incorporate significant physical or psychological pressure,” including “isolation, sleep deprivation not to exceed 72 hours,” and “loud music or white noise.” It also outlines enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) that “do incorporate physical or psychological pressure,” including attention grasp (slapping), walling (slamming a detainee against a wall), stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, and simulated drowning through “waterboarding.” The report describes this last technique in detail:
[T]he individual is bound securely to an inclined bench. . . . Water is then applied to the cloth in a controlled manner. . . . This effort produces the perception of “suffocation and incipient panic,” ie, the perception of drowning.
In addition, the report documents the use of “Specific Unauthorized” techniques. These include the use of a “handgun and power drill” and “mock execution[s].”
The role of health care professionals
Psychologists participated in every stage of the program’s development and implementation.2 First, they assisted in providing its legal justification. The United Nations Convention against Torture and corresponding federal statutes define torture as “an act intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”3,4 Severe mental pain or suffering is “the prolonged mental harm” caused by the “infliction or the threat of infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.” Psychologists sanctioned all utilized techniques. For example, the report observes that the CIA “informed us that your on-site psychologists, who have extensive experience with the use of waterboard in Navy training, have not encountered any significant long-term mental health consequences from its use.”
Second, those same psychologists sculpted the program’s basic structure. Initially, the CIA retained independent contractor and Air Force psychologist James Mitchell to “research and write a paper on al-Qaeda’s resistance to interrogation techniques.” Then, Mitchell paired with a Department of Defense psychologist and “developed a list of new and more aggressive EITs.”
Third, psychologists crafted individual intake evaluations that assessed mental status and forecast successful techniques. Consider, for example, the psychological profile of al-Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah. The profile observed that his strengths included “ability to focus, goal-directed discipline, intelligence, [and] emotional resilience.” The report predicted interrogation success because Zubaydah “believes [that] the ultimate destiny of Islam is to dominate this world. . . . Thus, there is the chance that he could rationalize that providing information will harm current efforts but represent only a temporary setback.”
Finally, psychologists attended and supervised interrogation sessions. Consider, again, the case of Zubaydah. Federal Bureau of Investigation agent Ali Soufan, who, according to Newsweek, “had a reputation as a shrewd interrogator who could work fluently in both English and Arabic,” conducted the initial interrogation in Guantánamo Bay. Although Soufan’s interrogation was productive, producing information that led to the arrest of Richard Reid, the would-be “shoe bomber,” the CIA brought in Mitchell. Mitchell ratcheted up the interrogation by stripping Zubaydah and barraging him with loud, rock music. When a coffin, apparently for a mock burial, arrived and Soufan objected, the CIA terminated his employment.5
Psychologists were not the only health care professionals involved in the interrogations. An April 13, 2005, Army Surgeon General survey revealed that 17% of Afghan and 10% of Iraqi medical personnel had been present during interrogations and that 73% were personally aware of “actual or sus- pected abuse.”6 The survey did not distinguish among physicians, nurses, physician’s assistants, medics, and other medical disciplines. It did, however, observe that in 2002 and 2003, psychiatrists were involved in interrogations: “Behavioral Science Consultation Teams . . . consisted of physicians/psychiatrists and psychologists who directly support detainee interrogation activities.”
Beginning in January 2004, the government ceased including psychiatrists on the teams. Members of interrogation teams had concluded that “physicians in this role only confused the situation.” Although it is not clear how physicians—presumably the psychiatrists who had been participants in interrogations—confused matters, one incident may provide insight:
One physician was asked to feign evaluations and treatment on detainees by (i) doing a DNA test from a hair sample, (ii) doing a DNA test from a buccal swab, or (iii) providing cough syrup but informing the detainee it was truth serum. The physician complied with the first two requests, but refused to comply with the third. He thereafter refused any further involvement by himself or any of his medical personnel.
The chronology
The road to enhanced interrogation began with a September 25, 2001, memorandum from Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo of the Office of Legal Counsel.7 Yoo asserted that no law “can place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response.”
Bolstered by Yoo’s memorandum, on January 18, 2002, President George W. Bush concluded that Geneva Conventions of 1949 would not be applied to al-Qaeda and Taliban detainees. The rationale, provided by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in a memorandum a few weeks later, was that the Conventions did not apply to “a new paradigm—ushered in not by us, but by terrorists” of armed conflict with groups not associated with any particular country’s government.8
In August 2002, Jay Bybee, also of the Office of Legal Counsel, with Yoo’s assistance, authored another memorandum supporting the President’s unfettered power.9 “Any effort to apply” a torture ban “in a manner that interferes with the President’s direction of such core war matters . . . would be unconstitutional.”
In 2003, the White House nominated Bybee to a US Court of Appeals judgeship, and Jack Goldsmith succeeded him as Chief Assistant in the Office of Legal Counsel. Goldsmith immediately withdrew the Yoo/Bybee memos and then resigned. Goldsmith, now on the Harvard Law School faculty, later characterized the memos as “sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious.”
In a 2005 interview with The New Yorker, Yoo, who had returned to the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, remained unbowed. Congress, he said, cannot “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture. . . . It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function.”10
In June 2006, the Supreme Court held that detainees are entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. In response, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act, which precluded detainees from invoking those protections. In June 2008, the Supreme Court struck down the law.
Above all, do no harm
The aphorism Primum non nocere is echoed in the Hippocratic Oath’s admonition “to do good or to do no harm” and, since it was first attributed to English physician Thomas Sydenham in 1860, has “remain[ed] a potent reminder that every medical . . . decision carries the potential for harm.”11 That reminder seems to have escaped nearly every health care professional involved in the “War on Terror.” Moreover, whatever the discipline or specialty, participating health care professionals certainly violated the tenets of their professional oaths.
The most broadly applicable is the World Medical Association’s International Code of Medical Ethics prohibition against using “medical knowledge to violate human rights and civil liberties, even under threat.” The AMA Code of Medical Ethics states, “A physician shall be dedicated to providing competent medical care, with compassion and respect for human dignity and rights.” The American Psychiatric Association buttressed this mandate in 2006 with the precept that “no psychiatrist should participate directly in the interrogation of persons held in custody by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities.”12 Similarly, the AMA has since mandated that “physicians must neither conduct nor directly participate in an interrogation.”13
The American Psychological Association (APA), however, has trod a slightly different path. Although its code mandates that “psychologists take reasonable steps to avoid harming their patients or clients,” the organization voted in 2002 that when ethical precepts run afoul of legal rules, “psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing authority.14 That precept allowed what the APA has since termed “the so-called Nuremberg Defense” to support the conduct of psychologists participating in interrogation.15
In August 2008, the APA membership resolved that psychologists “may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of” international or domestic law. Two months ago the APA Council of Representatives voted to direct the APA Ethics Committee to amend the organization’s Ethical Standard 1.02 to reflect the resolution. The council’s directive has been presented to the APA membership for comment. In February 2010, the ethics committee will vote on the measure. Should the committee approve the amendment by a requisite two-thirds vote, the amended standard will go into its ratification by the APA Board of Directors.
Medical personnel involved in interrogations not only forgot the then-existing ethics codes, but they also seemed to have forgotten about the Geneva Conventions, although 94% reported being familiar with their proscriptions against torture. Or, perhaps, they were mindful that the Commander in Chief had concluded that the Conventions were inapplicable to their conduct. If so, then they might have known that his decision also eliminated the protections of Protocol 1: “Under no circumstances shall any person be punished for carrying out medical activities compatible with medical ethics, regardless of the person benefiting therefrom.”
Perhaps this last point is the crux. Health care professionals were in a position to stop what the Administration and its lawyers had promoted, but the promoted position threatened not only the dignity of the detainees, but also the independent professionalism of health care providers.
As the investigation announced by current Attorney General Eric Holder proceeds, maybe we in the legal and health care professions can find reason to hope that the past 8 years will provide incentive for our professional organizations to work together in support of both medical ethics and international human rights laws.
References
1. Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003) (2003-7123-IG), May 7, 2004. http://www.freedominfo.org/documents/20090824cia.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2009.
2. Dept of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General, Final Report, Assessment of Detainee Medical Operations for OEF, GTMO, and OIF (April 13, 2005). http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2005/ detmedopsrpt_13apr2005.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2009.
3. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Dec. 10, 1984, S. Treaty Doc. No. 100-20, 1465 U.N.T.S. 85. http://untreaty.un.org/english/treatyevent2001/pdf/ 07e.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2009.
4. Dept of Justice. Legal Standard Applicable Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A, December 30, 2004. http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/18usc23402340a2.htm. Accessed October 9, 2009.
5. Isikoff M. We Could Have Done This the Right Way. Newsweek. May 4, 2009. http://www.newsweek.com/id/195089. Accessed October 9, 2009.
6. Dept of the Army, Office of the Surgeon General. Final Report Assessment of Detainee Medical Operations for OEF, GTMO, and OIF (April 13, 2005). http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/2005/ detmedopsrpt_13apr2005.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2009.
7. Memorandum from John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, to Timothy E. Flannigan, Deputy Counsel to the President (September 25, 2001). Reprinted in: Greenberg KJ, Dratel JL, eds. The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib.New York: Cambridge University Press; 2005.
8. Memorandum from Alberto R. Gonzales, White House General Counsel to President George W. Bush, Re: Decision Re Application of the Geneva Conven- tion on Prisoners of War to the Conflict With Al Qaeda and the Taliban. January 25, 2002. http://www.humanrightsfirst.com/us_law/etn/gonzales/memos_dir/memo_20020125_Gonz_Bush.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2009.
9. Memorandum from Office of the Assistant Attorney General, to Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President (August 1, 2002). http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Guardian/documents/2009/04/16/bybee_ to_rizzo_memo.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2009.
10. Mayer MJ. Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America’s “Extraordinary Rendition” Program. New Yorker. February 14, 2005. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/02/14/050214fa_fact6#Replay. Accessed October 9, 2009.
11. Smith CM. Origin and uses of primum non nocere—above all, do no harm! J Clin Pharmacol. 2005; 45:371-377.
12. American Psychiatric Association. Psychiatric Participation in Interrogation of Detainees: Position Statement. Approved by the Board of Trustees, May 2006. http://archive.psych.org/edu/other_res/lib_archives/ archives/200601.pdf. Accessed October 9, 2009.
13. American Medical Association. Opinion 2.068: Physician Participation in Interrogation. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/physician-resources/medical-ethics/code-medical-ethics/opinion2068.shtml. Accessed October 9, 2009.
14. American Psychological Association. Ethical Standard 1.02, Conflicts Between Ethics and Law, Regulations, or Other Governing Legal Authority. http://www.APA.org/ethics/standard-102/provisions-codes.html. Accessed October 9, 2009.
15. American Psychological Association. APA Council of Representatives Directs Change in Its Ethics Code to Prevent So-Called Nuremberg Defense. August 5, 2009. http://www.APA.org/releases/ethical-standard.html. Accessed October 9, 2009.
October 31st, 2009
Yesterday was Friday, so the Obama administration, like all administrations, released embarrassing documents. In addition to the Cheney Plame case interview materials, they released more torture documents to the ACLU in its long-running FOIA case. Among other things, these documents provide additional insights into the FBI’s relations with the CIA torturers: at times they collaborated and at other times they contemplated prosecution.
An ACLU Press Release is here while the have links to the documents here. The New York Times blog has a brief discussion, with links to seven documents [my downloads of several of these were damaged, as were retries]. Here’s what these dead with:
F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “how close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,”’ according to hundreds of pages of partially declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department.
The documents also include handwritten notes, apparently prepared by Justice Department officials, discussing the possibility of prosecuting some personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency. The notes reveal that the Justice Department considered prosecuting a C.I.A. interrogator for a previously reported incident in which a detainee was threatened with a gun and a power drill, but it says Justice officials declined to prosecute the case.
The AP also has an article. Here is the relevant section:
Newly released documents show the FBI interviewed a naked, chained terror suspect back in 2002 as the bureau struggled with the CIA over how to treat high-value prisoners.Details of the interrogation were contained in documents released late Friday as part of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Judicial Watch.
As the CIA began to use harsh interrogation techniques against captured terror suspects, the FBI became wary of the legality of the methods, which ranged from forced nudity to waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning. As a result, FBI agents were ordered not to participate in such harsh interrogations.
Yet sometime in late 2002, an FBI agent interviewed accused Sept. 11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh at a CIA site. The agent later said he got valuable information out of Binalshibh before the CIA shut down the questioning.
According to one document, FBI officials told investigators when they arrived at the unidentified CIA site “the detainees were manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock.”
The FBI agents worked with the CIA in developing questions, but were denied direct access to Binalshibh for four or five days, according to a report on detainee interrogations by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine.
The report says eventually one agent was allowed to speak to Binalshibh for about 45 minutes.
“Binalshibh was naked and chained to the floor,” the report said. The FBI agent later said “he obtained valuable actionable intelligence in a short time but that the CIA quickly shut down the interview.”
The report said FBI officials later had serious misgivings about their participation in the Binalshibh interrogation.
The incident “indicates that a ‘bright line rule’ against FBI participation or assistance to interrogations in which other investigators used non-FBI techniques was not fully established or followed” at the time of the interrogation, the report said.
Even the new release of documents still holds back many details. Still missing is a transcript of FBI Director Robert Mueller’s interview with investigators examining the interrogation issues.
A censored version of the inspector general’s report was released last year, but Friday’s release disclosed a few more details about the Binalshibh case.
Binalshibh is one of five prisoners currently at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility facing a possible death sentence for allegedly taking part in the 2001 terror attack on the U.S.
Military doctors have diagnosed him with a psychiatric disorder and he has been treated with a drug for schizophrenia, according to court papers, but the exact nature of the apparent illness is unknown.
The government papers released Friday also reveal that after Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces in Iraq, FBI officials debated whether he should be read his Miranda warning of legal rights, but they ultimately decided he did not need such a warning because he was unlikely to be brought back to the United States to face criminal trial. He was ultimately tried by Iraq’s new government and executed.
October 31st, 2009
At the end of Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, Moore states that there is an alternative to capitalism. “It’s called ‘democracy’ ” he says. By ‘democracy’ he clearly means democracy in our economic life, including inside the workplace. In the film he has shown us workers cooperatives where workers participate fully in decision-making about their enterprises. The Basque MONDRAGON cooperatives have been one of the few large-scale efforts to implement these cooperative democratic principles.
While these efforts are no without their problems, workers cooperatives are among the few interesting alternatives to traditional capitalist enterprises around. They deserve to be further developed and fully explored. Perhaps most exciting is how workplace democracy can overcome the alienation typical of the traditional workplace where so many are assumed to lack the knowledge, insight, and understanding to make good decisions while a small group of individuals who are guided largely by monetary concerns make the decisions for all and are rewarded handsomely for their supposed acumen.
The United Steelworkers and MONDRAGON cooperatives have issued the following press release which suggests that workplace democracy may soon be coming to an enterprise near you:
The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada. The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote.”“We see today’s agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada,” said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. “Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”
Josu Ugarte, President of MONDGRAGON Internacional added: “What we are announcing today represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”
Highlighting the differences between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and union co-ops, Gerard said, “We have lots of experience with ESOPs, but have found that it doesn’t take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control. We see Mondragon’s cooperative model with ‘one worker, one vote’ ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.”
Both the USW and MONDRAGON emphasized the shared values that will drive this collaboration. Mr. Ugarte commented, “We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first. We are excited about working with Mondragon because of our shared values, that work should empower workers and sustain families and communities,” Gerard added.
In the coming months, the USW and MONDRAGON will seek opportunities to implement this union co-op hybrid approach by sharing the common values put forward by the USW and MONDGRAGON and by operating in similar manufacturing segments in which both the USW and MONDRAGON already participate.
Click here for the full text of the Agreement.
About MONDRAGON:
The MONDRAGON Corporation mission is to produce and sell goods and provide services and distribution using democratic methods in its organizational structure and distributing the assets generated for the benefit of its members and the community, as a measure of solidarity. MONDRAGON began its activities in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon by a rural village priest with a transformative vision who believed in the values of worker collaboration and working hard to reach for and realize the common good.
Today, with approximately 100,000 cooperative members in over 260 cooperative enterprises present in more than forty countries; MONDRAGON Corporation is committed to the creation of greater social wealth through customer satisfaction, job creation, technological and business development, continuous improvement, the promotion of education, and respect for the environment. In 2008, MONDRAGON Corporation reached annual sales of more than sixteen billion euros with its own cooperative university, cooperative bank, and cooperative social security mutual and is ranked as the top Basque business group, the seventh largest in Spain, and the world’s largest industrial workers cooperative.
About the USW:
The USW is North America’s largest industrial union representing 1.2 million active and retired members in a diverse range of industries.
October 29th, 2009
Human rights investigator John Sifton discusses the Bush administration torture program for Russia Today:
[h/t The Public Record.]
They went to psychologists and lawyers and they tried to design a program which was, in their mind, legal.
October 29th, 2009
The LA Times reports on the difficulties Mohammed Jawad is having adjusting to life back in Afghanistan after six plus years in Guantanamo:
Young Afghan struggles to adapt after Guantanamo
Mohammed Jawad, widely considered the prison’s youngest detainee, is back home in Afghanistan after a judge ordered him freed. He is angry and confused. Many U.S. officials are unhappy he’s free.By Mark Magnier
Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan – At family gatherings, the young Afghan with the scraggly beard instinctively sits with the children, before others remind him that he is a man now.
Old friends he last saw when they were flying kites are now in college, married with children, enjoying their careers. He’s happy for them, but he feels like he’s watching life flash by and he’s not a part of it.
These are the shadows of the lost youth of Mohammed Jawad, the Afghan who many believe was Guantanamo’s youngest prisoner.
“There are such huge changes I need to catch up with,” he says. “I’ve missed a lot.”
Six inches taller and 40 pounds heavier than when he left his country nearly seven years ago, Jawad alternately smiles shyly, tenses with anger, then smiles again, the mood swings of someone trying to figure out how he lost a third of his life.
The odyssey that would send Jawad, who says he’s 19, to a forbidding facility half a world away started on a chilly day in mid-December 2002, shortly after he and his mother moved to Kabul from a Pakistani refugee camp.
He was about 12, he says, and had spent the day helping his uncle dig a well before heading out to buy some tea.
He says he was grabbed by police who beat him and threatened to kill his family unless he put his thumbprint to paper and admitted he’d tried to kill two U.S. soldiers. The Pashto speaker, largely illiterate, didn’t understand their Persian and had little idea what he’d agreed to, he says. A U.S. judge would later agree.
That day, a grenade had been thrown at a U.S. Army vehicle, injuring the two soldiers and an interpreter. Jawad was charged with attempted murder based on the confession, held at Kabul’s Bagram air base, then moved to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in early February 2003.
His attorneys and human rights groups maintain he was the youngest to enter the notorious prison. The Pentagon insists he was close to adulthood at the time, citing a bone scan done when he arrived at Guantanamo that suggested he was closer to 17. Jawad says his father died fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, which, if true, would make him older than 12 when he was arrested. Like many Afghans, he has no birth certificate.
Many in the Justice and Defense departments still maintain Jawad is guilty.
His relatives initially didn’t tell his mother that her only son had disappeared, pretending for two months that he was with family. After nine months, a letter from Jawad arrived via the Red Cross, blacked out by censors except for one sentence: “I’m in prison.”
Over the years they managed an occasional letter and a few calls, which mostly consisted of Jawad crying.
Eventually, military and civilian judges threw out most of the Pentagon’s evidence against Jawad, with U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle describing the case as an outrage “riddled with holes.” In August, Jawad was set free.
U.S. soldiers kept him shackled during the long flight back. On arrival, Afghan officials removed his handcuffs, whisking him by car and helicopter to meet President Hamid Karzai, who gave Jawad clothes to replace his prison uniform and promised him a house and some money.
Late that night, Jawad finally saw his mother, who didn’t recognize him. She made him show her a special mark on his head, then promptly fainted. He hardly slept his first two days back, his family says, talking nonstop as if making up for the lost years.
In the family’s 30-by-10-foot greeting hall, decorated with an inexpensive red carpet, he welcomes a stream of well-wishers.
These days, the shy young man from the Kuchi nomadic tribe — traditional migrants in Afghanistan and Pakistan — can’t walk down the street without strangers coming up to him, kissing his forehead in a traditional show of respect.
But he suffers from frequent headaches, he says, and often rests during the day. Prison memories haunt him, something doctors warn may never end. He worries about those left behind, his de facto family. He’s out and they’re not, and that’s a source of guilt. Though the Obama administration has said it will close Guantanamo, hundreds of detainees remain there and at Bagram.
He asks a reporter to tell President Obama, the United Nations, someone, to help them. “People there are sick,” he says. “They should be treated. They should be freed.”
As his anger rises, his uncle tells him not to think about the lost years.
But it spills out. He talks about having his hands bound behind his back and being forced to eat like a dog, being kicked, beaten and pepper-sprayed and subjected to excessive heat, loud noise, solitary confinement.
After a year, Guantanamo records show, Jawad tried to commit suicide by banging his head against his cell wall repeatedly.
“I was tortured and faced many problems,” he says. “They also play with your mind.”
His jailers refused to put him with other Afghans, he said, only with Arabs whose language he didn’t understand. He says officials hung heartwarming pictures of families in the interrogation room, then asked about his family. They repeatedly denied his requests for school books or a Pashto dictionary.
Guantanamo military officials did not immediately respond to questions about his alleged mistreatment.
As with many things at Guantanamo, it’s difficult to verify exactly what happened to Jawad there. A Defense Department official, speaking on background given the sensitivity of the issue, says Jawad was older than he claims, that a lot of people still think he threw the grenade, and that it’s always been U.S. policy to treat prisoners humanely.
A Justice Department official who asked not to be identified says the case was dropped when conditions changed.
“He was held so long with evidence based on torture,” the official says. “The president decided, one, that we won’t torture and, two, that we won’t rely on statements based on torture. It’s not really lessons learned. It was the result of a policy choice the president made.”
Jawad says only faith and a Koran prevented him from going insane.
Isolated, he forgot basic words in his own language. He learned a little English, but consciously avoided learning everything. “The guards used many bad words that I didn’t want to pick up,” he says.
Family members say he’s slowly coming out of his shell. In recent weeks, he’s become less angry and irritable, sleeps better and has fewer headaches.
“Afghanistan society’s emphasis on community and family could be very helpful,” says Katherine Porterfield, clinical co-director at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture, who examined him. “But honestly, he’s still very frightened.”
After Jawad returned home, one of the first things he did was wolf down a huge plate of mutton and rice after years of tasteless prison food. He’s enjoying his freedom, shopping and trying to make sense of cultural references, TV programs, Kabul society.
He wants to resume his education, he says, even if it means sitting with 13-year-olds at tiny desks. He’s started thinking about longer-term plans — a good sign, says a child care expert working with him who asked not to be identified to protect Jawad and herself. He even is starting to show a sense of humor.
UNICEF, his lawyers and other civic groups are trying to get him psychological care, education and job training, as well as money for some basic living expenses. The financial help promised by Karzai — now embroiled in election controversy — has not yet materialized.
Critics question why the U.S. government has done so little to help him and other longtime Guantanamo and secret-site prisoners adjust after they’re released, much like halfway houses ease the transition for regular prisoners.
“We need to do more than just dump him on the corner with a bus ticket after seven years and say, ‘Have a nice day,’ ” says Jawad’s lawyer, Eric Montalvo, who left the U.S. military in August. “If you’re trying to win the hearts and minds of Afghanis, I can’t think of a better investment.”
The Defense Department official says such a program would be too costly, and given officials’ worries about alleged terrorist links, “we don’t want to give them money to buy equipment that could come back to hurt us.”
Jawad’s family is now mulling a lawsuit, which his lawyer says could be filed within the next month.
Out in the family’s small enclosed courtyard in a modest Kabul neighborhood, two chickens fight and a child plays with a pump handle as Jawad contemplated his future.
He wants to be a doctor, he says, so he can do something good for people.
“That’s my dream,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s possible. But that’s my dream.”
October 28th, 2009
For years dissident members of the American Psychological Association, along with non-member psychologists, have fought the associations policies promoting psychologist participation in military and intelligence interrogations. These dissidents argued that psychologists aiding interrogations were sometimes aiding torture and other abuse. Further, even in cases where the interrogations were not themselves abusive, psychologist participation violated the profession’s principle ethical injunction, to “Do No Harm.”
The APA leadership, in contrast, claimed that psychologists were necessary to prevent harm to detainees, though they never explained how this prevention would actually occur. Meanwhile, the press and official documents gradually revealed the fact that psychologists, rather than preventing harm, were central actors in designing and implementing the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used by the CIA in its torture centers and by certain military interrogators at Guantanamo and elsewhere.
The APA response was to deny the facts as long as possible. When pure denial was no longer viable, they resorted to admitting that a very few psychologists acted against their professional ethics in aiding abuses. They have never commented on the role bof psychology as a profession when members of the ptofession are designing and implementing a systematic governmental program of abuse. Rather, APA leaders did everything in their power to obscure the issues in order to maintain their support for psychologist participation in detainee interrogations.
Yesterday a group of APA members filed a formal complaint with APA President Bray protesting what they regard as systematic violations of APA procedures and by-laws by the association in pursuit of its position that psychologists should participate in Bush-era detainee interrogations.
The extent of procedural violations is a major piece of evidence behind dissidents beliefs that APA leadership were knowingly complicit in the Bush program of detainee abuse. The other major pieces of evidence are the APA’s systematic refusal to acknowledge psychologist participation in abuses until the public record made denial impossible, and the massive resistance of APA leadership to any attempts by members to change policy. When APA members, by a vote of 59% to 41%, voted to condemn psychologist participation in illegal detention sites like Guantanamo, the APA accepted the formal wording but worked to obfuscate its application to any actual existing sites.
Many APA members have resigned in disgust at the association’s leadership’s duplicitous role. Yet other dissidents remain members and are pursuing all available means of redress allowed by association rules. This formal protest is their latest effort. Under APA rules, President Bray is to appoint a Committee on Constitutional issues, with membership acceptable to complainants, to investigate. APA rules stipulate that this Committee should be formed and operate expeditiously. The ball is now in President Bray’s court.
Here is the letter sent to President Bray [The letter is also available as a pdf here.]:
Dr. James H. Bray President American Psychological Association 750 First Street, NE Washington, DC 20002-4242October 26, 2009
Dear Dr. Bray:
We, the undersigned members of the American Psychological Association (APA), hereby submit a Formal Complaint and request that you appoint a three-member ad hoc Committee on Constitutional Issues (CCI) to adjudicate our complaint according to Association Rule 90-1. Under the Bill of Rights for Members, III.3, “Any individual Member or group of individual Members who believe their rights as Members of the Association, as specified in this Article, or any other rights, have been abridged by actions taken by an element of the Association’s governance structure or any employee or employees of the Association may seek such remedies as may be provided under procedures established by the Council of Representatives.”
The Bylaws (I.1) state that one of the objects of the APA is “the establishment and maintenance of the highest standards of professional ethics and conduct of the members of the Association.” We submit that the APA Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) recommended a controversial new policy based in part on highly questionable interpretations of the APA Ethics Code.1 By endorsing this policy, the 2005 Board of Directors made the APA the sole health care professional organization supporting member involvement in the interrogation of detainees held under conditions that violate international law.2 According to the UN Commission on Human Rights, many detainees have experienced severe suffering amounting to torture.3 In assuming the role of Behavioral Science Consultant (BSC) to interrogators, psychologists provided professional legitimacy and expertise to programs that have come under intense government investigation and worldwide condemnation. The PENS policy has damaged the reputation of the profession and the APA and undermined the obligation of the APA “to advance psychology as a science and profession and as a means of promoting health, education and human welfare…” (By-laws Article 1), thereby adversely affecting every member.
Article XI. 7, 10 and 12 of the By-laws and Association Rule 30-8 outline the extensive reviews and checks and balances that any major change in policy must undergo before adoption. The backgrounds of a Task Force proposing a far-reaching new policy or guideline should be fully identified and its recommendations reviewed by several APA committees and Boards that address the range of relevant issues. APA staff and those who would directly benefit from the policy should neither determine the policy nor dominate the process by which it is established.
Specifically, our complaint involves three interrelated issues:
A. Violation of rules for establishing a new policy
The secrecy of the PENS deliberations greatly limited information on the reasoning of the Task Force and the basis of its decisions.
Six members holding a majority vote were on the active payroll of the US military and/or intelligence agencies, creating clear bias and multiple conflicts of interest.4
After the Ethics Committee approved the Task Force recommendations (within days), the Board of Directors invoked its emergency powers and endorsed the PENS Report, preempting a review and vote by the Council of Representatives, which is the governing body of the APA. There was no valid reason for the extraordinary haste or for using Board emergency powers. Council was to meet within weeks of the Task Force deliberation, and could have reviewed the Task Force findings at that time, either endorsing or altering the action taken by the Board of Directors.5
Approval was not obtained from the Boards required to review major proposed changes in APA policy, such as the Policy and Planning Board, the Board of Professional Affairs, and the Board for Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest (see Article XI, 7, 10 and 11).
There was little or no consultation with psychologists from a range of specialties who would be affected by and concerned about the policy, and no period for member feedback before the policy was set (see Association Rules 30-8).
APA efforts to inform members about the policy through its website and publications, and to foster discussion through venues such as the 2007 San Francisco mini-convention on Ethics and Interrogation, were totally inadequate substitutes for the vetting procedures required before a new policy is established.
B. Bias of APA Officials, Ethics Office/Committee, and Board of Directors
The presence and active participation of several staff and non-Task Force members, some of who had undisclosed conflicts of interest, added to the bias created by the military/intelligence skew of the voting members.6
A confidentiality agreement bound Task Force participants not to discuss the process or the Report. The Task Force Chair designated the Directors of the Ethics Office and Office of Public Affairs as the sole spokespersons.
Information that officials provided to Council and the membership stressed potential positives of the policy and minimized or ignored obvious drawbacks.7
The APA Ethics Office Director wrote the Task Force Report, became spokesperson for the PENS policy, and for four years traveled extensively to defend it.
The PENS decision treats assisting national security interrogations as a benefit to society so great BSC psychologists may violate several important Ethics Standards, such as 3:10 Informed Consent and 3:05 Multiple Relationships.8
The PENS decision was also built on a broad and controversial application of Ethics Code Standard 1.02, essentially applying the clause added in 2002 to a wide range of national security activity by psychologists, and earning the publicly shameful criticism that the APA had a Nuremberg may-follow-orders defense in the enforceable part of its Ethics Code.
For at least a year before the Task Force met, APA officials were conferring with intelligence and military officers about what the APA policy should be toward psychologist involvement in detainee interrogations. Before the meeting, a high-ranking army psychologist appointed to the Task Force although not an APA member, submitted a draft guide to the Task Force on the Behavioral Science Consultant (BSC) role, parts of which were incorporated into the PENS Report almost verbatim, and then the PENS Report was included in the 2006 Army Surgeon General’s BSC Standard Operating Procedures along with the Task Force’s selective interpretation of the APA Ethics Code that had the approval of the Ethics Committee. Officials of the Department of Defense received the Report before Council representatives had time to read it. With such a collusive and circular process, it is difficult to determine who designed the policy, officials of the Department of Defense or the APA.9
Despite copious evidence from government investigations and complaints filed years ago that identified APA members involved in detainee abuse, the Ethics Committee has yet to find any of these psychologists in violation of professional ethics and has failed to subject these matters to the serious ethical inquiries that the Ethics Committee has conducted concerning other APA members for matters that are far less significant in terms of professional ethics and implications for the field of psychology.10
C. Obstruction of attempts to reverse the policy
In 2007, after a long period of conferencing, revisions and debate, Council was to vote on a Moratorium resolution that put a hold on the PENS policy until the issues could be adequately vetted. In a highly irregular action, the Moratorium vote was replaced with a vote on a last-minute revision of the APA Resolution Against Torture. This Resolution, which passed, did not materially affect the PENS policy. Sponsors of the Moratorium quickly added an amendment to the Resolution that called for a Moratorium. The Council was given little time to discuss this amendment and hear corrections to erroneous statements made about it, and it failed to pass.11
In official statements, reports of abuse by CIA and BSC psychologists, including APA members, have been ignored or minimized by APA officials for years. At the same time, these officials have insisted that psychologists keep detainees safe and interrogations effective, despite clear evidence that psychologists assisted in the routine use of unethical, ineffective and harmful methods for years.12
The APA has yet to provide for a way by which military psychologists working in classified operations can receive counsel and oversight from civilian ethics experts even though it has been four years since the PENS Task Force recommended that the APA somehow arrange a means for such consultations.13
The PENS Task Force made it clear that its work was preliminary and there was a strong need for the Ethics Committee to develop a Casebook. Four years later there is still no Casebook.
In mid-2008 APA members voted in an unprecedented Referendum to ban psychologists from settings that violated international law unless they were working solely for detainee welfare and were independent of the military command, effectively removing psychologists from detainee interrogation work. Council made the Referendum official policy as of February 2009, but full implementation has been stalled by referral to unprepared committees.
The military programs built on this now-repudiated policy remain undisturbed14 and, to our knowledge, the Army Surgeon General Behavioral Science Consultant Standard Operating Procedure (BSC SOP) still contains a copy of the PENS Task Force Report and controversial interpretations of the APA Ethics Code.
The APA has long been regarded as the primary representative of American psychologists, and as such has the duty to its members and to society to vigorously protect the fundamental values of our profession. Increasingly, APA members refuse to pay dues to an organization that supports a policy that diminishes the cardinal principal of our Ethics Code to “Do no harm.” The pride and value of belonging to an organization that upholds the highest professional ethics is giving way to the shame of being associated with abettors of torture. We believe that the Charter, Bylaws and Association Rules of APA have been grievously violated by the PENS policy and process; by the way that Standard 1.02 and other parts of the Ethics Code were applied to make psychologists’ involvement in interrogations appear ethical; and by the failure of the APA’s leadership to fully implement the Referendum and, thereby, honor a legal directive of the membership. To help rectify the damage done by these violations and to restore the reputation of our profession, we petition for the following:
I. Rescinding of the 2005 Board of Directors’ endorsement of the PENS Task Force Report, and a clear public statement that the APA policy that asserts psychologist involvement in national security interrogations is ethical is null and void.
II. Adjudication and recommendations from the Committee on Constitutional Issues regarding evidence that since 2002 the Ethics Office has put the needs and priorities of the Department of Defense and US intelligence agencies above the responsibilities and concerns of the profession as a whole, and that the Ethics Committee has failed to give oversight to psychologists involved in national security operations at least commensurate to the oversight that is given to complaints filed against non-military members of the APA on non-torture related complaints.
III. Full implementation of the members’ Referendum, including, but not limited to, published notice to the Deputy of Defense for Intelligence Oversight15 and the military and intelligence officials in charge of procedural manuals such as the Army BSC SOP and the CIA Office of Medical Services Guidelines on detainee interrogation16 that 1) the PENS Task Force decision and may-follow-orders clauses of the 2002 Ethics Code are no longer operative, and 2) that psychologists working in detention sites that violate international law, such as Guantanamo and Bagram, are now violating APA policy.
IV. CCI investigation of reports that, in its zeal to promote roles for psychologists in national security investigations, the Senior Staff of the APA, including but not limited to the APA Ethics Office, Public Affairs Office, Science Directorate, and Practice Directorate, became inappropriately involved in the PENS Task Force. Further, their work with officials at the DoD and CIA compromised APA independence as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) and reflected an inappropriate involvement of APA staff in efforts to influence policy within the APA contrary to historical protocols. Also, central management did not appear to monitor and manage these activities as it should.
We understand that you, as APA President, are to appoint an ad hoc Committee on Constitutional Issues to adjudicate this Formal Complaint, and that our approval of the appointments is required. Documents and sources that support the Complaint are provided in the reference section. We also understand that we may be required to provide additional documentation, and must be available for consultation through what appears to be a relatively speedy process according to Rules 90-1.
Sincerely,
Frank Summers, Ph.D., ABPP franksumphd@hotmail.com
Roy Eidelson, Ph.D. roy@eidelsonconsulting.com
Ryan Hunt, Ph.D. huntryanw@gmail.com
Mary Pelton-Cooper, Psy.D. mpeltonc@nmu.edu
Supporting References and Documents
Altman, N. (2008). Description of the Moratorium process in a Professional Crisis, a documentary available at http://www.DoctorsandDetainees.com.
Arrigo, J. M. (2007). A Counterintelligence Perspective on APA PENS Task Force Process. Presented at Ethics and Interrogations mini-convention, APA Convention, San Francisco. Also, former PENS Task Force members Jean Maria Arrigo (jmarrigo@cox.net) and Mike Wessells (mwessel@rmc.edu) have informed the Complaint signers that they value the opportunity to speak with the CCI about the PENS process.
Bond, T. (2008). “And open letter to Dr. Stephen Behnke on psychologists engaged in torture: If not now, when?” http://www.counterpunch.org/bond05192008.html. Trudy Bond, (ar_mordilo@yahoo.com), who submitted detainee abuse complaints to the Ethics Committee on APA psychologists, has informed the Complaint signers that she values the opportunity to speak to the CCI about her experience.
CIA Office of Inspector General’s May 2004 Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities Report and Supporting Documents (2002-4). http://www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/40832res20090824.html
Deputy Secretary of Defense Memorandum (June 2009). DoD Guidance for Reporting Questionable Intelligence Activities and Significant or Highly Sensitive Matters. http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives/corres/pdf/DTM-08-052.pdf
Marks, J. H. & Bloche, M. G., (2008). The Ethics of Interrogation — The U.S. Military’s Ongoing Use of Psychiatrists New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 359, 1090-1092. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/reprint/359/11/1090.pdf
Ochroch, R. (2008) Comments on the PENS process by a former Ethics Committee chair in Interrogation Psychologists: The Making of a Professional Crisis, A documentary available at http://www.DoctorsandDetainees.com.
Olson, B. & Miles, S. H. (2009). The American Psychological Association and War on Terror Interrogations, Appendix 2 in Miles, S. H. Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Olson, B., Soldz, S. & Davis, M. (2008). The Ethics of Interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A Critique of Policy and Process. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, vol. 3. http://www.peh-med.com/content/pdf/1747-5341-3-3.pdf
Report of the American Psychological Association Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, (2005). http://www.apa.org/releases/PENSTaskForceReportFinal.pdf
Rubenstein, L. S. & Annas, G. J. (2009). Medical Ethics at Guantanamo Bay Detention Centre and in the US Military: A Time for Reform. The Lancet, Vol. 374, 353-355.
United Nations Commission on Human Rights (Feb., 2006, p. 25). Situation of Detainees at Guantanamo Bay. UN%20Report%20on%20Guantanamo%20Bay_0.pdf
U.S. Army Surgeon General Behavioral Science Consultant Standard Operating Procedures. (2006). Army BSC SOP http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Guantanmo_Bay_use_of_psychologists_for_interrogations_2006-2008
Notes
1 Olson, Soldz & Davis, 2008.
2 Marks & Bloche, 2008.
3 UN Commission on Human Rights, 2006
4 Olson & Miles, 2009.
5 Altman, 2008
6 Olson & Miles, 2009
7 Altman, 2008.
8 Olson, Soldz & Davis, 2008.
9 Arrigo, 2007; Olson & Miles, 2009; Army BSC SOP, 2006.
10 Ochroch, 2008, Bond, 2008.
11 Altman, 2008.
12 CIA IG Report, 2004; UN Commission on Human Rights, 2006.
13 PENS Task Force Report, 2005
14 Rubenstein & Bloche, 2009.
15 Deputy Secretary of Defense Memorandum, 2009.
16 CIA Office of Inspector General’s Report, 2004.
October 28th, 2009
In a major development, foreign service officer stationed in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh, a former Marine, has resigned in protest of US policy in that country. In a four page letter he detailed his concerns that US policy is based on an unrealistic assessment of the nature of Afghan society and government. In his letter Hoh argues that the “insurgency” is fueled by opposition to foreign occupation while the government is a corrupt alliance of warlords and drug dealers.
Hoh speaks from experience. he served two tours of duty in Iraq and is credited by the Special inspector general for Iraq with running one of the few successful US-funded development projects in that country. In the case of Afghanistan, Hoh sees localized insurgencies, with hundreds or thousands of small groups fighting the US occupation forces, the corrupt government, and sometimes each other. The goal of these groups is maintaining their local power bases.
Hoh’s resignation has apparently shaken many of those in the Obama administration concerned with Afghan policy. The Washington Post details the positive responses from foreign service and administration officials. They all credit Hoh’s intelligence and his record of service to country. but, so far, at least publicly, they are not responding positively to his message. Let us hope this changes before more troops are sent on a hopeless quest.
Here is the Washington Post article:
U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
Foreign Service officer and former Marine captain says he no longer knows why his nation is fightingBy Karen DeYoung
When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”
The reaction to Hoh’s letter was immediate. Senior U.S. officials, concerned that they would lose an outstanding officer and perhaps gain a prominent critic, appealed to him to stay.
U.S. Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry brought him to Kabul and offered him a job on his senior embassy staff. Hoh declined. From there, he was flown home for a face-to-face meeting with Richard C. Holbrooke, the administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We took his letter very seriously, because he was a good officer,” Holbrooke said in an interview. “We all thought that given how serious his letter was, how much commitment there was, and his prior track record, we should pay close attention to him.”
While he did not share Hoh’s view that the war “wasn’t worth the fight,” Holbrooke said, “I agreed with much of his analysis.” He asked Hoh to join his team in Washington, saying that “if he really wanted to affect policy and help reduce the cost of the war on lives and treasure,” why not be “inside the building, rather than outside, where you can get a lot of attention but you won’t have the same political impact?”
Hoh accepted the argument and the job, but changed his mind a week later. “I recognize the career implications, but it wasn’t the right thing to do,” he said in an interview Friday, two days after his resignation became final.
“I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” Hoh said. Although he said his time in Zabul was the “second-best job I’ve ever had,” his dominant experience is from the Marines, where many of his closest friends still serve.
“There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed,” he said of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. “I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys.”
But many Afghans, he wrote in his resignation letter, are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there — a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected. While the Taliban is a malign presence, and Pakistan-based al-Qaeda needs to be confronted, he said, the United States is asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what is essentially a far-off civil war.
As the White House deliberates over whether to deploy more troops, Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because “I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is right.’ ”
“I realize what I’m getting into . . . what people are going to say about me,” he said. “I never thought I would be doing this.”
‘Uncommon bravery’
Hoh’s journey — from Marine, reconstruction expert and diplomat to war protester — was not an easy one. Over the weeks he spent thinking about and drafting his resignation letter, he said, “I felt physically nauseous at times.”His first ambition in life was to become a firefighter, like his father. Instead, after graduation from Tufts University and a desk job at a publishing firm, he joined the Marines in 1998. After five years in Japan and at the Pentagon — and at a point early in the Iraq war when it appeared to many in the military that the conflict was all but over — he left the Marines to join the private sector, only to be recruited as a Defense Department civilian in Iraq. A trained combat engineer, he was sent to manage reconstruction efforts in Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit.
“At one point,” Hoh said, “I employed up to 5,000 Iraqis” handing out tens of millions of dollars in cash to construct roads and mosques. His program was one of the few later praised as a success by the U.S. special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.
In 2005, Hoh took a job with BearingPoint, a major technology and management contractor at the State Department, and was sent to the Iraq desk in Foggy Bottom. When the U.S. effort in Iraq began to turn south in early 2006, he was recalled to active duty from the reserves. He assumed command of a company in Anbar province, where Marines were dying by the dozens.
Hoh came home in the spring of 2007 with citations for what one Marine evaluator called “uncommon bravery,” a recommendation for promotion, and what he later recognized was post-traumatic stress disorder. Of all the deaths he witnessed, the one that weighed most heavily on him happened in a helicopter crash in Anbar in December 2006. He and a friend, Maj. Joseph T. McCloud, were aboard when the aircraft fell into the rushing waters below Haditha dam. Hoh swam to shore, dropped his 90 pounds of gear and dived back in to try to save McCloud and three others he could hear calling for help.
He was a strong swimmer, he said, but by the time he reached them, “they were gone.”
‘You can’t sleep’
It wasn’t until his third month home, in an apartment in Arlington, that it hit him like a wave. “All the things you hear about how it comes over you, it really did. . . . You have dreams, you can’t sleep. You’re just, ‘Why did I fail? Why didn’t I save that man? Why are his kids growing up without a father?’ ”Like many Marines in similar situations, he didn’t seek help. “The only thing I did,” Hoh said, “was drink myself blind.”
What finally began to bring him back, he said, was a television show — “Rescue Me” on the FX cable network — about a fictional New York firefighter who descended into “survivor guilt” and alcoholism after losing his best friend in the World Trade Center attacks.
He began talking to friends and researching the subject online. He visited McCloud’s family and “apologized to his wife . . . because I didn’t do enough to save them,” even though his rational side knew he had done everything he could.
Hoh represented the service at the funeral of a Marine from his company who committed suicide after returning from Iraq. “My God, I was so afraid they were going to be angry,” he said of the man’s family. “But they weren’t. All they did was tell me how much he loved the Marine Corps.”
“It’s something I’ll carry for the rest of my life,” he said of his Iraq experiences. “But it’s something I’ve settled, I’ve reconciled with.”
Late last year, a friend told Hoh that the State Department was offering year-long renewable hires for Foreign Service officers in Afghanistan. It was a chance, he thought, to use the development skills he had learned in Tikrit under a fresh administration that promised a new strategy.
‘Valley-ism’
In photographs he brought home from Afghanistan, Hoh appears as a tall young man in civilian clothes, with a neatly trimmed beard and a pristine flak jacket. He stands with Eikenberry, the ambassador, on visits to northern Kunar province and Zabul, in the south. He walks with Zabul Gov. Mohammed Ashraf Naseri, confers with U.S. military officers and sits at food-laden meeting tables with Afghan tribal leaders. In one picture, taken on a desolate stretch of desert on the Pakistani border, he poses next to a hand-painted sign in Pashto marking the frontier.The border picture was taken in early summer, after he arrived in Zabul following two months in a civilian staff job at the military brigade headquarters in Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan. It was in Jalalabad that his doubts started to form.
Hoh was assigned to research the response to a question asked by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during an April visit. Mullen wanted to know why the U.S. military had been operating for years in the Korengal Valley, an isolated spot near Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan where a number of Americans had been killed. Hoh concluded that there was no good reason. The people of Korengal didn’t want them; the insurgency appeared to have arrived in strength only after the Americans did, and the battle between the two forces had achieved only a bloody stalemate.
Korengal and other areas, he said, taught him “how localized the insurgency was. I didn’t realize that a group in this valley here has no connection with an insurgent group two kilometers away.” Hundreds, maybe thousands, of groups across Afghanistan, he decided, had few ideological ties to the Taliban but took its money to fight the foreign intruders and maintain their own local power bases.
“That’s really what kind of shook me,” he said. “I thought it was more nationalistic. But it’s localism. I would call it valley-ism.”
‘Continued . . . assault’
Zabul is “one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected,” a State Department official said. Kandahar, the Taliban homeland, is to the southwest and Pakistan to the south. Highway 1, the main link between Kandahar and Kabul and the only paved road in Zabul, bisects the province. Over the past year, the official said, security has become increasingly difficult.By the time Hoh arrived at the U.S. military-run provincial reconstruction team (PRT) in the Zabul capital of Qalat, he said, “I already had a lot of frustration. But I knew at that point, the new administration was . . . going to do things differently. So I thought I’d give it another chance.” He read all the books he could get his hands on, from ancient Afghan history, to the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, through Taliban rule in the 1990s and the eight years of U.S. military involvement.
Frank Ruggiero, the Kandahar-based regional head of the U.S. PRTs in the south, considered Hoh “very capable” and appointed him the senior official among the three U.S. civilians in the province. “I always thought very highly of Matt,” he said in a telephone interview.
In accordance with administration policy of decentralizing power in Afghanistan, Hoh worked to increase the political capabilities and clout of Naseri, the provincial governor, and other local officials. “Materially, I don’t think we accomplished much,” he said in retrospect, but “I think I did represent our government well.”
Naseri told him that at least 190 local insurgent groups were fighting in the largely rural province, Hoh said. “It was probably exaggerated,” he said, “but the truth is that the majority” are residents with “loyalties to their families, villages, valleys and to their financial supporters.”
Hoh’s doubts increased with Afghanistan’s Aug. 20 presidential election, marked by low turnout and widespread fraud. He concluded, he said in his resignation letter, that the war “has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency.”
With “multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups,” he wrote, the insurgency “is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and Nato presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.”
American families, he said at the end of the letter, “must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more.”
‘Their problem to solve’
Ruggiero said that he was taken aback by Hoh’s resignation but that he made no effort to dissuade him. “It’s Matt’s decision, and I honored, I respected” it, he said. “I didn’t agree with his assessment, but it was his decision.”Eikenberry expressed similar respect, but declined through an aide to discuss “individual personnel matters.”
Francis J. Ricciardone Jr., Eikenberry’s deputy, said he met with Hoh in Kabul but spoke to him “in confidence. I respect him as a thoughtful man who has rendered selfless service to our country, and I expect most of Matt’s colleagues would share this positive estimation of him, whatever may be our differences of policy or program perspectives.”
This week, Hoh is scheduled to meet with Vice President Biden’s foreign policy adviser, Antony Blinken, at Blinken’s invitation.
If the United States is to remain in Afghanistan, Hoh said, he would advise a reduction in combat forces.
He also would suggest providing more support for Pakistan, better U.S. communication and propaganda skills to match those of al-Qaeda, and more pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to clean up government corruption — all options being discussed in White House deliberations.
“We want to have some kind of governance there, and we have some obligation for it not to be a bloodbath,” Hoh said. “But you have to draw the line somewhere, and say this is their problem to solve.”
October 27th, 2009
Another reminder of the case against Larry James, now Dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Ohio:
When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home
Hell and Dr. JamesBy Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski
The Louisiana Board that licenses psychologists is facing a growing legal fight over torture and medical care at the infamous Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons.
In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired colonel Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a U.S. prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming near-naked man on the floor.
The prisoner had been forced into pink women’s panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort “to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown.” As he recounts in his memoir, Fixing Hell, Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He “opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason…”
Although he claims to eventually find “good reason” to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.
Sadly, the story of Dr. James’ complicity in prisoner abuse does not end there. The New Orleans native and former LSU psychology professor admits to overseeing the detention, interrogation and health care of three boys, aged twelve to fourteen, who were disappeared to Guantanamo and held without charge or access to counsel or their families. In Fixing Hell and elsewhere, Dr. James proudly proclaims that he was in a position of authority at Guantanamo.
Government records indicate that, as the senior psychologist consulting on interrogations, his decisions affected the policy and operations of interrogations and detention on the base. During his time there, reports of beatings, sexual abuse, religious humiliation and sleep deprivation during interrogations were widespread, and draconian isolation was official policy. Prisoners suffered, and some continue to suffer, devastating physical and psychological harm.
Dr. Trudy Bond, a psychologist under an ethical obligation to report abuse by other psychologists, filed a complaint against Dr. James before the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in February 2008.
Dr. Bond’s complaint says that Dr. James’ conduct violated Louisiana laws governing his psychology license. As a psychologist and military colonel, he had a duty to avoid harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain informed consent, as well as to prevent and punish the misconduct of his subordinates.
How did the Louisiana licensing board respond? Rather than investigate, the Board dismissed the complaint, and when asked again, reaffirmed its decision. Dr. Bond has now taken the case to the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge. Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention in the notorious prison camps built to hold men and boys captured during the U.S. “War on Terror.”
According to his own statements, he was a senior member of interrogation consulting teams that, as documented by government records, were central in designing interrogation plans that exploited psychological and physical weaknesses of individual detainees. In one example cited by the New York Times, a military health professional told interrogators that “the detainee’s medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.”
Had Dr. James chosen to cast himself as a brave, but ultimately ineffective voice against torture, he may have fooled some people into believing him. Instead, he’s presented an utterly implausible portrait: one of a man “chosen” by “the nation” to “fix the hell” of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a feat he claims to have accomplished so successfully that ever since he was first deployed in January 2003, “where ever [sic] we have had psychologists no abuses have been reported.”
This is patently untrue. The real “fact of the matter,” as documented by government records, reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and eyewitness accounts, is that serious abuses were widespread both during Dr. James’ tenure as senior psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo, and after he left.
One would imagine that such disregard for a law designed to protect the public welfare would greatly concern the body charged with its enforcement. But the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which issued James his license, has refused to investigate whether he violated professional misconduct law.
The Board’s conduct should alarm all Louisiana health professionals and their patients. The Board demeans the profession when it fails to seriously address the possibility that a Louisiana licensee was involved in torture. It also strips the Louisiana psychology license of meaning and value.
How can patients rely on a license issued and enforced by a body that arbitrarily refuses to look into allegations of grave misconduct?
As the legal battle wears on, the people of Louisiana need to ask the Board’s members what “good reason” they await in order to act. They should demand that the Board of Examiners conduct a thorough investigation of Larry James and, if what he admits is true, revoke his privilege to practice.
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Bill Quigley is a Loyola Law professor working at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
Deborah Popowski is a Skirball Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program. Both authors are involved with the campaign When Healers Harm: Hold Health Professionals Accountable for Torture, see http://whenhealersharm.org/Bill can be contacted at quigley77@gmail.com.
Deborah can be contacted at dpopowski@law.harvard.edu.
October 26th, 2009
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