"You are completely destroyed": Testimony on Torture from Shaker Aamer's Medical Report at Guantanamo

On April 7, 2014, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantanamo, and his attorneys filed a habeas petition (PDF) asking for his release due to chronic health problems that can not be treated at Guantanamo. The worst of these problems apparently stems from PTSD from the torture Shaker has endured since he was captured by the Northern Alliance, then turned over to the Americans on Christmas Eve, 2001.

The details of his torture at Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo are described in lengthy quotations from a February 2, 2014 medical psychiatric report by Dr. Emily Keram, a forensic psychiatrist who has evaluated a number of Guantanamo detainees at the request of the U.S. courts, the Military Commissions, and various habeas attorneys. The report is appended to the habeas filing.

What follows here is a long section from her report (PDF), where Dr. Keram quotes Shaker's narrative about his experiences under torture after his capture. From my experience, it is one of the most remarkable and disturbing documents to have come out of Guantanamo, as Shaker Aamer is an intelligent, sensitive man who speaks English. He has left us a record of his torture that cries out to be read.

I reproduce portions of Shaker's testimony here in the hopes of mobilizing support for freeing him from Guantanamo (he has been "cleared for release" for years now). I also hope this helps mobilize support for freeing or transferring all the detainees/prisoners to humane incarceration with the certainty of quick adjudication of their cases. Those detainees who are not guilty of anything should be released, and at this point -- read the following and you will understand fully -- given the surety of medical treatment as long as they need it.

Both the habeas filing and the medical report were linked in a story by long-time Guantanamo expert and passionate advocate for an end to torture and indefinite detention, Andy Worthington. His article, "Gravely Ill, Shaker Aamer Asks US Judge to Order His Release from Guantánamo," is posted at the Close Guantanamo website.

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From Shaker Aamer's Medical Report (verbatim):

Mr. Aamer and I reviewed his conditions of confinement at Bagram Airfield. He reported severe maltreatment by guards, interrogators, and medical personnel working in concert, by means of humiliation, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, manipulation of food and water, stress positions, threats of sexual assault against his young daughter, and beatings.

“The nakedness made me feel animal-like. I was not a human being anymore. I meant nothing to them. I lost my dignity, my pride, being a man. I had to take off my underwear and hand it to them. You lose your humanity. You are an animal. You know if you don’t do it, they will do it by force and it will be a lot worse. I respected and believed they would give me a fair chance because they were Americans. I was happy that I was with Americans because of their human rights.

I had sleep deprivation for 11 days. That made me crazy. They poured cold water over me. They kept me standing for 20 hours a day. I had to hold my hands and arms out. If I dozed off they would bang on the concrete with an axe. The sleep deprivation caused hallucinations. It started with noise. Then I heard old music from my childhood. I wondered, ‘Where did they get those tapes?’ I heard people talking. I started looking for who was talking. There was no one there. No one else heard them. Finally I heard music from my childhood that I knew they never could have found. I talked to the doctor about it. He said I was going crazy. He told me, ‘You should talk to the interrogators so then you can relax.’

They withheld food, except for frozen MRE’s. They would give you a bottle of frozen water. You didn’t want to drink because it would make you have to pee. The guards won’t take you to pee so I peed where I was sitting. I didn’t have a bowel movement for 25 days. My stomach became like a stone. I didn’t see a doctor initially because the interrogators were happy because I was telling them everything, whatever they wanted. [Interrogators controlled access to medical personnel] Then the doctor gave me a laxative. They took me to a hole. Female and male guards were watching. A guard pulled down my coveralls and told me to shit. It was very hard. I had to push hard. The female and male guards were joking. A female said, ‘Look, he’s having a baby.’ I passed what felt like stones. The guards gave me a tissue from an MRE to wipe myself. It was bloody. I felt so humiliated.

All of the statements I made at Bagram were during the sleep deprivation. I would have said anything. I told them, ‘I will tell you I am bin Laden if you want me to tell you I am bin Laden.’”

Mr. Aamer described the effects of maltreatment on his mental state.

“It’s a process of losing your mind. First it’s knowing you are not in control of yourself anymore. Someone else is in control of you. So you fool yourself and think, ‘Well, he’s only controlling me physically, but not mentally.’ They’re not in your head. But then you realize you’re wrong and they control your mind.

Then it’s welcome to the microwave. It’s easy to crack an egg from the outside. It’s hard to blow up the egg from the inside. They let you recover so you think you’re strong again. And then they break you again. And you thought you were strong again. And you don’t know your thoughts anymore. Like the microwave, they boil you from the inside to the outside until you explode.

After the microwave, the eggshell may be intact because the heat penetrated to the inside. The shell looks strong. But if you crack the egg, inside you will see charcoal.

So I would go to the interrogators thinking, ‘How can I lower the level of torture? What can I say to please him? I am going to be so easy with him today, I will please him.’”....

“It makes me scared to talk about it. I’ve been keeping it all inside. I’m scared because they are listening to us now and they’re learning; I’m teaching them how to interrogate. And now they will write a whole new book on interrogation with what they have learned....

“It’s a terrible procedure. The interrogator starts to talk with you about things that are small and well known. You agree. But he is driving you to a cliff. The more you drive with him on his interrogation, he starts throwing out fish bait, so little by little they show you that they are interested in knowing who you are. They do this by saying, ‘Shaker Aamer, we know you; we know who you are. We know you are nobody. We know you are a small fish rubbing shoulders with the big fish.’

My goal is, ‘How can I minimize the torture? I just want to sleep.’ I never had a goal more than that. It was never my goal to get out of the facility and be freed. My goal was just to lessen the torture. The problem is, not all the small fish know the big fish; but you want to lessen the torture.

So, their interest in you makes you trust them. You start to tell them the truth; you build the truth by telling the story in chronological order. You build the building one story at a time. Until I separated from my wife and go [sic] to hide in the mountains and wait for the man to take me through the mountains. The interrogators asked me the name of the mountains, the name of the man who would guide me. I didn’t know. And that’s when the interrogators went crazy.

The interrogators threw chairs. They put me in a grey disc with my legs spread. They banged the chairs. And you are just trying to avoid any hit. They shook me. They threw me on the ground. They banged my head into the wall.

I was telling them the truth. Their interest made me trust them. It made me hope the torture will decrease. But when I couldn’t tell them what they want [sic] to hear they made me stand for hours, they scream at me, they bang into me. You aren’t even thinking beyond how to protect yourself and not attack them so that you don’t get a bullet in your head. They do that until you are shivering, until they have broken you, until your mind is completely empty. You feel like you’re not real anymore. Like it’s a dream.

And now the worst part comes. They treat you with kindness. It destroys you completely. Your thinking is paralyzed. Your feeling is paralyzed. And the interrogator says, ‘I am trying to help you.’ You don’t know what to love and what to hate because it’s all happening at the same time. You don’t know anything anymore. You can’t tell apart good and bad, kind and evil. You lose the sense of the meaning of kindness.

You ask yourself, ‘Are they really trying to hurt me or are they trying to help me?’ You can’t tell anymore. They bang your head on the wall and then they give you a hot meal. One interrogator talked about what he would do to my five-year-old daughter in details that destroyed me. He said ‘They are going to screw her. She will be screaming, ‘Daddy! Daddy’’ You are completely disorganized. You are completely destroyed.

It happened many times. You learn they don’t really want to hear what the truth is. The truth only results in the same; more torture. So you begin to follow their story; they ask you questions, they give you descriptions and you agree. What was the color of the car? Did the driver look like this? Was the driver from al Qaeda? I answered, ‘How should I know.’ They said, ‘Well, a taxi driver wouldn’t drive to this compound would he, so he must be al Qaeda. The taxi driver takes you to the Arab guesthouse so the taxi driver is al Qaeda and the Arab guesthouse is al Qaeda.’

The interrogators give you the details, but they don’t want you to agree. They say have you seen a fat guy? A guy with a turban? This guy? That guy? Guess what? Those guys are al Qaeda. And then you feel like that you are al Qaeda. Then the interrogators tell you that al Qaeda recruited you without you knowing it; they were behind funding your travel.

Then they ask you to sign a statement. When I say no, the whole thing starts again. In the end, I offered to my interrogator to sign that I am al Qaeda, everything the interrogator wanted me to sign, if the interrogator would agree not to interrogate and torture me anymore. And the interrogator said, ‘I can’t tell you that we won’t interrogate you anymore.’

No matter what you said, they still wanted more. So they kept torturing me no matter what. The degree of the torture would change. Maybe they would let me sit for a brief period of time and then it would get worse again.

For the first 25 days at Bagram it was constant severe torture. For the last week they left me alone with the other detainees in a room with a heater. We all had frostbite. The interrogators only asked what we knew about certain people, but they weren’t pushing me for specific information. I didn’t see the sun except twice while I was at Bagram. And then there was ‘The Big Goodbye Party’ when you leave for Kandahar. I was beaten, shackled, and hooded. The guards laughed and cursed me. I was roped together with other detainees. Then the plane didn’t come. The next day they gave us another ‘Goodbye Party.’ We weren’t allowed to use the toilet. The plane came. I was fearful, thinking, ‘If this is happening right now, what is coming next? Maybe they’re getting ready to shoot me? Maybe it will be something worse than this.’”

Mr. Aamer experienced severe maltreatment at Kandahar Airfield with identical effects on his physical and mental state.

"I was shipped to Kandahar. The airplane was freezing cold. Someone took my socks from me. And then the ‘Welcome Party.’ They told the soldiers they could do anything they wanted with the detainees. We landed. They put us face first on cold concrete. We were shivering. They hit me with gun butts, kicked me with boots, and stomped on my back. There was a 17-year-old detainee. They put a gun up his rectum. He was screaming, ‘I’m no woman! I’m no woman!’ I yelled at the guards to stop in English. Then, because I spoke English the soldiers said, ‘He’s a traitor. He speaks perfect English.’ They beat me even harder. A black female soldier stopped them, saying, ‘You’ve had your fun.’

At about 0600, after 20 minutes of not being beaten, they put me in a cage with a blanket. They put me on my face and unshackled me. Then they ran out. They gave me bread. At about 0730 or 0800 they yelled at me to get up. They put my head on the ground, hooded and shackled me and took me to the interrogators tent. I was kept awake for 10 days.

The torture in Kandahar was more physical than in Bagram. They shook me, threw me on the floor, made me hold my arms out, hit my hands. There was no blanket, just lying on the ground. There was a nice thick blanket lying on the floor, but if I reached for it they would start beating me.

Two interrogators named John and Tony and a guy named Sallie or Sal took turns for three to six hours at a time or two to three hours at a time. There was also an Egyptian. They were with me almost all the time. At least I had my own place in Bagram; I was in a cage and the guards were on the outside. That was a comfort to me. But at Kandahar there was nothing between me and the guards. They were in the tent. If I closed my eyes, the guard would say to open them.

The interrogations at Kandahar had the same process as at Bagram in terms of the interrogators being both cruel and kind. The worst was Sal. He was so kind. He sat me outside the tent with the guards and heated up my food. The guards were starting [sic?] at me. I felt humiliated. Sal talked to me as if I were a human being. Then Sal would say he was going to screw my five-year-old daughter; he was going to do this and that to my daughter sexually; how my daughter would scream and scream. I thought about attacking Sal and getting killed. But I wouldn’t do anything aggressive. Force is the weapon of the coward.

This went on for 10 days. It was constant interrogation and torture. I told them the exact same truth that I had told the interrogators in Bagram, plus they had more true information about me. I also told the interrogators things that weren’t true in order to decrease the intensity of the torture I was suffering.

In those ten days, I only went to the toilet once. I had sleep deprivation. The ICRC came to see me in Bagram one time. Then they came to Kandahar to see me. They took me to a cage with other detainees. The judge from the ICRC saw me there, a Swiss judge. He gave me a card with my number on it.

After 10 days they sent the Egyptian guy who told me I was going to Guantanamo. They put me in a cage for four days and pretty much left me alone. A British agent came to see me, a young officer with a red beret. I wouldn’t talk with him because he said he couldn’t do anything to help me. The Americans only asked me questions those last four days at Kandahar like the last days at Bagram. They didn’t press me to lie about anything.

After four days they gave me the ‘Goodbye Party’ at Kandahar and a far worse ‘Welcome Party’ at Guantanamo.”

The maltreatment and its physical and mental effects continued at Guantanamo.

“The interrogations at Guantanamo have twists. There’s a 'frequent flyer program' where they move you every two hours. The guards shout at you in the same block. They switch the water off. They spray Pine Sol in my clothes.

It’s the same process psychologically; I can’t tell cruelty and kindness apart. I told the interrogators everything to decrease the torture severity. Another thing that was at Guantanamo that was not at Bagram was the circles within circles. The guards were connected with medical, were connected with the people who gave supplies like linens, were connected with the administration like the NCO’s, were connected with the Navy or the Army, were connected with the CIA, were connected with the FBI, were connected with the Republicans and the Democrats. All of these people want to squeeze my neck at the center of all of the circles. You tell them what they want to hear to decrease the severity of the torture.

For example, an internist came to see me. I asked for a blanket because I have arthritis and the cold air conditioning makes it worse. The doctor said the arthritis is in my record and agreed that it was cold. The doctor said, ‘I will ask permission from the Joint Detention Group (JDG) for a blanket for you.’ And the doctor says he’s independent.

The worst thing about torture is that you don’t know how to think, what to do, how to feel. You know you have your mind, but you don’t now how to react, which is horrible because you feel vulnerable. It’s terrible. We believed that the people here; the CIA, the interrogators, use ‘djinn.’ [spirits] The evil djinn. Some of the things that happened, you can’t explain. Some people with think that it was drugs or something, but 95% of us believe we got possessed by djinn.”

Also posted at Firedoglake/The Dissenter

APA "Casebook" on Psychologist Ethics and Interrogations Fails to Convince

A new proposed "casebook" on psychologist ethics in national security settings, written by the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association (APA), tells psychologists that when assessing whether an interrogation technique is abusive or not, they should consider, among other factors, whether there are "data to support that the technique is effective in gathering accurate information." This determination, which places the needs of the military or intelligence gathering entity above that of the person the psychologist is examining, demonstrates how blatantly unethical it is for psychologists to participate in these interrogations.

While it's shocking that APA would call upon psychologists to weigh an interrogation technique's "effectiveness" with other ethical standards, it's even crazier when one considers it took them six years to write this up, having been originally tasked with writing an "ethics casebook" for interrogations back in 2005.

The vignettes that would compose the "casebook" were apparently posted (PDF) by APA for public comments last June, but APA failed to notify their membership, or really anyone. The earliest comment posted was on August 18. In a comment posted by Nina Thomas, a psychologist who was one of the few non-military, non-intelligence-linked members on the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) panel hastily assembled to formulate APA policy on psychologists and interrogations, Thomas decried the lack of notification of the membership.

"A barely three month period for responses does not seem adequate when we have not previously known anything about the progress on this work," Thomas wrote. She also indicated that progress on the casebook's development had not been regularly reported to APA's Council of Representatives. (The mandate to produce such a "casebook" goes back to 2005.) Thomas had other criticisms as well, writing, "It is my hope and aim that the Ethics Committee will seriously rethink its charge and return to Council with a request for a revised mandate."

The petition resolution affirmed by the membership of APA [in 2008] makes perfectly clear that psychologists are prohibited from working in settings in which people are held outside of or in violation of either international law or the U.S. Constitution. The only exceptions to this prohibition are in cases in which a psychologist is working directly for the person being detained, for an independent third party working to protect human rights or providing treatment to military personnel. These major and ultimately most important points do not have sufficient presence in this casebook as currently devised.

Over and over the APA "casebook" advises members to seek "consultation" about any difficult ethical situation, while advising psychologists to rely on a host of human rights documents, APA resolutions, and the APA ethics code to "guide" them. But psychologists shouldn't even be in these torture settings to begin with!

The petition resolution referenced by Thomas was a member-initiated petition that was passed in a referendum vote in 2008 by a membership unhappy with APA's policy on interrogations, and implemented by APA's Council in 2009. The resolution states that "psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights."

But APA has adamantly refused to set up a process that would actually determine when such a detention setting is in violation of the law, even while sententiously expressing "grave concern" over reports of torture and abuse at U.S. military and CIA interrogation and detention centers. According to one "casebook" instruction, "the psychologist ... would need to determine whether the site is a lawful or unlawful detention setting." If APA can't or won't make such a determination, how can they expect an individual psychologist to do this, and feel they will be backed up by their organization for doing so?

APA has refused to follow the policy of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in instructing their membership not to participate in interrogations. Indeed, it was the contention of the 2005 APA PENS panel that "it is consistent with the APA Ethics Code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes, as psychologists have a long-standing tradition of doing in other law enforcement contexts."

Nothing in the new "casebook" is really any different than the position APA derived in the 2005 PENS report (PDF). The psychologist is supposed to walk an ethical tightrope while serving as "consultant" to interrogations, admonished to report torture or other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment (as defined by law), and to engage in research beneficial to national security aims. All the while, APA's seemingly benign admonishments cover a policy of support to detention and interrogation policies that amount to torture, using various legalistic loopholes built into a 2002 rewrite of the Ethics Code to allow the unethical use of psychologist expertise to brain-trust the torture.

APA concludes that psychologists should report torture to the "appropriate authorities." Furthermore, "If the psychologist was not satisfied with the result of reporting such concerns, the psychologist would consider other reporting avenues such as the judge advocate and/or the inspector general." It all sounds good, until you realize that such reporting rarely goes anywhere, and it beggars all knowledge of social psychology to believe that one individual will buck an entire system and put their careers on the line to protest. This is even more true when one considers that previous investigations of detainee torture have either minimized or covered up significant aspects of the torture.

The one case that APA often cites where a psychologist protested torture concerns NCIS psychologist Michael Gelles, who protested the torture protocol for Mohamed Al Qahtani. Two salient points are connected with that case. One is that it didn't stop the torture, both of Al Qahtani, nor the spread of the torture program throughout the Department of Defense. Two, Gelles was not just protesting a torture protocol, he was proposing a different program of psychological torture based primarily on the application of extreme isolation of the prisoner, who was reportedly already manifesting psychotic behavior.

Another example of the impotency of the policy of protest concerns the CIA torture of Abu Zubaydah. Planned by two former SERE psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the "enhanced interrogation techniques" applied to Zubaydah, which included stress positions, placing him into a closed box with insects, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and more, led then chief operational psychologist for the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center, R. Scott Shumate to leave the interrogation "in disgust, leaving before the most dire tactics had commenced," according to a 2007 article by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair.

There is no evidence that Shumate protested the torture up the chain of command. Indeed, the torture continued, and was extended to others. Shumate, whatever he did, was rewarded by being put on the APA PENS panel.

APA cannot help but confuse the "casebook" instructions by mixing use of the ethics code as a guideline with advice laid down by DoD in the Army Field Manual for interrogations: "'If the proposed approach technique were used by the enemy against one of your fellow soldiers, would you believe the soldier had been abused?'.... if the answer to this question is yes, 'the contemplated action should not be conducted.'" The problem is, as has been amply documented, it is the military and/or CIA psychologists who are proposing the "techniques" to begin with, or following orders from those higher in the chain of command (see here, and here, and here, for instance).

Psychologists Speak Out

Dan Aalbers, one of the authors of the APA petition resolution told The Dissenter, "I didn't understand until fairly recently how few obligations remain in the APA's ethics code: if you use these quite useful pdfs [comparing the 1992 and 2002 ethical codes] and search for words and phrases that denote obligation -- 'must' 'should', 'do not' and 'obligation' itself -- you will quickly find that most of these phrases appear in the 1992 revision of the ethics code and, more often than not, the 2002 code saddles psychologists with no obligation greater than due consideration. Psychologists 'must' consider the consequences their actions -- but they are not prevented from doing much.... The 2002 ethics code should be thrown out and the 1992 code -- with its strictures on informed consent, on clarification of role, and obligations to avoid multiple relationships -- reinstated."

One good example of what Aalbers is talking about is Section 3.04 of the Ethics Code, to which the "casebook" authors often refer. It states, "Psychologists take reasonable steps to avoid harming their clients/patients..." Not "Do Not Harm," but the taking of "reasonable steps." Indeed, until the membership and some of the human rights community raised a hullaballoo, and even then only after eight years of stalling, did APA change its code last year regarding ethical conflicts with organizational authorities. Before this change, since 2002 the APA has instructed its membership that resolution of such conflicts could be resolved by simply following the authority in question (like the military) and not the ethical standard, should they be in conflict. Critics called this the Nuremberg Defense, referencing many a Nazi's defense against war crimes with the refrain that he was "only following orders."

Another psychologist who has been active in opposing APA's policies on interrogation, former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility Stephen Soldz, also told The Dissenter that he was worried about aspects of the Ethics Code that relate to research. "Remember," Soldz said, "that [Ethics Codes] 8.05 ['Dispensing with Informed Consent'] and 8.07 ['Deception in Research'] still remain. 8.05 removes the requirement for informed consent for institutional research. And 8.07 raises the bar for psychological distress to rule out research deception, using language similar to the Convention Against Torture's definition of psychological torture. Meanwhile, the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group currently has former APA fellow Susan Brandon as Research Director. The HIG may have conducted and is apparently intending to conduct research on detainees. There are persistent rumors that research on detainees occurred as recent as last year (I'm not saying it ended, just have no current sources) in both Iraq and Afghanistan. While we don't know the nature of this research, there are some indications in the press that raise alarm.

"All this is simply to say that the interrogation issue is not a matter of the Bush administration and the past. Rather, it is still alive. And we should remember that research may have played a larger role in the need for psychologists than many of us originally realized."

Martha Davis, a forensic psychologist who has just completed a documentary about psychologists, interrogations and torture, "Doctors of the Dark Side," in a statement to The Dissenter cautioned that no fine tuning of the "casebook" would make things better (for the record, I was interviewed by Davis as part of the documentary):

I worry that IF the Ethics Committee were ever to do the right thing, extend the deadline, open the discussion up, and somehow put together another, much better Casebook that incorporated these suggestions and other good ones, then in effect, the casebook process would reinforce and "legitimize" the practice of having psychologists directly involved in interrogations. Every significant health and human rights organization has condemn this practice except the APA. The simple versions of "no direct involvement in interrogations" adopted by the AMA and ApA are understandable to everyone and the only way to guarantee that doctors "keep in their lane" etc., etc. We know so much more now than we did in 2005 -- so much of it ominous and disturbing. The practice is spreading beyond "national security" interrogations to US law enforcement settings. BSCT psychologists violate at least 10 parts of the APA Ethics Code (and that's without torture), and the role is incompatible with the new Specialty Guidelines of Forensic Psychology.

Len Rubenstein, Senior Scholar, Center for Human Rights and Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote an op-ed at Huffington Post last week, indicating he believed that a recent rewrite by APA of its forensic psychology guidelines should apply to psychologists and interrogations. Rubenstein, calling the PENS ethical guidelines "ethically untenable, little more than a shabby rationalization for severe ethical violations," noted that APA's new Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists call for complete transparency with the client, and eschews use of deception, both the opposite of military/CIA practice.

The guidelines also render intolerable the conflict of interest at the heart of the psychologists' role -- at once to advance intelligence gathering and to act as a "safety officer." The conflict, moreover, is likely to be resolved in favor of pressing for information, since the psychologists involved are classified as combatants, not clinicians (though they must be licensed to practice), and assigned to an intelligence chain of command. Whereas PENS sought to fudge the conflict by urging a "delicate balance of ethical considerations" the Specialty Guidelines insist on adherence to core obligations of integrity and fairness and avoidance of involvement in roles with conflicts of interest.

But according to forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, "These guidelines are not enforceable. And, like all such professional guidelines, they will be subject to diverse interpretations."

And it is in such a forest of conflicting interpretations, vague instructions, unenforceable prohibitions against torture, and the like, that APA hides complicity in the U.S. torture program, having determined that "national security psychology" is the wave of the future. The lack of accountability for psychologist collaboration with torture is the background for the entire discussion. It is more incumbent than ever that psychologists and other mental health professionals speak out against this amalgam of psychological science and practice with the art of coercive interrogation and persuasion, of the marriage of psychology with torture.

Also posted at Firedoglake/The Dissenter

Dr. Welner Defends His Testimony in Khadr Trial, Spreads U.S. Propaganda on Detainee "Recidivism"

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post published an op-ed by forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner, "What I really said about radical jihadism." Dr. Welner achieved some notoriety for his testimony in the sentencing phase of the trial of fomer child soldier and Guantanamo prisoner, Omar Khadr. Mr. Khadr was the first former child soldier tried for war crimes by the United States in living memory. Sentenced to forty years in prison, due to a stipulation that was part of a plea bargain that garnered a confession from the formerly tortured Khadr, his sentence has been reduced to eight years, some at Guantanamo, where he remains imprisoned in solitary confinement, and some in Canada, upon a presumed repatriation at some point in the future.

As I pointed out at the time, even before he testified, Dr. Welner was telling Steven Edwards of the Canadian National Post that the young Khadr had failed to "publicly repudiat[e] al Qaida, as civilized Muslims should." Nor was Dr. Welner above a sly comparison of the young Omar Khadr, who has spent his entire brief adulthood in U.S. custody, with America's arch enemy (and former ally) Osama bin Laden.

“When one leaps to the conclusion about Omar Khadr’s future because he is friendly, one might recall that Osama bin Laden has always been described as gentle, likeable and charming,” New York-based Welner told Postmedia News.

The "Context" of "Radical Jihadism"

In a December 5 op-ed, also for the Washington Post, "Radical jihadism is not a mental disorder," retired Brigadier General (and child and adolescent psychiatrist) Stephen N. Xenakis, critiqued Welner's testimony at trial. Xenakis himself was a member of the Khadr defense team, and spent approximately 200 hours in clinical meetings with Mr. Khadr. While he was on the witness list for the sentencing phase of the military commissions trial, Dr. Xenakis never testified. (Andrea Prasow's theory for the failure to testify, posted at The Jurist, strikes me as more likely than Xenakis's own statement that the defense thought Omar Khadr's own testimony more powerful than that of his mental health witnesses.)

In his op-ed, Dr. Xenakis wrote:

"In my professional opinion, Omar Khadr is at a high risk of dangerousness as a radical jihadist," Welner said. Based on hundreds of hours of reviewing records and interviewing witnesses, and 7 to 8 hours of examining the prisoner, the doctor said he concluded that Khadr was a radical jihadist who was at risk of inspiring others to violent acts in the future.

Dr. Welner was nonplussed, replying that Xenakis had "mischaracterized" his testimony. "Assessing risk of dangerous jihadist activity borrows from clinical understandings about criminal and violent recidivism," Welner wrote, "but it must reflect the context of actual jihadist violence or an individual's ability to facilitate that violence." He added that his risk assessment on Mr. Khadr relied upon "statistical base rates" and cited a recent report from the director of national intelligence which noted that "the figures of released Guantanamo detainees who return to active battle have climbed sharply from just 6 percent in 2008 to 25 percent."

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

Now, Dr. Welner never bothers to mention that at the time of trial, the latest figures on recidivism from Guantanamo detainees was around 5%, as reported by the Department of Defense, as was finally conceded by the New York Times in an article in June 2009, after considerable controversy about over-reporting recidivism statistics. The Times noted that discrepancies which led them to report the figure as a higher 1-in-7 recidivism rate were due to adding in those detainees identified as "suspected of engaging in terrorism." (See also this May 2009 article by Lara Jakes in USA Today, which directly reports the Pentagon as giving a 5 percent recidivism rate.)

But even the latter figure is extremely questionable, as an earlier report by Professor Mark Denbeaux, attorneys Joshua Denbeaux and R.David Gratz, and researchers from the Seton Hall Law Center for Policy and Research proved in a scholarly examination of government recidivism claims published last year. The Seton Hall report demonstrates shoddy record-keeping by the Pentagon (at least two reported recidivist "terrorists" were never even at Guantanamo; some of those released took up arms against Morocco, Russia, and Turkey, but not the United States). More egregiously, former detainees are described as "returning to the fight" solely because they engaged in "anti-U.S. propaganda."

Many of the same problems occur in the report, "Summary of the Reengagement of Detainees Formerly Held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" (PDF), released earlier this month. The report claims that of the released detainees, "[t]he Intelligence Community assesses that 81 (13.5 percent) are confirmed and 69 (11.5 percent) are suspected of reengaging in terrorist or insurgent activities after transfer." Suspicion of terrorist activities doesn't rely anymore on engagement in "anti-U.S. propaganda," but is predicated upon "[p]lausible but unverified or single-source reporting" (emphasis added).

In a press release following the Pentagon's latest release on "recidivism" figures for former Guantanamo detainees, Center for Constitutional Rights commented, the government "persists in using the language of 're-engagement' to describe individuals, despite the fact that the majority of them should never have been detained in the first place and were known early on by the government to be innocent. It is not possible to return to the battlefield if you were never there in the first place." Furthermore, "the latest report only summarizes its figures without actually naming any alleged recidivists or including any information that would enable meaningful scrutiny."

Whatever the actual figures, and the Pentagon is hardly a trustworthy source, Dr. Welner doesn't bother to mention that the "confirmed" figure is actually around 13 percent, not the 25 percent he cites. Of course, if Welner were honest, he would admit that he didn't have any such figures at the time of his evaluation, and that the only figures then open to him were those of the approximately 5 percent reported earlier.

In addition, as a psychiatric professional, Dr. Welner must know that extrapolation of dangerousness from "clinical understandings about criminal and violent recidivism" about which he is familiar, i.e., an American population, on a population largely culturally different is extremely problematic. For instance, norms on psychological tests refer to specific populations, and one would never think of administering, for instance, a recent journal article states that use of the Psychopathy Checklist, widely used to predict violent and non-violent recidivism, is based on of Anglo-American samples, and its generalizability "beyond these groups... is still in question and requires further research." But it is just for this reason that Dr. Welner relied so heavily upon the work of Danish correctional psychologist Nicolai Sennels, "precisely because Sennels has studied and treated large-scale groups of young Muslim and non-Muslim inmates."

Racist Psychology

In his op-ed, Dr. Xenakis wrote:

As the defense explained during cross-examination, Sennels is also known for inflammatory views on Islam, having claimed that "massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1,400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool." Sennels has described the Koran as "a criminal book that forces people to do criminal things." Welner specifically repudiated these views in court.

But in this duel of op-eds, Dr. Welner went further, defending Sennels as a professional "lauded by the Danish Psychological Association." That Sennels "has now become a foe of unregulated Muslim immigration to Europe," Welner wrote, "does not negate what he learned from giving of himself to help Muslims stay out of prison."

Sennels is a racist ideologue, who uses psychological jargon to argue for the ejection of Muslims from Europe. He spews his views, based upon his work as a social worker and psychologist working with "antisocial individuals." Despite the fact that he admits, "I did not keep statistics of any kind," he believes he has enough evidence to conclude that "very few Muslims have the will, social freedom and strength of personality" to be integrated into European society.

Sennels continues. "Many young Muslims become assailants," he writes. "This is not just because of the Muslim cultural acceptance of aggression, but also because the Muslim honor mentality makes them into fragile, insecure men. Instead of being flexible and humorous they become stiff and develop fragile, glass-like, narcissistic personalities." And from this, the Danish psychologist, "lauded by the Danish Psychological Association," and Dr. Welner, concludes that the presence of Muslim populations in many Western countries means "the possibility that violent conflict will happen in Western cities all over the world is very great." His solution: "draconian measures"; "shutting down Muslim immigration;" "tightening the thumb screws on integration"; "and perhaps even sending Muslims who proved themselves unable to adjust to our Western secular laws back to their countries of origin."

Any data stemming from the work of Nicolai Sennels is irretrievably biased and unusable. It is to the ever-lasting detriment of the U.S. armed forces that they used an expert who relied upon unscientific approaches and racist ideology to testify on the dangerousness of a Guantanamo prisoner.

Predicting Dangerousness Has "Very Low Reliability"

Dr. Welner certainly sounds on the defensive in his article. He cites a previous Supreme Court decision, Estelle v. Smith (1981), and says that since that decision "forensic psychiatry has refined such dangerousness evaluation to focus on context." Welner has reason to be defensive. For one thing, Estelle v. Smith concerned the throwing out of such a dangerousness evaluation because the defendant's rights had been violated. The irony of this is not lost on those of us who have castigated the military commissions and the entire "war on terror" detainee policy as being outside the law. Additionally, the case includes this notable aside:

...some in the psychiatric community are of the view that clinical predictions as to whether a person would or would not commit violent acts in the future are "fundamentally of very low reliability," and that psychiatrists possess no special qualifications for making such forecasts. See Report of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Clinical Aspects of the Violent Individual 23-30, 33 (1974); A Stone, Mental Health and Law: A System in Transition 27-36 (1975); Brief for American Psychiatric Association as Amicus Curiae 11-17.

In a widely-cited 1994 essay, "The Dimensions of Dangerousness Revisited: Assessing Forensic Predictions About Violence" in Law and Human Behavior, sociologist Robert Menzies and colleagues, concluded that while some forensic clinicians "were able to predict some people, under limited temporal and contextual conditions, some of the time, under no circumstances could even the most encouraging performances be mustered as an argument for clinical or psychometric involvement in the identification of potentially violent clinical or correctional subjects." A later 2000 study on sexual predator evaluations and evidentiary reliability concluded there is a "large and consistent body of empirical evidence indicates that the standards of the profession include no ability to accurately predict dangerous behavior" (emphasis added).

That's not the kind of evidence that Dr. Welner would wish to enter into the record. Meanwhile, Omar Khadr, victimized more ways than one would care to count, now resides in the "fortress-like" maximum security prison, called Camp 5 at Guantanamo, where he endures near-24 hour solitary confinement, which as an article on isolation in the case of purported Wikileaks whistleblower Bradley Manning recently describes, is a pernicious form of torture.

The Psychiatric Demonization of Omar Khadr

Originally posted at FDL/The Seminal

As the intense negotiations over a possible plea bargain for former child "soldier" Omar Khadr come to a head, "internationally acclaimed" forensic psychiatrist Dr. Michael Welner has given an exclusive interview to Steven Edwards of the Canadian National Post. Khadr, captured at age 15, has been imprisoned for eight years in U.S. custody, and tortured at both Bagram and Guantanamo, accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan in a firefight in July 2002. Dr. Welner has consulted for the FBI, and is a frequent guest on network television. He is a vigorous self-promoter and has been a forensic examiner on a number of high-profile criminal cases.

From Edwards story:

There is no evidence that Omar Khadr has ever independently sought to promote peace with the West and renounce Muslim Jihad, the internationally acclaimed forensic psychiatrist who pioneered efforts to quantify evil reveals ahead testifying about his examination of the Canadian-born terror suspect....

“When one leaps to the conclusion about Omar Khadr’s future because he is friendly, one might recall that Osama bin Laden has always been described as gentle, likeable and charming,” New York-based Welner told Postmedia News.

“There is no record of (Khadr’s) publicly repudiating al Qaida, as civilized Muslims should, not even a letter composed for him by Dennis Edney,” he added in a reference to one of Khadr’s two Canadian lawyers. There is “no call... to radical Islamists to mature beyond their elemental intolerance.”

By the use of terms such as "elemental intolerance", Dr. Welner exposes his bias and political animus towards Mr. Khadr. It carries the same whiff of fanaticism as the statements of former Chief of Neuropsychiatry at Guantanamo Bay, Dr. William Anderson, who wrote that Islamic "hard-core zealots" had "brains that are structurally and functionally different from us," and that 100,000 "zealots" within the Muslim body politic would have to be eliminated, the way "malignant [cancer] cells" are removed from a healthy body.

One wonders what responsibility the young Mr. Khadr had to reach out to "radical Islamists." The entire accusation is preposterous on its face. The attempt to link Mr. Khadr to Osama bin Laden is even worse. It is character assassination, and the evident bias shown by Dr. Welner should be more than enough reason to have his entire testimony and evaluation thrown out of court.

But then this isn't any old court. It's the kangaroo proceedings that are the Obama revamped Military Commissions, a judicial setting that allows no courtroom observers, that banned reporters for stating the name of a witness that was otherwise a matter of public record, that allows the judge to admit hearsay evidence from third parties who were coerced, as long as the judge finds it doesn't cross over into "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment as defined in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005.

As Daphne Eviatar pointed out last year:

While that sounds good, remember that the Detainee Treatment Act was interpreted by the Bush administration’s Justice Department to allow such “enhanced interrogation techniques” as sleep deprivation, food deprivation, shackling, forced standing in stress positions, and a variety of “corrective techniques” that include physical slaps and grabs – either alone or in combination. The new “protections” in the MCA amendments are therefore not all that reassuring.

Omar Khadr was to be the first sample of "justice" in the new Obama-blessed military commissions. We got a sample of what kind of justice that would be when last August, the MC judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, announced there was "no credible evidence" of torture upon Mr. Khadr. And yet, even in the testimony in the case thus far, early interrogations of the then-15 year old prisoner were proven to contain theats of violent rape. Moreover, the U.S. has been contemptuous of international protocols that juveniles under 18 years of age require "special attention", and that "the physical and psychosocial rehabilitation and social reintegration of children who are victims of armed conflict" of such child prisoners is of essential importance.

Andy Worthington described the torture of Omar Khadr in an article last May (or read Mr. Khadr's own affadavit describing his treatment - PDF):

Khadr stated that he was short-shackled in painful positions and left for up to ten hours in a freezing cold cell, threatened with rape and with being transferred to another country where he could be raped, and, on one particular occasion, when he had been left short-shackled in a painful position until he urinated on himself:

Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me, and then, with me lying on my stomach and my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil on the floor. Later, I was put back in my cell, without being allowed a shower or a change of clothes. I was not given a change of clothes for two days. They did this to me again a few weeks later.

Ethical Transgressions?

The rest of the Welner interview continues the doctor's rant. "Civilized Muslims" have repudiated Al Qaeda, implying that without a strong statement from Mr. Khadr doing the same, he is not "civilized." According to Edwards, Dr. Welner states in the interview that "Khadr is known to have expressed peace-loving intentions only to “those advancing [h]is public image...” Even more, Dr. Welner describes Mr. Khadr as "socially agile, charming and more sophisticated," only to remind us -- "lest we forget" -- that Omar's father looked "good" enough to gather money for an orphanage, "'yet he was raising money for al Qaida, and (was) a high-ranking member' of the terror group."

In reference to Dr. Welner's last example, what should people think who believed once that the politicians who told them they were activating the defense of the United States and promoting the safety of their loved ones from a WMD-armed Iraq, only to find out their tax money was used to invade a country that had no WMD, that the entire story was gamed by the top leaders of the United States to destroy the infrastructure of another nation, kill 100,000s of people, and turn millions more into homeless refugees? These crimes make Omar Khadr's father look like a mere amateur.

It is difficult to discern the motives behind Dr. Welner's interview, but the fact there is pending a possible sentencing hearing for Mr. Khadr, or that the issue of Canadian repatriation of the former child soldier is currently a matter of some controversy in Canada (Prime Minister Stephen Harper is adamantly against it), calls Dr. Welner's actions into some question.

One wonders if Dr. Welner has ever read the Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychology (PDF):

Ordinarily, forensic psychologists avoid making detailed public (out-of-court) statements about particular legal proceedings in which they have been involved. When there is a strong justification to do so, such public statements are designed to assure accurate representation of their role or their evidence, not to advocate the positions of parties in the legal proceeding. Forensic psychologists address particular legal proceedings in publications or communications only to the extent that the information relied upon is part of a public record, or consent for that use has been properly obtained from the party holding any privilege.

Perhaps Dr. Welner, who is a forensic psychiatrist and not a forensic psychologist, does not feel himself bound by the ethics of his sister profession. Even so, the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law's Ethical Guidelines for the Practice of Forensic Psychiatry state that as a matter of confidentiality in a forensic, legal setting, "A forensic evaluation requires notice to the evaluee and to collateral sources of reasonably anticipated limitations on confidentiality. Information or reports derived from a forensic evaluation are subject to the rules of confidentiality that apply to the particular evaluation, and any disclosure should be restricted accordingly." Moreover, the process of gaining consent for an evaluation should include "notice... to the evaluee of the nature and purpose of the evaluation and the limits of its confidentiality."

Did Dr. Welner tell Omar Khadr that he planned to give a public interview to the press on certain aspects of his evaluation of him, an interview moreover on the eve of an important legal hearing for him?

Edward's interview liberally cites Dr. Welner's credentials, but never mentions that he has worked closely with the FBI, or that his highly-touted "Depravity Scale" project is the subject of much academic controversy.

It is hard to believe the extent to which the advocates of the demonization of Omar Khadr will go. The U.S. government, and their ally in the Canadian Prime Minister's office, evidently will go to no end to press their vendetta against the Khadr family. This is the morality of the mob, the morality of true moral depravity. Dr. Welner, look in the mirror.

Or better yet, review this videotape of an interrogation of Omar Khadr in 2004. Did the young man, then age 16, use the opportunity to "call... to radical Islamists to mature beyond their elemental intolerance"? You tell me.



H/T to skdadl for tipping me to the Welner interview