Psyche, Science, and Society

Torture interfered with getting bin Laden

Dan Froomkin at Huffington Post has another major article patiently explaining why the torture apologists are completely wrong about finding bin Laden: the torture made it harder:

Torture May Have Slowed Hunt For Bin Laden, Not Hastened It

By Dan Froomkin

Torture apologists are reaching precisely the wrong conclusion from the back-story of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, say experienced interrogators and intelligence professionals.

Defenders of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies have claimed vindication from reports that bin Laden was tracked down in small part due to information received from brutalized detainees some six to eight years ago.

But that sequence of events — even if true — doesn’t demonstrate the effectiveness of torture, these experts say. Rather, it indicates bin Laden could have been caught much earlier had those detainees been interrogated properly.

“I think that without a doubt, torture and enhanced interrogation techniques slowed down the hunt for bin Laden,” said an Air Force interrogator who goes by the pseudonym Matthew Alexander and located Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq, in 2006.

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us,” Alexander told The Huffington Post.

“We know that they didn’t give us everything, because they didn’t provide the real name, or the location, or somebody else who would know that information,” he said.

In a 2006 study by the National Defense Intelligence College, trained interrogators found that traditional, rapport-based interviewing approaches are extremely effective with even the most hardened detainees, whereas coercion consistently builds resistance and resentment.

“Had we handled some of these sources from the beginning, I would like to think that there’s a good chance that we would have gotten this information or other information,” said Steven Kleinman, a longtime military intelligence officer who has extensively researched, practiced and taught interrogation techniques.

“By making a detainee less likely to provide information, and making the information he does provide harder to evaluate, they hindered what we needed to accomplish,” said Glenn L. Carle, a retired CIA officer who oversaw the interrogation of a high-level detainee in 2002.

But the discovery and killing of bin Laden was enough for defenders of the Bush administration to declare that their policies had been vindicated.

Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president, quickly issued a statement declaring that she was “grateful to the men and women of America’s intelligence services who, through their interrogation of high-value detainees, developed the information that apparently led us to bin Laden.”

John Yoo, the lead author of the “Torture Memos,” wrote in the Wall Street Journal that bin Laden’s death “vindicates the Bush administration, whose intelligence architecture marked the path to bin Laden’s door.”

Former Bush secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld declared that “the information that came from those individuals was critically important.”

The Obama White House pushed back against that conclusion this week.

“The bottom line is this: If we had some kind of smoking-gun intelligence from waterboarding in 2003, we would have taken out Osama bin Laden in 2003,” Tommy Vietor, spokesman for the National Security Council, told The New York Times.
Chronological details of the hunt for bin Laden remain murky, but piecing together various statements from administration and intelligence officials, it appears the first step may have been the CIA learning the nickname of an al Qaeda courier — Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti — from several detainees picked up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Then, in 2003, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the 9/11 mastermind, was captured, beaten, slammed into walls, shackled in stress positions and made to feel like he was drowning 183 times in a month. When asked about al-Kuwaiti, however, KSM denied that the he had anything to do with al Qaeda.

In 2004, officials detained a man named Hassan Ghul and brought him to one of the CIA’s black sites, where he identified al-Kuwaiti as a key courier.

A third detainee, Abu Faraj al-Libi, was arrested in 2005 and under CIA interrogation apparently denied knowing al-Kuwaiti at all.

Once the courier’s real name was established — about four years ago, and by other means — intelligence analysts stayed on the lookout for him. After he was picked up on a monitored phone call last year, he ultimately led authorities to bin Laden.

The link between the Bush-era interrogation regime and bin Laden’s killing, then, appears tenuous — especially since two of the three detainees in question apparently provided deceptive information about the courier even after being interrogated under durress.

“It simply strains credulity to suggest that a piece of information that may or may not have been gathered eight years ago somehow directly led to a successful mission on Sunday. That’s just not the case,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney.

But for Alexander, Kleinman and others, the key takeaway is not just that the torture didn’t work, but that it was actually counterproductive.

“The question is: What else did KSM have?” Alexander asked. And he’s pretty sure he knows the answer: KSM knew the courier’s real name, “or he knew who else knew his real name, or he knew how to find him — and he didn’t give any of that information,” Alexander said.

Alexander’s book, “Kill or Capture,” chronicles how the non-coercive interrogation of a dedicated al Qaeda member led to Zarqawi’s capture.

“I’m 100 percent confident that a good interrogator would have gotten additional leads” from KSM, Alexander said.

“Interrogation is all about getting access to someone’s uncorrupted memory,” explained Kleinman, who as an Air Force reserve colonel in Iraq in 2003 famously tried, but failed, to stop the rampant, systemic abuse of detainees there. “And you can’t get access to someone’s uncorrupted memory by applying psychological, physical or emotional force.”

Quite to the contrary, coercion is known to harden resistance. “It makes an individual hate you and find any way in their mind to fight back,” and it inhibits their recall, Kleinman said. Far preferable, he said, is a “more thoughtful, culturally-enlightened, science-based approach.”

“I never saw enhanced interrogation techniques work in Iraq; I never saw even harsh techniques work in Iraq,” Alexander said. “In every case I saw them slow us down, and they were always counterproductive to trying to get people to cooperate.”

Carle, who was not a trained interrogator, said he came to recognize that interrogation was a lot like something he did know how to do: manage intelligence assets in the field.

“Perverse and imbalanced as the relationship is between interrogator and detainee, it’s nonetheless a human relationship, and building upon that, manipulating the person, dealing straight with the person, simply coming to understand the person and vice versa, one can move forward,” he told reporters on a conference call Thursday.

Carle’s upcoming book, “The Interrogator,” chronicles his growing doubts about his orders from his superiors.

“The methods that I was urged to embrace, I found first-hand — putting aside the moral and legal issues, which we really cannot put aside — from a practical and a tactical and a strategic sense and a moral and legal one, the methods are counterproductive,” he said.

“They do not work,” he added. “They cause retrograde motion from what you’re seeking to accomplish. They increase resentment, not cooperation. They increase the difficulty in assessing what information you do hear is valid. They increase the likelihood that you will be given disinformation and have opposition from the person that you’re interrogating, across the board.”

Carle said the detainee he worked with regressed when coerced. “All it did was increase resentment and misery,” he said.
Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff under former secretary of state Colin Powell, said, “I’d be naive if I said it never worked,” referring to enhanced interrogation techniques.

“Of course, occasionally it works, Wilkerson said. “But most of the time, what torture is useful for is confessions. It’s not good for getting actionable intelligence.”

Experts agree that torture is particularly good at one thing: eliciting false confessions.

Bush-era interrogation techniques, were modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.

“Somehow our government decided that … these were effective means of obtaining information,” Carle said. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

At a hearing in Guantanamo, several years after being waterboarded, KSM described how he would lie — specifically about bin Laden’s whereabouts — just to make the torture stop. “I make up stories,” Mohammed said. “Where is he? I don’t know. Then, he torture me,” KSM said of an interrogator. “Then I said, ‘Yes, he is in this area.’”

There are many other reasons to be skeptical of the argument that torture can lead to actionable intelligence, and specifically that enhanced interrogation led investigators to bin Laden.

Many of the positive accomplishments once cited in defense of enhanced interrogation have since been debunked.

And though its defenders are now trying to talk up the significance of the earlier intelligence, around the time of al-Libi’s interrogation, the CIA was not stepping up the hunt for bin Laden. Instead, it was closing down the unit that had been dedicated to hunting bin Laden and his top lieutenants.

This new scenario hardly supports a defense of torture on the grounds that it’s appropriate in “ticking time bomb” scenarios, Alexander said. “Show me an interrogator who says that eight years is a good result.”

The interrogation experts also noted the significant role Yoo, Rumsfeld and former Vice President Cheney each played in opening the door to controversial interrogation practices.

Wilkerson has long argued that there is ample evidence showing that “the Office of the Vice President bears responsibility for creating an environment conducive to the acts of torture and murder committed by U.S. forces in the war on terror.”

Yoo wrote several memos that explicitly sanctioned measures that many have deemed constitute torture, and the memo from Rumsfeld authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding and dogs was widely seen as a sign to the troops that the “gloves could come off.”

“These guys are trying to save their reputations, for one thing,” Alexander said. “They have, from the beginning, been trying to prevent an investigation into war crimes.”

“They don’t want to talk about the long term consequences that cost the lives of Americans,” Alexander added. The way the U.S. treated its prisoners “was al-Qaeda’s number-one recruiting tool and brought in thousands of foreign fighters who killed American soldiers,” Alexander said. “And who want to live with that on their conscience?”

From Bush himself on down, the defenders of his interrogation regime have long insisted that it never amounted to torture. But waterboarding, the single most controversial aspect of Bush’s interrogation regime, has been an archetypal form of torture dating back to the Spanish Inquisition. It involves strapping someone to a board and simulating drowning them. The U.S. government has historically considered it a war crime.

One can quibble over the proper term for some of the other tactics employed with official sanction, including forced nudity, isolation, bombardment with noise and light, deprivation of food, forced standing, repeated beatings, applications of cold water, the use of dogs, slamming prisoners into walls, shackling them in stress positions and keeping them awake for as long as 180 hours. But they comprise violations of human dignity, as codified by the United Nations — and championed by the U.S. government — ever since World War II.

Many have argued that whether torture works or not is irrelevant — that it is flatly illegal, immoral, and contrary to core American principles — and that even if it were effective, it would still be anathema.

But that torture is unparalleled in its ability to obtain intelligence is the central argument of its defenders. To concede that torture doesn’t work — as Alexander, Kleinman and Carle, among others, say — would be to forfeit the whole game. It would be admitting that cruelty was both the means and the end.

And so the debate goes on.

This article has been updated to include more information on waterboarding and historical background on other interrogation techniques.

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Dan Froomkin is senior Washington correspondent for The Huffington Post. You can send him an email, bookmark his page, subscribe to his RSS feed, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, and/or become a fan and get email alerts when he writes.

May 7th, 2011

The long tick of the time bomb

Remember that ticking time bomb that required such rapid information that, according to the torture apologists, torture was justified? Conor Friedersdorf points out that, according to today’s torture apologists, that bomb may tick for years:

The return of the torture debate is striking because its apologists no longer feel the need to advocate for a narrow exception to prevent an American city from being nuked or a busload of children from dying. In the jubilation over getting bin Laden, they’re instead employing this frightening standard: torture of multiple detainees is justified if it might produce a single useful nugget that, combined with lots of other intelligence, helps lead us to the secret location of the highest value terrorist leader many years later. It’s suddenly the new baseline in our renewed national argument.

That’s torture creep.

By the current logic of the torture apologists, everyone should be tortured all the time. For you never know who might give up that shred of information which, decades later, just might, play some minor role in helping to locate a  “terrorist” someday.

May 5th, 2011

NYT: The torture apologists

The New York Times editorializes on the latest torture promotion:

The Torture Apologists

New York Times Editorial

The killing of Osama bin Laden provoked a host of reactions from Americans: celebration, triumph, relief, closure and renewed grief. One reaction, however, was both cynical and disturbing: crowing by the apologists and practitioners of torture that Bin Laden’s death vindicated their immoral and illegal behavior after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jose Rodriguez Jr. was the leader of counterterrorism for the C.I.A. from 2002-2005 when Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and other Al Qaeda leaders were captured. He told Time magazine that the recent events show that President Obama should not have banned so-called enhanced interrogation techniques. (Mr. Rodriguez, you may remember, ordered the destruction of interrogation videos.)

John Yoo, the former Bush Justice Department lawyer who twisted the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions into an unrecognizable mess to excuse torture, wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the killing of Bin Laden proved that waterboarding and other abuses were proper. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, said at first that no coerced evidence played a role in tracking down Bin Laden, but by Tuesday he was reciting the talking points about the virtues of prisoner abuse.

There is no final answer to whether any of the prisoners tortured in President George W. Bush’s illegal camps gave up information that eventually proved useful in finding Bin Laden. A detailed account in The Times on Wednesday by Scott Shane and Charlie Savage concluded that torture “played a small role at most” in the years and years of painstaking intelligence and detective work that led a Navy Seals team to Bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan.

That squares with the frequent testimony over the past decade from many other interrogators and officials. They have said repeatedly, and said again this week, that the best information came from prisoners who were not tortured. The Times article said Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded 183 times, fed false information to his captors during torture.

Even if it were true that some tidbit was blurted out by a prisoner while being tormented by C.I.A. interrogators, that does not remotely justify Mr. Bush’s decision to violate the law and any acceptable moral standard.

This was not the “ticking time bomb” scenario that Bush-era officials often invoked to rationalize abusive interrogations. If, as Representative Peter King, the Long Island Republican, said, information from abused prisoners “directly led” to the redoubt, why didn’t the Bush administration follow that trail years ago?

There are many arguments against torture. It is immoral and illegal and counterproductive. The Bush administration’s abuses — and ends justify the means arguments — did huge damage to this country’s standing and gave its enemies succor and comfort. If that isn’t enough, there is also the pragmatic argument that most experienced interrogators think that the same information, or better, can be obtained through legal and humane means.

No matter what Mr. Yoo and friends may claim, the real lesson of the Bin Laden operation is that it demonstrated what can be done with focused intelligence work and persistence.

The battered intelligence community should now be basking in the glory of a successful operation. It should not be dragged back into the muck and murk by political figures whose sole agenda seems to be to rationalize actions that cost this country dearly — in our inability to hold credible trials for very bad men and in the continued damage to our reputation.

May 5th, 2011

Matthew Alexander on torture and the bin Laden capture

As the torture team uses the capture of bin Laden to defend their crimes, military interrogator Matthew Alexander demonstrates the falsity of their claims and points out that torture led to the “deaths of hundreds or thousands of American soldiers” in this interview on Democracy Now!

May 5th, 2011

Worthington explains Guantánamo Detainee Assessment Briefs

Andy Worthington has written an invaluable piece for those trying to make sense of the recently released by Wikileaks Guantánamo Detainee Assessment Briefs:

How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files

By Andy Worthington

A week after WikiLeaks began releasing classified military files — known as Detainee Assessment Briefs (DABs) — relating to the majority of the 779 prisoners held at Guantánamo since the prison opened in January 2002, I am reassured that the prison, its remaining inhabitants and its back story have reemerged so forcefully into the consciousness of the general public. Over the last few months, in particular, it had become apparent, to those of us who still cared about Guantánamo, that President Obama’s stated mission to close the prison had ended ignominiously, and that the prison’s supporters in the US (particularly in Congressand the judiciary) had won a resounding victory, closing off every avenue that might have led to the release of all but a few of the remaining 172 prisoners.

However, although it’s reassuring to see renewed interest in Guantánamo — and to see a decent amount of insightful reporting about the crimes and distortions of the Bush administration in the reporting of WikiLeaks’ media partners in the US and throughout Europe — I’m not yet persuaded that the release of these documents has caused significant enough ripples in the US to effect any kind of change to the existing policies.

This may not be possible — given the current deplorable state of US politics, and the New York Times‘ damaging introduction to its own unofficial release of the WikiLeaks documents last week — and it may be, as I have been suggesting all year, that the only answer to the appalling inertia regarding Guantánamo is for the international community, including the UN, to reassert the kind of criticism to which George W. Bush was particularly subjected in his second term in office.

With more articles by WikiLeaks’ media partners to be published in the weeks to come, and with my own detailed analyses of some of the documents also forthcoming, the story is far from over, but for now, as I continue to release links to interviews in which I discuss the importance of the released documents — and the particular importance of recognizing that the supposed intelligence in the files is in fact thoroughly infected with the unreliable testimony of tortured, coerced and bribed prisoners — I’m posting below the notes I wrote for WikiLeaks explaining how to read and understand the different sections in the documents, and also the introductions I wrote for a handful of briefing documents that were also made available last week by WikiLeaks.

Of particular interest, I hope, is my observation, under “5. Capture Information,” that the “Reasons for Transfer” included in the documents, which have been repeatedly cited by media outlets as an explanation of why the prisoners were transferred to Guantánamo, are, in fact, lies that were grafted onto the prisoners’ files after their arrival at Guantánamo. This is because, contrary to the impression gven in the files, no significant screening process took place before the prisoners’ transfer. As a senior interrogator who worked in Afghanistan explained in a book that he wrote about his experiences, every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be sent to Guantánamo, even though the majority were not even seized by US forces, but were seized by their Afghan and Pakistani allies at a time when substantial bounty payments for “al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects” were widespread.

No exceptions to these rules were allowed, which explains why Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavey, an early commander at the prison, complained about the large number of “Mickey Mouse prisoners” that he was expected to deal with, and the lack of screening also helps to explain why Marine Brig. Gen. Mike Lehnert, the prison’s first commander, told the BBC in February 2002 (before he was silenced) that “A large number [of the prisoners] claim to be Taliban, a smaller number we have been able to confirm as al-Qaeda, and a rather large number in the middle we have not been able to determine their status. Many of the detainees are not forthcoming. Many have been interviewed as many as four times, each time providing a different name and different information.”

How to Read WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files

The nearly 800 documents in WikiLeaks’ latest release of classified US documents are memoranda from Joint Task Force Guantánamo (JTF-GTMO), the combined force in charge of the US “War on Terror” prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to US Southern Command, in Miami, Florida, regarding the disposition of the prisoners.

Written between 2002 and 2008, the memoranda were all marked as “secret,” and their subject was whether to continue holding a prisoner, or whether to recommend his release (described as his “transfer” — to the custody of his own government, or that of some other government). They were obviously not conclusive in and of themselves, as final decisions about the disposition of prisoners were taken at a higher level, but they are very significant, as they represent not only the opinions of JTF-GTMO, but also the Criminal Investigation Task Force, created by the Department of Defense to conduct interrogations in the “War on Terror,” and the BSCTs, the behavioral science teams consisting of psychologists who had a major say in the “exploitation” of prisoners in interrogation.

Under the heading, “JTF-GTMO Detainee Assessment,” the memos generally contain nine sections, describing the prisoners as follows, although the earlier examples, especially those dealing with prisoners released — or recommended for release — between 2002 and 2004, may have less detailed analyses than the following:

1. Personal information

Each prisoner is identified by name, by aliases, which the US claims to have identified, by place and date of birth, by citizenship, and by Internment Serial Number (ISN). These long lists of numbers and letters — e.g. US9YM-000027DP — are used to identify the prisoners in Guantánamo, helping to dehumanize them, as intended, by doing away with their names. The most significant section is the number towards the end, which is generally shortened, so that the example above would be known as ISN 027. In the files, the prisoners are identified by nationality, with 47 countries in total listed alphabetically, from “az” for Afghanistan to “ym” for Yemen.

2. Health

This section describes whether or not the prisoner in question has mental health issues and/or physical health issues. Many are judged to be in good health, but there are some shocking examples of prisoners with severe mental and/or physical problems.

3. JTF-GTMO Assessment

a. Under “Recommendation,” the Task Force explains whether a prisoner should continue to be held, or should be released.

b. Under “Executive Summary,” the Task Force briefly explains its reasoning, and, in more recent cases, also explains whether the prisoner is a low, medium or high risk as a threat to the US and its allies and as a threat in detention (i.e. based on their behavior in Guantánamo), and also whether they are regarded as of low, medium or high intelligence value.

c. Under “Summary of Changes,” the Task Force explains whether there has been any change in the information provided since the last appraisal (generally, the prisoners are appraised on an annual basis).

4. Detainee’s Account of Events

Based on the prisoners’ own testimony, this section puts together an account of their history, and how they came to be seized, in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere, based on their own words.

5. Capture Information

This section explains how and where the prisoners were seized, and is followed by a description of their possessions at the time of capture, the date of their transfer to Guantánamo, and, spuriously, “Reasons for Transfer to JTF-GTMO,” which lists alleged reasons for the prisoners’ transfer, such as knowledge of certain topics for exploitation through interrogation. The reason that this is unconvincing is because, as former interrogator Chris Mackey (a pseudonym) explained in his book The Interrogators, the US high command, based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be transferred to Guantánamo — and that there were no exceptions; in other words, the “Reasons for Transfer” were grafted on afterwards, as an attempt to justify the largely random rounding-up of prisoners.

6. Evaluation of Detainee’s Account

In this section, the Task Force analyzes whether or not they find the prisoners’ accounts convincing.

7. Detainee Threat

This section is the most significant from the point of view of the supposed intelligence used to justify the detention of prisoners. After “Assessment,” which reiterates the conclusion at 3b, the main section, “Reasons for Continued Detention,” may, at first glance, look convincing, but it must be stressed that, for the most part, it consists of little more than unreliable statements made by the prisoners’ fellow prisoners — either in Guantánamo, or in secret prisons run by the CIA, where torture and other forms of coercion were widespread, or through more subtle means in Guantánamo, where compliant prisoners who were prepared to make statements about their fellow prisoners were rewarded with better treatment. Some examples are available on the homepage for the release of these documents (cross-posted with links here).

With this in mind, it should be noted that there are good reasons why Obama administration officials, in the interagency Guantánamo Review Task Force established by the President to review the cases of the 241 prisoners still held in Guantánamo when he took office, concluded that only 36 could be prosecuted.

The final part of this section, “Detainee’s Conduct,” analyzes in detail how the prisoners have behaved during their imprisonment, with exact figures cited for examples of “Disciplinary Infraction.”

8. Detainee Intelligence Value Assessment

After reiterating the intelligence assessment at 3b and recapping on the prisoners’ alleged status, this section primarily assesses which areas of intelligence remain to be “exploited,” according to the Task Force.

9. EC Status

The final section notes whether or not the prisoner in question is still regarded as an “enemy combatant,” based on the findings of the Combatant Status Review Tribunals, held in 2004-05 to ascertain whether, on capture, the prisoners had been correctly labeled as “enemy combatants.” Out of 558 cases, just 38 prisoners were assessed as being “no longer enemy combatants,” and in some cases, when the result went in the prisoners’ favor, the military convened new panels until it got the desired result.

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In addition, please find below the introductions that I wrote to three briefing documents that were put up on WikiLeaks’ Guantánamo Files page last week, to accompany the release of the prisoner files (which have now almost all been released). I also wrote the introduction to a classification document, whch is not incuded here, because it is probably only of interest those who take a professional interest in the US military’s obsession with classification, but I hope that the three briefing documents provide a fascinating accompaniment to the prisoner files.

Cover Story Assessment

This document, a four-page briefing paper entitled, “Assessment of Afghanistan Travels and Islamic Duties as they Pertain to Interrogation,” was published in August 2004 and provides interrogators with information about the perceived activities of foreigners in Afghanistan, and the types of cover stories that were allegedly used on a regular basis by foreigners who had traveled there for jihad.

While this may well have proved useful in identifying individuals who were attempting to hide their true motives, it also undoubtedly contributed to an atmosphere in which everyone who claimed to be innocent was regarded as having been trained by al-Qaeda to resist interrogation, leading to confirmation bias, even if, as was the case with many of those held, they were indeed innocent.

EC Threat Indicators

This document, a 17-page briefing paper entitled, “JTF-GTMO Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants,” was intended to help interrogators “to determine a detainee‟s capabilities and intentions to pose a terrorist threat if the detainee were given the opportunity,” primarily through the use of three types of indicators: “1) the detainee himself provides acknowledgement of a fact; 2) another detainee, document, government, etc. provides an identification of the detainee; and 3) analysis of the detainee‟s timeline, activities, and associates in context with other known events and individuals.”

The document contains detailed lists of places where prisoners were captured, which are regarded as suspicious, and groupings of prisoners regarded as significant. It also includes signs allegedly indicating military training and fighting, indicators of membership in al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, including travel routes and locations allegedly frequented by al-Qaeda members, and an analysis of what are regarded as common cover stories.

Also included are similar analyses regarding the Taliban or “Anti-Coalition Militia,” and a worryingly large list of “Associated Forces,” including relief organizations that were not regarded as a threat outside of Guantánamo, and the huge missionary organization Jama’at Al-Tablighi, which has millions of members worldwide, but which was routinely described in Guantánamo as a front for terrorist activities.

JTF-GTMO Threat Matrix

This two-page document, entitled, “JTF-GTMO Detainee Recommendation and Threat Matrix,” was published in May 2008 and explains the different categories of prisoners at Guantánamo, designated as high-risk, medium-risk and low-risk, and the recommendations for their disposition, which consist of “Continued Detention,” “Transfer Out of DoD Control,” and “Release.”

It should be noted that there is no category for innocent people seized by mistake, even though the documents themselves reveal that many of the prisoners were indeed seized by mistake, and were therefore no risk at all, although two of the definitions of a low-risk prisoner are that they “had little or no terrorist sponsored or related training” and that they “had few, if any, associations with terrorists, terrorist groups, or terrorist support networks.”

The document also includes the following alarming footnote about prisoners facing “Imminent Death”: “Medical prognosis indicating death within 6-12 months may be justification for humanitarian transfer.”

 

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Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and YouTube). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here — or here for the US), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free tomake a donation.

May 2nd, 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

The Guantanamo liars

There are an overwhelming number of articles on the Wiki8leaks’ Guantanamo Files. However, the most important take home message, that the prison was based on a tissue of lies, is outlined in this article from McClatchy. See also their Guantanamo secret files show U.S. often held innocent Afghans:

WikiLeaks: Just 8 at Gitmo gave evidence against 255 others

By Tom Lasseter and Carol Rosenberg | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — U.S. military intelligence assessing the threat of nearly 800 men held at Guantanamo in many cases used information from a small group of captives whose accounts now appear to be questionable, according to a McClatchy analysis of a trove of secret documents from the facility.

The allegations and observations of just eight detainees were used to help build cases against some 255 men at Guantanamo — roughly a third of all who passed through the prison. Yet the testimony of some of the eight was later questioned by Guantanamo analysts themselves, and the others were subjected to interrogation tactics that defense attorneys say amounted to torture and compromised the veracity of their information.

Concerns about the quality of the “facts” from the eight men goes to the heart of Guantanamo’s “mosaic” approach of piecing together detainees’ involvement with insurgent or terrorist groups that usually did not depend on one slam-dunk piece of evidence. Rather, intelligence analysts combined an array of details such as the items in detainees’ pants pockets at capture and whether they had confessed to interrogators — American or otherwise.

More than two-thirds of the men and boys at Guantanamo were not captured by U.S. forces. So analysts were often left to weave together the stories told by detainees, the context of where and how they were initially scooped up, the information passed on by interrogators at other U.S. detention sites and, crucially, the testimony of fellow detainees at Guantanamo.

At Guantanamo, the captives were aware that some prisoners were providing a pipeline of information to interrogators — either to justify their continued detention or for use in potential prosecutions before military commissions.

“I heard there was another detainee talking about me,” former Briton detainee Feroz Abassi said in a recent interview with McClatchy. “I thought, let them talk. They’re only going to corroborate my story.”

After being held at Guantanamo for more than three years, Abassi was released in a diplomatic deal in January 2005 at age 25. He now works as a caseworker at the London-based detainee activist group Cageprisoners.

Abassi said it later became apparent that some informants were “straying away from the truth, trying to save themselves. They crack and they think it helps them to point fingers. But they only dig a hole for themselves.”

That appears to have been the case for Mohammed Basardah, a self-described one-time jihadist whose information was used in assessments for at least 131 detainees. In some instances, he accused fellow detainees of training at militant camps or taking part in the fighting in Afghanistan against the United States and its allies in late 2001.

Other times, intelligence analysts simply inserted a sliver of a quote from Basardah about the guilt of everyone caught at Tora Bora — the rugged mountain region where Osama bin Laden and members of his inner circle fled following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks — as a sort of blanket truism.

The Yemeni’s testimony was included despite worries highlighted in a 2008 Guantanamo intelligence assessment that his “first-hand knowledge in reporting remains in question” and a remark that many of fellow prison camp captives seemed “willing to reveal self-incriminating information to him.”

At the Pentagon, Army Lt. Col. Tanya Bradsher said the military would not comment on the findings, based on documents obtained by WikiLeaks and given to McClatchy, because “the documents disclosed by Wikileaks are the stolen property of the U.S. government. The documents are classified and do not become declassified due to an unauthorized disclosure.”

Among the other informants, who were used in the assessments to both make direct allegations against detainees and explain more general issues such as the relationship between various militant groups:

 

 

 

• A Syrian detainee known as Abdul Rahim Razak al Janko, whose own file said that “there are so many variations and deviations in his reporting, as a result of detainee trying to please his interrogators, that it is difficult to determine what is factual.” He was quoted or cited in records for 20 detainees.

 

 

• Muhammad al Qahtani, a Saudi man whose interrogations reportedly included 20-hour sessions and being led around by a leash, appeared as a source in at least 31 cases. A Guantanamo analyst note about Qahtani acknowledged that “starting in winter 2002/2003, (Qahtani) began retracting statements,” though it argued that based on corroborating information “it is believed that (his) initial admissions were the truth.”At the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, the firm that has championed Qahtani’s unlawful detention lawsuit, senior attorney Shane Kadidal said that “the information that was given in the first place (by Qahtani) was not reliable.” As a condition of his security clearance, Kadidal said, he couldn’t discuss the specifics of the WikiLeaks documents.

 

 

• Ibn al Shaykh al Libi, a Libyan, told CIA de-briefers in 2004 that he had earlier exaggerated his status in al Qaida because he thought that’s what American interrogators wanted to hear. He also said that he fabricated connections between Iraq and al Qaida to avoid mistreatment or torture by Egyptian interrogators. Information from al Libi, thought to have been collected elsewhere, was cited in at least 38 of the Guantanamo files.

 

 

• Mohammed Hashim, an Afghan whose reporting was described in one analyst’s note as “of an undetermined reliability and is considered only partially truthful,” showed up in assessments for 21 detainees.

 

 

• Statements from Ali Abdul Motalib Hassan, an Iraqi whose assessment said he “has admitted that he exaggerates in order to make himself appear more important” and who was seen as “unreliable,” appeared in 33 detainee files.

 

 

• Zayn al Abidin Muhammad Husayn, a Saudi-born Palestinian who’s known more widely as Abu Zubaydah, was cited in about 127 detainee files. His interrogations are reported to have included at least 83 instances of water boarding, and his attorney, Brent Mickum, recently told McClatchy that “he provided tremendous amounts of information that was worthless.”

 

 

• Fawaz Naman Hamoud Abdullah Mahdi was used in only six cases. But given a 2004 Guantanamo assessment of the Yemeni, it seems surprising that the fruit of his interrogations would be used as evidence against anyone: His “severe psychological disorder and deteriorating attention span” meant “the reliability and accuracy of the information provided by (Mahdi) will forever remain questionable,” according to the assessment.

 

On Sunday, the Department of Defense released a statement saying the Obama administration’s current Guantanamo Review Task Force has in some cases come to the same conclusions as the 2002-2009 assessments, and “in other instances the review task force came to different conclusions, based on updated or other available information.”

Any lingering doubts about the eight men and the quality of their statements were rarely listed when their information appeared in the case files of other detainees. Guantanamo officials were so pleased with Basardah’s work, for example, that his identifying a fellow detainee was used as an example in a guide to “threat indicators.”

But in a 2009 opinion ordering the Pentagon to release Guantanamo detainee Saeed Mohammed Saleh Hatim, U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina pointed out that Basardah’s allegations about Hatim were collected several years after Guantanamo interrogators knew there were problems.

While the government maintained that Basardah provided interrogators with “accurate, reliable information,” Urbina said that Basardah had been flagged as early as May 2002 by a Guantanamo interrogator who did not recommend using him for further intelligence gathering “due in part to mental and emotional problems (and) limited knowledgeability.”

The interrogation in which Basardah fingered Hatim for operating heavy weapons on the front lines in Afghanistan happened in January 2006.

For Human Rights Watch senior counterterror counsel Andrea Prasow, who earlier in her career defended several Guantanamo captives, the military’s heavy reliance on such prison camp snitches vindicates the role of federal judges in analyzing the Pentagon’s patchwork of cases.

“But for habeas,” she said Monday, “we’d never have known that Basardah was a liar.”

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler took a similar view of Basardah in the unlawful detention lawsuit of Guantanamo detainee Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed. Kessler referred to Basardah as having “shown himself to be an unreliable source whose statements have little evidentiary value.”

Kessler also wrote of the U.S. government’s case against Ahmed and other Guantanamo detainees that “the mosaic theory is only as persuasive as the tiles which compose it … if the individual pieces of a mosaic are inherently flawed or do not fit together, then the mosaic will split apart.”

Basardah was not named publicly in either case, but his identity is clear after comparing the new Guantanamo files and the court cases.

In both cases, the judges ruled that the detainees should be freed.

April 27th, 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

Update on Larry James trial

Courthouse News provides an update on latest developments in the attempt to force the Ohio psychology licensing board to take seriously complaints against former Guantanamo BSCT psychologist Larry James:

Doctors Demand State Board Take Action Against Gitmo Psychologist

By Kyle Anne Uniss

COLUMBUS, Ohio (CN) – Two doctors, a minister and a disabled veteran sued the Ohio Board of Psychology, claiming it failed to act on their detailed complaint against a psychologist, an Army colonel who “was responsible for the abuse and exploitation of detainees as a senior psychologist at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, in violation of Ohio law and Board ethics rules.”

The plaintiffs seek writ of mandamus to compel the State Board to take “formal action” against Dr. Larry C. James, a board-licensed psychologist and Dean of Wright State University’s School of Professional Psychology.

James is not listed as a defendant.

The plaintiffs say he worked at the Guantanamo prison in 2003 and in 2007-2008. At Guantanamo, James was an Army colonel who led the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, which included psychiatrists and psychologists who “played a role in the exploitation, abuse, and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, subsequently misrepresented that experience, and improperly disclosed confidential patient information,” according to the complaint.

James led the team from January to May 2003, and against from June 2007 through May or June 2008, according to the complaint in Franklin County Court.

The plaintiffs are Dr. Trudy Bond, a practicing psychologist from Toledo; Michael Reese, an Army veteran, member of Disable American Veterans, and a former counselor for people with disabilities; the Rev. Colin Bossen, a Unitarian minister from Cleveland Heights; and Dr. Josephine Setzler, director of an Ohio chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The plaintiffs say they filed a 50-page complaint against James with the Board on July 7, 2010. They ask that if the board does not take “formal action” against james, that it be compelled “to provide clearly articulated reasons grounded in fact or law for any decision, and to show that it investigated meaningfully and/or carried out a formal proceeding in good faith.”

The plaintiffs say the July 7, 2010 “Board Complaint” alleges violations of 18 Ohio laws and Board ethics rules.

They accuse James of “publishing confidential patient history in his 2008 memoir and … misleading the public and the Board about his role.”

They claim that after James left Guantanamo, he continued to commit “grave breeches of confidentiality through statements he made in his book,” “Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib.” They say that James published this book in 2008, “while his application for an Ohio license was pending before the Board.”

According to the lawsuit: “The Board Complaint documents that while Dr. James was chief psychologist and alleged commanding officer of the BSCT [Behavioral Science Consultation Team], men and boys detained in the prison were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted.

“The Board Complaint alleges that Dr. James participated in, ordered, supervised, ratified, facilitated, acquiesced in, and/or failed to prevent, stop, report or punish this and other types of abuse at the prison.

The Board Complaint provides specific exampled of this misconduct, including an incident drawn from Dr. James’s own admission in which he watched behind a one-way mirror and drank coffee as an interrogator and three guards wrestled a man to the floor forcing him to wear lipstick, a wig, and women’s underwear. The Board Complaint alleges that Dr. James did not report the incident and documents Dr. James’s admission that he did not reprimand or disciplines the interrogator and guards.”

The plaintiffs say that their Board Complaint alleged, inter alia, that James and members “under his command and control … advised and trained interrogators, meeting with them to review interrogation plans designed to isolate detainees and foster dependence on their interrogators so as to enhance and exploit their disorientation, shock and fear;

“observed, monitored and retained at least de facto authority to end many, if not all, interrogations, many of which involved treatment rising to the level of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;

“assessed and evaluated detainee behavior and suggested abusive interrogation techniques …

“The U.S. government had previously recognized such techniques as illegal, and U.S. government officials have since reaffirmed that some of these techniques constitute torture.” (Citations omitted.)

“The Board Complaint is further supported by a report submitted by psychologist and attorney Dr. Bryant Welch, an expert in psychological ethics,” the legal complaint adds. “Dr. Welch concludes that if the allegations contained in the Board Complaint are factually true, the conduct described constitutes the most serious and far-reaching ethical breaches he has ever encountered in his career as a psychologist.”

The plaintiffs say the Ohio Board of Psychology responded to their complaint with a “cursory letter” of Jan. 31, stating that “It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action on this matter.”

The plaintiff’s say that’s an abuse of the Board’s discretion of “a 50-page complaint with over 1,000 pages of credible documentation, including government reports and Dr. James’s own admissions,” and that the Board “must proceed pursuant to its duty to protect the public from psychologists who abuse their professional knowledge and skills to cause harm.” The plaintiffs are represented by Terry Lodge of Toledo and Deborah Popowski and Tyler Giannini of Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic.

April 19th, 2011