Psyche, Science, and Society

Carl Levin on the export of SERE techniques to Iraq

Below I reported on yesterday’s important Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC], hearing on the export of SERE techniques to Iraq. Here I’ll post Senator Carl Levin’s Opening Statement, which summarize some of the key findings from the two rounds of SASC hearings. We eagerly look forward to the completed committee report, some time before the end of the Congressional session.

Here in Senator Levin’s Statement:

In June 2008, this Committee held a hearing on the origins of aggressive interrogation techniques used against detainees in U.S. custody at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. At that hearing, the Committee heard how techniques such as stress positions, forced nudity, and sleep deprivation – used in military Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape or “SERE” training to teach U.S. personnel to resist abusive interrogations, and based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions – were turned on their head and authorized at senior levels of our government for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody. Today’s hearing will cover one way that those techniques made their way to Iraq.

While some have claimed that detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were simply the result of a few bad apples acting on their own, at our June hearing we heard that as far back as December 2001, senior Department of Defense officials, including from General Counsel William J. “Jim” Haynes’s office, sought out information from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), the DoD agency responsible for overseeing SERE training. We heard how, when he later reviewed a request from Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) to use techniques similar to those used in SERE training, Mr. Haynes ignored strong concerns from the military services that some of the techniques were illegal, cut short an effort by the Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to conduct a legal and policy review of the techniques, and recommended that the Secretary of Defense approve most of them for use against detainees. In December 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld approved Mr. Haynes’s recommendation, sending the message that stripping detainees, placing them in stress positions, and using dogs to intimidate them was acceptable. Policies authorizing some of those same abusive techniques in Afghanistan and Iraq followed the Secretary’s decision. We’ll hear this morning how one military commander in Iraq sought and obtained interrogation support from JPRA, an agency whose expertise, again, is in teaching soldiers to resist abusive interrogations conducted by our enemies.

We’ll hear from Colonel Steven Kleinman, the former Director of Intelligence at the JPRA’s Personnel Recovery Academy and retired Colonel John R. Moulton II, former Commander, JPRA. Both witnesses have been cooperative with the Committee’s inquiry and I thank them for their appearance here today.

Some new information and recently declassified documents [PDF] provide further insight into the extent to which SERE resistance training techniques influenced detainee interrogations conducted by U.S. personnel and the role of senior officials in approving policies authorizing the use of those techniques against detainees.

At our June 17th hearing, we heard that the Department of Defense General Counsel’s office, led by Jim Haynes, sought advice from JPRA as far back as December 2001. Specifically, in mid-December 2001, Deputy General Counsel for Intelligence Richard Shiffrin solicited information from JPRA on detainee “exploitation.” JPRA Chief of Staff Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Baumgartner responded to Mr. Shiffrin’s call with a six page fax. An unclassified fax cover sheet addressed to Mr. Shiffrin and dated December 17, 2001 [TAB 1] states that the document provided JPRA’s “spin on exploitation” and that if the General Counsel’s office needed “experts to facilitate this process” that JPRA stood “ready to assist.” That December 2001 call from Mr. Shiffrin appears to have been JPRA’s first foray into “offensive” interrogation operations, but other efforts soon followed.

On April 16, 2002, Dr. Bruce Jessen, who was then the senior SERE psychologist at JPRA, circulated a draft “exploitation plan” to JPRA Commander Colonel Randy Moulton and other senior officials at the agency. Emails exchanged between Dr. Jessen and Colonel Moulton [TAB 2] suggest that JPRA intended to seek approval of the exploitation plan.

Also in the spring of 2002, the CIA sought approval from the National Security Council (NSC) to begin an interrogation program for high-level al-Qaida detainees. In a written response to questions I sent her in July 2008, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who was then the National Security Advisor to the President, responded on September 12th that, in 2002 and 2003 there were meetings at the White House where specific CIA interrogation techniques were discussed. [TAB 3] I also asked Secretary Rice whether she attended meetings where SERE training was discussed. Secretary Rice responded that that she recalled being told that U.S. military personnel were subjected in training to “physical and psychological interrogation techniques.” Her legal advisor at the time, John Bellinger, said in his September 12th written answers to my questions that he was present in meetings at the White House or the Eisenhower Executive Office Building “at which SERE training was discussed.” [TAB 4]

Secretary Rice also wrote in her September 12th response that John Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), provided legal advice at “several” meetings that she attended and that the Department of Justice’s advice on the program “was being coordinated by Counsel to the President Alberto Gonzales.” She wrote that CIA’s interrogation program was reviewed by NSC Principals and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld participated in that review. Secretary Rice said that when CIA sought approval of the interrogation program she asked Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet to brief the Principals and asked Attorney General John Ashcroft to “personally advise NSC Principals whether the program was lawful.” Mr. Bellinger, her Legal Advisor, wrote that he asked CIA lawyers to seek legal advice not only from the OLC, but also from the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice, headed at the time by Michael Chertoff.

The meetings referred to by Secretary Rice and Mr. Bellinger were not meetings between low-level bureaucrats. These were the most senior officials in the United States government, advisors to the President, meeting in the White House.

Mr. Bellinger said that some of the legal analyses of proposed interrogation techniques that were prepared by the Department of Justice referred to “the psychological effects of military resistance training” and that during the 2002-2003 timeframe, he “expressed concern that the proposed CIA interrogation techniques comply with applicable U.S. law, including our international obligations.”

At our June 17th hearing, the Committee heard that in July 2002, prompted by a request from DoD General Counsel Jim Haynes, Deputy General Counsel for Intelligence Richard Shiffrin called JPRA and asked for a list of physical and psychological pressures used in SERE training. In response to that request, on July 26, 2002, JPRA provided a list of techniques that included stress positions, waterboarding, slapping, sleep disruption, and sensory deprivation. The JPRA list also made reference to a section of the JPRA manual that talks about “coercive pressures,” like treating a person like an animal. Mr. Shiffrin testified that part of the reason the General Counsel’s office sought the information was its interest in reverse-engineering the techniques for use offensively in detainee interrogations.

At that hearing we also heard that in October 2002, Major General Michael Dunlavey, the Commander at Guantanamo, requested authority to use some of the same SERE resistance training techniques that had been on the list JPRA provided to Mr. Haynes’s office in July.

The military services registered serious concerns about the legality of some of the techniques in Major General Dunlavey’s request and Rear Admiral Jane Dalton, who was the Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified that she initiated a broad based legal and policy review of the request. But, at Mr. Haynes’s request, her review was cut short by General Richard Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff. Mr. Haynes subsequently recommended that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approve most of the techniques in Major General Dunlavey’s request. Again, on December 2, 2002 Secretary Rumsfeld approved Mr. Haynes’s recommendation, authorizing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques at GTMO, including stress positions, instilling fear through the use of dogs, and removal of clothing.

At the June 17th hearing, we heard from then-Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora about concerns he raised in December 2002 and January 2003 with Mr. Haynes about interrogations at GTMO. We learned from John Bellinger, the NSC legal advisor, in his September 12th response to my questions, that on several occasions, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Bruce Swartz raised concerns with him about allegations of detainee abuse at GTMO. Mr. Bellinger wrote to me that he, in turn, raised these concerns “on several occasions with DoD officials.” In her September 12th response, Secretary Rice wrote that Mr. Bellinger also advised her “on a regular basis regarding concerns and issues relating to DoD detention policies and practices at Guantanamo.” She wrote that as a result she convened a “series of meetings of NSC Principals in 2002 and 2003 to discuss various issues and concerns relating to detainees in the custody of the Department of Defense.”

At our last hearing, I described how aggressive techniques authorized by the Secretary of Defense for use at GTMO made their way to Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of those same techniques were authorized by senior military commanders. For instance, on September 14, 2003 Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the Commander of Combined Joint Task Force 7 in Iraq, authorized the use of dogs, stress positions, and other aggressive techniques in interrogations.

In the summer of 2003 the Commander of a special mission unit Task Force in Iraq went further. He contacted JPRA for help with interrogations. Again, JPRA’s expertise is in training soldiers to resist abusive interrogations by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. In response to the Commander’s request, and with explicit approval from the U.S. Joint Forces Command, JPRA’s higher headquarters, JPRA sent an interrogation support team to Iraq. Colonel Kleinman was the team leader during that visit.

Here’s some of what we know about the Iraq trip from unclassified or declassified sources. The Task Force’s request for JPRA “interrogator support” was submitted through official channels and was approved by JFCOM on August 27, 2003. JPRA put together a three person team to support the request. On September 4, 2003, just as the JPRA team was arriving in Iraq, Lieutenant General Robert Wagner, the Deputy Commander of the U.S. Joint Forces Command, JPRA’s senior command, sent an email to Colonel Moulton, the JPRA Commander, about the trip asking, what in JPRA’s “charter places JPRA in the business of intelligence collection?” [TAB 5] Again, just a week earlier, JFCOM had approved the trip. Colonel Moulton replied to Lieutenant General Wagner’s email that “there is nothing in our charter or elsewhere that points us toward the offensive side of captivity conduct” and that JPRA was “well aware of the problems associated with crossing the Rubicon into intel collection (or anything close).”

A second email from Colonel Moulton, however, sent on September 9, 2003 to the JFCOM Director of Operations, stated that “recent history (to include discussions and training with [DIA], USSOCOM, CIA) shows that no DoD entity has a firm grasp on any comprehensive approach to strategic debriefing/interrogation. Our subject matter experts (and certain SERE psychologist) currently have the most knowledge and depth within DoD on the captivity environment and exploitation.” While Colonel Moulton’s email said that JPRA was “NOT looking to expand our involvement to active participation” he noted that JPRA’s “potential participation is predicated solely on the request of the Combatant Commander.”

A recently declassified summary of a 2005 interview with Colonel Moulton [TAB 6] and Colonel Moulton’s prepared statement for today’s hearing both describe conversations he had with Colonel Kleinman while the JPRA team was in Iraq. Colonel Moulton acknowledges telling Colonel Kleinman that the JPRA team was authorized to participate in interrogations using SERE training techniques. Colonel Moulton said he granted that authority only after seeking approval from JFCOM. Colonel Kleinman has said that he objected to the use of SERE training techniques during the trip and that he told Colonel Moulton both that those techniques were inconsistent with the Geneva Conventions and that granting authority for the team to use them was an illegal order. This morning we will hear both Colonel Moulton’s and Colonel Kleinman’s account of those conversations and events that occurred during that trip.

Towards the end of their trip, members of the JPRA team produced a draft Concept of Operations or “CONOP” for the interrogation of detainees. Emails from Captain Daniel Donovan, U.S. Joint Forces Command’s Staff Judge Advocate, reveal some of what the CONOP proposed and what JPRA thought was acceptable.

Captain Donovan, in a September 26, 2003 email to Colonel Moulton and others at JPRA [TAB 7], raised a concern that techniques proposed in the CONOP would “not be legal under the Geneva Conventions.” A few days later in an email to JFCOM leadership [TAB 8] Captain Donovan reiterated his concern stating that “a number of the ‘interrogation techniques’ suggested by JPRA in their draft CONOP are highly aggressive (such as the ‘water board’), and it probably goes without saying that if JPRA is to include such techniques in a CONOP they prepare for an operational unit in another [area of responsibility], they need to be damn sure they’re appropriate in both a legal and policy sense.” Captain Donovan added “JPRA got its list of techniques from a DOD General Counsel Working Group Report dated 6 Mar 03, so I’m sure they felt that their list might have already been ‘blessed’ by Pentagon lawyers.”

The Working Group referred to by Captain Donovan’s email had been established at Secretary Rumsfeld’s direction in January 2003. As the Committee heard at our June 17th hearing, over the strong objections of senior military lawyers, the Working Group relied on a March 14, 2003 legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) written by John Yoo. The Working Group’s final report, issued on April 4, 2003, recommended several aggressive techniques including removal of clothing, prolonged standing, sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation, hooding, increasing anxiety through the use of a detainee’s aversions like dogs, and face and stomach slaps. While the final Working Group report did not mention SERE, many of the techniques it recommended were strikingly similar to techniques used in JPRA SERE training.

Captain Donovan’s email said that that the techniques approved by Secretary Rumsfeld for use at GTMO in April 2003 were not the same as those in the Working Group report and said that what the Secretary had approved was more restrictive. As we heard at our June 17th hearing, Secretary Rumsfeld’s April 2003 memo to U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), GTMO’s higher headquarters, was silent on most of the techniques in the Working Group’s report. The Secretary’s memo said that if techniques, beyond 24 that he specifically authorized, were required, SOUTHCOM should “provide a written request describing the proposed technique, recommended safeguards, and the rationale for applying it with an identified detainee.” We heard at our last hearing that one such request arrived at the Pentagon just a few months later and was approved by the Secretary.

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s original December 2, 2002, authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques including stress positions, use of dogs and removing detainees clothing and his Working Group’s April 2003 recommendation of many other aggressive techniques, conveyed the message that senior officials felt that physical pressures and degrading tactics were appropriate for use during interrogations of detainees in U.S. military custody. Many of the aggressive techniques the Secretary approved in December 2002, including the three I just mentioned - stripping detainees, putting them in stress positions and using dogs to intimidate them - were used against detainees at Abu Ghraib.

But even the public disclosure of abuses at Abu Ghraib apparently did not eliminate interest in using SERE specialists to provide advice on interrogations. The Department of Defense Inspector General said in its 2006 report that it was only after a request to send a JPRA team to Afghanistan in 2004 that JFCOM finally issued guidance that the use of SERE for “‘offensive’ purposes lies outside the roles and responsibilities of JPRA.” [TAB 10]

Add comment September 26th, 2008

Senate Armed Services Committee on importing SERE techniques to Iraq

Yesterday the Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC], or rather, its Chair, Senator Carl Levin [no other members deigned to come to the hearing on US war crimes] held a hearing on the export of SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape] tactics to Iraq, leading, eventually, to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib.

At the hearing they heard from Col. Steven Kleinman, an interrogator and former JPRA official [Joint Personnel Recovery Administration, the SERE parent agency] and Col. John Moulton, former JPRA Commander. They testified about Col. Kleinman’s mission to Iraq, in which he was asked to demonstrate SERE techniques. He witnessed abusive interrogations and stopped them. He was then sent back home. Col. Kleinman is one of the heros of this sordid episode.

Documents released at the hearing also contained a questionaire ansered by Secretary of State, and foemer National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice in which she admitted being briefed on SERE methods in the White House. She claims to have been  “that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm.” In fact, as was clarified by th hief SERE psychologists at the June 17 SASC hearing, these techniques were deemed safe for use in training US troops, because of the combination of psychological screening, careful monitoring, ability of troops to stop at any time, and extensive multi-session debriefings afterwards. This psychologist did not claim or provide any evidence that these techniques were safe when used as interrogation techniques of captured detainees.

There are many other goodies revealed in these hearings that I am only beginning to understand.

The AP and Washington Post covered the hearings. I will here post the AP account. Then I will post Senator Levin’s Opening Statement separately. Here is the AP:

Interrogator details pre-Abu Ghraib abuses

By Pamela Hess

WASHINGTON — A military interrogation expert, Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, told Congress on Thursday that prior to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he witnessed interrogations of Iraqi detainees that he considers violations of the Geneva Conventions.

One interrogation was conducted by an Air Force civilian and a contractor employed by his own organization, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. It had sent a small team to Iraq in September 2003 to help a special forces task force improve its interrogations of stubborn prisoners. The team was asked to demonstrate an interrogation on an Iraqi prisoner. It was an unusual role for the organization, which trains soldiers how to resist interrogations, not conduct them.

Kleinman said his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Kleinman said.

Kleinman stopped the interrogation, which had veered from his careful plan into abuse.

“Until their time in Iraq they had never seen a real world interrogation,” he said.

The men, Terrence Russell and Lenny Miller, had learned the harsh techniques working with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program for U.S. forces, which conducts stressful mock interrogations to prepare soldiers to withstand and resist abusive questioning in the event they are taken prisoner. The program uses methods derived from the real-life experiences of American prisoners of war. The techniques include forced nudity, stress positions, exposure to extremes in weather and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.

Russell is a civilian JPRA employee involved in research and program development. Miller was a contractor who no longer works for JPRA, according to the military.

Joint Forces Command, which oversees JPRA, did not investigate Kleinman’s allegations because they were made directly to the task force in Iraq, said spokesman Capt. Dennis Moynihan.

Attempts to locate Russell and Miller independently were unsuccessful.

At the time, Kleinman called his now retired commander, Col. John Moulton II, to express concern about the harsh methods he saw being used in several interrogations. He said Moulton checked with his superiors and called him back to say the techniques had been specifically approved. Moulton later told investigators that he understood that the Pentagon’s general counsel or higher had approved the measures, and that the prisoners were considered terrorists and were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions, however, did apply in Iraq.

The Senate Armed Services Committee also released responses from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and legal counsel John Bellinger regarding their knowledge of the CIA interrogation program when Rice was the national security adviser and Bellinger was the National Security Council’s top lawyer.

She and Bellinger were also briefed on SERE interrogation methods at the White House in 2002 or 2003.

“I recall being told … that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm,” Rice wrote.

Rice told the committee the CIA had sought NSC approval before embarking on its own harsh interrogation program in the spring of 2002. Rice said she asked then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to review its legality. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the White House on legal matters, later determined the CIA’s program to be legal.

Rice also said Bellinger advised her regularly about “concerns and issues” relating to the Pentagon’s interrogation and detention program at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. She said the Justice Department never discussed with her the FBI’s now documented concerns with interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay and CIA detention facilities.

Bellinger said he knew the FBI refused to participate in some CIA interrogations, which included waterboarding for at least three detainees. He was also aware of allegations of abuse at Guantanamo in 2003.

Also Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a step closer to forcing the Justice Department to hand over secret legal memos authorizing the Bush administration to use harsh and potentially illegal interrogation techniques on detainees.

By a 10-9 vote, the committee agreed to give the chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., authority to subpoena the memos from the Office of Legal Counsel. It is now up to Leahy to decide whether to issue the subpoena, which the Justice Department likely will fight because much of the information in the memos is highly classified.

Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse did not answer a question about whether the department would comply with such a subpoena.

“We regret that the committee authorized the subpoena,” Roehrkasse said in a statement. “We will continue to work with them to ensure that their legitimate oversight needs are met.”

Add comment September 26th, 2008

The epidemic of Israeli torture rationalization

Yuval Ginbar writes of the epidemic of Israeli academics rationalizing “no torture torture,” thus providing cover for Israeli practice:

Torture: Israel’s expanding export industry

By Yuval Ginbar

Apologies. What follows are not sensational revelations about Israel’s secret involvement in torture worldwide (though there have been some reports to that effect). I am referring to a possibly less exciting phenomenon, which is all in the public domain. To me, however, it is no less worrying: Israel has produced a surprising yield of academics who support torture and seek its legitimization, if not legalisation. Publishing widely, including in the most prestigious journals and publishing houses, they advocate the use of interrogational torture in the “war on terror”.

There are variations, of course. One favours torture to be authorized by a “public committee” – a variant of Alan Dershowitz’ “torture warrants” idea. Others propose allowing “only” methods that are “short of torture,” including one who attempts to show Americans how some forms of “coercive interrogation” would accord with their Constitution. However, the methods that the “torture lite” academics recommend, such as sleep and sensory deprivation, become by all accounts - legal, “common sensical” and factual - full torture, at least over time. No - guidance on how interrogators would know when to stop are not attached. Nor are any examples of how such methods were used without becoming torture. This is because no such examples exist.

But perhaps the speciality of pro-torture Israeli academics is devising schemes which would, they say, enable an absolute legal prohibition on torture to co-exist with allowing its use in “ticking bomb situations” – a “relativized” absolute prohibition, as one of them (seriously) quipped. Some have proposed that while torture should be prohibited by law absolutely, if a leader orders torture in extreme situations, his act would later undergo “ex post-facto ratification”. Others propose a modification of deontological morality so as to allow torture in extreme situations, as long as it is not “officialized”.

However heavily endowed with academic titles the writers are, however extensive and thorough their research is, and however rich their essays and books are with references, cases and footnotes, the results are invariably absurd, as the very combination they seek is self-contradictory. In my book I analyse several of these “have-your-cake-and-eat-it” solutions. Actually, perhaps a more apt – and updated -description would be the “yeah-but-no-but” approaches to torture. They ultimately make as much sense as Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard.

All this could all have been quite amusing were it not for the fact that such scholars – and other, non- Israeli ones, of course - are advocating that our officials be allowed, through one moral or legal scheme or another, to inflict excruciating pain on helpless prisoners, demolishing in the process an international legal and moral consensus it took humanity hundreds of years to achieve. And were it not for the fact that a “yeah-but-no-but” torture system, which most of the Israeli academics are in effect modelling their proposals on, is actually in operation – you guessed it – in Israel.

In 1999 Israel’s Supreme Court prohibited issuing the General Security Service (GSS) with instructions on how to inflict what was euphemistically called “moderate physical pressure” on Palestinian detainees, as had been the custom until then, and ruled that GSS agents cannot be authorized to inflict such “pressure”. The Court cited the absolute prohibition on torture in international law. So far so good. However, when it comes to “ticking-time bomb” situations, the Court ruled that the case of a GSS interrogator who tortures (the Court too preferred a euphemism: “applied physical interrogation methods”) would then be considered by the Attorney-General, and if need be by the courts, where “his potential criminal liability shall be examined in the context of the ‘necessity’ defence” – a criminal law defence which, as currently held in Israeli law, justifies actions in extreme situations if they produce the “lesser evil”.

The result has been predictable. Within a couple of years the GSS itself was admitting it was torturing – oops! – euphemism time again: using “exceptional interrogation measures” – in dozens of cases annually. All were cases of “ticking bombs”, of course. Figures from human rights NGOs, such as the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, have been much higher. Number of GSS interrogators convicted of torturing (or any other offence)? Zero. Prosecutions? Zero. Criminal investigations? Zero. Once introduced as a means of legitimizing torture, the “ticking bomb” and its legal corollary, the “necessity defence”, have overwhelmed the system.

Israel is not the focus of my book, but of the four “models of legalized torture” described and analysed there, two have, unfortunately, been in operation in Israel, in one form or another. Then there is the “torture warrants” model. The fourth is, of course, the US model.

But what about the big questions? Is ‘waterboarding’ or (perhaps more importantly) other, less blatant interrogation techniques considered torture under international law? Does international law allow the use of painful techniques falling short of torture, or the use of the “necessity defence” to exonerate torturers? What happens to a state, morally and practically, once it allows anti-terrorist torture? And – maybe the biggest question - would it not be morally justifiable to torture terrorists in order to save many innocent lives in “ticking bomb situations”? In other words – Why Not Torture Terrorists?

Yuval Ginbar is a scholar and human rights activist, and has recently written a book called Why Not Torture Terrorists?: Moral, Practical and Legal Aspects of the “Ticking Bomb” Justification for Torture. In the post below he gives his opinions on the Israeli academics who support the use of torture in the “war on terror” and are seeking its  legitimization.

Add comment September 19th, 2008

New Arrigo & Long paper: APA: Denunciation and accommodation of abusive interrogations: A lesson for world psychology

My friends and colleagues Jean Maria Arrigo and Jancis Long have published a new article on the American Psychological Association and its approach to the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations: APA: Denunciation and accommodation of abusive interrogations: A lesson for world psychology in the Brazilian journal Psicologia: Teoria e Prática. The article can be downloaded here.

At the same time word comes of the publication of a shortened version of the article in Preventing Torture within the Fight against Terrorism, the newsletter of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims [IRCT]. Issues of the newsletter are available at the link above. The current issue with the Arrigo-Long article can be directly downloaded as a pdf here.

The indefensible position of the APA abetting detainee abuses has become a cause celebre around the world. We regularly receive communications from colleagues in various countries who are outraged by the APA policy. See, for example, the questions raised by the Nordic Psychological Associations last June, questions which, to my knowledge, have so far not been answered by the APA.

Recently the Psychologists for Social Responsibility End Torture Action Committee issued an Appeal for International Support from U.S. Psychologists: Condemn Psychologist Participation in Bush Regime Detainee Abuse. Please help distribute this Appeal to colleagues around the world.

Add comment September 17th, 2008

Interview on Oregon’s KBOO: Psychologists and torture

I ws interviewed last week by Portalnd, OR radio KBOO regrading psychologists, US torture and the role of the American Psychological Association. The show was broadcast as part of KBOO’s 9-11 special programming. The interview can be downloaded here.

Add comment September 15th, 2008

WNYC on Psychologists and Torture: Reisner, Keller, & Eban

WNYC had a devoted a portion of the Leonard Lopate show today to the issue of psychologists in interrogations. [No, I was not on it.] Here is the program description:

Psychologists and Torture
Some professionals are trying to force the American Psychological Association to bar its members from participating in coercive interrogations and torture. Dr. Steven Reisner is running for president of the APA on an anti-terror platform; Dr. Allan Keller is Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. Journalist Katherine Eban has written about psychologists and torture for Vanity Fair magazine.

Listen here:

Add comment September 11th, 2008

WUNC The State of Things interview: Torture and Interrogation Symposium

I was interviewed today, along with law professor Scott Silliman, by Frank Stasio on WUNC, North Carolina Public Radio, on the show The State of Things. Here is the program description:

Torture and Interrogation Symposium

Since the attacks of 2001, there has been growing controversy over the United State’s use of certain interrogation techniques against so-called enemy combatants.  A symposium at the Parr Center at UNC this weekend will address many aspects of this controversy, including the complex and uncertain laws regarding torture, and the surprising role psychologists play in helping the government apply its interrogation methods. Host Frank Stasio will be joined by guests Scott Silliman, professor of the Practice of Law and executive director of the Center on Law, Ethics, and National Security at Duke University, and Stephen Soldz, the director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

You can listen to or download the program here. I am brought in about 12 minutes into the show.

If you’re near Chapel Hill, come hear me speak on Saturday, September 13.

Add comment September 10th, 2008

Republicans won’t say McCain was “tortured”

From Andrew Sullivan:

Bush: “McCain Wasn’t ‘Tortured’”

I checked the transcript this morning and the biggest bombshell in this campaign so far, in my opinion, is the following section of Bush’s speech:

John McCain’s life is a story of service above self. Forty years ago, in an enemy prison camp, Lieutenant Commander McCain was offered release ahead of others who had been held longer.

His wounds were so severe that anyone would have understood if he had accepted.

John refused. For that selfless decision, he suffered nearly five more years of beatings and isolation. When he was released, his arms had been broken, but not his honor.

Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain’s resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry left never will.

Now have you ever heard someone recount what was done to John McCain in the Hanoi Hilton and not use the word “torture”? I haven’t. “Beatings and isolation” is a bizarre phrase to use to describe the torture that was done to John McCain. I’m sure McCain thinks so.

Am I being persnickety? As with the Trig story, there’s a very easy way to find out - if the press will simply do its job. A White House reporter needs to ask the president, quite simply, if he believes that John McCain was tortured in Vietnam. Just ask. Use that specific word. See if he can answer.

The reason he put it this way, I infer, is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.

I repeat: The reason he put it this way is that if he describes what was done to McCain as torture, he has incriminated himself for war crimes.

Now prove me wrong. Please prove me wrong.

Sullivan then posts on Fred Thompson doing the same thing:

The Truth That Dare Not Speak Its Name

I’ve noted the bizarre locution Bush used last night to describe the torture endured by John McCain. I hope the press corps will follow up. But one piece of evidence that the omission of the t-word by Bush was deliberate comes in Fred Thompson’s speech as well. He went on at length about the hideous treatment handed down to John McCain in Vietnam. It was the longest section of the speech. Wanna guess if the word “torture” came up at all? Here’s the whole thing:

On October 26, 1967, on his 23rd mission over North Vietnam, a surface-to-air missile slammed into John’s A-4 Skyhawk jet, blowing it out of the sky.

When John ejected, part of the plane hit him — breaking his right knee, his left arm, his right arm in three places.

An angry mob got to him.

A rifle butt broke his shoulder.

A bayonet pierced his ankle and his groin.

They took him to the Hanoi Hilton, where he lapsed in and out of consciousness for days. He was offered medical care for his injuries if he would give up military information in return.

John McCain said “No”.

After days of neglect, covered in grime, lying in his own waste in a filthy room, a doctor attempted to set John’s right arm without success … and without anesthesia.

His other broken bones and injuries were not treated. John developed a high fever, dysentery. He weighed barely a hundred pounds.

Expecting him to die, his captors placed him in a cell with two other POWs who also expected him to die.

But with their help, John McCain fought on.

He persevered.

So then they put him in solitary confinement…for over two years.

Isolation … incredible heat beating on a tin roof. A light bulb in his cell burning 24 hours a day.

Boarded-up cell windows blocking any breath of fresh air.

The oppressive heat causing boils the size of baseballs under his arms.

The outside world limited to what he could see through a crack in a door.

What was done to John McCain was a war crime. His enduring of it, and his refusal to be released ahead of his fellows does indeed speak to enormous character, which is why so many of us love the man. But today’s great crime is that what was done to him is now being done to others … under orders from the president of the United States. You can either defend this, or you can use semantics to cover it up. The Bush administration has chosen the worst of all paths in this, and the taint of their actions is now spreading.

We have to start speaking English again. Asking Fred Thompson directly whether he believes John McCain was tortured in Vietnam is a start.

[Update: one other thing. Thompson does not mention, again bizarrely, the stress positions that feature very prominently in McCain’s own account of his torture. Why not?

Add comment September 3rd, 2008

Boston Globe editorial: Psychologists and torture

In a major development, the Boston Globe today editorialized against the participation of psychologists in US abuses. It calls for major change in American Psychological Association policies. It endorses both the APA Referendum and the Presidential campaign of Steven Reisner.

These votes are providing association members with a chance to end any ambiguity about their profession’s abhorrence of abusive techniques. Many came out of the playbook of totalitarian states and could easily be used against US personnel in future clashes. Psychologists should leave no doubt they are opponents, and not enablers, of these methods

The editorial is so good, it’s as if we  wrote it.

The circumstances in a place like Guantanamo are by their very nature abusive and should rule out psychologists’ participation even in “good cop” questioning. Guantanamo-style interrogation is hard to square with the psychological association’s ethics code: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”

This editorial follows by two weeks my Op Ed in the Globe. It follows by a week the the APA’s disingenuous and dishonest response. The Globe has clearly read both and conducted their own careful examination of the issues. Their verdict is in. The APA cover story does not pass the smell test. Our case is vindicated in all essential details.

Here is the complete Globe editorial:

Psychologists and torture

By Boston Globe

August 30, 2008

FROM THE moment US military and civilian officials began detaining and interrogating Guantanamo Bay prisoners with methods that the Red Cross has called tantamount to torture, they have had the assistance of psychologists. This has been a source of anguish to many members of the profession, who want to join their colleagues in other professional organizations and draw a clear line against psychologists’ involvement in interrogation of detainees.

Many psychologists fault their own professional organization, the American Psychological Association, for not taking a firmer stance and for not punishing association members who in the past have helped interrogators in using techniques like sleep deprivation to raise prisoners’ stress levels or in finding their emotional weak points. When the association convened a task force on the subject in 2005, a majority of members turned out to have ties with the military or US intelligence.

In its defense, the association points to a current policy statement that prohibits “direct or indirect participation” in torture or “cruel, degrading, or inhuman treatment or punishment.” The association should go further and forbid - as the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have - any involvement at all by medical professionals in interrogation.

The circumstances in a place like Guantanamo are by their very nature abusive and should rule out psychologists’ participation even in “good cop” questioning. Guantanamo-style interrogation is hard to square with the psychological association’s ethics code: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”

In the coming weeks, association members will vote on new leadership, and one candidate for president wants psychologists banned from participating in interrogations at US detention centers that violate human rights and do not adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Members are also voting on a resolution banning psychologists from working in such facilities “unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”

These votes are providing association members with a chance to end any ambiguity about their profession’s abhorrence of abusive techniques. Many came out of the playbook of totalitarian states and could easily be used against US personnel in future clashes. Psychologists should leave no doubt they are opponents, and not enablers, of these methods.

Add comment August 30th, 2008

APA Referendum: Why focus upon abusive settings?

The writers of the American Psychological Association referendum currently being voted upon have isued a statement explaining why the referendum focusses upon participation in abusive settings and not the actions of individual psychologists:

Why Settings?

By Dan Aalbers, Ruth Fallenbaum, & Brad Olson

Q. Why have you chosen to focus on settings rather than individual actions?

A: We have four main reasons for doing so:

1. Psychologists know from decades of research that good people do bad things in bad situations (cf. Ross and Nisbett, 1991, Zimbardo, 2007).  Psychologists subject to the chain of command in an inherently abusive environment (e.g., the CIA black sites and Guantanamo Bay) are no less vulnerable to “drift” than anyone else; it is time to start applying the hard-learned lessons of psychology to psychologists.

2. The presence of psychologists legitimizes the operations of these facilities.  This is because the Bush administration has redefined torture in a way that all but guarantees that psychologists will play a role in any given torture session.  To understand why one needs to explore the labyrinths of this administration’s legal defense of torture.

Most psychologists have heard of the infamous Yoo-Bybee legal memos that redefined torture so that only pain equivalent to that experienced during “death, organ failure or the permanent impairment of a significant body function” could be considered torture, but fewer psychologists know that the same memos incorporate psychologists into this administration’s legal defense of torture.

Yoo argues that torture can only take place if the perpetrator intends to cause prolonged mental harm:

“If a defendant has a good faith belief that his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture. A defendant could show that he acted in good faith by taking such steps as surveying professional literature, consulting with experts, or reviewing evidence gained from past experience.”

http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/yoo_army_torture_memo.pdf

Thus, by consulting with a psychologist an interrogator demonstrates that his or her intent is to extract information and not to cause harm; if the interrogator is a psychologist he or she can demonstrate good intent by reviewing the literature before an interrogation.  Of course members of other professions — say sociology — could also perform this same role but there is an advantage in using clinical psychologists since Yoo argues that one has only suffered ‘prolonged mental harm’ if the victim suffers from PTSD or (untreated) depression and psychologists can diagnose these disorders while other social scientists cannot:

“the development of a mental disorder such as posttraumatic stress disorder, which can last months or even years, or even chronic depression, which also can last for a considerable period of time if untreated, might satisfy the prolonged harm requirement”

http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/yoo_army_torture_memo.pdf

Psychologists hold the keys to these abusive settings because the clandestine services need psychologists to tell them that they are not torturing.   As Alexander Leighton once said: “the administrator uses social science the way a drunk uses a lamppost, for support rather than illumination.”

3. We find these settings inherently offensive.  Even without evidence of torture, we would object to the participation of psychologists in a system that buys people from mercenaries, ships them off to secret locations and holds them there for an indefinite period of time.

4. Although the accounts of prisoners who have been released and information emerging from military tribunals are beginning to provide first hand accounts about the treatment in Guantanamo Bay, we do not know what actions are being performed in the CIA black sites. These settings are - by their very nature - closed to scrutiny.  What little we do know comes from heavily redacted documents released through the freedom of information act requests and a handful of leaked documents.  We do know that abuse has taken place, we do know that psychologists have contributed to this abuse and we do know that those have who operate these facilities have resisted calls to allow a full, independent investigation.  Obviously, this is not a sound basis for oversight.

1 comment August 29th, 2008