CCR Announces Bush Indictment for Convention Against Torture Signatory States
No Immunity for Former Presidents Under Law
February 7, 2011, Geneva and New York – Today, two torture victims were to have filed criminal complaints, with more than 2,500-pages of supporting material, in Geneva against former U.S. President George W. Bush, who was due to speak at an event there on 12 February. Swiss law requires the presence of the torturer on Swiss soil before a preliminary investigation can be opened. When Bush cancelled his trip to avoid prosecution, the human rights groups who prepared the complaints made it public and announced that the Bush Torture Indictment would be waiting wherever he travels next. The Indictment serves as the basis on which to prepare country-specific, plaintiff-specific indictments, with additional evidence and updated information. According to international law experts at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), former presidents do not enjoy special immunity under the Convention Against Torture (CAT).
“Waterboarding is torture, and Bush has admitted, without any sign of remorse, that he approved its use,” said Katherine Gallagher, Senior Staff Attorney at CCR and Vice President of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH). “The reach of the Convention Against Torture is wide – this case is prepared and will be waiting for him wherever he travels next. Torturers – even if they are former presidents of the United States – must be held to account and prosecuted. Impunity for Bush must end.”
While the U.S. has thus far failed to comply with its obligations under the Convention Against Torture to prosecute and punish those who commit torture, all other signatories, too, are obligated to prosecute or extradite for prosecution anyone present in their territory they have a reasonable basis for believing has committed torture. If the evidence warrants, as the Bush Torture Indictment contends it does, and the U.S. fails to request the extradition of Bush and others to face charges of torture there, CAT signatories must, under law, prosecute them for torture.
In a statement this weekend, the groups who organized the complaints said, “Whatever Bush or his hosts say, we have no doubt he cancelled his trip to avoid our case. The message from civil society is clear – If you’re a torturer, be careful in your travel plans.”
The complaints that had been scheduled to be filed on Monday asked that the General Prosecutor of the Canton of Geneva investigate allegations that men were tortured as part of the Bush administration’s well-documented torture program. Bush proudly recounted in his recently published memoir that when asked in 2002 to if it was permissible to waterboard a detainee – a recognized act of torture – he replied “damn right.”
Monday, February 7, is the ninth anniversary of the day Bush decided the Geneva Conventions did not apply to ‘enemy combatants.’
According to the Bush Indictment, which was written on behalf of torture victims by CCR and ECCHR, former President Bush bears individual and command responsibility for the acts of his subordinates which he ordered, authorized, condoned or otherwise aided and abetted, as well as for the violations committed by his subordinates which he failed to prevent or punish.
“Bush is a torturer and deserves to be remembered as such,” said Gavin Sullivan, Solicitor and Counterterrorism Program Manager, ECCHR. “He bears ultimate responsibility for authorizing the torture of thousands of individuals at places like Guantánamo and secret CIA ‘black sites’ around the world. As all states are obliged to prosecute such torturers, Bush has good reason to be very worried.”
CCR, ECCHR and FIDH were joined by more than 60 human rights organizations and prominent individuals who signed on to support the call for George W. Bush’s prosecution, including former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Theo van Boven, former UN Special Rapporteur on Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Leandro Despouy, and Nobel Peace Prize recipients Shirin Ebadi and Pérez Esquivel. A number of the human rights organizations which signed on are facing the on-going harms of the “counterterrorism” policies advanced under the Bush administration and then adopted or employed in their own countries.. The complaint included 2500 pages of supporting materials.
Manfred Nowak, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture (2004-2010), was to submit an expert opinion on the complaints concluding that the conduct to which both plaintiffs were subjected constitutes torture, that Switzerland had an obligation to open a preliminary investigation, and that George W. Bush enjoys no immunity.
The Bush Torture Indictment, the official “letter of denunciation” summarizing the case and other materials are available here: http://ccrjustice.org/ourcases/current-cases/bush-torture-indictment.
The Center for Constitutional Rights, in addition to filing the first cases representing men detained at Guantánamo, has filed universal jurisdiction cases seeking accountability for torture by Bush administration officials in Germany, France and submitted expert opinions and other documentation to ongoing cases in Spain in collaboration with ECCHR. The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. Visit www.ccrjustice.org. Follow @theCCR.
The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) is an independent, non-profit legal organization that enforces human rights by holding state and non-state actors to account for egregious abuses through innovative strategic litigation. For more information visit www.ecchr.eu
The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) is a non-governmental federation for 164 human rights organizations. FIDH’s core mandate is to promote respect for all the rights set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Its priority areas include protecting human rights defenders and fighting impunity. For more information on FIDH, see www.fidh.org.
Wednesday, February 9, 2011
CCR Announces Bush Indictment for Convention Against Torture Signatory States
Monday, January 3, 2011
Dr. Welner Defends His Testimony in Khadr Trial, Spreads U.S. Propaganda on Detainee "Recidivism"
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.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Why the Silence on International Day of Support for Victims of Torture?
No editorials or news broadcasts reminded Americans that “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture,” and that anyone responsible for authorizing torture must be prosecuted, and no one called for the prosecution of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld or their supportive colleagues and co-conspirators, including, for example, John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the Office of Legal Counsel’s “torture memos,” or other key figures in Cheney’s “War Council” that drove the policies: David Addington, Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, Alberto Gonzales, the former Attorney general, and William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s former Chief Counsel.Andy links the societal neglect of the subject to President Obama's failed leadership on the issue, his "moral bankruptcy" regarding torture, and it's a position that I also have independently arrived at, as a gander at my Firedoglake/Seminal post, reproduced below, makes clear.
But before we get to the main course, let's consider that the Obama administration did release, late in the day on June 26 a statement, of sorts, on torture. It reads like it was written by a high school senior for a citizenship speech tournament, that is, it is rank with cliche, platitude and a hollow determination to do nothing. Here's the whole thing:
Statement by the President on the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Today we celebrate the anniversary of the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture, one of the foremost international human rights documents. The United States was a leader in the document’s drafting, and remains dedicated to supporting its principles at home and abroad.
I continue to believe that brutal methods of interrogation are inconsistent with our values, undermine the rule of law, and are not effective means of obtaining information. They alienate the United States from the world, and serve as a recruitment and propaganda tool for terrorists. They increase the will of our enemies to fight against us, and endanger our troops when they are captured. The United States will not use or support these methods.
Over the past year, the Department of State has, at my request, gathered information from our embassies around the world about effective mechanisms to stop torture and assist its victims. I have asked the Department of State to share this information with interested international and non-governmental organizations, and to develop a system of advice and tools to share with governments and other relevant actors in addressing this problem.
The United States will continue to support the efforts of other nations and international and nongovernmental organizations, to eradicate torture through human rights training for security forces, capacity building, and encouraging robust legislation against such practices. We will also continue our close collaboration with international and domestic groups working to rehabilitate and reintegrate torture victims and offenders. I am sincerely grateful for the efforts of all the men and women around the world who are working to end the scourge of torture.
When you read bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo such as this — “develop a system of advice and tools” — then you know you’re being conned, or rather lulled to sleep.
“I am sincerely grateful for the efforts of all the men and women”, “around the world,” no less… when you have to say that you are sincere, the unctuousness bleeds through.
You won’t see this covered anywhere else, and for good reason. It’s a joke. Unfortunately to the torture victims who can’t get justice from the U.S. courts, because Obama’s Justice Department files briefs to keep them from doing so, to Maher Arar, to the men and women who are imprisoned in black sites still run by the U.S., and the men still held at Guantanamo, some of whom are still interrogated via the extraordinary means of the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M (isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, inducement of fear and futility, stress positions, environmental “manipulation”), I’m sure they appreciate the sincerity of the U.S. president, in a way only they can. Same goes for those held in prisons in regimes that practice torture, but are supported politically and militarily by the United States (Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco, etc.).
What follows is my own essay from FDL/Seminal, posted on June 26.In commemoration of the passage of the treaty known as the Convention Against Torture (CAT), the United Nations declared June 26 the International Day of Support of Victims of Torture, I want to review where we are in the fight against U.S. torture today. I also want to revisit some important episodes in the history of how we arrived here, including the a look at the role of top U.S. behavioral scientists in the construction of a torture program for the CIA and military.
The U.S. is formally a signatory to CAT, but from the day it was ratified by the U.S. Senate, the treaty was eviscerated by a number of "reservations, declarations, and understandings", which legalisms were meant to shield the United States from actions that any reasonable person would understand constitute torture or cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment of prisoners. Still, the CAT remained a formidable obstacle to the Bush/Cheney lawyers, when they were drawing up their memorandum to allow torture. Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury made sure they addressed legal problems for the administration faced by the treaty the U.S. signed, and turned rhetorical and forensic somersaults to make sure that no one would charge U.S. actors for the crimes of torture.
Meanwhile, the administration of Barack Obama has made a fetish of the idea that U.S. society must not "look backward," and refuses to promote the necessary investigations and prosecutions of the crimes undertaken by the Bush/Cheney administration — and this is true even after recent revelations indicate that besides torture, illegal human experimentation on prisoners also occurred. Even worse, there is plenty of evidence to now indicate the Obama administration has itself embraced the policies of rendition, secret prisons, assassination, and abuse of prisoners.
Nor has Congress acquitted itself especially well. The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) undertook an in-depth investigation of Department of Defense involvement in detainee abuse, producing a fairly redacted public report that described how the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency and its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school (SERE) personnel were utilized to teach torture methods to the CIA, the DIA, and Special Operations teams (and perhaps others — see PDF report). Nevertheless, the SASC never recommended any specific reforms, and not one high-ranking military officer was held accountable for what had occurred. The use of JPRA personnel in interrogations remained "a policy decision" to be decided by the Secretary of Defense — who happens to remain, over a third of the way through Obama’s current term of office, Bush Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
The Senate and House Intelligence Committees were supposedly briefed on the CIA’s interrogation program, but as a number of articles by Marcy Wheeler have documented, the CIA lied about who was briefed, and falsified the evidence of the briefings when it was convenient to them.
Even so, one could criticize the overall actions of Congress on the torture issue. The Senate Intelligence Committee currently is investigating the circumstances around the CIA’s interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, and other aspects of the CIA "enhanced interrogation" program, including charges of human experimentation. But this investigation is behind closed doors, and we cannot judge its efficacy, nor does it do what real investigations of torture should do: educate the public about what has occurred, and mobilize society for the necessary task of cleaning up the government from the infection of torture and brutality that debilitates it. In order to keep the truth at bay, ever-increasing attacks against whistleblowers, ever-increasing encroachments on civil liberties and privacy, are taking place.
On this International Day of Support of Victims of Torture, I offer a reposting of an article of mine from last year, posted at Jason Leopold’s The Public Record. This is an important article that details the origins of the torture program, and demonstrates the importance of delaying real accountability. A failure to end the practice of torture has resulted in increasing militarism, increasing governmental secrecy, and the empowerment of a clique of individuals whose operations and immorality have penetrated to every major societal institution.
If this article is too long for you, bookmark it and read it later. Send it to your iPad or Kindle, print it out and read it at your leisure (though you might miss the hyperlinks). As an accompanying piece, you might also wish to take a look at this excellent diary at Daily Kos, which describes the uses of torture domestically, in U.S. jails and Supermax prisons. Torture at home, torture abroad, the question we must be asking ourselves is this: So far down the road to becoming a "torture state," do we have the courage and fortitude to turn back, to create a better society, or will we succumb to barbarism?
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Top U.S. Behavioral Scientists Studied Survival Schools to Create Torture Program Over 50 Years Ago
A couple of recent articles have highlighted the unseemly fact that some past presidents of the American Psychological Association (APA), the foremost professional organization for psychologists in the United States, if not the world, had links to the use of torture, or at least to military research into coercive interrogations.
An article by Jane Mayer in the recent New Yorker on CIA Director Leon Panetta noted in passing the participation of a former APA president Joseph Matarazzo on the governing staff of the Mitchell, Jessen & Associates (MJA) torture firm. First identified as one of the “governing people” of MJA by Bill Morlin in a Spokesman Review article in August 2007, Matarazzo is now known to have also been CIA, as noted in an article by Physicians for Human Rights Campaign Against Torture director, Nathaniel Raymond (emphasis added):
Mayer notes, parenthetically, that she has learned from the CIA’s Kirk Hubbard that former American Psychological Association president Joseph Matarazzo sat on the CIA’s professional-standards board at the time when psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen were developing an interrogation program for the CIA, based on the US military’s SERE training program.
This new information came at the same time as former APA insider Bryant Welch was publishing his own tell-all about APA and the Defense Department, "Torture, Psychology, and Daniel Inouye". Welch singled out former APA presidents Gerald Koocher and Ron Levant, along with Senator Daniel Inouye’s office, as key lobbyists for the participation of psychologists in interrogations (emphasis added):
One of Inouye’s administrative assistants, psychologist Patrick Deleon, has long been active in the APA and served a term in 2000 as APA president. For significant periods of time DeLeon has literally directed APA staff on federal policy matters and has dominated the APA governance on political matters. For over twenty-five years, relationships between the APA and the Department of Defense (DOD) have been strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by DeLeon.
Another famous former APA president, Martin Seligman, was also linked with the government’s recent torture program. According to Jane Mayer, Seligman taught his “learned helplessness” theories to the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape or SERE psychologists, who reverse-engineered it into the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” used by the CIA and DoD to torture prisoners in “war on terror” prisons around the world. Seligman admitted lecturing at SERE, but has denied any role in torture.
The role of former APA presidents DeLeon, Koocher, Levant, Seligman, and Matarazzo in supporting the role of military psychologists in interrogations, even after evidence of torture by the U.S. government was manifest, is perhaps unequalled in the annals of professional societies, as providing political, and possibly organizational and theoretical or practical support to unethical procedures, especially torture. (Stephen Soldz has outlined some of this recent history in an article just posted at ACLU Blog of Rights.) One might think this a terrible offshoot of the former Bush administration’s insane post-9/11 turn to the “dark side.”
But that is not the end of the story; it is not even the beginning.
Before this set of military/CIA-collaborationist APA presidents, there was Harry Harlow, and before him, Donald Hebb. Both were famous, distinguished U.S. psychologists, and both had been presidents of the APA in the 1950s. Both engaged in research, some of it secret, for the military and CIA. Hebb was a pioneer in the study of sensory deprivation. Harlow’s contribution was more synthetic: he helped construct an entire paradigm around the problem of how to break down an individual by torture.
In 1956, in the pages of an obscure academic journal, Sociometry, I.E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow, and psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West published a classic work on interrogation, Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread) (BCD). It was based on a report for the Study Group on Survival Training, paid for by the U.S. Air Force. (See West LJ., Medical and psychiatric considerations in survival training. In Report of the Special Study Group on Survival Training (AFR 190 16). Lackland Air Force Base, Tex: Air Force Personnel and Training Research Centers; 1956.) This research linked Air Force “Survival” training, later called SERE, with torture techniques, and as we will see, use of such techniques by the CIA, something we would see again decades later in the Mitchell-Jessen “exploitation” plan.
BCD examined the various types of stress undergone by prisoners, and narrowed them down to “three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread”.
Debility was a condition caused by “semi-starvation, fatigue, and disease”. It induced “a sense of terrible weariness”.
Dependency on the captors for some relief from their agony was something “produced by the prolonged deprivation of many of the factors, such as sleep and food… [and] was made more poignant by occasional unpredictable brief respites.” The use of prolonged isolation of the prisoner, depriving an individual of expected social intercourse and stimulation, “markedly strengthened the dependency”.
Dread probably needs no explanation, but BCD described it as “chronic fear…. Fear of death, fear of pain, fear of nonrepatriation, fear of deformity of permanent disability…. even fear of one’s own inability to satisfy the demands of insatiable interrogators.”
The bulk of BCD explains the effects of DDD in terms of Pavlovian conditioning and the learning theories of American psychologist Edward Thorndike. The consequence of the resulting “collapse of ego functions” is described as similar to “postlobotomy syndrome”.
By disorganizing the perception of those experiential continuities constituting the self-concept and impoverishing the basis for judging self-consistency, DDD affects one’s habitual ways of looking at and dealing with oneself. [p. 275]
BCD explains aspects of the U.S. torture program that otherwise to our eyes appear insane. (Not that it isn’t on a moral level “insane.”) Take the painful stress positioning of prisoners documented at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run detainee prisons — most recently, at Bagram prison in Afghanistan. BCE explains: it’s all part of inducing dependency through expectation of relief, but in a diabolical way. Forced stress positions are a “self-inflicted punishment”, one which increases the expectancy of relief via “voluntary” means. But the latter is “delusory… since the captor may select any behavior he chooses as the condition for relieving a prisoner’s distress” [pp. 276-277].
This form of carrot and stick torture may not seem that sophisticated, but it is the use of basic nervous system functioning and human instinctual need that makes it “scientific”. The need for sensory stimulation and social interaction, the need to eat, to sleep, to reduce fear, all of these are used to build dependencies upon the captor, using the fact that “the strengthening effects of rewards — in this instance the alleviation of an intensely unpleasant emotional state — are fundamentally automatic” [p. 278]. This impairment of higher cognitive states and disruption and disorganization of the prisoner’s self-concept, producing something like “a pathological organic state”, was subsequently modified and used by the CIA in its interrogations of countless individuals. If more brutal forms of torture sometimes were used, especially by over-eager foreign agents or governments, DDD remained the gold standard, the programmatic core of counterintelligence interrogation at the heart of the CIA’s own intelligence manuals.
Chapter Nine of the 1963 CIA KUBARK manual, ”Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources,” describes coercive interrogation procedures as “designed to induce regression.”
The anonymous authors of KUBARK quote the BCD article specifically:
Farber says that the response to coercion typically contains “… at least three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread.” Prisoners “… have reduced viability, are helplessly dependent on their captors for the satisfaction of their many basic needs, and experience the emotional and motivational reactions of intense fear and anxiety”….
The subheads to the chapter are evocative of the DDD paradigm: “Deprivation of Sensory Stimuli”, “Threats and Fear”, “Debility”, “Pain”, “Heightened Suggestibility and Hypnosis”, and “Narcosis”. That this was all constructed, in part, by the demented genius of a famous U.S. psychologist and former president of the APA only contributes to a deep, dark irony that runs like a blood-red gash through the body politic of this country.
The 2006 rewrite of the Army Field Manual was lauded for banning the beating of prisoners, threatening them with dogs, sexual humiliation, performing mock executions, electrocution of prisoners, and waterboarding, among other “techniques.” But in an appendix to the manual, the following procedures are authorized for certain prisoners: complete separation, sometimes with forced wearing of goggles and earmuffs, for up to 30 days (after which approval for more must be sought); limiting sleep to four hours a day, for 30 straight days (and more, with approval); and other concurrent techniques, including “futility”, “incentive”, and “fear up harsh”. In the latter, fear within a detainee is significantly increased, through knowledge of the person’s phobias, if possible.
In the press, and in the speeches of politicians on both sides of the aisle, the new AFM was praised as a model of reform. The CIA was urged to embrace the AFM’s policies, but has demurred. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is studying the interrogation issue, but so far has advocated the AFM be the government-wide interogation standard. Why, one wonders, as it’s evident the AFM has maintained a core DDD operational capacity (isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, fear)? The Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International and other human rights organization have called publicly for the Obama administration to rescind Appendix M and other offensive sections of the Army Field Manual.
It is important that all elements of the U.S. torture program be exposed and made illegal. If the country can not rise morally to this, then a terrifying future lies before us.
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Per Obama: Torture Evidence Is "Protected" Against Release
On Thursday, the House approved a Department of Homeland Security spending bill that included a provision to amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and grant Defense Secretary Robert Gates the authority to withhold "protected documents" that, if released, would endanger the lives of US soldiers or government employees deployed outside of the country.Leopold quotes Democratic Congresswoman Louise Slaughter as saying "the language was quietly reinserted in recent weeks, 'apparently under direct orders from the administration.'" The bill's language is a cover for Obama, who was otherwise threatening an administration petition to the U.S. Supreme Court to stop the release of the controversial, unseen "torture photos."
According to the bill, the phrase "protected documents" refers to photographs taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009, and involves "the treatment of individuals engaged, captured or detained" in the so-called "war on terror." Photographs that Gates determines would endanger troops and government employees could be withheld for three years.
Will we hear much protest from the progressive blogosphere? Not likely, as the torture issue slips off the radar, and the trudging submission of the progressive punditry to Democratic Party faux-ameliorism continues (there are exceptions, and you know who they are). Millions more on unemployment. Wall Street dances in blue chips. War continues apace, and the torture industry revs up for more high-tech adventures in breaking individuals down. No pictures of war. Nothing messy. Just bright baubles, Nobel Prizes, and proud words about equality... some day. No one in a position of power must lose a wink of sleep: that's how change is measured in America these days.
Congress Fails, But Justice Speaks OutMeanwhile, over in Great Britain, per the UK Guardian, some very welcome news:
In a devastating judgment, two senior judges roundly dismissed the [British] foreign secretary's claims that disclosing... evidence would harm national security and threaten the UK's vital intelligence-sharing arrangements with the US.Readers might remember the case of Binyam Mohamed, who was seized by the United States in Pakistan in 2002, secretly renditioned to Morocco, and later held at Bagram and Guantanamo "terror" prisons, suffering torture in all these sites. He is one of the plaintiffs in the Jeppesen case, a suit brought by the ACLU. That case engendered a decision last summer by the Ninth Circuit Court, which was one of the last legal victories in the U.S. in the struggle for accountability for torture.
In what they described as an "unprecedented" and "exceptional" case, to which the Guardian is a party, they ordered the release of a seven-paragraph summary of what the CIA told British officials – and maybe ministers – about Ethiopian-born [Binyam] Mohamed before he was secretly interrogated by an MI5 officer in 2002.
"The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law," Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones ruled. "Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy."
In 2007, the ACLU filed a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, on behalf of five victims of the United States government's unlawful "extraordinary rendition" program. The suit charges that Jeppesen knowingly participated by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the CIA to forcibly disappear these five men to detention and interrogation. Shortly after the suit was filed, the government intervened and inappropriately asserted the "state secrets privilege," claiming further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public. In April 2009, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court dismissal of the case, ruling that the government must invoke the state secrets privilege with respect to specific evidence, not to dismiss the entire suit. The case is remanded back to district court, providing the first opportunity for Bush-era torture victims to have their day in court.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Bambi Meets Cheney
Last Sunday, Dick Cheney made the television rounds, growling his by now stereotyped plea for the saving graces of torture. It would be Grand Guignol if it weren't so evilly comic. Andrew Sullivan caught this aspect of it in his review of the former vice president's interview with Chris Wallace at Fox "News" Network (H/T Glenn Greenwald):
One day, all the inanity of our society will meet all the evil that came from the lust for power, and crimes such as torture, and we will all be sucked to oblivion in the resulting black hole.Now look: there are softball interviews; and then there are interviews like this. It cannot be described as journalism in any fashion. Even as propaganda, which is its point, it doesn't work - because it's far too cloying and supportive of Cheney to be convincing to anyone outside the true-believers. When it comes to Cheney, one of the most incompetent vice-presidents in the country's history, with a record of two grotesquely botched wars, war crimes and a crippling debt, Chris Wallace sounds like a teenage girl interviewing the Jonas Brothers...
CHENEY: I am going to -- if I address that, I will address it in my book, Chris.
WALLACE: It is going to be a hell of a book.
CHENEY: It is going to be a great book.
Why isn't anyone writing about that?
PHR Releases White Paper on Health Professionals Ethics & Human Rights Violations
PHR Analysis: CIA Health Professionals’ Role in Torture Worse Than Previously Known
Cambridge, MA – The extent to which American physicians and psychologists violated human rights and betrayed the ethical standards of their professions by designing, implementing, and legitimizing a worldwide torture program is greater than previously known, according to a report by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
A team of PHR doctors authored the new white paper, Aiding Torture: Health Professionals’ Ethics and Human Rights Violations Demonstrated in the May 2004 Inspector General’s Report. The report details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees’ reaction to interrogation methods. PHR is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation and calls for more investigation on this point. If confirmed, the development of a research protocol to assess and refine the use of the waterboard or other techniques would likely constitute a new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists.
“Medical doctors and psychologists colluded with the CIA to keep observational records about waterboarding, which approaches unethical and unlawful human experimentation,” says PHR Medical Advisor and lead report author Scott Allen, MD. For example, “Interrogators would place a cloth over a detainee’s face to block breathing and induce feelings of fear, helplessness, and a loss of control. A doctor would stand by to monitor and calibrate this physically and psychologically harmful act, which amounts to torture. It is profoundly unsettling to learn of the central role of health professionals in laying a foundation for US government lawyers to rationalize the CIA’s illegal torture program.”
The Inspector General’s report documents some practices -- previously unknown or unconfirmed -- that were used to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end. These practices included:
· Mock executions;
· Brandishing guns and power drills;
· Threats to sexually assault family members and murder children;
· “Walling” – repeatedly slamming an unresponsive detainee’s head against a cell wall; and
· Confinement in a box.
“These unlawful, unethical, and ineffective interrogation tactics cause significant bodily and mental harm,” said co-author and PHR Senior Medical Advisor Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD. “The CIA Inspector General’s report confirms that torture escalates in severity and torturers frequently go beyond approved techniques.”
“The required presence of health professionals did not make interrogation methods safer, but sanitized their use, escalated abuse, and placed doctors and psychologists in the untenable position of calibrating harm rather than serving as protectors and healers. The fact that psychologists went beyond monitoring, and actually designed and implemented these abuses –- while simultaneously serving as ‘safety monitors’ –- reveals the ethical bankruptcy of the entire program,” stated co-author Steven Reisner, PhD, PHR’s Psychological Ethics Advisor.
“That health professionals who swear to oaths of healing so abused the sacred trust society places in us by instigating, legitimizing and participating in torture, is an abomination,” states co-author Allen Keller, MD, Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. “Health professionals who aided torture must be held accountable by professional associations, by state licensing boards, and by society. Accountability is essential to maintain trust in our professions and to end torture, which scars bodies and minds, leaving survivors to endure debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares.”
PHR has called for full investigation and remedies, including accountability for war crimes, and reparation, such as compensation, medical care and psycho-social services. PHR also calls for health professionals who have violated ethical standards or the law to be held accountable through criminal prosecution, loss of license and loss of professional society membership where appropriate.
To download PHR’s Aiding Torture, visit http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/news-2009-08-31.html. [Or click here to download PDF of the report.]
Since 2005, PHR has documented the systematic use of psychological and physical torture by US personnel against detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Bagram airbase, and elsewhere in its groundbreaking reports, Break Them Down, Leave No Marks, and Broken Laws, Broken Lives.
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) mobilizes the health professions to advance the health and dignity of all people by protecting human rights. PHR shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.
Monday, August 24, 2009
CVT Quizzes Obama on Army Field Manual Interrogations
The list of questions, reproduced below, were drawn up by William Taft, a former legal adviser to Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Harry McPherson, an old LBJ adviser. The list is being distributed by the Center for Victims of Torture. Note, one misstatement in their list of questions. They state that Appendix M of the Army Field Manual on interrogations is classified. It is not, and can be read as part of the original document.
* Does the report include a clear and specific set of lawful interrogation techniques — and is it binding on all US personnel? If a technique isn’t specifically included in that list, does that mean it is prohibited?The more I think of it, the point offered above on Appendix M is way off. The procedures are known to the world, and they represent at the least cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, if not torture, when used in combination.
* During his confirmation hearing, CIA Director Leon Panetta said that he believes the President may approve, in extraordinary circumstances, interrogation techniques that are otherwise prohibited by the Army Field Manual. Does the report recommend that the President have the authority to approve, on a case-by-case basis, techniques that could amount to torture or cruelty? If so, under what circumstances may the President use this authority?
* Do the recommendations require that all approved interrogation techniques comply with the “Golden Rule” – that is, will U.S. personnel be prohibited from using any methods of interrogation that the U.S. would find unlawful and unacceptable if used against Americans?
* Will the approved interrogation techniques be completely public so that America can reestablish in the eyes of the world that we do not torture? Currently, Appendix M to the Army Field Manual for interrogation is classified [sic].
* The President’s executive order called for the immediate closure of CIA operated detention facilities but then exempted facilities used to “hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Have “short-term” and “transitory” been defined?
* Will the procedures for transferring detainees to other nations ensure that those transfers absolutely will not, under any circumstances, result in detainees facing torture or cruelty?
I've written a series of articles on this, and for the interested reader, here's a bibliography of sorts. Note, from the beginning, Physicians for Human Rights was the organization out front on this issue, as you'll see if you read these articles. I guess Taft and McPherson missed those PHR press releases, not to mention my articles.
My first article on the AFM and Appendix M was posted at Daily Kos in September 2006, right after the current AFM was released: WTF? New Army Interrogation Manual Promotes Torture!
In June 2007, I wrote Sec. Gates: Stop SERE-type Torture! Drop Appendix M from Army Field Manual
Here's a list of articles from this year:
How the U.S. Army's Field Manual Codified Torture -- and Still Does
How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual that (Still) Sanctions Torture
CCR: Close Torture Loopholes in Army Field Manual
Fredman's Mea Culpa, the Army Field Manual, and the Istanbul Protocol
By Yoo's Own Analysis, Army Field Manual Allows Torture with Drugs
I think anyone reading the above will gain a great deal of knowledge regarding the Army Field Manual issue. Feel free to pass this along.
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