More on the Press and the Question of Torture in the Army Field Manual

This is second of two articles revisiting work I did on the "selling" of the Bush Administration's rewrite of the Army Field Manual (AFM) on intelligence interrogations. As the first article showed, while beat reporters at the Pentagon knew something weird was going on with the introduction of the new AFM regulations, particularly around the use of sensory deprivation as outlined in the manual's Appendix M, none of that information made it into the mainstream press accounts on the September 2006 introduction of the revised AFM.

In my second article from January 2009 (originally posted at Invictus), I looked at the how the foreign press interpreted the Pentagon's introduction of the new interrogation manual. Similar to the domestic press, the foreign press quizzed Department of Defense and State Department officials about the way Guantanamo detainees and others held as "unlawful enemy combatants" were being treated according to the new regulations. They noticed that despite claims the AFM adhered to Geneva Conventions protections in regards to prisoners, "unlawful enemy combatants" were held to a different standard in Appendix M's so-called "Separation" technique.

The Nation's "Gold Standard" for Interrogation

Also highlighted in my 2009 article was the role of the alternative press. I specifically singled out at the time Salon.com and its torture "beat" writer, Mark Benjamin, for failing to report the truth about the Army Field Manual. In fact, to this day, Salon.com has never carried one article on Appendix M, or even a report on the many exposés in regards to the AFM and torture released by numerous human rights and legal groups.

Well, there was one mention. Glenn Greenwald, writing a 2010 article for Salon, used an extended quote from Scott Horton at Harpers magazine that mentioned "plenty of torture-lite techniques under Appendix M of the Army Field Manual." Greenwald made no comment about Appendix M on his own, and the article itself was mainly about the otherwise important issue of indefinite detention.

But the one time Greenwald did write about the 2006 Army Field Manual, in December 2008, he got caught up in the juxtaposition of the AFM to the CIA's waterboarding and so-called enhanced interrogation program, aligning himself with "those of us who insist that Democrats fulfill their commitment to compel the CIA’s compliance in all cases with the extant Army Field Manual." Greenwald quoted favorably Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Dianne Feinstein, and wrote that the AFM "authorizes robust and effective interrogation techniques."

While Greenwald is doing extremely important work on issues of government surveillance and civil liberties in general, and has shown bravery in doing so, he has failed for some reason to grasp the issues surrounding torture and the Army Field Manual.

It seems reasonable to assume that the liberal or progressive press failure to oppose torture -- or rather, to see torture -- in the Army Field Manual derives from reliance on or obedience to Democratic Party politicians. An example of the liberal Democrats stance on the AFM and torture was published at Salon.com in October 2007. The late Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote an op-ed, "We must ban secretive U.S. torture." In his column, Kennedy called the AFM "the 'gold standard' for responsible and effective interrogation techniques."

Salon.com was not unique in touting the supposed benefits of the Army Field Manual, or in ignoring the criticisms made of its Appendix M, or aspects of the AFM that introduced abuse even outside the Appendix M category. The number of progressive bloggers who wrote about all this could be counted on one or two hands (Marcy Wheeler and bmaz at Emptywheel, Scott Horton, Andy Worthington, Spencer Ackerman, and Daphne Eviatar -- if I left anyone out, I apologize.) Some notable anti-torture bloggers, like the Hillman Prize-winning Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan, simply have kept quiet and said very little or nothing about the entire issue, at least once the new AFM was put in place and sold as a big reform.

An End to Torture?

I believe many commentators, outraged by the brutal CIA program of "enhanced interrogation" torture, exemplified by the use of waterboarding, squeezing people into tiny boxes, slamming them against walls, etc., assumed that the AFM prohibition of waterboarding, hooding, nudity, etc., meant an end to torture itself. But torture is not just about brutality; it is about how to break down a human being.

Years of study about the latter by this nation's intelligence and military researchers, assisted by top figures in medicine and behavioral science academia, led the CIA to adopt a torture program sometime between the mid-1950s and early 1960s that was based on "psychological" methods: using fear, feelings of helplessness or "futility", and "touchless" techniques like solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, stress positions, and even use of drugs to break down and control prisoners. In doing this the CIA borrowed also from the military survival, resistance, evasion and escape, or SERE, programs that they were monitoring, and apparently still do monitor and do research on as late as this past decade.

Below is the updated version of the Jan. 2009 story that continued my documentation on the "selling" of the Army Field Manual. I have added notes (in brackets) where applicable to bring up to date, and more silently corrected grammar and syntax to allow for greater comprehension.

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The Foreign Press, Salon.com, and the Army Field Manual

On September 7, 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson and Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) Lt. Gen. John Kimmons showed up at a State Department foreign press briefing on the then-new DoD Directive 2310.10E (on its detainee program) and the also then brand-new Army Field Manual on interrogations. Only the day before, Kimmons and Stimson had held a news briefing for U.S. reporters at the Department of Defense on the same subjects, which I covered in a recent article at AlterNet. (See updated version of this article here.)

While few bloggers paid attention to this September 6 DoD briefing (except one noted reporter, as I'll describe later), most likely that was because President Bush had one of his infrequent news conferences that same day, and this one was a blockbuster. Bush acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA prison network [which he also at the same time said he was closing]. He also announced he was ordering the transfer of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other "high-value detainees" [from the CIA black sites] to Guantánamo Bay to be put on trial.

As the Guardian UK described it:

Mr Bush's disclosure was intended to put pressure on the US Congress to support draft legislation put forward by the White House yesterday for a system of military tribunals for the Guantánamo detainees.

The US supreme court struck down the military tribunals established by the administration for the 450 inmates at Guantánamo last June, ruling that they had no basis in US law and violated the Geneva Convention [Hamdan v. Rumsfeld].

The pressure of the Bush administration to get a military commissions process in place -- to replace the one thrown out as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court -- resulted later that year in Congressional passage of the Military Commissions Act [of 2006]. As described by the ACLU, this infamous legislation, passed with the support of the vast majority of the GOP and certain key Democrats, eliminated "the constitutional due process right of habeas corpus for detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere." It also:

...[gave] any president the power to declare — on his or her own — who is an enemy combatant, decide who should be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime and define what is — and what is not — torture and abuse.

With so much going on at Bush's news conference, who would notice the goings on at DoD, with the decidedly less glamorous Kimmons and Stimson? But one reporter did. In an article for Salon.com, journalist Mark Benjamin, who had been covering the torture beat for awhile, described the "mixed messages on torture" emanating from the White House and DoD.

While Bush was defending "tough interrogation tactics" and "black site" secret prisons, the DoD spokesmen were lauding the new Army Field Manual as "designed to fit squarely within the protections of the Geneva Conventions." [In his article,] Benjamin quoted Kimmons approvingly, describing the AFM as "humane" and in accord with the views of "conventional senior generals."

Yet Benjamin failed to notice, or report, that the bulk of the Q&A session with reporters at that news conference concentrated on serious questions about whether the Army Field Manual allowed abuse itself, particularly in its Appendix M, which describes an omnibus "technique" called "Separation." Appendix M allows the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and various forms of sensory deprivation on prisoners, mostly to be used with other AFM "approaches," like "Fear Up," "Ego Down," and "Futility."

The reporters grilled Kimmons and Stimson on the AFM and its use of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation. But you wouldn't know that from Benjamin, the alternative and progressive [press] reporter, whose coverage of the event was as obtuse as that of the mainstream press. (See here or here for the full story of that news conference.)

The Foreign Press Have Their Say

The same day Salon.com was publishing Benjamin's article, and the mainstream press was assessing Bush's news conference, Stimson and Kimmons traipsed over to the State Department to give their briefing to the foreign press on 2310.10E and the Army Field Manual. Also in attendance were Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway, Legal Adviser to the Appointing Authority, Office of Military Commissions, and Sandra Hodgkinson, State Department Deputy Director, Office of War Crimes Issues.

[Not long after this press conference, Hodgkinson, a former JAG attorney, moved to DoD where she served from 2007-2009 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs. Today she is Vice President, Chief of Staff for U.S. defense contractor, DRS Technologies, "a leading supplier of integrated products, services and support to military forces, intelligence agencies and prime contractors worldwide."]

During the State Dept. news conference, Reymer Luever, from the German newspaper Suddeutche Zeitung, tried to nail down Lt. Gen. Kimmons on the use of the "Separation" technique and the applicability of Geneva Common Article Three. As we will see, skepticism from the press was met with double-talk, and a misrepresentation of the situation of "unlawful enemy combatants" and Geneva protections (bold emphasis added):

QUESTION: Thank you very much General Kimmons. You mentioned the 19 interrogation techniques and the 19[th] interrogation technique [S]eparation. You mentioned that this isn't covered by -- or is an exception from the Geneva Convention. Are there other exceptions from the Convention, the new manual?

LTG KIMMONS: Well, I take issue with you that it's an exception from the Convention. It's the wording in the Geneva -- the third Geneva Convention that causes us to place separation as a restricted technique and not to employ against prisoners of war or lawful combatants. It is the wording and the requirements of Geneva and the definition within Geneva of what is a lawful enemy combatant, what is a prisoner of war. And clearly al-Qaida and the Taliban and the people we are dealing with now in large portions, you know, of the battlefield do not fit the standard established in Geneva for prison of war or other types of lawful enemy combatants. And therefore, according to Geneva, those type of enemy combatants are not -- are just like spies and saboteurs in the older days. And traditionally are not entitled to the same protections under Geneva.

"Like spies and saboteurs"? Where did Kimmons come up with that? The reference is to the Fourth Geneva Convention on "Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War," [which allows for some reduction in rights for captured suspected spies and saboteurs, which is we'll examine more below.]  Of course, no one from DoD wants to refer to the Fourth Geneva Convention, because they would have to admit that such prisoners had rights even beyond those in Common Article 3, which protect against violence, "cruel treatment and torture." For instance, there's Article 31:

No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties.

Now, Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions does not explicitly forbid coercion. Also, Kimmons is correct that the POW Geneva convention has a higher standard for POWs, forbidding all forms of coercion upon them. Unfortunately, the GCs don't define what is meant by "coercion." But the CIA's 1963 Kubark interrogation manual does.

The Purpose of Coercive Interrogations

Jennifer Elsen, in an an essay on the "Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques Under the Geneva Conventions," in The Treatment of Prisoners (ed. R.D. McPhee, 2006, Nova Science Publishers), pointed out that the CIA distinguished between coercive and non-coercive interrogations. Coercive interrogations were those "designed to induce regression," producing a loss of general cognitive capacities, including the ability to deal with complex situations, or the ability to "cope with repeated frustrations." The tools of the coercive interrogator include the induction of fatigue, pain, sleep loss, anxiety, fear, and the "deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods."

[As we can see, "coercive" interrogation is really torture, and the forms of that kind of torture are for the most part those which are allowed for use in the Army Field Manual. It's not an accident that Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, the Constitution Project, Human Rights First, the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights Watch, and others have called for either the withdrawal of Appendix M or a rewrite of the Army Field Manual, or both.]

According to the Civilian Geneva Convention protocols, its protections include all civilians "taking no active part in hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause." [emphasis added] During the press conference, Kimmons noted the exception for "spies and saboteurs," equating the latter with the captured detainees. But those captured in their "war on terror" in Afghanistan and elsewhere were not spies and saboteurs. Yet, even if they were, according to the Geneva Conventions, they have only "forfeited rights of communication." One cannot lock them up and throw away the key.

The Civilian Geneva Convention protocol continues, discussing the plight of "spies and saboteurs":

In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity, and in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.

"Full rights and privileges of a protected person"... that doesn't sound like one could be subject to coercive interrogation or torture, or spurious military commissions, does it?

Kimmons Down the Rabbit Hole on Geneva

Let's go back to the briefing, and pick up just where we left off. Kimmons, asked if there exceptions to Geneva in the AFM, said that unlawful enemy combatants were "not entitled to the same protections under Geneva" as prisoners of war. But in his very next sentence, he continued, in an entirely different, and confusing vein:

As a matter of law here in the United States, we are going to provide the same single standard for humane treatment to all categories of detainees, both lawful and unlawful combatants.

That same legal requirement does not require us to afford additional privileges above and beyond that standard to unlawful combatants. And that's why separation is placed -- separated to it.

I'm sorry, could you repeat the second part of your question.

QUESTION: My question was are there other -- what I have called exceptions from the Convention in the field manual?

LTG KIMMONS: No. In accordance, as a matter of law, only those interrogation approach techniques that are listed in -- authorized by the Army Field Manual, this field manual, can be employed on any class of category of detainee across the Department of Defense.

The last statement makes no sense when compared with Kimmons remarks during his opening statement, remarks to which Mr. Luever alluded in his question above. [They don't even make sense grammatically!] For in his earlier statement, Lt. Gen. Kimmons stated (bold emphasis added):

Separation meets the standard for humane treatment, but the Geneva Conventions, specifically the third Geneva Convention, affords prisoners of war, lawful enemy combatants, additional protections above and beyond the single humane standard to which they're entitled. It entitles them to pay, entitles them to send and receive mail and packages, and it also protects them from separation from other prisoners of war with whom they were captured without their expressed consent.

Unlawful combatants are not entitled to those additional protections and privileges above the humane standard. So Geneva -- the common third -- Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all categories of detainees' [there may be missing text in the transcript here] [S]eparation, however, is only authorized for use on a by-exception basis with unlawful enemy combatants.

Threading the eye of the needle, DoD means to say one thing one moment and another thing the next. What's clear is that they believe Separation is not a group of techniques that can be used on regular POWs, only "unlawful enemy combatants." But the privileges enumerated by the third Geneva Convention -- Kimmons lists pay, getting mail and packages -- does not include in its text, as Kimmons maintains, the right not to experience "separation," i.e., solitary confinement, sleep and perceptual deprivation, etc.

This can all get quite confusing, but seems to boil down to this. The Pentagon, and perhaps their CIA mentors, want to slice and dice the Geneva Conventions at their will, in order to manifest the core program of coercive interrogation, as laid down by the CIA's KUBARK manual. DoD has done this by slyly implementing that core program into the Army Field Manual and Appendix M. Because of the Abu Ghraib scandal, they want to hide or forbid all types of treatment that became notorious due to press exposure, and that includes the revelations around waterboarding. But the induction of regression, using a paradigm the CIA referred to as DDD (Dependency, Debility, Dread), is still at the core of the coercive techniques they intend to rescue for their use.

And because of the ignorance or indifference, or in some cases, collusion, of the press and politicians, it appears that they will get their way.

Postscript, January 2014

George Hunsinger, who is the founder of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, wrote about the misrepresentation of the Army Field Manual and its Appendix M in the popular press. "It is sad to see the mainstream media display so much confusion about a heinous crime like torture," Hunsinger wrote.

"Torture is immoral under all circumstances.  It represents an extreme and shocking form of violating the human person.  Like slavery, genocide and rape, it is never justified."

Crossposted at The Dissenter/FDL

Report: Serious Allegations of Abuse by FBI and Other Agencies in World Cup Bombing Investigation

Originally posted at Truthout.org

A new report from the Open Society Justice Initiative finds allegations that US officials - possibly including FBI officials - abused World Cup bombing suspects in Uganda credible enough to require "independent, impartial and transparent investigation."

The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI) on November 27 released a new report on their investigation into allegations of human rights abuses, including torture and illegal rendition, by counterterrorism forces in Kenya and Uganda following the 2010 World Cup bombing in Kampala, Uganda.

The report, which also looks at allegations of abuse by the FBI and UK security officials in Kampala, concludes "counterterrorism actions that followed the bombing were characterized by human rights violations, including allegations of arbitrary detention, unlawful renditions, physical abuse and denial of due process rights."

East Africa is a major focus of US and UK counterterrorism efforts. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on "counterterrorism assistance" to countries in the area. Laws in the United States prohibit the use of such funds in countries with security forces that have committed gross violations of human rights. But as the OSJI report points out, this prohibition does "not apply to assistance funded out of US government intelligence budgets."

OSJI recommendations include demands that "Kenya, Uganda and the Western countries that support them thoroughly investigate the alleged abuses, and must pursue counterterrorism activities that do not entail human rights violations." In addition, both the US and the UK are encouraged to be more transparent on counterterrorism funding, especially with regard to rules and procedures for cooperating with foreign security forces.

The report was written by human rights investigator and OSJI Associate Legal Officer Jonathan Horowitz, in cooperation with the East Africa Law Society, the Kenyan Section of the International Commission of Jurists, and the Pan African Lawyers Union.

Back on July 11, 2010, there were two bombings at sites in Kampala, Uganda where people had gathered to watch the final game of the soccer World Cup, killing 76 people. One of those killed was US aid worker Nate Henn, who worked with the non-profit Invisible Children, a charity that went on to produce a wildly popular video on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army.

Somalia's Al Shabab publicly claimed responsibility for the bombings, and said it was a response to Uganda's participation in the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). According to the OSJI report, "Kenyan and Ugandan security forces cast a wide net" in the weeks after the bombing, "rounding up dozens of people."

The hunt for suspects spread from Uganda to Kenya, and included Tanzania and Somalia.

Approximately 20 suspects were illegally rendered to Uganda, some of whom were later released. US investigators, including a three-person FBI team, were dispatched quickly to the scene. New York Police Department (NYPD) detectives attached to the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) also were sent to be part of the investigation.

In all, upwards of 30 people from various countries were held in relation to the bombing. To date, some have been released, while two have pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges.

But 12 prisoners are still in Luzira Maximum Security Prison in Kampala awaiting trial. And according to OSJI, "serious questions remain about the human rights abuses they were allegedly subjected to, and the roles of Kenyan, Ugandan, US and UK security forces in those alleged abuses."

As reported by Truthout in an August 2011 story about Omar Awadh Omar, one of the Kenyan prisoners rendered to Uganda, Don Borelli was the FBI agent in charge of a team that grew to about 60 agents. It was "the largest FBI deployment since the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen," according to a web page describing Borelli for his current employer, The Soufan Group.

OSJI report author Horowitz told Truthout in a telephone interview that he believed teams of agents circulated in and out of the area during the investigation, and the "60 agents" figure might reflect that fact.

In addition, a third government agency may have been involved in the US effort. The OSJI report describes allegations by Omar Awadh Omar that he was "punched" and "slapped" by men who said they were FBI agents. In addition, Omar "provided the name of an alleged US 'security officer' who struck him in the knee with a hard object."

An affidavit from Mohammed Hamid Suleiman, a Kenyan national rendered to Uganda in August 2010 and still held in prison there, mentions the same "security officer," but identifies him as an FBI agent. (The OSJI report studiously does not report any of the names of security personnel it may have gathered.)

According to the report, both Omar and Suleiman's affidavits describe this officer "as an older man who had long hair in a ponytail, wore a blazer, shirt, and khaki trousers."

"Omar alleged that two other Americans involved in the interrogations saluted this man when he entered the room," the report states. "This is not a common practice of FBI or NYPD officials and raises questions as to whether other government agencies were involved in the investigation and interrogations."

Citing a Time magazine article by Mark Benjamin in May 2011, Horowitz speculated that this other government agency could be the secretive High-Value Interrogation Group (HIG), supposedly formed by President Obama in August 2009.

Asked if they could confirm the participation of the HIG in the World Cup bombing interrogations, FBI spokeswoman Kathleen Wright told Truthout, "As it pertains to the HIG, the FBI does not discuss when the HIG was or was not deployed."

The Associated Press (AP) wrote about OSJI's report upon its release. The news agency quoted an FBI spokesperson who denied claims of abuse or mistreatment of detainees by FBI employees.

"When investigating cases overseas, all FBI personnel operate within the guidelines established by the Attorney General as well as all other applicable laws, policies and regulations," the spokesman, Paul Bresson, told AP.

US and Uganda at Odds on Rendition Story

Ten of the 12 awaiting trial in Kampala were rendered to Uganda by either the Kenyan or Tanzanian governments.

Dean Boyd, spokesman for the National Security Division at the US Department of Justice, told Truthout last April, "Mr. Omar Awadh Omar was detained in Kenya and handed over from there to the Ugandan authorities. There was no US government involvement in his detention or transfer of custody. We refer you to the Governments of Uganda and Kenya regarding the bilateral or multilateral agreements under which this transfer occurred."

But according to a UK court document, the Ugandan government denies it ever received Omar via rendition, claiming he was arrested in Kampala on September 10, 2010.

Similarly, while admitting that five Kenyan prisoners were "transferred" to Uganda, Ugandan officials also deny that Habib Suleiman Njoroge was rendered from Kenya as well. The Anti-Terrorism Police Unit of Kenya (ATPU) also denies involvement in the rendition of Omar and Njoroge.

Yet OSJI's report states outright that the Kenyan government did not follow legal procedures in its rendition of suspects to Uganda.

"Procedures for a lawful transfer to another country are spelled out in Kenya's 1968 Extradition Act," the OSJI report states, "including the requirements to issue an arrest warrant and bring the detainee to a court prior to extradition.... In the aftermath of the World Cup bombing, Kenyan authorities ignored these rules."

OSJI also criticized the Tanzanian government because prisoners were rendered to Uganda before they had exhausted their appeal rights.

The issue of the illegal rendition of Omar and the others from Kenya to Uganda is a matter of legal appeal in the East African Court of Justice (EACJ). According to an EACJ December 2011 ruling, which ruled in favor of Omar and the others pursuing their appeal, the question of whether the prisoners were "abducted and surrendered to Uganda illegally and whether or not the Republic of Uganda failed to provide a remedy are matters for the merits of the case."

Torture Claims

Recent legal decisions in both Uganda and Kenya have curtailed some of the antiterror laws passed since the World Cup bombing, laws that OSJI and others said were overly broad and punitive, targeting political opponents and minority ethnic or national groups. But the abuses detailed in the OSJI report predate these recent legal changes.

A number of ATPU prisoners said they were held incommunicado and not allowed contact with family or attorneys. Some also alleged Kenyan authorities told them prior to rendition they would be tortured by Ugandan officials.

According to OSJI's report, Kenyan national Idris Magondu stated in a court affidavit, "The ATPU officers threatened to hand me over to the Ugandan Army, who would subsequently torture, shoot and kill me and they also told me that I would never see my family again and that they would kill members of my family."

Prisoners alleged abuse or torture by members of Kenyan, Tanzanian and Ugandan security forces, and also from FBI and UK anti-terror agents. For instance, in regard to Kenyan security, according to OSJI, Njoroge named "a high level ATPU official who allegedly took a gun, placed it against Njoroge's neck as if he was going to shoot him, and accused Njoroge of being an Islamic fundamentalist."

The Guardian UK described Njoroge's rendition and torture in an April 24, 2012 article. According to the Guardian, Njoroge alleged being hooded and shackled by Kenyan police and driven to Uganda, where he was transferred to Uganda's Rapid Response Unit (RRU).

According to the Guardian, "While in RRU custody, Njoroge says he was kept naked, beaten, sexually assaulted and forced to sign a statement in which he confessed to being involved in the bombings."
Njoroge claimed, "Among the officials interrogating him ... were men with American and British accents."

FBI in Charge?

A number of detainees have alleged abuse by FBI officers, including physical threats, hitting, hooding and threat of further rendition to Guantanamo. One prisoner alleged an FBI officer threatened him with a gun, telling him, "There are no human rights here. We are in charge of the police and the courts, and you will spend your life in prison and will not see your family again."

OSJI detailed the allegations of Kenyan national Yahya Suleiman Mbuthia. Mbuthia said that in his first interrogation "a blue-eyed man who identified himself as an FBI officer" threatened him. He "cocked his gun as if he were going to shoot me, saying that there was a bullet inside with my name on it and showing me a photo of dead people from the Kampala bombing, accusing me of being the person who did it."

Mbuthia has also alleged physical abuse by FBI officers, writing in an affidavit that he was "repeatedly beaten, punched in the stomach, had my mouth squeezed, and was almost suffocated with a dirty hood."

OSJI reported that Mbuthia "said there were Ugandans present during the interrogations but it was clear to him throughout the interrogations that the FBI was firmly in charge."

One purported FBI officer, who one detainee described merely as a "security officer," was described "as an older man who had long hair in a ponytail, wore a blazer, shirt and khaki trousers." As noted above, OSJI had reasons to believe this was possibly not an FBI agent.

In a telephone interview with Truthout, OSJI report author Horowitz wondered about possible misdirection regarding the identity of interrogators.

Horowitz said, "There is a history of other parts of the US government involved in a clandestine manner more than the FBI." He noted there have been allegations elsewhere, as at Guantanamo, where other officials or agents falsely identified themselves as FBI. The FBI, said Horowitz, is known for "a cleaner record" on detainee abuse than some other government agencies.

Indeed, the OSJI report states that "a former US government official with knowledge of the investigation" said that FBI involvement "had successfully reduced human rights violations" by security forces in the region. FBI agents supposedly "persuaded Ugandan authorities to conduct a more focused investigation rather than mass round-ups."

But OSJI was dubious about such claims. Their report describes how human rights workers in the area who investigated the abuses were themselves jailed, or deported from the country.

The OSJI report states that civil rights groups in Kenya and Uganda have been critical of both the United States and the United Kingdom "for blindly supporting domestic security forces that violate human rights and the rule of law, including their close partnership with the now disbanded Ugandan Rapid Response Unit."

In a review of instructions given to FBI agents for interrogations in foreign detention centers, Truthout found that interrogators are to supposed follow certain "non-coercive" rapport-building techniques, as well as the 18 "approach" techniques approved by Army Field Manual 2-22.3 (Human Intelligence Collector Operations). Such "approaches" include the use of "Fear Up," "Emotional Pride and Ego Down" and "Emotional Futility."

There is a 19th technique in the Army Field Manual, involving the use of isolation on a prisoner (Appendix M of the AFM). While not formally placed in the FBI's list of techniques, the Agency's manual does recommend "isolation of the detainee," stating, "In order to create the optimum conditions for productive interview, if the policy of the facility permits, consider having your detainee placed in an individual cell several days before you begin interrogation."

Asked to respond to the varied abuse allegations, Wright, the FBI's spokeswoman, told Truthout in an email exchange, "The FBI demands strict adherence to both the letter and the spirit of all applicable laws, regulations, and policies. Each employee has the responsibility to uphold the FBI's core values of integrity and accountability so that the Bureau maintains the public's trust."

Wright said the Bureau's Inspection Division (INSD) reviews all allegations of misconduct, and "the facts generated by INSD during the investigation are turned over to the Office of Public Responsibility (OPR) for adjudication based on those facts."

Asked if there had been an investigation by either INSD or OPR into the allegations surrounding FBI abuse during the World Cup bombing interrogations, or whether FBI agents had documented the condition of those it interviewed, as required by FBI manual procedures Special Agent Wright said, "The FBI cannot comment on investigations or on reports related to a particular investigation."

Wright said that the FBI had taken "considerable care and consideration" and made "an accurate and appropriate response," when they told AP abuse charges were "without merit."

She referenced a statement by FBI Director Robert Mueller to the Senate Judiciary Committee last May.

Mueller told the committee, "Every FBI employee takes an oath promising to uphold the rule of law and the United States Constitution. I emphasize that it is not enough to catch the criminal; we must do so while upholding civil rights.... In the end, we will be judged not only by our ability to keep Americans safe from crime and terrorism, but also by whether we safeguard the liberties for which we are fighting and maintain the trust of the American people."

Wright further said FBI policy "forbids abuse, threat of abuse to the interviewee or any third party, or imposing severe physical conditions on the interviewee. Agents may not participate in a circumstance in which the agent knows or suspects that a co-interrogator or the detaining authority has used a method that is not in compliance with FBI policy, even if the method is in compliance with the co-interviewer's or detaining authority's guidelines. "

But according to the FBI's Cross Cultural Rapport-Based Interrogation manual, revised in February 2011, FBI agents working in a "foreign detention facility" have "limited or no authority" over how detainees are treated.

The manual tells agents [bold in original], "You have no control over the detention conditions of your subject so you need to document his condition every time you interview him."

As the FBI says it will not comment "on investigations or on reports related to a particular investigation," we do not know what the FBI found regarding the condition of detainees held in Uganda, or rendered from Kenya and Tanzania. Nor do we know what was found on any internal investigation related to the charges, or if indeed such an internal investigation ever took place.

Horowitz labels much of the FBI's response to press questions as "stock language," and noted that the FBI refused multiple times to respond to official requests for comment or questions from OSJI.

Horowitz told Truthout the allegations of FBI mistreatment of prisoners "certainly require a serious, detailed, comprehensive public response."

Regarding allegations that US officials abused World Cup bombing suspects in Uganda, the OSJI report itself concludes, "If an independent, impartial and transparent investigation" into these allegations did not take place, [the US should] conduct one as a matter of urgency."

Copyright, Truthout.org. Reprinted with permission

Former Guantanamo Psychiatrist Promotes Dubious Drug Theory on Afghan Killings

Originally posted at Truthout.org

A tag team of two contributors to Time Magazine's Battleland blog have misrepresented the facts concerning the possibility that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales may have been under the influence of the controversial antimalarial drug mefloquine (also known as Lariam) when he allegedly killed 17 men, women and children in two villages outside Kandahar last March.

Using false information; faulty interpretation of documents and innuendo; and in one case, withholding key disclosures regarding their background, these authors took a serious issue - the dangerous psychiatric and neurotoxic effects of mefloquine on some people and the history of the use of this drug by the military - and twisted it to further an agenda that just happened to match US interests in limiting speculation about the Kandahar massacre to Bales.

One of the two authors, Mark Benjamin, who years ago had written a number of articles on mefloquine's terrible side-effects, published his article on Bales and mefloquine at Huffington Post.

The other author, a former top Army psychiatrist, Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, has written three articles for Time's Battleland that have strongly suggested Bales' alleged crime was linked to mefloquine use. She recently also gave an interview on the topic to Nina Shapiro at Seattle Weekly.

Ritchie's background in certain aspects is not well known and certainly is surprising, given the mefloquine issue. Currently, she is chief clinical officer for the District of Columbia's Department of Mental Health. But back in 2002, she was Lieutenant Colonel Ritchie, program director for mental health policy for the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs and consultant on suicidal detainees at Guantanamo. Interestingly, this was at the same time all incoming detainees were forced to take large treatment doses of mefloquine, even as she likely had access to their medical records.

In addition, at an unspecified time between 2002 and 2007, she trained psychiatrists for Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) that worked closely with Guantanamo interrogators. While the UN and numerous human rights groups have decried the use of health professionals in interrogations, Ritchie continues to defend the policy.

An "Emergency" Review of Mefloquine?

When it was first leaked that a single soldier, part of an Army Stryker Brigade, was in custody for the March 11 killings of up to 17 men, women and children in two villages near a counterinsurgency-inspired "Village Stability Platform" [VSP]), the horror of the massacre made it difficult to understand how the soldier - later identified as Staff Sgt. Robert Bales - could have done the killings.

Accordingly, a slew of news media reports focused on Bales' family life, his police record, his associates, the history of his duty postings and the possibility of his having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even while the Department of Defense (DoD) was quickly pulling off the Internet as many references to and pictures of Bales from military sources that it could. Meanwhile, reports were leaking out, including a major investigative piece by Australian SBS reporter Yalda Hakim, broadcast on March 28 atCNN, that a number of witnesses, including those in US custody, were saying there was more than one soldier present at the killings and perhaps as many as 20.

It is not surprising that some of the speculation surrounding the DoD's account of Bales as a lone shooter should focus upon what drugs he had been taking. One of the drugs discussed, mefloquine, is a controversial antimalarial drug known to have possible psychiatric and neurotoxic side effects. The first article proposing a Bales-mefloquine link appeared in the March 16 edition of Counterpunch.

But it wasn't until Benjamin's March 25 Huffington Post article that the mefloquine hypothesis took off in the press, leading to interviews for Benjamin at Democracy Now! and CNN. The reason for the heightened interest was Benjamin's contention that nine days after the killings, "a top-level Pentagon official ordered a widespread, emergency review" of how the drug was administered to troops. The implication was that a mefloquine-induced psychosis in Bales was possibly connected to the murders. [As described below, Benjamin's contention was later dropped, but the original version, including the quotes above, can be viewed at this linked web site.]

Yet, as a March 27 Truthout critique of Benjamin's article noted, there was no "widespread, emergency review" of mefloquine undertaken after the Kandahar killings, undermining the very premises of The Huffington Post piece. Benjamin had mistaken a March 20 "tasker" memo by a regional US medical command for the original order, which had been given by the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs (ASD-HA) back on January 17.

In his article, Benjamin quoted a March 20 Battleland post by Ritchie where she first raised the Bales-mefloquine link:

"'One obvious question to consider is whether he was on mefloquine (Lariam), an antimalarial medication,' Elspeth Cameron Ritchie wrote this week in TIME's "Battleland" blog, noting that the drug is still used in Afghanistan. "'This medication has been increasingly associated with neuropsychiatric side effects, including depression, psychosis and suicidal ideation.'"

In an email response to queries from Truthout, Benjamin would not comment upon any collaboration between himself and Ritchie. "My discussions with people who may or not be my sources will remain private."

Subsequently, Ritchie returned the favor to Benjamin, mentioning his Huffington Post article in an April 2 Battleland post. Ritchie asked "whether mefloquine or other toxic exposures - to licit or illicit drugs - might have been a contributing factor in the Afghan massacre."

Bales' attorney has picked up on the Benjamin-Ritchie mefloquine angle, telling CNN that he was interested in mefloquine as one of many possible drugs that might have affected his client's behavior.

Army Policy on Antimalarial Drugs

Bales was assigned to the Army's Third Stryker Brigade and, as such, his medical protocols fell under Central Command (CENTCOM) policy. According to CENTCOM rules, the antibiotic doxycycline, not mefloquine, is to be used for all malaria prophylaxis in Afghanistan, unless specifically medically contraindicated. This has been the case since, as Benjamin himself reported, the DoD in 2009 pulled back from use of Lariam except in special circumstances.

Moreover, according to CENTCOM orders, all departing soldiers are given "enough [antimalarial] medication for their deployment" when they leave the US. For soldiers deploying to Afghanistan, that medication has been overwhelmingly doxycycline, not mefloquine. There is no evidence that Bales was ever prescribed mefloquine, and while the Army's January review was prompted by known failures to prescribe the drug correctly, there is no evidence that this happened to Bales.

According to prescription figures provided to Truthout by DoD officials, mefloquine prescriptions have been declining for some time. In 2011, the Army gave out 169,690 scripts for doxycycline to 151,802 soldiers. (The DoD could not say if all of these were for malaria, or for other antibiotic use.) At the same time, only 1,780 soldiers (utilizing 1,921 scripts) were prescribed mefloquine, down approximately one-third from 2009 levels.

Bales' Stryker unit was part of I Corps stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McCord. In 2011, there were 6,566 scripts written for I Corps personnel and only 150 for mefloquine. On December 2, 2002, right around the time of Bales' actual deployment, the Army's policy changed again and mefloquine was downgraded from a second-line to a third-line malaria prophylactic drug. While none of the above proves Bales did or did not take mefloquine in Afghanistan, it makes the likelihood quite small.

[UPDATE 4/20 9:55 pm PST: The statistics for the number of DoD prescriptions of antimalarials were derived from the DOD Pharmaeconomic Center, which, as a DoD official explained to Truthout, "can pull data stateside because that reporting system exists." However, "this record of systems for visibility from Afghanistan (or Iraq) back to the states does not exist." Hence, there is no way to specifically say how many prescriptions of mefloquine (or any other antimalarial drug) was given inside Afghanistan. The official added, "within theater they certainly have visibility as to what is being dispensed and to who."

Yet, as explained in the article, as someone deployed from a stateside base to Afghanistan, Bales would have been prescribed enough antimalarial medication for his entire deployment before he left. Hence, assuming Bales correctly was prescribed doxycycline upon deployment, one would have to posit that Bales somehow lost his medication and then wrongly was prescribed mefloquine by some doctor in theater. There is no evidence or claim to date that this ever happened, though anecdotal reports have suggested that some events like this have occurred from time to time.]

Amplifying the problem with Benjamin and Ritchie's hypothesis concerning Bales and mefloquine is Ritchie's own contrasting history concerning mefloquine policy, some of it known and some of which can only be presumed or remain subject to speculation.

Ritchie, Guantanamo and Mefloquine

Ritchie had gone to Guantanamo, by her own account, four times. In October 2002, Ritchie indicated she first went to Guantanamo in order to "review all the suicidal gestures among the detainees." She said she "recommended many basic changes."

One can't say exactly how effective her recommendations were, in part because DoD figures concerning the number of suicide attempts and gestures by Guantanamo detainees has changed over the years and because the DoD labels some of the suicide gestures as attempts at "self-harm," but not suicide. But one damning report by BBC in 2005 noted that, in the year after Ritchie left, there were "350 incidents of self-harm, including 120 'hanging gestures."

In a 2003 New York Times article, a Guantanamo spokesman, Capt. Warren Neary, is quoted as saying that in the "18 months since the detention camp opened," there had been 28 suicide attempts by 18 individuals." "Most of those attempts" had been made in the first six months of 2003, that is, in the period just after, or even during, Ritchie's intervention on Guantanamo suicides.

As a physician, Ritchie likely reviewed the medical records for some or many of the detainees under her review. As previously reported at Truthout, the records would have shown that every detainee had been administered treatment doses of mefloquine upon arrival.

The treatment dose is a single 1,250 mg dose, versus the weekly 250 mg dose given for malaria prophylaxis, and what Bales would have taken (if he had taken mefloquine) upon arrival in Afghanistan.

Both treatment and prophylaxis dosages of mefloquine can cause serious side effects, according to medical reports. An April 16, 2002, meeting of the Interagency Working Group for Antimalarial Chemotherapy, which included DoD officials, the Working Group warned, "other treatment regimes should be carefully considered before mefloquine is used at the doses required for treatment." At this point, mefloquine had been given in treatment doses to all incoming detainees for three months and the policy would continue for years to come.

[UPDATE, May 19, 2012: The minutes of an Armed Forces Epidemiological Board Meeting on May 20, 2003 describes the presence of "Cameron Ritchie" at the IWG group meeting in January 2003. The speaker, Dr. Monica Parise, noted that the group specifically looked at the neuropsychiatric side effects of mefloquine. While the "serious reactions" were said to be "pretty rare," something along the order of "1 in 200 or so up to 1 in 10,000 of seizures or major psychiatric problems," she noted "there are a host of other more acute less severe neuropsychiatric issues that occur short-term, such as insomnia, strange dreams, fatigue, lack of energy, inability to concentrate, and some people have reported that those effects  have lasted a very long time."

Parise continued (bold emphasis added): "I've heard cases that this has just ruined people's lives. I don't if anybody  -- I had heard that there may be some data in DOD about how some of the studies that might shed light on that, but I've not seen anything in terms of effect on the brain. But I don't really think we have a good explanation of what that is. I mean, as I mentioned, at the meeting there was discussion -- and we did have a psychiatrist there -- of, well, are people susceptible, are they susceptible to these problems and this drug has brought that out?"

Presumably this psychiatrist was Dr. Ritchie.]

An Army physician who has published many journal articles on mefloquine called the mass presumptive treatment with mefloquine "pharmacological waterboarding."

Truthout's investigation determined that no US soldiers or contractors, even those brought from malarial-endemic regions by Halliburton subsidiary KBR, were administered presumptive doses of any anti-malaria drug, including mefloquine at Guantanamo.

Ritchie has never spoken out on the detainees' mefloquine dosing, which continued at least through 2005. She did not return a request for comment for this article.

Ritchie returned to Guantanamo in 2007 and/or 2008 to work in a forensic capacity on psychiatric evaluations of prisoners slated for trial by military commissions. In one high-profile evaluation, of Salim Hamden - whose case ultimately led to the Hamden v. Rumsfeld Supreme Court case in 2006, which threw out the first version of the military commissions as violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Geneva Conventions - Ritchie disagreed with the defense psychiatrist that Hamden, who had been tortured, suffered from PTSD and found him "manipulative."

In any case, Ritchie certainly would have looked at the medical records for the detainees she examined and could hardly have overlooked the presence of mefloquine. Given Ritchie's interest in suicide and her history of consulting on suicides at Guantanamo, one wonders if she were aware of the toxicology results for reported 2007 Guantanamo "suicide" Abdul Rahman Al Amri, which made special note of looking for mefloquine in his blood.

As reported by Truthout, the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions is looking into the Al Amri case, as well as that of 2009 reported suicide, Mohammad Al Hanashi.

Ritchie and the BSCTs

It is not known if Ritchie did more at Guantanamo, however, in an October 2008 article at Psychiatric News examining ongoing controversies over the use of psychiatrists in military interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere, Ritchie revealed she had taken a leading role in bringing psychiatrists onto the BSCTs. "The Army requires psychiatrists to complete a 136-hour course before taking part in interrogations," the article said. "Ritchie has taught parts of that program and said that four psychiatrists have attended it so far."

Ritchie may have taught the BSCTs when she worked in the Office of the Army Surgeon General (OASG) under Maj. Gen. Kevin Kiley. In 2006, a controversy arose when it was discovered that Kiley's office had continued to recommend the use of psychiatrists in interrogations, despite a policy statement from the American Psychiatric Association against use of doctors or psychiatrists in interrogations.

An October 20, 2006 OASG/MEDCOM policy memo issued by Kiley discussed BSCT training, including instruction in the "application" of "learned helplessness" "to the interrogation/debriefing processes."

"Learned helplessness" is a psychological syndrome so named by psychologist Martin Seligman, who was invited by the CIA to lecture on the topic at a Navy Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school in May 2002. Both James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen have said they relied on the theory in their construction of a torture program for the CIA that same year.

An important 2007 article by Dr. Steven Miles in the American Journal of Bioethics looked closely at the experience of psychiatrists and psychologists working for the BSCT at Guantanamo. The article focused on the interrogation of Mohammad Al Qahtani in late 2002, an interrogation the Guantanamo military commissions convening authority admitted amounted to torture.

"Clinicians were integral to this abusive interrogation," Miles wrote.

In the 2008 Psychiatric News article, Ritchie defended the use of psychiatrists in interrogations, claiming, "Psychologists and psychiatrists are experts at enhancing rapport.... They also can counteract behavioral drift, the spiraling down of interrogation into a culture of coercion." Ritchie also defended the BSCT policy in an interview with NPR in September 2008. NPR said Ritchie contended "at the beginning of the war on terror, there was misunderstanding of 'what the rules were' for interrogations." Ritchie added, ""We don't try to defend (that)."

Ritchie has not changed her beliefs in these regards over the years. In the 2012 book "Women in Psychiatry: Personal Perspectives," Ritchie wrote, "Although controversial in the American Psychiatric Association and the media, I continue to believe that psychologists and forensic psychiatrists can contribute in a very positive way to legal, safe and effective interrogation."

A Mefloquine "Expert"

In January 2003, not long after she first went to Guantanamo, Ritchie, then working in the office of the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, attended an "Experts Meeting" on malaria chemoprophylaxis organized by the Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). A year later, in 2004, Ritchie, now "Psychiatry Consultant to the Army Surgeon General," gave a presentation to the DoD's Deployment Health Clinical Center on the "Neuropsychiatric Side-Effects of Mefloquine."

No published work by Ritchie could be found that referenced mefloquine or anti-malaria treatment or medication. Ritchie mentioned, as if in passing, her 2004 presentation in an April 4 article at Battleland two days after this author informed an anti-Lariam activist of its existence. In a very brief posting, Ritchie wrote, "There is a lot more in the literature since a 2004 talk I gave on the neuropsychiatric effects of the medication. There followed a flood of anecdotal information and articles in the media, but rigorous scientific literature was limited."

In fact, there were dozens, if not hundreds of studies and articles on mefloquine prior to her 2004 talk. Indeed, a 2004 review article on antimalarial drug toxicity in the journal Drug Safety listed dozens of peer-reviewed articles on mefloquine, its efficacy as a drug and its potential side effects. In the same year, the CDC issued guidelines indicating mefloquine should only be used when other standard drugs were not available, as it "associated with a higher rate of severe neuropsychiatric reactions when used at treatment doses."

In her April 4 article, Ritchie coyly did not indicate what the substance of her 2004 presentation was, nor what data she drew upon. For full disclosure sake, she should release her paper or notes pertaining to that presentation.

Why Push a Bales-Mefloquine Link?

Both Benjamin and Ritchie appear to have had an agenda: to make it appear far more probable than any facts would admit that Bales could have gone psychotic on mefloquine.

None of their articles ever considers that Bales may not have acted alone, or that indeed, is not proven to have killed anyone in those hamlets where 17 died. Most of all, their stories ignore problems with the DoD's narrative of events, with charges by Bales' attorney that the DoD has hidden evidence from his defense team, or, as this USA Today article notes, "blocked them from interviewing survivors and are withholding evidence of the March 11 attacks ..."

Key evidence that eyewitnesses to the attacks saw helicopters, men with walkie-talkies and upwards of 15 soldiers, as evidenced by this CNN interview and this Global Post article, is never mentioned by Ritchie or Benjamin.

Lacking such balanced reporting, it would seem the anti-torture journalist Benjamin and the former trainer for Guantanamo interrogation consultants have joined up to help promote the mainstream narrative of Bales as a single and possibly deranged killer. Together, they were quite successful in spreading the idea that Bales might have gone crazy from mefloquine.

Deranged Bales may have been, but whether his actions, if proven, were taken alone or as part of a larger US military or Special Forces operation that dark March night are matters for full investigation.

Why the Huffington Post Needs to Immediately Retract Mark Benjamin's Afghanistan Massacre Report

Originally published at Truthout
This article reflects an updates included in the original Truthout article

A March 25 article by Mark Benjamin at The Huffington Post seriously misled readers about a link between the controversial antimalarial drug mefloquine and the mass murder in Afghanistan attributed to Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. Relying on a document he wrongly identified, and with zero evidence backing up his claims, Benjamin's headline stated "Military Scrambles to Limit Malaria Drug Just After Afghan Massacre." As a matter of journalistic ethics, Benjamin should apologize to his readers and retract the story.

The article begins with a dishonestly crafted lede that links the Afghan massacre with a "task order" memo from a Department of Defense (DoD) command regarding a review of mefloquine procedures, and goes on to suggest that Sgt. Robert Bales, a victim of traumatic brain injury, may have gone psychotic from use of mefloquine and possibly committed the killings under influence of the drug. Furthermore, the article strongly implied that DoD possibly knew this and then implemented an "emergency review" of mefloquine procedures nine days after the Afghan killings.

UPDATE: Instead of issuing the retraction I called for, Mark Benjamin, in yet another deceptive move aimed at misleading his readers, quietly rewrote his Huffington Post story hours after this report was published Wednesday morning without informing those readers that he made substantial changes to his original report. Nor did Benjamin point out to his readers that he quietly rewrote his story and changed the headline nearly four hours after we exposed the errors contained in his original report. Notably, the lede to Benjamin's story, which formed the basis for the entirety of his claims that a Defense Department review revolving around the administration of mefloquine for US troops was ordered after the Afghanistan massacre, no longer makes that argument because, as this report notes, the initial review was ordered before Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly murdered 16 people. Readers who now visit the Huffington Post link where Benjamin's story was originally published will be find a very different story. But this is how his report originally appeared when it was published Monday. I encourage you to compare the two. My report was published, as the time stamp below my byline shows, at 10:44 am. The rewrite to Benjamin's story was posted at 2:35 pm.

But nothing in the record suggests this is true. The word "emergency" is never used [UPDATE: Benjamin changed "emergency" in his original report to "urgent" after I pointed out the word was never used.] in the one document Benjamin cites, and an actual examination of the full documentary record shows that the mefloquine review described in the article was actually ordered last January.

Despite these serious flaws, Benjamin's article caused a sensation in the press, being picked up by many news outlets, including interviews with Benjamin on the topic at both CNN and Democracy Now!.

But in an email to Truthout, a DoD official strongly refuted Benjamin's claims, explaining that the task order referenced by the Huffington Post author originated in a January 17, 2012, memo from Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs Dr. Jonathan Woodson. Despite Benjamin's reporting, the review order was not issued nine days after the Afghanistan murders, nor was it limited to Afghanistan, but involved five different regional commands.

The official explained that the delay in implementing the review in the Afghan theatre was due to the absence of a key individual. The urgency in the March 20 task order (sometimes called a "tasker") referenced by Benjamin was due to a deadline for the conclusion of the review set back in January.
The official told Truthout:

Army Medical Command did receive the ASD [Assistant Secretary of Defense] Health Affairs tasking memo in mid-January, but due to the absence of the tasking individual on a temporary duty assignment for several weeks, the request to review the Army's program was not staffed and pushed out to the five regional medical commands until March 5th with a suspense date of March 15th. The Regions expressed that this was not enough time so they were given until March 20th to reply. This still put us well within the 90-day window provided by the original tasker in January. This review has no relation whatsoever to the incident in Afghanistan, as borne out by the dates when the tasker was initiated by ASD-Health Affairs in mid-January and later by the Army Medical Command to its subordinate regions on March 5th.

The official noted other problems with the Benjamin story. The link to what Benjamin called the "task order from Woodson, obtained by the Huffington Post," was actually to "a tasking document from one of the Army Medical Command regions - specifically the Southern Regional Medical Command, annotated in the incorrectly identified memo as 'SRMC'."

It appears Benjamin relied upon an implementing order by a lower command, but even with an update to his story a day later, the Huffington Post journalist insisted on linking this document to the Afghanistan killings. In his update [UPDATE: the "update" Benjamin posted was changed to a "correction" in the rewritten version of his story], Benjamin incomprehensibly kept pushing the March 20 order, which he claimed "shows that one part of the Army issued a new, urgent call to complete the Jan. 17 request from Woodson within six days." But Benjamin must know this is false, and there was nothing "new" about the order.

Truthout has obtained the original January 17 memo, which can be downloaded here. Woodson expressed concern that, "[s]ome deploying Service members have been provided mefloquine for malaria prophylaxis without appropriate documentation in their medical records and without proper screening for contraindications."

Some five months earlier, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) had issued a press release expressing her concern that mefloquine had been administered to military personnel without the safeguards put in place by a 2009 DoD protocol. Moreover, according to her press release, "These service members are now suffering from ... preventable neurological side effects."

While Benjamin never makes the point directly, if his mefloquine hypothesis about Bales and the killings were true, it would be the first mass murder attributable to mefloquine ever recorded in the roughly four decades of its use.
Yet, Benjamin admitted in his story that there is no evidence Bales ever took mefloquine, noting that DoD will neither confirm nor deny it. Even more, there is no evidence that if he did, he suffered ill effects, much less a reaction that led to the killings of 17 men, women and children on the night of March 13.

Benjamin states that military officials cited "privacy rules" as the reason they could not say whether Bales took mefloquine or not. But Benjamin appears dubious about this, and in his March 26 update to his story, continues to complain, "The Pentagon still will not say if Bales was wrongly given mefloquine."

In fact, the Federal 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, forbids the release of medical information, including by the military, "except for specifically permitted purposes" (see DoD 6025.18-R, paragraph C1.2.1). Such purposes can include criminal investigations, but not releases to the press.

To be fair, Democracy Now! has also emphasized the nondisclosure of Bales' medical information in its story on the possible Bales-mefloquine link, and also never mentions federal law prohibiting such disclosure.

No Mention of Eyewitnesses

Benjamin's article, like a similar piece on Time Magazine's Battleland blog, which Benjamin cites, never mentions that there were eyewitnesses to the Afghan killings who have provided a very different story as to what happened in the March 11 pre-dawn hours of the massacre. The Battleland article was written by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie, a former Army psychiatrist at Guantanamo.

One eyewitness report in the Global Post quoted Massouma, a woman who lives in the village of Najiban, where 12 people were killed, as saying at the time of the killings that there were helicopters flying overhead. She said the uniformed soldier that entered her home was speaking into a walkie-talkie.
According to the report, the soldier, "had a radio antenna on his shoulder. He had a walkie-talkie himself, and he was speaking into it," Massouma said.

"After the soldier with the walkie-talkie killed her husband, she said he lingered in the doorway of her home," the report continued. "'While he stood there, I secretly looked through the curtains and saw at least 20 Americans, with heavy weapons, searching all the rooms in our compound, as well as my bathroom,' she said."

In another example of eyewitness evidence, Jefferson Morley at Salon pointed out a March 17 Afghanistan Outlook report describing an Afghan Parliamentary investigation, which spent two days "interviewing the bereaved families, tribal elders, survivors and collecting evidences at the site in Panjwai district." The investigation found, "there were 15 to 20 American soldiers, who executed the brutal killings."

The Global Post article also reported that the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) turned away reporters who came to interview survivors of the shootings at a hospital at Kandahar Airfield. "'The wounded survivors, who saw everything of the massacre, are crucial to the story,' said one of the frustrated reporters. 'But the Americans didn't allow us to talk to them.'"

While there have been conflicting accounts of the massacre, Benjamin's article followed the DoD claims that Sgt. Bales was the sole soldier involved, then sought reasons to explain the actions of the supposed lone killer. The reader was never informed there may be other evidence that would make the mefloquine narrative superfluous.

Bales was charged with the murders on March 23.

Mefloquine Controversies

Benjamin, with reporter Dan Olmstead, covered the controversy over the use of the antimalarial drug mefloquine in the military. The reporters wrote story after story exposing the slowness, ineptitude and possibly corruption that allowed a dangerous drug to be continuously prescribed to armed forces personnel. So, it may be understandable that Benjamin still harbors passion for the topic. Additionally, Benjamin was correct when he told Amy Goodman at Democracy Now! that the recent DoD review shows that DoD, "seems to be violating its own rules."

Yet, curiously, he has remained silent, including in his most recent article, on investigations that revealed an unprecedented mass dosing of Guantanamo detainees. The supposed presumptive treatment for malaria of all incoming Guantanamo detainees was standard operating procedure, as documents revealed. One medical expert described the use of the drug, which was administered at doses five times that typically administered prophylactically to US soldiers serving in malarial regions, as "pharmacological waterboarding."

[Full disclosure: this author, along with Jason Leopold, conducted these investigations, which were published at Truthout. Seton Hall School of Law's Center for Policy and Research conducted their own investigation and released a report, while the story was later reported as well by the military's own paper, Stars and Stripes.]

Benjamin and "Tall Tale" Journalism 

One of the strangest aspects of Benjamin's article is that it comes not long after Benjamin himself strongly criticized an article by Scott Horton at Harper's Magazine. The article, which won the National Magazine Award for Reporting last year, revealed evidence of a cover-up in the 2006 deaths of three detainees at Guantanamo - deaths the military attributed to suicide.

Benjamin chided Horton for relying on witnesses "who did not witness much," and relying on "alleged inconsistencies and weaknesses in the government's investigation to buttress his narrative that something fishy was going on." He referred readers to another article by his former Salon.com collaborator, Alex Koppelman, who wrote a scathing critique of Horton's article for Adweek. Koppelman called Horton's investigation "a tall tale," and chided Horton for, "less methodical reporting and more conspiracy building, favoring the evidence that supports the conspiracy view and minimizing the evidence that does not."

Koppelman's own criticisms were debunked by this author in an article at Firedoglake last June. But Koppelman's verdict on Horton is an apt judgment upon Benjamin's own recent mefloquine article, which misrepresented government documents, minimized or buried evidence that would refute his claims, and implied a conspiracy and coverup without a shred of evidence that would support his view.

Even sadder, neither editors at Huffington Post, nor major media outlets like CNN, Democracy Now! or others ever fact-checked or even questioned Benjamin's assertions, which were patently untrue. To date, no media outlet that carried Benjamin's story has issued any retraction or substantive correction.

Deconstructing the Campaign to Malign Award-Winning Article on Guantanamo “Suicides”

Originally posted at Truthout

While not the first article attacking Scott Horton’s controversial Harpers’s article, “The Guantanamo Suicides,” Alex Koppelman’s critique in Adweek on May 23 capped a long campaign by some media figures to impugn the veracity of Horton’s investigation, if not the integrity of both Horton and Harper’s Magazine.

Horton’s article in January 2010 strongly criticized the Department of Defense investigations into the June 10, 2006 deaths of three Guantanamo detainees, bringing forth new eyewitness testimony as to what occurred that terrible evening at the camp, calling into question the official narrative. For their part, Guantanamo authorities immediately labeled these deaths suicides. Rear Admiral Harry Harris, the commander at Guantanamo, called the deaths a day after they occurred “an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us.”

Koppelman’s article appears to be a reaction to the recent presentation of the prestigious National Magazine Award to Horton’s article. The award is given annually by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME), who since then have stood by their decision to recognize the Horton article.

The Koppelman article also followed attacks on those critical of the DoD investigation of the “suicides” by Donald Rumsfeld, in a May 12 op-ed at the Washington Post, and a May 17 blogpost by Cully Stimson, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs at the time of the prisoners’ deaths, lambasting ASME’s “disgraceful award” to Horton.

In addition, the Adweek article was published only five days after another mysterious purported suicide at the Guantanamo prison camp. Inayatullah was a 37-year-old prisoner found dead either in a recreation yard or in his cell, depending on the news account. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) is investigating his death, which if ruled suicide would be the sixth such death at the camp, if one includes the deaths of the three prisoners in 2006.

An unprecedented attack by an advertising industry journal against a magazine industry award-winning story, Koppelman’s article stimulated a cascade of grateful response from conservative commentators, such as The Weekly Standard’s “The Scrapbook, “ Jonathan Last, and Joe Carter (who wrote his own earlier series of articles critiquing Horton’s investigation, blustering that to compare Harper’s Magazine with the National Enquirer “would be an insult to the supermarket tabloid”).

What was surprising was the enthusiasm for Koppelman’s piece from ostensibly more liberal writers, such as John Cole, and Mark Benjamin. In addition, the article was noted and recommended at numerous websites, from Gawker to The Daily Beast.

Benjamin is an interesting, if strange, case. Writing in Time/CNN’s blog, Battleland, Benjamin, himself the author of numerous articles on U.S. torture for Salon.com, wrote, “Alex Koppelman at AdWeek does a thorough job of airing the problems in Horton's piece,“ adding,  “It's worth a read.”

Benjamin never notes in his encomium to Koppelman’s piece that he had a prior relationship with Koppelman at Salon.com, or that he co-authored articles with Koppelman. It never occurs to him to reveal this as any source of potential bias. Perhaps he might have reflected that both Koppelman and he have cited Scott Horton as a reliable commentator on U.S. policies in the past.

As yet, no one has chosen to analyze Koppelman’s article in any depth, though both Harper’s Senior Editor Luke Mitchell, Scott Horton, and legal professor Mark Denbeaux have all replied at various times to previous criticism, a fact Koppelman never cites in his article. Denbeaux was the lead author of a Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy and Research study on the Guantanamo “suicides,” “Death in Camp Delta,” and a follow-up answer to DoD’s reply to the Horton and Seton Hall investigations, published as “DoD Contradicts DoD: An Analysis of the Response to ‘Death in Camp Delta.’”

Koppelman’s supposed exposé of Horton’s article is a mish-mash of poor analysis, half-truths, and misrepresentations of the facts. He relies on the following points, which are reproduced below in the order they appear in the article. In order to examine Koppelman’s evidence, and thereby demonstrate the dishonest methodology employed by Koppelman, the counter-evidence follows each of Koppelman’s arguments.

1)             The story had been “well-shopped” around, and had been considered and rejected by Seymour Hersh, ABC News’ Brian Ross Investigative Unit, CBS 60 Minutes, NBC News’ chief Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski, and an unidentified New York Times reporter.

Nothing is less convincing that this particular argument. There are many reasons why a reporter or news agency may pass on a story. It does not strain credulity too far to say that a story that directly contradicts official Department of Defense investigations may not be acceptable to reporters who value access to Pentagon sources, or who, like Miklaszewski, are involved in national security reportage training that relies to a good extent upon cooperation with Defense Department personnel.

Besides a quote from Miklaszewski, the only other quote from a journalistic source regarding Horton’s article is an anonymous criticism from “one of the reporters who looked into the story.” Why is this source anonymous? Why are they not on the record?

Koppelman studiously ignores in his article news sources and human rights groups that were laudatory of Horton’s article, including Amnesty International and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

2)            Horton’s main sources were perimeter guards, distant from the prisoners.”

Koppelman’s story never says how “distant” the guards were. Army Sergeant Joseph Hickman, the primary source for Horton’s article, was in Tower 1, twenty feet away from Sally Port 1 and mere yards away from the Detention Medical Clinic, the activity areas upon which Hickman reports, and perhaps fifty yards from Alpha block, where the prisoners were ostensibly found.

Rather than having a poor perspective on events, the guards, especially Hickman, had a unique overview of camp activities during the critical events that took place. A map labeling the various camp components was published along with the original Harper’s article. Neither Hickman nor the other Army guards on duty around the camp that night were ever interviewed by military investigators. When Hickman brought new witnesses to the attention of the Department of Justice, DoJ failed to follow-up.

3)            In an interview with Adweek, Colonel Michael Bumgarner, commander of the Joint Detention Group, the guard force component of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, denied he ever made a speech after the suicides telling guards the media would hear the dead detainees had hanged themselves. Horton reported witnesses as saying Bumgarner said “you all know” the detainees killed themselves by swallowing rags, and then choking to death. 

Nothing is stranger, perhaps, than Koppelman’s reliance on DoD assurances, not least that of a primary actor in the controversy, Col. Bumgarner. The JDG commander, who had been at Guantanamo from April 2005, and was due to leave command at the end of June 2006, was stripped of his command only days after the detainees’ deaths, possibly for having told the press that each of the detainees had been found with a ball of cloth in their mouths.

DoD later denied that the dead detainees all had such cloths or “rags” stuffed down their throats, saying, despite evidence from the NCIS investigation to the contrary, that such cloths were present in only one prisoner’s mouth. According to Horton, Bumgarner’s speech to the guards, telling them to stick to the hanging story, was derived via a number of sources. Meanwhile, Koppleman asks us to rely on the word of a man who called the detainees under his control totally untrustworthy, as “nothing short of a damn animal that can’t be trusted.”

Furthermore, reading the detainees’ statements (large PDF) taken by the Criminal Investigative Task Force at Guantanamo in the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the “suicides,” one is struck by the multiple complaints of the “Colonel” for making prison conditions worse during the term of his command.

4)             One of the independent autopsies performed at the request of the families of the deceased men wrote a report that “ended with the conclusion that hanging was, in fact, the most likely cause of death.” Moreover, according to Koppelman, “[Swiss pathologist Patrice] Mangin reiterated this point in a press conference.”

Koppelman’s fudging of the facts regarding Mangin’s autopsy is egregious. In fact, the autopsy report says that the cause of death is mechanical asphyxiation consistent with a hanging, but also “sans pouvoir exclure formellement un autre mécanisme,” that is, unable to formally exclude another mechanism or cause.

The primary reason for the lack of a definitive decision was the decision of U.S. authorities not to provide crucial neck organs -- the larynx, the hyoid bone, and the thyroid cartilage -- whose examination, for instance, could rule out death by hanging versus death by strangulation or other means. The government’s autopsy noted that one detainee had a broken hyoid bone. Such an injury, according to forensic experts, is more consistent with strangulation than hanging, and quite rare in younger persons.

Mangin was quite explicit about his findings in a March 3, 2007 interview in English with Carol Vann at InfoSud. Mangin told Vann, “There was asphyxiation which could be due to suicide but also to other reasons. We have too little information to make any definitive conclusions…. And above all, what was the state of the missing organs? We have written to the American authorities, but so far we have not had any reply.”

Not only did DoD stonewall requests for the missing organs to more than one independent autopsy physician, they gave no answer to questions Mangin had surrounding the odd cuttings of the prisoners’ toenails and fingernails, removing critical evidence such as DNA or other material to be found under the nails, as there often is in murder cases, in particular strangulation (where the victim often claws the attacker to remove their hands or other mechanical choking device).

That Patrice Mangin did not definitively rule the cause of death as suicide by hanging at his press conference, as maintained by Koppelman, also is reported in an Associated Press article on the press conference at the time. Koppelman is totally wrong in his Adweek assertion about Mangin’s findings.

5)            Army Sergeant Joe Hickman’s account of paddy wagons transporting prisoners to a secret black site at Guantanamo, dubbed “Camp No,” is not plausible, and this is backed up by an email from Dwight Sullivan, who’d been chief defense counsel in the Office of Military Commissions, writing at the time to Slate’s Jack Shafer, who also wrote a series of articles last year criticizing the Horton article.

Sullivan wrote about the Camp No issue in an impassioned blogpost recently, calling Horton’s accusations “crazy libel,” “conspiracy theory,” and “Birther/Truther crazy.” Sullivan maintains that the road the paddy wagons took towards Camp No led “to everything on Naval Station Guantanamo other than the detention camps. That road leads to the hospital. That road leads to the commissary. That road leads to the military commission complex. That road leads to a high school. That road leads to housing areas. That road leads to the ferry to the airport. The road leads to a McDonald’s, a coffee shop, and my favorite Guantanamo eating establishment, the Jerk House."

Horton’s own reply to Koppelman appears to answer the charge, explaining that “It’s true, of course, that when you drive out and you get on roads, you could take roads almost anywhere, there were connections that went on, but everyone I spoke with said ‘No, you would not have driven to that part of the base using that road, there were other roads that would have taken you there much more directly.’”

A look at the map of Guantanamo provided with the original Harper’s article shows Camp No to be quite isolated along a road running north of the main prison camp. There is nothing else along that road, and certainly nothing like a McDonalds, or any housing areas. The areas to the east of Camp No, which include some of the areas to which Sullivan alludes, including the camp headquarters, the chapel, and the post office, and other buildings from the camp, are eminently reachable and in much more direct fashion from Camp Delta from a road running west by northwest out of the camp area. (See also this map from The Guantanamo Testimonials Project.) It is difficult to imagine that multiple paddy wagon trips took a long way around to get to other parts of the camp, along a long empty road passing the Camp No area each time. In short, the objections Sullivan raises do not pass the logic test.

Sullivan also quotes in his blog piece a McClatchy news article reporting that former Guantanamo detainee Abdul Zuhoor said the suicides were a plot by Taliban and Arab prisoners at Guantanamo, corroborating charges of “asymmetrical warfare” put forth by camp officials. But, in a lapse of integrity more typical of the charges Sullivan aims at Scott Horton, Sullivan never mentions that the McClatchy reporter cautioned Zuhoor’s story “must be taken with some skepticism” as Zuhoor “admitted lying to the tribunal at Guantanamo about a host of things.” [Updated note: Sullivan is apparently here simply taking an assertion made by Cully Stimson in his blog post and repeating it without checking on its

6)            Hickman may have seen prisoners being transported, but he could not identify them.  Furthermore, the timeline he provides contradicts that of “multiple witnesses” who saw the detainees in their cells that evening.

While Hickman could not identify the prisoners, and never claimed he could, the unusual instance of their nighttime transfer piqued his interest, and took on a more ominous light due to the circumstances that followed.

The “multiple witnesses” argument might carry more weight, if there weren’t significant problems with the witness statements themselves. As Mark Denbeaux and his team at Seton Hall have described it, the “multiple witnesses” testimony is both dubious and unreliable.

For one thing, the Guantanamo Standard Operation Procedure calls for witnesses to a self-harm act to fill out a Form 2823 immediately after a self-harm event (see p. 172, “Emergency Action Plan (EAPs). 32-1. Attempted Actual Self-Harm”). But no sworn statements were ever given until, as Seton Hall wrote, “more than three days after the detainees died and after the official announcement that they hanged themselves."

Moreover, the statements actually given by the six guards on duty in Alpha Block that night were suspected by NCIS of being false, and the guards were made to sign letters to that effect. Yet none of the guards’ statements has ever been released. Of note, no guard or other personnel on duty at Guantanamo that evening was ever disciplined or charged with anything, despite the fact that numerous SOP procedures seem to have been ignored (such as the failure to call an emergency “Code Blue” after the discovery of the bodies).

A number of detainees in Alpha Block were also interviewed. Almost all said they had seen or heard nothing, and at least one blamed the Americans for the deaths of the prisoners.

Koppelman’s article is not a comprehensive summary of all the purported arguments that have been brought to bear against Horton’s reporting, hence Truthout is not here providing a complete refutation of every argument made by every critic that has been made thus far.

But Koppelman’s story gained an inordinate amount of attention, and the credulity with which it was accepted and promoted by a number of people appears to have more to do with animus against Horton’s investigation than anything else. While the Seton Hall reports, which together total over 150 pages, are far more comprehensive in answering the DoD investigation, they have not been the subject of detailed critique by these same critics. But then, many fewer people were likely to have read them than the Harper’s article. In general, except in passing, Koppelman, like others writing negative hit pieces on the Horton article, have ignored the Seton Hall studies, which fully back Scott Horton’s reporting.

Perhaps what the flap over the ASME award demonstrates is that no serious piece of investigative journalism, especially if recognized, that challenges national security narratives will go unattacked. Certainly any piece of journalism can be challenged, and deservedly so, the better to ascertain its credibility. Koppelman’s article fails to stand up to scrutiny. It is an unserious poison pen attack, cavalier with facts, and undetermined to examine what occurred beyond what DoD authorities allege. Those who have jumped on Koppelman’s bandwagon should be ashamed of themselves.