Psyche, Science, and Society

Comprehensive Soldier Fitness critique in Washington Post

The article that I wrote with Roy Eidelson and Marc Pilisuk critiquing the military’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program is discussed in a Washington Post article on CSF. Also discussed is a critique by by Penn psychologists James Coyne. Here are the sections of the article focussing on CSF critique:

“There’s little reason to believe that these techniques would have any efficacy at all,” said James C. Coyne, a psychology professor in the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “It’s very difficult to do anything preventively before the fact.”

In cases of combat stress, he said, he fears that preventive techniques could disrupt a soldier’s natural coping process.

“Getting upset, saying, ‘I don’t like feeling this way, this is a horrible way to feel,’ can often be the first step in a very healthy, adaptive response,” he said.

“Targeted, secondary prevention is much wiser and has much more of an evidence base than primary prevention,” he said.

Another critic, Roy Eidelson, a board member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, added: “This is the largest experiment ever undertaken — it involves a million soldiers.”

“The stakes are very high,” he said, “because we’re talking about war. We’re talking about life and death. And there’s a lot that wasn’t done to prepare for this experiment.”

And:

In January, at the suggestion of Seligman, a special issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, devoted 13 articles — by Cornum, Casey and others — to the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program.

Norman B. Anderson, head of the association and the journal’s editor, said Seligman’s work is a hot topic, and so is the mental health of American military personnel.

But in March, a trio of psychologists — Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz — wrote a blistering online essay accusing the journal of “cheerleading” and attacking the Army program as research, not training.

And as research, the program should involve the consent of its subjects, the soldiers, the authors stated. “Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors,” the authors said.

In addition, Seligman’s resilience work in schools has been “only modestly and inconsistently effective,” the authors contended, producing only small reductions in mild depression.

The critics also charged that the resilience work done in schools is probably not applicable to soldiers who face combat.

Finally, the authors worried that the program might actually harm soldiers: “Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or underestimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades, or civilians at heightened risk of harm?”

“Given those ethical questions,” Eidelson said, “psychology . . . should be thinking really hard about whether this is a good idea.”

Seligman countered that “it’s not remotely” a research project. “It’s an Army-wide course. . . . It’s no more subject to consent than . . . when you’re told to run in sneakers rather than boots.”

BTW, it is interesting that resilience guru Martin Seligman here, after our critique,  denies that CSF is at all a research study. In contrast, in 2009, in the APA’s Monitor on Psychology Seligman bragged:

“This is the largest study—1.1 million soldiers—psychology has ever been involved in, and it will yield definitive data about whether or not [resiliency and psychological fitness training] works,” Seligman says.

Furthermore, Seligman admitted that CSF was being “tested” by the military in an article promoting resilience training for businesses:

It is now being tested in an organization of 1.1 million people where trauma is more common and more severe than in any corporate setting: the U.S. Army

Evidently it’s a research “study” when that brings Seligman bragging rights or potential business but not when questions about research ethics are raised. Perhaps the ability to utilize situational ethics like that is what Seligman means by “resilience.”

Here’s the complete Post article:

Army program works to make soldiers fit in body and mind

By Michael E. Ruane

FORT BRAGG, N.C. — The soldiers crowd around a large conference table, their maroon berets scattered on top. A digital clock on the wall shows the time in Afghanistan and Iraq. The unit’s flag, hung with battle streamers, rests at one end of the room.

Outside, not far away, stands the 16-foot bronze statue of World War II paratrooper “Iron Mike,” grim-faced with submachine gun in hand — the epitome of the rugged American soldier.

But the training here this morning has little to do with war.

A young soldier from Rhode Island is telling how his wife walked out on him when she was two months pregnant and he fell into depression and alcoholism.

A burly soldier with red hair admits that he has a bad temper, which leads to disputes with his spouse. There are murmurs of assent around the room, and other problems galore.

It feels like an intense group-therapy session.

In a way, it is.

It’s also a radical shift in the Army’s approach to mental health, a switch from the just-suck-it-up tradition of the past and a change that was expected to get a grumpy reception from rank-and-file “Joes.”

But the new program, designed largely by outside psychologists, appears to have been embraced by soldiers.

The critics, it turns out, are other psychologists.

The Army, burdened by almost a decade of war and beset by increases in suicides, substance abuse and combat stress, embarked on the controversial $125 million project to instill psychological strength in soldiers the same way it teaches physical fitness.

The program, called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, is designed to make soldiers more psychologically “resilient” amid the pressures of combat, repeated deployments, and family and financial crises.

The effort runs counter to many military traditions.

“It’s a big culture change,” said Col. Jeffery Short, a physician and the program’s medical director.

“For decades,” he said, the Army attitude was “everybody’s just going to be tough. . . . You’re going to sweat this out, and when you come out the other end, you’re going to be better for it.

“Now, to concentrate on how people are thinking, and how they’re feeling . . . that is an Army culture change,” he said.

Brig. Gen. Rhonda Cornum, who oversees the program, said: “The Army recognized that its historical way of dealing with psychological fitness was to wait until somebody showed evidence of not having psychological fitness and then trying to fix it.”

This is an effort to help soldiers before that happens.

The program includes a mandatory confidential online assessment tool so soldiers can gauge their emotional status around issues such as relationships, job satisfaction and life in general. They can take further optional online training to get help in areas where they would like to improve.

The Army also wants resilience to be taught face to face, classroom-style and is in the process of teaching “master resilience trainers,” who go back to their bases and conduct sessions in person.

There, the MRTs use slides, excerpts from TV shows and round-the-table discussions to talk about ways to stay optimistic, avoid prejudging others and forestall “catastrophic thinking,” or dwelling on worst-case scenarios.

During one recent session touching on prejudgment, MRTs here played the now-famous segment of the “Britain’s Got Talent” TV show in which the drab-looking phone salesman Paul Potts turns out to have a world-class opera voice.

So far, according to recent interviews here and at training sessions at the University of Pennsylvania, Comprehensive Soldier Fitness seems to be a hit.

“It’s a revolution for us younger-generation soldiers,” said Spec. Matthew Gregg, 27, a Fort Bragg truck driver from Leesville, La., who has twice been deployed to Iraq.

“It shows that the military does care,” he said during a break in a recent Fort Bragg session. “When you fill out surveys, they’re not just going in the trash. People are actually . . . listening to what soldiers are saying.”

The program’s most vocal critics have been outside the Army — other psychologists who contend that it won’t work and that it is not training at all but rather a vast, quasi-ethical research project.

“There’s little reason to believe that these techniques would have any efficacy at all,” said James C. Coyne, a psychology professor in the psychiatry department at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. “It’s very difficult to do anything preventively before the fact.”

In cases of combat stress, he said, he fears that preventive techniques could disrupt a soldier’s natural coping process.

“Getting upset, saying, ‘I don’t like feeling this way, this is a horrible way to feel,’ can often be the first step in a very healthy, adaptive response,” he said.

“Targeted, secondary prevention is much wiser and has much more of an evidence base than primary prevention,” he said.

Another critic, Roy Eidelson, a board member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, added: “This is the largest experiment ever undertaken — it involves a million soldiers.”

“The stakes are very high,” he said, “because we’re talking about war. We’re talking about life and death. And there’s a lot that wasn’t done to prepare for this experiment.”

Search for a strategy

The program was launched after the Army said it recognized some alarming trends.

Suicides among active-duty soldiers jumped from 138 in 2008 to 162 in 2009, according to the most recently available Army statistics.

Cases of spousal abuse and child abuse or neglect almost doubled between 2004 and 2009, from 913 to 1,625, the Army said. And referrals for alcohol and drug abuse rose from 15,000 in 1999 to 22,500 in 2009.

“It used to be that you just kind of joined the Army and lived your life . . . and there wasn’t anything very dangerous about it,” Cornum said.

“When I came in the Army, which was 1978, nobody was going anywhere and doing anything. Vietnam was over.”

Now, she said, almost everybody who joins is quickly deployed to a hot zone and faces redeployment over and over. “It’s a different Army, and nobody sees peace breaking out.”

The idea for the program was that of Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the recently retired Army chief of staff, who Cornum said was dismayed by the cases of suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder and family violence.

“We’ve got to have something besides the Whac-a-Mole theory,” Cornum quoted Casey as saying. “We need a strategy to teach people to do better and not just wait till they do badly.”

The Army’s vice chief of staff, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, said day-to-day pressures on the modern soldier are enormous.

“We are putting as much stress on a soldier in the first six years in the United States Army” as many 80-year-old civilians have experienced in an entire lifetime, he said.

In 2008, Cornum said, the Army asked the University of Pennsylvania to help design something to combat negative behaviors.

The Army had a similar program, called Battlemind, but it was aimed at soldiers being deployed and coming off deployments and had not been implemented effectively, said Lt. Col. Sharon McBride, a senior research psychologist with the soldier fitness program.

Penn’s Positive Psychology Center and its director, Martin E.P. Seligman, are proponents of the idea of positive psychology, where attention is focused on positive aspects of life.

Seligman and his colleagues had already designed resilience programs for middle schools, high schools and college to prevent anxiety and depression, and they found that it was not that hard to adjust the training for soldiers.

“A lot of the material was directly relevant,” Seligman said. “The struggles of a soldier are relational — families, getting along with others. A very small part of life is going into battle.”

“I was worried that people would say [it was] ‘girlie psychobabble,’ ” he said. Instead, about half the soldiers who rated the program “said it was the best course they ever had in the Army.”

In 2009, the university began teaching resilience to the first 150 of the more than 4,500 noncommissioned officers who have thus far become trainers.

“We teach a set of skills around building mental toughness,” said Karen Reivich, co-director of the Penn Resiliency Project, who helps lead training sessions at a hotel near the university’s campus in Philadelphia.

The teaching is “designed to enhance a person’s ability to handle stress, to perform well, to stay optimistic,” she said during a break in a recent session.

“It’s about making sure that the soldiers have the skill sets to be able to do what our army is asking of them,” she said.

Sgt. 1st Class Brian Diggs, 35, a drill sergeant who has twice been deployed to Iraq and took the Penn trainers course in March, said he found it “excellent.”

He said he believed it would be useful in dealing with recruits.

“The younger generation . . . coming in the military, some of them have, already, issues that they bring with them,” he said. “I think this is just a better tool for leaders to help these new recruits get past those individual barriers that they bring with them.”

Psychologists criticize

In January, at the suggestion of Seligman, a special issue of American Psychologist, the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association, devoted 13 articles — by Cornum, Casey and others — to the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program.

Norman B. Anderson, head of the association and the journal’s editor, said Seligman’s work is a hot topic, and so is the mental health of American military personnel.

But in March, a trio of psychologists — Eidelson, Marc Pilisuk and Stephen Soldz — wrote a blistering online essay accusing the journal of “cheerleading” and attacking the Army program as research, not training.

And as research, the program should involve the consent of its subjects, the soldiers, the authors stated. “Such research violates the Nuremberg Code developed during post-World War II trials of Nazi doctors,” the authors said.

In addition, Seligman’s resilience work in schools has been “only modestly and inconsistently effective,” the authors contended, producing only small reductions in mild depression.

The critics also charged that the resilience work done in schools is probably not applicable to soldiers who face combat.

Finally, the authors worried that the program might actually harm soldiers: “Might soldiers who have been trained to resiliently view combat as a growth opportunity be more likely to ignore or underestimate real dangers, thereby placing themselves, their comrades, or civilians at heightened risk of harm?”

“Given those ethical questions,” Eidelson said, “psychology . . . should be thinking really hard about whether this is a good idea.”

Seligman countered that “it’s not remotely” a research project. “It’s an Army-wide course. . . . It’s no more subject to consent than . . . when you’re told to run in sneakers rather than boots.”

Chiarelli, the vice chief of staff, said: “We do all kinds of mandatory things. . . . We make people pee in a bottle every month, too. We take mandatory physical fitness tests.”

At the same time, “they’re probably right in saying it’s an experiment,” he said. “Take an organization of 1.1 million people and try to institute a program like this, it probably is a little bit of an experiment. But that’s okay.”

Chiarelli said the debate is understandable.

“There are always going to be naysayers out there,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we should wait until all the publishers publish all the articles.

“I think we have enough evidence on Comprehensive Soldier Fitness,” he said. “We know resiliency is key. And we know we can train people to be more resilient. To me, that’s all I need to know right now.”

Working through crises

At Fort Bragg one recent morning, sun streamed through an open door to a meeting room of the 264th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion.

Inside, the soldiers were among the first “lower enlisted” to be exposed to the notions of resilience by the newly minted teachers.

They had broken into small groups to analyze a personal crisis detailed by one person in each group.

The Rhode Island soldier’s group offered the story of his reaction to his pregnant wife’s departure for general discussion in the room.

“What was the activating event?” asked the moderator, Staff Sgt. Nathan Hayes, 27.

“Uh, finding out your wife was two months pregnant, and she leaves you,” a spokesman for the group replied.

“Sorry to hear that,” Hayes said.

He asked for the soldier’s reaction to his wife’s departure.

“He went into a drunken rage,” the spokesman related, “went into a downward spiral, got put into AA . . . got put on medicine, went through depression, didn’t want to work, didn’t want to do anything.”

Why did he turn to alcohol? Hayes asked.

“Just to forget everything,” the 24-year-old Rhode Island soldier, who had been sitting quietly, replied. “Just block it out.”

“So, ‘I can’t handle this on my own? I need alcohol?’ ” Hayes asked.

“Yeah, basically” the soldier said.

“So what’s the thinking trap there?” Hayes asked.

A “thinking trap,” a decades-old psychological concept, is one of the things the program wants soldiers to identify and avoid.

Reivich, of Penn, identified eight thinking traps in “The Resilience Factor,” a 2002 book she co-authored with Andrew Shatte. They include jumping to conclusions, overgeneralizing and “personalizing,” or always blaming oneself for setbacks.

“ ‘Alcohol’s the solution’ was the conclusion you jumped to,” Hayes told the young specialist.

After the session ended, the Rhode Island soldier, who has since reached an understanding with his wife, said he found the program valuable.

“If I had this kind of training before, I probably would have still been with my wife,” he said. “It definitely does help.”

 

July 5th, 2011

Torture Accountability After All?

Those of us who opposed the Bush administration torture program have been demoralized by the lack of accountability for the numerous abuses committed as part of that program. President Obama decried torture, and said he would end it, but he also said he wanted to “look forward, not back,” apparently precluding investigations of the abuses committed by the previous administration.

The Obama administration has not merely refused to initiate criminal investigations of those who approved and ordered the Bush-Cheney torture program. They have declined even to support a Commission of Inquiry to explore what happened in a non-judicial forum. Further, the administration used every legal tool available – including spurious arguments about national security in US courts and diplomatic pressure on foreign governments – to stymie efforts at accountability through ethics complaints, domestic civil trials, and foreign criminal cases for the crimes committed by predecessors.

Over the last few years, as one avenue of accountability after another was closed, it looked as if the torture program would be protected as carefully by the Obama administration as it was by the Bush administration. The result, many feared, was that torture would remain an available tool of the state, to be dragged out by future administrations who could cite the lack of accountability for Bush torture by a Democratic administration as evidence of a bipartisan consensus that torture really isn’t that bad. Many human rights experts have argued that future courts, too, could view the current lack of accountability as a legal precedent, potentially further shielding future torturers.

The one avenue for accountability that wasn’t closed by the Obama administration was the investigation by Department of Justice prosecutor John Durham. Durham, readers may recall, was the Federal prosecutor originally tasked to investigate the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes in apparent violation of a court order. In 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder expanded Durham’s mandate to include investigating incidents of detainee treatment that went beyond even those actions approved under the so-called “torture memos” of the Bush Justice Department.

Durham’s expanded investigation has dragged on for two years with little visibility, except for his declaration in January that he would not indict anyone for the destruction of the interrogation videotapes. Many in the human rights community took the lack of indictments in the tapes case as an indication that Durham would ultimately decline to prosecute anyone, thus closing yet another avenue for possible accountability.

The pro-torture party of former Bush officials and right-wing pundits who defended the “enhanced interrogation” torture program at every opportunity did not appear as convinced as human rights advocates that Durham’s investigation would ultimately turn into a paper tiger. In the aftermath of the Bin Laden raid, they repeatedly harped on two issues. First, they vociferously claimed, using patently absurd arguments, that Bin Laden’s death showed that torture “worked.” Second, they frantically demanded that Durham’s investigation be called off.

It now appears that the pro-torture party may have recognized the implications of Durham’s investigation better than did most human rights advocates. On Monday, Adam Zagorin reported in TIME that Durham was in the process of actively investigating the murder of Manadel al-Jamadi, the Iraqi general whose frozen, brutally abused body appeared in the Abu Ghraib photographs. While al-Jamadi’s death had earlier been ruled a homicide, the Justice Department had taken no action. But Zagorin reports that Durham is now presenting evidence to a grand jury on the Jamadi case. And he apparently has his eyes on a possible perpetrator:

Perhaps most important, according to someone familiar with the investigation, Durham and FBI agents have said the probe’s focus involves “a specific civilian person.” Durham didn’t name names, but those close to the case believe that person is Mark Swanner, a non-covert CIA interrogator and polygraph expert who questioned al-Jamadi immediately before his death.

Also important is that Zagorin has a copy of a subpoena from the investigation that suggests that Durham may be looking beyond al-Jamadi:

TIME has obtained a copy of a subpoena signed by Durham that points to his grand jury’s broader mandate, which could involve charging additional CIA officers and contract employees in other cases. The subpoena says “the grand jury is conducting an investigation of possible violations of federal criminal laws involving War Crimes (18 USC/2441), Torture (18 USC 243OA) and related federal offenses.”

Thus, this investigation may be the beginning of a broader investigation of “CIA officers and contract employees.” One wonders if the CIA’s torture psychologist contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen may be among Durham’s targets. This seems plausible since — based on later torture memos — their waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation” tactics went, well beyond those authorized at the time in their intensity and longevity, providing potential liability under Durham’s mandate.

If Mitchell and Jessen are indeed targets, that could well explain the near panic of the torture defenders when they refer to the Durham investigation. These former officials and their apologists may be worried that an investigation into the actions of Mitchell and Jessen will go higher up the chain of command. Reportedly, everything done in the secret CIA prisons was approved in Washington, sometimes even in the White House. And, as Watergate demonstrated, investigations, once started, can sometimes climb the command chain to the very top.

There are no certainties in human rights work. But this latest news about Durham’s investigation is a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak picture of continued abuses and absent accountability. It now appears possible that we might have some torture accountability after all.

June 13th, 2011

NY bill bans health professionals’ involvement in torture

A bill in New York would ban health professionals involvement in torture. It is a sad comment that  such a bill is needed. The state medical association is opposed. In contrast, the state psychological association supports it. We are pushing a similar bill in Massachusetts, as are psychologists in other states. Here is an article from the AMA newsletter:

Medical board could discipline physicians for torture under N.Y. bill
The unique proposal would give the state board the authority to punish doctors and others who take part in, or conceal evidence of, torture

By Kevin O’Reilly

A New York bill that is the first of its kind in the nation would make participation in torture or interrogation of prisoners grounds for board discipline of physicians and other health professionals.

Dozens of medical students and other health professionals in training lobbied in favor of the legislation in late May, meeting with nearly 40 New York state legislators, said Allen Keller, MD. He helped organize the lobbying trip and directs the Bellevue Hospital Center/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture in New York City.

The bill, which was introduced in March by Democratic Assemblyman Richard N. Gottfried and has 39 co-sponsors, would give the state medical board and other health professional licensing boards the explicit authority to suspend or revoke practice rights based on evidence presented in accordance with the state’s usual due-process procedures (assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=%0D%0At&bn=A05891&term=&Summary=Y).

Under the bill, physicians and other health professionals would be barred from directly participating in torture, treating patients with the intent of determining when torture could continue, concealing medical evidence of torture or taking part in individual interrogations. Health professionals could generally advise interrogators on rapport building or other nonabusive techniques.

The bill is needed to give medical licensing boards clear authority to discipline doctors and others for participating in torture, supporters say. In 2007, a complaint was brought against one psychologist alleged to have participated in abusive interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, but the New York state body that licenses psychologists said it did not have jurisdiction to investigate the matter.

“We want to clarify that this is, indeed, grounds for discipline and also to achieve a preventive effect,” said Dr. Keller, associate professor of medicine at NYU School of Medicine. “It’s easier for individuals to torture than we’d like to think, because of hierarchies and environments that allow it. We believe this legislation would help physicians who are put in an untenable position to say, ‘I can’t do this; I’d lose my license.’ ”

A state matter?

The American Medical Association and the Medical Society of the State of New York have policy opposing physician participation in torture or direct participation in interrogations. But the MSSNY said the matter is best handled at the federal level, noting that torture is already criminal under federal law. In a June 2 letter to the New York State Assembly, MSSNY Senior Vice President and Chief Legislative Counsel Gerard Conway noted other concerns.

“The bill provides no practical recourse for physicians who are intimidated by military superiors into withholding reports of torture,” Conway wrote. “There are inherent challenges and barriers to evidentiary discovery for accusations of torture in the military and prisons. Physicians may be poorly positioned to defend themselves since, ostensibly, many of these incidents would occur overseas. Physicians would have to overcome claims of national security and national defense and would have to operate in domains in which civil authority will be limited.”

In response, Dr. Keller said that, with regard to accessing classified documentary evidence, physicians would be on a level playing field with anyone bringing a complaint. If the evidence were classified, then neither the medical board nor the physician would have it to use in a proceeding. On the other hand, if national-security documents were brought into evidence, then both the physician and the board would have equal access to them.

And, he said, it is appropriate for state medical boards to act because they are the bodies charged with regulating physician practice.

“Health professionals — whether they practice in their state or in the Army or wherever — they do so because they have a license that is issued not by the federal government or the Army but by a state,” Dr. Keller said.

The New York legislative session is scheduled to end June 20. Advocates are pushing to have similar legislation proposed in other states.

 

June 10th, 2011

Noted South African judge Albie Sachs on the horrors of solitary confinement

Albie Sachs, a former judge on the Constitutional Court of South Africa, recalls being placed in solitary confinement without trial while living under South African apartheid. Sachs describes the experience as worse than the car bomb that took his right arm and left him blind in one eye.

May 18th, 2011

Veteran Army Interrogators: Torture doesn’t work. Torture is wrong. Torture helps the enemy.

In my years in the antitorture movement, one of the most moving experience has been getting to know military interrogators, military intelligence professionals, JAGS, and  other military members who struggled to behave honorably, often at great personal cost, even when they served an administration that promoted torture and when the American public became convinced by politicians, pundits, and the media that torture was both right and necessary. Below is a recent statement by a veteran Army interrogator and interrogation instructor, 1LT(P) Marcus Lewis, who reminds his fellow interrogators of the folly of the torture promoters. Torture neither “works” nor is it moral, he reminds them.

Lewis is not alone among experienced interrogators. One of the sad facts is that when the Bush administration and the CIA were creating the torture program they ignored the opinions of experienced interrogators, preferring instead the views of psychologists without any actual interrogation experience. What they got as a result was not an effective strategy for obtaining accurate intelligence, but a program that could effectively get prisoners to say what they believed their torturers wanted to hear. The fact that occasionally a tortured soul uttered a morsel of true information is no more an argument that torture is effective than the fact that I once caught a sunfish with an empty hook proves that fishing without bait is an effective fishing strategy.

Forbes today has an article describing the similar views of an interrogator currently serving in Afghanistan:

A top United States interrogator in Afghanistan says that torture played no role in locating Osama bin Laden, and that claims to the contrary by former Bush administration officials recently is “propaganda [that] degrades our intelligence operations more than any other factor I can think of.”

This interrogator, like so many others, emphasizes not only that torture doesn’t “work” and is wrong, but that it causes great harm by creating enemies:

Such talk also creates blowback — unintended consequences — that can be deadly, he added in an interview. “Simply the idea of our interrogators using torture or coercion recruits jihadists, facilitators, suppliers, supporters, and even suicide bombers, against us and our allies,” he said.

…

On the subject of blowback, he continued:

I cannot even count the amount of times that I personally have come face to face with detainees, who told me they were primarily motivated to do what they did, because of hearing that we committed torture. Even the rumor of torture is enough to convince an army of uneducated and illiterate, yet religiously motivated young boys to strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up while killing whoever happens to be around – police, soldiers, civilians, women, or children. Torture committed by Americans in the past continues to kill Americans today.

This interrogator, further bemoans the way in which torture promoting pundits and media injure efforts to teach effective and ethical interrogation technique to new interrogators:

“If right-wing news outlets and partisan pundits or politicians are allowed to continue to spread their completely bogus claims that torture is effective,” he said, “then we will have corrupted the beliefs of yet another generation of new intelligence recruits….It takes months and years of ‘intervention’ to get the next generation back on the track of quality work, specialization, and intelligence dominance – not quick and easy fixes. This is not an hour-long TV show.”

Alas, it is not experienced interrogators and military intelligence personnel who need to be reminded of the folly of torture. It is new military recruits and the rest of our fellow citizens who need to hear the message of  Lt. Marcus Lewis and of the Afghan interrogator interviewed byForbes.

Here is the email by Lt. Lewis to his fellow interrogators:

Fellow Interrogators, former interrogators, and instructors,

Once again, our profession is in the spotlight. As a former interrogator and instructor, now a leader in this schoolhouse, I would feel remiss not to speak out.

In the wake of Usama Bin Laden’s death, politicians, pundits, 24-hour TV chatterboxes, and other such attention-seekers have begun again to sharpen their teeth on that debate which should never have existed in a free country like the United States: the notion that torture is justified.

Some are pointing out that one of the couriers who led us to UBL gave up this information under the stress of waterboarding. The reality is that it took us over 14 long, painful years to get Bin Laden. For at least five of those years it seems he was hiding within a stone’s throw of the Pakistani Military Academy, in an embarrassing amount of comfort for the world’s most wanted terrorist.

That it took so long from the time the alleged waterboarding-derived information was revealed, seven years ago, according to some reports, until UBL’s demise only demonstrates how extraordinarily counterproductive our overt policy of torture was. We got a name only. Perhaps had we used some of our more sophisticated approaches — our minds rather than brutality — we would have had a detainee willing to take us directly to Bin Laden.

We will never know how many lives might have been saved had we held fast to our Army values instead of flaunting them out of fear of the unknown.

I need not remind you:

This is not a subject for debate as far as you are concerned as a military intelligence professional or contractor, especially as an instructor. We do not torture. We do not teach it. There are no winks, no nods, not a scintilla of reverence for “special warfare types” who might operate outside the rules. (Truth be told, anyone who has ever worked with JSOC, CJSOTF, Ranger Bat, OGA, etc., knows they have as many or more lawyers and rules than any odd Army BCT or Marine Det., and they don’t torture.)

I need not remind you:

In World War II, our nation executed Japanese officers for water torture.

In World War II, our nation executed German officers for torture.

I need not remind you:

Torture is illegal; it is wrong; it is against military law, values, doctrine; and it is against the basic human rights we soldiers have fought and died for in centuries of service to the United States of America. We don’t teach it. We don’t do it. It is cowardly and dishonorable. Do not let the moral flexibility of the political class sway you otherwise.

We know, to be sure, our experiences as interrogators have never been without significantly emotional moments. Good HUMINTers are tough, aggressive, if need be, push the envelope, but know well where and when to draw the line. Good HUMINTers don’t need to torture. We are calm and reasonable students of human behavior who can develop rapport with a source quickly and acquire valuable intelligence information, then just as quickly put that information forward in a coherent report or use it to stage a movement to the next critical target.

Torture is antithesis of everything we are. Torture is by nature anti-rapport building. Worse, torture paints the picture of the U.S. military and its soldiers as goons and stooges, the bully-imperialists, The Great Satan, the very picture our enemies would like their followers to believe is true, and we know is false.

It was analysis, insight, and smart detective work that got Bin Laden. This same kind of thinking we try to impart upon our students in the planning and preparation, approaches, and questioning phases of interrogation training. What’s really import in interrogation? We know: Strategic thought. Psychological insight. Preparation. Analysis. Patience. Restraint. Thinking before doing or acting. Having a reason for every word said and paying attention to each word said to you, the interrogator. Tenacity. That is interrogation. It is a game of thought and mental strength, not of brutality.

The popular press and, unfortunately, many otherwise well-meaning and some not-so-well meaning politicians can be tragically ignorant of our job, more informed by Hollywood fantasy and fear of the unknown than the cold hard facts of this discipline.

I ask you as soldiers and contracted intelligence professionals first, citizens second, not to let your personal political views sway you here. Both parties in our government use this issue to raise the emotional temperature within their respective constituencies to win votes, aggrandize, and score political points. Few speak to this issue with critical thought or concern for our values.

Indeed, I have heard no political leader put forward a dispassionate and convincing argument tying the defense of this great nation to the need to torture.

Stay true to your Army values, to your training, and you can’t go wrong.

Always be an advocate for rational thinking. Reason defeats irrationality.

Do not be afraid to speak out for the honorable discipline of military interrogation, as a humane and intellectual soldier, a linguist, an intelligence professional. You alone are the expert on the nuances of tribal culture in the Jazira around Mosul. You alone delve deep into the minutia of the politics in Waziristan, know the immensely important differences between the Pashtuns and Tajik tribes, or the particular affection a Ukrainian might still have for the former Soviet Union because he was born in Odessa. You know the enemy so you can defeat the enemy.

And, foremost, you are an advocate for the humane treatment of captured enemy personnel. You conduct your affairs in a legal and honorable manner.

We do not let the chattering classes set our agenda, or the politicians who bend in whichever direction they think the wind might blow any given moment. We obey lawful orders, defend the Constitution of the United States, and put ourselves in front of the enemy to defeat him.

This great Army, and I, have your six.

Sincerely,

1LT(P) Marcus Lewis

S3, 6/98 MI BN
United States Army Interrogator, Instructor, Intelligence Analyst
Fort Devens, MA

3 comments May 9th, 2011

Social Engineering: Human Resources

A fascinating film by Scott Noble covering much of 20th century history from a different angle. Well worth watching in full:

Here are selected comments on the film from YouTube, including a comment I wrote when Scott sent me the film a few months ago:

http://metanoia-films.org/humanresources.php

“A viscerally overpowering film and at the same time a thoughtful meditation on the human condition.”

-Walter A. Davis, Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University

“Brilliant…Riveting…The amount of material the filmmaker covers and unifies is astounding… Human Resources diagnoses the 20th century.”

-Stephen Soldz, Professor, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis;
President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility

“Powerful…Must See…It will leave you Spellbound.”

-Andrew Goliszek, Author, In the Name of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation

“An important work…terrifiying in its implications…. Human Resources is a must see for those of us who still take democracy seriously.”

-Bruce E. Levine, Author Commonsense Rebellion: Taking Back Your Life from Drugs, Shrinks, Corporations, and a World Gone Crazy

“It scared the shit out of me…A powerful and methodical dissection of the dominant culture.”

-Derrick Jensen, Author, Endgame

“A masterful examination of the mechanization of human existence… It is a rare occasion when watching a film can help open not only our eyes, but our minds.”

-Andrew Marshall, Centre for Research on Globalization

“A Masterpiece. Unless you weep, you may be damaged by this film. Viewer discretion, and love, advised.
-David Ker Thomson, Professor, Language and Thinking Program at Bard College

“Scott Noble’s work is a pioneering development in documentary filmmaking in its content,documentary technique, and even distribution method. Watch his stuff, use it, and build on it.”

-Chris Simpson, Professor, School of Communication, American University

–
Please also visit my good friend Kenneth’s truth blog: http://killtheempire.blogspot.com/

Peace&Love
God bless
-Christopher

May 8th, 2011

Victory! Bradley Manning conditions improve

Courage to Resist reports that the international campaign against the abusive treatment of Bradley Manning has scored a major victory inn improving his conditions. Psychologists for Social Responsibility played a small role in this campaign through our two letters to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Here is the Courage to Resist statement:

Campaign Ends Torturous Treatment of Bradley Manning!

Supporters of accused WikiLeaks source vow to fight on for open trial and freedom

By the Bradley Manning Support Network. May 5, 2011

Hundreds of thousands of individuals globally celebrate today the confirmation that their efforts to end the torturous pre-trial confinement conditions inflicted upon US Army PFC Bradley Manning have been successful. Manning’s lead defense attorney, David E. Coombs of Rhode Island, has personally verified that Manning is indeed being held in Medium Custody confinement at the Joint Regional Corrections Facility (JRCF) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, as claimed by the Army last week.

“We won this battle because 600,000 individuals took the time to write letters and sign petitions, because thousands called the White House switchboard, because 300 of America’s top legal scholars decried Bradley’s pre-trial conditions as a clear violation of our Constitution’s 5th and 8th Amendments,” declared Jeff Paterson of Courage to Resist and the Bradley Manning Support Network. “We won this battle because over a hundred concerned citizens engaged in civil disobedience at the White House and at Quantico, and because our grassroots campaign shows no sign of slowing.”

These new conditions reflect a dramatic improvement for Manning following his transfer to Fort Leavenworth on April 20, 2011, after having suffered extreme solitary-like confinement at US Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia. During the nine months at Quantico, Manning was denied meaningful exercise, social interaction, sunlight, and was at times kept completely naked. These conditions were unique to Manning and were illegal under US military law as they clearly amounted to pre-trial punishment.

“I was able to tour the [Fort Leavenworth] facility and meet with PFC Manning last week. PFC Manning is now being held in Medium Custody. He is no longer under…harsh pretrial confinement conditions. Unlike at Quantico, PFC Manning’s cell has a large window that provides adequate natural light….PFC Manning is able to have all of his personal items in his cell, which include his clothing, his legal materials, books and letters from family and friends….Each pre-trial area (including PFC Manning’s) has four cells, and each pre-trial detainee is assigned to his own cell. The cells are connected to a shared common area, with a table, a treadmill, a television and a shower area….PFC Manning and his group are taken to the outdoor recreation area [for approximately two hours daily],” explained Coombs on his blog at www.armycourtmartialdefense.info hours ago.

“President Obama’s recent pronouncement that Bradley Manning ‘broke the law’ amounts to Unlawful Command Influence, something clearly prohibited because it’s devastating to the military justice system. Manning will eventually be judged by a jury of career military officers and noncommissioned officers. Will they be able to set aside the declaration of their commander in chief?” explains attorney Kevin Zeese, a member of the Bradley Manning Support Network. “Along with the illegal pre-trial punishment already inflicted upon Bradley, the government has more than enough legal basis to drop the prosecution. Instead, the death penalty or life in prison hangs over Manning’s head.”

After nearly a year in confinement, the Army is expected to soon announce Manning’s first public hearing, an Article 32 pre-trial proceeding, which will be held in the Washington DC area. Scores of international solidarity events are already being planned.

US Army intelligence analyst Private First Class Bradley E. Manning, 23-years-old, was arrested in Iraq on May 26, 2010. He still awaits his first public court hearing, now expected to begin in June 2011. Over 4,300 individuals have contributed over $333,000 towards PFC Manning’s legal fees and related public education efforts. The Bradley Manning Support Network is dedicated to thwarting the military’s attempts to hold a secret court martial, and to eventually winning the freedom of PFC Manning.

May 5th, 2011

Guantanamo docs fail to document torture; independent scrutiny needed

As one of very few health professionals who has viewed Guantanamo detainee health files as a consultant to defense and habeas attorneys, I was not at all surprised by the findings of a new paper in PLOS Medicine by Vincent Iacopino and Stephen N. Xenakis: Neglect of Medical Evidence of Torture in Guantánamo Bay: A Case Series. Iacopino and Xenakis report on their examination of the medical records and reports by independent medical and psychological consultants on nine Guantanamo prisoners. They find that, despite strong evidence that the prisoners were subjected to torture, the health professionals examining and treating them made no attempt to determine if the prisoners had been abused and failed in their ethical (and military) duty to document and report torture and ill treatment.

The findings of this study demonstrate that allegations by these nine detainees of torture were corroborated by forensic evaluations by non-governmental medical experts and that DoD medical and mental health providers at GTMO failed to document physical and/or psychological evidence of intentional harm.

In each case we reviewed, detainees alleged forms of abuse that are highly consistent with torture as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture as well as the more restrictive US definition of torture that was operational at the time [12]. In one case, unclassified interrogation plans and interrogation summaries provided precise corroboration of the methods of torture and ill treatment that the detainee alleged.

….

The medical evaluations in this case series revealed evidence of severe physical and severe and prolonged psychological pain as stipulated in the Bybee definition of torture. But, according to the Bybee definition of torture, even if the requisite pain thresholds had been exceeded, the infliction of such pain had to be the interrogator’s “precise objective” to constitute torture.

….

The medical doctors and mental health personnel who treated the detainees at GTMO failed to inquire and/or document causes of the physical injuries and psychological symptoms they observed. Psychological symptoms were commonly attributed to “personality disorders” and “routine stressors of confinement.” Temporary psychotic symptoms and hallucinations did not prompt consideration of abusive treatment.

The documentation of torture and ill treatment in medicolegal evaluations conducted by non-governmental medical experts indicates that each of the detainees continues to experience severe, long-term and debilitating psychological symptoms that are likely to persist for many years, and possibly a lifetime.

The Defense Department has issued a response to Iacopino and Xenakis which, in its failure to even mention their main charges can be taken as an official confirmation that Guantanamo health professionals do no investigate or document the terrible abuses suffered by many prisoners there:

DoD personnel working in detention facilities operate under a high level of scrutiny and consistently provide the most humane and safe care and custody of individuals under their control. The Joint Medical Group is committed to providing unconditional appropriate comprehensive medical care to all detainees regardless of their disciplinary status, cooperation, or participation in a hunger strike. The healthcare provided to the detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay rivals that provided in any community in the United States. Detainees receive timely, compassionate, quality healthcare and have regular access to primary care and specialist physicians. The care provided to detainees is comparable to that afforded our active duty service members. All medical procedures performed are justified and meet accepted standards of care. A detainee is provided medical care and treatment based solely on his need for such care and the level and type of treatment is dependent on the accepted medical standard of care for the condition being treated. Diagnosis of such conditions and medical care and treatment for them are not affected in any way by a detainee’s cooperation, or lack thereof, during an interrogation session. Similarly, medical care is not provided or withheld based on a detainee’s compliance or noncompliance with detention camp rules or on his refusal to end a hunger strike. Medical decisions and treatment are not withheld as a form of punishment. Additionally, the medical staff has no involvement in discipline decisions made by detention personnel.

This DoD reesponse also neatly elides the Iacopino and Xenakis claims in another way in that it is written in the present tense and thus only applies to current practices. Yet Iacopino and Xenakis, by their methodology of examining medical records, are talking about past practices. The DoD “response” makes no claims whatsoever recording the appropriateness of past practices. It thus seems likely that some of those practices were indefensible, even by Defense Department spokespeople not usually noted for their truthfulness.

The Iacopino and Xenakis findings are entirely consistent with my experience reading medical files on one Guantanamo prisoner on whom I consulted. Despite claims that he had been subjected to abuse, and mental health symptoms consistent with abuse, there was no indication in the hundreds of pages I read that any health professional had made any attempt to find out if he had been abused or to document possible abuse. Rather, the mental heath staff seemed only interested in whether the prisoner might make a suicide attempt. Beyond that, his obvious anguish appeared to be of no interest to the psychologists and other mental health staff.

Further, the Guantanamo medical unit and the Obama Justice Department fought tooth and nail to prevent any independent examination of these records, much less of the prisoner himself. The prisoner’s attorneys requested, and the habeas judge ordered, that the records be made available for examination by an independent psychologist, me, to determine if there was a possibility that mental health issues might interfere with the prisoner’s ability to cooperate with his attorneys. The Guantanamo medical staff filed a declaration denying any need for independent evaluation. And the Justice Department appealed every step. First they opposed any access to records as too burdensome. Then they appealed access to more than the past few month’s records. They appeared to objected to any scrutiny on principle, which in itself in a sign of inadequate transparency at Guantanamo and is the exact opposite of what should occur in an institution run by a democratic government. We cannot take the word of officials at an institution absent meaningful independent scrutiny that abuses and ethical lapses were, or are, absent.

The Iacopino and Xenakis paper contributes to existing evidence, including the questionable use of anti-malarial drugs, that Guantanamo healthcare was often problematic and deserves independent scrutiny. While the Bush and Obama administrations have made every effort to keep those records secret, health professionals should challenge that secrecy. We should demand that Guantanamo medical records be opened, with prisoner consent, to independent inspection. Further, all detainees desiring it should be able to receive independent medical evaluations.

Additionally, independent of the issues of possible abuse, the complete medical records of released prisoners should be made available to those prisoners and/or their current health providers. To suppress medical records for years of a person’s life is unethical as it interferes with released individuals’ ability to obtain required care in the present and the future. Health professionals from all disciplines should make clear that denial of access to their records by released prisoners is in simply unacceptable.

May 1st, 2011

Greening: Three poems on torture and the torturers

BLESS THE TORTURERS

Our valiant efforts should not cease
until we find out who’s for peace.
As patriot I have no doubt:
those peaceniks must be routed out.
Such cowards who don’t like to kill
could undermine our righteous will.
Our wars are good, and we must win
to save the wicked world from sin.
And as for torture, it’s our job
to pacify the evil mob
by any means that we can find,
and thus redeem all humankind.
Let’s pray that God in Heaven will
bless torturers who maim and kill.

Tom Greening

IN PRAISE OF TORTURE

Dictated to me by Jonathan Swift, author of “A Modest Proposal,”
upon learning of the American Psychological Association’s position
regarding psychologists participating in torture.

I think we really should be fair
to torturers who try to care
about their evil victims who
endanger folk like me and you.
Let’s be adult and realistic:
there is a time to be sadistic.
Yes, waterboarding has its place
and it is hardly a disgrace
for colleagues who would serve our state
to torture those we love to hate.
Let’s honor our astute profession–
if we would coerce a confession
then we must use effective tools,
not be deterred by squeamish fools.
If victory is our shared goal
I’ll gladly sacrifice my soul.

Tom Greening

ENHANCED INTERROGATION

I think “enhanced” means
that champagne is served,
everyone is nicely dressed,
and the conversations are quite lively.
There are free plane trips to exotic places
and a lot of attention is lavished on you.
In return not much is asked,
certainly nothing beyond your comprehension,
and you end up with the feeling
of having participated importantly in history.
Given the tedium of ordinary life
and our natural love of drama,
I’m surprised more people don’t volunteer.

Tom Greening

April 28th, 2011

Kaye: Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys

Psychologist Jeff Kaye has elaborated in Truthout on our understanding of the actions of psychologist Col. Larry James during the time that James was head of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team [BSCT] at Guantanamo in 2003. Kaye discusses the actions of James in regards to the numerous juvenile detainees at the facility during James’ tenure:

Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys, Complaint Charges

By Jeffrey Kaye

Four Ohio residents filed court papers last week seeking to compel the Ohio State Psychology Board to investigate Dr. Larry James, a retired Army colonel and former chief psychologist for the intelligence command at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, who oversaw the brutal torture of detainees, including children.

The motion was filed by Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas on behalf of the four residents, which includes a psychologist, a veteran, a minister and a long-time mental health advocate.

Earlier this year, the psychology board had dismissed a complaint first filed by the same Ohio residents last July, stating, “It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action in this matter.”

The original complaint, filed with the Ohio Board of Psychology, was supported by over a thousand pages of documentation, including reports from the US military, the Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency and statements from survivors and witnesses. But the board did not provide a rationale as to why it was unable to probe the allegations leveled against James.

James was head of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), which was made up of psychologists and other mental health professionals who assisted interrogators at the prison facility during the first half of 2003. From 2004 to 2006, he served as chief of psychology at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, and in 2007 he returned to Guantanamo. He retired in 2008.

James is currently dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He was licensed to practice psychology in Ohio in 2008.

According to the complaint, during James’ tenure at Guantanamo, “boys and men were systematically abused” and were subjected to “rape and death threats” and torture techniques such as “forced nudity; sleep deprivation; extreme isolation; short-shackling into stress positions; and physical assault.”

Moreover, the complaint states that James supervised the forceful and arbitrary detention of three Afghan boys, “transported thousands of miles away from their families and denied them access to counsel.”

James did not return an email request for comment.

In their verified complaint filed with the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, seeking a writ to compel the Ohio Board of Psychology “to proceed to ‘formal action’ against Dr. Larry C. James,” the complainants quote an affidavit by former American Psychological Association (APA) Practice Directorate Chief, Dr. Bryant Welch, that the allegations in the complaint, “if true, represent the most serious ethical breaches I have seen in my thirty-five years as a psychologist. They also have the most far reaching implications for the profession of psychology of any ethical or licensing issue I have yet encountered.”

IHRC’s earlier complaint (PDF link) was damning.

He was accused of numerous instances of professional misconduct and violations of the law, including failure to protect his clients from harm, exploitation of those with whom he worked, failure to protect detainees’ confidentiality and failure “to represent honestly his own conduct, experience and the results of his services.”

Indeed, in “Fixing Hell,” a book James published in 2008 about his experiences at Guantanamo and at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, he claimed that he was “righting the wrongs” at both prisons and that there “have been no incidents of abuse at Guantanamo Bay by either an interrogator or psychologist reported since my arrival in Cuba in January 2003.”

Ironically, in his book, James wrote of at least two incidents of such abuse during his 2003 tenure, which as the IHRC complaint explains, he failed to report to proper authorities.

A fair amount of James’ narrative about his time at Guantanamo concerns his actions after his commander, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, put him in charge of three young teenage prisoners, all younger than age 16 and one perhaps as young as 12 years old, in February 2003. James was in charge of rendering the boys from Bagram, Afghanistan, where they were then held, arranging their Guantanamo housing and attending and supervising their interrogations. James wrote that the boys were “very traumatized” upon arrival at Guantanamo. While he presents his treatment of these children as a “case study” for his “softer” style of interrogation – “exactly the kind of prisoners I needed to test my philosophy on interrogation” – a closer, more nuanced look presents a very different picture.

“Teenage Terrorists”

The story of these young detainees had previously been documented in news reports and is also retold in the IHRC complaint, which redacts the boys’ personal information, something James failed to do in his book.

While James doesn’t mention the fact in his book, there were at least a dozen underage, minor children or teenagers held at Guantanamo. US authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan have allegedly held thousands of other juveniles. The IHRC complaint refers to torture and abuse suffered by two of the Guantanamo minors, Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, during the period James was chief psychologist. These teens, as well as all the others but the three held at Camp Iguana, the special camp built to hold them at the Guantanamo base, were kept with the adult prisoners at Camp Delta and other sites at the prison.

According to James, when he arrived at Bagram to pick up his new prisoners, he found them looking “not only terrified but also disheveled and lost.” Nevertheless, he believed them to be “far from innocent,” “teenage terrorists.” “These juveniles were not sweet kids,” James wrote.

Yet, he also found that the trauma they endured was very real. James wrote that the boys were “victims of rape, illiterate, one certainly had PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]“; they were, according to James, “the most fragile – psychologically, medically and academically – children I had ever met.”

James glosses over in his book the circumstances of the 20-hour flight from Bagram that brought the children to Guantanamo. But news reports published after the children were released in January 2004 provides more detail about their time held by US forces in Afghanistan and their subsequent transport to Guantanamo.

In his book, James states that all three children “had been captured while fighting in a combatant role against US forces in Afghanistan.” But James failed to provide any evidence to support such an assertion, which is contrary to reports the boys made themselves. According to a report published a Guardian UK article, two of the boys were caught while US forces were “looking for a local commander, Mansoor Rahman Saiful, who had fought against the Taliban for years, but joined the radical Islamists when America attacked Afghanistan.”

Naqibullah, age 13, “a local imam’s son, said he stumbled into the raid while cycling from a friend’s house,” and was interrogated daily about his knowledge of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

“I told them, ‘I don’t know these people and I am too young to give anything to anyone without my father’s authority.’” After two weeks, Naqibullah said, he was asked whether he had any objection to being taken to “another place.”

“I said, ‘What can I do? You will take me wherever you want to.’ That night, bound, blindfolded and fitted into orange overalls, he was loaded on to a cargo plane and flown non-stop to Cuba. Naqibullah’s first 10 days in Guantanamo were the worst of his life, he said.”

According to a March 2004 story by The New York Times, another child prisoner, Asadullah, age 12 or 13, believed to be the youngest of the prisoners, said he was interrogated daily for several months while held in Afghanistan. The beatings he endured in the first five days of his captivity still bothered him when he arrived in Guantanamo.

As with Naqibullah, the third child prisoner, Mohammed Ismail Agha, age 13, told a foreign journalist, as reported in The Washington Post in February 2004, that he had been arrested because a friend with whom he was looking for work was supposedly identified as a Taliban. He spent a month and a half at Bagram before being “warned that if he did not confess he would be sent to a terrible and distant place called Guantanamo.”

Agha was subjected to sleep deprivation and stress positions during his time at Bagram in an effort to get him to make a confession.

“It was a very bad place. Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick on my door and yell at me to wake up,” he said. “When they were trying to get me to confess, they made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours. Sometimes I couldn’t bear it any more and I fell down, but they made me stand that way some more.”

Agha’s story of his rendition is similar to that of Naqibullah. He was “put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood placed over his head.”

“It was hard to breathe,” he said.

Supervising the transport back to Guantanamo on the large C-17 transport plane, complete with medical team, military police and Air Force Special Forces shooters, was Col. Larry James. The former chief psychologist never states whether he reported the treatment received by these child prisoners at Bagram to any authority.

“I Prayed to God, I Asked, ‘Where Is My Son?’”

While James and the Guantanamo authorities apparently did try to make the boys’ treatment much improved over that of prisoners in the rest of the camp, including at least eight or nine other teens held at roughly the same time, the young prisoners were not entirely grateful.

According to the Guardian report, “The boys played football every day and sometimes basketball and volleyball with their guards.” But Asadullah told his interviewer, “I was very sad because I missed my family so much…. I was always asking, ‘When can I go home? What day? What month?’ They said, ‘You’ll go home soon,’ but they never said when.”

According to a February 2004 story in the UK Telegraph, Ismail Agha (who is reported as 15 in this article) said, “At first I was unhappy … For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer.”

The boys lived in shared bedrooms and appear to have been treated humanely by their guards. According to James’ account, they were assigned a Navy child psychologist, Dr. Tim Dugan. They attended school classes. A pediatrician provided “thorough medical care.”

James states that he attended the interrogations of the boys every day from 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM, which he said provided “useful intelligence.”

Meanwhile, the children had not seen or heard from their families for many months. They complained of homesickness. Though one paper quoted Agha as praising the soldiers who watched over him, he was critical of US authorities for not notifying his parents for ten months of his incarceration, even though he says he gave the Red Cross letters from the first months of his incarceration. “They stole 14 months of my life and my family’s life. I was entirely innocent: just a poor boy looking for work,” Agha said.

The families by most accounts were desperate to find out what happened to their children. No US authority or the Red Cross informed them about the fate of their sons for many months. James never raises the issue of the boys’ parents in his book.

According to the Post article, Nayatullah, “an illiterate farmer of about 60,” traveled to work sites throughout his area, asking if anyone had seen his son. No one had. “Finally I thought he must be dead,” Agha’s father said.

Asadullah’s mother spoke through a translator to a Guardian UK correspondent about how she suffered not knowing her son’s fate. She cried “every night thinking about my son.”

“I prayed to God, I asked, ‘Where is my son?’” she continued. “He was just a boy, much too young to disappear on his own.”

The family and other villagers looked high and low for the boy. Family members and friends went to Bagram, Logar and Gardez to inquire from the Americans regarding their son’s whereabouts, but “no one knew about him.” Asadullah’s father sold his land to fund the several thousands dollars it took to fund the search for his son. It took the family seven months before they found out where their son was held.

At last, with no explanation or apology, the boys were released in January 2004. James had left Guantanamo after May 2003, but in his book, he wrote proudly of his work with the inmates of Camp Iguana. “This is how my country handles prisoners,” he said. “It’s not all about abuse. We can take juveniles like that and send them home better than we found them.”

An Exploitation Program

News of the incarceration of minors at Guantanamo, including the capture of the three boys held at Camp Iguana, leaked out in early 2003, the same time James was supposedly “fixing” the prison facility. An April 2003 Guardian UK report quoted Angela Wright, an Amnesty International official, as saying that “holding the children was ‘wholly repugnant and contrary to basic principles of human rights’ … and contravened UN rules with ‘near-universal acceptance’ regarding the treatment of juveniles.” Moreover, Wright said, the incarceration of the children at Guantanamo, with no access to counsel and under conditions of indefinite detention, was contrary to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and “is clearly totally at odds with the purpose of the treaty.”

The Center for Human Rights in the Americas at UC Davis has noted that the youngest children held at Guantanamo were Naqibullah, Assadullah and Abdul Qudus, all of whom were born in 1988. Naquibullah and Assadullah were sent to Camp Iguana, but Qudus, who was imprisoned at Guantanamo as early as February 7, 2002, was held along with the adult population and presumably treated the same as other adult prisoners. He is reported to have been released in 2005 or 2006.

Other Guantanamo teens under age 16 included Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, both of whom made claims of extensive torture and use of solitary confinement.

When the Camp Iguana children were released in January 2004, the Anglo-American press made a great deal about their supposed humane treatment.

Carlotta Gall at The New York Times stated, “Aside from homesickness, the boys did not suffer at Guantanamo.” James Astill at The Guardian UK noted the “gentle treatment” of the boys, while the headline to the article stated, “Cuba? It was great, say boys freed from US prison camp.”

Such was the general propaganda theme surrounding the release of the boys. “I had a good time at Guantanamo, says inmate,” was the headline in the February 7, 2004 UK Telegraph.

A February 11, 2004, Washington Post story by Pamela Constable concludes with Agha’s father smiling and saying, “My son got an education in America.” Agha is said to be proud of his education, too. This mirrors James’ own assertion that he took boys who “were flat-out dumber than a bag of rocks” and returned them home “all functioning at the sixth to eighth grade academic level.” How James took illiterate children and lifted them to this grade level in approximately a year isn’t explained.

Despite claims of humane treatment of the Camp Iguana minors, given the fragile psychological condition of these youth, as reported by James himself, their incarceration was certainly at odds with standards of mental health even within the military itself. In the 2006 book “The Military Family,” part three of the “Military Life” series, published by Praeger Security International, an entire chapter is devoted to the “pain and loss” of family separation. The stress of unexpected combat deployment on military families, that is, sudden separation with unknown outcome for one family member, is compared with “catastrophic stress” and “immobilizing crisis” (p. 19).

Whatever the nature of the treatment of the boys at Camp Iguana, other children or teens held at Guantanamo during James’ tenure (and afterward) was significantly abusive, amounting in many cases to torture. Omar Khadr’s affadavit regarding his torture has been posted as a PDF online. He alleges beatings, isolation, exposure to cold, short-shackling, threats, and other abuse.

In August 2008, another Guantanamo BSCT psychologist, US Army Lt. Col. Diane M. Zierhoffer, refused to testify in Mohammed Jawad’s military tribunal hearing, pleading the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination. According to a Newsweek article, Zierhoffer (who was identified separately in an article at Daily Kos), working with interrogators, “encouraged them to continue to dial up the emotional pressure on Jawad: ‘He appears to be rather frightened and it looks as if he could break easily if he were isolated from his support network and made to rely solely on the interrogator,’ according to an excerpt of the report read to Newsweek. The psychologist recommended that Jawad be moved to a section of the prison where he would be the only Pashto speaker and be moved again if he somehow began to socialize in his new block. The psychologist also suggested that interrogators emphasize to Jawad that his family appeared to have forgotten him: ‘Make him as uncomfortable as possible. Work him as hard as possible.’”

Other reports of abuse or torture by underage children held at Guantanamo also exist. Most recently, the youngest prisoner at Guantanamo Bay at the time of his release in June 2009, Chadian citizen Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 years old when grabbed by the Americans, told a Miami Herald reporter that beatings and tear gassing occurred as late as 2009. Prior to that time, according to the British charity organization Reprieve, he had been subjected to sleep deprivation, freezing cold, strobe lights, blasting music, being burned by a cigarette and more beatings. As a result, the boy who entered Guantanamo at age 14 or 15 attempted suicide more than once, “including slashing his wrists, trying to hang himself and running head-first into the wall as hard as he could.”

When putting the treatment of the Camp Iguana boys next to that of other children and teens held at Guantanamo and other US sites, it can only be inferred that the Camp Iguana children were primarily a demonstration project for public propaganda purposes. While little or no attention was spent on the impact of separation from family on these three children, or on the effect upon other family members, and while the abuse and difficulties of their initial stay at Camp Iguana, as reported by the children themselves, was never pursued by those who interviewed them, the emphasis on the supposed good treatment of these children appears to be aimed at promoting a picture of basic treatment of the children that is at odds with the treatment that most minors incarcerated by the United States received.

The construction of a “model” camp for children at Camp Iguana, never used again for other minors after the three Afghan boys left in January 2004, is consistent with a program of exploitation of prisoners for propaganda purposes that was revealed in a recent set of notes by former CIA psychologist contractor, Bruce Jessen, in an article at Truthout last month.

Recently, James emailed members of the Wright State University School of Professional Psychology community to announce that he was “appointed” by First Lady Michelle Obama to a White House Task Force entitled “Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family.”

According to a story at Truthout, the White House subsequently denied any such appointment, or even the existence of such a task force. The APA would not directly deny a report that they or another group may have “indirectly” invited James to a White House meeting on military families, but a spokesperson said the APA is “happy to work with the White House to recommend psychologists who have experience in helping military families.”

James has served on other matters for APA in the past. In 2005, James served on the APA’s president’s task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security. The task force controversially recommended in a report, “Psychologists may serve in various national security-related roles, such as a consultant to an interrogation, in a manner that is consistent with the Ethics Code and when doing so psychologists are mindful of factors unique to these roles and contexts that require special ethical consideration.”

In the press release by IHRC, Dr. Trudy Bond, a Toledo-based psychologist and one of the four complainants against James, commented on the dismissal of the complaint against the former Guantanamo psychologist. “The Board disregarded ample and credible evidence that an Ohio psychology dean had overseen torture,” Bond said. “When the ethics watchdog apparently finds it appropriate to dismiss a complaint like this without conducting a proper investigation, or even justifying the decision, it shows that our system is broken.”

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This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California, writes regularly on torture and other subjects for  Truthout, The Public Record and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

April 21st, 2011