Psyche, Science, and Society

Benjamin: Waterboarding for dummies

Mark Benjamin has put together all the chilling details on the CIA’s application of waterboarding from the publicly released documents. The details make clear that CIA waterboarding bore little relationship to that used in the Navy SERE School. BTW, Jeffrey Kaye recently revealed an internal JPRA memo showing that the agency decided that waterboarding was far from safe for its soldier-students:

Waterboarding for dummies
Internal CIA documents reveal a meticulous protocol that was far more brutal than Dick Cheney’s “dunk in the water”

By Mark Benjamin

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

“This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing,” said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. “The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.’ It just sounds like lunacy,” he said. “This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine.”

These torture guidelines were contained in a ream of internal government documents made public over the past year, including a legal review of Bush-era CIA interrogations by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility released late last month.

Though public, the hundreds of pages of documents authorizing or later reviewing the agency’s “enhanced interrogation program” haven’t been mined for waterboarding details until now. While Bush-Cheney officials defended the legality and safety of waterboarding by noting the practice has been used to train U.S. service members to resist torture, the documents show that the agency’s methods went far beyond anything ever done to a soldier during training. U.S. soldiers, for example, were generally waterboarded with a cloth over their face one time, never more than twice, for about 20 seconds, the CIA admits in its own documents.

These memos show the CIA went much further than that with terror suspects, using huge and dangerous quantities of liquid over long periods of time. The CIA’s waterboarding was “different” from training for elite soldiers, according to the Justice Department document released last month. “The difference was in the manner in which the detainee’s breathing was obstructed,” the document notes. In soldier training, “The interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth (on a soldier’s face) in a controlled manner,” DOJ wrote. “By contrast, the agency interrogator … continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee’s mouth and nose.”

One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood. Generally a concern only for marathon runners , who on extremely rare occasions drink that much water, hyponatremia could set in during a prolonged waterboarding session. A waterlogged, sodium-deprived prisoner might become confused and lethargic, slip into convulsions, enter a coma and die.

Therefore, “based on advice of medical personnel,” Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Steven Bradbury wrote in a May 10, 2005, memo authorizing continued use of waterboarding, “the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to reduce the possibility of hyponatremia.”

The agency used so much water there was also another risk: pneumonia resulting from detainees inhaling the fluid forced into their mouths and noses. Saline, the CIA argued, might reduce the risk of pneumonia when this occurred.

“The detainee might aspirate some of the water, and the resulting water in the lungs might lead to pneumonia,” Bradbury noted in the same memo. “To mitigate this risk, a potable saline solution is used in the procedure.”

That particular Bradbury memo laid out a precise and disturbing protocol for what went on in each waterboarding session. The CIA used a “specially designed” gurney for waterboarding, Bradbury wrote. After immobilizing a prisoner by strapping him down, interrogators then tilted the gurney to a 10-15 degree downward angle, with the detainee’s head at the lower end. They put a black cloth over his face and poured water, or saline, from a height of 6 to 18 inches, documents show. The slant of the gurney helped drive the water more directly into the prisoner’s nose and mouth. But the gurney could also be tilted upright quickly, in the event the prisoner stopped breathing.

Detainees would be strapped to the gurney for a two-hour “session.” During that session, the continuous flow of water onto a detainee’s face was not supposed to exceed 40 seconds during each pour. Interrogators could perform six separate 40-second pours during each session, for a total of four minutes of pouring. Detainees could be subjected to two of those two-hour sessions during a 24-hour period, which adds up to eight minutes of pouring. But the CIA’s guidelines say interrogators could pour water over the nose and mouth of a detainee for 12 minutes total during each 24-hour period. The documents do not explain the extra four minutes to get to 12.

Interrogators were instructed to pour the water when a detainee had just exhaled so that he would inhale during the pour. An interrogator was also allowed to force the water down a detainee’s mouth and nose using his hands. “The interrogator may cup his hands around the detainee’s nose and mouth to dam the runoff,” the Bradbury memo notes. “In which case it would not be possible for the detainee to breathe during the application of the water.”

“We understand that water may enter – and accumulate in – the detainee’s mouth and nasal cavity, preventing him from breathing,” the memo admits.

Should a prisoner stop breathing during the procedure, the documents instructed interrogators to rapidly tilt the gurney to an upright position to help expel the saline. “If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose, and nasopharynx,” Bradbury wrote. “The gurney used for administering this technique is specially designed so that this can be accomplished very quickly if necessary.”

Documents drafted by CIA medical officials in 2003, about a year after the agency started using the waterboard, describe more aggressive procedures to get the water out and the subject breathing. “An unresponsive subject should be righted immediately,” the CIA Office of Medical Services ordered in its Sept. 4, 2003, medical guidelines for interrogations. “The interrogator should then deliver a sub-xyphoid thrust to expel the water.” (That’s a blow below the sternum, similar to the thrust delivered to a chocking victim in the Heimlich maneuver.)

But even those steps might not force the prisoner to resume breathing. Waterboarding, according to the Bradbury memo, could produce “spasms of the larynx” that might keep a prisoner from breathing “even when the application of water is stopped and the detainee is returned to an upright position.” In such cases, Bradbury wrote, “a qualified physician would immediately intervene to address the problem and, if necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy.” The agency required that “necessary emergency medical equipment” be kept readily available for that procedure. The documents do not say if doctors ever performed a tracheotomy on a prisoner.

The doctors were also present to monitor the detainee “to ensure that he does not develop respiratory distress.” A leaked 2007 report from the International Committee of the Red Cross says that meant the detainee’s finger was fixed with a pulse oxymeter, a device that measures the oxygen saturation level in the blood during the procedure. Doctors like Allen say this would allow interrogators to push a detainee close to death – but help them from crossing the line. “It is measuring in real time the oxygen content in the blood second by second,” Allen explained about the pulse oxymeter. “It basically allows them to push these prisoners more to the edge. With that, you can keep going. This is calibration of harm by health professionals.”

One of the weirdest details in the documents is the revelation that the agency placed detainees on liquid diets prior to the use of waterboarding. That’s because during waterboarding, “a detainee might vomit and then aspirate the emesis,” Bradbury wrote. In other words, breathe in his own vomit. The CIA recommended the use of Ensure Plus for the liquid diet.

Plowing through hundreds of pages of these documents is an unsettling experience. On one level, the detailed instructions can be seen as helping to carry out kinder, gentler waterboarding, with so much care and attention given to making sure detainees didn’t stop breathing, get pneumonia, breathe in their own vomit or die. But of course dead detainees tell no tales, so the CIA needed to keep many of its prisoners alive. It should be noted, though, that six human rights groups in 2007 released a report showing that 39 people who appeared to have gone into the CIA’s secret prison network haven’t shown up since. The careful attention to detail in the documents was also used to provide legal cover for the harsh and probably illegal interrogation tactics.

As brutal as the waterboarding process was, the memos also reveal that the Bush-era Justice Department authorized the CIA to use it in combination with other forms of torture. Specifically, a detainee could be kept awake for more than seven days straight by shackling his hands in a standing position to a bolt in the ceiling so he could never sit down. The agency diapered and hand-fed its detainees during this period before putting them on the waterboard. Another memo from Bradbury, also from 2005, says that in between waterboarding sessions, a detainee could be physically slammed into a wall, crammed into a small box, placed in “stress positions” to increase discomfort and doused with cold water, among other things.

The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. “In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks,” the CIA’s Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. “Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness.”

The agency’s medical guidelines say that after a case of “psychological resignation” by a detainee on the waterboard, an interrogator had to get approval from a CIA doctor before doing it again.

The memo also contains a last, little-noticed paragraph that may be the most disturbing of all. It seems to say that the detainees subjected to waterboarding were also guinea pigs. The language is eerily reminiscent of the very reasons the Nuremberg Code was written in the first place. That paragraph reads as follows:

“NOTE: In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”

Add comment March 9th, 2010

Scoundrel Time: Rachel Maddow on the Al Qaeda Everyone

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And then this followup:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Add comment March 6th, 2010

Alexander: Thiessen is just Courting Fear

I just posted an appeal for protest of the Washington Post’s hiring of torture promoter Mark Thiessen. In a Slate piece today, former Air Force interrogator Matthew Alexander dissects Thiessen’s dangerous nonsense. Read Alexander’s article and then sign the Media Matters for America petition:

Courting Fear
A former military interrogator unpacks the errors and fear-mongering in Marc Thiessen’s Courting Disaster.

By Mattew Alexander

My gut reaction on reading Marc Thiessen’s new book, Courting Disaster, was: “Why is a speechwriter who’s never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert on interrogation and national security?” Certainly, everyone is entitled to a voice in the debate over the lawfulness and efficacy of President Bush’s abusive interrogation program, regardless of qualifications. But if you’re not an expert on a subject, shouldn’t you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists. Not once does he cite Army Doctrine—which warns of the negative consequences of torture and abuse. Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense’s opening statement in a war crimes trial.

While many of Thiessen’s opinions are appalling from a moral perspective (he justifies torture and abuse through the religious writings of St. Thomas Aquinas), the book is comprised of errors, omissions, and a whopping dose of fear-mongering. I’ll concentrate here on his worst misstatements and why his conclusions ultimately make us less safe.

First, Thiessen promulgates a theory that Islamic extremists are uniquely deserving of torture because they are doctrinally obligated to resist cooperating, after which they may disclose information. Of course this isn’t unique to Islamic extremists. The U.S. military’s own Code of Conduct and the resistance training given American soldiers impose the exact same requirements. Article V, pertaining to interrogations states: I will evade answering further questions to the utmost of my ability. Moreover, regardless of our enemy’s resistance philosophy, we have legal obligations to treat them humanely. If an American soldier is captured, would we want his obligation to resist turned into a justification that allows him to be water-boarded into cooperating?

Thiessen also asserts that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was not rendered ineffective after his capture (and was still an active combatant) because he had knowledge of future attacks. The CIA was thus justified in torturing him. But every captured enemy has information of future plans or other valuable information about capabilities. Thiessen’s justification could be used to water-board everyone we capture. The standard for detainee treatment is not a sliding scale based on a particular captive’s knowledge. It’s a constant based on law and our principles.

Thiessen also argues that we will never know what other information we would have gotten out of KSM had we not used torture and abuse. But we do know. We need only examine the success of numerous professional interrogators against high-ranking members of al-Qaida. There is Eric Maddox, the U.S. Army interrogator who located Saddam Hussein (as told in his excellent book Mission: Black List #1).There is also Ali Soufan, the FBI agent who successfully interrogated Abu Zubaydah. In Iraq, my own team successfully interrogated many mid- and high-level leaders of al-Qaida while hunting Abu Musab Al Zarqawi. Serious interrogators have little doubt that we would have gotten better information from KSM, and sooner, had the interrogations been conducted by professional interrogators using noncoercive techniques.

Another mischaracterization in Courting Disaster is Thiessen’s claim that CIA water-boarding is identical to the water-boarding given American troops in training. Thiessen calls it “absurd” to believe we would torture our own troops. But if it were the same as the training given American troops, detainees would be told beforehand that it’s temporary and voluntary; they’d have a codeword to make it stop at any time; and be reassured that it would not harm them permanently. Real water-boarding—unlike resistance training—exploits the real fear of death. The detainee does not know when, or if, it will stop. This is no different than charging the slide of a pistol and pointing it at a prisoner’s head. The soldier holding the pistol may have taken precautions (removing the bullets from the magazine and/or getting the Justice Department to produce memos calling it legal), but it’s still illegal, as the military courts determined when an American soldier did just this in Afghanistan. Threatening prisoners with death or physical harm is torture. That’s precisely why the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Conventions Against Torture, U.S. law, and military regulations prohibit it.

The many omissions from Thiessen’s book are also telling. For instance, in citing case law regarding water-boarding as torture, he fails to mention the case of a Texas sheriff and his deputies who were convicted and sentenced to four years in prison for water-boarding prisoners. (The John Yoo torture memos conveniently disregarded this precedent as well.) Thiessen states that water-boarding depicted at Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia is different because it involved dunking a prisoner’s head in a tub of water. But there is a painting at Tuol Sleng of a victim being tortured in the same position CIA interrogators used. For a man so obsessed with tiny details that define away and excuse torture, Thiessen should have caught a large detail that spotlights it.

Throughout his book, Thiessen comes back to a single argument: Abusing prisoners is acceptable because it saves lives. But Army regulations prohibit coercion without exception. Thiessen never bothers to cite military doctrine in his research. Had he read the Army Field Manual’s instructions, he would have to answer for the fact that it cautions: “Revelation of use of torture by US personnel will bring discredit upon the US and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It may also place US and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse by their captors.” Torture makes Americans less safe, not more so. The fact that al-Qaida would use Bush’s abusive interrogation policy to recruit new fighters was not a surprise that cropped up after Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. It was anticipated and codified into Army doctrine long before.

Thiessen argues fatuously that KSM had to be water-boarded because another attack could have been imminent. Thiessen’s juvenile metaphor of KSM giving us the “cover of the puzzle box” to which we had only the pieces displays his ignorance about assembling intelligence clues. His source for this oversimplified view of the intelligence collection process? Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, who is at the top of the list of culpability for war crimes. We already knew what the “puzzle box cover” looked liked after the first World Trade Center bombing. In fact, military intelligence analysts knew what it looked like after the bombing of the Beirut barracks, Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, and the U.S. Embassies in Africa. We didn’t need the puzzle cover box. What we did need was the location of Osama Bin Laden, but KSM never gave that up. Every al-Qaida operational commander knows he can give up details already known by U.S. intelligence or information about operations below them and their organization will survive. Their objective is to protect those above them on the ladder, which KSM did astoundingly well. So much for the effectiveness of water-boarding.

Throughout this book, Thiessen argues that the number of detainees water-boarded is just three. He claims that because very few prisoners were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, we are not inquisitors. But we don’t know the exact numbers because there’s never been an independent commission to investigate. The best we can do is an FBI inspector general report released in May 2008 that found FBI agents witnessed hundreds of cases of torture and abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay. Since FBI agents are only present for, at most, 3 percent of all interrogations, you can extrapolate that U.S. torture victims number in the thousands. That’s assuming we know all the prisons. The FBI I.G. report and other released documents suggest through their redactions that we do not, as does other recent journalistic reporting. Maybe our numbers are lower than the inquisition, but the law is blind to such metrics. After reading Thiessen’s insider revelations, we do know that the rationales were the same.

Thiessen and the torture apologists mock every American soldier who has followed the rules of law and ethical warfare. He insults every interrogator who has learned to elicit information without resorting to medieval abuses. The America that I know and signed up to defend does not stand exclusively for security. It also stands for freedom, justice, and liberty. It stands for universal rights afforded to every human being (even unlawful combatants or “detained persons”). America, as Thiessen surely has written into many a presidential speech, is a beacon of light precisely because it represents the protection of basic human rights. Yet, in Courting Disaster, Thiessen thoroughly villainizes those who defend individual rights against the state (such as members of the Center for Constitutional Rights). Thiessen’s ideology represents exactly what we are fighting against in the battle with Islamic extremism—the regression of human rights and the sacrifice of individual protections to the state.

Our current president is keeping us safe by denying al-Qaida the ability to recruit. President Obama, unlike Thiessen or his former boss, understands that you don’t win this conflict by stopping individual terrorist attacks. You win it by choking off the terrorists’ lifeblood: new fighters. We will never be able to measure how many American lives are saved because of President Obama’s leadership on this issue. But even if lives saved were the only justification for brutal interrogation, more Americans will be endangered by this experiment with torture than saved. This, like so many others, is a fact Thiessen conveniently ignores. Or, perhaps, his book has less to do with courting disaster than courting fear.

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Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym) is a former senior military interrogator and author of How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, To Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq. He is currently a Fellow for the Open Society Institute.

March 3rd, 2010

American Psychological Association removes infamous “Nuremberg Defense” from ethics code, leaves other ethics loopholes

Last week, the American Psychological Association (APA) finally revised its ethics code so that it no longer contained the so-called “Nuremberg Defense,” allowing dispensing with professional ethics when they conflicted with “law, regulations, other governing legal authority.” This clause was added in 2002, at the heyday of the Bush administration.  APA dissidents, retired military personnel, ethicists,and human rights advocates have long pushed for its removal.

A number of military psychologists who served in or trained the Behavioral Science Consultation Team at Guantanamo (BSCT) had opposed change in this code. Not coincidentally, this section had been emphasized in the instructions for the BSCTs and in the APA’s report of the 2005 task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) where the APA let military-intelligence psychologists create ethics policy for the association.

The ethics code 1.02 has stated since 2002:

If psychologists’ ethical responsibilities conflict with law, regulations, or other governing legal authority, psychologists make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take steps to resolve the conflict. If the conflict is unresolvable via such means, psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority.

When the change goes into effect in June, this clause will essentially revert to the pre-2002 wording:

If psychologists’ ethical responsibilities conflict with law, regulations, or other governing legal authority, psychologists clarify the nature of the conflict, make known their commitment to the Ethics Code and take reasonable steps to resolve the conflict consistent with the General Principles and Ethical Standards of the Ethics Code. Under no circumstances may this standard be used to justify or defend violating human rights

The removal should be a cause for celebration. However, like every change in APA’s policies on psychologists providing interrogation support, this change is too little too late. APA leadership waited till over a year after the end of the Bush regime and its “enhanced interrogation” torture program before changing this clause which provided protection for psychologists aiding the torturers. While the Justice Department’s OLC torture memos provided legal protection, the APA policy complemented that protection by providing protection from future charges that psychologists aiding detainee abuse violated professional ethics.

While the infamous 1.02 is gone from the ethics code, the less well known but equally disturbing section 8.05 governing research without informed consent is still there. It allows dispensing with informed consent, the bedrock of professional ethics, whenever “law or federal or institutional regulations” say it is OK:

Psychologists may dispense with informed consent only (1) where research would not reasonably be assumed to create distress or harm and involves (a) the study of normal educational practices, curricula, or classroom management methods conducted in educational settings; (b) only anonymous questionnaires, naturalistic observations, or archival research for which disclosure of responses would not place participants at risk of criminal or civil liability or damage their financial standing, employability, or reputation , and confidentiality is protected; or (c) the study of factors related to job or organization effectiveness conducted in organizational settings for which there is no risk to participants’ employability, and confidentiality is protected or (2) where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations. [emphasis added]

Thus, research on detainees would be acceptable as long as institutional regulations (from the CIA or Defense Department, say) gave permission.

If the APA were really interested in removing loopholes in the ethics code, they would have changed this clause without prodding. I have been calling for change in this and another problematic research ethics clause for years. Unfortunately, the battle to remove loopholes in the ethics code allowing abuse will continue into the indefinite future.

March 1st, 2010

Rubenstein-Xenakis: Doctors Without Morals

In a New York Times Op Ed, Leonard Rubenstein and Brig. Gen.  [ret] Stephen Xenakis discuss the contrast between the investigation of the torture lawyers and the lack of any investigation of the torture physicians and psychologists:

Doctors Without Morals

By Leonard S. Rubenstein and Stephen N. Xenakis

After five years of investigation, the Justice Department has released its findings regarding the government lawyers who authorized waterboarding and other forms of torture during the interrogation of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. The report’s conclusion, that the lawyers exercised poor judgment but were not guilty of professional misconduct, is questionable at best. Still, the review reflects a commitment to a transparent investigation of professional behavior.

In contrast, the government doctors and psychologists who participated in and authorized the torture of detainees have escaped discipline, accountability or even internal investigation.

It is hardly news that medical staff at the C.I.A. and the Pentagon played a critical role in developing and carrying out torture procedures. Psychologists and at least one doctor designed or recommended coercive interrogation methods including sleep deprivation, stress positions, isolation and waterboarding. The military’s Behavioral Science Consultation Teams evaluated detainees, consulted their medical records to ascertain vulnerabilities and advised interrogators when to push harder for intelligence information.

Psychologists designed a program for new arrivals at Guantánamo that kept them in isolation to “enhance and exploit” their “disorientation and disorganization.” Medical officials monitored interrogations and ordered medical interventions so they could continue even when the detainee was in obvious distress. In one case, an interrogation log obtained by Time magazine shows, a medical corpsman ordered intravenous fluids to be administered to a dehydrated detainee even as loud music was played to deprive him of sleep.

When the C.I.A.’s inspector general challenged these “enhanced interrogation” methods, the agency’s Office of Medical Services was brought in to determine, in consultation with the Justice Department, whether the techniques inflicted severe mental pain or suffering, the legal definition of torture. Once again, doctors played a critical role, providing professional opinions that no severe pain or suffering was being inflicted.

According to Justice Department memos released last year, the medical service opined that sleep deprivation up to 180 hours didn’t qualify as torture. It determined that confinement in a dark, small space for 18 hours a day was acceptable. It said detainees could be exposed to cold air or hosed down with cold water for up to two-thirds of the time it takes for hypothermia to set in. And it advised that placing a detainee in handcuffs attached by a chain to a ceiling, then forcing him to stand with his feet shackled to a bolt in the floor, “does not result in significant pain for the subject.”

The service did allow that waterboarding could be dangerous, and that the experience of feeling unable to breathe is extremely frightening. But it noted that the C.I.A. had limited its use to 12 applications over two sessions within 24 hours, and to five days in any 30-day period. As a result, the lawyers noted the office’s “professional judgment that the use of the waterboard on a healthy individual subject to these limitations would be ‘medically acceptable.’”

The medical basis for these opinions was nonexistent. The Office of Medical Services cited no studies of individuals who had been subjected to these techniques. Its sources included a wilderness medical manual, the National Institute of Mental Health Web site and guidelines from the World Health Organization.

The only medical source cited by the service was a book by Dr. James Horne, a sleep expert at Loughborough University in Britain; when Dr. Horne learned that his book had been used as a reference, he said the C.I.A. had distorted his findings and misrepresented his research, and that its conclusions on sleep deprivation were nonsense.

Dr. Horne had used healthy volunteers who were subject to no other stresses and could withdraw at any time, while C.I.A. and Pentagon interrogators used a broad array of stresses in combination on the detainees. Sleep deprivation, he said, mixed with pain-inducing positioning, intimidation and a host of other stresses, would probably exhaust the body’s defense mechanisms, cause physical collapse and worsen existing illness. And that doesn’t begin to acknowledge the dire psychological consequences.

The shabbiness of the medical judgments, though, pales in comparison to the ethical breaches by the doctors and psychologists involved. Health professionals have a responsibility extending well beyond nonparticipation in torture; the historic maxim is, after all, “First do no harm.” These health professionals did the polar opposite.

Nevertheless, no agency — not the Pentagon, the C.I.A., state licensing boards or professional medical societies — has initiated any action to investigate, much less discipline, these individuals. They have ignored the gross and appalling violations by medical personnel. This is an unconscionable disservice to the thousands of ethical doctors and psychologists in the country’s service. It is not too late to begin investigations. They should start now.

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Leonard S. Rubenstein is a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Stephen N. Xenakis is a psychiatrist and a retired Army brigadier general.

March 1st, 2010

Torture psychologists wanted mock burial authorization. Yoo refused

Marcy Wheeler — emptywheel – has apparently figured out that the OPR report indicates that the CIA’s torture psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, wanted to use a mock burial, but that that was too much for John Yoo, unless he was given additional time to dream up a legal cover. Raw Story reports:

Bush’s torture psychologists wanted to use ‘mock burials’: report

By Raw Story

Two psychologists working on the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation techniques pushed for the use of “mock burials” on terror suspects, according to documents released by the Department of Justice.Blogger Marcy Wheeler reports that the Department of Justice rejected a request from psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell to give the CIA the power to pretend to bury terror suspects during interrogations in the years after the 9/11 attacks.

A report (PDF, 289 pages) from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, released last Friday, documents ten interrogation techniques approved by Bush administration lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

But Wheeler notes that the psychologists had requested twelve techniques. One of those two techniques has already been revealed to be prolonged diapering. Wheeler uncovers evidence that the other one was mock burial.

“There must have been significant discussion about the decision to exclude mock burial from the [list of approved enhanced interrogation techniques], because the reference to its exclusion in the report itself (PDF page 60 in the Final Report) includes a page and a half of redactions following the discussion of leaving it out,” Wheeler reports.

Wheeler also suggests that the revelations about mock burial could be potentially incriminating for the CIA.

“Any legal discussion of why mock burial would be a problem would focus on how torture statutes prohibit the threat of imminent death,” Wheeler writes.

“Yet after mock burial was specifically excluded as a torture technique, CIA torturers went on to threaten detainees with a power drill and a gun. In other words, someone at that CIA had already been told, specifically, that they could not use the threat of imminent death on detainees. But on at least two occasions, they did so anyway.”

A CIA inspector general’s report, released last summer, documented cases of CIA interrogators using “mock executions” to intimidate suspects, including one instance in which a gun was fired in an adjoining room to make a suspect think another prisoner had been shot.

Jessen and Mitchell, the two psychologists reportedly behind the idea to carry out mock burials, came from SERE, or “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape,” a military program designed to teach soldiers how to resist torture when captured. They were contracted to work for the CIA after 9/11, and were tasked with teaching CIA interrogators some of the harsh methods they learned to defend against at SERE. The techniques covered by SERE appear to be the basis for the enhanced interrogation program run under the Bush administration.

In 2008, the Pentagon banned the use of SERE techniques in interrogations.

February 25th, 2010

NYT: The torture lawyers

The New York Times editorial board understands the absurdity of the OPR report:

Poor judgment is an absurdly dismissive way to describe giving the green light to policies that have badly soiled America’s reputation and made it less safe.

The complete editorial:

The Torture Lawyers

New York Times Editorial

Is this really the state of ethics in the American legal profession? Government lawyers who abused their offices to give the president license to get away with torture did nothing that merits a review by the bar?

A five-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s ethics watchdogs recommended a disciplinary review for the two lawyers who produced the infamous torture memos for former President George W. Bush, but they were overruled by a more senior Justice Department official.

The original investigation found that the lawyers, John Yoo and Jay Bybee, had committed “professional misconduct” in a series of memos starting in August 2002. First, they defined torture so narrowly as to make it almost impossible to accuse a jailer of torturing a prisoner, and they finally concluded that President Bush was free to ignore any law on the conduct of war.

The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility said appropriate bar associations should be asked to look at the actions of Mr. Yoo, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mr. Bybee, who was rewarded for his political loyalty with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. It was a credible accounting, especially since some former officials, like Attorney General John Ashcroft, refused to cooperate and e-mails from Mr. Yoo were mysteriously missing.

But the more senior official, David Margolis, decided that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee only had shown “poor judgment” and should not be disciplined. Mr. Margolis did not dispute that Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee mangled legal reasoning and produced work that ultimately was repudiated by the Bush administration itself. He criticized the professional responsibility office’s investigation on procedural grounds and excused Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee by noting that everyone was frightened after Sept. 11, 2001, and that they were in a hurry.

Americans were indeed frightened after Sept. 11, and the Bush administration was in a great rush to torture prisoners. Responsible lawyers would have responded with extra vigilance, especially if, like Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee, they worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. When that office renders an opinion, it has the force of law within the executive branch. Poor judgment is an absurdly dismissive way to describe giving the green light to policies that have badly soiled America’s reputation and made it less safe.

As the dealings outlined in the original report underscore, the lawyers did not offer what most people think of as “legal advice.” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee were not acting as fair-minded analysts of the law but as facilitators of a scheme to evade it. The White House decision to brutalize detainees already had been made. Mr. Yoo and Mr. Bybee provided legal cover.

We were glad that the leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, Representative John Conyers Jr. and Senator Patrick Leahy, committed to holding hearings after the release of the Justice Department documents.

The attorney general, Eric Holder Jr., should expand the investigation into “rogue” interrogators he initiated last year to include officials responsible for facilitating torture. While he is at it, Mr. Holder should assign someone to look into the disappearance of Mr. Yoo’s e-mails.

The American Bar Association should decide whether its rules are adequate for deterring and punishing ethical failures by government lawyers.

The quest for real accountability must continue. The alternative is to leave torture open as a policy option for future administrations.

February 25th, 2010

Soldier waterboards four-year-old daughter

One of many reasons to be against torture is that the brutality is likely to be brought home, by the torturers, the witnesses, and those in our society who learn that torture is an acceptable way to deal with conflicts. A British paper, the Daily Mail, brings word that a US soldier has waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because had trouble with the alphabet!

U.S. soldier ‘waterboarded his own daughter, 4, because she couldn’t recite alphabet’

A soldier waterboarded his four-year-old daughter because she was unable to recite her alphabet.

Joshua Tabor admitted to police he had used the CIA torture technique because he was so angry.

As his daughter ’squirmed’ to get away, Tabor said he submerged her face three or four times until the water was lapping around her forehead and jawline.

Tabor, 27, who had won custody of his daughter only four weeks earlier, admitted choosing the punishment because the girl was terrified of water.

he practice of waterboarding was used by the CIA to break Al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Detainees had water poured over their face until they feared they would drown. President Barack Obama has since outlawed the practice.

Tabor, a soldier at the Lewis-McChord base in Tacoma, Washington, was arrested after being seen walking around his neighbourhood wearing a Kevlar military helmet and threatening to break windows.

Police discovered the alleged waterboarding when they went to his home in the Tacoma suburb of Yelm and spoke to his girlfriend.

She told them about the alleged torture and the terrified girl was found hiding in a closet, with bruising on her back and scratch marks on her neck and throat.

Asked how she got the bruises, the girl is said to have replied: ‘Daddy did it.’

During a police interview Tabor allegedly admitted grabbing his daughter, placing her on the kitchen counter and submerging her face into a bowl of water.

Sergeant Rob Carlson said the punishment was carried out because the girl would not recite the alphabet.

Police have not revealed Tabor’s military service, but his base is home to units that have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tabor has been charged with assault and ordered to remain on his base and have no contact with his daughter or girlfriend, who has not been named. He is due to appear in court this week.

The girl has been taken into care. Her natural mother lives in Kansas but Tabor had been granted custody by a court.

February 8th, 2010

Obama’s torture scorecard

North Carolina Stop Torture Now has published a Torture Scorecard for the Obama administration. [Available as a nice pdf here.] Unfortunately, it makes clear how disastrous the Obama administration has been for the cause of human rights and accountability.

BTW, I will be speaking on Psychology of denial and accountability  at the Stop Torture Now conference: Weaving a Net of Accountability: Taking on extraordinary rendition at the state and regional level, April 8-10.]:

Obama’s torture scorecard
A tortured record

President Barack Obama has failed to renounce extraordinary rendition of terrorism suspects—and has yet to hold the Bush and his administration accountable for torturing prisoners.

That’s the message from N.C. Stop Torture Now, which compiled this scorecard to grade the Obama administration on its efforts to curb human rights violations.

The group’s calls for investigations into the role of North Carolina companies in renditions and torture have been stonewalled by state and federal officials, who contend “it’s somebody’s else’s job,” says Christina Cowger, spokesperson for N.C. Stop Torture Now.

It plans to ask the state to create a commission that could call witnesses, compile and request public documents and create an official record of what has transpired in North Carolina.

Positives:

• Banned the use of torture in interrogations. [read report]
• Ordered closure of CIA-administered secret prisons. [read report]
• Ordered release of some torture memos written by previous administration officials. [read report]

Negatives:

• Failed to keep a commitment to close the Guantánamo prison camp by January 23, 2010.
• Is weighing a Department of Justice recommendation to continue holding detainees indefinitely, without charge, and with no opportunity to challenge their detention. [read report]
• Continues to capture and send individuals to a secret prison facility in Afghanistan, refusing the prisoners any right to challenge their detention and blocking the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their condition and treatment. [read report]
• Opposed or blocked legal actions aimed at gaining release of torture evidence, including a public commitment to release photographs of U.S. personnel engaging in torture of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. [read report]
• Worked to deny restorative justice to victims and survivors of U.S. torture, by arguing that perpetrators are shielded from civil remedies by the state secrets doctrine. [read report]
• Has delayed or is now withholding release of internal investigative reports on potential war crimes by former high U.S. government officials. [read report]
• Ignored Nuremberg precedents regarding the responsibility of policymakers for crimes by lesser officials carrying out their instructions. [read report]
• Threatened to end intelligence cooperation with Britain if an investigation there into torture of British nationals at Guantánamo and other U.S. facilities proceeds. [read report]
• Failed to direct an adequate investigation into the death of Guantánamo detainee Mohammed al-Hanashi, an elected leader among the detainees, whom the U.S. military claims killed himself days after finally winning the right to be represented by legal counsel. [read report] [read report]
• Opposed efforts to establish an independent public commission to investigate charges of torture and war crimes by U.S. officials, intelligence operatives and contractors. [read report]
• Evaded direct inquiries about the effort to quash war crimes investigations by officials in Spain. [read report]
• Decided to continue “extraordinary rendition,” or sending prisoners to be interrogated in countries where torture has been routine. Many of those flights have been conducted by North Carolina-based planes and pilots (Aero Contractors of Smithfield). [read report]
• Covered up suspicious deaths of detainees, apparently involving torture, at a secret CIA black site, “Camp No,” at Guantánamo, and opposed lawsuit (Al-Zahrani v. Rumsfeld) by family members of detainees who died. [read report] [read report]

Source: N.C. Stop Torture Now

February 8th, 2010

Scoundrel time: Susan Collins demagogues and lies about about terrorist interrogation

Susan Collins demagogued about how reading the attempted Christmas day bomber his Miranda rights demolished the ability to get intelligence from him. When caught out, she falls back on nonsense about a supposed “lack of consultation” that Andrea Mitchell demolishes:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

[H/t Crooks & Liars.]

In addition to the point about the cooperation of the bomber’s family, there is another point I haven’t seen made anywhere. The US was warned by the bomber’s father that his son posed a danger. If the father believed his son would be subjected to the “enhanced interrogation” [torture] tactics so beloved by conservatives, it is extremely unlikely that such a warning would have come. It is even likely that the threat of a military commission would have discouraged the family.

The point is that torture destroys the ability to gather intelligence. Sources will not turn in family or acquaintances to be tortured. But they are likely to turn in enemies, often with false accusations. Thus torture and an absence of due process discourage good intelligence and encourage bad.

Glenn Greenwald demolishes Collins in a piece where he takes on the right wing fiction ["lie"] that Constitutional rights only apply to American citizens:

Collins railed: “Once afforded the protection our Constitution guarantees American citizens, this foreign terrorist ‘lawyered up’ and stopped talking” (h/t). This notion that the protections of the Bill of Rights specifically and the Constitution generally apply only to the Government’s treatment of American citizens is blatantly, undeniably false — for multiple reasons — yet this myth is growing, as a result of being centrally featured in “War on Terror” propaganda.

First, the U.S. Supreme Court, in 2008, issued a highly publicized opinion, in Boumediene v. Bush, which, by itself, makes clear how false is the claim that the Constitution applies only to Americans. The Boumediene Court held that it was unconstitutional for the Military Commissions Act to deny habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo detainees, none of whom was an American citizen (indeed, the detainees were all foreign nationals outside of the U.S.). If the Constitution applied only to U.S. citizens, that decision would obviously be impossible. What’s more, although the decision was 5-4, none of the 9 Justices — and, indeed, not even the Bush administration — argued that the Constitution applies only to American citizens. That is such an inane, false, discredited proposition that no responsible person would ever make that claim.

What divided the Boumediene Court was the question of whether foreigners held by the U.S. military outside of the U.S. (as opposed to inside the U.S.) enjoy Constitutional protections. They debated how Guantanamo should be viewed in that regard (as foreign soil or something else). But not even the 4 dissenting judges believed — as Susan Collins and other claim — that Constitutional rights only extend to Americans. To the contrary, Justice Scalia, in his scathing dissent, approvingly quoted Justice Jackson in conceding that foreigners detained inside the U.S. are protected by the Constitution….

[B]asic common sense by itself should prevent people like Susan Collins from claiming the Constitution applies only to American citizens. There are millions of foreign nationals inside the U.S. at all times — not only illegally but also legally: as tourists, students, workers, Green Card holders, etc. Is there anyone who really believes that the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to them? If a foreign national is arrested and accused by the U.S. Government of committing a crime, does anyone believe they can be sentenced to prison without a jury trial, denied the right to face their accusers, have their property seized without due process, be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and be denied access to counsel? Anyone who claims that the Constitution only protects American citizens, but not foreigners, would necessarily have to claim that the U.S. Government could do all of that to foreign nationals. Does anyone believe that? Would it be Constitutionally permissible to own foreigners as slaves on the ground that the protections of the Constitution — including the Thirteenth Amendment — apply only to Americans, not foreigners?

February 4th, 2010