Psyche, Science, and Society

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Psychology and Torture

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a News Analysis of the APA controversy:

Psychology and Torture

By David Glenn

Mock executions, waterboarding, and religious humiliation: Participation in those interrogation practices and more than a dozen others was banned in a resolution enacted at last August’s convention of the American Psychological Association. At the time, the association’s spokespeople said they hoped they had put to rest a lengthy debate about psychologists’ responsibility for torture at the Guantánamo Bay detention center and other sites where suspected terrorists have been held.

But as the association prepares to meet this week in Boston, feelings are running hotter than ever. For the second consecutive year, activists are planning a large street demonstration outside the convention. One of the activists scheduled to speak there — Steven Reisner, a psychoanalyst and a senior adviser in New York University’s international trauma-studies program — is running for the association’s presidency.

The lingering ill will stems in part from new revelations about how the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Defense drew on psychological research when they designed their post-September 11 interrogation systems.

The Dark Side, a new book by Jane Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, describes a 2002 incident in which Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a former president of the psychology association, accepted a CIA invitation to lecture at a naval training center about his theories of “learned helplessness.”

Mr. Seligman’s widely respected research suggests that when people and animals are traumatized at random intervals, they tend to give up: They stop seeking to rationally help themselves, and they stop responding to ordinary incentives. Mr. Seligman insists that his 2002 lecture was intended only to help train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if they are captured. But in his 50-person audience that day were Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell, psychologists who operate a consulting firm that helped the CIA develop interrogation techniques that some critics have called abusive. According to Ms. Mayer’s book, Mr. Mitchell has long been fascinated by learned-helplessness theory. (Through a lawyer, Mr. Mitchell denied to Ms. Mayer that his CIA interrogation techniques were inspired by Mr. Seligman’s work.)

Few people in the psychology association believe that Mr. Seligman consciously assisted in the development of detainee abuses. But many say that the association needs to make a more thorough public accounting of how the work of Mr. Seligman and other prominent members may have been misused by government agencies.

The association has so far rejected calls for formal inquiries. In a public statement last summer, Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, a clinical psychologist in Massachusetts who chaired an association task force on psychological ethics and national security, argued that the association is not equipped to sift through the military’s decision making in 2002 and 2003. The association “has neither subpoena power nor the necessary security clearances,” she wrote, “so an ‘investigation’ would be pointless.”

Beyond disputes about the past, calls to toughen the association’s interrogation policies still persist. Last year’s anti-torture resolution permits psychologists to work as advisers and therapists at Guantánamo-style detention centers, as long as they do not assist in or tolerate coercive interrogations. But some activists say that the general conditions at Guantánamo and similar sites are intrinsically abusive, and that psychologists should have nothing to do with them.

Those activists have forced a mail ballot on a resolution that would forbid the association’s members from working in any capacity “in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either international law … or the U.S. Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.” Ballots were distributed on August 1, and results are expected in late September.

The referendum’s authors say that if psychologists want to provide mental-health services to detainees, they should do so through outside agencies such as the Red Cross, not as direct employees of military or intelligence agencies.

But it is not clear that the government would welcome independent therapists into the detention centers. Many leaders of the association insist that if military psychologists leave Guantánamo, the detainees’ situation will only get worse. Even Michael Gelles, a former Navy psychologist who famously left Guantánamo after protesting abuses, has said that it would be a serious mistake for his colleagues to withdraw entirely. This debate seems likely to tear at the association well after the Guantánamo Bay facility itself is closed.

1 comment August 11th, 2008

Psychologists for Social Responsibility endorses APA referenndum

Psychologists for Social Responsibility has just voted to endorse the American Psychological Association referendum against psychologist participation at US detention sites in violation of international law. It is time for all progressive psychologists to join PsySR and make it a stronger, more active organization. [Truth in advertising: I am Co-Chair of the PsySR End Torture Action Committee and a member of its Steering Committee. Please join me.]

UPDATE: Here is a statement from Anthony Marsella, President of PsySR:

Dear PsySR Members & Friends:

I am writing to announce that the PsySR Steering Committee has voted in favor of endorsing a “yes” vote on the Referendum. The Steering Committee supports the the call for a referendum and encourages its members to vote “Yes” in accord with the PsySR Steering Committee decision.

The Steering Committee is the representative body for PsySR and is the primary source of major PsySR policies and decisions.

Best wishes, Tony

Add comment August 11th, 2008

Systematized sleep deprivation at Guantanamo persisted far longer than previously admitted

Today’s Washington Post brings further information on the Pentagon’s duplicity at Guantanamo. After Guantanamo officials claimed that the “frequent flyer” psychological torture program was shut down, they continued using it for many months, at least. The “frequent flyer” program involves frequent moves from cell to cell for days or weeks on end, profoundly disrupting sleep and increasing a sense of distress and disorientation.Apparently it was often, though not always, used to facilitate certain Guantanamo interrogations.

The basis for this program was established in a crucial October 2002 meeting — the infamous meeting where the CIA lawyer said “If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong” — to plan the Guantanamo abusive techniques. According to the minutes, at that meeting the Behavioral Science Consultation Team [BSCT] consisting of a psychologist and psychiatrist recommended techniques such as “sleep deprivation, withholding food, isolation, loss of time” in order to increase “psychological stress” and “to create an environment of ‘controlled chaos.’ ” This meeting also described what might have been the initial form of the “frequent flyer” program: “Let detainee rest just long enough to fall asleep and wake him up about every thirty minutes and tell him it’s time to pray again.”

One lesson here is that one should never believe official statements on the treatment of detainees. One should assume these statements are false until there is independent evidence otherwise. In the case of the “frequent flyer” program, they simply claimed it had ended in early 2004 and continued on with no change. In fact, they were torturing Mohammad Jawad at the very time that Vice Admiral Church was conducting one of the never-ending “investigations” that concluded that US abuses were isolated incidents due to the proverbial “few bad apples” and not evidence of a systematic program. Jawad’s attorney, Maj. David Frakt described the extreme contrast between official statements and the reality of abuse in his June 19, 2008 closing argument on a motion to dismiss charges due to subjection to the “frequent flyer” program:

“Incredibly, the very day that Admiral Church was investigating conditions at Guantanamo and finding the treatment of detainees to be so wonderful, detention officials at Guantanamo ordered the initiation of the frequent flyer program on Mohammad Jawad. Before the wheels of Admiral Church’s plane were even off the Guantanamo runway, Mohammad Jawad’s arms and legs were being shackled in preparation for the first of 112 moves up and down the hall of L Block, every 3 hours for the next 14 days. While Jawad was being shackled for the first of these moves, back on Capitol Hill, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was testifying before the Senate and House Armed Services Committees, reassuring the nation that the abuse at Abu Ghraib was isolated to a few rogue guards. When Secretary Rumsfeld testified before the HASC on May 7, 2004, the day the torture of Mohammad Jawad commenced, he told Congress, in reference to those detainees who had been abused at Abu Ghraib, Quote ‘I am seeking a way to provide appropriate compensation to those detainees who suffered such grievous and brutal abuse and cruelty at the hands of a few members of the U.S. military. It’s the right thing to do.’ “

Interestingly, while most detainees were subjected to the “frequent flyer” program  to aid interrogations, Jawad was not interrogated for months afterward. His brutal treatment, all meticulously documented in official logs, was apparently punishment for some unspecified offense, or perhaps simply entertainment for the guards. There is still much that we don’t know about this “program,” just as there is much we still don’t know about many other aspects of recent US brutality toward detainees.

Here is the Washington Post article:

Tactic Used After It Was Banned
Detainees at Guantanamo Were Moved Often, Documents Say

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 8, 2008

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation, according to U.S. military documents.

Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March 2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than a hundred times over a two-week period.

Military police logs for cell blocks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, show that guards used the program — dubbed the “frequent flyer” program in official documents — on numerous detainees and noted the program in their 2003 and 2004 records. The logs, reviewed by The Washington Post, also indicate that the frequent cell movements took place on the same days a Navy admiral was visiting Guantanamo to assess possible detainee abuses.

Some of the detainees violently objected to the moves, spitting at guards and resisting handcuffs and shackles after enduring repeated cell transfers, leading to even more sanctions. One “cell transfer schedule” for detainee 519 — Maher Rafat al-Quwari — shows that he was moved six times a day for 12 days in July 2003, with a four-hour interrogation session in the middle.

Defense officials have previously acknowledged the program’s existence, saying it stopped in 2004. They also have said that detainees are treated humanely and that credible allegations of abuse are investigated.

“There is no such program currently in place,” said Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, a spokeswoman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo. “JTF Guantanamo conducts the safe and humane care and custody of detained enemy combatants legally, ethically and transparently.”

U.S. military investigators deemed the program “abusive” but did not describe the extent of its use. Military police soldiers noted in handwritten entries that the cell movements were part of interrogation plans and that they were carefully organized.

For example, Moroccan detainee Ahmed Rashidi was scheduled for six-hour interrogations in the middle of the night and then moved to his cell for four hours, “then cycled through again repeatedly,” according to one notation.

“Detainee must be monitored, observed, and recorded by on-duty MPs,” the entry states. “The room will contain nothing more than a chair.”

Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi, a Saudi detainee who has been charged with terrorism offenses, was in the “frequent flyer” program from November 2003 to February 2004, according to the records, moving repeatedly from cell K36 to K38. Sharbi’s civilian lawyer said he was troubled to learn that his client might have faced sleep deprivation at the hands of his jailers.

“We have to assume that the frequent flyer program, what its details were, was not designed to strengthen the comfort and resolve of the prisoner,” said Robert Rachlin, who represents Sharbi. “Sleep deprivation is coercive. Of course it troubles me.”

Mohammed Jawad, a 24-year-old detainee accused of trying to kill U.S. forces in Afghanistan with a grenade, has asked through his lawyers to have all military commission charges against him dismissed as a result of the abuse he suffered by the frequent moves.

Other detainees could raise similar arguments in military commission cases, as Salim Ahmed Hamdan did in his commission trial that ended yesterday. The judge in that case ruled that some evidence could not be presented because of “coercive” techniques but found that his treatment at Guantanamo, including the frequent flier program, did not affect his statements to interrogators.

Jawad’s lawyer, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said the newly discovered records indicate that “no one actually knows the full scope of the abuses at Guantanamo” and that “all of these allegedly comprehensive investigations were whitewashes.”

“This is only the tip of the iceberg,” Frakt said. “This program was approved at the highest levels. . . . It suggests that people had simply lost their ability to distinguish right from wrong.”

Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said he worries that more of the organization’s numerous clients at Guantanamo could have faced the frequent flier technique.

“News that this methodology is more widespread than the government has initially acknowledged is troubling but not initially surprising,” Warren said. “Things like sleep deprivation are against international law and U.S. domestic law, and all investigators, including those in Congress, need to focus on these issues of programmatic torture.”

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Add comment August 8th, 2008

Flyer for August 16 American Psychological Association rally

Here is a flyer for the rally, August 16, 12:00-2:00 at the American Psychological Association Convention in Boston protesting the APA’s policies on participation in detainee interrogations.  Please post it where appropriate and give it to freinds and colleagues who might consider attending. Note: The rally is for all citizens concerned about the abuse of psychological knowledge and expertise, not just psychologists.

Add comment August 4th, 2008

Prosecutions or Truth Commission for torture in an Obama administration?

Mark Benjamin discusses whether an Obama administration would prosecute Bush administration officials involved in torture. The conclusion: Probably not. But a Truth Commission is more likely. And prosecutions are not impossible in a second term. Of course, those of us in psychology and the other health professions need to push hard for truth and accountability for those in our professions who abetted the torture regime. And we need to  explore ethical, policy, and structural changes to reduce such collaboration in the future:

Would Barack Obama prosecute the Bush administration for torture?

Obama’s brain trust wants to form a commission on torture and call Bush officials as witnesses.

By Mark Benjamin

WASHINGTON — On the campaign trail in April, Barack Obama was asked whether, if elected, he would prosecute Bush administration officials for establishing torture as American policy. The candidate demurred. “If crimes have been committed, they should be investigated,” he said. But he quickly added, “I would not want my first term consumed by what was perceived on the part of the Republicans as a partisan witch hunt, because I think we’ve got too many problems to solve.”

People who have given advice to the Obama campaign say they see little political advantage in the candidate discussing during a general election campaign how his administration might investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials for torture. Other than the response above, prompted by a question from Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News, he has said little about his plans. But behind the scenes, a slate of foreign policy and human rights experts with various degrees of connections to the Obama campaign, some of them likely to occupy positions of authority in an Obama administration, have begun to discuss that very issue, and in great detail. What they’re likely to recommend to Obama, should he become president, won’t fulfill the dreams of those who’ve hoped for immediate criminal accountability for Bush administration officials.

Members and advisors of the administration-in-waiting have formed largely informal working groups to take up a whole host of issues related to the Bush administration’s legacy, like what to do about the Guantánamo detainees. While they have not been asked to develop a formal recommendation for Obama on the question of criminal accountability for torture, those who are weighing the issue, a group that includes some of the 300 people the New York Times recently described as Obama’s “mini State Department,” are moving toward consensus on some key points. Specifically, don’t hold your breath waiting for Dick Cheney to be frog-marched into federal court. Prosecution of any officials, if it were to occur, would probably not occur during Obama’s first term. Instead, we may well see a congressionally empowered commission that would seek testimony from witnesses in search of the truth about what occurred. Though some witnesses might be offered immunity in exchange for testimony, the question of whether anybody would be prosecuted would be deferred to a later date — meaning Obama’s second term, if such is forthcoming.

While there are certainly participants in these discussions who believe that top-level administration officials deserve to be hauled before a judge, even the harshest critics of the current administration’s torture policies don’t think there will be an immediate effort by the next president to prosecute anyone from the Bush administration. “I don’t sense the political appetite for it,” said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, who is involved in the informal discussions about what Obama could do about investigating torture. “I don’t think the next president will do that no matter who he is.”

Attorneys say successful prosecutions would be tough anyway. The Justice Department approved the abuse and Congress changed the War Crimes Act in 2006 to make prosecutions more difficult. There is also speculation that any end-of-term presidential pardons by Bush might include some of the likely torture defendants.

But the avenues of investigation being discussed don’t necessarily rule out at least an attempt at prosecuting Bush officials at some later date. The nonpartisan presidential commission that Malinowski and other people involved in the discussions are advocating would have considerable power, granted by Congress, to force cooperation. The commission would ultimately deliver recommendations to the president that would include, among other things, whether or not Cheney deserves that walk up the courthouse steps.

The first order of business, however, would be learning the truth. “I think a lot of us feel that the American people are entitled to the whole truth,” said another person who knows about the discussions. “The American people are entitled to [an investigation] from an official body that has access to the classified documents that makes as much public as it can,” that person added.

The commission would focus strictly on detention, torture and extraordinary rendition, or the practice of spiriting detainees to a third country for abusive interrogations. The panel would focus strictly on these abuses, leaving out any other allegedly illegal activities during the Bush administration, such as domestic spying.

It would also try to confirm or debunk, once and for all, the claims of high-level Bush administration officials that the use of abusive interrogations worked and resulted in significant intelligence gains.

This might include claims made by the president. In a Sept. 6, 2006, White House address, Bush admitted to a network of secret CIA prisons and the use of “tough” interrogation techniques by the agency. He then ticked off a treasure trove of intelligence he said the CIA pried out of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al-Qaida operative captured on March 28, 2002, by intelligence agents from the United States and Pakistan.

But FBI agents initially interrogated Zubaydah using tried and true, noncoercive techniques, reportedly with success. The CIA later took over and used coercive methods that included waterboarding. Controversy lingers over claims about the effectiveness of the CIA’s methods, particularly in comparison to the FBI’s approach.

Like the 9-11 Commission, Congress could grant this panel the authority to issue subpoenas to compel witnesses to cooperate and leverage the production of documents. The panel might also have the power to grant witnesses immunity from prosecution in exchange for cooperation.

Immunity, in fact, remains one of the thorniest issues in the ongoing discussions about how to investigate the Bush administration’s interrogation program. A recent Newsweek piece by Stuart Taylor Jr. suggested that Bush “pardon any official from cabinet secretary on down who might plausibly face prosecution” for torture during the Bush years. Taylor argued that this would encourage those individuals to testify freely in front of some sort of truth commission.

That indemnity arrangement is more reminiscent of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the 1990s-era investigation aimed at unearthing the sins of apartheid. But blanket indemnity would not be part of the commission under discussion. “A lot of people think that that is not something that goes over well with the American people,” said the person familiar with the discussions. “What we have much more of a tradition of is presidential fact-finding commissions.”

Instead of offering a blanket amnesty, the fact-finding commission would delay any decisions on whether or not to attempt to prosecute any Bush administration officials for their transgressions. Given the time it would take for a commission to do its work, any such decision would probably not take place till Obama’s second term. That would be in accord with what Obama said in April, in what seems to be his lone statement on the issue of accountability, about not wanting his first term to be taken up by what critics would try to characterize as political retribution.

“Something like this would be unprecedented in the American experience and I think it would be absolutely necessary,” Kenneth Kitts, author of “Presidential Commissions and National Security: The Politics of Damage Control,” said when informed of the rough plans for the commission. “We’ve had panels that have looked at scandals. We’ve had panels that have looked at intractable political problems,” said Kitts, a political science professor at South Carolina’s Francis Marion University. “But nothing in terms of looking at an issue that has this array of legal, moral and even spiritual questions attached to it.”

Ben Rhodes, a foreign policy advisor to the Obama campaign, did not respond to Salon’s request for comment by press time.

Add comment August 4th, 2008

Steven Reisner’s Candidate Statement for APA President

As most of my regular readers know, my friend and colleague Steven Reisner is running for President of the American Psychological Association as an attempt to change the association’s policies allowing psychologists to participate in US detainee abuse. Steven has released his candidate statement. For more information on the campaign, go to http://www.reisnerforpresident.org/. And please register to receive further information and to help the campaign.

Dr. Steven J. Reisner’s candidate statement

I am running for President of the American Psychological Association for several reasons, but none more important than the fact that the APA’s support of psychologists’ participation in detainee interrogations and detention operations demonstrates that the association has lost its moral compass. APA interrogation policy is a part of a culture of unreflective support of military and intelligence counterterrorism operations that has led our country and our profession down a dangerous and disingenuous path. This policy and culture have undermined the APA’s independence, its scientific integrity, and its ability to lead us into the twenty-first century. The APA, and the field of psychology it represents, must stand unequivocally for human rights and human welfare. Otherwise, we are merely a guild, promoting only the interests of its well-connected members; otherwise, we are the tools of our government, pandering to programs that violate our own ethical values.

My foremost task as APA President will be to reclaim our first ethical principle of beneficence: “to benefit those with whom [we] work and take care to do no harm… to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom [we] interact professionally and other affected persons.”

At this point in our history, our Association stands alone among the health professions in supporting its members’ direct participation in military and CIA interrogations. Psychiatrists, physicians, and nurses, have all rejected such participation and aligned themselves with international standards of medical ethics. Recently, international associations of psychologists, too, have protested our Association’s unique position. The Nordic Psychological Associations stated in their June 25th, 2008 letter to the APA that “military psychologists cannot function in an ethically correct way in sites where basic human rights are systematically violated and where appropriate international bodies of control are denied access.”

New information steadily emerges on psychologists’ operational role in abusive detention conditions—from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, the Defense Department’s Inspector General Report, and the press—directly implicating psychologists in the design or practice of abusive interrogations at Guantánamo, Bagram and at CIA black sites. When orders came directly from the White House to use waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, and other abusive techniques on detainees, psychologists implemented the program; and when secret Justice Department memos asserted that health professionals’ oversight was required to render such techniques legal, psychologists provided that oversight. These revelations are not only morally damning but scientifically embarrassing, with psychological research and theory distorted for political maneuvers and abusive ends.

Let’s be clear – these abusive interrogation procedures and conditions were not exceptions, perpetrated by unsupervised individuals. These abuses were part of a carefully developed program of psychological pressure, abuse, and torture, supported by protocols from the CIA and the military and with legal justifications from the Justice Department. Psychologists helped to author and implement those protocols and to give legal cover to those involved in abuse. To this day, brutal systems of psychological reward and punishment are implemented and overseen by psychologists at Guantánamo.

While the APA has passed several anti-torture resolutions, APA policy continues to support psychologists’ presence at detention sites whose very conditions violate international law, and where psychologists have been consistently implicated in those violations. Against all evidence, it remains APA policy that psychologists’ presence at such sites is necessary to keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”

As president, I will seek practical measures to prohibit such involvement and to restore APA’s reputation as an unequivocal voice for human welfare. Such measures would protect not only “those with whom we interact professionally,” as mandated by our Ethics Code, but our good name—and future!—as a profession. It would also offer safeguards for our military and CIA psychologists from moral compromise under pressure as well as from potential criminal liability.

Resolving our ethical conflicts will strengthen our profession as we confront healthcare reform and other significant challenges to our profession in the 21st Century. As APA President, I will advocate on behalf of these pressing issues, based upon the same guiding principles of improving human welfare, doing no harm, and upholding scientific integrity:

• to bring about universal health care, accompanied by full mental health parity.
• to raise awareness of the psychological dimension of environmental and ecological responsibility through research, practice and policy.
• to address the crisis in mental health care and private practice through public education and through combating managed care’s ever narrowing definition of mental illness and treatment.
• to advance the role of psychology in our transition into a diverse and global society.
• to work to resolve the crisis in psychology education and training, address the problems of student funding and debt, and help develop diverse internship opportunities relevant to our changing world.
• to build bridges between our research and practice communities by fostering a variety of research-practice partnerships.
• to restore and increase behavioral research funding, particularly in areas that further psychology’s time-honored commitment to human welfare and social justice.

Currently, the APA puts an extraordinary effort into supporting government funding for psychologists’ contributions to homeland security and counterterrorism. Such advocacy may have its place, in that it supports psychologists seeking government-funded contracts and academic grants. But, in a manner analogous to psychiatry’s dependence on pharmaceutical funding, our dependence on military-related contracts and appropriations can undermine our necessary independence. We must undertake a transparent, internal review of the allocation of APA resources and lobbying efforts so that APA members may decide together how to best advocate for the good of our members, our scientific discipline, and our society. But we cannot bring the best of our field to bear on these pressing issues unless we put our ethical house in order. With your vote for my presidency and with your assistance, we can transform the APA at this turning point in our history.

Add comment August 2nd, 2008

Translated into Spanish — Torture After Dark: Torture and the Strategic Helplessness of the American Psychological Association

Our recent article, Torture After Dark: Torture and the Strategic Helplessness of the American Psychological Association, has been translated into Spanish as Torturando en la oscuridad: La tortura y la estrategia de la indefensión de la Asociación Psicológica Americana. Please help distribute to Latin American ad other Spanish speaking colleagues.

1 comment August 2nd, 2008

PHR on Diego Garcia rendition revelations

Physicians for Human Rights has issued a statement in response to last night’s repot that the US secretly housed prisoners at its base on the British island of Diego Garcia:

Covert CIA Detention Center on British Soil Revealed

PHR Demands Trans-Atlantic Investigation and International Red Cross Access to All Detainees in US Custody

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) calls for a full trans-Atlantic investigation by Congress and the Parliament of the United Kingdom in the wake of today’s revelation by TIME magazine that the US covertly used Diego Garcia, a British island off the coast of India, as a top secret CIA detention center. Further, PHR demands that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) be given immediate access to all detainees that may still be held at Diego Garcia and other “black” site locations.

“The US and the UK must at last come clean about the scope of extraordinary rendition and secret detention—a violation of American and British law, human rights standards, and the rules and regulations of NATO,” stated Frank Donaghue, Chief Executive Officer of PHR. “Both Congress and Parliament must set the record straight about what happened at Diego Garcia. PHR knows from our twenty-one year history of documenting torture around the world that secret detention opens the floodgates to torture and other gross human rights abuses.”

The disclosure that Diego Garcia held CIA “ghost” detainees, such as Riduan Isamuddin, commonly known as “Hambali”, shows that General Michael Hayden, Director of the CIA, provided false information to senior members of the British Government. Director Hayden assured the Brown Government earlier this year that only two rendition flights had refueled at Diego Garcia. According to TIME, however, senior Bush Administration officials had been previously informed about the existence and use of the facility in highly classified briefings in the White House situation room.

“The Bush Administration’s detainee treatment and interrogation policies have damaged our nation’s reputation as human rights leader,” said Donaghue. “Seven years of secrets whispered in secret rooms must give way to on-the-record testimony and open hearings.”

PHR calls on the House and Senate committees on Intelligence and Armed Services to hold CIA Director Hayden and senior Bush Administration officials accountable. PHR also calls on Parliament to determine what current Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister Tony Blair, current Foreign Secretary David Miliband, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and other members of the Privy Council knew about US detention activities at Diego Garcia and when they knew it.

Since the publication of its landmark report in 2005 documenting the use of torture against detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by US Forces, PHR has been a leading voice in the effort to end the use of abusive interrogation techniques during interrogations of detainees held by the US military and intelligence services. PHR published in June the report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and its Impact, an analysis of medical and psychological evaluations of detainees held at US detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Add comment August 1st, 2008

Time/BBC: British Diego Garcia used for US torture

Time magazine and the BBC are both reporting that the US detained prisoners at their base on the British island of Diego Garcia. This despite repeated assurances by the US to the British government that this was not occurring. The BBC has a video report. Here is the Time article:

Source: British Territory Used for US Terror Interrogation

By Adam Zagorin

Almost two years have passed since President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the existence of a CIA program in which agency-leased aircraft fly terror suspects between secret prisons and interrogation sites around the world. “This program has helped us to take potential mass murderers off the streets before they have a chance to kill,” the President said on Sept. 6, 2006. Since that admission, the White House has declined to elaborate or comment further on the program’s specifics, although multiple reports have surfaced regarding the existence of secret facilities in Poland and Romania.

According to a former senior American official, it appears another locale can be added to the international roster of interrogation sites — one both more obscure and potentially more controversial than the alleged sites in Poland and Romania. The source tells TIME that, in 2002 and possibly 2003, the U.S. imprisoned and interrogated one or more terrorist suspects on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean controlled by the United Kingdom.

The official, a frequent participant in White House Situation Room meetings after Sept. 11 who has since left government, says a CIA counter-terrorism official twice said that a high-value prisoner or prisoners were being held and interrogated on the island. The identity of the captive or captives was not made clear. According to this account, the CIA officer surprised attendees by volunteering the information, apparently to demonstrate that the agency was doing its best to obtain valuable intelligence. According to this single source, who requested anonymity because of the classified nature of the discussions, the U.S. may also have kept prisoners on ships within Diego Garcia’s territorial waters, a contention the U.S. has long denied. The White House meetings were also attended by a variety of other senior counter-terrorism officials.

TIME discussed the allegation with Richard Clarke, who served as a Special Advisor to President George W. Bush on the National Security Council dealing with counter-terrorism until 2003 but is not the source for this story. “In my presence, in the White House, the possibility of using Diego Garcia for detaining high value targets was discussed,” says Clarke. Clarke did not witness a final resolution of the issue, but adds, “Given everything that we know about the Administration’s approach to the law on these matters, I find the report that the U.S. did use the island for detention or interrogation entirely credible.”

Since leaving the White House, Clarke has written Against All Enemies, a scathing critique of the Bush Administration’s handling of the war on terror. Clarke, who was in charge of U.S.-U.K. cooperation on Diego Garcia in the early 90s, says that using the island for interrogations or detentions without British permission “is a violation of U.K. law, as well as of the bi-lateral agreement governing the island.”

Diego Garcia is a tiny island, but its use by the U.S. as a detention or interrogation site has global significance. While the governments of Poland and Romania have faced few domestic consequences for their rumored cooperation with U.S. counter-terrorism measures, many in Britain have been voluble in their opposition to what they see as the U.S.’ abrogation of human rights as well as violations of law and British sovereignty. The chief spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office says: “Our intelligence and counter-terrorism relationship with the U.S. is vital to the national security of the United Kingdom. We accept U.S. assurances on rendition in good faith. But if others have definitive evidence of rendition through the U.K. or our Overseas Territories, including Diego Garcia, then we will raise it with the U.S. authorities.”

A CIA spokesman says there have been no changes in the agency’s position on Diego Garcia since February 2008, when CIA director Michael Hayden admitted that the agency’s previous denials about U.S. activities on the island were incorrect. Hayden acknowledged then that the U.S. had inadvertently misled the British government and that two suspects had been on flights that stopped to refuel on Diego Garcia en route to Guantánamo Bay and Morocco in 2002. “Neither of those individuals was ever part of CIA’s high-value terrorist interrogation program,” said Hayden. “These were rendition operations, nothing more.” Hayden did not identify the suspects who transited on the island and said that no other U.S. prisoners have been on Diego Garcia since Sept. 11.

A variety of press reports over the years have claimed otherwise, citing evidence that everyone from alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to his associate, Abu Zubaydah and other suspected terrorists were in American hands there. (Britain leased Diego Garcia, which is halfway between Africa and Southeast Asia, to the United States, and barred anyone from entering the island, except by permit, in 1971.) In 2003, TIME reported that Hambali, alleged architect of the Bali discotheque bombings, was held there.

U.K. foreign secretary David Miliband, and his predecessor, Jack Straw, who served under Prime Minister Tony Blair, have both repeatedly denied that the U.S. detained terror suspects on British territory.

Hayden’s attempt to set the record straight has failed to quiet British protests about American activities on the island. Instead, an All Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition has begun an investigation, raising a variety of pointed questions about the island with Gordon Brown’s Labour government. Speaking to the BBC, Labor MP and Foreign Affairs Committee member Fabian Hamilton said this week that, “I think it’s important the British government makes plain its … deep concern that it’s not being told the truth and that our territories are being used for these purposes.”

In late June, Foreign Secretary Miliband said the United States had studied a list of 391 flights compiled by British human rights groups and assured British authorities it had found that no further extraordinary rendition flights had passed through British territory. But Hamilton’s Committee insists that Britain can no longer take at face value America’s assurances that it is not torturing prisoners, and, in a clear reference to Diego Garcia, said the U.K. now bears a “legal and moral obligation” to make certain that no British territory abets American rendition flights or interrogations.

Add comment August 1st, 2008

Miles: Doctors’ complicity with torture

Steven Miles has a new editorial in the British Medical Journal on medical complicity with torture and the spotty record of accountability:

Doctors’ complicity with torture: It is time for sanctions

By Steven H. Miles

It is an arresting thought. More doctors abet torture than treat the millions of victims. More than 100 countries condone the use of torture. A third to a half of torture survivors report that a doctor oversaw the abuse.¹ Many prisoners never see the doctors who refined the techniques to minimise evidential scars, prolong pain, or cause psychological destruction.² Estimates of the numbers of torture victims do not include people whose murders disappear when a doctor writes “natural causes” on a death certificate.

The medical profession ought to dissociate itself from torture-a practice that destroys institutions of civil society; that is used against colleagues of conscience, and that has far reaching adverse mental, physical, and social consequences. Instead, medical societies and licensing boards offer lofty condemnation, which is most ardently aimed at offenders abroad rather than accomplices at home.

Doctors who abet torture rarely face professional risks. Governments will not punish a doctor for helping them carry out their crimes. Few medical societies or licensing boards have the courage and constancy of vision to investigate or censure colleagues who carry out the law of the land. In principle, medical societies support ethics codes like the World Medical Association’s Declaration of Tokyo, which bars doctors from complying with torture. In practice, they sustain the policy of impunity.³

The exceptions are instructive. The Nuremberg trial of Nazi doctors for war crimes was the birth of bioethics. That admirable court was convened by victors over defendants from a vanquished nation. But it is the wrong place to look for solutions to the common problem of doctors complying with torture. The problem today is holding doctors accountable for abetting torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of their own citizens. Such cases have occurred after a torturing regime loses power. Brazilian medical licensing boards began investigating doctors for collaborating with torture during the last years of military rule. Initially, the government blocked sanctions against doctors; within a decade of civilian government sanctions against doctors took hold.⁴

In Greece, Dimitrios Kofas, a doctor stationed at the persecution section of a prison in Athens, was sentenced to prison within a year of the military junta being deposed.⁵ The Chilean Medical Society actively investigated complaints against doctors and expelled six doctors for overseeing torture during Pinochet’s rule.⁶ Three years after Argentina’s junta fell, Dr Jorge Berges was sentenced to prison for carrying out torture.⁷ A South African medical board tabled complaints against police doctors who failed to report or treat the fatal head injury inflicted by police on civil rights leader Steven Biko; two doctors were punished eight years after his death.⁸

A more secure foundation for this kind of accountability can and should be laid. The World Medical Association’s Declaration of Hamburg states that licensing boards should deny licences to doctors who are guilty of war crimes, including torture.⁹ Unfortunately, that declaration only applies to immigrating doctors who are accused of crimes in another country. For example, there was a successful campaign to deny a Belgian licence to an immigrant doctor who had been active in Rwanda’s genocide.¹⁰ The BMA is one of a few medical societies that support sanctions against doctors who torture, but it has not established a means to implement such sanctions.¹¹

Countries wax and wane in their practice of torture. Foundations for making doctors accountable for this crime must be laid during periods of civil society. At such times, each national medical society and licensing agency should assert that medical complicity with torture and cruel inhuman or degrading treatment is a punishable breach of medical ethics that cannot be excused by law and for which there is no term limit. In the United States, California is considering a law that would ask its licensing agencies to inform health professionals that participating in coercive interrogation, torture, or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment may subject them to prosecution.¹²

The recruitment of the medical community in support of torture has far reaching effects. It harms prisoners. It deprives all prisoners of hope in the humanity of the medical staff. A civilian medical community that acquiesces to torture by its military members cannot credibly protest against foreign doctors who carry out torture. Such a community can hardly support doctors who are endangered for their resistance against torture. The prestige and values of medicine make it a crucial part of the campaign to abolish torture.

“I will guard my art and my life.” That pivotal promise of vigilance in the Hippocratic oath acknowledges that medical professionalism is not an easy virtue. Diverse enticements lure doctors from the core of medicine: “I will use regimens for the benefit of the ill but from what is to their harm or injustice, I will protect them.” Governments that practice torture need doctors. The medical accomplices of torture must not rest in the confidence that they can violate civil society and the ethics of medicine with impunity.

Cite this as: BMJ 2008;337:a1088

Steven H Miles, professor of medicine and bioethics

¹ Center for Bioethics, N504 Boynton, Minneapolis, MN 55414, USA

miles001@umn.edu

Competing interests: None declared. Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.

From the archive: Two recent news stories have dealt with torture. Doctors protest against surgeon held for six years at Guantanomo (news story; doi: 10.1136/bmj.a1071); Medical evidence exposes US use of torture-includes embedded video clip (news story; doi: 10.1136/bmj.a490)

References

1. Rasmussen OV. Medical aspects of torture. Dan Med Bull 1990;37(suppl 1):1-88.[ISI][Medline]
2. Stover E, Nightingale E. The breaking of bodies and minds. Washington DC: American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1985.
3. World Medical Association. Guidelines for medical doctors concerning torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in relation to detention and imprisonment (Declaration of Tokyo). 2006. www.wma.net/e/policy/c18.htm.
4. Amnesty International. Brazil. Human rights violations and the health professions. 1996. http://asiapacific.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAMR190251996?open&of=ENG-346.
5. Amnesty International. Torture in Greece: the first torturers’ trial 1975. London: Amnesty International, 1977.
6. BMA. Medicine betrayed. London: BMA, 1992.
7. Human Rights Watch. Argentina. 2006. www.hrw.org/reports/2001/argentina/argen1201-02.htm.
8. McLean GR, Jenkins T. The Steve Biko affair: a case study in medical ethics. Dev World Bioethics 2003;3:77-95.[CrossRef]
9. World Medical Association. Statement on the licensing of physicians fleeing prosecution for serious criminal offences (Declaration of Hamburg). 1997. www.wma.net/e/policy/c16.htm.
10. Hall P. Doctors and the war on terrorism. BMJ 2004;329:66.[Free Full Text]
11. British Medical Association. The medical profession and human rights: handbook for a changing agenda. Torture. 2001. www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/MedProfhumanRightsRecommendations#Torture.
12. California Senate 19. Health professionals: torture. 2008. www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sjr_19&sess=CUR&house=B&author=ridley-thomas.

Steven Miles, MD
N504 Boynton, 410 Church St SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455-0346
612-624-9440

Add comment July 31st, 2008