How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual that (Still) Includes Torture (updated)

I'm marking the 12th anniversary of the abomination that is Guantanamo with a couple of repostings related to how the Bush administration, with the connivance of key members of the press and the human rights community, sold a continuation of torture as an end to torture.

Such a reposting seems necessary as the entire press, human rights groups, and blogging world continues to ignore the ongoing issue of torture via interrogations. While indefinite detention, forced cell extractions aka beatings, and the painful forced-feeding of hunger strikers still garners attention, and rightly so, the fact the U.S. continues to have an official policy of torture in its interrogation manual continues to be ignored, even though it is the most important issue about torture facing America today.

Eschewing the worst-looking forms of torture, like waterboarding, in 2006, at the same time that "high-value detainees" like Khalid Sheik Muhammad and Abu Zubaydah were transferred out of the CIA black sites and sent to Guantanamo, the U.S. put out a new Army Field Manual (AFM) with instructions on interrogations that claimed to be "humane."

Origin of AFM Rewrite Out of Ashes of Abu Ghraib Scandal

Only recently have I found the possible origin of the new AFM's drafting in the August 2005 recommendations of a Joint Chiefs of Staff panel subsequent to the military investigations into the Abu Ghraib scandal. (See pg. 315-16 of this document.)

Recommend a policy-level review and determination of the status and treatment of all detainees, when not classified as EPWs [Enemy Prisoners of War]. This review needs to particularly focus on the definition of humane treatment, military necessity, and proper employment of interrogation techniques. (e.g. boundaries or extremes)....

Recommend study of the DoD authorized interrogation techniques to establish a framework for evaluating their cumulative impact in relation to the obligation to treat detainees humanely.

The study of "authorized interrogation techniques" was tasked to the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone.

But a number of the new techniques that ultimately showed up in the newly written AFM were not humane at all. In fact, they amounted to torture and/or cruel, inhumane and degrading behavior. Over the years various human rights groups recognized this and came out publicly for changes to the AFM. (See here, and here, and here, and here, and here.)

The AFM made changes to its text that allowed wider latitude in use of drugs in interrogations, while eliminating prohibitions against sleep deprivation and stress positions that had been in the pre-2006 AFM. Even worse, a category of prisoners that were not considered subject to Geneva Convention POW protections was singled out for a special kind of interrogation "technique," as described in the manual's Appendix M.

Appendix M allowed for use of isolation for 30 days, and potentially indefinitely; sleep deprivation for up to 30 days, but potentially indefinitely; manipulation of environment and diet (so long as it wasn't "extreme"); and forms of sensory deprivation, so long as every form of sensory input wasn't affected.

There was very little interest in whether or not or how these new techniques were being used. In fact, no one had apparently even thought to ask the government until I did in January 2010 whether or not Appendix M had even been used. Not surprisingly, the Department of Defense confirmed it was using Appendix M interrogations at Guantanamo.

More surprising was my discovery, confirmed by a DoD spokesman, that the use of the Appendix M torture techniques was approved in a Bush-era Office of Legal Council memorandum, and left in place by the Obama administration despite claims that all such memos were withdrawn in January 2009. Even to this day, in a massive political failure, not one human rights group or legal organization has recognized this fact.

The Torture Never Stopped

Intense abusive interrogations continue. We know from a filing by Omar Khadr in his Canadian court case that prior to release from Guantanamo to Canadian authorities, and shortly after his plea deal with Military Commissions authorities in October 2010, Khadr was subjected to prolonged interrogation that likely was conducted, given the key presence of the use of isolation, to Appendix M parameters: "Following the Pre-Trial Agreement, the Americans transferred Omar to a maximum security detention facility restricted for prisoners convicted of offenses. Omar was thrown back into solitary confinement and continued to be subjected to months of prolonged interrogations consisting of a sequence of 9 hours of interrogation per day for 9 days at a time."

With an even dozen years of crimes at Guantanamo -- fully over 1/3 of them under the auspices of the Obama administration -- I think it's time to review just how consensus around torture takes place in actuality. As we shall see, it is a complex story, involving media manipulation, psychological effects such as denial, and subordination of human rights to party politics and an achingly slow platform of reformist change. I say "consensus" because silence about all this amounts to consensus.

The following was published at Alternet and my own blog, Invictus, in January 2009. (My first writing recognizing torture in the AFM goes back to the introduction of the new manual in September 2006, when I wrote under my pseudonym Valtin.) In a day or two, I will publish part two, which will look at how the foreign press saw through what DoD was doing, and how a major blogging news and opinion site helped cover that up.

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How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual that (Still) Includes Torture

A January 17 [2009] New York Times editorial noted that Attorney General designate Eric Holder testified at his nomination hearings that when it came to overhauling the nation's interrogation rules for both the military and the CIA, the Army Field Manual represented "a good start." The editorial noted the vagueness of Holder's statement. Left unsaid was the question, if the AFM is only a "good start," what comes next?

The Times editorial writer never bothered to mention the fact that three years earlier, a different New York Times article (12/14/2005) introduced a new controversy regarding the rewrite of the Army Field Manual. The rewrite was inspired by a proposal by Senator John McCain to limit U.S. military and CIA interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual. (McCain would later allow an exception for the CIA.)

According to the Times article, a new set of classified procedures proposed for the manual was "was pushing the limits on legal interrogation." Anonymous military sources called the procedures "a back-door effort" to undermine McCain's efforts at the time to change U.S. abusive interrogation techniques, and stop the torture.

A Forgotten Controversy

Over the next six months or so, a number of articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times described the course of the controversy. By mid-June 2006, the NYT was reporting that, under pressure from unnamed senior generals and members of Congress (including McCain, and Senators Warner and Graham), the Pentagon was rethinking its plan to have a classified annex to the AFM, which would include a different set of interrogation rules for "unlawful combatants," like the detainees at Guantanamo. Included in the discussion about these classified procedures were, reportedly, members of the State Department and various human rights organizations.

According to an article in the L.A. Times, this latest fight over the classified procedures went back at least to mid-May 2006. The manual itself had been written at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, roughly a year earlier, and then sent to the Pentagon for further evalution. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man, Stephen Cambone, was put in charge of its final draft. According the L.A. Times article, members of Congress were "keen to avoid a public fight with the Pentagon." The announcement that the controversial and still unknown procedures might not be included in the manual was seen as a success by human rights groups.

Yet the proverbial chickens never hatched, and by early September 2006 the new Army Field Manual was finally released. The section on special interrogation procedures for "unlawful combatants" was included as a special appendix (Appendix M), and published in unclassified format. According to a L.A. Times story on September 8, Cambone was crowing that the new Army Field Manual instructions would give interrogators "what they need to do the job." The article noted:

The new manual includes one restricted technique that will only be used on so-called unlawful combatants – such as Al Qaeda suspects – not traditional prisoners of war.

That technique, called “separation,” involves segregating a detainee from other prisoners. Military officials said separation was not the equivalent of solitary confinement and was consistent with Geneva Convention protections.

As for the proposed secrecy surrounding the new techniques, the Pentagon had decided it couldn't keep them secret forever. Senator Warner was also on record as against any classified annex to the manual.

Not long ago, I wrote about what was included in Appendix M, which purports to introduce the single technique of "separation." In fact, the Appendix M includes instructions regarding solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and, in combination with other procedures included in the Army Field Manual, amounted to a re-introduction of the psychological torture techniques practiced at Guantanamo, and taught by Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE psychologists and other personnel at the Cuban base and elsewhere.

The rewrite of the Army Field Manual included other seemingly minor changes. It introduced dubious procedures, such as the "False Flag" technique, wherein interrogators could pretend they were from another country. It also redefined the meaning of "Fear Up," a procedure meant to exploit a prisoner's existing fears under imprisonment. Now, interrogators could create "new" fears. The AFM rewrite was a masterpiece of subterfuge and double talk, which could only have been issued from the offices of Rumsfeld and Cambone.

One would think this turnaround of the Pentagon's position regarding a removal of these controversial procedures would have been a matter of some note. But there was no protest from Congress, no mention of the past controversy in the press, and only vague comments at first and then acceptance by human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Only Physicians for Human Rights protested the inclusion of the techniques listed in Appendix M. For the rest... silence.

[Author's Note, 1/13/2014: By 2009, Amnesty International had clearly come out against Appendix M, as we can see at this posting. In 2010, Open Society Foundations, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch signed a letter to the Pentagon, along with other groups, asking for the removal of Appendix M. The letter stated, "we are concerned that Appendix M creates a legal precedent that may be used in the future by othergovernments to justify abusing captured U.S. personnel. As we make clear above, Appendix M can be interpreted to allow serious abuse, including months of abnormal sleep deprivation.]

DoD Rolls Out the New Model

On September 6, 2006, a news briefing was held by the Department of Defense, as part of the unveiling of the new Army Field Manual, in conjunction with the then-new Defense Department Directive for Detainee Programs (DoD Directive 2310.01E). Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson and Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) Lt. Gen. John Kimmons were the DoD presenters.

Much of the belief that the AFM provides an improvement over previous policies of the Department of Defense is likely due to a confusion between the two documents introduced that summer of 2006, the new Detainee Program Directive and the new Army Field Manual.

DoD Directive 2310.10E made a number of changes in regards to detainee operations and management. It made clear that "All persons subject to this Directive shall observe the requirements of the law of war, and shall apply, without regard to a detainee’s legal status, at a minimum the standards articulated in Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949..." The same type of language appears in the text of the Army Field Manual itself.

During the press briefing on September 6, and a different one the next day for the foreign press, reporters were not so easily fooled.

One unnamed reporter at the DoD briefing challenged Lt. Gen. Kimmons on the "single standard" issue:

Q General, why was the decision made to keep these categories -- the separate categories of detainees? You have traditional prisoners of war and then the unlawful enemy combatants. Why not treat all detainees under U.S. military custody the exact same way?

Kimmons's answer gives us insight into the kind of convoluted legal thinking that went into the Pentagon's rationale for the acceptability of coercive interrogation -- for some (emphasis added):

GEN. KIMMONS: Well, actually, the distinction is in Geneva through the Geneva Convention, which describes the criteria that prisoner -- that lawful combatants, such as enemy prisoners of war -- which attributes they possess -- wearing a uniform, fighting for a government, bearing your arms openly and so on and so forth. And it's all spelled out fairly precisely inside Geneva.

Geneva also makes clear that traditional, unlawful combatants such as in the -- 50 years ago, we would have talked about spies and saboteurs, but also now applies to this new category of unlawful -- or new type of unlawful combatant, terrorists, al Qaeda, Taliban.

They clearly don't meet the criteria for prisoner of war status, lawful combatant status, and so they're not entitled to the -- therefore to the extra protections and privileges which Geneva affords.

But Kimmon's clarification was not very helpful. In fact, if a prisoner is judged not a "lawful combatant", then he or she immediately becomes covered by Geneva IV, the "Civilian Convention," which protects anyone "who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever find themselves" held prisoner. According to the International Red Cross Commentary on the Geneva Conventions:

Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third [POW] Convention, [or] a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention.... There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law.

Separation and Sensory Deprivation

One questioner took on the topic of the "Separation" technique. Wasn't it the same as solitary confinement, and wasn't solitary confinement "banned by Common Article 3 in the affront to human dignity, other provisions? "Are you confident," a reporter asked, "that separation is permitted under Common Article 3?"

The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs responded by denying that separation amounted to solitary confinement, even though the AFM describes the technique as, among other things "physical separation" "limited to 30 days of initial duration." Extensions for such physical separation must be reviewed and approved the General Officer or Flag Officer who initially approved the original "separation."

Kimmons' reply was even more disingenuous:

We have always segregated enemy combatants on the battlefield at the point of capture and beyond, to keep them silent, segregate the officers from the enlisted, the men from the women, and so forth. That's traditional; it goes back to World War II and beyond.

So, is "separation" a matter of segregating prisoners, or what? In the Army Field Manual itself, one gets that same kind of double talk. At first it is presented thus:

The purpose of separation is to deny the detainee the opportunity to communicate with other detainees in order to keep him from learning counter-resistance techniques or gathering new information to support a cover story; decreasing the detainee's resistance to interrogation.

This description sounds a lot like segregation for security purposes, although there is that phrase "decreasing the detainee's resistance." A page or so later, however, we find the following (emphasis added):

The use of separation should not be confused with the detainee-handling techniques approved in Appendix D [Guide for Handling Detainees]. Specifically, the use of segregation during prisoner handling (Search, Silence, Segregate, Speed, Safeguard, and Tag [5 S's and a T]) should not be confused with the use of separation as a restricted interrogation technique.

Furthermore, we learn that "separation" requires an interrogation plan, and medical and legal review, as well, of course, as "physical separation." If this is not solitary confinement for the purposes of breaking a prisoner down for interrogation, then the English language has lost all purpose in explaining things.

Another line of questioning took on the AFM's contention that it banned sensory deprivation. The entire exchange at the September 6 hearing is worth reproducing here. It represents, among other things, the most thorough line of inquiry I have seen by any reporter in quite some time. The following quote contains added emphases.

Q General, as an expert in interrogations, do you believe that sensory deprivation was abusive, or did it ever prove to be helpful in interrogation?

GEN. KIMMONS: Sensory deprivation is abusive and it's prohibited in this Field Manual, and it's absolutely counterproductive, in my understanding of what we have used productively. Sensory deprivation, just to be clear -- and we define it in the Field Manual, but basically, it comes down to the almost complete deprivation of all sensory stimuli, light, noise, and so forth, and to the point where it can have an adverse mental, psychological effect on a -- disorienting effect on a detainee.

Q So could there be deprivation of light alone for extended periods of time, as opposed to complete sensory deprivation?

GEN. KIMMONS: I think the total loss of an external stimulus, such as deprivation of light, would not fit what we have described here as -- for example, if you're hinting about separation, separation does not involve the darkness or lack of that type of sensory stimulation.

Q That wasn't the question, though. Would sensory -- would the deprivation of light alone be permitted under the current manual, as opposed -- because you described sensory deprivation as total deprivation --

GEN. KIMMONS: That's correction.

Q -- of all senses. So deprivation of light alone for extended periods would be permitted?

GEN. KIMMONS: I don't think the Field Manual explicitly addresses it.

It does not make it prohibited.And it would have to be weighed in the context of the overall environment. If it was at nighttime during sleep hours, then it would make personal sense to turn the lights off.

Q You know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to get at -- because you said specifically total sensory deprivation -- so deprivation of any one sense might be permitted. Like light, for example. They could be kept in the dark for extended periods of time beyond the usual nighttime hours.

This is really too specific and challenging for the DoD briefers, and they turn on their double-talk machine:

MR. STIMSON: Jim, questions like this are good questions to ask. And what's important to remember is that interrogation plans are put together for a reason so that not just one person can decide what he or she wants to do and then run off and do it. They're vetted. It's laid out how they're vetted. General Kimmons could go into that in exhaustive detail. Typically, there would be a JAG, as I understand it, General Kimmons --

GEN. KIMMONS: That's correct.

MR. STIMSON: -- that would have to review that. It goes up through various chains of command. And so, you know, types of questions like this would have to be asked and then vetted through that process.

Burying the Story

With all the hard questioning by the press, you'd think the issues would have been aired in the media in the days and weeks following the introduction of the Army Field Manual. As should be evident by now, that's not what happened.

Here's how the L.A. Times covered it (9/6/06), getting the story exactly backwards (emphasis added):

Bowing to critics of its tough interrogation policies, the Pentagon is issuing a new Army field manual that provides Geneva Convention protections for all detainees and eliminates a secret list of interrogation tactics.

The manual, set for release today, also reverses an earlier decision to maintain two interrogation standards – one for traditional prisoners of war and another for “unlawful combatants” captured during a conflict but not affiliated with a nation’s military force.

There is no mention of Appendix M or any controversy over techniques. Jumana Musa, an "advocacy director for Amnesty International, is quoted as noting, "“If the new field manual embraces the Geneva Convention, it is an important return to the rule of law.'"

The 9/7/06 article in the Washington Post was, if anything, even more laudatory of the new AFM:

Pentagon officials yesterday repudiated the harsh interrogation tactics adopted since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, specifically forbidding U.S. troops from using forced nudity, hooding, military dogs and waterboarding to elicit information from detainees captured in ongoing wars.

The Defense Department simultaneously embraced international humane treatment standards for all detainees in U.S. military custody, the first time there has been a uniform standard for both enemy prisoners of war and the so-called unlawful combatants linked to al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist organizations.

The article falsely claims the AFM bans manipulation of sleep patterns. Regarding any controversy, the article explains:

Three expanded techniques -- good cop, bad cop; pretending to be an official from another country; and detention in a separate cell from others -- are allowed but require approval from senior officers. Officials originally considered keeping those three techniques classified but decided to make them public for the sake of full transparency.

The Post article also briefly mentions the generally positive response of human rights groups:

"This is the Pentagon coming full circle," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "This is very strong guidance."

As for the human rights organizations, Amnesty International later essentially signed off on the AFM. In an article from the Winter 2007 issue of Amnesty International Magazine, Jumana Musa, quoted in the L.A. Times article above, had this to say about the new AFM:

AIUSA also worked with U.S. representatives and senators to introduce legislation to create a single, transparent standard for interrogations and to limit the CIA to approved interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual.

In a telephone interview for this article, Mr. Malinowski said he supported using the Army Field Manual as a replacement for the CIA "enhanced interrogation techniques," and described the question of abuse in Appendix M as not entirely clear. The language in Appendix M was "ambiguous," and open to criticism due to a "lack of clarity." He maintained, however, that using the current Army Field Manual as a model was merely a beginning, and that a new overhaul of interrogation techniques was on the agenda.

A call made to Amnesty International's press contact regarding this issue, and an e-mail sent to Jumana Musa, were both unreturned.

Conclusion

Two conclusions can be drawn from the above examination of the "selling" of the Army Field Manual to the American public in the late summer of 2006 and beyond. One is that reporters on the beat were very aware of the origins and implications of the issues surrounding Geneva and the AFM, and the controversies surrounding the use of isolation and other techniques under the rubric of "Separation." The extremely muted or non-existent discussion in the mainstream press of these issues after the AFM was introduced means that a decision to suppress these issues was made at an editorial level, and were not the result of laziness or dilatory reporting on behalf of reporters.

Secondly, the role of some human rights organizations in promoting the new Army Field Manual -- in particular, the actions of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch -- are curious, to say the least. Press reports and the interview with Malinowski show that inclusion of certain human rights organizations in the vetting of the AFM started at the very beginning. We may not be able to find out what went on in the editorial offices of the nation's top newspapers, but we should know more about the discussions within the human rights organizations on how they advised, or were fooled, by talks with Bush administration and Pentagon personnel.

Meanwhile, other human rights organizations, such as the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights, have criticized the language and techniques described in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, and called for rescission of the offending text. In a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in May 2007, Leonard S. Rubenstein, Executive Director of PHR, and retired Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, MD, former Commanding General of the Southeast Regional U.S. Army Medical Command, wrote:

The new Army Field Manual on human intelligence gathering... explicitly prohibits several SERE-based techniques, yet Appendix M of the manual explicitly permits what amounts to isolation, along with sleep and sensory deprivation. The manual is silent on a number of other SERE-based methods, creating ambiguity and doubt over their place in interrogation doctrine....

PHR, therefore, respectfully urges you to take the following actions:

1. Fully implement the OIG’s recommendation to “preclude the use of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape physical and psychological coercion techniques” in all interrogations. (Id, pp. 29-30.) This includes rescission of Appendix M of the new Army Field Manual and specific prohibition, by name, of each of the known SERE-based methods and their equivalents.

It seems likely that the Army Field Manual, whether by executive order (most likely) or by legislation, will become the new "single standard" for U.S. interrogation. Press reports hint that the Obama administration may yet allow a loophole for CIA interrogators. I don't know how that will sit with the many military lawyers and officers who have been instrumental in opposing Bush/Rumsfeld's torture policies from the beginning. I'm thinking of people like Alberto Mora and Antonio Taguba, or the new nominee for DoD General Counsel, Jeh Charles Johnson, who apparently intends to seriously change the policies set by his predecessor, Jim Haynes.

[Author's note, 1/12/2014: Johnson never did change the Army Field Manual/Appendix M policies. Last month, he was confirmed by the Senate as Secretary of Homeland Security.]

In any case, the full history and controversy behind torture and U.S. interrogation policy deserves a full airing. What happened, for instance, between June and September 2006, allowing for Pentagon acceptance of the Appendix M abusive procedures? When it comes to the implementation of a host of torture and cruel, inhumane interrogation techniques by the U.S. government, both an investigation and prosecutions are needed.

It will be a challenge for our society to bring out the full story, while also bringing to justice those individuals who broke both domestic law and international treaty. We will need both investigations and prosecutions in order settle scores with the past, to understand where we stand now, and what we need to change to move forward.

Omar Khadr Leaves Guantanamo, While Press Refuses to Report His Water Torture

reposted from Firedoglake

On a pre-dawn Saturday morning, September 29, the youngest prisoner in Guantanamo, Omar Khadr left the harsh US-run prison where he had been held since October 2002. At the time of his incarceration he was fifteen years old. According to a CBC report, Khadr was flown to Canadian Forces Base Trenton, where he was to be transferred to the Millhaven Institution, a maximum security prison in Bath, Ontario.

Khadr is supposed to serve out the remainder of an eight-year sentence, part of a deal his attorneys made with the U.S. government, with Khadr agreeing to plead guilty to the killing of SPC Christopher Speer during a firefight at the Ayub Kheil compound in Afghanistan, in addition to other charges such as "material support of terrorism" and spying. Khadr essentially agreed to participate in what amounted to a show trial for the penalty phase of his Military Commissions hearing. For this, he got a brokered eight year sentence, with a promise of a transfer out of Guantanamo to Canada after a year.

The Khadr deal was made in October 2010, but the transfer promise was dragged out as seemingly the Canadian government balked at accepting the former child prisoner, who was also a Canadian citizen. The entire affair became a magnet for right-wing propaganda in Canada, while human rights groups also fought for Khadr's release. But not long after Macleans leaked U.S. documents related to the Khadr transfer, including psychiatric reports by both government and defense evaluators, the Canadians appeared to move more quickly to accept Khadr into Canada.

CBC reported that Public Safety Minister Vic Toews said he was "satisfied the Correctional Service of Canada" (CSC) could administer Khadr's sentence, presumably six more years of imprisonment. Speaking no doubt to those fear-mongerers who suggested Khadr's safety somehow threatened the average Canadian, he also noted the CSC could " ensure the safety of Canadians is protected during incarceration."

For those looking for an early release by Canadian authorities, Toews said, "Any decisions related to his future will be determined by the independent Parole Board of Canada in accordance with Canadian law." According to Carol Rosenberg's report, Khadr could be eligible for early release because he was a juvenile at the time of his supposed crimes.

Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) Legal Director Baher Azmy released a statement calling for Khadr's immediate release, and for President Obama to close Guantanamo and release the 86 known detainees already cleared for transfer.

Khadr never should have been brought to Guantanamo. He was a child of fifteen at the time he was captured, and his subsequent detention and prosecution for purported war crimes was unlawful, as was his torture by U.S. officials.

Like several other boys held at Guantanamo, some as young as twelve years old, Khadr lost much of his childhood. Canada should not perpetuate the abuse he endured in one of the world’s most notorious prisons. Instead, Canada should release him immediately and provide him with appropriate counseling, education, and assistance in transitioning to a normal life.

Azmy also suggested that Canada could "accept other men from Guantanamo who cannot safely return to their home countries," such as Algerian citizen Djamel Ameziane, who lived legally as a refugee in Canada from 1995 to 2000. Ameziane fears persecution if he were transfered back to Algeria.

Covering-up Crimes

No doubt the Khadr transfer will get a great deal of coverage in the mainstream press and the bloggers of the fictional Internet land of Blowhardia. Little of the digital ink will be meaningful, and much of it will be disinformation.

But even reputable sources will leave out many of the details surrounding Khadr's imprisonment and torture, details that may be too embarrassing for the U.S. government, or for a Democratic incumbent running for President who steadfastly refuses to punish those who engaged in the planning and implementation of torture during the Bush years, and who lies about the so-called nonabusive nature of current U.S. interrogation policy (while even the progressive press and bloggers give him a free pass on this, because such lies are printed on the front page of the New York Times).

In probably the most egregious cover-up surrounding the Khadr case, one recent document released in the Macleans' treasure drove of released reports on Khadr's treatment and mental condition under U.S. control states that Khadr received a form of waterboard-like drowning torture while held as a wounded teen at Bagram.

Dr. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and former brigadier general in the U.S. Army, wrote in a February 28, 2012 summary report to Canada's Public Safety Minister Toews that while at the Bagram medical facility in late 2002, that Khadr  "was mocked" by U.S. personnel,  "and remembers having water poured on his face while hooded so that he felt unable to breathe." Dr. Xenakis confirmed to me by telephone that Khadr had told him this during one of the 300 hours he spent interviewing the famous Guantanamo prisoner.

Given the hullaballoo surrounding the issue of waterboarding in general, as evinced in the recent controversies over the release of a Mitt Romney campaign draft about his support for "enhanced interrogation techniques" and the wide reporting surrounding Human Rights Watch's recent report that included revelations about unreported waterboarding of a Libyan prisoner, it is shocking to see the total lack of interest in this new revelation. It is as if there were an invisible censor that determined what was appropriate to report, and never or rarely to go farther than that.

I was personally distressed by the lack of coverage (I believe I'm still the only one to report it in an article at The Dissenter earlier this month), but I directly approached human rights groups and members of the press who regularly cover the torture issue, and the Khadr case in particular. I never received a response from the press. Human Rights Watch told me they would look into it.

Meanwhile coverage by McClatchy's Carol Rosenberg quotes derogatory statements about Khadr by the government's psychiatric "expert," but is totally mum on the revelations about the water torture of the teenaged prisoner noted in a defense attorney's report. Nor do any reports seem to recall that there never was an eyewitness to Speer's death, or that documents long withheld from Khadr's defense showed the likelihood that Speer died from "friendly fire," as noted in this April 2008 LA Times story.

As for other overlooked details about the Khadr case, an initial look at report on Khadr's release shows that nothing is said about previously reported threats Khadr had about being transferred and raped, as came out at his military commissions "trial". According to the ACLU:

In bombshell testimony, Interrogator One described a “fictitious story” he told the 15-year-old about an Afghan they sent to prison in America because he was lying. Interrogator One said he told Khadr that “a bunch of big black guys and big Nazis,” patriotic and angry about the 9/11 attacks, “noticed the little Muslim” because he “speaks a different language, prays five times a day.” He said he told Khadr, “This poor little kid, away from home, kind of isolated,” was “in the shower by himself and these four big black guys show up, and say ‘we know about you Muslims.’ They caught him in the shower and raped him. The kid got hurt and we think he ended up dying.”

Interrogator One also explained the approved interrogation techniques he used on Khadr to extract information, including “fear up,” “fear up harsh,” “fear of incarceration,” “pride and ego down,” and “love of family.”

The references to "fear up" and the "approved interrogation techniques" are specifically to techniques that are part of the Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogations. Such techniques are, according to a most recent article by Charlie Savage, "nonabusive" in nature. Now Savage is reporting as fact what is in fact spin by the U.S. government, who loves counterpoising the abusive AFM -- which also includes in its "techniques" use of cruel isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and use of certain drugs -- to the equally repugnant but more splashy waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" tortures of the Bush era.

Savage and the New York Times were not challenged by the characterization of AFM tactics as "nonabusive," even by people who knew better. The fairy tale that the AFM is a "humane" alternative to the Bush-era torture is a fiction central to the Obama reelection campaign, and there's nary a "progressive" blogger that will challenge that these days, especially when the assertion is in a story on the election on the front page of the New York Times. The silence persists despite the fact the actual nature of the AFM and especially its notorious Appendix M has been documented by Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights, Center for Constitutional Rights, Open Society Foundation, and other human rights groups.

Meanwhile, it seems likely that Khadr's release itself is related to U.S. presidential politics, with a thorny controversy related to Guantanamo finally stashed out of sight. No more questions, no more unsightly leaks (like this recent article two days ago revealing Dr. Michael "I-have-no-opinion-if-nearly-half-of-all-Muslims-are-inbred" Welner's seven-hour interview with Omar Khadr). Khadr will go now to Millhaven, a dangerous maximum security prison that had a prison riot in 2009, and where the exercise yard lacks prison staff and yard fights are broken up by rifle shots by guards.

Khadr's release will temporarily throw an embarrassing light on the Obama's administration's failure to close the controversial torture prison, and then the news will sink back into the turgid morass of bloated presidential campaign politics. And just like the story about a prisoner at Guantanamo, Adnan Latif, who was found dead on September 10, but was quickly forgotten (the press doesn't even care how he died), the Khadr case will slip out of sight, and the unsightly parade of lies and cover-up that masquerades as reporting on U.S. politics will continue.

But at least one prisoner will have left Guantanamo alive, soon to see family, and maybe have half a start at a life, a life he insisted had been taken from him first by his pro-Al Qaeda father, and then later by U.S. authorities and interrogators. "I never had a choice in my past life, Khadr once told CBC News, "but I will build my future with the right bricks, and that Islam is a peaceful, multicultural and anti-racism religion for all."

Report on US Torture and Rendition to Libya Details New Waterboarding Claims

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a major new report detailing how the Bush Administration and other allied governments tortured and imprisoned opponents of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The prisoners were then rendered to Gaddafi’s own prisons where many of them were tortured.

According to a HRW press release, the 154-page report, “Delivered into Enemy Hands: US-Led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi’s Libya,” is based on documents discovered by Human Rights Watch on September 3, 2011 in the offices of Libya’s former intelligence chief, Musa Kusa, after Tripoli fell to rebel forces last year.

The report also references 14 interviews with victims of both U.S. rendition and U.S. and Libyan torture. In addition, HRW provides new information on the mysterious last days of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who reportedly committed suicide in a Libyan prison in 2009, two weeks after HRW representatives briefly spoke with him.

According to HRW, other governments involved in torture and/or unlawful renditions to Libya included “Afghanistan, Chad, China and Hong Kong, Malaysia, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Sudan, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.”

Perhaps the most explosive new information in the report concerns charges by one of the prisoners that he was waterboarded. US authorities have long maintained that only three CIA-held prisoners were ever waterboarded, and the Department of Defense maintains it never waterboarded prisoners in DoD custody.

According to the report, Mohammed al-Shoroeiya, who was former Deputy Head of the Military Council for the anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), told HRW representatives earlier this year that he after he was captured by the Pakistanis in April 2003, he was imprisoned by the Americans in Afghanistan.

Shoroeiya told HRW that U.S. forces tortured him. He was “chained to walls naked—sometimes while diapered—in pitch black, windowless cells, for weeks or months at a time; being restrained in painful stress positions for long periods of time, being forced into cramped spaces; being beaten and slammed into walls; being kept inside for nearly five months without the ability to bathe; being denied food; being denied sleep by continuous, deafeningly loud Western music; and being subjected to different forms of water torture including… waterboarding.”

Shoroeiya said the interrogators wore “’special forces’ black uniforms with black caps on but no masks.” He also drew numerous pictures of the torture apparatuses used on him, including the board he was strapped to for waterboarding. Many of these pictures are reproduced in the HRW report.

Khalid al-Sharif, who was another LIFG leader captured at the same time as Shoroeiya, told HRW that he also was subjected to water torture while in U.S. custody. Today, Sharif is head of the Libyan National Guard.

“Sometimes they put a hood over my head and they lay me down and they start to put water in my mouth….They poured the water over my mouth and nose so I had the feeling that I was drowning. I couldn’t breathe…. I tried to turn my head left and right as much as I could to take in some gulps of breath. I felt as if I was suffocating,” Sharif told HRW in a telephone interview last May.

U.S. interrogators reportedly repeatedly threatened both Sharif and Shoroeiya with return to Libya. Despite pleas not to be returned, and despite the fact U.S. State Department reports on Libya described the widespread use of torture in Libyan prisons, both the men were unlawfully rendered to Libya.

The UN Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory, states, “No State Party shall expel, return ("refouler") or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

Sharif has said the Libyans placed him in “extreme isolation.” Shoroeiya said initially the Libyans told him he would not be maltreated because they had made assurances to U.S. authorities as to his safety as part of his transfer. Nevertheless, after six months, the Libyans began to torture Shoroeiya, including both “long periods of solitary confinement” and beatings by guards, who used “sticks, steel pipes, and electrical cables that were used as a whip” to bloody the prisoner.

U.S. Water Torture of Teen

The new revelations concerning waterboarding and waterboarding-like torture of detainees comes a year after a two-part series at Truthout in August 2011 which revealed that, despite denials by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other DoD authorities, waterboarding-like torture was used in DoD facilities, including Guantanamo.

While the HRW report is certain to get wide U.S. coverage, the recent release of documents related to the incarceration of Omar Khadr, a long-term Guantanamo detainee who was brought to that prison as a 15-year-old teenager, has so far not gained much attention.

In one of the documents published August 31 by Macleans Canada, US Army psychiatrist, Brigadier General (retired) Stephen Xenakis, wrote to Canada’s Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews last Feburary, describing his psychiatric evaluation of Khadr, based on hundreds of hours of meetings with the former child prisoner.

Xenakis’s report and that of other doctors and psychologists involved in examining Khadr were requested by the Canadian government as part of their deliberations in the contentious possible transfer of Khadr from Guantanamo to Canada. Such a transfer was reportedly part of a plea deal Khadr and his attorneys made last year when he pleaded guilty to purported war crimes at his military commission trial in October 2010. Khadr is a Canadian citizen.

According to Xenakis’s letter, after Khadr, who was “severely wounded” in a July 2002 firefight in Afghanistan, was brought to Bagram medical facility, he was “forcibly handled while still in his hospital stretcher.”

Xenakis continued, “He was mocked [by U.S. personnel] and remembers having water poured on his face while hooded so that he felt unable to breathe.”

Another story similar to that of Sharif and Khadr was described by this reporter in an article at Truthout last year. Saudi national Ahmed al-Darbi was rendered from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan in 2002. In a 2009 declaration, al-Darbi described torture by U.S. DoD interrogators, who placed "a sand bag or hood… over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered."

“The Case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi”

One section of the HRW report adds new details to what is known about the fate of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi. Captured by Pakistani forces in late 2001, Al-Libi was turned over to the U.S. who rendered him to Egypt. There he was tortured until he “revealed” that Al Qaeda operatives were given training in use of biological and chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein’s regime. The torture infamously included being confined in a coffin.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell referred to this al-Libi’s “revelations” in making his case against Saddam Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons capacities at the UN in a speech on February 5, 2003. The U.S. invaded Iraq in March 2003.

But Al-Libi recanted his confession months later. Even earlier, U.S. intelligence agencies were doubtful concerning the original revelations, in part because they were obtained by torture. But Al-Libi himself had disappeared into the maw of the U.S. rendition system.

According to the HRW report, Al-Libi was transferred to a number of prisons. After Egypt, it appears likely he was transferred to CIA custody at Bagram “where it seems he recanted the information he had provided earlier on links between Iraq and al Qaeda. On February 4 and 5, 2004, CIA officers sent cables to headquarters acknowledging that al-Libi’s account from 2002 was not reliable,” the HRW report said.

Speaking to Al-Libi family members and other prisoners, HRW determined that this high-value detainee was shuffled from Bagram to “a prison in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul from June 2003 to October 2003, then Kabul again, Morocco for about a year, Guantanamo for three to five months, Alaska, a US air base in Sweden, and finally to Libya.” Some contacts could not corroborate the Sweden or Guantanamo incarcerations, and others thought Al-Libi may have been held for a time on a prison ship, in Syria, or in Poland (or possibly another European country).

Al-Libi appears to have certainly been in Libya by December 2007, held first in Tajoura prison and later transferred to Abu Salim, where he reportedly committed suicide on May 9, 2009. HRW reports, “Libyan authorities claim he committed suicide by hanging himself with a sheet, tied into a loop and hooked onto the corner of the edge of the wall in the middle of his cell. “

But pictures taken the morning of Al-Libi’s death reportedly show he has a large bruise on his left arm, “a small bruise on the top of his back near his shoulder blades,” and “two long light scratches that go at an angle across his back from the middle of his shoulder blades to the middle of his lower back.” An autopsy supposedly was provided to a Libyan prosecutor.

Al-Libi’s brother and uncle have asked the new Libyan government for a full investigation.

Human Rights Watch reports that their representatives “saw al-Libi for a few minutes and tried to interview him. He appeared agitated and angry but he sat down with researchers and listened to a short introduction about Human Rights Watch. However, before he could be interviewed, al-Libi got up and said before walking away, ‘Where were you when I was being tortured in American jails?’”

Two weeks later, al-Libi was dead.

Call for New Investigations

The release of the HRW report comes only days after Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the investigation by special prosecutor John Durham into the deaths of two detainees held in U.S. custody was being shut down with no charges being filed.

Laura Pitter, counterterrorism advisor at Human Rights Watch and author of the report, is quoted in a press release, “The closure of the Durham investigation, without any charges, sends a message that abuse like that suffered by the Libyan detainees will continue to be tolerated.”

“The involvement of many countries in the abuse of Gaddafi’s enemies suggests that the tentacles of the US detention and interrogation program reached far beyond what was previously known,” Pitter said. “The US and other governments that assisted in detainee abuse should offer a full accounting of their role.”

HRW has called for the U.S. government to honor its commitment under the UN Convention Against Torture treaty and investigate allegations of torture, while taking steps to allow compensation for torture victims.

More specifically, HRW calls for President Obama to “[d]irect the attorney general to begin a criminal investigation into US government detention practices and interrogation methods since September 11, 2001, including the CIA detention program.”

They also call for Congress to create “an independent, nonpartisan commission to investigate the mistreatment of detainees in US custody anywhere in the world since September 11, 2001, including torture, enforced disappearance, and rendition to torture.” The commission should have “full subpoena power” to “compel the production of evidence, and be empowered to recommend the creation of a special prosecutor to investigate possible criminal offenses, if the attorney general has not commenced such an investigation.”


Cross-posted from The Dissenter/Firedoglake

Guantanamo Psychologist Led Rendition and Imprisonment of Afghan Boys, Complaint Charges

Originally posted at Truthout

Four Ohio residents filed court papers last week seeking to compel the Ohio State Psychology Board to investigate Dr. Larry James, a retired Army colonel and former chief psychologist for the intelligence command at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility, who oversaw the brutal torture of detainees, including children.

The motion was filed by Harvard Law School's International Human Rights Clinic (IHRC) in the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas on behalf of the four residents, which includes a psychologist, a veteran, a minister and a long-time mental health advocate.

Earlier this year, the psychology board had dismissed a complaint first filed by the same Ohio residents last July, stating, "It has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action in this matter."

The original complaint, filed with the Ohio Board of Psychology, was supported by over a thousand pages of documentation, including reports from the US military, the Department of Justice, the Central Intelligence Agency and statements from survivors and witnesses. But the board did not provide a rationale as to why it was unable to probe the allegations leveled against James.

James was head of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT), which was made up of psychologists and other mental health professionals who assisted interrogators at the prison facility during the first half of 2003. From 2004 to 2006, he served as chief of psychology at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, and in 2007 he returned to Guantanamo. He retired in 2008.

James is currently dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. He was licensed to practice psychology in Ohio in 2008.

According to the complaint, during James' tenure at Guantanamo, "boys and men were systematically abused" and were subjected to "rape and death threats" and torture techniques such as "forced nudity; sleep deprivation; extreme isolation; short-shackling into stress positions; and physical assault."

Moreover, the complaint states that James supervised the forceful and arbitrary detention of three Afghan boys, "transported thousands of miles away from their families and denied them access to counsel."

James did not return an email request for comment.

In their verified complaint filed with the Franklin County Court of Common Pleas, seeking a writ to compel the Ohio Board of Psychology "to proceed to 'formal action' against Dr. Larry C. James," the complainants quote an affidavit by former American Psychological Association (APA) Practice Directorate Chief, Dr. Bryant Welch, that the allegations in the complaint, "if true, represent the most serious ethical breaches I have seen in my thirty-five years as a psychologist. They also have the most far reaching implications for the profession of psychology of any ethical or licensing issue I have yet encountered."

IHRC's earlier complaint (PDF link) was damning.

He was accused of numerous instances of professional misconduct and violations of the law, including failure to protect his clients from harm, exploitation of those with whom he worked, failure to protect detainees' confidentiality and failure "to represent honestly his own conduct, experience and the results of his services."

Indeed, in "Fixing Hell," a book James published in 2008 about his experiences at Guantanamo and at the Abu Ghraib prison facility in Iraq, he claimed that he was "righting the wrongs" at both prisons and that there "have been no incidents of abuse at Guantanamo Bay by either an interrogator or psychologist reported since my arrival in Cuba in January 2003."

Ironically, in his book, James wrote of at least two incidents of such abuse during his 2003 tenure, which as the IHRC complaint explains, he failed to report to proper authorities.

A fair amount of James' narrative about his time at Guantanamo concerns his actions after his commander, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, put him in charge of three young teenage prisoners, all younger than age 16 and one perhaps as young as 12 years old, in February 2003. James was in charge of rendering the boys from Bagram, Afghanistan, where they were then held, arranging their Guantanamo housing and attending and supervising their interrogations. James wrote that the boys were "very traumatized" upon arrival at Guantanamo. While he presents his treatment of these children as a "case study" for his "softer" style of interrogation - "exactly the kind of prisoners I needed to test my philosophy on interrogation" - a closer, more nuanced look presents a very different picture.

"Teenage Terrorists"

The story of these young detainees had previously been documented in news reports and is also retold in the IHRC complaint, which redacts the boys' personal information, something James failed to do in his book.

While James doesn't mention the fact in his book, there were at least a dozen underage, minor children or teenagers held at Guantanamo. US authorities in Iraq and Afghanistan have allegedly held thousands of other juveniles. The IHRC complaint refers to torture and abuse suffered by two of the Guantanamo minors, Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, during the period James was chief psychologist. These teens, as well as all the others but the three held at Camp Iguana, the special camp built to hold them at the Guantanamo base, were kept with the adult prisoners at Camp Delta and other sites at the prison.

According to James, when he arrived at Bagram to pick up his new prisoners, he found them looking "not only terrified but also disheveled and lost." Nevertheless, he believed them to be "far from innocent," "teenage terrorists." "These juveniles were not sweet kids," James wrote.

Yet, he also found that the trauma they endured was very real. James wrote that the boys were "victims of rape, illiterate, one certainly had PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]"; they were, according to James, "the most fragile - psychologically, medically and academically - children I had ever met."

James glosses over in his book the circumstances of the 20-hour flight from Bagram that brought the children to Guantanamo. But news reports published after the children were released in January 2004 provides more detail about their time held by US forces in Afghanistan and their subsequent transport to Guantanamo.

In his book, James states that all three children "had been captured while fighting in a combatant role against US forces in Afghanistan." But James failed to provide any evidence to support such an assertion, which is contrary to reports the boys made themselves. According to a report published a Guardian UK article, two of the boys were caught while US forces were "looking for a local commander, Mansoor Rahman Saiful, who had fought against the Taliban for years, but joined the radical Islamists when America attacked Afghanistan."

Naqibullah, age 13, "a local imam's son, said he stumbled into the raid while cycling from a friend's house," and was interrogated daily about his knowledge of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

"I told them, 'I don't know these people and I am too young to give anything to anyone without my father's authority.'" After two weeks, Naqibullah said, he was asked whether he had any objection to being taken to "another place."

"I said, 'What can I do? You will take me wherever you want to.'" That night, bound, blindfolded and fitted into orange overalls, he was loaded on to a cargo plane and flown non-stop to Cuba. Naqibullah's first 10 days in Guantanamo were the worst of his life, he said.

According to a March 2004 story by The New York Times, another child prisoner, Asadullah, age 12 or 13, believed to be the youngest of the prisoners, said he was interrogated daily for several months while held in Afghanistan. The beatings he endured in the first five days of his captivity still bothered him when he arrived in Guantanamo.

As with Naqibullah, the third child prisoner, Mohammed Ismail Agha, age 13, told a foreign journalist, as reported in The Washington Post in February 2004, that he had been arrested because a friend with whom he was looking for work was supposedly identified as a Taliban. He spent a month and a half at Bagram before being "warned that if he did not confess he would be sent to a terrible and distant place called Guantanamo."

Agha was subjected to sleep deprivation and stress positions during his time at Bagram in an effort to get him to make a confession.

"It was a very bad place. Whenever I started to fall asleep, they would kick on my door and yell at me to wake up," he said. "When they were trying to get me to confess, they made me stand partway, with my knees bent, for one or two hours. Sometimes I couldn't bear it any more and I fell down, but they made me stand that way some more."

Agha's story of his rendition is similar to that of Naqibullah. He was "put on a plane with other prisoners, chained by the wrists and ankles, with a hood placed over his head."

"It was hard to breathe," he said.

Supervising the transport back to Guantanamo on the large C-17 transport plane, complete with medical team, military police and Air Force Special Forces shooters, was Col. Larry James. The former chief psychologist never states whether he reported the treatment received by these child prisoners at Bagram to any authority.

"I Prayed to God, I Asked, 'Where Is My Son?'"

While James and the Guantanamo authorities apparently did try to make the boys' treatment much improved over that of prisoners in the rest of the camp, including at least eight or nine other teens held at roughly the same time, the young prisoners were not entirely grateful.

According to the Guardian report, "The boys played football every day and sometimes basketball and volleyball with their guards." But Asadullah told his interviewer, "I was very sad because I missed my family so much.... I was always asking, 'When can I go home? What day? What month?' They said, 'You'll go home soon,' but they never said when."

According to a February 2004 story in the UK Telegraph, Ismail Agha (who is reported as 15 in this article) said, "At first I was unhappy ... For two or three days [after I arrived in Cuba] I was confused but later the Americans were so nice to me. They gave me good food with fruit and water for ablutions and prayer."

Means and Ends: Newly Published Notes of Bruce Jessen Reveal Real Purpose of Bush’s Torture Program

As part of a new investigative story, Truthout has published documents written by the former psychologist for SERE, and later CIA contract interrogator for the Bush torture program, Bruce Jessen. Before going to work for the CIA with his former SERE partner, psychologist James Mitchell, Jessen authored a 2002 "draft exploitation plan" for military use, based on his experiences as a SERE instructor. The newly-discovered documents, provided to Truthout by former SERE Air Force Captain Michael Kearns, were written back in 1989 when Jessen was transferred from his clinical role elsewhere in SERE to help staff a new survival training course for Special Mission Units undertaking dangerous assignments for Special Operations forces abroad.

Jason Leopold and I co-authored the new story, which includes a video interview with Captain Kearns, who helped hire Jessen back in 1989 for his new SERE role helping put together the class titled SV-91. The documents include notes for a portion of that class, known as "Psychological Aspects of Detention." The other document is a paper by Jessen, "Psychological Advances in Training to Survive Captivity, Interrogation and Torture," which was prepared for a symposium at that time: "Advances in Clinical Psychological Support of National Security Affairs, Operational Problems in the Behavioral Sciences Course."

Jessen's notes, in particular, demonstrate that this course material, which was "reverse-engineered" to provide a blueprint for the interrogation and detention policies of the Bush administration -- some of which remain in use today -- emphasized not just the ways to coercively interrogate an individual for intelligence purposes, but to "exploit" the detainee for a number of uses. As Jessen wrote (and those following the Bradley Manning torture case will find this quite chilling, I suspect):

"From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer's goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION," Jessen wrote. "Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc. )…Your detainer wants you to feel 'EVERYTHING' is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind."

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the "end goal" of the detainer, who wants the detainee "to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)."

What is "Exploitation"?

If one were to search for the term "exploitation" in the Senate Armed Services Committee report on detainee abuse, published with numerous redactions in late 2009 (PDF), you would find numerous mentions of the term. While at times the word "exploitation" appears to be used as a synonym for the "breaking down" of prisoners, it doesn't usually explain for what purpose. Indeed, many have noted that such "breaking down" is antithetical to the production of information from an interrogation suspect. Jessen says as much in his notes. But there are other reasons to break someone down.

For instance, the SASC report notes that "The 'Al Qaeda Resistance Contingency Training' presentation described methods used by al Qaeda to resist interrogation and exploitation..." (p. 39 of the PDF). "The presentation on detainee "exploitation" described phases of exploitation and included instruction on initial capture and handling, conducting interrogations, and long-term exploitation." "Another slide describing captor motives states: establish absolute control, induce dependence to meet needs, elicit compliance, shape cooperation.... techniques designed to achieve these goals include isolation or solitary confinement, induced physical weakness and exhaustion, degradation, conditioning, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, disruption of sleep and biorhythms, and manipulation of diet" (p. 40 of the PDF). When intelligence is the aim of the "exploitation process", it is specifically called "intelligence exploitation" in the report.

One of the primary reasons exploitation is used on prisoners is to produce false confessions. Indeed, it was the torture of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi that was used to provide the false intelligence about Saddam Hussein seeking nuclear materials that was to provide a major casus belli for the United States for their war with Iraq.

Other examples of exploitation include the recruitment of prisoners as intelligence assets, i.e., as snitches and spies. Indeed, the Truthout article notes a number of cases of attempting just such recruitment of former Guantanamo detainees, while they were still incarcerated. Another long-standing example of such exploitation is the use of prisoners in show trials, which have been used in a number of countries as a means of squashing dissent and offering a faux-legitimate function to governmental security forces. This was the case in the famous 1949 show trial of Cardinal Mindzenty of Hungary by the Stalinist government there.

It was also the case more recently in the military commissions show trial of former "child soldier" Omar Khadr, who was tortured, held in solitary for years, then forced to sign a confession and endure a military show trial which sentenced him to 40 years in prison (while a backroom deal supposedly has reduced that to 8 years and release from Guantanamo to Canada sometime next year).

Show Trials, False Confessions, Spying, Medical Experimentation

In a little remarked aspect of the Khadr case, his brother, Abdurahman, who was also held as a prisoner at Guantanamo while also working as a spy for the CIA, trying to get intelligence from prisoners there, testified under oath in 2004 that Omar had agreed to collaborate with the FBI, but was returned to onerous torture conditions after he changed his mind. We don't know the kind of collaboration he was ready to provide, though it's noteworthy that his brother had already been working for a few years as a CIA asset.

A. My brother Omar cooperated with the FBI and he was ready, they were being ready to release him and then he was in his cellblock and people saw that he was being ready to be released so they told him: "Oh, you told everything. You are going to hell. So if you don't change you are going to go to hell." So the next time he went to interrogation he denied everything so they took away everything from him and he is still there till now.

Q. Because he decided not to continue the collaboration?

A. Not to continue the cooperation.

Perhaps one of the most heart-rending accounts of a prisoner being broken and used for false confessions is in the autobiography of David Hicks. Hicks also discussed his torture in an interview recently with Jason Leopold at Truthout, describing his experience of solitary confinement, beatings, stress positions, being drugged, and having "every aspect of our lives" controlled by the Guantanamo authorities. In particular, he describes another aspect of exploitation of prisoners I haven't mentioned thus far, medical experimentation, as he was constantly given different pills, injections, blood tests. His sense of being an experimental guinea pig has been echoed by a number of other former detainees, most recently the German-born ethnic Turk, Murat Kurnaz.

The following is from Mr. Hicks' book, Guantanamo: My Journey. It could be used as a teaching text on the meaning of "exploitation," and what the U.S. government implemented at Guantanamo. But we cannot forget that an innocent human being was the subject of this evil.

As time passed, the threat of ‘special treatment’ and psychological conditioning took its toll. The interrogators wore me down so that when they said, ‘So when you attended the al-Qaeda training camp...’ I would answer the question without denial or protest. I became too exhausted to argue. I allowed the interrogators to frame my words and say anything they wanted....

The interrogator’s associate, who had remained quiet until now, said they had a proposal for me: they would place me next to the various English-speaking detainees over a period of time, and I was to milk each one for information and report it back to the interrogators. If I agreed to do this, I would be allowed fifteen minutes with a lady from the Philippines. I instantly refused and requested to be sent back to my cage....

A goal of interrogation is to repeatedly break you and then put you back together until the parts can be manipulated. You become the interrogators’ creation.... The memory of what I have described depresses me deeply to this day. It does something to the soul; it felt like something had died inside me....

My end of the bargain was that I had to verbally repeat my story, agreeing with anything they added, even when they dictated my thoughts, beliefs and actions incorrectly. They also fed me things to say about other detainees as well. I did so obediently, even though I knew they were all lies. I struggled terribly with this and hated every minute of it, especially when they brought up other detainees. I searched desperately for the courage to resist and renege on the deal. I had no recourse. I had crumbled and was fully theirs.

Up until now, the primary narrative surrounding the torture scandal has been about the purported efficacy of using torture to produce intelligence in the "war on terror." But the new Jessen material demonstrates that the program used as the basis for the "reverse-engineering" of the SERE torture techniques was a full-blown exploitation program, whose aims went far beyond the mere elicitation of information, but included the physical and psychological pressures to produce absolute compliance in prisoners for the purpose of false confessions, show trials, recruitment of spies, and medical experimentation.

As Capt. Kearns is quoted in the Truthout article, "The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered - not just 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar."

It will be up to the press and the blogosphere to make the full reality of the Bush-era torture program fully understood to the population at large, to weave the kinds of information provided here into the narrative of events. Only when the full extent of this program is revealed, can we begin to take steps to end such heinous activities, and bring to justice those who sought a number of nefarious ends through means almost too awful to recount.

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

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

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

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

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

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

The "Context" of "Radical Jihadism"

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

In his op-ed, Dr. Xenakis wrote:

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

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

Lies, damned lies, and statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racist Psychology

In his op-ed, Dr. Xenakis wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

Predicting Dangerousness Has "Very Low Reliability"

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

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

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

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