Psyche, Science, and Society

Globe Op Ed: Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

I have a Op Ed in the Boston Globe today:

Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

By Stephen Soldz

WHEN MOST people think of psychologists, they think of a professional helping them with life’s emotional difficulties, or of a researcher studying human or animal behavior. Since the Bush administration and the war on terrorism have transformed our country, however, a new, more ominous image of psychologists has slowly seeped into public consciousness.

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer, in her new book, “The Dark Side,” reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of “learned helplessness.” Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will, and become totally dependent upon their captors.

At Guantanamo, the Red Cross described a system of psychological abuse as “tantamount to torture.” Psychologists, and some psychiatrists, helped interrogators “break down” detainees by exploiting information in their medical records. Thus, someone with an intense fear of dogs would be threatened with snarling dogs, while a person with a fear of being buried alive might be threatened with being sealed in a coffin.

When reports of these abuses surfaced, we psychologists looked to our largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, to take the lead in condemning them and taking measures to ensure that they would not recur. After all, these actions by psychologists violate the central principle of the APA’s ethics code: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”

The APA, however, failed to take clear action. While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association quickly and unequivocally condemned any involvement by its membership in such activities, APA leaders quibbled over whether psychologists had been present at the interrogations and questioned the motives of internal critics.

When the leadership appointed a task force on the ethics of psychologist involvement in interrogations, the report was strangely unsigned, and the members’ names were kept secret from APA members and the media. Finally, it was revealed that a majority of members were from the military-intelligence establishment, with four having served in chains of commands implicated in detainee abuses. Three of the four nonmilitary members have since denounced the task force process and two have called for the report to be rescinded.

The APA has since passed several antitorture resolutions - all of them full of loopholes - but has failed to take ethics enforcement action against a single psychologist for participating in abuses, despite publication two years ago of a detailed interrogation log showing the participation of a military psychologist in the abuse amounting to torture of a Guantanamo detainee.

Not surprisingly, unrest among APA members is growing. Many members, including the founder of the APA’s Practice Directorate and the former head of its Ethics Committee, have resigned in protest.

This month, ballots went out for a first-ever referendum to call a halt to psychologist participation in sites where international law is violated. And dissident New York psychologist Steven Reisner, a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, is running for the APA presidency. His principal campaign platform is for psychologists to be banned from participating in interrogations at US military detention centers, like Guantanamo Bay, that violate human rights and function outside of the Geneva Conventions. In the nomination phase Reisner received the most votes of the five candidates.

At our annual convention in Boston this month, other APA members and I will rally against association policies encouraging participation in detainee interrogations. We will be joined by community activists, human rights groups, and civil libertarians to demand that APA return to its fundamental principle of “Do no harm.” Psychologists owe it to their profession and to the cause of human rights to oppose abuses, not participate in them.

Stephen Soldz, psychologist and psychoanalyst, is professor and director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

1 comment August 10th, 2008

Fisk: On brutality and the death of Margaret Hassan

Robert Fisk manages to convey the horror of the last ten years of Western meddling in Iraq and its horrific effects through telling the story of the death of his friend Margaret hassan. He also makes clear that “freedom,” as in the freedom of Al Jazeera’s brave reporter to tell the truth, was always viewed as an enemy of the American efforts in Iraq:

The Tragic Last Moments of Margaret Hassan

When a renowned British aid worker was kidnapped in Iraq, the world was horrified. Her body was never recovered, but her execution was captured on video and sent to Al Jazeera, the Arab satellite channel. Robert Fisk watched it and reveals why it has never been broadcast

by Robert Fisk

She stands in the empty room, a deplorable, terrible, pitiful sight. Is it Margaret Hassan? Her family believe so, even though she is blindfolded. I’m not sure if videos like this should ever be seen - or perhaps the word is endured - but they are part of the dark history of Iraq, and staff of the Arab Al Jazeera satellite channel have grown used to watching some truly atrocious acts on their screens.

The “execution” - the cold-blooded, appalling murder of Margaret Hassan, the Care worker who was a friend as well as a contact of mine - is among the least terrible of the scenes that lie in the satellite channel’s archives.

Kidnapped by men in police uniforms, it is now November, 2004, and Margaret has already made her last appeal. Viewers saw her begging Tony Blair to help her, to withdraw British troops from southern Iraq. “I beg of you to help me,” she says in a voice of great distress. But there was then another tape which Al Jazeera refused to show, in which Margaret was coerced into claiming that she gave information to American officers at Baghdad airport. A man’s voice prompts her to keep to a text. “I admit that we worked with the occupation forces …” she says. It is untrue, of course. Margaret was against the whole Anglo-American invasion. She would never have spied on Iraqis.

Then comes the last tape. She is standing in that bare room in a white blouse, a blindfold over her face, her head slightly bowed and a man approaches her from behind holding a pistol. He points it at her head and places what appears to be an apple over the muzzle - a primitive form of silencer? And then squeezes the trigger. There is a click, an apparent misfire, and the man retreats to the right of the screen and then reappears. Margaret Hassan doesn’t move although she must have heard the click. The man is wearing a grubby grey and black checked shirt and ill-fitting, baggy trousers, a scarf concealing his face.

This time the gun fires and the woman utters a tiny sound, a kind of cry, almost a squeal of shock, and falls backwards onto the floor. The camera lingers on her. She has fallen onto a plastic sheet. And she just lies there. There is no visible blood, nor wound. It is over. Should such terrible things be seen? Margaret’s immensely brave Iraqi husband told me I had his permission to watch this, but still I feel guilty. I think it was only here, watching her death on a screen next to Al Jazeera’s studios more than three years later, that I realized Margaret Hassan was dead.

It was Margaret who took leukaemia medicines donated by readers of The Independent to the child cancer victims of Iraq back in 1998 after we discovered that hundreds of infants were dying in those areas where Western forces used depleted uranium munitions in the 1991 Gulf War. She was a proverbial tower of strength, and it was she - and she alone - who managed to persuade Saddam Hussein’s bureaucrats to let us bring the medicine into Iraq. The United Nations sanctions authorities had been our first hurdle, Saddam Hussein our second. It is all history. Like Margaret, all the children died.

“We’ve trained ourselves not to go to the maximum in our feelings when we see terrible things like this,” Ayman Gaballah, Al Jazeera’s deputy chief editor, says bleakly. And I can see why. There are other tapes, other outrages too terrible to show. George Bush wanted to bomb the station’s headquarters in Doha but staff have shown great sensitivity with what they show the world from Iraq. There is no proof that any of Al Jazeera’s reporters was ever tipped off about anti-American attacks before they happened - in Iraq, I investigated these claims in 2003 and 2004 - but plenty of proof that some things are too awful to see.

On one tape, a half-naked man is held to the floor while another produces a small butcher’s knife and slowly carves his way through the victim’s throat, the poor man’s shriek of pain dying in froths of blood until his head is eventually torn from his body.

Another tape shows 18 Iraqi policemen held captive against a demand for the release of Iraqi women prisoners. They are aged between 17 and 40 and stare at the camera hopelessly.

Al Jazeera aired the pictures and the written demands but then cut the next scene. It shows the 18 men trussed up and blindfolded in front of a ditch. A hooded man then fires into the back of one of their heads and - along with other men off-camera - goes from one body to the next, firing again and again. Some of the victims are still alive, their legs kicking and the hooded man goes to each one and fires again into their heads. Then, in the background, a bearded youth approaches the camera, holding an Islamic flag. He is singing.

For some in the Al Jazeera studios these archives are intensely personal. “I trained Ali Khatib - he was a great reporter,” I am told. “The war was almost declared at an end in Iraq and he went out with our cameraman to cover some story and, while he’s approaching an American checkpoint, you can hear an American soldier on the tape say ‘Stop - you have to go back’. And then the soldier just shot at them and killed both of them. Ali had got married two weeks earlier.”

For some, the videotapes will always be too much. When I met Margaret’s husband Tahseen in his Baghdad home after her murder, he was a picture of courage and mourning. There were terrible times. “I would come home and sit here and weep,” he told me then. “I would sit here sometimes and go out of my mind crying and sobbing. I don’t think insurgents did this. I don’t think Iraqi people did this … I couldn’t see the video that was released - not because she’s my wife, but because I can’t bear to see anyone assassinated.”

So who did murder Margaret Hassan? On the video of her apparent execution, there are no Islamic banners, no Muslim chants, no claim of responsibility, just the killer and the fatal shot. After her kidnap, Margaret - who once worked as an English-language newsreader on Saddam’s government television station in Baghdad - even found support among the anti-American insurgents; they issued a joint appeal for her release. Even Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qa’ida leader in Iraq who was later killed by the Americans, joined in the appeal. Margaret had worked in Palestinian camps in the 1960s and fought tirelessly for those thousands of Iraqis under her care in Iraq. If her husband’s suspicions were correct, then whose “foreign” hand took her away?

The tape leaves no clue. In Al Jazeera’s archives, it is difficult to escape this repository of death. The Americans fired a cruise missile at Al Jazeera’s Kabul office in 2001 after it had forwarded Osama bin Laden’s tapes to Doha. Then an American aircraft fired a missile at the station’s Baghdad office in 2003. That time, the Americans killed the bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub. His jacket and his last notes are today on the wall of Al Jazeera’s Doha head office. His staff had - for their own protection - earlier given the map coordinates of their Baghdad office to the US State Department. Reporters asked Tony Blair - on a post-prime-ministerial tour of the Doha offices - if Bush had really planned to bomb them. “Blair said something about ‘the need to move on’” one of them told me. “So we knew it was true.”

If Al Jazeera’s staff have paid a terrible price for their reporting and have been the witnesses to some of the ghastlier acts in Iraq, they appear to have the ferocious support of the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, who spends his millions funding the loss-making station.

Stories abound of the day that George Tenet - then America’s CIA chief - turned up in Qatar to give the Emir a dressing down for Al Jazeera’s reporting. There was a stiff row between the two men before the Emir walked out.

In Washington, he was invited to meet Vice-President Dick Cheney, only to find that Mr Cheney had a thick file on his desk when he walked in. It was Mr Cheney’s list of complaints against Al Jazeera. The Emir told him he would not discuss it. “Then that is the end of our meeting,” Mr Cheney announced. “It is,” the Emir apparently replied. And walked out. The “meeting” had lasted 30 seconds.

But those are the high points, the drama of Al Jazeera. The dark moments are on those terrible tapes. I asked some of the reporters how humans could commit such atrocities. None of them knew.

One suggested that 11 years of UN-imposed sanctions had somehow changed the mentality of Iraqis. And I do recall, back in 1998 - when Saddam still ruled Baghdad - an NGO official tried to explain to me what was happening to Iraqis. The Americans and British “want us to rebel against Saddam,” the official said. “They think we will be so broken, so shattered by this suffering that we will do anything - even give our own lives - to get rid of Saddam. The uprising against the Baath party failed in 1991 so now they are using cruder methods. But they are wrong. These people have been reduced to penury. They live in shit. And when you have no money and no food, you don’t worry about democracy or who your leaders are.”

That official was Margaret Hassan.

–Robert Fisk

Add comment August 9th, 2008

British blast porn at Shia prisoner

According to this report of abuse of a Mahdi Army commander, the British are fully equal to their “Coalition” partners, the Americans, in abusing detainees. So much for the “the British have learned from their long colonial history how to do it right” claims:

Iraq abuse claims: British troops ‘made Muslim commander hear porn videos’

· New abuse claims against soldiers in Iraq
· Detainee ’spent months in solitary confinement’

By Richard Norton-Taylor
The Guardian,

British soldiers forced a Shia militia commander to listen to pornographic videos, deprived him of sleep, repeatedly beat him, and kept him in solitary confinement for more than five months, according to fresh damning allegations against the conduct of UK troops in Basra.

A detailed account of the latest claims of unlawful treatment by British soldiers are contained in a 20-page witness statement, seen by the Guardian, of Ahmed Jawad al-Fartoosi, a leader of the radical Shia cleric Moqtada al Sadr’s militia, the Mahdi army. The Ministry of Defence said yesterday that the military police were investigating the allegations. Fartoosi was detained for more than two years, including nearly six months in solitary confinement. He was arrested in his Basra home in September 2005 and released late last year after British forces agreed to an Iraqi-sponsored deal with the militia.

He says he was beaten with rifle butts and blindfolded before he was put in a tank. For 12 hours he and his fellow detainees given no food and were prevented from going to the toilet.

He says he was taken to the British base at Shaibah, on the outskirts of Basra, where he spent 72 days in solitary confinement in a small cell with no ventilation, though he says he was provided with three cooked meals a day. On the third or fourth night, he says, soldiers brought a laptop and placed it on a window sill just outside his cell.

“After a short period of conversation in English it became clear to me that the DVD was showing porn. It was playing at the loudest possible volume. Thereafter for the next month the porn movies were played all night.” He says soldiers left porn magazines for him to see by the sinks and toilets. “It was very humiliating for me to be treated in this way by the British army. If they expected me to give in to my basic instincts they did not realise that I am not that kind of man … I was determined not be sexually aroused by this but it made me physically sick.”

Fartoosi says he was deprived of sleep. When he was taken to be interrogated, he says, a blanket was thrown over his head. He adds: “I was spun about for between 15-30 minutes to disorientate me.”

In April 2007 Fartoosi was driven to Basra airport, now the only British base in Basra. He says he was accused of killing a member of Basra council. He was repeatedly told he was being detained because he was “leader of the Mahdi army”, and that the evidence against him was secret.

He was eventually released, as a result of papers signed by the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, he learned later. Now living in Lebanon, according to his lawyers, Fartoosi identifies a number of British soldiers, including a senior officer, in his witness statement.

Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, has written to Des Browne, the defence secretary, saying Fartoosi is entitled to substantial damages for false imprisonment and human rights violations.

Shiner said yesterday: “The use of sensory bombardment and, in particular, the pornographic films to attempt to break down this male Muslim shows that the UK were doing exactly the same as the US, using coercive interrogation techniques developed in the 1960s and especially in Northern Ireland, and then refined to fit the so-called ‘war on terror’.”

The MoD said in a statement: “Mr Al-Fartoosi, who was a senior commander in the Jaish al-Mahdi militia in Basra, was interned for the protection of UK forces and Iraqi nationals. We are not aware of any allegations of abuse being made by him during his internment. Claims are now being investigated by the Special Investigation Branch of the Royal Military Police.”

Add comment August 2nd, 2008

McCain finds mass killing funny

McCain appears to have fine qualifications to be US President. He can joke about the mass murder of others:

McCain jokes about killing Iranians with cigarettes

U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, on Tuesday reacted to a report of rising U.S. cigarette exports to the country by saying it may be “a way of killing ‘em.”

McCain, known for acerbic comments and for sometimes firing verbally from the hip, was responding to a report that U.S. exports to Iran rose tenfold during President George W. Bush’s term in office despite hostility between the two states.

A rise in cigarette sales was a big part of that, according to an Associated Press analysis of seven years of U.S. trade figures.

“Maybe that’s a way of killing ‘em,” McCain said to reporters during a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “I meant that as a joke, as a person who hasn’t had a cigarette in 28 years, 29 years,” he added, laughing.

He declined further comment on the report.

At a campaign meeting in South Carolina last year the Arizona senator, asked if there is a plan to attack Iran, began his answer with a variation on the lyrics of a well-known pop song, Barbara Ann.

“You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?” he said, then sang “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” before discussing what he considered Iran’s serious threat to Israel and international security.

Tension is high between the two countries over Iran’s nuclear program, which Washington says is aimed at making an atomic bomb but Tehran says is for generating energy. There has been media speculation of a possible U.S. or Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Add comment July 9th, 2008

American “justice,” NOT, says UN Special Rapporteu

The UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions has denounced many aspects of US justice, both at home, at Guantanamo, and in occupied Iraq Afghanistan:

UN envoy rips US violations in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan
Rapporteur condemns rights abuses at home, too

By Thalif Deen

Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS: After a two-week fact-finding tour of US prison and detention facilities, a UN human rights investigator has blasted the administration of President George W. Bush for a rash of shortcomings in the country’s flawed justice system and continued violations of the rule of law.

Unleashing a stinging barrage of attacks, Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary and arbitrary executions, singles out the existence of racism in the application of the death penalty in the United States, and the lack of transparency in the deaths of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility housing suspected terrorists.

Alston, a professor at the New York University School of Law and an outspoken critic of human rights abuses worldwide, also complains about the non-availability of information on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the refusal of the US Justice Department to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings.

During his 14-day tour of the United States at the invitation of the administration, he met with federal and state officials, judges and civil society groups in New York, Washington DC, Alabama and Texas.

Alston was particularly critical of the state of Texas which has refused to review the cases of foreign nationals on death row, most of whom had been deprived of the right to consular assistance from their home countries.

He specifically chose to visit Alabama “because it has the highest per capita rate of executions in the United States, and Texas because it has the largest number of executions and prisoners on death row.” Still, 129 individuals waiting on death row have been exonerated across the United States, since 1973, and the number continues to grow.

“Indeed, while I was in Texas, the conviction of yet another person on death row was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals,” Alston said.

While in this case DNA testing ultimately prevented the execution of an innocent man, Alston said, others may have been less fortunate.

“In Texas, I met a range of officials and others who acknowledged that innocent people might have been executed,” he said, adding the problem is that a criminal justice system with recognized flaws that the government refuses to address will always be capable of mistakes.

In his report, Alston points out that studies across the United States also suggest racial disparities in the application of the death penalty. In particular, many studies suggest that a defendant is more likely to receive the death penalty when the victim is white, and some studies also suggest that a defendant is more likely to receive the death penalty if he is African American.

“When I raised this issue with federal and state government officials, I was met with indifference or flat denial,” said Alston, who noted that many officials wrote off the results of studies showing racial disparity as being biased because they were written by researchers with anti-death penalty views. “Given what is at stake, there is a need for governments at both the state and federal levels to revisit systematically the concerns about continuing racial disparities,” he added.

Meanwhile, to date, just six of the “enemy combatants” detained at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have been charged with capital offenses under the Military Commissions Act (MCA). They are being tried before military commissions on war crimes charges, and if convicted, face the death penalty. According to Alston, the United States has an obligation to provide fair trials which afford all essential judicial guarantees.

“The fundamental principles of a fair trial may never be derogated from. But the text of the MCA, which provides the rules which govern the trials, and the experiences of those with whom I met during my mission involved in the trial process to date, indicate clearly that these trials utterly fail to meet the basic due process standards required for a fair trial under international humanitarian and human rights law,” he said.

There have been five reported deaths of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2006-07. Four were classified as suicides, and one was attributed to cancer. In the custodial environment, Alston said, a state has a heightened duty and capacity to ensure and respect the right to life. As a result, there is a rebuttable presumption of state responsibility whether through acts of commission or omission in cases of custodial death. The state has an obligation to investigate the deaths, and publicly report on the findings and the evidence upon which the findings are based.

“But the Department of Defense has provided little public information about the causes or circumstance of any of these deaths,” he said.

While it has been reported that autopsies were conducted in each case, the results have not been made public or even provided to the families of the deceased men, he added. It was also reported that the Naval Criminal Investigative Services is conducting investigations into each of the deaths. But over two years since the first deaths, no results of investigations have been released.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US military is considered an occupying power, Alston points to a string of human rights abuses and violations of the rule of law.

The “troublingly opaque character of the US military justice system is well illustrated by a case described to me by witnesses and investigators when I visited Afghanistan,” he said. On March 4, 2007, he recalled, US Marines responded to a suicide attack on their convoy, in which one soldier was wounded, by killing 19 people and wounding many others in the space of a 10-mile retreat.

“I asked the regional commander in Afghanistan what follow-up had occurred. He could not tell me and explained that his unit had just arrived in Afghanistan and that accountability for incidents involving the previous unit was its responsibility and that it had taken all the relevant files when it left the country,” Alston said.

In fact, a Court of Inquiry into the incident proceeded in North Carolina: “Shortly after I returned from Afghanistan, the US military released a short statement on this incident indicating that the commander of US Marine Corps Forces Central Command had conducted a thorough review of the report of a Court of Inquiry and had determined that the soldiers had acted appropriately and in accordance with the rules of engagement and tactics, techniques and procedures in place at the time in response to a complex attack.” Unsurprisingly, he added, this conclusive and unsubstantiated response to such a serious incident was met with dismay in Afghanistan.

“Afghans and Americans have a right to ask on what basis this conclusion was reached,” Alston said. “But all of the documents produced by the Court of Inquiry have remained classified. The record of proceedings has not been released. The 12,000 page report of the Court of Inquiry including recommendations and factual findings has not been released.”

The US government has even disregarded the existing regulation stating that the convening authority should ensure that an executive summary of the report be made public in order to inform government officials, the legislative branch, the media, and the next of kin of the victims of the investigations findings and recommendations.

“Whether or not the decision not to initiate courts-martial was justified, the manner in which the military justice system has operated in this case is entirely inconsistent with principles of public accountability and transparency,” Alston declared.

Regarding killings by private security contractors, he said: “It’s the [US] Department of Justice’s job to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings, but it has done next to nothing.”

1 comment July 3rd, 2008

Bob Herbert on US torture

Bob Herbert writes in the New York Times of the recently releases Physicians for Human Rights report, Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the US:

All Too Human

By Bob Herbert

Thursday was the 21st anniversary of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

It was also the same day that two Bush administration lawyers appeared before a House subcommittee to answer questions about their roles in providing the legal framework for harsh interrogation techniques that inevitably rose to the level of torture and shamed the U.S. before the rest of the world.

The lawyers, both former Justice Department officials, were David Addington, who is now Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and John Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. There is no danger of either being enshrined as heroes in the history books of the future.

For most Americans, torture is something remote, abstract, reprehensible, but in the eyes of some, perhaps necessary - when the bomb is ticking, for example, or when interrogators are trying to get information from terrorists willing to kill Americans in huge numbers.

Reality offers something much different. We saw the hideous photos from Abu Ghraib. And now the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.

The report profiles 11 detainees who were tortured while in U.S. custody and then released - their lives ruined - without ever having been charged with a crime or told why they were detained. All of the prisoners were men, and all were badly beaten. One was sodomized with a broomstick, the report said, and forced by his interrogators to howl like a dog while a soldier urinated on him.

He fainted, the report said, “after a soldier stepped on his genitals.”

Officials at Physicians for Human Rights said extensive medical and psychological examinations were conducted - and in two cases prior medical records were consulted - to help corroborate the testimony of the detainees. The organization has a long and credible history of documenting such abuses.

Leonard Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights, said: “In doing the evaluations, we used international standards, medical assessments of torture and ill treatment, and meticulously assessed physical and psychological evidence of torture and ill treatment, and the long-term physical and mental health consequences.”

The most effective element of the report is the way in which it takes torture out of the realm of the abstract to show not just the horror and cruelty of the torture itself, but the way in which it absolutely devastates the body, soul and psyche of its victims.

The detainees profiled in the report were abused at facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Three said they had been subjected to electric shocks. One said he was stabbed in the cheek with a screwdriver and hit in the head and in the jaw with a rifle.

In an example of how medical evidence was used to back up a detainee’s account, the report said scarring on one of the prisoner’s thumbs “was highly consistent with the scarring caused by electric shock.”

In addition to the physical mistreatment, the detainees reported that various gruesome forms of humiliation, including sexual humiliation, were pervasive. They said men were paraded nude in front of female soldiers, forced to watch pornography, and forced to disrobe before female interrogators.

The sheer number of different ways in which detainees were reported to have been abused was mind-boggling. They were deprived of sleep, forced to endure extremes of heat and cold, chained in crouching positions for 18 to 20 hours at a time, told that their female relatives would be raped, that they themselves would be killed, and on and on. All to no good end.

The ostensible purpose of mistreating prisoners is to inflict pain and induce disorientation and despair, creating so much agony that the prisoners give up valuable intelligence in order to end the suffering. But torture is not an interrogation technique; it’s a criminal attack on a human being.

What the report makes clear is that once the green light is given to torture, the guaranteed result is an ever-widening landscape of broken bodies, ruined lives and profound shame to all involved.

Nearly all of the detainees profiled in the report have experienced excruciating psychological difficulties since being released. Several said that they had contemplated suicide. As one put it: “No sorrow can be compared to my torture experience in jail. That is the reason for my sadness.”

Congress and the public do not know nearly enough about the nation’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation practices. When something as foul as torture is on the table, there is a tendency to avert one’s eyes from the most painful truths.

It’s a tendency we should resist.

Add comment July 1st, 2008

New report documents medical consequences of and medical complicity with US torture

Physicians for Human Rights has just released an extremely important new report — Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact — involving extensive medical and psychological examinations of 11 detainees released from US detention facilities in Iraq and at Guantanamo. The report provides a detailed account of the brutality involved throughout the US detention system in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantanamo.

These detainees were all brutally beaten and humiliated. All subjected to isolation. Several were sodomized while others were subjected to electric shocks. All the other “techniques” from the panoply of US torture techniques are represented here, including sleep deprivation; sensory deprivation; being subjected to loud noise; and “stress positions,”  including being suspended from the ceiling.

The report provides both medical evidence supporting torture claims, and evidence of the severe long-term effects of the abuse. The medical and psychological examinations in most cases substantiated detainees’ claims of abuse. Where the medical evidence was equivocal, it was largely due to types of injuries, e.g., soft tissue injuries, that would have healed in the meantime.

The report also provides abundant documentation of the extent of medical and psychological complicity with the torture. In no case did medical personnel report abuse. In many cases they patched up detainees to facilitate additional torture:

“[W]hen the doctor had finished treating him, “I heard the doctor say ‘continue’ (to the interrogators)”, p. 21.

The cases where medical personnel were “helpful” are just as disturbing:

““[The doctor] helped me … he told the soldiers, ‘If you go on torturing him in this way, he will die’,” p. 85.

Not surprisingly, detainees did not report psychologists consulting in interrogations (SOP called for these psychologists to not identify themselves, an interesting ethical issue in itself). But treatment psychologists were perceived to be collaborating with interrogators:

“Haydar indicated, however, that he suspected the psychologists shared information with the soldiers,” p. 48.

And:

“While in Camp Delta, Youssef asked to speak with a psychologist because he was distressed, and the two spoke about him missing his family and his feelings of sadness. Although Youssef believed the meeting was confidential, he stated that shortly after the psychologist left, he was brought to an interrogator who immediately brought up information connected to his disclosures, such as telling him that he was going to stay at Guantánamo for the rest of his life and discussing his family (“Don’t you want to leave this place and get back together with your family?”…If you do as we tell you, you can get back to your family.”). He stated, “I figured out the reason they had called me for the interrogation was because the psychologist had told them about the meeting.” He stated, “They were stressing these fears very much.” Following this interrogation, Youssef reported that he was moved to the “worst” section in Camp Delta, where he was not allowed to have a blanket or a mattress,” p. 58

After the publication of this report, any claim that psychologists helped keep detentions or interrogations “safe or ethical” are completely unsupportable. Psychologists, and indeed, all medical personnel, regardless of their personal characteristics, were simply part of the apparatus of abuse. As Maj. Gen. Taguba — who was driven out of the military because of his Abu Ghraib investigation– states in his preface:

“And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.”

If we do not stop this complicity, we thereby ourselves become complicit. After this report, we can no longer say “We didn’t know. We thought they were helping.”

Below are two PHR Press Releases and the Preface by Gen. Taguba.

Medical Evidence Supports Detainees’ Accounts of Torture in US Custody

Cambridge, Mass. (PRWEB) June 18, 2008 — Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has published a landmark report documenting medical evidence of torture and ill-treatment inflicted on 11 men detained at US facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, who were never charged with any crime. The physical and psychological evaluation of the detainees and documentation of the crimes are based on internationally accepted standards for clinical assessment of torture claims. The report also details the severe physical and psychological pain and long-term disability that has resulted from abusive and unlawful US interrogation practices.

“Rigorous clinical evaluations confirm the enormous and enduring toll of agony and anguish inflicted for months by US personnel on eleven men who were detained without any charge or explanation,” stated PHR President Leonard Rubenstein. “Their first-hand accounts, now confirmed by medical and psychological examinations, take us behind the photographs to write a missing chapter of America’s descent into the shameful practice and official policy of systematic torture.”

Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact documents practices used to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end. These practices included, but were not limited to:

• Suspensions and other stress positions;
• Routine isolation;
• Sleep deprivation combined with sensory bombardment and temperature extremes;
• Sexual humiliation and forced nakedness;
• Sodomy;
• Beatings;
• Denial of medical care;
• Electric shock;
• Involuntary medication; and
• Threats to their lives and families.

In the foreword to the report, Maj. General Antonio Taguba (USA-Ret.), who led the U.S. Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal, wrote: “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

“Ending the use of torture, while essential, is not enough. The United States government must make this right. Those responsible for these abuses must help heal the grievous harm inflicted in our name,” said PHR CEO Frank Donaghue. “PHR is calling for full investigation, accountability, an official apology, and reparations, including medical and psychological treatment for the survivors.”

And:

US Torture of Detainees Caused Severe Pain, Long-Term Suffering

Cambridge, Mass. (PRWEB) June 18, 2008 - A team of doctors and psychologists convened by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) to conduct intensive clinical evaluations of 11 former detainees held in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay has found that these men suffered torture and ill-treatment by US personnel, which resulted in severe pain and long-term disability. The men were ultimately released from US custody without charge or explanation.

“The horrific consequences of US detention and interrogation policy are indelibly written on the bodies and minds of the former detainees in scars, debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares,” states Dr. Allen Keller, Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and a contributor to PHR’s report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact. “Physical and psychological evidence clearly supports the detainees’ first-hand accounts of cruelty, inhuman treatment, degradation, and torture.”

“The poignant case studies focus on the profound and lasting consequences of cruelty at the hands of US personnel,” said Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, PHR Research Associate and lead author of the report. “The detainees suffer permanent hearing loss, persistent and debilitating pain in limbs and joints, major depressive disorder, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety disorders, such as panic attacks.”

One Iraqi detainee, Laith, recounted that during his initial detention in an unknown prison, he was brutally beaten and kicked until he lost consciousness. In Abu Ghraib, he was kept naked for almost a month in a variety of stress positions in isolation in a small, dark cell wearing soiled underwear and was subjected to lengthy interrogations.

On one occasion he was brought to see his brother who was bleeding, naked, and humiliated. The most painful experience for Laith was the threat of rape of his mother and sisters: “They were saying, ‘you will hear your mothers and sisters when we are raping them [here].’”

These men also continue to endure profound disruptions in their social and family lives. Many live with an abiding sense of shame caused by the loss of their ability to protect and provide for their families. And several men told medical evaluators of their desire to relocate, stemming from their loss of a sense of safety, since they had been arrested without charge or to avoid the frequent reminders of their harrowing detention experiences.

The report calls for full investigation and remedies, including accountability for war crimes, and reparation, such as compensation, medical care and psycho-social services.

Here is the preface :

Preface

by General AntonioTaguba [Ret]

This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted —both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The former detainees in this report, each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life, require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.

And so do the American people.

Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.)

Maj. General Taguba led the US Army’s official investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and testified before Congress on his findings in May, 2004.

Go download and read the report here.

4 comments June 18th, 2008

Richrd Clarke: Don’t let warmongerers back into polite society

As regular readers know, I have been calling for accountability for those who authorized and directed US torture. Former antiterrorism official Richard Clarke has a similar idea regarding those responsible for the Iraq war. He calls for accountability for those who launched this disastrous war based upon lies.

Think Progress has the transcript. Here is the critical portion:

CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.

Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society and give them jobs on university boards and corporate boards and just let them pretend that nothing ever happened when there are 4,000 Americans dead and 25,000 Americans grieviously wounded, and they’ll carry those wounds and suffer all the rest of their lives.

Add comment June 8th, 2008

A drugged army is a more reliable army

Meanwhile, te soldiers who are in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking psychoactive drugs, primarily antidepressants and sleeping medications, in order to cope:

Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say.

At a Pentagon that keeps statistics on just about everything, there is no central clearinghouse for this kind of data, and the Army hasn’t consistently asked about prescription-drug use, which makes it difficult to track. Given the traditional stigma associated with soldiers seeking mental help, the survey, released in March, probably underestimates antidepressant use. But if the Army numbers reflect those of other services — the Army has by far the most troops deployed to the war zones — about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were on such medications last fall. The Army estimates that authorized drug use splits roughly fifty-fifty between troops taking antidepressants — largely the class of drugs that includes Prozac and Zoloft — and those taking prescription sleeping pills like Ambien.

The extensive use of psychotropics may enable the military to keep more troops in the field longer, at the cost of more mental disorders long-term:

“No magic pill can erase the image of a best friend’s shattered body or assuage the guilt from having traded duty with him that day,” says Combat Stress Injury, a 2006 medical book edited by Charles Figley and William Nash that details how troops can be helped by such drugs. “Medication can, however, alleviate some debilitating and nearly intolerable symptoms of combat and operational stress injuries” and “help restore personnel to full functioning capacity.”

Which means that any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the “dwell time” at home before they go back to war — it’s possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. “This is what happens when you try to fight a long war with an army that wasn’t designed for a long war,” says Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan Administration.

Not everyone is fooled:

Military families wonder about the change, according to Joyce Raezer of the private National Military Family Association. “Boy, it’s really nice to have these drugs,” she recalls a military doctor saying, “so we can keep people deployed.” And professionals have their doubts. “Are we trying to bandage up what is essentially an insufficient fighting force?” asks Dr. Frank Ochberg, a veteran psychiatrist and founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

Add comment June 8th, 2008

Self-mutilation as a life preservative: ‘Anything Not to Go Back’

Those of us old enough to remember Vietnam recall the creativity of men avoiding the draft. Today we see similar signs of a war gone badly wrong, as Newsweek reports:

‘Anything Not to Go Back’

By Tony Dokoupil

As an internist at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, Dr. Stephanie Santos is used to finding odd things in people’s stomachs. So last spring when a young man, identifying himself as an Iraq-bound soldier, said he had accidentally swallowed a pen at the bus station, she believed him. That is, until she found a second pen. It read 1-800-GREYHOUND. Last summer, according to published reports, a 20-year-old Bronx soldier paid a hit man $500 to shoot him in the knee on the day he was scheduled to return to Iraq. The year before that, a 24-year-old specialist from Washington state escaped a second tour of duty, according to his sister, by strapping on a backpack full of tools and leaping off the roof of his house, injuring his spine.

Such cases of self-harm are a “rising trend” that military doctors are watching closely, says Col. Kathy Platoni, an Army Reserve psychologist who has worked with veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. “There are some soldiers who will do almost anything not to go back,” she says. Col. Elspeth Ritchie, the Army’s top psychologist, agrees that we could see an uptick in intentional injuries as more U.S. soldiers serve long, repeated combat tours, “but we just don’t have good, hard data on it.” Intentional- injury cases are hard to identify, and even harder to prosecute. Fewer than 21 soldiers have been punitively discharged for self-harm since 2003, according to the military. What’s worrying, however, is that American troops committed suicide at the highest rate on record in 2007—and the factors behind self-injury are similar: combat stress and strained relationships. “It’s often the families that don’t want soldiers to return to war,” says Ritchie.

Soldiers have long used self-harm as a rip cord to avoid war. During World War I, The American Journal of Psychiatry reported “epidemics of self-inflicted injuries,” hospital wards filled with men shot in a single finger or toe, as well as cases of pulled-out teeth, punctured eardrums and slashed Achilles’ heels. Few doubt that the Korean and Vietnam wars were any different. But the current war—fought with an overtaxed volunteer Army—may be the worst. “We’re definitely concerned,” says Ritchie. “We hope they’ll talk to us rather than self-harm.”

This trend poses complex ethical issues for psychologists and other mental health professionals. What is the ethical way to “help” these soldiers: fix them up and send them back to their units; help them escape; or to treat their desire to avoid another horrifying tour as a mental illness? And who is the treater primarily responsible to? The patient or the army? Unfortunately, I see few signs of our professions grappling with these thorny issues.

Add comment June 8th, 2008