Psyche, Science, and Society

Anthopologists oppose counterinsurgency use of knowledge

TIME covers the controversy in anthropology around the military’s use of social scientists in its Human Terrain Systems program. Unlike the situation in psychology, where the American Psychological Association is totally in bed with the military-intelligence establishment, anthropologists have taken an ethical stand. Interestingly, the authors of the American Anthropological Association report condemning the HTS program includes several anthropologists who work with the military. [The AAA has links to additional press accounts of this issue on their web page announcing the report's release.]:

Social Science vs. The Pentagon: Should Anthropologists Go to War?

By Christopher Shay

Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief, or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the frontlines. For the last two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the army’s cultural IQ. But last week, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that both in concept and application, it “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

Since 2007, the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System has been placing social scientists in every army combat brigade, regiment and Marine Corps regimental combat team. There are now more than 500 people employed by HTS, a number that is increasing rapidly. On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, their job is to gather information and provide commanders with a greater understanding of the local population, reducing the need for lethal force by helping the army determine the needs of the community, according to Steve Fondacaro the project manager at HTS. Secretary of State Robert Gates has publicly praised the project, and one army colonel told Congress that one Human Terrain team reduced violent clashes encountered by his brigade in Afghanistan by 60-70%. As President Barack Obama revamps his Afghanistan strategy, getting ready to send 30,000 more soldiers, HTS is poised to become a major part of America’s war, helping troops navigate in a foreign land. “We’re pleased to find ourselves fully aligned with the goals [of the Obama administration],” says Fondacaro.

But if the military’s program is to continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation’s top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics — a sort of Hippocratic Oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month’s 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather; some anthropologists involved in the report say it’s already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martins University in Washington and one of the co-authors of the AAA report, says the army appears to be using the anthropological information to better target the enemy, which, if true, would be a gross violation of the anthropological code. One Human Terrain anthropologist told the Dallas Morning News that she wasn’t worried if the information she provided was used to kill or capture an insurgent. “The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill,” she said. “I’d rather they did not operate in a vacuum.” Price and other critics see this as proof that the anthropologists don’t have full control over the information they gather and that commanders can use it to kill. “The real fault with Human Terrain is that it doesn’t even try to protect the people being studied,” says Price. “I don’t think it’s accidental that [the Pentagon] didn’t come up with ethical guidelines.”

HTS adamantly denies that its program is designed to help the army improve its targeting, saying on its website that the role of the program “is neither to directly assist in lethal targeting of insurgents nor the collection of actionable military intelligence.” But Ben Wintersteen, who recently finished the nearly five-month HTS training program and has a masters in anthropology, says oversight is lacking. Once on the battlefield, “there’s definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject,” Wintersteen says. “There’s no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field.”

Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA’s decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization’s ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. “It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings,” Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.Ds — many of the others came from a military background. Because of the AAA, “there are a lot of highly motivated, ethical, critical anthropologists who are being discouraged from helping the program.” HTS project manager Fondacaro admits that finding recruits with regional expertise is “very rare,” but, he argues, HTS is creating a population of social scientists with firsthand experience in Iraq and Afghanistan where none existed before.

HTS is not the first time anthropologists have become involved with war efforts. Before the First World War, the field techniques of the discipline were used by the British to administrate and subdue the different cultural groups at the edges of its empire. Later in World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict played a key role in President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to allow the Japanese Emperor’s reign to continue as part of Japan’s surrender to the U.S. According to Price, who has written a book on the use of anthropology during World War II, the majority of American anthropologists were actively involved the Allied war effort. One British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, even led a team of ruthless Kachin fighers — the indigenous group he was studying in Burma — against the nation’s Japanese occupiers.

But the relationship between the military and anthropology soured during the ’60s and early ’70s. In 1964, the U.S. army recruited scholars for Project Camelot, a program whose goals included helping the U.S. army “assist friendly governments in dealing with active insurgency problems” such as in Chile, the project’s test case. The project never moved out of Chile, however; in 1965, once the public got wind of it, Project Camelot was canceled. Later, in 1970, documents stolen from a U.S. anthropologist’s office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military funded programs. Over the last 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, “the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower.”

AAA policy is not against anthropologists helping the military — a few of the co-authors of the AAA report, in fact, work closely with the military. But McFate’s larger point stands: For the last few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles. As American troops adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they’ve once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline’s checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels between HTS and the colonial era. “Anthropology was used in much the same way to help colonial militaries and colonial occupation,” says David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the military from asking for their help. “What’s been missing is the insight and the experiences that social scientists bring to these kinds of conflicts,” Fondacaro says. The traditional army, he says, is good at treating “the symptoms of insurgency” — fighting armed violent groups or reducing the number of IEDs, for instance — but “what HTS is focused on is the disease. There’s a reason why the population tolerates and sometimes actively supports groups that advocate violence.” That, says Fondacaro, is what HTS is trying to diagnose and ultimately cure.

When it comes down to it, the AAA has no sanctioning power, and the decision whether or not to join HTS comes down to the individual. For now at least, the Pentagon wants to leverage the cultural insights of academics to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whether HTS has brought more top scholars into the military fold or only widened the schism between academia and the military remains unclear. James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan, one of three HTS social scientists to die on duty, says “the emphasis in previous wars has been more about how you defeat the enemy by controlling territory,” but now, “the center of gravity shifted to a psychological territory.” HTS is a clear indication that the Pentagon has realized in order to win the wars of the 21st century, cultural knowledge will need to be integrated into combat operations. And how do we do that exactly? Says Der Derian: “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

December 13th, 2009

Every Afghan airstrike kills the same number of “insurgents”

Anyone who paid close attention to the Iraq war knows that it was not just the Bush administration that routinely lied about the war. For virtually all claims made by the US military on contentious matters later turned out to be false.

In either case, fraud or gross error, we should draw the same implications. If the military is presenting false information regarding how many were killed, there is no reason we should believe other aspects of their report, such as who was killed. Were they “insurgents?” Civilians? Goats? We have no idea until and unless there is independent verification.

Thanks to the Pentagon, this time under President Obama, we are again reminded that Truth is the first casualty of war. What I find saddest is that the media even find government claims of this type, given the extensive track record of lies and obfuscations. Surely any media doing its job would routinely remind its readers that government spokespersons exist to spin and dissemble, not to inform.

December 11th, 2009

Condoleeza Rice stars in American Faust

A new documentary, American Faust, that opens Saturday, covers the career of WMD lie promoter and torture enabler Condoleeza Rice. Here is the trailer:

November 18th, 2009

Peter Galbraith pushed Iraqi constitution provisions that could earn him $100 millon

The New York Times reveals that noted foreign policy expert, partial author of the Iraqi Constitution, and advocate of Kurdish autonomy, Peter Galbraith, stands to gain upwards of $100 million from secret investments in Kurdish oil. In other words, he apparently helped fleece the Iraqis of their oil.  Glenn Greenwald relays the story:

The sleazy advocacy of a leading “liberal hawk”
Peter Galbraith’s vast, undisclosed financial interests in the policies he spent years advocating as an “expert.”

By Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times today details the unbelievably sleazy story of Peter Galbraith, one of the Democratic Party’s leading so-called “liberal hawks” and a generally revered Wise Man of America’s Foreign Policy Community.  He was Ambassador to Croatia under the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s and, in March, 2009, the Obama administration (specifically, Richard Holbrooke, Galbraith’s mentor) successfully pressured the U.N. to name Galbraith as the second-in-command in Afghanistan.  The NYT does a good job today of adding some important details to the story, but it was actually uncovered by Norwegian investigative journalists and reported at length a month ago in pieces such as this one by Helena Cobban.  In essence, this highly Serious man has corruptly concealed vast financial stakes in the very policies and positions he has spent years advocating while pretending to be an independent expert.Galbraith was one of the most vocal Democratic supporters of the attack on Iraq, having signed a March 19, 2003 public letter (.pdf) – along with the standard cast of neocon war-lovers such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Danielle Pletka, and Robert Kagan – stating that “we all join in supporting the military intervention in Iraq” and “it is now time to act to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”  As intended, that letter was then praised by outlets such as The Washington Post Editorial Page, gushing that “it is both significant and encouraging that a bipartisan group of influential foreign policy thinkers, veterans of both Democratic and Republican administrations, has signed on to a statement of policy on Iraq that makes sense on the war.”  Throughout 2002 and 2003, Galbraith appeared in numerous outlets — including repeatedly on Fox News and with Bill O’Reilly — presenting himself as a loyal Democrat firmly behind the invasion of Iraq.  In 2002, he was an adviser to Paul Wolfowitz on Kurdistan.

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After playing a key role in enabling the invasion of Iraq, Galbraith first became one of a handful of U.S. officials who worked on writing the Iraqi Constitution, and after he resigned from the government, he then continuously posed as an independent expert on the region and, specifically, an “unpaid” adviser to the Kurds on the Constitution.  Galbraith was an ardent and vocal advocate for Kurdish autonomy, arguing tirelessly in numerous venues for such proposals — including in multiple Op-Eds for The New York Times – and insisting that Kurds must have the right to control oil resources located in Northern Iraq.  Throughout the years of writing those Op-Eds, he was identified as nothing more than “a former United States ambassador to Croatia,” except in one 2007 Op-Ed which vaguely stated that he ”is a principal in a company that does consulting in Iraq and elsewhere.”  When he participated in a New York Times forum in October, 2008 — regarding what the next President should be required to answer — he unsurprisingly posed questions that advocated for regional autonomy for Iraqis generally and Kurds specifically, and he was identified as nothing more than the author of a book about the region.

What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he “stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars.”  In other words, he had a direct — and vast — financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region.  As Cobban wrote:

For the preceding four years, while Galbraith was an influential participant in Iraq-related constitutional and political discussions, he also had an undisclosed financial interest in a KRG-authorised oil development venture. . . .

Here in the U.S., Galbraith has long been associated with the “liberal hawk” wing of the Democratic Party . . . Many members of this group have been liberal idealists – though some of those who, on “liberal” grounds, gave early support to Pres. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq later expressed their regret for adopting that position.

Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush’s late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.

Unfortunately, that last sentence is likely wishful thinking.  What Galbraith has done, as sleazy and dishonest as it is, is simply par for the course in accountability-free Washington.

Galbraith’s relationship with the Kurds goes back many years.  He undoubtedly knew that overthrowing Saddam would empower his Kurdish friends and their ability to dole out oil contracts.  Indeed, in his own 2006 book, he recounts that he began working on Kurdish autonomy and independence “two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”  Less than a year later, having helped convince the public — and many Democrats — to invade Iraq, he formed a company that then acquired a huge stake in Kurdish oil.  And he then spent years running around trying to use his status as Foreign Policy Community expert to exploit the war he cheered on for his own massive personal gain, while keeping completely concealed those glaring conflicts of interests.

Reider Visser, a historian of southern Iraq, told The Boston Globe last month:  ”Galbraith has been such a central person to the shaping of the Iraqi Constitution, far more than I think most Americans realize. All those beautiful ideas about principles of federalism and local communities having control are really cast in a different light when the community has an oil field in its midst and Mr. Galbraith has a financial stake.”  So here’s a leading advocate of the war on Iraq who used his influence in the U.S. Government and the Foreign Policy Community — as well as the break-up of Saddam’s regime — to enrich himself on Iraqi oil.  As the NYT put it:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company “has a representative in the room, drafting.”

Remember how all those freakish and paranoid people — on the crazed “Arab street” and in American-hating leftist circles — actually believed in “conspiracy” theories such as the wacky notion that one of the motives for invading Iraq was a desire to exploit its oil resources?

Here we have yet another example of one of America’s most Serious and respected “experts” advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy.  He was given access to every major media outlet virtually on demand to do so — the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, Fox — all while those interests remained concealed.  His uniting with the country’s most extreme neocons to support the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq didn’t prevent the Obama administration from pushing him to be hired as the U.N.’s number two official in Afghanistan.  He continued to be revered by leading establishment Democrats as an important and respected expert.  In other words, Peter Galbraith is a perfect face showing how America’s Foreign Policy Community and our political debates function.

UPDATE:  Jonathan Schwarz recalls what was done to those who suggested that part of the motive in invading Iraq might have something to do with that country’s oil reserves.

UPDATE II:  The New York Times is forced to publish an Editor’s Note today in light of this story, noting that “Mr. Galbraith signed a contract that obligated him to disclose his financial interests in the subjects of his articles”; he “should have disclosed to readers that Mr. Galbraith could benefit financially” from the policies he was advocating in his Op-Eds; and “had editors been aware of Mr. Galbraith’s financial stake, the Op-Ed page would have insisted on disclosure or not published his articles.”

November 13th, 2009

The stresses of military mental health personnnel

As we ponder the tragedy at Fort hood, the New York Times has a good article on the stresses facing military psychiatrists and other military mental health personnel.

Painful Stories Take a Toll on Military Therapists

By Benedict Carey, Damien Cave, and Lizette Alvarez

Many of the patients who fill the day are bereft, angry, broken. Their experiences are gruesome, their distress lasting and the process of recovery exhausting. The repeated stories of battle and loss can leave the most professional therapist numb or angry.

And hanging over it all, for psychiatrists and psychologists in today’s military, is the prospect of their own deployment — of working under fire in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the Pentagon has assigned more therapists to combat units than in previous wars.

That was the world that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, inhabited until Thursday, when he was accused of one of the worst mass shootings ever on a military base in the United States, an attack that killed 13 and left dozens wounded. Five of the dead were fellow therapists, the Army said.

Major Hasan’s motives are still being investigated. But those who work day in and day out treating the psychological wounds of the country’s warriors say Thursday’s rampage has put a spotlight on the strains of their profession and of the patients they treat.

Major Hasan was one of a thin line of military therapists trying to hold off a rising tide of need. So far this year, 117 soldiers on active duty were reported to have committed suicide. The Army has only 408 psychiatrists — military, civilian and contractors — serving about 553,000 active-duty troops around the world. As a result, some soldiers home from war, suffering from nightmares and panic attacks, say they have waited almost a year to see a psychiatrist.

Many military professionals, meanwhile, describe crushing schedules with 10 or more patients a day, most struggling with devastating trauma or mutilated bodies that are the product of war and the highly advanced care that kept them alive.

Some of those hired to heal others end up needing help themselves. Some go home at night too depressed to talk to their children. Others, like Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist at Fort Hood, ultimately quit.

“I planned for a career in the military, but I burned out” after about five years, he said.

The biggest problem, Dr. Moore said, was “compassion fatigue.”

“I thought that was a bogus phenomenon, but it’s true,” he said. “You become detached, you start to feel like you can’t connect with your patients, you run out of empathy. And the last thing you want to do is talk about it with someone else. It really puts a wedge between you and loved ones.”

Whatever the facts in Major Hasan’s case, some therapists who work with the military agree that the tragedy is likely to have a “lasting impact on how we look at mental health providers,” said Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.

The Army has added to their ranks in recent years, as the number of soldiers with the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder has climbed to 34,000. But the shooting has raised a pressing question: Who counsels the counselors? Dr. Moore and other therapists who have worked in the military or for Veterans Affairs said that mental health evaluations of therapists themselves were virtually nonexistent.

“I have worked with the Army, the Navy, the V.A., and I’m not aware of any formal, systematic process to evaluate professionals,” said Dr. Andy Morgan, a psychiatrist at the National Center for P.T.S.D.

At Walter Reed, where Major Hasan was in training until recently, Lt. Col. Brett Schneider, a psychiatrist, described a complicated system of checks and balances, including a training committee with superiors and civilians who evaluate residents and mental health staff members.

“There is a lot more built into the processes to keep tabs on each other,” said Colonel Schneider, who spoke on the condition that he not be asked any questions about Major Hasan. “If somebody is starting to get to the point where these things are a problem, there are a number of ways we can intervene.”

Generally, though, the military, like many large civilian employers, relies on self-evaluation and voluntary employee-assistance programs.

“Once training is over, you’re basically on your own,” Dr. Paulus said.

At Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base, Major Hasan, like other therapists, would have had to manage many patients with severe combat stress. At his relatively high rank, he would have been expected to seek help on his own if he thought he needed it, experts said.

The base sees continual traffic in and out of war zones, and the work conditions are especially stressful, according to at least one report provided to the Army.

Dr. Stephen M. Stahl, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, who worked on the report, said the base’s program for soldiers returning from war simply lacked the staff it needed. He said there were about 15 psychiatrists on staff, treating hundreds of inpatients and outpatients. Generally, the psychiatrists did not do therapy but prescribed medication.

“They’re so under-resourced that people just don’t end up getting enough care,” Dr. Stahl said.

He added: “It’s a pretty damn stressful place to be. I think it’s a horrible place to practice psychiatry.”

Soldiers described similar situations at many other installations. Jason Yorty, 34, an Arabic linguist with the Army who deployed to Iraq four times and Afghanistan once, said that when he returned to Fort Gordon in Georgia two years ago, the system appeared to be overwhelmed and resistant to diagnosing problems that would require multiple visits.

First, he said, he saw a physician’s assistant at the base, then a clinical social worker, neither of whom agreed that his nightmares and panic attacks amounted to post-traumatic stress disorder. “It took me eight months just to get an appointment to see a psychiatrist,” he said. “When I got there, he blew me off.”

A few weeks later, after he refused the Army psychiatrist’s prescription for a sleep aid, a nonmilitary mental health provider gave him a diagnosis of P.T.S.D.

Experts say that the military has made big strides in taking mental health issues seriously, but that military therapists are sometimes pressured to place the needs of the force above the needs of the patient. Indeed, they can be overruled by commanders who need soldiers in the field.

Since 2001, the military has deployed many soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or other ailments. “The focus in the military is readiness,” said Charles Figley, a psychologist at Tulane University. “There is an inherent conflict.”

And in war zones, the relationships between soldiers and mental health providers can be especially fraught. Therapists in Iraq said that they could often do little more than provide a few coping tips to soldiers, just enough to keep them functioning. There were simply too many people and not enough time, as Army officials have acknowledged.

Providing care has its own risks. In studies of therapists working to soothe mental distress in victims of violence, whether criminal, sexual or combat-related, researchers have documented what is called secondary trauma: contact distress, of a kind. In one 2004 study of social workers on cases stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks, researchers found that the more deeply therapists were involved with victims, the more likely they were to experience such trauma. The same associations have been found in doctors working with survivors in war zones.

Dr. Hasan was reportedly facing his first deployment — a prospect that scares even trained fighters, many of whom become increasingly frantic before going to war, according to surveys.

The workload itself is enough to give psychiatrists and psychologists pause. In Iraq, with sectarian violence at its peak in 2007, officials say there were 200 such specialists serving more than 130,000 troops, driving between bases on bomb-rigged roads.

The experience of Lt. Col. Reagon P. Carr was common. In six months with the Second Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division in 2007, he said he saw more than 700 soldiers. In one typical week, he visited three locations, meeting with 36 soldiers who came in for immediate help: 3 were contemplating suicide, a dozen were unable to sleep, 5 said they were apprehensive about returning to a dysfunctional marriage and 16 said they were disgruntled with their leadership.

Few who are deployed feel prepared for this punishing task.

Dr. Peter Linnerooth, a former Army psychologist who treated soldiers in Germany and Iraq and at Fort Hood, said that in Schweinfurt, Germany, he was the sole psychologist for a community of 10,000 people in 2005.

At Fort Hood, he treated a burly man whose job in Iraq was to recover the bodies of soldiers. His patient was devastated by one particular loss, Dr. Linnerooth said.

“He had picked up this corpse that was so badly burned, it weighed about 20 pounds,” he said. “He was this big, tough, awesome guy. For him, it was like picking up his daughter. That was an extreme case. But you get those at least once or twice a week.”

If it turns out that Major Hasan did in fact break partly under the stress of the job and impending deployment, many veterans would not be surprised.

“If this guy can go over the edge, imagine what it is like for the actual combat troops who have been through four or five deployments,” said Bryan Hannah, 22, a disabled Iraq war veteran from San Marcos, Tex., who was stationed at Fort Hood until he was discharged a year ago because of post-traumatic stress disorder and other injuries.

He added, “There are a lot of others who are worse off than him.”

Erica Goode and Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting.

November 8th, 2009

Engelhardt: Endless war without victory

In a new piece, Tom Engelhardt reminds us what our country has become:

Is America Hooked on War?

By Tom Engelhardt

“War is peace” was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in “Newspeak,” the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell’s imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.

Last week, for instance, a New York Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger was headlined “Obama Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue.” It offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.

“Doubts,” of course, imply dissent, and in fact just the week before there had been a major break in Washington’s ranks, though not among Democrats. The conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece offering blunt advice to the Obama administration, summed up in its headline: “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.” In our age of political and audience fragmentation and polarization, think of this as the Afghan version of Vietnam’s Cronkite moment.

The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on the other hand, represented a more typical Washington moment. Ignored, for instance, was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s end-of-August call for the president to develop an Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus of the piece was instead an upcoming speech by Michigan Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He was, Schmitt and Sanger reported, planning to push back against well-placed leaks (in the Times, among other places) indicating that war commander General Stanley McChrystal was urging the president to commit 15,000 to 45,000 more American troops to the Afghan War.

Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist of Levin’s message about what everyone agrees is a “deteriorating” U.S. position: “[H]e was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.”

Think of this as the line in the sand within the Democratic Party, and be assured that the debates within the halls of power over McChrystal’s troop requests and Levin’s proposal are likely to be fierce this fall. Thought about for a moment, however, both positions can be summed up with the same word: More.

The essence of this “debate” comes down to: More of them versus more of us (and keep in mind that more of them — an expanded training program for the Afghan National Army — actually means more of “us” in the form of extra trainers and advisors). In other words, however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public now views the war, however much the president’s war coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices will be between more and more.

No alternatives are likely to get a real hearing. Few alternative policy proposals even exist because alternatives that don’t fit with “more” have ceased to be part of Washington’s war culture. No serious thought, effort, or investment goes into them. Clearly referring to Will’s column, one of the unnamed “senior officials” who swarm through our major newspapers made the administration’s position clear, saying sardonically, according to the Washington Post, “I don’t anticipate that the briefing books for the [administration] principals on these debates over the next weeks and months will be filled with submissions from opinion columnists… I do anticipate they will be filled with vigorous discussion… of how successful we’ve been to date.”

State of War

Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. Similarly, we’ve become used to the idea that, when various forms of force (or threats of force) don’t work, our response, as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version of the same under a new or rebranded name — the hot one now being “counterinsurgency” or COIN — in a marginally different manner. When it comes to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally the order of the day.

This wasn’t always the case. The early Republic that the most hawkish conservatives love to cite was a land whose leaders looked with suspicion on the very idea of a standing army. They would have viewed our hundreds of global garrisons, our vast network of spies, agents, Special Forces teams, surveillance operatives, interrogators, rent-a-guns, and mercenary corporations, as well as our staggering Pentagon budget and the constant future-war gaming and planning that accompanies it, with genuine horror.

The question is: What kind of country do we actually live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) lists 16 intelligence services ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency? What could “intelligence” mean once spread over 16 sizeable, bureaucratic, often competing outfits with a cumulative 2009 budget estimated at more than $55 billion (a startling percentage of which is controlled by the Pentagon)? What exactly is so intelligent about all that? And why does no one think it even mildly strange or in any way out of the ordinary?What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now submitted an even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and two wars’ worth of disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?

What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This, in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220 million upgrade of the base that includes new “water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms, and power generating plants.” And what about the U.S. air base built at Balad, north of Baghdad, that now has 15 bus routes, two fire stations, two water treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two power plants, a water bottling plant, and the requisite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago’s O’Hare International?

What kind of American world are we living in when a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of private security contractors in that country?

What do you make of a world in which the U.S. has robot assassins in the skies over its war zones, 24/7, and the “pilots” who control them from thousands of miles away are ready on a moment’s notice to launch missiles — “Hellfire” missiles at that — into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild, mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan? What does it mean when American pilots can be at war “in” Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is “the most dangerous part of your day”?

What does it mean when, for our security and future safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest ideas imaginable for developing high-tech weapons systems, many of which sound as if they came straight out of the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example, Boeing’s advanced coordinated system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield surveillance equipment slated for seven Army brigades within the next two years at a cost of $2 billion and for the full Army by 2025; or the Next Generation Bomber, an advanced “platform” slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic bomber, “a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere,” for 2035? What does it mean about our world when those people in our government peering deepest into a blue-skies future are planning ways to send armed “platforms” up into those skies and kill more than a quarter century from now?

And do you ever wonder about this: If such weaponry is being endlessly developed for our safety and security, and that of our children and grandchildren, why is it that one of our most successful businesses involves the sale of the same weaponry to other countries? Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this, which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don’t tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers. Recently, the Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, for instance, wrote a piece on the subject which appeared inside the paper on a quiet Labor Day. “Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows” was the headline. Perhaps Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable with his subject, because he included the following generic description: “In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations…” The figures he cited from a new congressional study of that “highly competitive” market told a different story: The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came “a distant second” with $3.7 billion. In sales to “developing nations,” the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market. In other words, with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position — in this case, in things that go boom in the night. With the American car industry in a ditch, it seems that this (along with Hollywood films that go boom in the night) is what we now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state. Is that an American accomplishment you’re comfortable with?

On the day I’m writing this piece, “Names of the Dead,” a feature which appears almost daily in my hometown newspaper, records the death of an Army private from DeKalb, Illinois, in Afghanistan. Among the spare facts offered: he was 20 years old, which means he was probably born not long before the First Gulf War was launched in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. If you include that war, which never really ended — low-level U.S. military actions against Saddam Hussein’s regime continued until the invasion of 2003 — as well as U.S. actions in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, not to speak of the steady warfare underway since November 2001, in his short life, there was hardly a moment in which the U.S. wasn’t engaged in military operations somewhere on the planet (invariably thousands of miles from home). If that private left a one-year-old baby behind in the States, and you believe the statements of various military officials, that child could pass her tenth birthday before the war in which her father died comes to an end. Given the record of these last years, and the present military talk about being better prepared for “the next war,” she could reach 2025, the age when she, too, might join the military without ever spending a warless day. Is that the future you had in mind?

Consider this: War is now the American way, even if peace is what most Americans experience while their proxies fight in distant lands. Any serious alternative to war, which means our “security,” is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian terms then, war is indeed peace in the United States and peace, war.

American Newspeak

Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever more constricted form of English that would, sooner or later, make “all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended,” he wrote in an appendix to his novel, “that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable.”

When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our permanent situation, in good Orwellian fashion it has also been sundered from a set of words that once accompanied it.

It lacks, for instance, “victory.” After all, when was the last time the U.S. actually won a war (unless you include our “victories” over small countries incapable of defending themselves like the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing “victory” over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades old that has proved a catastrophe. Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and Korean Wars and the last time the U.S. military was truly victorious was in 1945.

But achieving victory no longer seems to matter. War American-style is now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When George W. Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror (aka World War IV), conceived as a “generational struggle” like the Cold War, he caught a certain American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war system can’t absorb victory. Any such endpoint might indeed prove to be a kind of defeat.

No longer has war anything to do with the taking of territory either, or even with direct conquest. War is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography.

Similarly drained of its traditional meaning has been the word “security” — though it has moved from a state of being (secure) to an eternal, immensely profitable process whose endpoint is unachievable. If we ever decided we were either secure enough, or more willing to live without the unreachable idea of total security, the American way of war and the national security state would lose much of their meaning. In other words, in our world, security is insecurity.

As for “peace,” war’s companion and theoretical opposite, though still used in official speeches, it, too, has been emptied of meaning and all but discredited. Appropriately enough, diplomacy, that part of government which classically would have been associated with peace, or at least with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means, has been dwarfed by, subordinated to, or even subsumed by the Pentagon. In recent years, the U.S. military with its vast funds has taken over, or encroached upon, a range of activities that once would have been left to an underfunded State Department, especially humanitarian aid operations, foreign aid, and what’s now called nation-building. (On this subject, check out Stephen Glain’s recent essay, “The American Leviathan” in the Nation magazine.)

Diplomacy itself has been militarized and, like our country, is now hidden behind massive fortifications, and has been placed under Lord-of-the-Flies-style guard. The State Department’s embassies are now bunkers and military-style headquarters for the prosecution of war policies; its officials, when enough of them can be found, are now sent out into the provinces in war zones to do “civilian” things.

And peace itself? Simply put, there’s no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it’s left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell’s Newspeak, while “peace” remains with us, it’s largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it’s just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases — recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone — and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America’s true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also — always — marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.

*********

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

September 18th, 2009

Music: Song of a U.S. Army Interrogator

John Crigler sings his original composition, Song of a U.S. Army Interrogator, about our mutual friend, veteran Army interrogator Ray Bennett. It beautifully captures Ray’s passion, moral conflicts, and self-deprecating humor.

The song is dedicated to Ray and to Abu Ghraib whistleblower Sam Provance (another wonderful human being):

July 20th, 2009

Mother Jones on health professionals’ complicity with US torture

Mother Jones has a major new article on health professionals’ complicity with the US military’s torture and detainee abuse. The article shows that none of our major professional associations acted honorably in the face of government-sanctioned torture and abuse.

While I have written extensively on the failures of the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, while possessed of better policies, failed to condemn US torture, or to investigate medical complicity with torture. Professional licensing boards across the country failed to act on, or even to investigate, ethics complaints filed against those accused of aiding abuse have been rejected without investigations.

From the perspective of the struggle about the role of psychologists in interrogations occurring in the American Psychological Association, the article has important information. It begins and ends with the story of Army medic Andrew Duffy, who served at Guantanamo in 2006. That is, he served two years after psychologist and former Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib Behavioral Science Consultation Team [BSCT] member Col. Larry James claims to have single-handedly “fixed hell” at both detention facilities. Yet Duffy tells tales of routine horrific abuse, even resulting in death. Granted, the abuse Duffy describes is not interrogation abuse, but, rather, the pervasive neglect that comes from dehumanizing those within one’s care.

THE MEMORY OF detainee No. 173379 still haunts Andrew Duffy. The 24-year-old prisoner showed up in March 2006 among a truckload of captures at Abu Ghraib, where Duffy was stationed as a medic. His job was to treat new arrivals in an overcrowded, sweltering tent suffused with the stench of human waste and vomit. There, Duffy, then 19, handled everything from common diseases like tuberculosis to festering gunshot wounds.

But the new prisoner stood out. He was belligerent, yelling gibberish and staggering like a drunk. Having witnessed this kind of behavior before with detainees in diabetic shock, Duffy checked the man’s blood-sugar level. From 70 to 140 milligrams per deciliter is normal; his read 431. The prisoner explained that Iraqi soldiers had held him for five days without his insulin. Duffy called the compound’s hospital to request an immediate transfer. It was denied. Duffy’s medical supervisor ordered him to just give the guy water.

He was used to this. The prison’s medical officers routinely rejected medics’ requests to hospitalize sick and wounded detainees; the general sentiment, Duffy says, was “screw these guys.” Once, he tried to re­vive an elderly prisoner whose heart had stopped. The ambulance’s defibrillator had the wrong pads, so Duffy attempted CPR and mouth-to-mouth. “Why did you make out with that hajji?” the hospital staffers taunted. “Why didn’t you just let him die?” For the next month, he heard it around the chow hall: “That fucking medic gave that hajji CPR!”…

BACK AT ABU GHRAIB, Andrew Duffy was in no position to disobey a direct order, so he did as he was told and gave water to his diabetic prisoner. By the next morning, detainee No. 173379 was even weaker and more confused. Duffy and his partner again called for a hospital transfer-their third try-and again the captain denied the request. This time, she told them to administer saline through a 14-gauge needle.

That’s a huge needle-more than two millimeters in diameter. A civilian doctor would only use it for extreme trauma situations, with an unconscious patient or with a local anesthetic to numb the pain. At Abu Ghraib, the large needles were used as punishment, or to discourage detainees from asking for care.

If Duffy’s account is verified by others who served at Abu Ghraib, it puts the lie to James’ claims of having transformed the facility to humane standards. As James’ account of the humane transformation of Guantanamo through his efforts in early 2003 are belied by virtually every other unbiased account of that facility in 2003, 2004, and after, James’ account of his alleged efforts to reform either facility are highly questionable at best. Either James was startlingly incompetent or he was engaged in some other activity than “fixing hell” during his time as a BSCT at these facilities. Unfortunately, the information we have on the BSCT program leans in the second direction.

First, Do Harm

By Justine Sharrock

THE MEMORY OF detainee No. 173379 still haunts Andrew Duffy. The 24-year-old prisoner showed up in March 2006 among a truckload of captures at Abu Ghraib, where Duffy was stationed as a medic. His job was to treat new arrivals in an overcrowded, sweltering tent suffused with the stench of human waste and vomit. There, Duffy, then 19, handled everything from common diseases like tuberculosis to festering gunshot wounds.

But the new prisoner stood out. He was belligerent, yelling gibberish and staggering like a drunk. Having witnessed this kind of behavior before with detainees in diabetic shock, Duffy checked the man’s blood-sugar level. From 70 to 140 milligrams per deciliter is normal; his read 431. The prisoner explained that Iraqi soldiers had held him for five days without his insulin. Duffy called the compound’s hospital to request an immediate transfer. It was denied. Duffy’s medical supervisor ordered him to just give the guy water.

He was used to this. The prison’s medical officers routinely rejected medics’ requests to hospitalize sick and wounded detainees; the general sentiment, Duffy says, was “screw these guys.” Once, he tried to re­vive an elderly prisoner whose heart had stopped. The ambulance’s defibrillator had the wrong pads, so Duffy attempted CPR and mouth-to-mouth. “Why did you make out with that hajji?” the hospital staffers taunted. “Why didn’t you just let him die?” For the next month, he heard it around the chow hall: “That fucking medic gave that hajji CPR!”

Beyond patching up detainees, Duffy and his comrades with the 134th Medical Company of the Iowa National Guard were ordered to soften them up for interrogation. One day, Duffy and an MP restrained and hog-tied a resisting detainee-cuffing his wrists to his crossed ankles behind his back-so that Duffy could check his vital signs. Guards later boasted that they’d left the man that way for 12 hours.

Throughout Duffy’s year at Abu Ghraib-long after the infamous photos were published and the Pentagon vowed that detainees were no longer abused-men were still being strapped into restraint chairs and left in the blazing sun for hours or locked in cells too small to lie down in for 24 hours at a time. The medics regularly found prisoners dehydrated, wrists bloody from overtight handcuffs, ankles swollen from forced standing, joints dislocated from stress positions. They knew to keep their written evaluations vague, never mentioning cause of injury as a standard medical report would. When they shuttled broken detainees to and from the prison’s interrogation rooms, the orders were explicit: Transport only. No medical care. No paper trail. Flouting the Geneva Conventions, Duffy’s platoon sergeant even ordered the medics to strip their uniforms and ambulances of the Red Cross emblems that denoted them as noncombatants. Should anyone from the Red Cross show up to see the prison, the soldiers were told, send them away and tell them nothing.

FOR MORE THAN five decades, starting with the prosecution of Nazi doctors during the Nuremberg trials-seven were sentenced to death-the Pentagon made a point of ordering its physicians to abide by international norms. The World Medical Association, which counts the American Medical Association (AMA) as a member, had issued clear directives: Doctors could not assist in torture or cruelty of any kind, and were duty bound to report abuses they witnessed. The United Nations later clarified that the rules apply to all medical personnel-from surgeon to nurse to psychologist to lowly medic. Even now, the Army’s Military Medical Ethics textbook echoes the Geneva Conventions, noting that a doctor-warrior’s priority is always “physician first.” “They don’t give up their licenses and their medical ethics when they join the military,” explains George Annas, a professor of law and public health at Boston University.

But even as the nation debates disbarment for the Bush administration lawyers who green-lighted torture, the medical profession has dealt reluctantly, if at all, with its own involvement. “The indifference is shocking,” says retired Army Brig. General Stephen N. Xenakis, a rare outspoken critic among military doctors. “Some civilian doctors are appalled, but many say, ‘It doesn’t affect my life; I’m not involved.’”
Doctors were complicit in the torture strategy from the start. In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued a directive allowing interrogators to withhold care in nonemergency situations-men with injuries including gunshot wounds were denied treatment as a way to make them talk. (The directive was soon revoked, but the practice continued.)

Four months later, Rumsfeld ordered that doctors had to certify prisoners “medically and operationally” suitable for torture and be present for the sessions. At Abu Ghraib, interrogations had to be preapproved by a physician and a psychiatrist. “They have the final say as to what is implemented,” Colonel Thomas M. Pappas told military investigators.

The CIA received similar advice in 2002 and 2005 from the Justice Department, whose torture memos recommended that physicians and psychologists be present for the interrogation of “high value al Qaeda detainees.” These doctors, the lawyers argued, would see to it that interrogators didn’t torture detainees by intentionally inflicting “serious or permanent harm.”

But it was in June 2005 that the Pentagon delivered its biggest ethical bombshell, a memo that allowed doctors to participate in torture and share medical records with interrogators so long as the detainee in question wasn’t officially their patient. The directive’s author, physician and top Pentagon health official William Winkenwerder Jr., received a prestigious award from the AMA that year for outstanding contributions “to the betterment of the public health.”

Field medics like Duffy, who were still being trained to do no harm according to the military’s old ethical standards, faced a rude awakening on the ground. “You have all these codes you follow as a health care worker, but then it’s, ‘Now we’re in Iraq, forget those,’” Duffy told me.

Plenty of doctors in uniform felt similarly but, like Duffy, did as they were told. A 2007 Red Cross report indicates that CIA medical personnel presided over hundreds of waterboardings, including those of Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. One Al Qaeda associate, an amputee named Walid bin Attash, told the Red Cross that health workers periodically measured the swelling in his remaining leg as he was shackled in a stress position at a CIA black site. Gitmo military doctors twice sent alleged 9/11 planner Mohammed al-Qahtani to the hospital after his heart rate fell to dangerously low levels, only to send him back to the torture chamber when he improved.

Aware of the breaches, Xenakis says, a few military physicians called for ethical reviews. But the Pentagon overruled them, and the protests ceased. “There was a blackout,” he explains. Fearing for their careers, “military doctors wouldn’t speak, even informally.” Before long, adds M. Gregg Bloche, a Georgetown University law professor who interviewed military physicians on condition of anonymity, the Defense Department was screening doctors and deploying only those on board with the program.

DURING THE 1980S, as a symbolic show of support for doctors working under oppressive regimes, the American Medical Association enacted guidelines that forbade their participation in torture. But even when it became clear that US doctors were violating these rules, the association (which represents a quarter of a million doctors and med students nationwide) took no steps toward censuring its wayward members. Instead, in 2004, it released a statement pointing to its existing guidelines. The AMA’s refusal to take a stronger stand, says Penn State bioethics professor Jonathan H. Marks, has been “a source of shame” for the profession.

What stood out for Steven H. Miles, a bioethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, was the association’s resounding silence in February 2006, after the UN Commission on Human Rights condemned American doctors for having “systematically” participated in detainee abuse. “In a serious medical community, that would be a call to arms,” Miles says. “But the AMA said nothing.”

It wasn’t until November 2006 that the association issued a statement clarifying that doctors cannot participate in interrogations of any kind. Xenakis, who helped shape the new policy, says most of the AMA’s military delegates resisted the move, arguing that “the mission of getting information was greater than the medical ethics they acknowledged we were overriding.” (The four military delegates contacted for this story declined to comment.)

The nation’s top medical association has all but ignored the sorts of serious ethical breaches that Duffy witnessed daily-the neglect, the filthy conditions, the incomplete medical reports. Some doctors even abused detainees under the guise of treatment. Brandon Neely, who served as a guard at Guantanamo back in 2002, twice watched a Navy physician perform violent exams on new arrivals. Without lubrication, he said, the doctor “just reached back and shoved his finger as hard as he could in the rectum.” His fellow MPs told him the other doctors were doing the same thing. They all heard the prisoners screaming.

On at least four occasions, doctors have petitioned AMA leaders to endorse an independent investigation of their colleagues’ role in the abuses-only to be voted down. “They said, ‘Look, we trust our military and we aren’t going to step on their toes,’” explains Matthew Wynia, director of the association’s Institute for Ethics.

None of the AMA’s top officials would be interviewed for this story. When pressed on why they were so reluctant to act, even after the complicity of doctors became apparent, spokeswoman Kate Cox insisted that the association has no specific knowledge of doctors being involved in abuse or torture and that it is not equipped to conduct the sort of investigation needed to “credibly confirm” such allegations. Besides, Cox said, the AMA has fulfilled its duty simply by setting ethical standards.
But the AMA’s critics worry that its half-measures have already-perhaps irreparably-damaged the moral standing of American doctors. “It has had a corrosive effect,” says Xenakis. Adds Miles, “We’re now in an extremely poor position to protest abuse in other countries. It will silence us as a medical community.”

MENTAL HEALTH practitioners were, if anything, even more deeply involved in the abuses. In November 2002, Gitmo commander Maj. General Geoffrey Miller put together a Behavioral Science Consultation Team, a group of psychiatrists and psychologists tasked with preparing prisoner profiles and advising interrogators on the use of environmental manipulation, sleep deprivation, exploitation of individual fears, and other coercive methods.

Among the practitioners was Guantanamo senior psychologist Major John Leso, who helped plan and implement the 50-day interrogation of Mohammed al-Qahtani. Detailed logs of the torture sessions indicate that the prisoner was sexually humiliated, isolated and deprived of sleep for extended periods, subjected to extreme cold, shackled in stress positions, tormented by military dogs, and leashed and made to perform like a dog.

Leso, who was in the interrogation room for part of Qahtani’s ordeal, advised-among other things-that the detainee could be disoriented by spinning him on a swivel chair so that he couldn’t fix his eyes on one spot. Along with the prison’s medical doctors, he regularly evaluated Qahtani for his ability to tolerate further abuse. During one session, the medical staff injected the prisoner with three and a half IV bags of saline-Qahtani’s questioner then wouldn’t let him urinate until he provided satisfactory answers. Despite evidence of Leso’s actions, the American Psychological Association has failed to act on an ethics complaint by a fellow APA member.

Rank-and-file psychologists are deeply divided on the subject of torture. In 2007, an association task force (six of its ten members had military ties) voted to condemn torture but still allow psychologists in the interrogation room, where, its members argued, they might discourage abuse and even save detainees’ lives. Incensed, thousands of psychologists petitioned for a vote on the question by the APA membership. In a roughly 60-40 tally, the association decided that psychologists have no place in the interrogation room. (For more on the APA and torture, see David Goodman’s “The Enablers”.) It was the right choice, says Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist and former military medic who has written about the role of Nazi doctors during the Holocaust. Putting health professionals into an abusive setting, he argues, “can confer an aura of legitimacy and can even create an illusion of therapy and healing.”

Which is more or less what Duffy experienced. “If a medic was around, there was a sense of some control,” he told me. “The guards probably thought, ‘If I really cross the line, this guy would stop me.’”

In May 2006, the American Psychiatric Association, which represents some 38,000 psychiatrists, reiterated its past position that its members should not directly assist in interrogations. But Steven Sharfstein, then the association’s president, also noted that psychiatrists “wouldn’t get in trouble” if they heeded military orders over the association’s advice-which, he added, should not be considered “an ethical rule.”

IT’S NOT THAT the medical community lacks the tools to police itself. Doctors can’t practice without a state license, and a grave breach of ethics can cost them that license. State licensing boards are legally obligated to investigate violations, yet no state medical board has ever disciplined a doctor for assisting in military torture.

One California complaint illustrates the boards’ reluctance to confront the military. Filed by New York-based attorney Scott Sullivan on behalf of four former detainees, the 2005 complaint targeted Captain John S. Edmondson, then Guantanamo’s lead physician. The men claimed that their medical records were shared with interrogators, who then withheld treatment for heart problems, worms, constipation, and injuries inflicted by the camp’s “internal reaction forces”-five-man teams dispatched to beat recalcitrant prisoners. When these attackers showed up, the detainees claimed, medical personnel would instruct them on details such as, “Hit him around the eye; don’t poke him in the eye.”
But the complaint never got a hearing: The Pentagon claimed jurisdiction in the case, and the medical board demurred. Citing insufficient subpoena power and resources, it turned the matter over to military investigators, who found no evidence of wrongdoing. “The board didn’t care how they got out of it,” says Sullivan. “They just didn’t want to be in the middle of a hot-button political issue.”

Mother Jones obtained three similar complaints filed by former APA member Trudy Bond against psychologists who allegedly participated in abuses. In addition to targeting Leso’s license in New York, she pursued his Gitmo colleague, senior psychologist Colonel Larry C. James, in Louisiana. In Alabama she filed a complaint against Diane M. Zierhoffer, a military psychologist who helped direct the interrogation of an Afghan teenager accused of throwing a grenade at a US military vehicle. Zierhoffer recommended a month of isolation, which can cause or exacerbate mental health problems; later, the teen tried to hang himself.

None of these complaints resulted in disciplinary action. Licensing boards, says bioethicist Marks, are “reluctant to call into question anything with broader implication beyond the individual physician, especially if it is impugning government officials or state policy.”

Absent action from the profession, some states have turned to political pressure. California’s Senate passed a symbolic joint resolution last year urging the state’s licensing boards to warn doctors that they could be prosecuted for participating in torture. (The American Psychiatric Association petitioned unsuccessfully to have psychiatrists exempted.) A bill under consideration in New York would bar any health care worker from participating in torture or “improper treatment,” as defined by international standards. But reform advocates say legislation is no substitute for sanctions by doctors themselves. “The practice of medicine,” says Boston University professor Annas, “is something the profession defines and the profession has to guard.”

BACK AT ABU GHRAIB, Andrew Duffy was in no position to disobey a direct order, so he did as he was told and gave water to his diabetic prisoner. By the next morning, detainee No. 173379 was even weaker and more confused. Duffy and his partner again called for a hospital transfer-their third try-and again the captain denied the request. This time, she told them to administer saline through a 14-gauge needle.

That’s a huge needle-more than two millimeters in diameter. A civilian doctor would only use it for extreme trauma situations, with an unconscious patient or with a local anesthetic to numb the pain. At Abu Ghraib, the large needles were used as punishment, or to discourage detainees from asking for care.

A day later, the Army’s criminal investigation unit summoned Duffy and his partner for questioning. No. 173379 was dead. Interpreting his symptoms as insubordination, MPs had pepper-sprayed the man and stuck him in a tiny cell in the scorching heat. Duffy says he filled out a five-page sworn statement, but his captain gave a conflicting account, and the case was dropped. Later, when it became clear that the dead man had been an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the bloodthirsty commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq, soldiers came up to congratulate the medics.

Duffy did what he felt he could. Beyond his statement (which the investigators now claim they have no record of), he complained to his superiors about the shoddy medical supplies and the stripping of Red Cross emblems. More recently, he filed complaints about his platoon sergeant and captain with the Army Inspector General’s office, but nothing has come of it. In any case, much of the paper trail that might have implicated them is probably lost. When the military abandoned Abu Ghraib in September 2006, Duffy and his comrades were given one last order: Burn all of the compound’s medical records.

July 16th, 2009

Two Specail Forces generals evade torture accountability

In a detailed reading of the recent Senate Armed Services Committess [SASC] report on interrogations, Jeff Kaye calls attention to the crucial roles of two Special Forces officers in bringing SERE-based abuse to Iraq:

Recently, there was a spike of interest in the command responsibility Obama nominee for top military commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, might hold for the use of torture by Special Operations forces under his command in Iraq. But at the Senate Armed Services hearing for his nomination the other day, according to Spencer Ackerman, only Senator Levin even queried him on the subject, and no senator appeared opposed to his nomination.

But I want to look at the actions of two generals mentioned in the SASC report, “Inquiry on the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody.” Both of them are singled out for actions related to the approval of torture under their commands. Both had command responsibility for these actions, and one of them, Air Force Special Operations Brigadier General Lyle Koenig, was specifically singled out for obloquy (although not by name). The other senior officer, Brigadier General Thomas Moore, was the Director of Operations and Plans (J3) for Joint Forces Command (JFCOM).

Both officers dropped out of sight after 2004, or, that is, an extensive web search on their activities turned up practically nothing. It was on September 24, 2004 that JFCOM finally withdrew official approval for use of SERE-like interrogation techniques, at least by SERE personnel (or rather, through SERE’s parent agency, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, or JPRA). Earlier, BG Koenig and BG Moore had played crucial roles in the implementation of SERE torture, giving approval to the use of SERE techniques in interrogations.

Read the article for a detailed explication of their roles.

June 6th, 2009

Do the withheld Iraq photographs depict rape and sodomy?

In a piece by Salon’s Mark Benjamin, Gen. Taguba denies last week’s Telegraph story on the content of the Iraq photos withheld by the Obama administration:

Taguba denies he’s seen abuse photos suppressed by Obama

The general told a U.K. paper about images he saw investigating Abu Ghraib — not photos Obama wants kept secret.

By Mark Benjamin

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba denied reports that he has seen the prisoner-abuse photos that President Obama is fighting to keep secret, in an exclusive interview with Salon Friday night.

On Thursday an article in the Daily Telegraph reported that Taguba, the lead investigator into Abu Ghraib abuse, had seen images Obama wanted suppressed, and supported the president’s decision to fight their release. The paper quoted Taguba as saying, “These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency.”

But Taguba says he wasn’t talking about the 44 photographs that are the subject of an ongoing ACLU lawsuit that Obama is fighting.

“The photographs in that lawsuit, I have not seen,” Taguba told Salon Friday night. The actual quote in the Telegraph was accurate, Taguba said — but he was referring to the hundreds of images he reviewed as an investigator of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq — not the photos of abuse that Obama is seeking to suppress.

In March 2006 Salon published “The Abu Ghraib Files,” 279 photographs and 19 videos collected by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division as it examined the shocking cases of prisoner abuse at the notorious Baghdad prison. The photos depict scenes of extreme cruelty – prisoners forced to publicly masturbate, naked prisoners held in extreme stress positions, or being walked naked by a female guard. Some photos show prisoners bloodied and otherwise injured, with untrained guards tending to their wounds.

Several news organizations have described some of those same images as among the ones Obama is seeking to suppress, when in fact, they’ve already been published by Salon.

Taguba says the Telegraph story got one important fact right: He said he does support Obama’s decision to fight the release of the images subject to the lawsuit, even though he has not seen those images. “No other photographs should be released,” Taguba told Salon, because he worries additional images might threaten the safety of U.S. troops.

On the other hand, Scott Horton claims to have validated the Telegraph report:

The Bogus Torture Coverup

The Pentagon is denying the facts: Photographs of Abu Ghraib torture are even more sexually explicit than first reported, including rape and sodomy, writes The Daily Beast’s Scott Horton, who has obtained specific and detailed corroboration of the photos.

by Scott Horton

The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition, and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.

These descriptions come on the heels of a British report yesterday about the photographs that contained some of these revelations—and whose credibility was questioned by the Pentagon as well as the British newspaper’s source, who claims he was misunderstood.

The Daily Beast has obtained specific corroboration of the British account, which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph, from several reliable sources, including a highly credible senior military officer with firsthand knowledge, who provided even more detail about the graphic photographs that have been withheld from the public by the Obama administration.

A senior military officer familiar with the photos told me that they would likely provoke a storm of outrage if released. The well-informed source confirmed, just as reported in the Telegraph, that many of the photographs are sexually explicit, including those mentioned above. The photographs differ from those already officially released. Some show U.S. personnel engaged in sexual acts with prisoners and each other. In one, a female prisoner appears to have been forced to expose her breasts to be photographed. In another, a prisoner is suspended naked upside down from the top bunk of a bed in a stress position.

The Telegraph article quoted retired Major General Antonio Taguba, who directed the official inquiry in 2004 into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. Taguba told the Telegraph that the “pictures show torture, abuse, rape, and every indecency.” The Telegraph reported: “At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire, and a phosphorescent tube. Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.”

In response to the Telegraph account, Bryan G. Whitman, a deputy assistant secretary of Defense, attacked the newspaper. “That news organization has completely mischaracterized the images,” he said. “None of the photos in question depict the images that are described in that article.” White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, later in the day, widened the assault to a general one against British journalism. “If I wanted to read a writeup today of how Manchester United fared last night in the Champions League Cup, I might open up a British newspaper,” Gibbs said. “If I was looking for something that bordered on truthful news, I’m not entirely sure it’d be in the first pack of clips I’d pick up.”

In one withheld photograph, not previously described, Specialist Charles A. Graner, Jr., an Abu Ghraib guard, is shown suturing the face of a prisoner, a reliable source tells The Daily Beast. The suturing appeared to serve no ostensible medical purpose than perhaps Graner’s attempts to humiliate or terrorize the prisoner, the source suggested. Graner was court-martialed and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment in 2005 for charges that included prisoner abuse. A number of the withheld photographs, according to reliable sources, show Graner engaged in sexual acts with Specialist Lynndie A. England, another soldier assigned to duty at Abu Ghraib. She appears in some of the most notorious photographs disclosed so far, including one in which she walked a detainee on a leash—enacting a regimen later revealed as an authorized technique known as “walking the dog.”

Other suppressed photographs show a female prisoner assuming sexually suggestive poses in a chair, while a prison guard appears behind her in some frames. In another series, prisoners are shown hooded in a transport with open copies of pornographic magazines in their laps.

Still other withheld photographs have been circulating among U.S. soldiers who served in Iraq. One soldier showed them to me, including a photograph in which a male in a U.S. military uniform receives oral sex from a female prisoner.

The Obama administration’s decision to challenge the Telegraph account presents a dilemma because many of the photographs have already been leaked, and they match the very images that Taguba described and which Pentagon spokesman Whitman denied. The already leaked photographs can be seen at the Web sites of Salon.com, the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia, the Australian Broacasting Corp. Dateline program, and the Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

The suppressed photographs and videos are the subject of a Freedom of Information Act litigation brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU prevailed against government claims of secrecy both in the federal district court and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. (Full disclosure: I supplied a legal expert’s opinion on the Geneva Conventions, which was cited by both courts in reaching their conclusions.) Yesterday, the Justice Department filed papers asking the court to reconsider its decision directing that the photographs be made public. In its papers, the Justice Department suggested it would seek to have the matter reviewed in the Supreme Court if its motion were to be denied.

The immediate pushback against the Telegraph story from the Pentagon, coupled with the decision of White House press secretary Gibbs to chime in, suggests the sensitivity of the issue. The full-scale strike against the Telegraph, the leading conservative quality newspaper in Britain, broadened into an offensive against the whole of British journalism, suggesting the precariousness of the public-relations effort.

The Pentagon spokesperson, Bryan G. Whitman, who came to prominence during the Bush administration, has drawn on standard operating procedures honed during the Rumsfeld era. Instead of offering correction of supposed factual inaccuracies, he has slammed the credibility of the publication itself. Yet his statement is both sweeping and extremely vague, and the claim that none of the photos reflect the descriptions in the article is immediately belied by an examination of the photos that have already been leaked.

Whitman has used this sort of bludgeoning attack on news organizations before. Ask Michael Isikoff at Newsweek. When Newsweek’s April 30, 2005, issue ran a brief Periscope piece referring to an internal report’s description of an incident in which a Quran was thrown down a toilet, Whitman launched a dramatic attack on the publication, pressuring it to retract and apologize. The report had, it later turned out, been correct. In 2007, the ACLU secured, through a Freedom of Information Act request, a copy of a 2002 FBI report which documented a prisoner’s charge that his Quran has been thrown in the toilet; five other cases of mishandling Qurans were reported, although the Pentagon insisted that none of them amounted to desecration.

The most prominent victim in the past of Whitman’s disinformation may have been none other than Barack Obama. On the campaign trail, in Austin, Texas, candidate Obama said he had gotten a message from an Army captain in Iraq who described how his unit had been shorted in munitions and equipment. I learned from reporters that Whitman started a whispering campaign with the Pentagon press corps telling them (not for attribution) that he didn’t believe Obama’s claims were true. Whitman’s game, however, was stopped by ABC reporter Jake Tapper, who tracked down the captain, interviewed him and fully verified the account.

Bryan Whitman remains on the job in the Pentagon today. But the effort to suppress the shocking photographs is already failing, as they leak to the public and reliable sources verify their authenticity. A senior military officer told me that in the months before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Pentagon officials engaged in strange maneuvers to avoiding viewing the pictures. That, he noted, didn’t make the photos any less real. But it apparently made it easier for Pentagon officials to dissemble about them. That process hasn’t stopped.

********

Scott Horton is a law professor and writer on legal and national-security affairs for Harper’s magazine and The American Lawyer, among other publications.

It isn’t clear from Horton’s account if the photographs he is discussing are necessarily the specific ones involved in the court case. In any case, it has been clear for a long time from multiple reports that pictures of rape and sodomy at Abu Ghraib exist.

It should also be remembered that many of the pictures the ACLU has fought for years to receive access to are not from Abu Ghraib, but from elsewhere in Iraq. Their importance is not so much the disturbing content, but the graphic evidence they will provide that the abuses of Abu Ghraib were in no sense isolated and could not have been the creations of a few isolated MPs, but were, rather, common throughout the Iraq conflict at that time. That is, that they were either authorized or tolerated up the entire chain of command. That is why the government has fought so hard to withhold those pictures. They would provided a vivid argument for the need for investigation and accountability for US torture.

May 31st, 2009