In an article from TPM Cafe, Ruth Rosen describes her experiences as an editorial nd Op-Ed writer for the liberal San Francisco Chronicle during the run-up to the Iraq war. Despite knowing that the administration was lying, Rosen and her fellow editorialists felt constrained as to what they could say. This is one of the best descriptions of the process of self-censorship in the liberal media. The take-home point:
The truth is, even a liberal newspaper, blessed with a liberal editorial board, did not engage in truth telling. We raised some good questions, wrote about supporting the troops, but failed to describe the deception that led to the catastrophe that was unfolding right before our eyes.
Here’s the article:
Tales From Inside the Editorial Board Room
By Ruth Rosen
When I first heard about Scott McClellan’s charges that the Bush administration had lied and deceived Americans during the months and years leading up to the war, I burst into tears of happiness. No, nothing he wrote was new. And even if he still seems like a sleazy public relations expert in obfuscation, an insider was finally telling the truth, in one book.
My story is different from those who felt seriously constrained about raising questions about the administration’s obvious lies. I worked as an editorial writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where a liberal editorial board raised serious objections to the war. And yet, in the years following 9/11, I felt editorial restraints that never allowed us to tell the whole truth about the lies and deception that led to America’s most catastrophic foreign policy disaster.
Others in the mainstream media felt far greater restraints. Jessica Yellin, a CNN journalist, for example, says she felt pressured by corporate executives at her previous network to support the Iraq War. To Anderson Cooper, she described how she and others were “under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president’s high approval ratings.” On the Today Show, Katie Couric, Brian Williams, and Charles Gibson also admitted feeling pressure from the Bush administration to support the war, MSNBC reported. Couric even recounted a threat from the White House Press Secretary to “block access to [the network] during the war” if she did not change the tone of her interviewing style.”
So what did I experience? An editor and an editorial board who felt that, in the absence of inside sources, we could not counter the administration’s lies.
Let me give you some examples. I was raised in a Republican family, but schooled by the great iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, who taught me that you can find the truth without inside sources, if only you’re willing to see beyond patriotic fervor and examine voices in the public domain that are marginalized, So, I would read national security experts who countered Donald Rumfeld’s ridiculous predictions; I would read the British, Canadian, Italian and French press; I would read the writings of experts in resource wars and weapons of mass destruction.
No, I didn’t know I was right. But I was sure that the administration was lying. And, I knew that at the very least that our editorials should be asking why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al should be believed when I had found strong evidence that they were cherry picking intelligence, and setting up their own office in the Pentagon, and acting in complete secrecy.
The rush to war drove me crazy. In the days that led up to the war, I went to my editor and told him I needed a few days unpaid leave to accept the fact that we were, in fact, going to war. In my mind’s eye, I saw a baby tied to the railroad tracks and saw the train rapidly moving toward the helpless child. I saw years of quagmire, bloodshed, and tens of thousands of deaths. I needed a few days to accept that reality before I could return to writing. He understood and allowed me to regain my professional composure.
To its credit, the editorial board raised some of the toughest questions in the mainstream media. And yet….I was the only one who didn’t believe Colin Powell’s shameful presentation at the United Nations. Why? Not because I had special insider knowledge, but like I.F. Stone, I had found credible people who could dissect his speech and found it unconvincing and unpersuasive.
When I heard Bush’s inaugural address, I heard two major lies embedded within his speech. But somehow that still wasn’t enough to accuse him of plagiarism and deception.
The truth is, even a liberal newspaper, blessed with a liberal editorial board, did not engage in truth telling. We raised some good questions, wrote about supporting the troops, but failed to describe the deception that led to the catastrophe that was unfolding right before our eyes.
While I was writing editorials, I was also publishing two weekly political columns on the op-ed page. I also felt constrained as a columnist. If I wanted to discuss this country’s desire to gain control and access over oil, I had to bump up against the accusation that I was a vulgar Marxist, rather than conversant with the reality of resource wars.
Finally, I am an historian, and I knew Iraq’s history. I also knew that the war would end in a disastrous occupation, not a liberation, and that no country, including our own, will ever tolerate occupation by a foreign nation.
This week, I sat with a former colleague from the editorial board in a café, rather than in the room where we used to make our editorial decisions. He admitted that I had been right, but even more, that even in a liberal paper, the editor and most of the board, had felt restrained, afraid of seeming unpatriotic, afraid of saying the emperor wore no clothes, afraid of not giving the President the benefit of the doubt, afraid of truth telling without access to inside sources.
You may say, “Ho Hum, even the Senate has now, after five years, come out with a report that describes (oh, so tepidly) the years of deception.
But for me, the tears flowed because I remembered all those years when I felt passionate about telling the public the truth, but was unable to do so in a mainstream, liberal, newspaper.
June 8th, 2008
Thanks to Dori Smith of Talk Nation Radio, our May 3 forum — Torture and the American Psyche: Blurring the Boundaries Between Healers and Interrogators — was audio-recorded. Dori has edited the material for two hald hour shows on Talk Nation Radio. That material is now available. [NOTE: The forum was also video recorded. These videos should be available soon, on YouTube or a similar site. Stay tuned.]
For those who don’t read this blof regularly, here’s the description of the speakers:
SPEAKERS:
Eric Fair currently a divinity student at Princeton will speak from his experience as a civilian contract interrogator in Baghdad, Fallujah, and Abu Ghraib in early 2004. He will lend his first person account to our conversation.
Leonard Rubenstein, J.D. President of Physicians for Human Rights, a Nobel Prize winning organization, is an attorney and veteran of many human rights struggles. He will speak of the role of torture in our contemporary political culture.
David Sloan-Rossiter, Ph.D. will bring his long standing interest in using a psych oana¬lytic perspective to aid communities to the role of moderator of the program. He is co-chair of the Curriculum Committee at Boston Institute for Psychotherapy and Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Stephen Soldz, Ph.D. a local psychoanalyst, social activist and Professor at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, is one of the nation’s leaders in opposing psycholo¬gist participation in torture and abuse. He will speak to the history of that struggle in the context of the broader struggle for human rights.
Talk Nation Radio
TNR Show I contains material from the Introduction by David Sloan-Rossiter and an interspersing of material from the talks by Leonard Rubenstein (President of Physicians for Human Rights) and myself. [See Dori's description here and download mp3 here.]
TNR Show II contains the conclusion from my talk, the talk by former Iraq interrogator Eric Fair, and some discussion, including comments by Stephen Behnke, the Ethics Director of the American Psychological Association. [See Dori's description here and download mp3 here.]
Complete Talks, unedited
The Talk Nation Radio versions are selected and cleaned up. For those who would like to listen to the complete talks, Dori has kindly made available the raw recordings.
David Sloan-Rossiter Introduction and Stephen Soldz talk here.
Leonard Rubenstein talk here.
Eric Fair talk here.
The Question & Answer session is available here.
June 2nd, 2008
Since 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) has steadfastly asserted that psychologists participating in detainee interrogations protects detainees by helping to keep these interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” Last week, the APA’s Ethics Director Stephen Behnke seized upon newly released portions of an official investigation of US detainee abuse, called the Church Report, as an opportunity to reinvigorate support for the APA policy of psychologist participation in interrogations.
In a letter to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the APA’s Dr. Behnke stated:
“In carefully reviewing the documents, we note that according to the information obtained by the ACLU, psychologists supporting interrogations ‘emphasized their separation from detainee medical care’, and that a psychologist who suspected abuse ‘recommended the interrogation not proceed and brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee.’ According to these documents, APA’s policy of engagement served the intended purpose: to stop interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety.”
To give Dr. Behnke credit, he did acknowledge the abuses described in the newly released material as “abhorrent.” However, any unbiased “careful review” of the documents falls far short of supporting Dr. Behnke’s conclusion. Quite the contrary, the report raises new concerns about the roles of psychologists in US interrogations.
Dr. Behnke’s letter to the ACLU was widely distributed within the APA as a defense of the association’s long-contested policy. It therefore is important to carefully examine his claims in the context of what is known about interrogation abuses in Iraq. In a separate article, Trudy Bond responded to Dr. Behnke’s claims in the same letter, questioning his assertions that the APA is willing to adjudicate reports of psychologists participating in detainee abuse. I will focus instead here on examining Dr. Behnke’s claim that the Church Report supports the APA’s policy of participation in detainee interrogations. In this process I briefly revisit previous justifications for APA policy.
Newly Released Church Report Materials
On April 30, 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced the release, under the Freedom of Information Act, of previously redacted portions of the Church Report on US military detainee abuses. This material contains numerous reports of physical and mental abuse, including several detainee deaths. The report makes clear that:
“[M]edical personnel often have exposure to the circumstances of detainee treatment.”
In discussing a number of these deaths the report states:
“We do not know if medical personnel reported suspicions of detainee abuse in this case, but the circumstances probably should have led them to consider detainee abuse.”
Although the language is sanitized, this statement nevertheless strongly points to the failure of medical personnel to take appropriate action in the face of likely interrogation abuse. Yet, in only one of eight deaths judged “suspicious for abuse” is there evidence that an Army physician reported the abuse. Thus, even in the face of potential homicide, medical personnel, for the most part, appear to have remained silent.
With regard to psychologists, the report stated:
“In Iraq, we interviewed two military personnel and one civilian serving in this capacity. All three emphasized their separation from detainee medical care. Only one believed he had observed or suspected detainee abuse. No details were offered, except that, when this occurred, he recommended the interrogation not proceed and brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee.”
The newly released material also reports that interrogation techniques [authorized by a September 2003 memorandum from commanding General Ricardo Sanchez] continued to be widely used until at least July 2004, well after some techniques were retracted in October 2003. Other techniques were banned in May 2004 [in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal]. These included:
” Isolation.”
” Environmental Manipulation: Altering the environment to create moderate discomfort (e.g. adjusting temperature or introducing an unpleasant smell)…. [Caution: Based on court cases in other countries, some nations may view application of this technique in certain circumstances to be inhumane. Consideration of these views should be given prior to use of this technique.]”
” Presence of Military Working Dog: Exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations.”
” Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control: Used to create fear, disorient detainee and prolong capture shock.”
” Sleep Management: Detainee provided minimum 4 hours of sleep per 24 hour period, not to exceed 72 continuous hours.”
” Stress Positions: Use of physical postures (sitting, standing, kneeling, prone, ect.) for no more than 1 hour per use. Use of technique(s) will not exceed 4 hours and adequate rest between use of each position will be provided.”
As was confirmed by the just released Justice Department Inspector General report on FBI involvement in abusive interrogations, these techniques were derived from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program to train US military personnel how to resist breaking under torture. As the Defense Department Inspector General reported, these techniques were “reverse engineered” by military and intelligence psychologists into US interrogation techniques. Authorization to use these techniques was hidden as, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the administration refused to release the Sanchez memo for nearly a year. These techniques, according to the Church Report, continued in widespread use long after their use had been retracted.
Special Forces
According to accounts by individuals like former Iraq Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, these SERE techniques were regularly used by Special Forces in Iraq. Other interrogators learned of them, directly or indirectly, from Special Forces and attempted to imitate the techniques used by these revered units. Abuses by the Navy SEALS, a Special Forces unit, were reported by Lagouranis:
“They would actually have the detainee stripped nude, laying on the floor, pouring ice water over his body. They were taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer. We had one guy who had been burned by the navy SEALs. He looked like he had a lighter held up to his legs. One guy’s feet were like huge and black and blue, his toes were obviously all broken, he couldn’t walk.”
Further reports of abuse by Special Forces include the New York Times’s March 19, 2006 article chillingly entitled “In Secret Unit’s ‘Black Room,’ a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse“:
“American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government’s torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.
In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball….
Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, “NO BLOOD, NO FOUL.” The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: ‘If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.’ “
This unit combined elements from throughout the Special Forces:
“The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy’s Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment.”
There are numerous other reports of pervasive abuse by troops across Iraq. Thus Capt. Ian Fishback and two other members of the 82nd Airborne Division told Human Rights Watch in 2005 that the abuse in their unit was routine. As reported in the New York Times:
“In separate statements to the human rights organization, Captain Fishback and two sergeants described systematic abuses of Iraqi prisoners, including beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in human pyramids and sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja.”
Capt. Fishback also quoted an Army Ranger, a Special Forces unit, as saying (after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004):
“I talked to an officer in the Ranger regiment and his response was, he wouldn’t tell me exactly what he witnessed but he said “I witnessed things that were more intense than what you witnessed,” but it wasn’t anything that exceeded what I had heard about at SERE school”
Military Intelligence
Military Intelligence units in Iraq were also involved in much of the detainee abuse. Thus, the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] inspected detention facilities across the country and, in a leaked February 2004 report, described systematic abuse by military intelligence throughout Iraq. It states:
“persons deprived of their liberty under supervision of the Military Intelligence were at high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture, in order to force cooperation with their interrogators” (p. 3-4).
The ICRC further reported:
“In certain cases such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information. Several military intelligence officers confirmed to the ICRC that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion” (p. 11).
It is important to note that no one was prosecuted or convicted at Abu Ghraib for isolating or humiliating prisoners, or for putting prisoners in ‘stress positions.’ These were considered standard operating procedures by the prosecution. The convictions were handed down for taking the infamous photographs or when there was evidence of physical abuse that went beyond these techniques.
The Church Report
It is relevant to understand that the Church Report is widely viewed as an attempt to whitewash detainee abuse through sidestepping the extent to which abuse was standard operating procedure and thus reducing command responsibility for that abuse. Thus Human Rights Watch characterizes the Church Report as a partial cover-up containing patent falsehoods:
“The Church report was supposed to be the definitive report on the development of interrogation techniques and detainee abuse in the “global war on terror” but the unclassified summary suggests a careful attempt - months after the Schlesinger and Fay/Jones report put the Pentagon on the defensive - to present a version of the facts that would not cause any trouble for the hierarchy. Time and again, the summary goes out of its way to rebut any inference that government policy was to blame, to the point of straining credibility and flatly contradicting the earlier reports. The report concluded that there was ‘no single, overarching explanation’ for the ‘few’ cases in which detainees had not been treated humanely.
Although Secretary Rumsfeld and General Sanchez both approved the use of guard dogs to strike fear in detainees, and although guard dogs were featured prominently in the Abu Ghraib photos, the Church executive summary states that ‘it is clear that none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater.’ Indeed, the only mention of dogs in the entire summary is the patently false statement that in Afghanistan and Iraq ‘interrogators clearly understood that abusive practices and techniques - such as … terrorizing detainees with unmuzzled dogs … - were at all times prohibited.’ “
Given the nature of this report, it should be taken as a statement of what cannot be denied, and not as a definitive account of the nature or the extent of detainee abuse.
Previous APA Policy Justifications
The APA has utilized many questionable arguments and deceptive tactics to justify psychologists’ participation in interrogations. In 2005, the APA appointed a Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). This Task Force was given the mandate to determine APA policy on psychologists’ participation in detainee interrogations. The majority of the Task Force membership, it turns out, consisted of military and intelligence psychologists who played roles in post 9/11 interrogations at Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the CIA’s “black site” torture centers. Not surprisingly, this task force emphasized psychologists important role is aiding national security by participating in these interrogations.
In support of its policy the APA has highlighted every available report of psychologists resisting interrogation abuses. While finding small pockets of resistance would hardly defend the policy, the APA has been able to offer only three incidents of psychologists ostensibly opposing the abusive interrogation policy. This despite the central role of psychologists in interrogations at Guantánamo and the CIA black sites and their participation in interrogations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
The most noteworthy example offered thus far has been that of Michael Gelles, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service psychologist. Gelles forcefully opposed opposed some of the worst abuses committed at Guantánamo and reported them to his commander, leading to policy changes. While Dr. Gelles acted honorably and may have helped change policies, one should remember that, long after these interventions the ICRC found conditions at Guantánamo continued to be abusive. As the New York Times described the ICRC findings during their June 2004 visit:
“[I]nvestigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through ‘humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.’ Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly ‘more refined and repressive’ than learned about on previous visits.
”The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,’ the report said. It said that in addition to the exposure to loud and persistent noise and music and to prolonged cold, detainees were subjected to ’some beatings.’ The report did not say how many of the detainees were subjected to such treatment.”
Thus, whatever successes Dr. Gelles’ achieved, they did little to dismantle the abusive system, described in the ICRC report as “tantamount to torture.” Even Dr. Gelles’ valiant attempt to oppose these interrogation techniques did little, in the end, to keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”
The APA has also at times pointed to Col. Larry James as an example of a psychologist successfully opposing torture. But there is simply no evidence to support this claim. Col. James was the Chief Psychologist on the Joint Intelligence Task Force in charge of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) at Guantánamo in early 2003. As the Red Cross noted when they returned to Guantánamo a year after col. James’ departure, conditions had only become increasingly “more refined and repressive” since Col. James was stationed there. Additionally, during Col. James’ tour at Guantánamo, the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures were adopted mandating a minimum of four weeks isolation for all new detainees:
“to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.”
The Joint Intelligence Task Force, of which Col. James was the Chief Psychologist, was in fact assigned the role of deciding when a detainee had been sufficiently disoriented, disorganized, and dependent on his interrogator enough to be released from this isolation. When this policy was described in Harpers online, Dr. Behnke, the APA’s Ethics wrote a letter agreeing that this use of isolation was unethical for psychologists:
“With the recent posting on the Internet of what has been identified as the U.S. military’s 2003 operating manual for the Guantánamo detention center, attention has been directed to the use of isolation and sensory deprivation as interrogation procedures. APA policy specifically prohibits using any such technique, alone or in combination with other techniques for the purpose of breaking down a detainee.”
Nonetheless, even after this information became public, APA officials have continued to cite Col. James to audiences as an anti-torture hero.
APA and the Newly-Released Materials
Contained in the newly released sections of the Church Report is an official acknowledgement that psychologists in so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) functioned in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But what had not been clear before is that these BSCTs are “mostly within Special Operations, where they provide direct support to military operations.” That is, the BSCT psychologists were, as described above, within the units especially known for using brutal means for dealing with detainees (Arrigo & Bennett, 2007).
Given this context, it is especially misleading that the APA’s Ethics Director points to two vague sentences in the report to argue that this material supports the APA’s policy of “engagement” with the Bush administration’s interrogation regime. Here are the relevant sentences from the Church report:
“In Iraq, we interviewed two military personnel and one civilian serving in this capacity. All three emphasized their separation from detainee medical care. Only one believed he had observed or suspected detainee abuse. No details were offered, except that, when this occurred, he recommended the interrogation not proceed and brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee.”
Given that these BSCT psychologists are “mostly within Special Operations” and are assigned to military intelligence, a curious reader might wonder about the routine nature of interrogations witnessed or participated in by the BSCT psychologists. These routine interrogations likely included techniques approved by the September 2003 memorandum from Gen. Sanchez which the very same Church Report materials document were still in widespread use through at least July 2004. Given this background, there is a more plausible reading of these sentences. It is most likely that what was “abuse” to a BSCT psychologist were interrogation tactics that went beyond those authorized by the September 2003 memo as ‘standard operating procedure.’ That is, given the “No Blood, No Foul” attitude of many Special Forces units, “abuse” would very likely be tactics that led to serious and visible physical harm. The fact that the BSCT “brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee” also supports such an interpretation. In years of reading and writing about detainee abuse in Iraq and elsewhere, I have never seen accounts of medical personnel being brought in to examine victims exposed “merely” to psychological abuse such as isolation, stress positions, sleep deprivation, or exposure to loud noises or freezing temperatures. It is unlikely that this sole report of a psychologist reporting abuse was referring to these widespread, but standard, abuses.
Can I prove my interpretation of this passage is the correct one? No. The wording is ambiguous and “no details were offered.” But Dr. Behnke’s claim that these newly released materials provide evidence that “APA’s policy of engagement served the intended purpose - to stop interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety” - is totally unsupported. In contrast, my interpretation is grounded in knowledge about detainee abuse in Iraq and about the Church report. Dr. Behnke’s “careful” review of these documents does not attempt to understand the role of psychologists in abuse of detainees but, like U.S. “intelligence” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, fixes the data around established APA policy.
Reference
Arrigo, Jean Maria, & Bennett, Ray. (2007). Organizational Supports for Abusive Interrogations in “The War on Terror.” In Torture Is for Amateurs, special issue of Peace and Conflict, 13 (4): 411-421.
May 26th, 2008
The New York Times had an editorial on last week’s Department of Justice Inspector General report on FBI observation of US detainee torture and abuse.
What the FBI agents Saw
New York Times Editorial, May 22, 2008
Does this sound familiar? Muslim men are stripped in front of female guards and sexually humiliated. A prisoner is made to wear a dog’s collar and leash, another is hooded with women’s underwear. Others are shackled in stress positions for hours, held in isolation for months, and threatened with attack dogs.
You might think we are talking about that one cell block in Abu Ghraib, where President Bush wants the world to believe a few rogue soldiers dreamed up a sadistic nightmare. These atrocities were committed in the interrogation centers in American military prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. And they were not revealed by Red Cross officials, human rights activists, Democrats in Congress or others the administration writes off as soft-on-terror.
They were described in a painful report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, based on the accounts of hundreds of F.B.I. agents who saw American interrogators repeatedly mistreat prisoners in ways that the agents considered violations of American law and the Geneva Conventions. According to the report, some of the agents began keeping a “war crimes file” — until they were ordered to stop.
These were not random acts. It is clear from the inspector general’s report that this was organized behavior by both civilian and military interrogators following the specific orders of top officials. The report shows what happens when an American president, his secretary of defense, his Justice Department and other top officials corrupt American law to rationalize and authorize the abuse, humiliation and torture of prisoners:
— Four F.B.I. agents saw an interrogator cuff two detainees and force water down their throats.
— Prisoners at Guantánamo were shackled hand-to-foot for prolonged periods and subjected to extreme heat and cold.
— At least one detainee at Guantánamo was kept in an isolation cell for at least two months, a practice the military considers to be torture when applied to American soldiers.
The study said F.B.I. agents reported this illegal behavior to Washington. They were told not to take part, but the bureau appears to have done nothing to end the abuse. It certainly never told Congress or the American people. The inspector general said the agents’ concerns were conveyed to the National Security Council, but he found no evidence that it acted on them.
Mr. Bush claims harsh interrogations produced invaluable intelligence, but the F.B.I. agents said the abuse was ineffective. They also predicted, accurately, that it would be impossible to prosecute abused prisoners.
For years, Mr. Bush has refused to tell the truth about his administration’s inhuman policy on prisoners, and the Republican-controlled Congress eagerly acquiesced to his stonewalling. Now, the Democrats in charge of Congress must press for full disclosure.
Representative John Conyers, who leads the House Judiciary Committee, said he would focus on the F.B.I. report at upcoming hearings. Witnesses are to include John C. Yoo, who wrote the infamous torture memos, and the committee has subpoenaed David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. Mr. Conyers also wants to question F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller and Attorney General Michael Mukasey, both of whom should be subpoenaed if they do not come voluntarily.
That is just the first step toward uncovering the extent of President Bush’s disregard for the law and the Geneva Conventions. It will be a painful process to learn how so many people were abused and how America’s most basic values were betrayed. But it is the only way to get this country back to being a defender, not a violator, of human rights.
May 26th, 2008
Spencer Ackerman has written a detailed piece of the May Day West Coast Longshoreman’s strike against the war. This was one of the most important events in recent years:
Longshoremen Union Protests Iraq War
Some Say Walkout Signals a Working-Class Weary of War
By Spencer Ackerman
According to virtually every poll this election year, the working class voter — particularly the white working class voter — is most concerned about the economy, to the exclusion of almost all else. It’s through that prism, according to a parade of television pundits, that the working-class views the war in Iraq. Perhaps the war is unpopular to the working class, as it is to approximately 70 percent of Americans, but the greater danger, they believe, comes from overzealous opposition to the war.
If that was the case, the walkout in California earlier this month should not have happened. Across 29 California ports, as many as 25,000 longshoremen — members of the firebrand International Longshore & Warehouse Union — refused to show up for work in protest of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Activity at the ports was significantly diminished on May 1 — the international day of labor solidarity. Labor historians interviewed by The Washington Independent were hard-pressed to remember the last anti-war labor strike of this magnitude.
(Matt Mahurin) The ILWU tied the war to the turbulence in the global economy to explain their action. “Big foreign corporations that control global shipping aren’t loyal or accountable to any country,” said Bob McEllrath, president of the union, in a prepared statement. “For them it’s all about making money. But longshore workers are different. We’re loyal to America, and we won’t stand by while our country, our troops, and our economy are destroyed by a war that’s bankrupting us to the tune of 3 trillion dollars. It’s time to stand up, and we’re doing our part today.”
Few outside analysts believe that the ILWU action is the vanguard of any large-scale labor action against the war. For one thing, the ILWU has traditionally had a strident aspect: it was the home of legendary labor firebrand Harry Bridges in the 1930s. Bridges was the union’s charismatic and radical spokesman during the 1934 longshoremen’s strike that brought shipping in the West Coast to a halt and the force of the police down on San Francisco longshoremen on the infamous “Black Thursday” events of July 5, 1934. But some see it as a sign that working-class Americans are increasingly fed up with the war.
According to the union, the push for the May 1 strike came from its locals, not union headquarters. The union duly notified the Pacific Maritime Assn., a conglomerate that owns the California ports. But ILWU said the organization did not accommodate the request for a work stoppage. As a result, as many as 25,000 ILWU members did not show up for work on May Day.
The strike affected 29 ports along the California coast, including Los Angeles and Long Beach, two of the country’s largest. A spokesman for the maritime association told AFP that the strike wouldn’t have a lasting economic impact but was nonetheless important. “It does come at a time when people are relying on U.S west coast ports operating smoothly,” Steve Getzug from the Pacific Maritime Assn. said. “These kinds of stoppages aren’t helpful.”
Repeated efforts to contact union representatives were unsuccessful. But Gene Bruskin, one of the leaders of U.S. Labor Against The War, a coalition of unions opposed to the war in Iraq that includes the ILWU’s Oakland chapter, said that the union made an attempt to coordinate with its brother workers in the Iraqi port of Basra to shut down that crucial oil-exporting port on May 1.
“That communication was a really powerful thing,” Bruskin said. “Port workers were talking to to port workers, as well as the oil workers who are very close to them, because Basra is the main port there. There were messages sent up and back… I fully understand why that didn’t happen — sometimes it’s complicated and over there you can’t always say what’s on their mind. But I think that was really powerful.”
While Basra did not shut down, some Iraqi labor groups issued a statement in solidarity with anti-war U.S. workers. “On this day of international labour solidarity we call on our fellow trade unionists and all those worldwide who have stood against war and occupation to increase support for our struggle for freedom from occupation — both the military and economic,” the Iraqi Labour Federation stated.
But the particular ethos of the longshoreman’s trade make exporting such an action to different U.S. unions difficult, labor historians say. “It’s part of the maritime culture,” said Pete Hoefel, an instructor in labor studies at the AFL-CIO’s National Labor College in Silver Spring, Md. “It’s very internationally minded. That union staked out positions on the civil war in Spain in the ’30s, the Hungarian revolution, Cuba, that sort of stuff. Unloading vessels, they talk with other maritime workers [from around the world]. It’s part of their own work culture.”
Indeed, building on the momentum of the strike would not be easy, said Gene Bruskin. “The longshoremen have a somewhat unique situation,” he said. “Their contract allows, under the right conditions, for them to take these kind of actions. But 90 percent of the contracts in the U.S. explicitly prevent this kind of action from happening. It’d be very difficult for most workers in the U.S. to join with the ILW even if they wanted to.”
Michael Kazin, a history professor at Georgetown University, pointed to the ILWU’s radical roots as reason to be skeptical that the strike will spread to other unions. “They were one of the first [unions] to come out against the Vietnam War, and I believe one of the first to come out against this war,” Kazin said. “I’m not sure how much of a harbinger it is.”
Still, it is hard to remember the last anti-war labor action of this magnitude. Hoefel recalled a demonstration in Washington in the 1980s of mostly public-sector unions against U.S. involvement in Nicaragua. But that was not an on-the-job action against a war. Bruskin remembered on-the-job actions of a similar size against Apartheid South Africa around the same time — undertaken, then as now, by the ILWU. Aside from those examples, there is little recent precedent for the action. “Iraq is big,” said Hoefel, “and within labor, it’s significant.”
Bruskin said a potential next step is to increase ties with Iraqi workers. A coalition of Iraqi unions — there is no unified labor movement in Iraq, a remnant of Saddam Hussein’s crackdown on civil society — is attempting to hold a labor conference against the U.S. occupation of Iraq in the relative safety of the Kurdish north, he said. “The relations between the labor movement here with USLAW, and even the official parts of the labor movement here, and the Iraqi unions are itself very historic,” Bruskin said. “In a time of war, when our country has invaded and occupied another country, to be in solidarity with those workers against the occupation, it’s important to provide [that] kind of support.” If the Iraqis hold the conference, Bruskin said he and representatives of U.S. Labor Against The War would attend.
As recounted in Rick Perlstein’s new book “Nixonland,” ever since the Vietnam War, the American right has used cultural issues to divide labor from liberals on foreign policy, a development capped in New York’s 1970 “Hardhat Riot,” in which stockbrokers and construction workers joined in attacking hippies demonstrating against the Vietnam War.
While the port strike remains, for now, an isolated incident, some believe it signals that such cultural appeals might be wearing thin. “The anti-war movement is very strong in the labor movement,” Hoefel said. “Like Vietnam, [Iraq] is a working-class war. Look at socio-economic background of the troops. Many are from a part of country where the economy has left them.”
May 21st, 2008
On November 1, 2003, Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley wrote of the terrible abusive conditions in US detention centers in Iraq. As noted by Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher, the story was virtually ignored. No major paper published it and no other reporters followed it up. I’m proud to say that my Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report contained a link to the Hanley piece. As I quoted from the article on November 2 2003:
In Iraq’s American detention camps, forbidden talk can earn a prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun, and detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers, according to recently released Iraqis.
I’ll post here Mitchell’s article on this, which includes his May 1 2004 [after the Abu Ghraib photos came out and the scandal broke] interview with Hanley, followed by the original 2003 article. In the 2004 interview Hanley presciently said:
My gut tells me the story will spread outward to Guantanamo and Afghanistan and to other prisons in Iraq. I guess it already is.
Imagine how history could have been different if more of the press had done their job instead of acting as conduits for military propaganda and US lies.
Greg Mitchell’s piece:
Four Years Later: Why Did It Take So Long for the Press to Break Abu Ghraib Story?
Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer winner for the Associated Press, uncovered abuses at the infamous prison months before the scandal really exploded. Why were so many others so slow to act?
By Greg Mitchell
(May 08, 2008) — Four years ago this month, as May unfolded, each day brought fresh horrors, images, or details about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. Pictures of shackled and hooded prisoners gave way to detainees on leashes, cowering before snarling dogs, or just plain beaten and bruised.
On May 10, 2004, an Iraqi human rights official charged that American overseer Paul Bremer had been repeatedly informed about abuses at Abu Ghraib. The New Yorker revealed that Donald Rumsfeld personally okayed a set of procedures that led to the abuses. Several major newspapers called for Rumsfeld to quit.
At that time, in a column, I disclosed how Pulitzer-winning correspondent Charles J. Hanley at The Associated Press had actually “broken” the Abu Ghraib story months before it came out via The New Yorker and other outlets—but the rest of the media had paid it little mind. This led me to ask, Is the press trying to make up for lost time once again?
The media was now bursting with accounts of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but where were they the previous fall when evidence of wrongdoing started to emerge—when a public accounting might have halted what turned out to be the worst of the incidents? “It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source,” Hanley told me.
Hanley started looking into accusations of abuse when he returned to Baghdad for his latest tour of press duty (he had earlier broken several key stories and worked on AP’s early revelations about heavy civilian casualties). It led to a series of pieces, culminating in a shocking report on Nov. 1, 2003, based on interviews with six released detainees.
He was still amazed that apparently no one else quickly looked into the allegations, and no major newspaper picked up on his reporting after it appeared. Why? “That’s something you’d have to ask editors at major newspapers,” he said. “But there does seem to be a very strong prejudice toward investing U.S. official statements with credibility while disregarding statements from almost any other source—and in this current situation, Iraqi sources.”
The Hanley stories that fall told of detainees being attacked by dogs, humiliated by guards, and spending days with hoods over their heads, now familiar images in the American—and Arab—mind. Even after the Pentagon promised an investigation in January, and announced arrests in March, Hanley was “surprised there was not more interest and investigative reporting done. It’s hard to fault my colleagues in Baghdad considering the pressure and danger they feel. Many stories are missed—that’s the way it is in war. But clearly there is a mindset in the U.S. media that slows the aggressive pursuit of stories that make the U.S. military look bad. The greatest fall down, of course, was the uncritical and often ignorant swallowing of claims about weapons of mass destruction presented by often unidentified sources.”
A partial transcript of our discussion in may 2004 follows.
When did you get involved in the prison angle?
Last September I arrived in Baghdad for another tour. What sparked my interest was an obscure British Web site which cited Amnesty International saying it had gotten some information about possible abuses.
I set about trying to locate released detainees. I think my first approach was to defense lawyer-types from the Iraqi League of Lawyers. They gave me some secondhand information. While working on that, I talked to the military officer at the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] who was responsible for the prison program. He let out that they had just shut down Camp Cropper at Baghdad airport, which had the worst reputation for abuse at that time.
They did not announce it, they just told me that in passing. I can only surmise that they did not want to draw attention to Cropper.
I did that story on Oct. 5, mainly about the closing of Cropper but also cited Amnesty’s contention about physical abuse and their protests. Then on Oct. 9, I did a longer piece based mainly on the lawyers and what they were finding inside. The president of the Lawyers League was a former political prisoner under the Baathist regime. They had so many families coming to them saying husbands or sons did nothing, they had been held for months, and couldn’t even find where they were. Only a few of the lawyers had gotten inside. Of course we now know, from the Red Cross, that a large percentage of the inmates were mistakenly imprisoned.
What led you to the released detainees?
The key was finding the right person at the Iraqi equivalent of the Red Cross, the Red Crescent Society. Then they began leading me to released detainees. In the end, with my interpreter, we spoke to six of the former detainees and they were from all three major camps—Cropper at the airport, Bucca in the south, and Abu Ghraib. One of them might have been in all three. We spent hours talking to them. Nothing like what we found had been published at that time, as I found out in a check of our database.
After writing the big piece, we held it and presented the U.S. command in Baghdad with a list of specific questions: Were certain kinds of deprivation and physical punishment used against detainees, as we were told, and why? How many deaths had occurred, and what were the circumstances? What types of weapons were used to put down disturbances? How many cases had there been of discipline or prosecution because of abuse? We learned that the MP (military police) brigade had sent responses to the Baghdad command, but they were never released to us, and there was no explanation given. Around this time, the MP general, Janis Karpinski, told an Arab TV interviewer the detainees were treated humanely. We quoted her on that.
So what happened after your AP story came out on Nov. 1?
The play was very disappointing. A few papers ran it, like the Tulsa World and Akron Beacon Journal. It got wide use in Germany. None of the major U.S. newspapers published the story. And I was surprised to see that none of them followed up.
Why do you think no one else jumped on it?
One reason is simple and practical—it’s a difficult story to get, in a chaotic city like Baghdad. Although, in the end, simply realizing that the Red Crescent Society was the Red Cross liaison could have occurred to others. But the other thing is, there was no official structure to the story. It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source. A handout from CPA eventually happened in January, but even after that there was not much pursuit.
The story did not pop out at everybody. But there was a lot going on elsewhere. Clearly there is a lot of indiscriminate killing going on in Iraq in general and there’s little focus on that. It’s not like the only human rights story is behind the walls. But the one behind the walls is toughest to get out.
Why didn’t more papers just run your story, when it was handed to them, then?
That’s something you’d have to ask editors at major newspapers. But I do think there’s often disproportionate weight of credibility given to the statements of U.S. officials. There seems to be a tendency at times to discount the statements of others—people like Iraqi former detainees—if they’re not somehow supported by a U.S. source, or perhaps by photographs.
Rumsfeld said this week the military, not the media, reported the Abu Ghraib abuses.
This is strictly correct if you’re talking about the specific abuses shown in some of the photos. But the AP provided specifics on other abuses throughout the system many months earlier and at the time was unable to get the U.S. military command to comment on them.
What do you think will happen now?
My gut tells me the story will spread outward to Guantanamo and Afghanistan and to other prisons in Iraq. I guess it already is.
*
Greg Mitchell’s new book “So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits–and the President–Failed on Iraq” explores this and other issues related to the war. It includes a preface by Bruce Springsteen and a foreword by Joseph L. Galloway.
Hanley’s November 1, 2003 article:
AP Enterprise: Former Iraqi detainees tell of riots, punishment in the sun, good Americans and pitiless ones
By Charles J. Hanley
Associated Press
9:36 a.m. November 1, 2003
BAGHDAD, Iraq – In Iraq’s American detention camps, forbidden talk can earn a prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun, and detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers, according to recently released Iraqis.
In these secretive islands in a scorched landscape, “they don’t respect anyone, old or young,” Rahad Naif said of his U.S. Army guards. He and others told of detainees in wheelchairs, and of a man carried into a stifling hot tent in his sickbed. “They humiliate everybody.”
Naif, 31, is one of three brothers – butchers from the east Baghdad slums – who were thrown into the three biggest detention centers by the Americans in July after a nasty quarrel with an influential neighbor. They never faced charges; the last brother was finally freed Oct. 15.
The camps and prisons hold a mixed population: curfew-breakers and drivers who tried to evade U.S. checkpoints, suspected common criminals, anti-U.S. resistance fighters, and many of deposed President Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party leadership.
A Naif brother released in September, Hassan, 32, said there are “good people” among the U.S. guards, like an older man the Iraqis respectfully dubbed “al-Haji” – “Pilgrim.” Ex-detainees also say conditions improve at times, as new underwear, toothbrushes and other supplies arrive; some facilities are better than others, and none compares with Saddam’s bloody political prisons. On Oct. 1, the most notorious U.S. center, the Baghdad airport’s overcrowded Camp Cropper, was closed.
For the third brother, however, the bitterness is too fresh.
“They confined us like sheep,” the newly freed Saad Naif, 38, said of the Americans. “They hit people. They humiliated people.”
Although details cannot be otherwise confirmed, the accounts by a half dozen former detainees in Associated Press interviews corroborated each other on key points, and meshed with what Amnesty International has heard from released Iraqis. The human rights group has accounts of detainee uprisings, punishment by exposure to the sun, and other examples of what it calls “inhumane conditions.”
Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the U.S. Army commander of Iraq’s detention facilities, has said prisoners are treated humanely and fairly. Specific questions about AP’s ex-detainee accounts were submitted to the U.S. command on Oct. 18, but no response has been received.
Two pending U.S. military legal cases may offer a glimpse at problems in the detention system: In one, four soldiers are accused of beating Iraqi prisoners; in the other, two Marines are charged in connection with an Iraqi’s death in detention.
The number of prisoners is in dispute. The U.S. command says it holds 5,500, but some lawyers and other Iraqis believe the figure is higher. In toppling the Saddam government last April, the U.S.-British invasion force inherited a legal vacuum and began incarcerating ordinary criminals with prisoners of war and less well-defined detainees.
Iraq’s chief U.S. administrator, L. Paul Bremer, says he has moved to speed up release of unjustly held Iraqis, and Iraqi lawyers and judges are slowly taking on criminal cases. The International Committee of the Red Cross, responsible under international law for inspecting wartime prison camps, says the listing and processing of detainees has improved in recent weeks.
The Baghdad spokeswoman for the ICRC, whose representatives are the only outsiders allowed into the camps, said the organization’s policy does not allow any public comment on any abuse or other poor conditions detected. Nada Doumani noted, however, that the law – the Geneva Conventions – forbids all physical pressure on detainees.
The ICRC’s decision to reduce its Baghdad staff, because of the bombing of its headquarters, may limit its ability to visit detention sites.
Baathists deemed “high-value detainees” by the Americans have been concentrated at a detention site in southern Iraq called Camp Bucca.
Before he was moved to Camp Bucca, one of them, former Parliament speaker Saadoun Hammadi, shared a tent with more than 100 men at the Baghdad airport camp and “was in miserable condition, very thin,” said a former tentmate, Hassan Ali Muslim.
Hammadi, a man in his late 60s who once served as prime minister, “didn’t speak with anybody. In the morning and afternoon, he walked alone for an hour, back and forth along the fence,” Muslim said. The famous Baath politician was dressed in shorts, his dyed hair had gone white, and he’d grown a long beard, the freed detainee said.
At Camp Bucca, in the wastes near Basra, “we were suffering, sitting in the desert,” said one of the Naif brothers, Rahad, who was released from Bucca on Sept. 22.
Water was the first concern for internees everywhere, especially as summer temperatures topped 120 degrees. There was never enough to drink and wash with, they said.
“They’d give us hot water while we’d see them drinking cold water,” said Ra’id Mohammed Hassan, 41, freed from Bucca on Oct. 15 after two months’ detention for having a weapon in his car.
Rahad Naif said 1,000 men in his section at Bucca had to share just 10 water taps. “They would come, especially the Kuwaiti translators, and throw ice into the sand just to make us suffer psychologically,” Naif said.
At the airport’s Camp Cropper, Muslim, a 28-year-old factory worker, tried to keep a bottle filled and hidden from thieves. When the Americans finally erected a tank for showers, there was so little water the detainees got into vicious arguments over it, he said. Skin diseases became common, he said.
The ex-prisoners, uniformly, said the sick men among them were the camps’ saddest sight. “There were crippled people at Bucca. Some were in wheelchairs,” said Rahad Naif. He said two died in the next tent while he was there.
“At the airport, they brought in a chronically ill man in a bed and put him near me. He was very sick,” Hassan Naif said. One crippled man had to be carried up the steps to a toilet, he said.
The prisoners staged protests or hunger strikes demanding better care for their sick comrades. At other times, they would erupt in anger over their own plight.
“Twenty or so of us would start shouting, ‘Get us out! Let us go!’,” said Muslim, who was freed Sept. 20 after two months’ detention, accused of attempted carjacking.
“The demonstrations happened almost every day at Bucca,” said Rahad Naif, who described scenes in which military police countered with the tools of U.S. prison guards.
“Sometimes we’d fight the Americans with tent poles. The Americans would come at us behind riot shields, firing plastic bullets and electric pistols (stun guns). We can’t fight against that. We knew they’d win. We’d never manage to get out.”
The ex-detainees said the common punishment, even for such lesser infractions as shouting over to the next tent or stealing food, was “The Gardens” – a razor-wire enclosure where prisoners were made to lie face down on the burning sand for two or three hours, hands bound.
They said they would also be punished by having rations reduced or withdrawn, or by being denied two staples – cigarettes and tea. They were allotted two cigarettes a day.
At Camp Cropper, Muslim said, he endured four days in solitary confinement, in a dark, sweltering 3-by-6-foot cell, after a confrontation with a notoriously tough guard over cigarettes.
“It felt like my skin was melting,” he said of the heat in the cell. A doctor came on the second day to check on him, and the Americans apologized after he was freed, Muslim said. The guard responsible was moved elsewhere, he said.
“There are some good ones who don’t like to punish people,” Hassan Naif said of his time at Cropper. “There was an old black soldier we called ‘al-Haji’ who argued with the other Americans if they weren’t respecting our rights.”
But much of what detainees saw was intolerable, Naif said, “especially when we saw Iraqi women punished in the same way as men.”
When one detainee shouted to his sister in a nearby women’s tent, the guards punished the woman, Naif said. Seeing her lying bound in the sun, the brother angrily started to cross the razor wire ringing his tent, “and they shot him in the shoulder,” Naif said.
“The worst thing was their treatment of the women,” said Saad Naif, who spent time both at the airport and at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where tents spread across the prison yards.
“Innocent women were kept for months in the same clothes,” he said. He said he remembered in particular an elderly woman “whose hands were tied up and she was lying in the dust.”
Saad Naif said he saw a prisoner shot dead at Abu Ghraib when he approached the razor wire.
Amnesty International says it has received credible reports of such shootings. AP queried the U.S. command here about deaths in the camps, but got no response.
Not knowing what they were charged with and when they might be released, detainees grew angrier and more depressed, said Ziad Tarik, 24, a friend who was swept up with the three Naif brothers after the fateful quarrel and spent more than a month at Abu Ghraib before abruptly being freed.
“They interrogated me about Saddam’s family, about al-Qaeda terrorists, about weapons markets – things I know nothing about,” he said. “I thought they’d ask me about my case. Why was I arrested?”
“There’s no law,” Rahad Naif said. “It’s up to them. It’s arbitrary.”
Tarik gave an example: An Iraqi colonel was released from Abu Ghraib, but the Americans still hold his wife and, according to Tarik, “she didn’t do anything.” That account could not be verified.
The Naif brothers’ mother, black-veiled Fawzia Ibrahim, 59, said she feels “like a bird” since their release, but she dreads the memory of the mid-July night when 16 U.S. soldiers, with Iraqi police, stormed into her house to take her sons away.
“Death would be better than the Americans again!” she said.
Ex-detainee Muslim says he knows of a worse fate – to have been imprisoned under Saddam Hussein, as his late father was for three months in 1995. Torture and summary execution became routine in the Baathist political prison system.
“Compared to Saddam, the Americans are better,” he said.
May 11th, 2008