The anti-torture John McCain makes a return in the Senate as he takes on those claiming that torture was critical in locating bin Laden:
Ultimately, this is about morality.
Also read McCain’s op ed in the Washington Post: Bin Laden’s death and the debate over torture. See also Greg Sargent’s comments here and emptywheel’s comments on the response of the Torture Party to McCain.
1 comment May 13th, 2011
In my years in the antitorture movement, one of the most moving experience has been getting to know military interrogators, military intelligence professionals, JAGS, and other military members who struggled to behave honorably, often at great personal cost, even when they served an administration that promoted torture and when the American public became convinced by politicians, pundits, and the media that torture was both right and necessary. Below is a recent statement by a veteran Army interrogator and interrogation instructor, 1LT(P) Marcus Lewis, who reminds his fellow interrogators of the folly of the torture promoters. Torture neither “works” nor is it moral, he reminds them.
Lewis is not alone among experienced interrogators. One of the sad facts is that when the Bush administration and the CIA were creating the torture program they ignored the opinions of experienced interrogators, preferring instead the views of psychologists without any actual interrogation experience. What they got as a result was not an effective strategy for obtaining accurate intelligence, but a program that could effectively get prisoners to say what they believed their torturers wanted to hear. The fact that occasionally a tortured soul uttered a morsel of true information is no more an argument that torture is effective than the fact that I once caught a sunfish with an empty hook proves that fishing without bait is an effective fishing strategy.
Forbes today has an article describing the similar views of an interrogator currently serving in Afghanistan:
A top United States interrogator in Afghanistan says that torture played no role in locating Osama bin Laden, and that claims to the contrary by former Bush administration officials recently is “propaganda [that] degrades our intelligence operations more than any other factor I can think of.”
This interrogator, like so many others, emphasizes not only that torture doesn’t “work” and is wrong, but that it causes great harm by creating enemies:
Such talk also creates blowback — unintended consequences — that can be deadly, he added in an interview. “Simply the idea of our interrogators using torture or coercion recruits jihadists, facilitators, suppliers, supporters, and even suicide bombers, against us and our allies,” he said.
…
On the subject of blowback, he continued:
I cannot even count the amount of times that I personally have come face to face with detainees, who told me they were primarily motivated to do what they did, because of hearing that we committed torture. Even the rumor of torture is enough to convince an army of uneducated and illiterate, yet religiously motivated young boys to strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up while killing whoever happens to be around – police, soldiers, civilians, women, or children. Torture committed by Americans in the past continues to kill Americans today.
This interrogator, further bemoans the way in which torture promoting pundits and media injure efforts to teach effective and ethical interrogation technique to new interrogators:
“If right-wing news outlets and partisan pundits or politicians are allowed to continue to spread their completely bogus claims that torture is effective,” he said, “then we will have corrupted the beliefs of yet another generation of new intelligence recruits….It takes months and years of ‘intervention’ to get the next generation back on the track of quality work, specialization, and intelligence dominance – not quick and easy fixes. This is not an hour-long TV show.”
Alas, it is not experienced interrogators and military intelligence personnel who need to be reminded of the folly of torture. It is new military recruits and the rest of our fellow citizens who need to hear the message of Lt. Marcus Lewis and of the Afghan interrogator interviewed byForbes.
Here is the email by Lt. Lewis to his fellow interrogators:
Fellow Interrogators, former interrogators, and instructors,
Once again, our profession is in the spotlight. As a former interrogator and instructor, now a leader in this schoolhouse, I would feel remiss not to speak out.
In the wake of Usama Bin Laden’s death, politicians, pundits, 24-hour TV chatterboxes, and other such attention-seekers have begun again to sharpen their teeth on that debate which should never have existed in a free country like the United States: the notion that torture is justified.
Some are pointing out that one of the couriers who led us to UBL gave up this information under the stress of waterboarding. The reality is that it took us over 14 long, painful years to get Bin Laden. For at least five of those years it seems he was hiding within a stone’s throw of the Pakistani Military Academy, in an embarrassing amount of comfort for the world’s most wanted terrorist.
That it took so long from the time the alleged waterboarding-derived information was revealed, seven years ago, according to some reports, until UBL’s demise only demonstrates how extraordinarily counterproductive our overt policy of torture was. We got a name only. Perhaps had we used some of our more sophisticated approaches — our minds rather than brutality — we would have had a detainee willing to take us directly to Bin Laden.
We will never know how many lives might have been saved had we held fast to our Army values instead of flaunting them out of fear of the unknown.
I need not remind you:
This is not a subject for debate as far as you are concerned as a military intelligence professional or contractor, especially as an instructor. We do not torture. We do not teach it. There are no winks, no nods, not a scintilla of reverence for “special warfare types” who might operate outside the rules. (Truth be told, anyone who has ever worked with JSOC, CJSOTF, Ranger Bat, OGA, etc., knows they have as many or more lawyers and rules than any odd Army BCT or Marine Det., and they don’t torture.)
I need not remind you:
In World War II, our nation executed Japanese officers for water torture.
In World War II, our nation executed German officers for torture.
I need not remind you:
Torture is illegal; it is wrong; it is against military law, values, doctrine; and it is against the basic human rights we soldiers have fought and died for in centuries of service to the United States of America. We don’t teach it. We don’t do it. It is cowardly and dishonorable. Do not let the moral flexibility of the political class sway you otherwise.
We know, to be sure, our experiences as interrogators have never been without significantly emotional moments. Good HUMINTers are tough, aggressive, if need be, push the envelope, but know well where and when to draw the line. Good HUMINTers don’t need to torture. We are calm and reasonable students of human behavior who can develop rapport with a source quickly and acquire valuable intelligence information, then just as quickly put that information forward in a coherent report or use it to stage a movement to the next critical target.
Torture is antithesis of everything we are. Torture is by nature anti-rapport building. Worse, torture paints the picture of the U.S. military and its soldiers as goons and stooges, the bully-imperialists, The Great Satan, the very picture our enemies would like their followers to believe is true, and we know is false.
It was analysis, insight, and smart detective work that got Bin Laden. This same kind of thinking we try to impart upon our students in the planning and preparation, approaches, and questioning phases of interrogation training. What’s really import in interrogation? We know: Strategic thought. Psychological insight. Preparation. Analysis. Patience. Restraint. Thinking before doing or acting. Having a reason for every word said and paying attention to each word said to you, the interrogator. Tenacity. That is interrogation. It is a game of thought and mental strength, not of brutality.
The popular press and, unfortunately, many otherwise well-meaning and some not-so-well meaning politicians can be tragically ignorant of our job, more informed by Hollywood fantasy and fear of the unknown than the cold hard facts of this discipline.
I ask you as soldiers and contracted intelligence professionals first, citizens second, not to let your personal political views sway you here. Both parties in our government use this issue to raise the emotional temperature within their respective constituencies to win votes, aggrandize, and score political points. Few speak to this issue with critical thought or concern for our values.
Indeed, I have heard no political leader put forward a dispassionate and convincing argument tying the defense of this great nation to the need to torture.
Stay true to your Army values, to your training, and you can’t go wrong.
Always be an advocate for rational thinking. Reason defeats irrationality.
Do not be afraid to speak out for the honorable discipline of military interrogation, as a humane and intellectual soldier, a linguist, an intelligence professional. You alone are the expert on the nuances of tribal culture in the Jazira around Mosul. You alone delve deep into the minutia of the politics in Waziristan, know the immensely important differences between the Pashtuns and Tajik tribes, or the particular affection a Ukrainian might still have for the former Soviet Union because he was born in Odessa. You know the enemy so you can defeat the enemy.
And, foremost, you are an advocate for the humane treatment of captured enemy personnel. You conduct your affairs in a legal and honorable manner.
We do not let the chattering classes set our agenda, or the politicians who bend in whichever direction they think the wind might blow any given moment. We obey lawful orders, defend the Constitution of the United States, and put ourselves in front of the enemy to defeat him.
This great Army, and I, have your six.
Sincerely,
1LT(P) Marcus Lewis
S3, 6/98 MI BN
United States Army Interrogator, Instructor, Intelligence Analyst
Fort Devens, MA
3 comments May 9th, 2011
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
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
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
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
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
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
BOMBING CIVILIANS
There was a time, before Guernica,
when it was considered barbaric
to bomb civilians.
Then came Coventry, London, Hamburg, Dresden,
Hiroshima and the rest.
We’ve outgrown our squeamishness and,
as one door gunner put it,
“There was a My Lai every day.”
Thus do we evolve,
and out there in the universe
there are lots of targets
we can go gunning for.
If they are inhabited
by strange or familiar creatures
they’d better start preparing.
Tom Greening
April 16th, 2011
Democracy Now! today interviewed psychologist, and American Psychological Association Presidential candidate Steven Reisner regarding Dr. Reisner’s ethics complaint against Maj. John Leso for his activities as part of the Guantanamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), including his participation in the torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani. [Amy Goodman also wrote about the case in the weekly column.]:
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Monday that key suspects in the 9/11 attacks would be tried by military commissions in Guantánamo, not in U.S. civil court. Holder blamed members of Congress for the decision.
ATTORNEY GENERAL ERIC HOLDER: Had this case proceeded in Manhattan or in an alternative venue in the United States, as I seriously explored in the last year, I am confident that our justice system could have performed with the same distinction that has been its hallmark for over 200 years. Now, unfortunately, since I made that decision, members of Congress have intervened and imposed restrictions blocking the administration from bringing any Guantánamo detainees to trial in the United States, regardless of the venue.
AMY GOODMAN: But there will be one Guantánamo case tried in New York. This week, the New York State Supreme Court will hear the case against Dr. John Leso, a psychologist accused of participating in torture of prisoners at Guantánamo.
The case was brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Justice and Accountability on behalf of Dr. Steven Reisner. He’s a New York psychologist and adviser to Physicians for Human Rights. He’s at the center of a growing group of psychologists campaigning against the participation of psychologists in the U.S. government’s interrogation programs. He’s on the faculty at New York University Medical School and at the International Trauma Studies Program affiliated with Columbia University and a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and the New York Campaign Against Torture. Dr. Reisner is currently running for president of the American Psychological Association, the largest association of psychologists in the world.
Welcome to Democracy Now!, Dr. Reisner.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: You are just about to go over to the New York State Supreme Court today to hear this case that is being brought against, really, a colleague, against Dr. John Leso. Explain who he is and what he did.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, John Leso was the first psychologist—the first person—named to a Department of Defense BSCT team. BSCTs were the Behavioral Science Consultation Team that oversaw and advised on the enhanced interrogations of detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere. And John Leso found himself in Guantánamo, was put in charge of this BSCT team—he was BSCT number one—and was given the responsibility of creating a program, which we would now call a program of torture, for the high-value detainees at Guantánamo.
AMY GOODMAN: And what was that program?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, he went to Fort Bragg to be trained in SERE techniques. SERE is the program in our—for our armed forces to be given experiences of torture in case they’re captured, as a kind of inoculation.
AMY GOODMAN: S-E-R-E.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. And the “resistance” part is the part that has to do with dealing with torture techniques. And he was taught a series of techniques while at Fort Bragg, and his colleagues and the interrogators at Guantánamo were all part of a training program. And they went back to Guantánamo, and Dr. Leso and his partner, Dr. Burney, a psychiatrist, created a progressively harsh list of techniques to be used, at that point, on Mohammed al-Qahtani, who was a detainee who was thought to be the 20th hijacker. All those charges have been dropped since. But the increasingly harsh techniques included isolation, sleep deprivation, extreme cold, sexual and religious humiliation—the whole gamut of techniques used individually and together. And the interrogation lasted for about a month and a half.
AMY GOODMAN: Major Leso recommended three categories of interrogation severity at Guantánamo, depending on the prisoner’s ability to resist.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Right.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what “Category III” was.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, Category III were the harshest techniques. They included some physical abuse. They included nonstop interrogations for 20 hours, absolute isolation. I can’t remember all of—
AMY GOODMAN: Including from the ICRC.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Oh, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: That they were not to be seen by the International Committee of the Red Cross?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, that was not only the case for those detainees undergoing severe interrogation techniques; the Guantánamo protocols prohibited any contact with the ICRC for all detainees in their first 30 days of isolation.
AMY GOODMAN: What are the rules? You actually brought a case to the Office of Professional Conduct against John Leso, but they would not investigate him.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Right. They made the claim that since what he was doing was aimed to harm—in other words, aimed to break down prisoners—he wasn’t functioning as a professional psychologist, and therefore the State of New York’s Office of Professional Discipline didn’t have jurisdiction to question the ethics of a psychologist who was not acting according to the New York definition of a professional psychologist. So they just refused to hear the case. They refused to investigate.
AMY GOODMAN: So, if you break the rules, you’re not acting according to the professional rules of conduct, so you’re not investigated?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: To some extent—
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, isn’t he hired because he is a psychologist?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: He was hired because he was a psychologist. It was required that he be licensed. He was asked to use his psychological expertise. The state board said that he didn’t have a therapist-patient relationship with al-Qahtani, but it left out a whole area of professional psychology where the client is the organization. This holds, for example, in prisons. Prison psychologists are clinical psychologists, licensed in the State of New York, who oversee the practice and care of prisoners. And if they act unethically, they are held accountable. It’s quite analogous at Guantánamo. But for some reason, the New York board decided that it was unique and different, and they refused to investigate.
AMY GOODMAN: So your case today is trying to force the Office of Professional Discipline to investigate Dr. John Leso?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: That’s exactly right.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, he was at Walter Reed.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, John Leso was at Walter Reed under Colonel Larry James. And—
AMY GOODMAN: Who’s head of Wright State now, right?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, Larry James is now a dean at Wright State School of Professional Psychology. And cases have been brought against Colonel Larry James, as well, because Larry—
AMY GOODMAN: In Ohio.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Larry James followed John Leso as BSCT number one at Guantánamo.
AMY GOODMAN: Put this in the context of the battle within the largest association of psychologists in the world, your association, the APA, the American Psychological Association.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, because the legal justification for torture required the presence of psychologists and psychiatrists or—and physicians, in order to allow the torture to go forward according to the Justice Department’s rules at the time, there were—it was necessary for health professionals to be part of the Bush administration torture program. A growing number of psychologists, in particular, felt that we could find a wedge to stop that torture program by forcing the American Psychological Association to declare such practices unethical. And that would take away the legal justification for torture. So, more and more psychologists were made aware of the role of psychologists in the torture. And I don’t know if the public is aware, but the protocols for torture in both the CIA and the Department of Defense were crafted by psychologists. So we’ve been trying now for about five or six years to have the American Psychological Association state unequivocally that these psychologists who followed the Department of Defense protocols should be held accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: And it’s interesting that the American Psychological Association has not enforced resolutions like the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association around issues of interrogation and torture.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, that’s right, and they’ve refused to implement those.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, what hasn’t become clear is, a few weeks ago, there was some news that Larry James, also who complaints have been brought against, was being selected to serve on the White House task force called Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of the Military Family. What is this about? Because the Obama administration is denying this.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, it’s hard to know exactly what it’s about. Dr. James sent a letter to faculty and students stating that he was proud to have been selected to serve on this task force. But when the White House was asked about it, they stated that Dr. James was not invited to the task force. In fact, the task force—there was no such task force. So, those of us who have followed Larry James’s career and have read his book, we’re not so surprised, because the exaggerations and distortions in that book are pretty widely known. And so this—we had to take this one with a grain of salt, as well.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we will continue to follow both of these cases, and we will link at our website to all of our coverage of the controversy in the American Psychological Association. Dr. Steven Reisner, thanks so much for being with us, adviser on psychology and ethics for Physicians for Human Rights, running for president of the American Psychological Association.
3 comments April 6th, 2011
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