Those of us fighting the American Psychological Association’s campaign of denial, deceit, and delay in order to maintain psychologists in Bush’s illegal and abusive interrogations are not surprised that the APA leadership has used similar slimy tactics to counter other challenges to its cozy relationship with the War of Terror boondoggle and war machine. Paul Kimmel writes of how APA sidelined a report from an APA task force he chaired, the Task Force on the Psychological Effects of Efforts to Prevent Terrorism. [This article will appear in the APA's Peace Psychology Division newsletter (Division 48). Reprinted with permission.]
Reflections From Panama
Paul Kimmel
Hola, amigos
Greetings from Panama City where Ramona and I are living until December to see if we want to relocate here in 2008. We missed seeing you in San Francisco, but through the wonders of the Internet, kept up with much of what happened there. We were saddened, but not surprised, when we read Linda Woolf’s commentary on the Moratorium proposal.
As Yogi Berra said, it was like “deja vu all over again.” The experiences that she described in dealing with the APA before and during the Council meetings brought back many memories of my two years as Chair of the Council’s Task Force on the Psychological Effects of Efforts to Prevent Terrorism.
At their February 2003 meetings we were charged with “assessing the emotional and behavioral effects of processes initiated in the U.S. to safeguard American lives and property and prevent future acts of terrorism.”
Council approved this Task Force proposal nearly unanimously with one long time council member calling it the “most important task force ever established by Council.”
The Board of Directors of the APA, President Sternberg and Secretary Levant vetted the 15 Task Force members that I recommended and added one other researcher from NIH. We pursued our assignments individually and coordinated through conference calls attended by a variety of employees of the APA’s Public Interest Directorate between June and October of 2003. The editing of the final document was done by e-mail with expert help from Art Kendall on the necessary detailed work.
Three other experts in conflict resolution reviewed our work in March 2004. Their comments were taken into account in the Final Report that went to the Board of Directors’ June 2004 meeting. At this meeting the Report was approved for the Council meetings of July 2004.
And then the fun began.
Just before the afternoon session at which I was scheduled to present our Report to the APA Council, Ron Levant, Rhea Farberman, Henry Tomes and my contact on the Board of Directors called me from lunch to discuss our Report. I was told that to have the Report “received” by the Association - as proposed in our Agenda item - would not be as powerful as having it “reported” to the APA after being reviewed by a number of relevant Boards and Committees. They suggested that I amend our item on the floor to have such a review take place so that the Association could do more with our findings and recommendations than just accepting them.
With little time to consult the rest of the Task Force (there had been no mention of such a review process before this hurried discussion), I amended the proposal as requested (although Bernice Lott, another TF member on Council, who was skeptical of this last minute turn of events, opposed postponing the reception of our time-sensitive work). My expectation was that by going through the review process, the Report would be stronger and the Association would act upon it more quickly and comprehensively after Council approved it in February 2005.
Attending the meetings and responding to the suggestions of the many Boards and Committees involved a lot more work for me and our authors, as these groups had different interests and points of view regarding our findings and recommendations.
When we finished revising our Report in light of their suggestions, the APA Board of Directors recommended it be rejected as lacking “peer review” in spite of the fact that it was a policy piece and not an academic journal article.
It was also suggested that our findings and recommendations were too “political” (it seems that only the status quo is not “political” or “politically correct” at the Association).
We brought our responses to the Board of Directors’ objections to the February 2005 Council meetings, only to find our item being moved down the agenda by Ron Levant (presiding as President) until there were just 10 minutes left in the final afternoon session.
This was barely enough time to go over the main item and no time for discussion of or response to the Board’s critique.
Our first speaker was cut off by Levant (there were several others ready and able to address their issues) and a vote was called.
We were voted down - as Representatives were leaving to catch flights and other Convention activities - and the Report was never received by the APA.
As many of you know, I took the initiative to transform the 12 articles written by the Task Force members into chapters in “Collateral Damage: The Psychological Consequences of America’s War on Terrorism” published by Praeger in August 2006. The APA’s attorney made it clear that I was not to intimate in any way that the book was endorsed or approved by the Association.
Like Linda in her struggles with the recent Moratorium proposal, I felt neglected, misled and taken advantage of by the Board of Directors and members of the APA Central Office.
There was little money for the Task Force (our only meeting was at our own expense, staying late at the 2004 Convention in Toronto) and no single staff member was assigned by the Public Interest Directorate to assist us as needed with our volunteer activities.
The APA’s Director of Public Affairs told me that the Association could not publish some of our statements such as “more people will die from the ‘war on terrorism’ than died on 9/11,” even before the Report was seen by Council. In short, rather than feeling we were part of a professional organization working together to promote the general welfare, I felt that we were being led through a series of obstacles in an effort to prevent us from bringing to the public important information about the effects of our government’s policies on terrorism.
After being rejected, our Report was referred to the Board of Scientific Affairs for further review where it has remained undiscussed for two and one half years.
Thus, our findings and recommendations are available only to those who purchase “Collateral Damage.”
Joanne Tortorici Luna favorably reviewed our book in the August 15 2007) on-line issue of PsyCritiques. It ends, “It is good to know that, in a moment of our history when even a supposedly independent press has largely suspended its critical voice, there are still some who will call it as they see it. Psychologists are sometimes referred to as those who are willing to speak the unspeakable. There is no better time than now.”
I sincerely hope that the time is not too far off when our membership association will speak with a clearer voice on critical national and international issues.
In the meantime, I suggest that you read the rest of the PsyCritiques’
book review and/or buy a copy of “Collateral Damage” to see what it is that the Association will not associate with.
Hasta luego,
Paul Kimmel
September 21st, 2007
Last month Vanity Fair online published Katherine Eban’s account of the psychologist-designed torture of Abu Zubaydah, designed and conducted by CIA consultants Mitchell and Jessen, former Suvival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) psychologists. This week, the New Yorker publishes a companion piece by Jane Mayer on the CIA torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [The Black Sites]. In the course of a long piece, the article sheds more light on the role of psychologists in US torture.
Here are a few excerpts on the role of psychologists:
The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”
The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”
Nevertheless, the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)
Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”
As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that “if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”
Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that “they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that “after the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”
The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”
Katherine Eban’s Vanity Fair articlerevealed the existence of a December 10, 2002 document — SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure — establishing certain of these SERE-derived torture techniques as standard Operating procedure for US abuse at Guantanamo. Mayer reveals a bit more of the contents of this chilling document which shows the degree to which torture became routinized and bureaucratically organized in American gulags:
A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”
Mayer also reveals the important role of doctors in US torture:
In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, “It’s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.”
Mayer also makes clear that we are talking about “torture” here, not any supposed “torture-lite”:
Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guantánamo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. “It’s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,” Kassem said. “He breaks down in tears.” Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.
According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that “sleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.” Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, “It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.”
Under President Bush’s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the “basic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.” Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.
In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that “longtime standing” was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, “A Question of Torture,” he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce “excruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.”
And:
Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet’s former chief of staff, said, “It all comes down to individual moral barometers.” Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for “enemy combatants,” it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.
But the psychological disorientation was paramount:
Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guantánamo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, “like the soundtrack from a horror film,” to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. “The C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,” Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. “Plenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.”
Some US interrogators with SERE training claim that this treatment can’t be torture because its nothing more than is done to US troops during SERE training. They can’t seem to distinguish a couple of days of abuse under known limited conditions from the never-ending tortures inflicted upon real detainees:
One of these former [CIA] officers defends the C.I.A.’s program by noting that “there was absolutely nothing done to K.S.M. that wasn’t done to the interrogators themselves”—a reference to SERE-like training. Yet the Red Cross report emphasizes that it was the simultaneous use of several techniques for extended periods that made the treatment “especially abusive.” Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been a prominent critic of the Administration’s embrace of harsh interrogation techniques, said that, particularly with sensory deprivation, “there’s a point where it’s torture. You can put someone in a refrigerator and it’s torture. Everything is a matter of degree.”
As Mayer makes clear, the US torture regime became more systematic, more routinized, more bureaucratic over time. Eventually Mohammed was moved to the US’s state-of-the-art secret torture facility in Poland:
But, according to well-informed sources, it was a far more high-tech facility than the prisons in Afghanistan. The cells had hydraulic doors and air-conditioning. Multiple cameras in each cell provided video surveillance of the detainees. In some ways, the circumstances were better: the detainees were given bottled water. Without confirming the existence of any black sites, Robert Grenier, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, said, “The agency’s techniques became less aggressive as they learned the art of interrogation,” which, he added, “is an art.”
Mohammed was kept in a prolonged state of sensory deprivation, during which every point of reference was erased. The Council on Europe’s report describes a four-month isolation regime as typical. The prisoners had no exposure to natural light, making it impossible for them to tell if it was night or day. They interacted only with masked, silent guards. (A detainee held at what was most likely an Eastern European black site, Mohammed al-Asad, told me that white noise was piped in constantly, although during electrical outages he could hear people crying.) According to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he was shackled and kept naked, except for a pair of goggles and earmuffs. (Some prisoners were kept naked for as long as forty days.) He had no idea where he was, although, at one point, he apparently glimpsed Polish writing on a water bottle.
In the C.I.A.’s program, meals were delivered sporadically, to insure that the prisoners remained temporally disoriented. The food was largely tasteless, and barely enough to live on. Mohammed, who upon his capture in Rawalpindi was photographed looking flabby and unkempt, was now described as being slim. Experts on the C.I.A. program say that the administering of food is part of its psychological arsenal. Sometimes portions were smaller than the day before, for no apparent reason. “It was all part of the conditioning,” the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said. “It’s all calibrated to develop dependency.”
The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed’s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he “broke.”
“Waterboarding works,” the former officer said. “Drowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It’s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you’re waterboarded, you’re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It’s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.” (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, “didn’t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.” He said, “A lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn’t stand toe to toe and fight it out.”
The article also shows the moral complexity of America’s torture regime as a former CIA official insists the program is “safe” for the detainees but speaks of the psychological damage to the interrogators”:
The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed’s interrogator “has horrible nightmares.” He went on, “When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it’s well outside the norm. You can’t go to that dark a place without it changing you.” He said of his friend, “He’s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.”
This article again raises the issue of the centrality of psychology to America’s torture regime. It was the supposed knowledge, expertise, credentials, and legitimacy of psychologists that was important to the CIA torture-planners.The psychological profession will be stained by this association, and by its silence while these abuses occurred in our name. Not untill the profession fully investigates and condemns these abuses will the stain begin to be lifted. No simple “banning” of specific torture techniques by the American Psychological Association (APA) can possibly be an adequate reply to these horrors. The profession must loudly and collectively cry “Shame!” and “Never again!”
Further, the critical collaboration and silence of the APA leadership during this profound moral crisis cannot go unchallenged. In the interests of maintaining their ties to the military and the CIA, these leaders were more than willing to turn a blind eye to the torture being designed and conducted by our psychological colleagues. They never uttered a peep of concern for these abuses, but, rather, parsed words to try and evade responsibility. In the final accounting for US torture, the APA leadership will certainly bear a measure of the responsibility.
August 5th, 2007
There are worrying developments for human rights, and for the mental health professions, in Great Britain. a new article reports that British psychiatrists are going to start emulating their disgraced Soviet-era colleagues who hospitalized and involuntary drugged dissidents under the pretense of treating mental illness. The British psychiatrist will be part of preventive detention teams on the watch for “terrorists” under every bed:
Psychiatrists set to use mental health law to detain terrorist suspects
May 31, 2007
by Angela Hussain
Psychiatrists are set to increasingly use mental health law to detain terrorists suspects, prompting fears that psychiatry will be directly involved in the abuse of civil rights.
The government has set up a VIP “stalker” squad to identify and detain terrorists and other individuals who pose a threat to prominent people, such as the Prime Minister, the cabinet and the Royal Family.
The unit, staffed by psychiatrists as well as police, could have extra powers to detain suspects using mental health law.
Critics say a mental health bill going through parliament includes a wider definition of mental disorder. They fear it will mean people - including terrorist suspects - may be detained on grounds of their cultural, political or religious beliefs.
The new London-based unit, called the fixated threat assessment centre (FTAC) and set up last year, uses the police to identify suspects.
Liberty, the human rights organisation, said the unit represented a threat to civil liberties.
Its policy director, Gareth Crossman, told newspapers: “This blurs the line between medical decisions and police actions.
“If you are going to allow doctors to take people’s liberty away, they have to be independent. That credibility is undermined when the doctors are part of the same team as the police.”
In a statement, the Metropolitan Police said: “The fixated threat assessment centre is a joint initiative between the Metropolitan Police, Home Office and Department of Health. Its role is to assess, manage and reduce risks and threats from fixated individuals, against people in public life, particularly protected VIPs.”
The Mail on Sunday reported that FTAC’s senior forensic psychiatrist is David James. He has made a study of attacks on British and European politicians by people diagnosed with pathological fixations.
Also on the staff is Robert Halsey, a consultant forensic clinical psychologist who specialises in risk assessment.
At least one terror suspect - allegedly linked to the 7/7 bomb plot and a suicide bombing in Israel - has already been held under the Mental Health Act.
The government has always argued its mental health bill is a suitable balance between patient rights and public safety.
But Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley told the Mail that classing someone as mentally ill on the grounds of their religious beliefs is “a very worrying scenario”
He said: “The Government is trying to bring in a wider definition of mental disorder and is resisting exclusions which ensure that people cannot be treated as mentally disordered on the grounds of their cultural, political or religious beliefs.
“When you hear they are also setting up something like this police unit, it raises questions about quite what their intentions are.
“The use of mental health powers of detention should be confined to the purposes of treatment. But the Government wants to be able to detain someone who is mentally disordered even when the treatment would have no benefit.
“Combined with the idea that someone could be classed as mentally ill on the grounds of their religious beliefs, it is a very worrying scenario.”
There appears to no limit to the evils that people will participate in under the guise of “protecting society from an enemy.”
June 2nd, 2007
Bioethicist Steven Miles, author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, writes of a new Department of Defense Office of Inspector General report, which among other things, provides conclusive evidence that psychologists from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program played a key role in the development of American interrogation techniques in the war on terror:
New Defense Department Investigation Describes the History of Psychologists Selling their Souls to Abusive Interrogation
Steve Miles, MD
Professor of Medicine
The Defense Department has declassified the Office of Inspector General’s (OIG) August 2006 ” Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse. Most of this 131 page document reviews previously released general investigations such as the Formica, Jacoby, and Army Surgeon General’s Reports. However it concludes that
“allegations of detainee abuse were not consistently reported, investigated, or managed in an effective, systematic, and timely manner. … Nevertheless, no single entity within any level of command was aware of the scope and breadth of detainee abuse. … Interrogation support in Iraq lacked unity of command and unity of effort. … In addition, policy for and oversight of interrogation procedures were ineffective. As a result, interrogation techniques and procedures used exceeded the limits established of Army” doctrine (p. ii).
Medical personnel were aware of abuses (p8, 21). It confirms that medical supervision of interrogation began in Guantanamo (p. 26).
The OIG report offers the clearest delineation of the hotly debated involvement of SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape Training) with psychologists, the Behavior Science Consultation Teams and abusive coercive interrogation. It shows that psychologists from BSCT and SERE did collaborate in developing highly coercive and abusive interrogation techniques.
SERE training teaches US soldiers how to psychically survive abusive capture.
“SERE training, sometimes referred to as code of conduct training, prepares select military personnel with survival and evasion techniques in case they are isolated from friendly forces. The schools also teach resistance techniques that are designed to provide U.S. military members, who may be captured or detained, with the physical and mental tools to survive a hostile interrogation and deny the enemy the information they wish to obtain. SERE training incorporates physical and psychological pressures, which act as counterresistance techniques, to replicate harsh conditions that the Service member might encounter if they re held by forces that do not abide by the Geneva Conventions. (OIG)”
In the process, US soldiers are subject to supervised abuse by other US forces. Many records show that US military forces drew on their recollection of SERE training to develop techniques which were employed in abusing prisoners. The current debate centers on whether SERE served as a curriculum and policy formation for abusive treatment of prisoners or whether the SERE experience was simply drawn on by its graduates who applied it to the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan. The OIG investigation offers the most elaborate account of what happened.
“U.S. Joint Forces Command is the DoD Executive Agent responsible for providing Service members with SERE training. The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency at [...various bases] … . The Services train an estimated 6,200 members annually at these schools. … SERE schools do not have personnel assigned to be interrogators and do not advocate interrogation measures to be executed by our force. The SERE expertise lies in training personnel how to respond and resist interrogations–not in how to conduct interrogations. Therefore, the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency and SERE mission is defensive in nature, while the operational interrogation mission is sometimes referred to as offensive. … The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (CJCS) … review recommended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation Behavioral Science Unit, the Army’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team, the Southern Command Psychological Operations Support Element, and the Joint Task Force 170 clinical psychologist develop a plan to exploit detainee vulnerabilities. The Commander, JTF-170 expanded on the CJCS recommendations and decided to also consider SERE training techniques and other external interrogation methodologies as possible DoD interrogation alternatives. Between June and July 2002, but before the CJCS review, the Chief of Staff of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, working with the Army Special Operations Command’s Psychological Directorate, developed a plan designed to teach interrogators how to exploit high value detainees. (S//NF) On September 16, 2002, the Army Special Operations Command and the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency co-hosted a SERE psychologist conference at Fort Bragg for JTF-170 interrogation personnel. The Army’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team from Guantanamo. Guantanamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team personnel understood that they were to review documentation and standard operating procedures for SERE training in developing the standard operating procedure for the JTF-170, if the command approved those practices. The Army Special Operations Command was examining the role of interrogation support as a “SERE Psychologist competency area.” …
“On at least two occasions, the JTF-170 requested that Joint Personnel Recovery Agency instructors be sent to Guantanamo to instruct interrogators in SERE counterresistance interrogation techniques. SERE instructors from Fort Bragg responded to Guantanamo requests for instructors trained in the use of SERE interrogation resistance techniques. Neither of those visits was coordinated with the Joint Forces Command, which is the office of primary responsibility for SERE training, or the Army, which is the office of primary responsibility for interrogation. … The Commander, Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, explained that he understood that the detainees held by TF-20 were determined to be Designated Unlawful Combatants (DUCs), not Enemy Prisoners of War (EPW) protected by the Geneva Convention and that the interrogation techniques were authorized and that the JPRA team members were not to exceed the standards used in SERE training on our own Service members. He also confirmed that the U.S. Joint Forces Command J-3 and the Commanding Officer, TF-20 gave a verbal approval for the SERE team to actively participate in “one or two demonstration” interrogations. SERE team members and TF-20 staff disagreed about whether SERE techniques were in compliance with the Geneva Conventions. When it became apparent that friction was developing, the decision was made to pull the team out before more damage was done to the relationship between the two organizations. The SERE team members prepared After Action Reports that detailed the confusion and allegations of abuse that took place during the deployment. These reports were not forwarded to the U.S. Joint Forces Command because it was not a common practice at that time.”
We need an independent Congressional investigation of this mess. Perhaps it could be assigned to the Institute of Medicine. Military Medicine did betray its duty to the prisoners. All of us, citizen, civilian and military health personnel must clean up this stain.
[Dr. Steven Miles has created the United States Military Medicine in War on Terror Prisons archive of primary documents.]
I echo Dr. Miles’ call for a Congressional investigation. I am, however, not sure the Institute of Medicine is the appropriate group to conduct such an investigation as the investigation will require investigative capacity and subpoena power. I will soon be releasing an article explaining the meaning of this report in greater detail.
May 28th, 2007
Thoroughly believable:
Vatican calls verbal attack on Pope “terrorism”
ROME (Reuters) - The Vatican’s official newspaper accused an Italian comedian on Wednesday of “terrorism” for criticizing the Pope and warned his rhetoric could fuel a return to 1970s-style political violence.
In an unusually strongly worded editorial, L’Osservatore Romano said a presenter of a televised May Day rock concert, which is sponsored by Italy’s labor unions, had launched “vile attacks” on Pope Benedict in front of an “excitable crowd”.
“This, too, is terrorism. It’s terrorism to launch attacks on the Church,” it said. “It’s terrorism to stoke blind and irrational rage against someone who always speaks in the name of love, love for life and love for man.”
And what was this “terrorism?”
“The Pope says he doesn’t believe in evolution. I agree, in fact the Church has never evolved,” he said.
He also criticized the Church for refusing to give a Catholic funeral to Piergiorgio Welby, a man who campaigned for euthanasia as he lay paralyzed with muscular dystrophy. He died in December after a doctor agreed to unplug his respirator.
“I can’t stand the fact that the Vatican refused a funeral for Welby but that wasn’t the case for (Chilean dictator Augusto) Pinochet or (Spanish dictator Francisco) Franco,” he said between musical acts at the open-air concert.
Calling someone a “terrorist” in today’s culture is a call for their destruction. The Catholic Church, in recovery from its decades long conspiracy to protect pedophiles, is now acting as a purveyor of hate speech.
May 3rd, 2007
A terrorist walks
Luis Posada Carriles has boasted of bombing Havana hotels, yet American justice lets him go free.
April 20, 2007
WITH A MISGUIDED decision upholding bail for Cuban-born terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans has done more than free a frail old man facing unremarkable immigration charges. It has exposed Washington to legitimate charges of hypocrisy in the war on terror.
By allowing Posada to go free before his May 11 trial, the court has released a known flight risk who previously escaped from a Venezuelan prison, a man who has boasted of helping set off deadly bombs in Havana hotels 10 years ago and the alleged mastermind of a 1976 bombing of a Cuban airplane that killed 73 people. Posada’s employees confessed to the attack, and declassified FBI and CIA documents have shown that he attended planning sessions.
In other words, Posada is the Zacarias Moussaoui of Havana and Caracas. Moussaoui is serving a life sentence without parole in a federal prison in Colorado for conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks; Posada is free to live in Miami.
Posada, a 79-year-old Bay of Pigs veteran who served time in Panama for plotting to kill Fidel Castro, has never been charged with crimes of terrorism in U.S. courts. Instead, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement nabbed him for lying to immigration authorities after he sneaked in the country in March 2005 and held a news conference announcing his triumphant return. Both Customs and the Justice Department lobbied to keep Posada behind bars, but U.S. law enforcement has never shown a strong interest in trying him for more serious crimes. In turn, Posada’s lawyer has preemptively warned that if charged, his client would likely reveal extensive collaboration with the CIA.
The United States keeps 385 suspected terrorists imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, many in isolation and all without U.S. norms of due process. Yet Posada, a confessed terrorist, is sent home with an ankle bracelet.
The United States has not been able to persuade any of seven allied nations to accept Posada. A federal judge has ruled that he can’t be extradited to Cuba or Venezuela because he might be tortured. The best solution would have been for the court to refuse bail until trial while the State Department keeps searching for a third-party country that would agree to try him on terrorism charges.
Instead, Castro receives a propaganda victory gift, the White House has its moral authority undermined and the victims of Carriles’ alleged crimes see justice delayed once more.
The U.S. government has done many odd things in 46 years of a largely failed Cuba policy, but letting a notorious terrorist walk stands among the most perverse yet.
Of course, it is hard to understand how this White House could have “ts moral authority undermined.” Moral authority isn’t usually measured in negative numbers. And isn’t the concern of the United States government, perhaps the only country to legalize torture, that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela just lovely?
April 21st, 2007
Steven Miles, author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, informs us of a fantastic new website he has been working on for many months. here is his description:
This website will contain all 60,000 pages of government documents pertaining to the medical operations in the war on terror prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.
This website includes:
a.. administration policies,
b.. DoD policies,
c.. DoD and FBI e-mails,
d.. medical policies in order by site.
e.. medical records,
f.. autopsy reports,
g.. death certificates,
h.. policies for the theaters and bases, i.. DoD criminal investigations with sworn witness statements j.. Some trial transcripts, etc.
Equally importantly,
a.. the documents will be on a stable server at Human Rights Library website that is permanent and draws about 2 million visits a month from 100 countries.
b.. the documents will be fully indexed so that they can be found.
These documents contain many stories that have not been told. The final version had identified 148 prisoner deaths including that of a child of untreated tuberculosis at Camp Cropper, a woman, and a several ghost prisoners. It tells of a high value woman who was pregnant when arrested.
JAGS took new newborn from her for placement in an orphanage or with her family and she was sent to be interrogated.
In short, this is the largest and most accessible compendium of government documents describing the medical operations in the war on terror prisons that has been assembled.
The website will be operational early next week. I will post the link when it goes live.
April 17th, 2007