toward the end of the interview, Ellsberg describes a domestic situation very similar to that recently described by Seymour Hersh as a military war on Obama, a “war” that our system virtually guarantees that Obama will lose:
October 25th, 2009
In a 3-part series, [part 1, part 2, part 3] Jeff Kaye adds to our picture of the development of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program by taking a closer look at the other shareholders of Mitchell Jessen, and Associates. As has been previously noted by Kaye, all of them had long connections with the SERE program and with JPRA [Joint Personnel Recovery Agency], the SERE parent agency.
Kaye cites a JPRA sources as stating that Mitchell and Jesses were not the prime actors in the initiator of the program. Rather, this source suggests, stakeholders Roger Aldrich, one of the pioneers of the SERE program, played a critical role.
Kaye also extends backwards the involvement of former American Psychological Association President Joseph Matarazzo:
David Ayers, head of Tate, Inc., was the other MJA shareholder, along with Joseph Matarazzo, yet another former president [in addition to Martin Seligman: SS] of the American Psychological Association who crossed Mitchell and Jessen’s path. Matarazzo, who Jane Mayer recently reported worked for the CIA, had been hired by Mitchell and Jessen years earlier, in 1996, along with other prominent U.S. psychologists — Charles Speilberger, Richard Lazarus, and Albert Bandura – for an internal review of SERE training procedures, according to a SERE internal document.
It is amazing how many senior psychologists seem to have been at least tangentially connected with the developers of the CIA’s torture program. And, of course, we should remember that the APA itself had Mitchell and Jessen as participants in a joint CIA-APA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception at which, accordingly to the conference description, several enhanced interrogation techniques were discussed. Someday we will understand why these and, no doubt, other prominent psychologists were so close to the SERE program and to Mitchell, Jessesn, and the other creators of the CIA torture program.
August 17th, 2009
Jeffrey Kaye has found a document suggesting that SERE psychologists are still involved in detainee interrogations with Special Forces, despite claims to the contrary:
An extraordinary piece of information lies buried in a June 15, 2009 Air Force Special Operations Command Instruction (48-101) on “Aeromedical Special Operations.” This document ostensibly “establishes Mission Qualification and Mission Ready clinical medical training requirements for AFSOC operational medical personnel,” and notes “compliance with this publication is mandatory.”
While the Instruction appears to apply only to U.S. Air Force support by medical personnel, Section 5.7, in the chapter for “Medical Operations,” presents something totally different. This section describes the functions of Special Forces Psychologists (SOFPSY), who are composed of “those SERE and Aviation qualified psychologists assigned to AFSOC operational units.” These psychologists are now instructed to provide “psychological oversight of battlefield interrogation and detention,” among other functions.
The Instruction details the functions of Special Operations Psychologists, and it’s hard to believe they are talking about medical issues here. An in-depth look at what the document actually says is in order (bold emphases added):
5.5.2.1. The primary responsibility of the SOFPSY is to support AFSOC operational units and missions through battlefield interventions and consultation, and in-garrison preparation for, and reconstitution from, combat operations. They do this by providing psychological consultation and services to include:
5.5.2.1.1. Unit and individual performance enhancement.
5.5.2.1.2. Unit climate assessments.
5.5.2.1.3. Personnel selection programs.
5.5.2.1.4. Psychological oversight for SERE training.
5.5.2.1.5. Special training programs.
5.5.2.1.6. Post-mishap and combat trauma recovery and return to duty.
5.5.2.1.7. Reintegration of recovered personnel, after isolation in hostile territory.
5.5.2.1.8. Human factors expertise for mishap investigations and prevention activities.
5.5.2.1.9. Consultation to Influence Operations.
5.5.2.1.10. Adversary profiling.
5.5.2.1.11. Psychological oversight of battlefield interrogation and detention.
5.5.2.2. In garrison, SOFPSYs are usually assigned to an operations unit at the Group level. When deployed, SOFPSYs serve in unit or battle-staff positions to facilitate their consultation and liaison roles. Most services provided by the SOFPSY fall into the categories of consultation and training, and are not clinical treatment interventions. When airmen require clinical treatment services, the SOFPSY primarily serves as liaison between commanders, unit personnel and the appropriate medical service provider. Typically, they will refer individuals needing clinical mental health evaluation and/or medical treatment to medical treatment facilities.
Special Operations Command clearly doesn’t intend to use SERE psychologists for medical or clinical purposes. This blurring of medical and operational roles in a memorandum meant to document the roles of medical personnel is typical of the way in which the torture program, which utilizes medical and psychological personnel, has tried to hide its primary activities.
July 26th, 2009
Democracy Now! discusses the Dasht-e-Leili massacre with journalist James Risen and Physicians for Human Rights’ Susannah Sirkin. Somewhat surprisingly, Risen emphasizes several times that investigations should focus only upon Bush administration cover-up, ignoring the possible collusion of the hundreds of US troops reported to be present at the massacre by witnesses. It almost makes me wonder if Risen is concerned that others will succeed where he failed, in elucidating the role of US troops.
I think it’s still—it’s very unclear what US personnel knew at the time. And I think the investigation should focus rather on what happened afterwards in the Bush administration.
If “it’s very unclear what US personnel knew at the time,” why shouldn’t an official investigation find out? I don’t get it.
You can watch, listen, or read here.
July 15th, 2009
Rachel Maddow wonders about the mysterious secret CIA program that Vice President Cheney order be kept from Congress. Unlike much of the press, she makes clear that a simple assassination of Al Qaeda leaders program would not outrage Congress like this program has.
She talks to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson to discuss:
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
[H/t Scott Horton.]
Raw Story has a transcript of two paragraphs:
“We, very early on, after 9/11, at the State Department, learned from our ambassadors in the field that there were teams being dispatched to their cities, to their countries, and these teams were clandestine and essentially aimed at capturing al Qaeda leaders or al Qaeda affiliates and interrogating them,” Wilkerson told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Tuesday. “So the fact that it might have gravitated over to the CIA or the CIA might have joined in, which is something that happens a lot these days with Delta Force and other special operators is no surprise to me.
“What I suspect has happened is what began to happen while I was still in the government, and that was we’re killing the wrong people,” Wilkerson added. “And we’re killing the wrong people in the wrong countries. And the countries are finding out about it, or at least there was a suspicion that the countries might find out about it, and so it was shut down. That’s my strong suspicion.”
July 15th, 2009
A must view video on the Dast-e-Leili massacre and the Bush administration cover-up. Unfortunately, so far the Obama administration has decided to maintain the Bush administration cove-up, thus themselves becoming complicit in this horrific war crime. We must not let them get away with it:
Video transcript.
For more information go to afghanistan.phrblog.org/.
Sign the PHR petition here. Petition text:
Dear Attorney General Holder,
Let the FBI do its job.
In November 2001, as many as 2,000 detainees were allegedly massacred by Afghan forces jointly operating with the United States and buried in a mass grave at Dasht-e-Leili, Afghanistan.
And that was just the beginning.
Witnesses to the incident were tortured, killed or simply disappeared, according to US Government documents that were uncovered through a Physicians for Human Rights Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. And in the area where these detainees were allegedly buried, large portions of earth have recently been dug up and removed.
The Bush administration impeded at least three federal investigations, including one conducted by the FBI, into these alleged war crimes, according to the New York Times.
Attorney General Holder, please let the FBI finally proceed with a fair and impartial investigation.
It’s time for the United States to send a message to the world that there will be no longer be impunity for mass atrocities, especially those committed by US allies.
The American public deserves truth and accountability from its government, especially in the case of potential war crimes.
It is time for the cover-up to end.
Sign here.
July 11th, 2009
At a recent discussion at the University of Minnesota Seymour Hersh told of an executive assassination team of special forces, resorting directly to Vice President Cheney. He also talked of domestic operations by the CIA. Here are his statements:
Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.
“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.
“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’
“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”
You can hear the relevant part of the talk here [scroll down].
March 11th, 2009
Tom Lasseter of McClatchy Newspapers reports on the removal of a mass burial site in Afghanistan. At this site as many as 2,000 suspected Taliban an Al Qaeda members who had surrendered to US ally Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum and been killed through suffocation and/or being shot. Physicians for Human Rights has been investigating this site since late 2001. According to the article, NATO, the US and the UN have all been silent about the destruction of the evidence of mass murders; the article quotes people suggesting that they were implicitly complicit in the cover-up:
[T]he fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass.
And:
Farid Mutaqi, a senior investigator for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said that it was almost impossible to visit the site because of Dostum’s power in northern Afghanistan…. [He]said that he told officials at the United Nations and the local provincial reconstruction team that Dostum’s men had disturbed the mass graves this year. They did nothing, he said.
The United Nations admists to knowing:
A spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Adrian Edwards, acknowledged in an e-mail statement that the U.N. had known that the graves had been dug up but had kept quiet.
“You’re right that we don’t always make public statements, but that’s because we’re in a conflict environment and have to weigh up whether doing so will stall chances of progress against impunity in other areas or put lives at risk,” the statement said. “It’s a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones.” Edwards noted that the U.N. is awaiting a report about the site by a forensic specialist.
Of course the US and NATO claim total ignorance:
Spokesmen for NATO and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul denied knowing that the remains of hundreds of men had been removed from the site, and had no further comment.
Physicians for Human Rights get quoted late in the article.
Here is the complete article:
U.S. keeps silent as Afghan ally removes war crime evidence
By Tom LasseterDASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan — Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with the human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.
When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.
Dostum’s men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.
Earlier this year, bulldozers and backhoes returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.
A U.N.-sponsored team of experts first spotted two large excavations on a visit in June, one of them about 100 feet long and more than 9 feet deep in places. A McClatchy reporter visited the site last month and found three additional smaller pits, which apparently had been dug since June.
Faqir Mohammed Jowzjani, a former Dostum ally and the deputy governor of Jowzjan province, where the graves were located, told McClatchy that it’s common knowledge that Dostum sent in the bulldozers.
He speculated that Dostum wanted to destroy the evidence because of local political trouble that could have made him more prone to prosecution for the killings.
Last year, Dostum and the then-Jowzjan governor became embroiled in a feud that killed seven people and wounded more than 40. This year, Dostum and his men kidnapped and reportedly beat a rival Afghan leader.
“Maybe General Dostum did it because of a fear of prosecution in the future,” Jowzjani said.
Another local Afghan official said that Dostum had begun to worry that the 2001 killings could come back to haunt him. “Everyone in the city (Sheberghan) knows that the evidence has been removed,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries about being killed for talking about the subject.
“When the crime happened, (Dostum and his commanders) didn’t think they would ever be prosecuted,” the official said. “But later they began to worry . . . they have taken all the bones and thrown them into the river” that’s about half a mile from the graves.
NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum’s alleged war crimes.
“The truth is that General Dostum went out with bulldozers and dug up those graves,” Jowzjani charged. “I don’t know why UNAMA” — the U.N. mission in Afghanistan — “hasn’t said anything in this regard . . . maybe because of fears about his power, or maybe they made a deal.”
Gen. Ghulam Mujtaba Patang, the commander of Afghanistan’s national police in the north, said that he knew that the graves had been emptied. He noted that “the digging was done very professionally” and said that U.N. and NATO-led teams in the area were also aware. (While provincial reconstruction teams are led by individual nations, their military components are under NATO command.)
“I don’t understand why they didn’t secure the area,” Patang said in an interview. Perhaps, he said, Western officials “are nervous” about the power that Dostum has locally and don’t want to upset local security by pushing him on the matter.
Dostum was unavailable for comment, and one of his senior aides, Gen. Ghani Karim Zada, declined several interview requests.
The Bush administration, too, has remained silent. U.S. officials claimed that they had no knowledge of the deaths of the prisoners in the convoy until the news media revealed them in 2002, and now the administration has remained silent about Dostum’s reported effort to destroy the evidence of them, which also would be a major violation of international law.
American officials say that Dostum’s alleged war crimes are a matter for the Afghan authorities. But the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and depends on American and NATO troops to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that now operates in most of Afghanistan and all but surrounds Kabul, the capital.
However, the fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass.
The U.S. Defense Department has said that it found no evidence of American involvement or presence during the 2001 incident. If there was an investigation, however, its findings have never been made public.
“At the time, we had a handful of special forces and CIA, and there was no way we could have exercised any oversight” of the thousands of detainees under Afghan control, said Joseph Collins, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations.
When he was asked about the detainees suffocating in metal shipping containers, Collins, who’s now a professor at the National War College, said that “I think most people just took for granted what he (Dostum) said: that it was a horrible accident.”
McClatchy interviewed eight Pakistani men last year who said that Dostum’s gunmen had stuffed them in the containers. The men, mostly low-level Taliban volunteers, said they’d had to climb over dozens of dead bodies to get out of the containers.
“We were all sitting on the dead bodies which were lying on the floor; they were lifeless,” said Abdul Haleem, who said that many of the approximately 200 men in his container died. “An arm was sticking up in the air here, a leg was sticking up in the air there.”
Another man who said he’d made the trip to Sheberghan in a container full of dead and dying men was Tariq Khan. He said that when Dostum’s men shot into the metal box, “some people were shot in the eye; some were shot in the neck.”
Dostum offered to take Pierre-Richard Prosper, who was then the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, on a tour of the grave site in late 2002, but Prosper declined. He was pressing a reluctant Afghan government and the U.N. to take the lead in investigating the killings.
“We felt the Afghans needed to play a role,” Prosper said in a telephone interview. “If you’re a new government, and you want to move forward, you have to deal with the past.”
However, no investigation was likely without strong U.S. backing, and Prosper said that he couldn’t recall whether Washington ever gave funding for a probe.
Farid Mutaqi, a senior investigator for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said that it was almost impossible to visit the site because of Dostum’s power in northern Afghanistan.
Mutaqi said there’d been threats on his life and those of his staff members from Dostum. There are rumors that the site was mined and that Dostum’s men would torture or kill people if they were caught researching in the area. At least three Afghans who witnessed the original digging of the mass grave or who investigated it later reportedly were killed, and a handful of others were beaten.
Mutaqi said that he told officials at the United Nations and the local provincial reconstruction team that Dostum’s men had disturbed the mass graves this year. They did nothing, he said.
Now, Mutaqi said, “You can see only a hole. In the area around it you can find a few bones or some clothes. The site is gone . . . as for evidence, there is nothing.”
A spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Adrian Edwards, acknowledged in an e-mail statement that the U.N. had known that the graves had been dug up but had kept quiet.
“You’re right that we don’t always make public statements, but that’s because we’re in a conflict environment and have to weigh up whether doing so will stall chances of progress against impunity in other areas or put lives at risk,” the statement said. “It’s a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones.” Edwards noted that the U.N. is awaiting a report about the site by a forensic specialist.
The spokesman for the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said that while he didn’t know the details of the digging at the site, “there cannot be impunity for war crimes of this nature and scale . . . it’s a real shame.”
Spokesmen for NATO and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul denied knowing that the remains of hundreds of men had been removed from the site, and had no further comment.
“We have no information about bulldozers or digging at the site,” said Lt. Cmdr. James Gater, a spokesman for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. general who heads NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, wouldn’t do an interview, Gater said.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Stroh said that he’d checked with several officials at the embassy and “nobody seemed to have any visibility on this.” Stroh added that “We don’t necessarily monitor all of Dostum’s behavior.”
A McClatchy reporter, traveling without official escort, took GPS readings of the open pits last month, and a forensic investigator with Physicians for Human Rights, a group contracted by the U.N. to examine the site, confirmed that they were in the same area where the grave site was found in early 2002.
In May 2002, the U.N. announced that a Physicians for Human Rights team had dug a test trench in the area and found 15 bodies, three of which had been exhumed and found to have died recently of asphyxiation
In November 2002, amid the Physicians for Human Rights findings and news reports, a top-secret cable from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research said that the number of people killed during transport to Sheberghan “may approach 2,000.”
The cable also said that while there was no security at Dasht-e Leili, U.N. personnel from Mazar-e-Sharif were monitoring the grave ” ‘every few days’ for signs of tampering.” There’d been plans for a detailed forensic investigation of the site in spring 2003.
“The hope had been to do a full exhumation in 2003,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a senior investigator at Physicians for Human Rights. “It didn’t happen.”
The U.N. monitoring of the site stopped. Edwards, the U.N. spokesman, said that he was still trying to reach officials who’d been present to get an explanation. The U.N., NATO, U.S. forces and the Afghan government never took any formal responsibility for patrolling the grave site.
Physicians for Human Rights made several requests to top U.S. officials to secure the mass graves, including an August 2002 letter to then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asking that he “reconsider the position of the Defense Department and assure security at the grave site.” Four months later, the organization sent a letter to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz saying that it was crucial to provide a small security detachment.
“From the time we discovered the site in January 2002, we had been advocating privately and publicly to the United Nations, the U.S. and the Afghan government to ensure consistent site protection and protection of forensic evidence,” Frank Donaghue, the chief executive officer of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a statement to McClatchy. “And clearly that did not happen.”
Dostum has long experience with mass graves being used in the Afghan political arena. In 1997, he revealed the discovery of mass graves of Taliban members killed by a former ally turned rival, Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan, in the Dasht-e Leili desert. The grave sites, which Dostum’s men brought in international journalists to document, helped cement Pahlawan’s exile from the area at the time.
Afghanistan’s attorney general, its top law enforcement official, said that given the bad security conditions in the country it was hard to think about investigating possible war crimes.
“So for the time being, we have put these issues off for the future,” Mohammed Ishaq Aloko said in an interview at his Kabul office.
Aloko, who’s seen as being very close to President Karzai, didn’t respond directly to repeated questions about Dostum.
“I believe that those who committed crimes against humanity will be prosecuted one day,” Aloko said. Just not anytime soon, he said.
1 comment December 11th, 2008
Scott Horton discusses one of the implications of last Sunday’s op-ed by a former Iraqi interrogator. He also lets us know that the interrogator, along with Scott, will b e on Democracy Now! on Wednesday:
How Many Americans Died Because of Bush’s Torture Program?
By Scott Horton
According to a special operations intelligence officer, the answer is a number north of three thousand–not counting the tens of thousands maimed or seriously wounded, the destruction of the nation’s reputation as a moral leader, or the damage done to our Constitution. In a stunning op-ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post, a special operations intelligence officer details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006—long after the Pentagon had forsworn them, but while Donald Rumsfeld was still running the shop.
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
The Pentagon’s claims that it had returned to interrogations based on the venerable Field Manual, was, it seems, conscious disinformation. But the officer offers an assessment. The torture techniques consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence, he said. But the old techniques—which rest on confidence building—consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to information that saved lives. Moreover, the strategies employed to effect later were used as a much broader tactic, accentuating differences between native Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters, in what came to be known as the “Sunni Awakening.”
But then we come to the most chilling part of the op-ed, which the writer discloses the Bush Administration struggled to suppress:
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me–unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
The torture techniques developed by the Bush torture team were the most effective recruitment tool we could ever have given terrorists. They cost thousands of American lives. And that’s a key element of the legacy of the forty-third president.
Update:
Matthew Alexander, the author of the Post op ed (this is a pseudonym) and I will appear together tomorrow morning on DemocracyNow! with Amy Goodman to discuss his column and afterwards I’ll talk about the accountability issues facing the administration based on “Justice After Bush.” Identify your local broadcaster here and tune in.
December 2nd, 2008
Yesterday the Senate Armed Services Committee [SASC], or rather, its Chair, Senator Carl Levin [no other members deigned to come to the hearing on US war crimes] held a hearing on the export of SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape] tactics to Iraq, leading, eventually, to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib.
At the hearing they heard from Col. Steven Kleinman, an interrogator and former JPRA official [Joint Personnel Recovery Administration, the SERE parent agency] and Col. John Moulton, former JPRA Commander. They testified about Col. Kleinman’s mission to Iraq, in which he was asked to demonstrate SERE techniques. He witnessed abusive interrogations and stopped them. He was then sent back home. Col. Kleinman is one of the heros of this sordid episode.
Documents released at the hearing also contained a questionaire ansered by Secretary of State, and foemer National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice in which she admitted being briefed on SERE methods in the White House. She claims to have been “that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm.” In fact, as was clarified by th hief SERE psychologists at the June 17 SASC hearing, these techniques were deemed safe for use in training US troops, because of the combination of psychological screening, careful monitoring, ability of troops to stop at any time, and extensive multi-session debriefings afterwards. This psychologist did not claim or provide any evidence that these techniques were safe when used as interrogation techniques of captured detainees.
There are many other goodies revealed in these hearings that I am only beginning to understand.
The AP and Washington Post covered the hearings. I will here post the AP account. Then I will post Senator Levin’s Opening Statement separately. Here is the AP:
Interrogator details pre-Abu Ghraib abuses
By Pamela Hess
WASHINGTON — A military interrogation expert, Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, told Congress on Thursday that prior to the abuses at Abu Ghraib, he witnessed interrogations of Iraqi detainees that he considers violations of the Geneva Conventions.
One interrogation was conducted by an Air Force civilian and a contractor employed by his own organization, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. It had sent a small team to Iraq in September 2003 to help a special forces task force improve its interrogations of stubborn prisoners. The team was asked to demonstrate an interrogation on an Iraqi prisoner. It was an unusual role for the organization, which trains soldiers how to resist interrogations, not conduct them.
Kleinman said his two colleagues forcibly stripped an Iraqi prisoner naked, shackled him and left him standing in a dank, six-foot cement cell with orders to the guards that the prisoner was not to move for 12 hours. Had the prisoner passed out, he would have hit his head on a wall, Kleinman said.
Kleinman stopped the interrogation, which had veered from his careful plan into abuse.
“Until their time in Iraq they had never seen a real world interrogation,” he said.
The men, Terrence Russell and Lenny Miller, had learned the harsh techniques working with the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program for U.S. forces, which conducts stressful mock interrogations to prepare soldiers to withstand and resist abusive questioning in the event they are taken prisoner. The program uses methods derived from the real-life experiences of American prisoners of war. The techniques include forced nudity, stress positions, exposure to extremes in weather and waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning.
Russell is a civilian JPRA employee involved in research and program development. Miller was a contractor who no longer works for JPRA, according to the military.
Joint Forces Command, which oversees JPRA, did not investigate Kleinman’s allegations because they were made directly to the task force in Iraq, said spokesman Capt. Dennis Moynihan.
Attempts to locate Russell and Miller independently were unsuccessful.
At the time, Kleinman called his now retired commander, Col. John Moulton II, to express concern about the harsh methods he saw being used in several interrogations. He said Moulton checked with his superiors and called him back to say the techniques had been specifically approved. Moulton later told investigators that he understood that the Pentagon’s general counsel or higher had approved the measures, and that the prisoners were considered terrorists and were not protected by the Geneva Conventions.
The Geneva Conventions, however, did apply in Iraq.
The Senate Armed Services Committee also released responses from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and legal counsel John Bellinger regarding their knowledge of the CIA interrogation program when Rice was the national security adviser and Bellinger was the National Security Council’s top lawyer.
She and Bellinger were also briefed on SERE interrogation methods at the White House in 2002 or 2003.
“I recall being told … that these techniques had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm,” Rice wrote.
Rice told the committee the CIA had sought NSC approval before embarking on its own harsh interrogation program in the spring of 2002. Rice said she asked then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to review its legality. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the White House on legal matters, later determined the CIA’s program to be legal.
Rice also said Bellinger advised her regularly about “concerns and issues” relating to the Pentagon’s interrogation and detention program at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. She said the Justice Department never discussed with her the FBI’s now documented concerns with interrogation practices at Guantanamo Bay and CIA detention facilities.
Bellinger said he knew the FBI refused to participate in some CIA interrogations, which included waterboarding for at least three detainees. He was also aware of allegations of abuse at Guantanamo in 2003.
Also Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee took a step closer to forcing the Justice Department to hand over secret legal memos authorizing the Bush administration to use harsh and potentially illegal interrogation techniques on detainees.
By a 10-9 vote, the committee agreed to give the chairman, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., authority to subpoena the memos from the Office of Legal Counsel. It is now up to Leahy to decide whether to issue the subpoena, which the Justice Department likely will fight because much of the information in the memos is highly classified.
Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse did not answer a question about whether the department would comply with such a subpoena.
“We regret that the committee authorized the subpoena,” Roehrkasse said in a statement. “We will continue to work with them to ensure that their legitimate oversight needs are met.”
September 26th, 2008
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