Psyche, Science, and Society

CIA paying $5 million to defend torture psychologists

The Associated Press reports that the CIA has promised $5 million to defend torture psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, far more than they pay to defend their own agents.

Officials: CIA gave Waterboarders $5M Legal Shield

By Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo

WASHINGTON (AP) – The CIA agreed to cover at least $5 million in legal fees for two contractors who were the architects of the agency’s interrogation program and personally conducted dozens of waterboarding sessions on terror detainees, former U.S. officials said.

The secret agreement means taxpayers are paying to defend the men in a federal investigation over an interrogation tactic the U.S. now says is torture. The deal is even more generous than the protections the agency typically provides its own officers, giving the two men access to more money to finance their defense.

It has long been known that psychologists Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen created the CIA’s interrogation program. But former U.S. intelligence officials said Mitchell and Jessen also repeatedly subjected terror suspects inside CIA-run secret prisons to waterboarding, a simulated drowning tactic.

The revelation of the contractors’ involvement is the first known confirmation of any individuals who conducted waterboarding at the so-called black sites, underscoring just how much the agency relied on outside help in its most sensitive interrogations.

Normally, CIA officers buy insurance to cover possible legal bills. It costs about $300 a year for $1 million in coverage. Today, the CIA pays the premiums for most officers, but at the height of the war on terrorism, officers had to pay half.

The Mitchell and Jessen arrangement, known as an “indemnity promise,” was structured differently. Unlike CIA officers, whose identities are classified, Mitchell and Jessen were public citizens who received some of the earliest scrutiny by reporters and lawmakers. The two wanted more protection.

The agency agreed to pay the legal bills for the psychologists’ firm, Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, directly from CIA accounts, according to several interviews with the former officials, who insisted on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The company has been embroiled in at least two high-profile Justice Department investigations, tapping the CIA to pay its legal bills. Neither Jamie Gorelick, who originally represented the company, nor Henry Schuelke, the current lawyer, returned messages seeking comment. Mitchell and Jessen also didn’t return calls for comment.

The CIA would not comment on any indemnity agreement.

“It’s been nearly eight years since waterboarding – an interrogation method used on three detainees – was last used as part of a terrorist detention program that no longer exists,” CIA spokesman George Little said.

After the terrorism attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mitchell and Jessen sold the government on an interrogation program for high-value al-Qaida members. The two psychologists had spent years training military officials to resist interrogations and, in doing so, had subjected U.S. troops to techniques such as forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation and waterboarding.

But those interrogations had always been training sessions at the military’s school known as SERE – Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape. They had never conducted any actual interrogations.

That changed in 2002 with the capture of suspected al-Qaida facilitator Abu Zubaydah (ah-BOO’ zoo-BY’-dah). The agency believed tougher-than-usual tactics were necessary to squeeze information from him, so Mitchell and Jessen flew to a secret CIA prison in Thailand to oversee Zubaydah’s interrogation.

The pair waterboarded Zubaydah 83 times, according to previously released records and former intelligence officials. Mitchell and Jessen did the bulk of the work, claiming they were the only ones who knew how to apply the techniques properly, the former officials said.

The waterboarding technique involved “binding the detainee to a bench with his feet elevated above his head,” formerly top-secret documents explain. “The detainee’s head is immobilized and an interrogator places a cloth over the detainee’s mouth and nose while pouring water onto the cloth in a controlled manner.”

The documents add that “airflow is restricted for 20 to 40 seconds and the technique produces the sensation of drowning and suffocation.” The session was not supposed to last more than 20 minutes.

The psychologists also waterboarded USS Cole bombing plotter Abd al-Nashiri (ahbd al-nuh-SHEE’-ree) twice in Thailand, according to former intelligence officials.

The role of Mitchell and Jessen in the interrogation of confessed Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a bit murkier.

At least one other interrogator was involved in those sessions, with the company providing support, a former official said. Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in Poland in 2003, according to documents and former intelligence officials.

The CIA inspector general concluded in a top secret report in 2004 that the waterboarding technique used by the CIA deviated from the rules outlined by the Justice Department and the common practice at SERE school. CIA interrogations involved far more water poured constantly over the prisoner, investigators said.

“One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the agency’s use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the agency’s technique is different because it is ‘for real’ and is more poignant and convincing,” the inspector general’s report said.

It was not clear whether Mitchell or Jessen made that remark.

Justice Department prosecutor John Durham is investigating whether any CIA officers or contractors, including Mitchell and Jessen, should face criminal charges.

In at least two instances, Mitchell and Jessen pushed back. During Zubaydah’s interrogation, the psychologists argued he had endured enough waterboarding, believing they had reached the point of “diminishing returns.” But CIA superiors told them to press forward, two former officials said.

In another case, Mitchell and Jessen successfully argued against waterboarding admitted terrorist Ramzi Binalshibh (RAM’-zee bin-al-SHEEB’) in Poland, the official said.

On top of the waterboarding case, Mitchell and Jessen also needed lawyers to help navigate the Justice Department’s investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videos.

Mitchell and Jessen were recorded interrogating Zubaydah and al-Nashiri and were eager to see those tapes destroyed, fearing their release would jeopardize their safety, former officials and others close to the matter said.

They often contacted senior CIA officials, urging them to destroy the tapes and asking what was taking so long, said a person familiar with the Durham investigation who insisted on anonymity because the case’s details remain sensitive. Finally the CIA’s top clandestine officer, Jose Rodriguez, made the decision to destroy the tapes in November 2005.

Durham investigated whether that was a crime. He subpoenaed Mitchell, Jessen & Associates last year, looking for calendars, e-mails and phone records showing contact between the contractors and Rodriguez or his chief of staff, according to a federal subpoena. They were ordered to appear before a grand jury in northern Virginia in August 2009.

Last month, Durham closed the tapes destruction investigation without filing charges.

2 comments December 17th, 2010

CIA brain electrode experiments challenged in lawsuit

It has widely been know that the cold war CIA conducted numerous experiments with LSD and other drugs on unwitting soldiers and civilians. They also conducted horrific studies of various mind-control techniques including the rather silly “psychic driving” of Montreal psychiatrist Ewan Cameron, a monster if ever there was one.

Now the Washington Post‘s Jeff Stein reports on a lawsuit by veterans who claim electrodes were planted in their brains by the CIA. Bizzare, but, alas, not implausible:

CIA brain experiments pursued in veterans’ suit

By Jeff Stein

The CIA is notorious for its Cold War-era experiments with LSD and other chemicals on unwitting citizens and soldiers. Details have emerged in books and articles beginning more than 30 years ago.

But if military veterans have their way in a California law suit, the spy agency’s quest to turn humans into robot-like assassins via electrodes planted in their brains will get far more exposure than the drugs the CIA tested on subjects ranging from soldiers to unwitting bar patrons and the clients of prostitutes.

It’s not just science fiction — or the imaginings of the mentally ill.

In 1961, a top CIA scientist reported in an internal memo that “the feasibility of remote control of activities in several species of animals has been demonstrated…Special investigations and evaluations will be conducted toward the application of selected elements of these techniques to man,” according to “The CIA and the Search for the Manchurian Candidate,” a 1979 book by former State Department intelligence officer John Marks.

“[T]his cold-blooded project,” Marks wrote, “was designed … for the delivery of chemical and biological agents or for ‘executive action-type operations,’ according to a document. ‘Executive action’ was the CIA’s euphemism for assassination.”

The CIA pursued such experiments because it was convinced the Soviets were doing the same.

Victims have sought justice for years, in vain. Now, almost 40 years later, a federal magistrate has ordered the CIA to produce records and witnesses about the LSD and other experiments “allegedly conducted on thousands of soldiers from 1950 through 1975,” according to news accounts.

U.S. Magistrate Judge John Larsen’s Nov. 17 order exempted the agency from having to testify about electrode tests on humans, but Gordon P. Erspamer, lead attorney for the veterans, says “we are pursuing this as well.”

“There is no question that these experiments were done,” Erspamer said by e-mail Tuesday, “but defendants say that they used private researchers and test subjects drawn from prisons, hospitals and nursing homes as subjects, not active duty military [personnel]. CIA said it had no one knowledgeable on this topic.”

Erspamer, senior counsel in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster, said “several” CIA witnesses “are…still alive,” naming some that have been publicly identified, but opting to keep secret others before he calls them.

Papers filed in the case describe “electrical devices implanted in brain tissue with electrodes in various regions, including the hippocampus, the hypothalamus, the frontal lobe (via the septum), the cortex and various other places,” Erspamer said, drawing on [research papers] (http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/documents/spytalkheathdocument.pdf) written by government scientists.

“We believe that one of our plaintiffs was given a septal implant at [Edgewood Arsenal] (www.edgewoodtestvets.org),” he said, based on an MRI he has “showing a ‘foreign body’ on the border between the septum and the frontal lobe.”

“A lot of this work was done out of Tulane University using a local state hospital and funding from a cut-out (front) organization called the Commonwealth Fund,” he continued, again drawing on the research papers.

“We tried to get docs from Tulane, but they told us that they were destroyed in the hurricane flooding.”

The CIA claims that at least some of the documents should remain classified as “state secrets.” But Magistrate Larson told the agency to come back with a better rationale, a “supplemental declaration explaining with heightened specificity” why the documents should be protected after all these years.

1 comment November 29th, 2010

CIA ordered to release cold war human research documents

guinea pigsguinea pigsIt is well known that the CIA conducted horrific experiments on many people, including US troops, during the cold war. A group of veterans is suing the government for using troops as human guinea pigs in studies of chemical, biological, and psychological weapons in the MKULTRA, Artichoke, Bluebeard and other CIA programs. The plaintiffs have just won a major victory as the judge has ruled that the CIA must release a broad range of documents on these experiments that they are still trying to hide.

The judge came near to accussing the CIA of lying in order to withhold the documents:

The CIA insisted discovery was unwarranted in its case, because it never funded or conducted drug research on military personnel.
Larson wasn’t convinced.
“[T]his court rejects the conclusion that the CIA necessarily lacks a nexus to Plaintiffs’ claims, and orders the CIA to respond in earnest” to the veterans’ requests, “particularly because defendants have presented evidence that would appear to cast doubt on that conclusion,” he wrote.

Now we need some brave judge to order the CIA to release documents on recent CIA research on detainees.

November 17th, 2010

Britain to compensate torture victims

Britain is light years ahead of the US in coming to terms with its government’s involvement in torture. In the latest development, the British government has agreed to pay millions of pounds compensation to 12 men, a number of whom were Guantanamo prisoners, who claim British government collusion in their torture. The BBC reports:

Government to compensate ex-Guantanamo Bay detainees

Around a dozen men who accused British security forces of colluding in their torture overseas are to get millions in compensation from the UK government.

Some of the men, who are all British citizens or residents, were detained at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba.

At least six of them alleged UK forces were complicit in their torture before they arrived at Guantanamo.

The Commons will debate the payout when Justice Secretary Ken Clarke makes a statement on Tuesday afternoon.

A written ministerial statement on the out-of-court settlement, which had been expected to be released on Tuesday morning, was withdrawn by the Ministry of Justice.

BBC chief political correspondent Laura Kuenssberg explained there was some concern whether a written statement was sufficient for an issue that was causing so much concern.

Lengthy negotiations

It is believed the government wanted to avoid a lengthy and costly court case which would also have put the British secret intelligence services under the spotlight.

Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil el Banna, Richard Belmar, Omar Deghayes, Binyam Mohamed and Martin Mubanga were among those who had begun High Court cases against the government.

They had claimed that UK intelligence agencies and three government departments were complicit in their torture and should have prevented it.

In May, the Court of Appeal ruled that the government was unable to rely on “secret evidence” to defend itself against the six cases.

Then, in July, the High Court ordered the release of some of the 500,000 documents relating to the case.

At least 60 government lawyers and officials have been working through the documents.

The settlement was believed to have been agreed after lengthy negotiations.

BBC political correspondent Ross Hawkins said the Intelligence and Security Committee and the National Audit Office would be briefed about the payments.

He said the government would now be able to move forward with plans for an inquiry, led by Sir Peter Gibson, into claims that UK security services were complicit in the torture of terror suspects.

Mr Mohamed’s solicitor, Sapna Malik, refused to comment on reports that her client will receive more than £1m in compenstation

She told the BBC: “I can’t confirm any details about the settlement package. All I can say is that the claims have been settled and the terms are confidential.”

She added: “Our client was horrendously treated over a period of almost seven years, with a significant degree of collusion from the security services in the UK.”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said of the payments: “It’s not very palatable but there is a price to be paid for lawlessness and torture in freedom’s name. There are torture victims who were entitled to expect protection from their country.

“The government now accepts that torture is never justified and we were all let down – let’s learn all the lessons and move on.”

Severely tortured

The Cabinet Office said: “The prime minister set out clearly in his statement to the House (of Commons) on July 6 that we need to deal with the totally unsatisfactory situation where for ‘the past few years, the reputation of our security services has been overshadowed by allegations about their involvement in the treatment of detainees held by other countries’.”

The UK security services have always denied any claims that they have used or condoned the use of torture.

Last month, the head of MI6, Sir John Sawers described torture as “illegal and abhorrent” and defended the service’s need for secrecy.

Mr Mohamed, from west London, was held in Pakistan in 2002 before US agencies moved him to Morocco, where he was severely tortured, before he was sent on to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

It later emerged that a British intelligence officer visited him in detention in Pakistan and that the CIA had told London what mistreatment he had suffered.

Mr Mohamed, 32, had alleged that his torturers in Morocco had asked questions supplied by MI5.

He was released in 2009, when allegations of British involvement in torture returned to prominence.

November 16th, 2010

Philadelphia Inquirer: Investigate torture crimes

The Philadelphia Inquirer editorializes in favor of a criminal investigation of CIA-Bush Administration torture:

But Was It a Crime?

Even after ruling against charging the CIA officers who destroyed videos of the brutal interrogation of terrorism suspects, a special prosecutor should still answer the critical question of whether crimes were depicted on the tapes. The long-delayed decision to forgo prosecuting anyone over the tapes’ destruction was disappointing, but at least it’s a hopeful sign that Justice Department officials say the investigation continues into whether agents resorted to illegal torture.

This is a case where the possible crimes are far more important than any cover-up.

The tactics reportedly depicted on the tapes included waterboarding, which simulates drowning, along with a host of other harsh interrogation methods used on detainees in secret CIA prisons overseas.

Conducted during the Bush administration with the approval of Justice Department lawyers, the program of harsh interrogations was curtailed by then-President George W. Bush. President Obama banned torture tactics upon taking office.

As the CIA’s chief operative involved in destroying the tapes, then-clandestine services director Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. certainly conveyed the impression that the tactics on the videotapes were deeply troubling. They “would make us look terrible,” Rodriguez said in an e-mail released by federal officials in response to a filing by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Indeed, what’s already known about CIA interrogations is enough to turn anyone’s stomach: 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, waterboarded 183 times; accused terrorist Abu Zubaydah, 83 times.

Other tactics, including slamming suspects’ heads into walls, stripping prisoners, and keeping them awake for hours, were also sanctioned at the highest levels – even by Bush himself, the former president admits in his new memoir, Decision Points.

Until now, the official government version has been that the tactics never exceeded the guidelines set down by Justice Department and White House lawyers.

But Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. expanded the purview of special prosecutor John Durham to include whether agents illegally tortured detainees.

Deciding that issue remains vital to restoring U.S. prestige as a nation that – no matter how much its safety is threatened – will always live by the rule of law.

November 15th, 2010

NYT covers ethics complaint against against torture psychologist Mitchell

The New York Times has finally covered last June’s ethics complaint against the CIA’s torture psychologist James Mitchell. BTW, the American Psychological Association is quoted as supporting the complaint against Mitchell. What is left out is the APA’s deep complicity with Mitchell and his activities, as detailed here and here.

Psychologist in Terror War Is Subject of Complaint

By Morgan Smith

The decision about whether an architect of Bush-era interrogation tactics will keep his license as a psychologist is in the hands of a Texas government agency.

A complaint against Dr. James E. Mitchell is now before the Texas State Board of Psychologists, alleging that he violated the profession’s rules of practice in helping the C.I.A. develop “enhanced interrogation techniques” for use in its so-called black prison sites during the Bush administration’s war on terror. Along with Dr. Bruce Jessen, a fellow military psychologist, Dr. Mitchell was a primary developer of post-Sept. 11 C.I.A. interrogation methods that are currently under a criminal torture investigation by the Department of Justice.

Dr. Mitchell, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article, parlayed his experience in training American soldiers to survive as prisoners of war into a lucrative consulting business with the C.I.A. He orchestrated — and, according to the complaint, participated in — the harsh interrogation of terror suspects using sexual humiliation and the drowning technique called waterboarding.

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor, and Dicky Grigg, an Austin lawyer, worked with a Texas psychologist, Jim L. H. Cox, to bring the complaint, which documents in lurid detail Dr. Mitchell’s role in the questioning of prisoners.

The complaint, which was brought in June, alleges that the doctor misrepresented his qualifications to the C.I.A., placing “his own career and financial aspirations above the safety of others” while designing a “torture regime” with a “complete lack of scientific basis.”

Mr. Margulies said he was pursuing the possibility of a similar action against Dr. Jessen, who is licensed in Idaho.

Mr. Margulies said Dr. Mitchell had never practiced psychology in Texas although through the years, he had maintained his license here and renewed it.

The severity of the accusations led the American Psychological Association to take the rare step of submitting a public comment to the Texas licensing board. The group’s letter said that if Dr. Mitchell were a member of the professional association — he is not — and if the accusations were true, he would be expelled.

The association’s ethics guidelines prohibit inhumane or abusive treatment of anyone, and there “are no circumstances in which that isn’t the case,” including wartime or threat of terrorism said Rhea Farberman, a spokeswoman.

A spokeswoman for the Texas board said she could not comment on the complaint, saying only that the board had yet to take disciplinary action against Dr. Mitchell, a process that typically takes about six months.

Mr. Margulies emphasized the board members’ importance in the process , calling them the “only gatekeepers” of the profession.

“They are either up to the challenge or not. This is their responsibility,” he said. “There is a psychologist out there who did these things. There’s no credible question about whether they happened. It’s been confirmed over and over again. And so the question is whether it matters.”

msmith@texastribune.org

November 14th, 2010

McGovern on the Bush torture boast

Ray McGovern comments on Bush’s torture boasting, and the silence by the Fawning Corporate Media, as he calls them:

Torture Sans Regrets
Bush Boasts About Waterboarding

By Ray McGovern

Former President George W. Bush continues to be beyond shame. Those favored with an advance copy of his memoir, Decision Points, say it paints a picture of a totally unapologetic Bush bragging, for example, about authorizing the CIA to waterboard 9/11 “mastermind,” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

According to newspaper accounts of the memoir, Bush says he was asked by the CIA for permission to subject KSM to the technique that creates the sensation of imminent drowning. His response was: “Damn right.”

For such a frank admission of high-level criminality, we can say, with ample justification, Shame on Bush. But that shame also sticks like Saran wrap to the rest of us – and especially to the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM), which has soft-pedaled the significance of Bush’s confession, and to his make-nice successor, Barack Obama, who has refused to demand any accountability.

However, if we are still a democracy, we are all complicit.

I don’t much care if this sounds judgmental. You see, I was alive during World War II when there was torture galore; then it was considered a grave offense. The Nuremberg Tribunals tried and convicted Germany’s leaders for torture and other war crimes. In the war’s aftermath, there were a very few serious people arguing that the world should simply look forward, not backwards.  The vast majority knew there had to be a reckoning, even amid the many serious crises that were facing a war-ravaged world.

The chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, insisted that the civilized world had no choice but to demand justice. He looked the Nazi leaders straight in the eye and told the court:

“No charity can disguise the fact that the forces which these defendants represent … are the darkest and most sinister force in society,” Jackson said. “By their fruits we best know them. Their acts have bathed the world in blood and set civilization back a century.  They have subjected their European neighbors to every outrage and torture. …

“The real complaining party at your bar is civilization. … Civilization asks whether law is so laggard as to be utterly helpless to deal with crimes of this magnitude by criminals of this order of importance.”

The prescient Jackson foresaw a time when not just the vanquished Nazis, but also America’s own leaders might deserve to be put in the dock:

“But the ultimate step in avoiding periodic wars … is to make statesmen responsible to law. And let me make clear that while this law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve any useful purpose it must condemn, aggression by any other nations, including those which sit here now in judgment.”

Beyond Nuremberg

Sadly, it is now clear that U.S. officials do not believe they should be held to that universal standard, and that the Nuremberg principles and other international laws need not apply to decisions emanating from the White House.

Rather than facing a stern judgment for his criminal actions, including approving torture and authorizing aggressive war against Iraq, George Bush is about to be lionized in Dallas over his presidential library, in bookstores for his memoir, and in the FCM. Two articles in the New York Times’ “Week in Review” section on Sunday cited Bush’s memoir as a possible turning point for Americans viewing the ex-President more favorably. Neither article made any mention of Bush’s “Damn right” admission of ordering torture.

Reporter Peter Baker wrote, “Perhaps it is time to think about whether America has begun to reconsider its 43rd president.” Columnist Maureen Dowd faulted “W’s decision-making” but said “his story-telling is good.”

In his memoir, Bush exudes confidence that he can achieve the resurrection of his popularity even as he boasts about his role on torture. It was a mark of almost inconceivable hubris that he would callously admit, this time in writing, his authorization of waterboarding.

But he did make that admission, which lobs the ball into our court as American citizens. It is indeed time for the kind of judgment Justice Jackson envisioned, not a celebratory book tour. Nor is it time for breaking ground on a new presidential library to further cover up crimes and falsehoods under a veneer of neo-con “scholarship.” (Progressives in Dallas have taken to calling Bush’s new structure a “lie-bury.”)

Bush’s confidence – or arrogance – can be traced, in part, to the power and tenacity of his acolytes, especially the neocons who remain very influential in Washington.

But blame also must fall on cynical politicians, especially in the House of Representatives, who thought they could maximize Democratic gains in 2006 and 2008 by ignoring their solemn oath to honor the Constitution of the United States. Forget the Founders, who took great pains to incorporate in the Constitution an orderly process for impeaching and removing senior officials guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors, foreseeing a time when that might be required.

The timid, calculating Democratic leadership wimped out when it had the chance – actually, when it had a Constitutional as well as moral obligation – to investigate, to build public support for action, and to hold Bush accountable.

Misguided Appeasement

Now, with the Republicans “shellacking” the Democrats on Nov. 2 and returning to power in the House, here’s a question for the outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her main malleable man, Judiciary Committee chair John Conyers: How’s all that appeasement workin’ for ya?

Shame, as well, on the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM) for joining Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney in stoking the hysteria that set the stage for the torture and then for caving in to White House pressure to avoid calling torture torture.

Last but hardly least, shame on Bush’s timid successor. Every time I hear that Obama is a former professor of Constitutional law I find myself muttering, “And that would be the constitution of which country?” The President’s soaring rhetoric falls flat fast the moment you stop to ponder how he has betrayed his oath to see to it that the laws are faithfully executed — in this case, by holding self-confessed torturers accountable.

Shame, too, on those of us who decide to remain silent as Bush openly brags about how he personally approved the use of controlled-drowning for interrogation. The Spanish Inquisitors who applied for the first patent on waterboarding had no qualms calling it what it is — tortura de agua.

“Unequivocally torture” is how U.S. Brigadier General David Irvine described waterboarding, after teaching POW interrogation and military law for 18 years.

Signs of the Times

Before some of the revelations of the Bush book hit the media last week, I had been wondering how much light, if any, the memoir would shed on what Bush euphemistically labeled an “alternative set of procedures for interrogation.”

Call me naïve, but I had found it too much of a stretch to visualize a former president of the United States admitting in writing to having ordered waterboarding, the same technique for which Japanese and American soldiers have been tried, convicted and punished.

I am now trying to come to grips with the notion that I have been living in the past, the kind of past that Bush lawyer Alberto Gonzales would call “quaint” and “obsolete” (adjectives he applied to the Geneva Conventions), a past inspired by the Nuremberg principles, where there was at least a modicum of respect for the law—and such a thing a shame.

For over five months now, I have been unable to get out of my head the photo of a relaxed, tuxedo-clad George W. Bush in an arm-chair being interviewed after a speech in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on June 2. He says nonchalantly:

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.” [But waterboarding doesn’t save lives—just the opposite; see below.]

Cavalier Torturer

Since I had not been able to shake that insipid image of the cavalier torturer in the armchair, there is little excuse for my being surprised at what Bush writes in his memoir about his role in ordering torture and the pride he takes in having done so.

I should have been fully prepared for Decision Points, in which the counterfeit cowboy assumes the very same posture of in-your-face-and-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it-when-even-the-wimps-sworn-to-enforce-the-law-are-too-timid-to-do-so.

I have seen much change in the body politic since I arrived in Washington, DC, almost 48 years ago. There is one change, however, that dwarfs all others in significance. It is that the country no longer has, in any real sense, a free media. Read Jefferson and Madison on the importance of a free media to preserving a democracy and you will be reminded of how very BIG this change really is.

Don’t believe me?  This coming week, watch how the media gives George W. Bush a stay-out-of-jail pass as he starts to peddle his lie-infested memoir on TV and in bookstores. Watch how the moneyed interests he served lionize him at the groundbreaking for Bush’s “Presidential Center” in Dallas on Nov. 16.

The accomplices of the FCM can be counted on to suppress the truth about Bush and about their own complicity in cheerleading for war, torture and the rest. As is well known, cheerleading is a team effort demanding equal enthusiasm by all.

Maybe this is the real reason why NBC chose this particular time to put Keith Olbermann on leave without pay. Olbermann would never quite “get with the program.”

Unlike most of his pundit colleagues, he was uncomfortable buying into the wisdom of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who famously said:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

How does the Big Lie technique translate to today? Simple. We will be getting a steady diet of this kind of punditry: waterboarding is merely something that a bunch of liberals associate with torture. And, besides, we waterboarded some of our own servicemen to show them what it was like (as if no one has the mental capacity to distinguish between a demonstration and the real thing). And, Bush’s confidence was bolstered by the results of his painstaking efforts to acquire guidance from both the legal and the medical profession. Right?

And most of the lawyers and doctors of this great country will keep silent — even in the face of that kind of provocation.

Media Attention

With the book not yet formally released, it has been easier for the FCM to give Bush’s bragging on waterboarding relatively little attention.

Last Thursday, after Bush’s comment on torture hit the news, the Washington Post, to its credit, ran on page two a report by staff writer R. Jeffrey Smith titled “Bush says in memoir he approved waterboarding.” Smith even noted in his first paragraph that “simulated drownings [are] a practice that many international legal experts say was illicit torture.”

Smith highlights Bush’s admission that he answered, “Damn right,” when CIA thugs asked permission to waterboard “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for the first of 183 times, and indicates that Bush repeated the mantra that he would decide the same way again “to save lives.”

That was Thursday.  On Sunday the Post hastened to inject the customary “balance” with a long panegyric defending George W. Bush from “Five Myths” spread by “liberals” and other recalcitrants unwilling to give him his due.

Did you know, for example, that Bush was “personally invested in compassionate conservatism?” And that his “experience as a born-again Christian led him to empathize with individuals’ personal struggles and to respect the role of religion in civic life?” So writes Professor Julian Zelizer of Princeton, whom the Post apparently paid bucks for “balance.”

The Post must have given Zelizer an advance copy of Decision Points, since his 1,250-word essay dominating page three of Sunday’s Washington PostOutlook section was occasioned by the soon-to-be-unveiled memoir and shows he has read it carefully. Zelizer does not mention Bush’s comments on authorizing waterboarding — presumably because that can no longer be dismissed as a “myth.”

As for the bit about Bush being a born-again Christian, this reminded me of another Bush admirer, his father, telling the media shortly after 9/11 that his son George had read straight through the Bible — twice!

Yep; two times! But did he miss, twice, “Thou Shalt Not Kill?” Or Jesus’s instructions to his followers to love your enemy and to treat others as you yourself would want to be treated? Does he need an exegete to unpack those pronouncements?

Favorite Bumper Sticker

To assist with his continuing theological education—and help him keep in mind a key passage, I shall try to give the former president my favorite bumper sticker when I see him at the groundbreaking in Dallas. It reads:

“When Jesus said Love Your Enemies I think he probably meant not to kill them.”

Or torture them.

Meanwhile, the New York Times continues to steer well clear of any such suggestion that waterboarding might be torture. That it had had ample opportunity to read and digest an advance copy of the book was clear on Nov. 4 when it published a 1,700-word article by star reviewer, Michiko Kakutani.

Kakutani was super-careful. Her only allusion to what Bush wrote on waterboarding is buried in one sentence sandwiched into dead center between the revelation that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had access to “an Arabic translation of ‘Harry Potter’” and vapid comments on the economic meltdown. There she inserted Bush’s claim that there would have been “a greater risk that the country would be attacked,” had he not authorized waterboarding.

As for George W. Bush’s faith, Kakutani gives pride of place to Bush’s agonizing choice between religion and alcohol, quoting from the memoir: “Could I continue to grow closer to the Almighty or was alcohol becoming my god?”

(With all due respect, had I known earlier what direct instructions Bush would later claim he got from being close to the “Almighty,” I would have sent him a monthly carton of whatever whiskey they drink down there in Texas.)

In Sunday’s Times, Peter Baker’s article offers a generally flattering portrayal of Bush and his book; Baker also neglects to mention Bush’s “Damn Right” approval of waterboarding. Instead, he notes plaintively that “a good portion” of Americans “still revile him for invading Iraq, waterboarding terror suspects and presiding over the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”
Picky, picky, that portion of Americans!

“And yet” are the familiar words Baker, and Professor Zelizer, use to start their various exculpatory paragraphs. No one should be surprised to see the “and yet’s” dominate media coverage this week, when major promotion of the book gets under way. (That’s assuming anyone is so impolite as to ask about waterboarding/torture.)

Baker finishes his article with a familiar sentiment from Bush: “Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I’m comfortable with the fact that I won’t be around to hear it.” At least the man is consistent. Interviewing Bush for his panegyric, Bush at War, Bob Woodward asked then-President Bush what he anticipated with respect to his place in history. “History, we’ll all be dead,” was Bush’s reaction.

Caring Less…

I’d like to ask Peter Baker why he decided to tuck that particular quote onto the end of his Times article on Sunday. Does he perhaps think it cute to have had a President who couldn’t care less? Or what?

As for Bush himself, I suppose he does not feel there is much danger from the possibility that some writer might prepare an objective, truthful portrayal of his tenure in office any time soon. No doubt he takes reassurance from the virtual certainty that the FCM would drown any such author in decibels. And should someone suggest Bush be prosecuted for war crimes, as he should be, that person would likely be sent off to do penance with Keith Olbermann. (So glad I do not have to depend on the FCM to earn a living.)

…and Making Stuff Up

As for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, according to Reuters, Bush claims KSM was “difficult to break” but that waterboarding did the trick. “He disclosed plans to attack American targets with anthrax…among other breakthroughs,” writes Bush.

There he goes again, making stuff up. There is nothing to support that claim, and lots to refute it. For example, David Rose, a serious investigative journalist writing two years ago for Vanity Fair, conveyed the appraisal of a former senior CIA officer who read all the reports on Mohammed’s interrogation.

His verdict?  “Ninety percent of it was total “bullsh*t.” In addition, a former Pentagon analyst told Rose that the interrogation of Mohammed produced no actionable intelligence.

KSM himself has boasted derisively about sending CIA and FBI agents scurrying around the world on wild-goose chases, following up on the “leads” he gave them. I imagine that, by his 183rd waterboarding session, KSM may have identified terrorists he claimed were responsible for global warming.

Other of the Bush’s claims are demonstrably false — contradicted by the FBI, for example. Bush repeats the old saw about KSM yielding information leading to the capture of one of his top aides, Ramzi bin al-Shibh. But that information came from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional, legal methods.

The So-What Yawns

By and large, the “so-what” yawns that have greeted the initial reporting on torture is further testimony to the sorry fact that raw fear can lead to the forfeiture of the ability of Americans to distinguish between right and wrong — even regarding heinous offenses like torture. Sadly, this is made all the easier by the craven silence of the institutional churches and synagogues which, with very few exceptions, cannot find their voice — just as the Catholic and Lutheran churches could not find theirs during the Thirties in Germany.

Behind the stained glass, the end can now be subtly seen to justify the means, if that’s what it takes to head off contentiousness in the church community and keep pews and collection plates full. Anything goes; whatever is necessary to “keep us safe” is the mantra.

If a rare (prophetic) voice does enter the dialogue with a reminder that many of the prophets, including Jesus of Nazareth, were tortured to death, that voice is quickly silenced. Can’t you see? This is different; the terrorists hate us and are out to kill the lot of us.

What rankles most is the success Bush and Cheney have had, with the corporate media support on which they depend, in stoking Americans’ fear to the point where waterboarding and other forms of torture have become widely accepted as necessary to “keep us safe.”

Hidden is the supreme irony that torture has been doing just the opposite. In fact, it has proven the most powerful fillip to violence against us. Now who should find that surprising? Bush’s policy on interrogation has been directly linked by U.S. interrogators to the killing of American troops — in Iraq, for example.

The senior U.S. Air Force interrogation specialist who uses the name Matthew Alexander and who conducted more than 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised over 1,000 more lamented those additional killings, “It’s a hard pill to swallow, but true.” Alexander, a Bronze Star awardee, says that as many as 90 percent of the foreign fighters captured in Iraq said they joined the fight against the U.S. because of the torture conducted at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

Former General Counsel to the Navy Alberto Mora made the same point in testimony before Congress:

“There are serving U.S. flag-rank officers who maintain that the first and second identifiable causes of U.S. combat deaths in Iraq — as judged by their effectiveness in recruiting insurgent fighters into combat — are, respectively, the symbols of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.”

It is a given, then, that the Bush torture policy made Americans less — not more — safe.

Getting Desired Answers

Are waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques “highly effective,” as Bush reportedly claims in his memoir? The short answer is No.
On Sept. 6, 2006, the very day Bush first bragged publicly about his “alternative set of procedures for interrogation” and appealed for legislation allowing the CIA to continue using them, the then head of Army intelligence, Lt. Gen. John Kimmons, took a very different tack.

Conducting a Pentagon briefing shortly before the President gave his own speech on the other side of the Potomac, Kimmons underscored the fact that the revised Army manual for interrogation is in sync with the Geneva treaties.

Then, conceding past “transgressions and mistakes,” Kimmons updated something I learned 48 years ago as a second lieutenant in Army infantry/intelligence:

“No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that. I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.”

Grabbing the headlines the following day was Bush’s admission that the CIA has taken “high-value” captives to prisons abroad for interrogation using “tough” techniques prohibited by the revised Army field manual — and by Geneva, for that matter. Gen. Kimmons displayed uncommon courage in facing into that wind.  Too bad our political leaders are afraid to follow his example.

Question: If Bush’s “alternative set of procedures for interrogation” adds to the queuing in front of terrorist centers, so to speak, and if they don’t yield good intelligence, why use them? Former FBI Special Agent/Attorney Coleen Rowley and I have co-authored articles for Consortiumnews.com, which address this very understandable question.  Let me refer you especially to “‘Justifying’ Torture: Two Big Lies.”

Briefly, if your aim is to extract untruthful information (like “intelligence” on those non-existent but close ties between al-Qaeda and Iraq, remember?), nothing works better than torture. If you want to intimidate real or imagined troublemakers, torture is a natural for proving that what Lord Acton said about absolute power is horribly real.

And, if you have a streak of sadism, harsh interrogation techniques can give grand release.

You are not likely to have seen much in the FCM about Bush’s bent toward sadism. Justin Frank, MD, psychiatrist and professor at George Washington University, who authored Bush on the Couch, has helped us veteran intelligence officers explore the implications.  Dr Frank explains:

“Bush’s certitude that he is right gives him carte blanche for destructive behavior. He has always had a sadistic streak: from blowing up frogs, to shooting his siblings with a b-b-gun, to branding fraternity pledges with white-hot coat hangers.

“His comfort with cruelty is one reason he can be so jocular with reporters when talking about American casualties in Iraq. Instead of seeing a president in anguish, we watch him publicly joking about the absence of ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in Iraq, in the vain search for which so many young Americans died.”

Patchwork of False Beliefs

The following excerpt is from a Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity memorandum of July 27, 2007, which included some additional observations with regard to how Bush looks at truth, as suggested by Dr. Frank: “Dangers of a Cornered Bush”:

“His pathology is a patchwork of false beliefs and incomplete information woven into what he asserts is the whole truth… he lies — not just to us, but to himself as well…What makes lying so easy for Bush is his contempt — for language, for law, and for anybody who dares question him…. So his words mean nothing. That is very important for people to understand.”

A useful reminder as Bush comes back into public view in the coming weeks.
Torture is not wrong just because there are laws against it. There are laws against it because it is wrong. Intrinsically wrong; always wrong — like genocide, rape, slavery. And as one scholar put it, “to acknowledge that waterboarding is torture is like conceding that the sun rises in the east.”
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have each said that waterboarding is torture. But, sadly, neither has the guts to look in the rear-view mirror and do what the Constitution and common decency require.

In the wake of World War II, civilized nations came to a general consensus on all this, and the ensuing laws and international conventions reflected that consensus. George Bush is simply the most visible leader to employ lawyers and doctors — and even a stray theologian here and there — to help him carve out exceptions to that consensus.

True, on occasion a moral theologian will summon the courage to speak out. Professor William Schweiker of the Chicago Divinity School, for example, has heaped scorn on the familiar scenario of the lone knower of the facts whose torture is thought to be able to save millions of lives. He notes that such is “the stuff of bad spy movies and bad exam questions in ethics courses.”
With specific reference to waterboarding, Schweiker admonishes Christians, in particular:

“Not to fall prey to fear and questionable reasoning and thus continue to support an unjust and vile practice that demeans the nation’s highest political and moral ideals, even as it desecrates one of the most important practices and symbols (Baptism) of the Christian faith.”

From the Professional Military

Interrogator Matthew Alexander reports,

“I have been contacted by World War II veterans who were outraged that the Bush administration so easily dismissed the American principles that millions of veterans gave their lives to defend. They pointed out what I have said all along: we cannot become our enemy in trying to defeat him.”

World War II General George C. Marshall warned,

“Once an Army is involved in war, there is a beast in every fighting man which begins tugging at its chains. … A good officer must learn early on how to keep the beast under control both in his men and in himself.”

And in 1775, as the birth of America hung in the balance, General George Washington said,

“Should any American soldier be so base and infamous as to injure any prisoner…by such conduct they bring shame, disgrace and ruin to themselves and their country.”

With George W. Bush’s “Damn right” permission to waterboard – and the FCM’s flaccid response – America has certainly come a long way. Again, I believe we are all complicit—and that would be doubly so, if we emulate the passive stance of the “good Germans” of the Thirties.

Bush has brought the issue of torture to a head. Shame on us all, if we allow the recent history of waterboarding and other torture techniques to go unchallenged and to end up defining us.

**********

Ray McGovern was an Army officer and CIA analyst for almost 30 year. He now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades: Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair (Verso). He can be reached at: rrmcgovern@aol.com

November 8th, 2010

Miles on Bush authorizing torture, medical complicity, and the AMA’s silence

Noted bioethicist Steven Miles has sent this comment on recent reports that President Bush received medical assurances that waterboarding didn’t cause long-lasting harm before authorizing waterboarding. He notes the passivity of the American Medical Association [AA] in face of overwhelming evidence of organized medical complicity with torture and the AMA’s failure to call for investigation or accountability for those involved:

Former President Bush filled in the last link showing that medical complicity with torture was integral to the program.

Previous documents had shown that physician design and monitoring of coercive, abusive and torture interrogations was approved by Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and the Office of Medical Services of the CIA.

As President Bust put it in an interview posted on CNN yesterday, “Another technique was waterboarding, a process of simulated drowning. No doubt the procedure was tough, but medical experts assured the CIA that it did no lasting harm.” [added emphasis] In other words, the medical oversight and go-ahead for torture was incorporated into the very highest presidential authorization of torture.

It need not be reiterated that waterboarding has been prosecuted as torture by the United States and that President Bush’s statement on its efficacy has been repudiated by the government itself.

Previously, the policy foundation for medical complicity with torture has been traced as high as Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and to the CIA administrative structure. Now it goes all the way past the President’s lawyers to the President himself.

The AMA [American Medical Association] stands on the bad apple theory. It renounces medical complicity with torture in principle while not standing for independent truth commissions or censuring the physicians responsible. As the AMA’s chief ethics spokesperson puts it.

“AMA Institute for Ethics Director Matthew Wynia, MD, noted that, while the recent Fay Report on intelligence activities at Abu Ghraib calls for further investigation into the role of medical professionals and states that at least two prison medics failed to report abuse, there are also several “instances of doctors doing the right thing under adverse circumstances.”

The silence of AMA and IOM [Institute of Medicine] with regard to serious moral accountability for crimes against international law and for degradation of international standards of medical ethics becomes even more glaring.

In holding to standards against clinicians who participate in torture that are not backed up with accountability; in a silence that implies that the structural participation in torture is a “political” matter rather than the destruction of medical professionalism; in continuing to seek shelter in the discredited idea that US torture was made possible by a few medical bad apples, US medicine had separated itself from physicians who are fighting torture in Turkey and Egypt and is utterly unable to speak on behalf of their cause or protection.

November 7th, 2010

Bush personally authorized water torture; memoir

The Washington Post reports that, in his memoir, President Bush admits to personally authorizing waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

The former president defends his handling of some of the most intense controversies of his presidency, acknowledging at one point that he personally approved the waterboarding, or simulated drowning, of alleged Sept. 11 plotter Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a practice that the CIA has since forsworn and both President Obama and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. have described as torture barred by international law.

“Damn right,” Bush said he told the CIA when they sought his permission.

Good thing for Bush that the Constitution protects Presidents from ever being brought to account for their abuses.

Bush also reports that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld offered to resign after Abu Ghraib and Bush refused:

Bush writes that he still considers the war justified and said he believes it left America safer, despite the revelations of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib that prompted Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to offer his resignation privately to Bush. He said he turned Rumsfeld’s offer down because he feared the change in leadership would send a bad signal to U.S. troops.

November 3rd, 2010

Accountability for torture necessary to heal the sould of our nation

Three members of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture in Pasadena, representing three faiths, have published an oped

Healing the soul of a nation

By Rev. J. Edwin Bacon, Rabbi Joshua Levine-Grater and Dr. Maher Hathout

Prior to the Bush administration, many of us thought the practice of torture was beneath the United States government. It is certainly antithetical to our central values that all people are created equal and are endowed by certain inalienable rights – to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

In June, we joined with the National Religious Campaign Against Torture and interfaith religious leaders in decrying the evidence uncovered by Physicians for Human Rights that the U.S. government not only practiced torture but also experimented on detainees to refine torture techniques. While this month’s report of unethical medical experiments on Guatemalans in the 1940s elicited public apologies from the Obama administration and a commitment to a thorough investigation, the only response to the evidence of these more recent experiments involving torture has been public denial by the CIA and silence from the White House. Medical experimentation without consent is wrong wherever it takes place. We need to uncover the full truth about our government’s use of torture in order to begin healing our nation’s soul.

Thomas Merton was once asked the question, “What is the contemporary face of evil?” Merton’s answer was dehumanization. A whole host of immoral practices grow from one central cancerous thought: that certain lives are less valuable than others.

This lie has taken root in our time, for there is no life that is of less value than another. All of us have within our soul the living image of God. Every human being is sacred. When we do any harm to someone else, we have done that harm to God. Our practices of torture have unleashed into the world a flood of dehumanization, the effects of which we will feel and know for generations to come.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. believed that African-American people were not the only victims of racism. “Oppression has two victims,” he said. “Both the recipient and the perpetrator of racism are victims.” This is true of torture as well. We have reports of American soldiers who, having tortured detainees, are especially susceptible to suicide. Alyssa Petersen was one such soldier. She refused to participate in “enhanced interrogations” on naked detainees and days later took her own life. The official report said, “She could not be two people.” Alyssa Petersen could not escape the torture inflicted on her own mind, soul, and body by the acts she was tasked with committing.

In protecting persons from torture, we are also protecting those who would inflict torture. You cannot cause intentional pain to another, who bears the image of God, without suffering trauma in your own soul.

Truly, the victims of torture include both its victims and its perpetrators. To an important degree that includes us all.

Accordingly, healing for victims of torture must also include everyone.We must do everything we can to become agents of healing instead of oppression and torture. And true healing involves honest accountability.

That is why you and I have a moral responsibility to urge President Obama, Congress and Attorney General Holder to initiate an investigation and ensure safeguards that torture and involuntary human experimentation will never happen again in the name of the United States. President Obama has refused to do so, effectively sweeping it under the rug arguing that he wants to “look forwards, and not backwards.” But no victim can recover from the past by ignoring what occurred. The only way we can look forward with clarity of vision is to look backwards to heal what is wounded in our past. There is much moral reckoning that must be transacted. Trauma victims and trauma theory tell us that trauma cannot be healed unless and until it is acknowledged, reverenced, recognized and given a moral content.

We must alter the mindsets which allow for such heinous evils as torture. Allowing torture against human beings has become our new norm because of the blanket excuse, “They are terrorists.”

In this way we have replaced the title God gave to the human being – child of God. In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, we ask God to purify our conscience by God’s daily visitation. The Jewish tradition sees that each person is created in the image of God, as we read in the book of Genesis, and therefore each face is the face of God. The Koran tells us to honor the progeny of Adam.

This is our prayer for our nation, that by the visitation of God our actions toward other human beings might be realigned with God’s vision of them. The first step toward realigning our national conscience is openly and honestly accounting for U.S.-sponsored torture and the experimentation on human victims that bolstered torture practices. That is the only path to healing torture survivors. It is the only path to healing the soul of our nation. It is the only path to healing the soul of the world.

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Rev. J. Edwin Bacon is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. Maher Hathout is senior advisor of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Rabbi Joshua Levine-Grater is senior rabbi of Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.

October 23rd, 2010