SSCI Confirms Staff Visited CIA's Salt Pit Prison in 2003, No Records of Visit Kept at CIA Request

There are many aspects to the exploding torture scandal that are being spun by interested parties. That's not necessarily bad, and in fact to be expected. But it's hard to get to the actual truth.

One problem is that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Committee (SSCI) has only released the Executive Summary (PDF) of their full, 6,000-plus page report on the CIA's torture program. On the other hand, the CIA censored a number of items in the document. While the Summary has lots of new and very interesting information in it, it's clear that we're not getting the entire story.

One thing that has the SSCI report critics up in arms is the assertion from CIA and GOP critics that the SSCI did not interview actual CIA personnel. CIA claims that it did brief Congressional oversight committees, or at least their leading members, about the torture program.

The SSCI maintains the CIA has not been forthcoming with information, and has even misled investigators and government personnel about their interrogation program. For example, according to the report, "in late 2002, Chairman Graham sought to expand Committee oversight of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program, including by having Committee staff visit CIA interrogation sites and interview CIA interrogators. The CIA rejected this request. An internal CIA email from [redacted] CTC Legal [redacted] indicated that the full Committee would not be told about 'the nature and scope of the interrogation process,' and that even the chairman and vice chairman would not be told in which country or 'region' the CIA had established its detention facilities." (emphasis added, p. 438)

But what is most surprising, and no one has mentioned, much less emphasized, is that according to the CIA's own June 2013 written response (PDF) to an earlier draft of the SSCI's executive summary, SSCI "staff members" visited the Salt Pit CIA black site in Afghanistan (codenamed COBALT) in late 2003. According to the CIA, the SSCI staff found it compared "favorably" with detainee facilities at Bagram and Guantanamo.

At the time, the SSCI director was Republican Senator Pat Roberts, while Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller was the ranking minority member on the committee. The CIA does not name who the SSCI staff were. There is no reference to any such Committee visits to CIA black sites in the SSCI Executive Summary. I checked with some experts who have been following closely the CIA torture scandal, and they also believed this was new information.

A SSCI committee aide who would only speak on background told The Dissenter the committee doesn’t dispute CIA records. However, the aide noted, the 2003 visit was years in advance of the SSCI study that resulted in the recent report. Furthermore, at the request of the CIA, the committee retained no records of the 2003 visit. I'm told the committee stands by its description of detention facilities in the report, and the CIA’s refusal to allow the committee to conduct oversight over detention and interrogation activities prior to 2006, when the committee was finally informed of the program.

The entire episode raises many questions, however. For instance, in the SSCI report, the committee states, "At the July 2004 briefing, the minority staff director requested full Committee briefings and expanded Committee oversight, including visits to CIA detention sites and interviews with interrogators — efforts that had been sought by former Chairman Graham years earlier. This request was denied."

That request was denied, but was an earlier one approved? We know now there was a visit to at least one CIA detention site. Why isn't that mentioned in the report? If there were no records of the visit, there were still individuals who could be interviewed from that time, not least Sen. Rockefeller, who was ranking minority member on the SSCI at the time of the staff visit, and is still a member of the Senate intelligence committee. Even more, what kind of oversight committee would fail to keep records of an oversight action when requested by the agency upon which it is conducting oversight?

"... a markedly cleaner, healthier, more humane and better administered facility"

The story about the SSCI staff visit in the CIA Response is tied into CIA's response to SSCI charges that both the interrogation of CIA detainees and the conditions of their confinement at the various CIA black sites were more brutal than CIA had indicated. The Senate report highlighted the death of one CIA detainee, Gul Rahman, who died of hypothermia while being tortured at the CIA's notorious Salt Pit prison.

The CIA, whose response is self-serving at best, and can generally not be trusted, responded to these charges. They claimed that conditions at the black sites were "unacceptable" in the "early days," but that conditions improved over time.

"Most importantly," the CIA wrote, "we found no evidence to support the charge that the facts relating to confinement conditions or the application of enhanced techniques were previously unknown or undisclosed to NSC and DOJ officials or to oversight committees."

The CIA did agree with Committee charges that the "confinement conditions" at the Salt Pit black site were "harsher than at other facilities and deficient in significant respects for a few months prior to the death of Gul Rahman in late 2002." The actual identification of the Salt Pit prison does not occur in either the CIA Response or SSCI report, as such sites names are either redacted or given code names. The identification of the Salt Pit is inferred by information in the documents, especially the death of Rahman.

According to an account at the Daily Beast, the Salt Pit prison, called by some former detainees the "Dark Prison," were abominable. "Nude prisoners were kept in a central area, and walked around as a form of humiliation. Detainees were hosed down while shackled naked, and placed in rooms with temperatures as low as 59 degrees Fahrenheit. Loud music was played constantly.... Detainees there were subject to sleep deprivation, shackled to bars with their hands above their heads."

The CIA Response to SSCI stated the Agency "took steps to consolidate responsibility" for the facility and "moved quickly to improve conditions." Then they reminded the SSCI about something:

Although conditions at the facility remained sub-optimal throughout its existence, significant improvements at the site prompted two SSCI staff members who visited the facility in late 2003 to compare it favorably with military facilities at Bagram and Guantanamo Bay. In fact, one remarked that [one word redaction] was "a markedly cleaner, healthier, more humane and better administered facility." [One word redaction] was decommissioned in 2004 in favor of a newer facility.... [p. 56 (p. 80 of PDF)]

Only months after their visit, a CIA Office of Medical Services medical officer described the rectal rehydration procedure used on detainees in a February 27, 2004 email, as quoted in the SSCI Summary: “[r]egarding the rectal tube, if you place it and open up the IV tubing, the flow will self regulate, sloshing up the large intestines.... [w]hat I infer is that you get a tube up as far as you can, then open the IV wide. No need to squeeze the bag – let gravity do the work.”

The hideous use of such medical torture, amounting to sexual assault on prisoners, has sparked new calls for further investigation. See a full discussion of this aspect of the torture in a new report by Physicians for Human Rights (PDF).

Incestuous Goings-on

So what's going on here?

I can't know exactly. But the cozy relationship between the Congressional intelligence committees and the agencies they oversee is a major problem. I noted back in August that numerous leading staff members for SSCI over the years have had a tight relationship with the CIA. Indeed, the EIT torture program of the CIA was implemented under the leadership of the former Staff Director for the SSCI back in the early 1990s, George Tenet.

From my August article:

After leaving SSCI in January 1993], Tenet went straight to the White House, where he worked as "Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs." In a relatively short time, he was appointed deputy director of the CIA in July 1995. By December 1996, Tenet replaced John Deutch as temporary director of the CIA. Bill Clinton would nominate him as full director the next year....

In four quick years, Tenet went from SSCI Staff Director to head of the CIA.

But Tenet was not the only instance of such incestuous goings on in the oversight world. Other individuals that either went from the intelligence world to SSCI staff, or from the latter to the CIA, included former Minority Staff Director John H. Moseman, who went from being Minortity Staff Director to CIA's Director of Congressional Affairs in 1996, and then later Tenet's Chief of Staff; former Charles Battaglia, who went from senior management at CIA to staff director at SSCI in the mid-1990s; and former SSCI Staff Director Bernard F. McMahon in the 1980s, who earlier had served as Executive Director to the Director of the CIA.

Another notable connection between Congressional oversight and the CIA involves the 2002 Joint Congressional investigation into 9/11. The House and Senate intelligence committees appointed former CIA Inspector General L. Britt Snider to head the unified staff for the joint inquiry.

To my knowledge, there is no connection between the CIA or other intelligence agency and the current Congressional intelligence oversight committees.

In general, I'm very pleased to have even the redacted version of the Executive Summary of the SSCI report, which had much more in it that I would have expected.

But the evidence in the Summary points to one overwhelming fact: if we are ever to get the full story on what went on behind the scenes in the torture program, we need the SSCI to release the full 6,000 page report, and all censorship removed to the extent possible.

Secondly, we need a non-partisan, non-government connected committee to investigate fully the entire affair, including the rendition program, the full extent of the military's own torture program, and recent revelations of illegal human subject medical experimentation as part of the CIA program. Such an independent committee must have no ties to the intelligence community, and include strong presence of human rights and anti-torture organizations. It must also include representatives or the presence of some of the victims of the torture itself, the better to keep such an investigation honest.

Crossposted at The Dissenter/FDL

Top US Psychologist Allegedly Met with James Mitchell in Weeks Before Zubaydah Torture

America 2013: A top U.S. psychologist touting "Positive Psychology" is to be a keynote speaker at a huge Southern California conference on psychotherapy. Other speakers include psychiatry heavies Aaron Beck, Irvin Yalom, as well as Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman, and big media names like James Foley and Alanis Morissette.

The famous psychologist -- Martin Seligman from the University of Pennsylvannia -- has been linked to the CIA's Bush torture program. The charges lack a smoking gun, but there is lots of circumstantial evidence. What is reported below shows that Seligman wasn't fully open about his contacts with those accused of waterboarding Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and torturing various CIA "black site" prisoners circa 2002-2006. Why did he hide this information?

A Forgotten Book

A 2011 book written by Georgetown academic and ethics expert M. Gregg Bloche (currently co-director for the Georgetown-Johns Hopkins Joint Program in Law and Public Health) broke important new ground about the origins of the post-9/11 CIA torture program. Unfortunately, he did so just as the Obama administration's policy of non-investigation and non-prosecution of those involved in U.S. torture had gained ascendency among both press and the public.

Bloche described a hitherto unreported meeting between Martin Seligman and James Mitchell during the crucial period when Mitchell, the former Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program (SERE) psychologist, was involved with both the CIA and the Pentagon in setting up a torture program for prisoners captured in what the U.S. was calling the "war on terror."

Various reports say that Seligman met Mitchell and Jessen twice before, in December 2001 and May 2002. What hasn't been reported previously was that Seligman also allegedly met with Mitchell literally days before Mitchell and another CIA psychologist, Kirk Hubbard, were called to fly to Thailand, where the CIA was holding a very special "high-value" prisoner, the terribly injured Abu Zubaydah.

While Seligman has discussed his interactions with Mitchell numerous times before (here's one such link), he never mentioned this other meeting -- in late March or early April 2002 -- whose timing was so suspicious. Within days, Mitchell arrived in Thailand to take over Zubaydah's interrogation from FBI agents and institute his "new" version of "enhanced interrogation" that relied on a theory -- "learned helplessness" -- associated with Seligman himself.

According to Ali Soufan's book, The Black Banners, Mitchell (called Boris in Soufan's book) arrived when Zubaydah was still in the hospital recovering from wounds received during his capture in Pakistan. Scandalously, much of Soufan's account was censored by the government.

I emailed Seligman to ask him to confirm or deny Bloche's allegation, and offered him plenty of space in this article to explain himself. I never heard back from him. Meanwhile, the major media, for reasons of their own, passed by this story, even though I know it was offered to them.

[Update, 12/9/13, 8:50am PST: Dr. Seligman has emailed me this morning with a reply to this article. It states, in full:

"Dr. Kaye: Your allegation is entirely fiction.

"To the best of my knowledge, I have met Mitchell exactly twice. Once at my home in December of 2001, and once at the SERE meeting. There was no other meeting BEFORE or after the SERE meeting.

"Once again, I disapprove of torture. I have never and would never aid or abet it.

"Martin Seligman"]

"Learned Helplessness"

Buried in two chapters towards the end of his book, The Hippocratic Myth, Bloche described a narrative of events surrounding Mitchell and his SERE associate Bruce Jessen. Bloche obtained the new information in a series of email exchanges with a key CIA player in the torture scandal, psychologist Kirk Hubbard, who was Chief of Operations, and later Chief of the Research and Analysis Branch for the CIA's shadowy Operational Assessment Division (OAD).

(In July 2003, Hubbard would be in charge of putting together a CIA/Rand/American Psychological Association workshop on detecting deception that would investigate new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down prisoners for interrogation. His partner in organizing the event was then-White House senior scientist Susan Brandon. Today, Brandon is head of Obama's HIG interrogation research program.)

Bloche wrote that Hubbard's work at the CIA brought him into contact with "an informal network of military and civilian psychologists and psychiatrists with shared interests in psyops, Special Forces selection, resistance training, and the reliability of 'humint' (human intelligence)" (p. 135).

Hubbard apparently knew Mitchell from this milieu. (I've written before about the military/special ops/SERE/contractor environment Mitchell sprang from.) According to Bloche, "in the weeks after 9/11" Hubbard brought Mitchell to the attention of higher-ups in the CIA (p. 136). Perhaps he introduced Mitchell's SERE colleague Bruce Jessen at the same time, though Bloche is unclear on this. Hubbard does say, however, he introduced both Mitchell and Jessen to his Agency superiors as "potential assets."

Mitchell reportedly had long been interested in the behavioral theory of "learned helplessness," which was associated with the academic work of Martin Seligman. "Learned helplessness" (LH) was an animal model of breakdown via uncontrollable stress which was later used to help understand the clinical manifestation of depression in humans. Mitchell believed using a combination of physical and psychologically extreme pressures would reduce a prisoner to a state of compliance, similar to the helpless state produced by LH. This would make a prisoner or interrogatee extremely dependent on an all-powerful interrogator "god," someone who could be easily "exploited" by government forces.

The rationale for all this was described in notes Mitchell's SERE associate, Bruce Jessen, wrote when he and Capt. Michael Kearns, then head of operations for Air Force Intelligence’s Special Survival Training Program, were forming in 1989 a survival class for "Special Mission Units," i.e., for secret "black" operations personnel. This course, SV-91, meant to help U.S. Special Forces survive torture and captivity by a brutal enemy, became the template for the kinds of techniques Mitchell and Jessen would flip to use now on U.S. prisoners.

Meeting Mitchell

Bloche writes that Seligman admitted being invited by the CIA to speak at a May 2002 SERE conference before an audience that included Mitchell and Jessen. Subsequently, Scott Shane wrote in the New York Times that Mitchell met Seligman in a small meeting at the latter's house in December 2001.

In an article by Mark Benjamin at Salon.com, Seligman confirmed the December meeting, describing it as (as Benjamin described it) "a small gathering of professors and law enforcement personnel as well as at least one 'Israeli intelligence person,' to conduct an academic discussion about the so-called war on terror." Seligman told Benjamin the meeting at his house had nothing to do with interrogation. What Mitchell was doing at such a meeting, when he had no academic expertise on the "war on terror" or "Jihad" or moderate Islam, no one has ever said.

Here's how Bloche described the meeting between Seligman and Mitchell just before the latter left for Thailand.

[Seligman] acknowledged only that he spoke on learned helplessness at a JPRA meeting in May 2002 and that Mitchell and Jessen were in the audience:

I was invited to speak about how American... personnel could use what is known about learned helplessness to resist torture and evade successful interrogation by their captors. This is what I spoke about.

Seligman added:

I have had no professional contact with Jessen and Mitchell since then....

It is important to point out that Seligman here only denies contact with Mitchell and Jessen after May 2002. He doesn't say anything about contact with them prior to that period. He simply never mentions anything about the late March or early April meeting. Bloche continued:

But sometime in the spring of 2002, according to a CIA source, Seligman met with Mitchell, Jessen, and Hubbard in Philadelphia. “The fact that we had a meeting in Philadelphia,” said the source, a meeting participant [possibly Kirk Hubbard -- JK], “means that Mitchell/Jessen were at least thinking about interrogation strategies.” Seligman wanted to help and understood what Mitchell had in mind. But having built his reputation as a clinical pioneer — the man who’d discovered learned helplessness, then transformed depressed people’s lives through “learned optimism” — he didn’t want to be seen as telling CIA operatives how to break people by inducing despair. So he walked a careful line, keeping to the question of what the science did and didn’t support while abstaining from how-to advice. Seligman, said the CIA source, had a “classic approach-avoidance conflict regarding helping us"....

By the time of the Philadelphia meeting, CIA preparations for “enhanced” interrogation had reached high intensity, energized by what looked like an extraordinary opportunity.
[Bloche M.D., M. Gregg (2011-03-15). The Hippocratic Myth: Why Doctors Are Under Pressure to Ration Care, Practice Politics, and Compromise their Promise to Heal (p. 141). Palgrave Macmillan. Kindle Edition. -- bold emphases added]

The opportunity was the capture of Abu Zubaydah in a joint U.S.-Pakistan raid on March 28, 2002. Zubaydah had been taken to a hospital with life-threatening wounds, though that didn't stop FBI interrogators from beginning their interrogation of Zubaydhah while still hospitalized.

According to Bloche, "Months would pass before final Justice Department approval for what Mitchell had in mind. But once approval seemed likely, CIA leadership made the call. Kirk Hubbard answered it, quite literally, on the way back from Philadelphia. “I received a phone call indicating ‘they’ wanted Mitchell to depart that night along with others from CTC [Counter-Terrorism Center],” Hubbard remembers. “Mitchell had about twelve hours’ notice that he was being flown to meet AZ [Zubaydah].” Exactly when Mitchell began his brutish efforts with Zubaydah (and based on what sort of approval) remains a matter of dispute." (p. 142)

Zubaydah's Torture

According to Soufan's account in Black Banners, the abuse began right away, with Zubaydah subjected to nudity, loud music, white noise (a form of sensory deprivation), and sleep deprivation. Weeks later Mitchell stepped up the abuse to the level of full-on physical torture. This was probably in early to mid-May, around the time even Soufan, who'd been playing good-cop to CIA's bad-cop, left the CIA black site, apparently disgusted with Mitchell's techniques, though his FBI partner, Special Agent Stephen Gaudin, stayed on for some weeks more, and may have even participated in some of the "enhanced interrogation," according to a Department of Justice Inspector General report.Hubbard told Bloche that Mitchell and Jessen, who joined the CIA at the Thailand black site after he retired from the Air Force later in the year, were not running a "maverick" operation.

“Jim Mitchell, et al. didn’t take a pee without written approval from headquarters..." Hubbard said. "CIA leadership approved and is responsible for all that occurred" (p. 142). Mitchell's appointment had been supported by CTC's director, Cofer Black, and CIA director George Tenet, against some push-back from CTC's chief operational psychologist, R. Scott Shumate. (Shumate also served at the Thailand black site, leaving supposedly in protest at Mitchell's EIT program later in the year.)

Bloche's book also specifically states that James Mitchell was the author of the psychological assessment of Abu Zubaydah that was used to justify the torture techniques to the Office of Legal Counsel. As Bloche put it, Mitchell's assessment was based on “direct interviews with and observations of the subject,” and "gave the OLC cover to conclude that waterboarding wouldn’t cause Zubaydah 'severe mental pain or suffering.'" According to the written evaluation, Mitchell relied also on Zubaydah's written diaries, which were captured with him.

But with the release of Zubaydah's pre-capture diaries, obtained by Jason Leopold at Al Jazeera America, we know that much of what was written in Mitchell's psychological report was bogus. Claims of Zubaydah's massive influence were exaggerated, as the diaries make clear.

In addition, there is no mention of Zubaydah's serious medical problems and previous neurological injuries, which would have likely disqualified Zubaydah for the "enhanced interrogation" torture, even under the CIA's morally dubious criteria. Nor was there any mention of Zubaydah's previous torture, or an assessment of how that affected him. Leopold, who wrote a number of article analyzing the AZ diaries, has written up the story of Zubaydah's tortureby Pakistani authorities during a pre-9/11 arrest.

How bad was Zubaydah's torture by the CIA? Zubaydah described it to representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). The ICRC report was leaked to Mark Danner in 2010, and the following is a small representative sample of what Mitchell did, using his version of learned-helplessness via "enhanced interrogation":

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply. As it was not high enough even to sit upright, I had to crouch down. It was very difficult because of my wounds....

I was then dragged from the small box, unable to walk properly and put on what looked like a hospital bed, and strapped down very tightly with belts. A black cloth was then placed over my face and the interrogators used a mineral water bottle to pour water on the cloth so that I could not breathe. After a few minutes the cloth was removed and the bed was rotated into an upright position. The pressure of the straps on my wounds was very painful. I vomited.... I struggled against the straps, trying to breathe, but it was hopeless. I thought I was going to die. I lost control of my urine. Since then I still lose control of my urine when under stress.

A Long Tradition

Breaking down prisoners to make them compliant, to either use them for "exploitation" or to gain information, was a subject of great interest for the CIA going back to the beginning of the Cold War. One of the researchers from decades earlier, Albert Biderman, created a "chart of coercion" which was later taught by SERE associates of Mitchell to interrogators at Guantanamo in December 2002. (To see the actual chart, go to pg. 51 of supporting documentsin the Senate Armed Services 2008 report on detainee abuse.)

There is no evidence that Seligman's original research on learned helplessness, which made him famous, was associated with the CIA research into torture, even though other prominent behavioral researchers at the time, such as psychiatrist Louis West, and psychologist Harry Harlow (who was also an American Psychological President at one point), had created by the late 1950s a theory of breaking down human beings psychologically by inculcating dependency, debility and dread into them. The CIA incorporated this into their KUBARK manual for interrogation, and a version of these techniques even informs current practicein the Army's current Field Manual for interrogation.Seligman's research on LH, which went back to the 1960s, made him famous. In 1997, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association (serving his term a year later).

Whither Psychology? Wither America?

On December 15, 2013 Seligman will be one of a handful of keynote speakers at the Milton H. Erickson Foundation's "Evolution of Psychotherapy" meeting in Anaheim, California, where he will speak on "Positive Psychology," his 21st century enthusiasm. His Positive Psychology work garnered Seligman a huge "no-bid" contractwith the Department of Defense a few years ago.

There's been precious little interest in recent years in pushing harder to get to the bottom of the CIA/Pentagon torture scandal.

Many Americans, including those on the left, believe that President Obama ended torture, and on that basis supported his call to ignore the past crimes of the Bush administration, and trusted that the current political regime had eschewed torture and such cruelty forever.

But that's not true, and disinterest in pursuing investigation into the torture story further has a political agenda at its root, i.e., protecting the Democratic Party's image as an alternative to the GOP on matters of national security, while also protecting top Pentagon and CIA brass.

While Guantanamo remains an embarrassment for Obama and occasionally makes the press -- mostly due to the actions of the prisoners there who have gone on hunger strike over and over again to bring the world's attention to their plight -- there is precious little interest in bringing the former or current torturers to any real accountability. That must change, because the logic and morality of torture calls for its resurrection as needed. Already, the US public has been fooled into believing there is no torture, even as the country's primary military and intelligence manual allows use of isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, instillation of fear and manipulation of phobias, not to mention use of drugs.

Only an informed and impassioned public can make the difference between the continuing barbarism of torture and the civilized and humane practices that our country pretends to believe in.

Cross-posted at ShadowProof

Japanese WWII Torture Document Eerily Reminiscent of US Torture Program

The following is taken from a 63 year old book published in the early days of the Cold War. Titled Materials on the Trial of Former Serviceman of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons (Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1950), the book contains trial summaries and testimony from the Khabarovsk war crimes trial in December 1949.

Derided as just another Stalinist show trial at the time, historians have since confirmed the evidence regarding the crimes prosecuted, including deadly biological experiments on prisoners by special units of the Japanese Imperial Army, the most famous of which was Unit 731.

The selection below is one of the exhibits contained in the book, collected in a section labeled “Documentary Evidence.” The book itself has been out of print for decades, and is generally unavailable, except via some few libraries and antiquarian bookstores. The selection included here is on the Japanese Army use of torture. The reader will notice that the Japanese Army demonstrated many of the same techniques and concerns the U.S. showed when it was implementing its own torture program under the CIA and the Department of Defense.

The Japanese torture program included, as described here, use of stress positions, physical attack, and a form of waterboarding. The interrogators were instructed to be aware of possible false information by prisoners in order to get “relief from suffering.” They appeared to also be concerned in the truthfulness of information obtained, and the possibility of deception.

Moreover, the Japanese were quite worried about others knowing about the torture. While they do not outright call for the murder of prisoners, one is left to guess at what “measures must be taken” so that prisoners did not talk of the torture “afterwards.”

The material from the Khabarovsk trial is consistent with that published in a report by the Supreme Commander of Allied Powers on “Japanese Methods of Prisoner of War Interrogation” (June 1, 1946). Techniques described there include: beatings of various sorts (derided, though, as “the most clumsy method”); threats of “murder, torture, starving, deprivation of sleep, solitary confinement, etc.”; psychological threats; water torture, which sometimes resulted in fatalities; attaching a prisoner's thumbs to a “motor car which proceeds to pull him around in a circle until he falls exhausted,” and other tortures. Some Japanese soldiers and officers were prosecuted for war crimes after the war for such inhumane and criminal conduct.

What Made the Khabarovsk Trial Special

What makes the selection from the Khabarovsk trial unique is the degree to which the document discusses the importance of hiding the torture, and how to deal with deception. Interestingly, there is no discussion of producing false confessions.

It is noteworthy, too, to understand that thousands of prisoners who were sent to Unit 731 had also been, or were interrogated and/or tortured, at the site where biological experiments on them were done. All the prisoners were killed after the experiments were completed. The results of the experiments were operationalized in biological warfare campaigns by the Japanese in China that killed, recent estimates claim, perhaps as many as half a million people.

In future stories, I will discuss at much greater length aspects of this material that has gone unreported for years. The reasons for such a lack of historical writing is not lack of interest, but the fact that what materials the Japanese did not destroy were kept classified by the Americans for decades as part of an amnesty deal made with the leaders of the Japanese biological warfare program. The deal included a transfer of data on the fatal human experiments to the U.S. Army and intelligence services. Both the Department of Defense and (most likely) the CIA were involved in the decision to give amnesty to the Unit 731 et al. criminals.

For more information on the deal made between the U.S. and the Japanese described here see Peter Williams and David Wallace, Unit 731: The Japanese Army Secret of Secrets, 1989, Hodder and Stoughton, London; Sheldon H. Harris, Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-1945, and the American Cover-up, rev. ed. 2002, Routledge, New York; and Daniel Barenblatt, A Plague Upon Humanity: the Secret Genocide of Axis Japan’s Germ Warfare, 2004, Harper, New York.

The Khabarovsk selection reprinted below appears on pages 235-237 of Materials. I have tried my best to reproduce the material as it is in the book. What is italic or bold here is italic or bold in the book. Extra spacing between letters is as in the printed material. Case has been preserved. Paragraph breaks are by extra lines, while in the book they are by indent.

File No. 48. Pages 90, 112, 113, 124, 125, 126. “Operation Officer's Guide (Part I).” From the files of the Mutankiang J.M.M. 

Translated from the Japanese  

S t r i c t l y  C o n f i d e n t i a l 

Seal: “MUTANKIANG J. M. M.
Received June 14, 1945
Inc. No. 9”

Page 90 

MILITARY INVESTIGATION DIVISION
OF GENERAL HEADQUARTERS 

Copied by Unit
No. 471-MANSHU 

SECRET WAR SERVICE GUIDE 

Page 112  

I n c l o s u re 

Fundamental Rules for Interrogating War Prisoners 

Page 113 

G e n e r a l  R u l e s 

1. The present rules relate to cases of interrogation with the view to obtaining information, but do not relate to the interrogation of criminals. 

2. Persons who have surrendered, deserters, captured enemy spies, those who illegally cross the frontier, crews of aircraft compelled to make a forced landing or of vessels compelled to come to our shores, escaped war prisoners who had formerly served in our army, the inhabitants of districts we have newly occupied, and also civilian refugees from the sphere of enemy influence, except on special matters, are interrogated in conformity with the methods of investigating and interrogating war prisoners.

Page 124 

62. Sometimes, depending on circumstances, it is advantageous to resort to torture, but often this may lead to harmful consequences, and therefore, before resorting to it, it is necessary to carefully consider whether this should be done or not. Furthermore, torture must be applied in such a way as not to lead to bad consequences for us. 

Page 125 

63. Torture, the infliction of physical suffering, must be sustained and continued in such a way that there shall be no other way of relief from suffering except by giving truthful information. 

Torture is advantageous because of the speed with which it is possible with relative ease to compel persons of weak will to give truthful testimony, but there is the danger that, in order to relieve himself from suffering, or in order to please the interrogator, the person interrogated will, on the contrary, distort the truth. 

In the case of persons of strong will, torture may strengthen their will to resist and leave ill-feeling against the empire after the interrogation. 

64. In relation to persons of weak will, torture is usually applied in those cases when the person interrogated does not speak the truth in the face of evidence, but there is full reason to suppose that this person will speak frankly if torture is applied. 

65. It is necessary to bear in mind that the methods of torture must be such as can be easily applied, as will sustain suffering without rousing feelings of pity, and as will not leave either wounds or scars. However, in those cases when it is necessary to create apprehension of death, the harm caused the person interrogated can be ignored, but this must be done in such a way as not to make it impossible to continue the interrogation. 

The following examples of torture may be given: 

1. Compelling the person to sit up straight and motionless. 

2. Putting pencils between the fingers not far from their bases and tying the tops of the fingers with string and moving them. 

3. Putting the person interrogated on his back (it is advisable to raise the feet a little) and dripping water into the nose and mouth simultaneously. 

4. Putting the interrogated person on his side and stamping on his ankle. 

5. Compelling the interrogated person to stand under a shelf that is too low to enable him to stand straight. 

66. In a case when a wound is accidentally inflicted on the person interrogated, it is necessary, taking into account the general situation and the interests of our country, to take resolute measures, taking full responsibility for same. 

67. On receiving testimony as a result of applying torture, it must be ascertained whether this testimony is the result of a desire to avoid further suffering and to please the interrogator; in such cases, some corroboration of the truth of the testimony is necessary. 

Page 126 

68. After the application of torture, it is necessary to convince the person who had undergone torture that the torture applied to him was quite a natural measure, or to take such measures as will induce him out of a sense of pride, sense of honor, etc, not to speak of it afterwards. In the case of persons from whom this cannot be expected, measures must be taken as in the case of those upon whom accidental wounds have been inflicted. 

69. Nobody must know about the application of torture except the persons concerned with this. Under no circumstances must other prisoners know about it. It is very important to take measures to prevent shrieks from being heard.* 

Translated by Senior Interpreter, Master of Historical Sciences
Signed: (PODPALOVA) 

*The rest is omitted. – Trans.

"Guidebook to False Confessions": Key Document John Yoo Used to Draft Torture Memo Released

Originally published at Truthout
by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye

In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency's first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was "withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions," according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, "attorneys from the CIA's Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S."

One of the key documents handed out to Bush officials at this meeting, and at Principals Committee sessions chaired by Rice that took place between May and July 2002, was a 37-page instructional manual that contained detailed descriptions of seven of the ten techniques that ended up in the legal opinion widely referred to as the "torture memo," drafted by Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, three months later. According to Rice, Yoo had attended the Principals Committee meetings and participated in discussions about Zubaydah's torture.

That instructional manual, referred to as "Pre-Academic Laboratory (PREAL) Operating Instructions," has just been released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The document sheds additional light on the origins of the Bush administration's torture policy and for the first time describes exactly what methods of torture Bush officials had discussed - and subsequently approved - for Zubaydah in May 2002.

The PREAL manual was prepared by the Department of Defense's (DOD) Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) and used by instructors in the JPRA's Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) courses to teach US military personnel how to withstand brutal interrogation techniques if captured by the enemy during wartime. The manual states one of the primary goals of the training is "to give students the most reliable mental picture possible of an actual peacetime governmental detention experiences [sic]."

A US counterterrorism official and an aide to one of the Bush officials who participated in Principals Committee meetings in May 2002, however, confirmed to Truthout last week that the PREAL manual was one of several documents the CIA obtained from JPRA that was shared with Rice and other Principals Committee members in May 2002, the same month the CIA officially took over Zubaydah's interrogation from the FBI. As National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush, Rice chaired the meetings.

Rice and Bellinger have denied ever seeing a list of SERE training techniques. But in 2008, they told the Senate Armed Services Committee, which conducted an investigation into treatment of detainees in custody of the US government, that they recalled being present at White House meetings where SERE training was discussed.

Sarah Farber, a spokeswoman at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Rice teaches political economy, said she would pass on Truthout's queries about claims that Rice reviewed and discussed the PREAL manual to Rice's office. But Rice's office did not respond to our inquiries.

Guidebook to False Confessions

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD's most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA's teaching academy, said he immediately knew the true value of the PREAL manual if employed as part of an interrogation program.

"This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence," Kleinman said in an interview. "If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using."

Indeed, in their newly published book "The Hunt for KSM," which refers to self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, investigative reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer wrote that the torture of the top al-Qaeda figure resulted in false confessions about pending attack plans.

Kleinman, who has testified before four committees of Congress about interrogation and detainee policy - and the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" - has publicly called for a thorough investigation into how a program such as this could have found its way into the interrogation doctrine that guided US-sanctioned operations.

"In SERE courses, we emphatically presented this interrogation paradigm as one that was employed exclusively by nations that were in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and international treaties against torture," Kleinman said. "We proudly assured the students that we - the United States - would never resort to such despicable methods."

Rice said she was assured the interrogation methods that were used on Zubaydah, which she and other officials signed off on, "had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm," according to written responses to questions about the origins of the torture program Rice provided the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Kleinman, however, said that's simply untrue.

"Dr. Rice is clearly an exceptionally bright individual, as were her colleagues. At the same time, however, they understood little about human intelligence gathering and even less about resistance to interrogation training. I simply don't understand how they could have promoted the assertion that, because these techniques have been used safely with tens of thousands of US military personnel in a carefully controlled training environment, they would also be employed safely in a real-world interrogation environment?" said Kleinman, who testified before the Armed Services Committee about the use of SERE techniques. "A critical distinction that has been consistently overlooked is that detainees have no idea whether interrogators are using [techniques like waterboarding] to intimidate them or to kill them. In a training environment, waterboarding would end as soon as you raised your hand, and the student could be absolutely confident that SERE instructors and medical personnel were always ready to respond to ensure they wouldn't be injured. In contrast, from the detainee's perspective, he is in the presence of the enemy."

Kleinman pointed to one of the techniques in the PREAL manual to demonstrate how the safety of detainees subjected to the methods was clearly not a cause for concern among the government officials who designed and approved of Bush's torture program. In a section describing the use of cramped confinement, one of the torture techniques Zubaydah was subjected to, the training manual says, "The maximum time allowed for a student to be in cramped confinement in 20 minutes." But the Yoo/Bybee torture memo says, "Confinement in the larger space can last up to eighteen hours; for the smaller space confinement lasts no more than two hours."

The PREAL document notes that the purpose of cramped confinement, like the 55-gallon drum and the water pit, is used to "demonstrate the reaction to uncooperative behavior, inconsistent logic, or to accelerate the physical and psychological stresses of captivity."

It also appears that James Mitchell, the psychologist under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of Bush's torture program, received some form of authorization to use cramped confinement and sleep deprivation in May 2002, the same month the PREAL manual appears to have been accessed and discussed among top Bush officials and the CIA.

The introduction of a cramped confinement box in May 2002 is what led Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who first interrogated Zubaydah shortly after he was captured, to leave the CIA black site prison in Thailand that month.

Soufan had complained to officials at FBI headquarters that Mitchell's interrogations of Zubaydah amounted to "borderline torture," according to a report released in 2008 by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine related to the FBI's role in harsh interrogations.

Soufan's partner on the other hand, FBI Special Agent Steve Gaudin, opted to remain at the black site prison. He told Fine's investigators that unlike Soufan, he had no "moral objection" to the interrogation techniques Mitchell subjected Zubaydah to because they were "comparable" to the "harsh interrogation" techniques he "himself had undergone" as part of the US Army's SERE training.

In his book, "The Black Banners," published last September, Soufan refers to the methods of interrogation Mitchell subjected Zubaydah to during May 2002 as "experiments."

Breaking Down the Prisoner

The CIA, apparently, was not legally authorized to subject detainees to some of the more extreme forms of torture described in the manual, such as immersion in an icy "Water Pit" and forced confinement in a 55-gallon drum or barrel, the purpose of which was to "demonstrate the reaction to uncooperative behavior and accelerate the physical and psychological stresses of captivity."

But other techniques cited in the PREAL instructional manual, such as walling, cramped confinement, facial slap, sleep deprivation, attention grasp, facial hold and stress positions were included in Yoo and Bybee's August 1, 2002 torture memo.

The manual also describes how the use of hooding (a form of sensory deprivation) and sexual humiliation can be used as a form of torture, which military interrogators employed against detainees at Guantanamo. Moreover, SERE trainees were also subjected to isolation, according to the PREAL manual (another form of torture detainees underwent), including a harsh form where the isolated prisoner was hooded and cuffed in what the manual called "Iso-stress." OLC, however, never signed off on isolation as a specific interrogation technique.

Where the PREAL manual and the torture memo differ is in the detailed descriptions of the purpose of subjecting a prisoner to these torture techniques. For example, the PREAL manual says the purpose of walling, where a prisoner is slammed against a "flexible" wall, would be to instill "fear," "despair" and "humiliation." The torture memo, however, states "walling" is a method used to "shock" or "surprise" the detainee.

The most controversial of the ten torture techniques used on Zubaydah - waterboarding - is not included in the PREAL manual. Waterboarding was cited in other SERE documents the CIA and DOD obtained from JPRA, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee that probed the treatment of detainees in custody of the US government.

The PREAL manual also includes a lengthy description on the use of water as a torture method, such as "water dousing." That technique, which the manual says was used to "create a distracting pressure, to startle" and to "instill humiliation or cause insult," was not approved until August 2004, when the head of OLC, Steven Bradbury, drafted a second torture memo to replace the one by Yoo and Bybee.

However, high-level intelligence source told Truthout in April 2010 that Zubaydah was repeatedly doused with cold water from a hose (an example cited in the PREAL manual's of how water could be used to torture a prisoner) while he was naked and shackled by chains attached to a ceiling in the cell he was kept in at the black site prison in Thailand.

The harsh physical techniques included in the manual are consistent with notes written by psychologist Bruce Jessen for a SERE survival-training course more than two decades ago, which said enemies who captured US personnel used methods of torture, such as those outlined in the PREAL manual, as a way of gaining "total control" over the prisoner. The "end goal," according to Jessen's handwritten notes, was to make the prisoner feel "completely dependent" on his captors so they would "comply with [their] wishes."

The purpose of such dependence, according to Jessen, who worked with Mitchell in designing Bush's torture program, was to coerce the prisoner's cooperation, the better to use the prisoner for "propaganda, special favors, confession, etc." Jessen's handwritten notes provided the first look into the true purpose of the "enhanced interrogation" program and were the subject of an exclusive investigative report published by Truthout last year.

The PREAL manual also notes the importance of propaganda in the prisoner of war setting. For instance, in a mock torture scenario prisoners are brought before a "press conference" to answer questions from "reporters." According to the manual, "reporters play the role of legitimate American newspersons," raising the question as to whether professional reporters were recruited as part of the PREAL training.
 
"Found" in OLC's Files

The PREAL manual was first identified in a report released by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) in February 2010, which was the result of an investigation conducted by OPR over five and a half years into the legal work Yoo and Bybee did prior to writing the August 2002 torture memo. (Jeffrey Kaye was the first reporter to discuss the PREAL manual in a report published in Truthout in March 2010.)

The OPR report states that the "May 7, 2002" PREAL manual, marked "For Official Use Only," was found in OLC's files, but investigators said there was "no indication of how or when it was obtained."

Aaron Graves, a spokesman in DoD's FOIA division, said he did not know if the May 7, 2002, date at the bottom of each page of the manual meant it was drafted on that date, accessed from  a government hard-drive, or placed into OLC's files on that date.

Jason Darelius, a DoD FOIA officer, told Truthout Monday that the manual was cleared for release late last year and posted to DoD's FOIA reading room March 15. It was requested under FOIA by McClatchy Newspapers, but the news organization never filed a report about the significance of the document as it pertains to the origins of the Bush administration's torture program.

"Learned Helplessness"

The Justice Department's OPR report stated that interrogation methods US military personnel may experience after enemy capture differed from the mock prisoner of war scenarios SERE trainees underwent "in one significant respect ..." Quoting from the PREAL manual, the OPR report said, "Maximum effort will be made to ensure that students do not develop a sense of 'learned helplessness'" during role-playing scenarios.

That citation, we now know, can be found on page 4 of the PREAL manual, under "[P]re-Academic Laboratory Goals." It underscores how military and CIA interrogators deviated from the lessons of the SERE training when they subjected detainees to the same torture techniques used in the role-playing scenarios.

"Learned Helplessness" was one of the main goals of the Bush administration's torture program as overseen by Mitchell and Jessen. It is defined as "a laboratory model of depression in which exposure to a series of unforeseen adverse situations gives rise to a sense of helplessness or an inability to cope with or devise ways to escape such situations, even when escape is possible," according to the American Heritage Medical Dictionary.

The learned helplessness theory was developed by psychologist Martin Seligman, who discussed it in May 2002 at the SERE training school in San Diego, the same month Mitchell, who attended the lecture, began subjecting Zubaydah to various torture techniques. The CIA sponsored Seligman's lecture.

Brent Mickum, Zubaydah's habeas attorney, reviewed the PREAL document and said it confirms what he has long believed: that Zubaydah's torture took place prior to the issuance of Yoo and Bybee's August 2002 torture memo.

"This document confirms, in my view, that my client's torture was over before that memo was ever issued," said Mickum. "I can't go into detail and why that is the government can only explain. I have been muzzled wrongfully even though the government contends that everything it did was legal."

Echoing Kleinman, Mickum added he was also struck by the PREAL manual's extensive warnings to SERE instructors about the safety of trainees subjected to brutal interrogation methods.

"Without commenting about anything that my client told me about what was done to him, what I can tell you is that there is no correlation between the safe treatment of SERE trainees listed in this particular document and what happened to my client. None whatsoever."

Author's Note: When the Department of Defense released the PREAL manual last month, several pages were missing from the PDF file and the file also contained a number of duplicate pages. We contacted the FOIA office about the issue and officials there restored the missing pages, except for one: page 33, which a FOIA officer said he is unable to track down.

Slapping David Shedd, or How I Learned to Love the CIA Interrogation Program

Originally posted at FDL/The Seminal

Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, is full of the same insider tales of government gossip as his previous books. One reads Woodward to pick out the various gems strewn along the way, cognizant that even those are the products of spin manufactured by the various principals involved. A particularly interesting nugget concerns the way the intelligence agencies passed on information about their torture program to the incoming Obama administration.

Woodward spends precious few pages on this subject, and the anecdotes involved can't be relied upon to provide a real study of just what went on. But the couple of stories provided are juicy enough.

According to Woodward, on December 9, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama was shepherded into a tiny SCIF office to meet with CIA Director Michael Hayden and Director of National Intelligence Michael O'Connell. "Hayden sat directly across from Obama at a table so narrow that they were uncomfortably close to each other." Obama had brought Joe Biden, Jim Jones, Greg Craig, and "several others." Hayden and O'Connell reviewed various top secret clandestine and anti-terrorism programs, secret operations against North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. Craig was apparently "shocked" when Hayden told Obama's group that the U.S. "owned" the political structure and security forces of Iraq.

Be that as it may, Hayden, who apparently ran the briefing, got to their review of the CIA's Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program at the end of the meeting. While Obama apparently sat mostly impassively, Biden and the others were not convinced by CIA claims they got promises of "no torture" from the countries to which they sent kidnapped victims in the "war on terror." Hayden also noted that the CIA "black sites" had been shut down and "all the prisoners transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba." This timeline conflicts with the claim by Obama that he had closed the black sites himself in his early executive order on detentions.

Then the discussion wheeled around to the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EIT). At this point, Woodward's narrative gets a bit confusing. Hayden tells Obama that, per a 2006 finding by President Bush, only six of the 13 original EITs remained in use. Woodward reminds us of the original 13 in an endnote. They are Dietary manipulation; Forced nudity; Attention grasp; Walling (slamming the prisoner into a wall multiple times); Facial hold; Facial or insult slap; Abdominal slap; Cramped Confinement; Wall standing (a kind of stress position); Stress positions proper; Water dousing; Sleep deprivation; and Waterboarding. (What happened to the insects in a box, Bob?) Woodward does describe the sleep deprivation in a way consistent with my contention in May 2009 that "sleep deprivation" was always combined with stress positions, shackling, partial nudity or humiliation, and dietary manipulation or partial starvation. This aspect of sleep deprivation, never totally emphasized by Woodward in the main text of the book, must be kept in mind when Woodward has Hayden tell Obama that the attenuated version of the EITs (which includes sleep deprivation) are more than enough to "break" "suspected terrorists" in "less than a week."

Obama asked what the remaining six EITs were? And Hayden's reported answer appears to veer off from the EITs.

Hayden said: Isolation of the detainee; noise or loud music; and lights in the cells 24 hours a day. There was limited use of shackles when moving a prisoner or when the prisoner was a danger. In addition, blindfolds were used when moving prisoners or when the prisoners might gain information that could compromise the security of the facility.

"David, stand up please," Hayden said to David Shedd, the DNI's deputy director for policy. Shedd rose. Hayden gently slapped his face, then shook the deputy DNI.

It was as rough as what might happen in "Little League football," Hayden said. [pg. 54]

From reading this account, apart from the hilarious bit of play-acting with the ever-obliging David Shedd, it's difficult to see what six of the EITs were retained, and what, besides waterboarding, was eliminated. For one thing, Hayden's reply focuses on techniques that were not part of the EITs -- isolation, sensory overload, and partial sensory deprivation -- while demonstrating by a slap to O'Connell's deputy that "Facial or insult slap" was still in use.

Hayden then makes his play to keep "these methods" under an Obama administration, because "the very existence of the interrogation program was more important than its content." The CIA director told the President-elect, "Terrorists would know they faced a more severe interrogation if picked up by the CIA than by the military, which used the Army Field Manual."

But how would the terrorists know this, when even I can't figure out what exactly the U.S. intelligence agencies do? Woodward quotes Hayden in an unintentional moment of self-revelation. For the CIA, the form is more important that the content. The "terrorists" don't really know, but they believe they know they can expect something terrible, something especially bad. The point of this is to engender fear. And fear is an essential component to psychological torture. It enhances the effects of sensory overload and sensory deprivation, and contributes to the psychological breakdown of the victim. This is not a theory, but was the conclusion of years of research by the U.S. government into interrogation and torture. The use of SERE trainees as experimental subjects for coercive interrogation and techniques did not begin in 2001 or 2002 -- it began at least over 50 years ago.

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.”

.... 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.

Now Bob Woodward is not going to explain all that. Being a stenographer for spooks and politicians, he offers very little analysis at all. His fable of how Obama got briefed on the use of torture by the CIA, and Obama's subsequent decision to ban all the EITs and utilize the Army Field Manual may bear some elements of truth. It seems certain Obama knows very little if any of the historical material I adverted to above. And Barack Obama, like much of America, may not know that the Army Field Manual contains the very techniques that Hayden said the CIA was using (isolation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, driving up of fear). The operative word here is ignorance: ignorance about what has gone on and is going on.

This nation has not gotten the full truth about this country's torture program, past, present, and plans for the future. As the commentators latch onto the upcoming election with ever-greater avidity, it appears certain that these issues will get shoved even farther onto the back burner. We can't let that happen. The City of Berkeley has announced that October 10-16 will be "Say No to Torture Week." I'll be participating with a slew of other celebrities, bloggers, psychologists, and political activists to make it clear that "the community finds it unacceptable for an American torture apparatus to remain operational while those responsible remain unaccountable." What is your community doing?