For reasons which I hope will be obvious, I find this article to be very disturbing, although I'd heard rumblings about it for awhile. We think of ourselves as being in a helping profession, you know? It's really long, so I'll post it page by page. And I'll not post it in the Cafe.


http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feature...7/torture200707


Rorschach and Awe

America's coercive interrogation methods were reverse-engineered by two C.I.A. psychologists who had spent their careers training U.S. soldiers to endure Communist-style torture techniques. The spread of these tactics was fueled by a myth about a critical "black site" operation.

by Katherine Eban VF.COM EXCLUSIVE July 17, 2007



Abu Zubaydah was a mess. It was early April 2002, and the al-Qaeda lieutenant had been shot in the groin during a firefight in Pakistan, then captured by the Special Forces and flown to a safe house in Thailand. Now he was experiencing life as America's first high-value detainee in the wake of 9/11. A medical team and a cluster of F.B.I. and C.I.A. agents stood vigil, all fearing that the next attack on America could happen at any moment. It didn't matter that Zubaydah was unable to eat, drink, sit up, or control his bowels. They wanted him to talk.

A C.I.A. interrogation team was expected but hadn't yet arrived. But the F.B.I. agents who had been nursing his wounds and cleaning him after he'd soiled himself asked Zubaydah what he knew. The detainee said something about a plot against an ally, then began slipping into sepsis. He was probably going to die.

The team cabled the morsel of intelligence to C.I.A. headquarters, where it was received with delight by Director George Tenet. "I want to congratulate our officers on the ground," he told a gathering of agents at Langley. When someone explained that the F.B.I. had obtained the information, Tenet blew up and demanded that the C.I.A. get there immediately, say those who were later told of the meeting. Tenet's instructions were clear: Zubaydah was to be kept alive at all costs. (Through his publisher, George Tenet declined to be interviewed.)

Zubaydah was stabilized at the nearest hospital, and the F.B.I. continued its questioning using its typical rapport-building techniques. An agent showed him photographs of suspected al-Qaeda members until Zubaydah finally spoke up, blurting out that "Moktar," or Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, had planned 9/11. He then proceeded to lay out the details of the plot. America learned the truth of how 9/11 was organized because a detainee had come to trust his captors after they treated him humanely.

Al-Qaeda operative Khalid Shaikh Mohammed shortly after his capture, 2003. Corbis.

It was an extraordinary success story. But it was one that would evaporate with the arrival of the C.I.A's interrogation team. At the direction of an accompanying psychologist, the team planned to conduct a psychic demolition in which they'd get Zubaydah to reveal everything by severing his sense of personality and scaring him almost to death.

This is the approach President Bush appeared to have in mind when, in a lengthy public address last year, he cited the "tough" but successful interrogation of Zubaydah to defend the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, America's use of coercive interrogation tactics, and the abolishment of habeas corpus for detainees. He said that Zubaydah had been questioned using an "alternative set" of tactics formulated by the C.I.A. This program, he said, was fully monitored by the C.I.A.'s inspector general and required extensive training for interrogators before they were allowed to question captured terrorists.

While the methods were certainly unorthodox, there is little evidence they were necesssary, given the success of the rapport-building approach until that point.

I did not set out to discover how America got into the business of torturing detainees. I wasn't even trying to learn how America found out who was behind 9/11. I was attempting to explain why psychologists, alone among medical professionals, were participating in military interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere.

Both army leaders and military psychologists say that psychologists help to make interrogations "safe, legal and effective." But last fall, a psychologist named Jean Maria Arrigo came to see me with a disturbing claim about the American Psychological Association, her profession's 148,000-member trade group. Arrigo had sat on a specially convened A.P.A. task force that, in July 2005, had ruled that psychologists could assist in military interrogations, despite angry objections from many in the profession. The task force also determined that, in cases where international human-rights law conflicts with U.S. law, psychologists could defer to the much looser U.S. standards—what Arrigo called the "Rumsfeld definition" of humane treatment.

President George W. Bush delivers a speech acknowledging the existence of secret C.I.A. prisons such as those where Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed were interrogated, September 2006. Gerald Herbert/A.P. Photo.

Arrigo and several others with her, including a representative from Physicians for Human Rights, had come to believe that the task force had been rigged—stacked with military members (6 of the 10 had ties to the armed services), monitored by observers with undisclosed conflicts of interest, and programmed to reach preordained conclusions.

One theory was that the A.P.A. had given its stamp of approval to military interrogations as part of a quid pro quo. In exchange, they suspected, the Pentagon was working to allow psychologists—who, unlike psychiatrists, are not medical doctors—to prescribe medication, dramatically increasing their income. (The military has championed modern-day psychology since World War II, and continues to be one of the largest single employers of psychologists through its network of veterans' hospitals. It also funded a prescription-drug training program for military psychologists in the early 90s.)

A.P.A. leaders deny any backroom deals and insist that psychologists have helped to stop the abuse of detainees. They say that the association will investigate any reports of ethical lapses by its members.

While there was no "smoking gun" amid the stack of documents Arrigo gave me, my reporting eventually led me to an even graver discovery. After a 10-month investigation comprising more than 70 interviews as well as a detailed review of public and confidential documents, I pieced together the account of the Abu Zubaydah interrogation that appears in this article. I also discovered that psychologists weren't merely complicit in America's aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.

Two psychologists in particular played a central role: James Elmer Mitchell, who was attached to the C.I.A. team that eventually arrived in Thailand, and his colleague Bruce Jessen. Neither served on the task force or are A.P.A. members. Both worked in a classified military training program known as sere—for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape—which trains soldiers to endure captivity in enemy hands. Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on sere trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror, according to psychologists and others with direct knowledge of their activities. The C.I.A. put them in charge of training interrogators in the brutal techniques, including "waterboarding," at its network of "black sites." In a statement, Mitchell and Jessen said, "We are proud of the work we have done for our country."

The agency had famously little experience in conducting interrogations or in eliciting "ticking time bomb" information from detainees. Yet, remarkably, it turned to Mitchell and Jessen, who were equally inexperienced and had no proof of their tactics' effectiveness, say several of their former colleagues. Steve Kleinman, an Air Force Reserve colonel and expert in human-intelligence operations, says he finds it astonishing that the C.I.A. "chose two clinical psychologists who had no intelligence background whatsoever, who had never conducted an interrogation … to do something that had never been proven in the real world."

The tactics were a "voodoo science," says Michael Rolince, section chief of the F.B.I.'s International Terrorism Operations. According to a person familiar with the methods, the basic approach was to "break down [the detainees] through isolation, white noise, completely take away their ability to predict the future, create dependence on interrogators."

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Interrogators who were sent for classified training inevitably wound up in a Mitchell-Jessen "shop," and some balked at their methods. Instead of the careful training touted by President Bush, some recruits allegedly received on-the-job training during brutal interrogations that effectively unfolded as live demonstrations.

Mitchell and Jessen's methods were so controversial that, among colleagues, the reaction to their names alone became a litmus test of one's attitude toward coercion and human rights. Their critics called them the "Mormon mafia" (a reference to their shared religion) and the "poster boys" (referring to the F.B.I.'s "most wanted" posters, which are where some thought their activities would land them).

Former director of central intelligence George Tenet, 2002. © Ron Sachs/CNP/Corbis.

The reversed sere tactics they originated have come to shatter various American communities, putting law enforcement and intelligence gathering on a collision course, fostering dissent within the C.I.A., and sparking a war among psychologists over professional identity that has even led to a threat of physical violence at a normally staid A.P.A. meeting. The spread of the tactics—and the photographs of their wild misuse at Abu Ghraib—devastated America's reputation in the Muslim world. All the while, Mitchell and Jessen have remained more or less behind the curtain, their almost messianic belief in the value of breaking down detainees permeating interrogations throughout the war effort.

"I think [Mitchell and Jessen] have caused more harm to American national security than they'll ever understand," says Kleinman.

The bitterest irony is that the tactics seem to have been adopted by interrogators throughout the U.S. military in part because of a myth that whipped across continents and jumped from the intelligence to the military communities: the false impression that reverse-engineered sere tactics were the only thing that got Abu Zubaydah to talk.

Each branch of the U.S. military offers a variant of the sere training curriculum. The course simulates the experience of being held prisoner by enemy forces who do not observe the Geneva Conventions. The program evolved after American G.I.'s captured during the Korean War made false confessions under torture. Sure enough, those in sere training found that they would say anything to get the torment to stop.

During a typical three-week training course, participants endure waterboarding, forced nudity, extreme temperatures, sexual and religious ridicule, agonizing stress positions, and starvation-level rations. Some lose up to 15 pounds. "You're not going to die, but you think you are," says Rolince.

James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played a key role in developing the Air Force's sere program, which was administered in Spokane, Washington. Dr. Bryce Lefever, command psychologist on the U.S.S. Enterprise and a former sere trainer who worked with Mitchell and Jessen at the Fairchild Air Base, says he was waterboarded during his own training. "It was terrifying," he remembers. "I said to myself, 'They can't kill me because it's only an exercise.' But you're strapped to an inclined gurney and you're in four-point restraint, your head is almost immobilized, and they pour water between your nose and your mouth, so if you're likely to breathe, you're going to get a lot of water. You go into an oxygen panic."

sere psychologists such as Mitchell and Jessen play two crucial roles. They screen the trainers who play interrogators, to ensure that they are stable personalities who aren't likely to drift into sadism, and they function as psychic safety officers. If a trainer emerges from an exercise unable to smile, for example, he is viewed as "too into the problem," says Dr. Lefever, and is likely to be removed.

In an ever more dangerous world, some sere trainers realized that they could market their expertise to corporations and government agencies that send executives and other employees overseas, and a survival-training industry sprang into being.

Mitchell's entry into private contracting began less than three months before September 11 with a scientific consulting company called Knowledge Works, L.L.C. He registered it in North Carolina with the help of another sere psychologist he'd worked with at Fort Bragg, Dr. John Chin. Since then, he has formed several similar companies, including the Wizard Shop (which he renamed Mind Science) and What If, L.L.C.

In Spokane, several survival companies share space with Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. The firm's executive offices sit behind a locked door with a security code that the receptionist shields from view. There, Mitchell, Jessen maintains a Secure Compartmented Information Facility, or scif, for handling classified materials under C.I.A. guidelines, says a person familiar with the facility. But instead of training C.E.O.'s to survive capture, the company principally instructs interrogators on how to break down detainees.

The sere methods it teaches are based on Communist interrogation techniques that were never designed to get good information. Their goal, says Kleinman, was to generate propaganda by getting beaten-down American hostages to make statements against U.S. interests.

The best and most reliable information comes from people who are relaxed and perceive little threat. "Why would you use evasive training tactics to elicit information?" says Dr. Michael Gelles, former chief psychologist of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The sere tactics aren't just morally and legally wrong, critics say; they're tactically wrong. They produce false leads and hazy memories. "[Mitchell and Jessen] argue, 'We can make people talk,'" says Kleinman. "I have one question. 'About what?'" As one military member who worked in the sere community says, "Getting somebody to talk and getting someone to give you valid information are two very different things."

And yet, when it came time to extract intelligence from suspected al-Qaeda detainees, sere experts became "the only other game in town," according to a report, "Educing Information, Interrogation: Science and Art," put out last December by the Intelligence Science Board of the National Defense Intelligence College.

Exactly how that happened remains unclear. Many people assume that Special Forces operatives looked around for interrogation methods, recalled their sere training, and decided to try the techniques. But the introduction and spread of the tactics were more purposeful, and therefore "far more sinister," says John Sifton, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Mitchell and Jessen, Sifton says, offered a "patina of pseudo-science that made the C.I.A. and military officials think these guys were experts in unlocking the human mind. It's one thing to say, 'Take off the gloves.' It's another to say there was a science to it. sere came in as the science."

The use of "scientific credentials in the service of cruel and unlawful practices" harkens back to the Cold War, according to Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of Physicians for Human Rights. Back then, mental-health professionals working with the C.I.A. used hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, and extreme sensory deprivation on unwitting subjects to develop mind-control techniques. "We really thought we learned this lesson—that ambition to help national security is no excuse for throwing out ethics and science," Rubenstein says.

Some of those who encountered Mitchell and Jessen at the annual conference of all the military's sere programs were skeptical of their assertions. "Jim would make statements like, 'We know how people are responding to stress,'" one sere researcher recalls. "He always said he would show us data, but it would never arrive."

In truth, many did not consider Mitchell and Jessen to be scientists. They possessed no data about the impact of sere training on the human psyche, say former associates. Nor were they "operational psychologists," like the profilers who work for law enforcement. (Think of Jodie Foster's character in The Silence of the Lambs.) But they wanted to be, according to several former colleagues.

"It's a seductive role if you work with [elite] combat-type guys," says the military member who works in the sere community. "There is this wannabe kind of phenomenon. You lose role identity."

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Dr. Gelles, who had been at the forefront of trying to stop coercive interrogations at Guantánamo, calls it the "op-doc syndrome": "These sere guys, who were essentially like school counselors, wanted to be in a position where they had the solution to the operational challenge. They cannot help themselves."

But in the incestuous world of the Special Forces, where all psychologists are referred to as "Doc" and revered as experts, "no one ever questions that you might not have a clue what you're talking about," says an intelligence expert who opposed the use of sere tactics.

For a 2005 article in The New Yorker that raised the question of whether sere tactics had been reverse-engineered, Jane Mayer asked Mitchell if he was a C.I.A. contractor. He refused to confirm or deny the claim. But the newly minted op-docs Mitchell and Jessen had been among the experts who gathered at a daylong workshop in Arlington, Virginia, in July 2003, to debate the effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive techniques. The conference, titled "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory," was funded by the C.I.A. and co-hosted by the American Psychological Association and the Rand Corporation. One of its organizers was Kirk Hubbard, then chief of the C.I.A.'s Research and Analysis Branch. Mitchell and Jessen were named on the attendance list as C.I.A. contractors.

A key participant said that, before the conference, Hubbard called and warned him not to publicly identify attendees from the C.I.A. or ask them what they do, saying, "These people have jobs where deception and interviewing is very important."

Hubbard, who recently retired from the C.I.A., told me when I called him at his home in Montana that he has "no use for liberals who think we should be soft on terrorists." Asked about the work of Mitchell and Jessen, he was silent for a long time, then said, "I can't tell you anything about that."

Mitchell left one clue to his activities in corporate records. In 2004, he filed a notice with North Carolina's secretary of state formally dissolving Knowledge Works. In it, he wrote, "All members of this LLC moved out of the state of NC in March 2002, and subsequently Knowledge Works, LLC ceased to do business 29 March 2002."

Abu Zubaydah had been captured in Pakistan the day before.

One of the first on-the-ground tests for Mitchell's theories was the interrogation of Zubaydah. When he and the other members of the C.I.A. team arrived in Thailand, they immediately put a stop to the efforts at rapport building (which would also yield the name of José Padilla, an American citizen and supposed al-Qaeda operative now on trial in Miami for conspiring to murder and maim people in a foreign country).

Mitchell had a tougher approach in mind. The C.I.A. interrogators explained that they were going to become Zubaydah's "God." If he refused to cooperate, he would lose his clothes and his comforts one by one. At the safe house, the interrogators isolated him. They would enter his room just once a day to say, "You know what I want," then leave again.

As Zubaydah clammed up, Mitchell seemed to conclude that Zubaydah would talk only when he had been reduced to complete helplessness and dependence. With that goal in mind, the C.I.A. team began building a coffin in which they planned to bury the detainee alive.

A furor erupted over the legality of this move, which does not appear to have been carried out. (Every human-rights treaty and American law governing the treatment of prisoners prohibits death threats and simulated killings.) But the C.I.A. had a ready rejoinder: the methods had already been approved by White House lawyers. Mitchell was accompanied by another psychologist, Dr. R. Scott Shumate, then chief operational psychologist for the C.I.A.'s counterterrorism center. Surprisingly, Shumate opposed the extreme methods and packed his bags in disgust, leaving before the most dire tactics had commenced. He later told associates that it had been a mistake for the C.I.A. to hire Mitchell.

With Shumate gone, the interrogators were free to unleash what they called the "sere school" techniques. These included blasting the Red Hot Chili Peppers at top volume, stripping Zubaydah naked, and making his room so cold that his body turned blue, as The New York Times reported last year.

Ultimately, the F.B.I. pulled its agents from the scene and ruled that they could not be present any time coercive tactics were used, says Michael Rolince. It was a momentous decision that effectively gave the C.I.A. complete control of interrogations.

While it was the F.B.I.'s rapport-building that had prompted Zubaydah to talk, the C.I.A. would go on to claim credit for breaking Zubaydah, and celebrate Mitchell as a psychological wizard who held the key to getting hardened terrorists to talk. Word soon spread that Mitchell and Jessen had been awarded a medal by the C.I.A. for their advanced interrogation techniques. While the claim is impossible to confirm, what matters is that others believed it. The reputed success of the tactics was "absolutely in the ether," says one Pentagon civilian who worked on detainee policy.

In response to detailed questions from Vanity Fair, Mitchell and Jessen said in a statement, "The advice we have provided, and the actions we have taken have been legal and ethical. We resolutely oppose torture. Under no circumstances have we ever endorsed, nor would we endorse, the use of interrogation methods designed to do physical or psychological harm."

The C.I.A. would not comment on Mitchell's and Jessen's role. However, a C.I.A. spokesman said the agency's interrogation program was implemented lawfully and had produced vital intelligence.

Dr. Shumate, who now works in the Defense Department as director of the Behavioral Sciences Directorate within the Counterintelligence Field Activity (cifa), did not respond to interview requests. But a cifa spokesman said that Dr. Shumate, who served on the A.P.A.'s task force, supported the association's "guidelines that psychologists conduct themselves in an ethical and professional manner regardless of mission assignment or activity."

Colonel Brittain P. Mallow, 51, was the ultimate straight-up soldier: blue-eyed and poker-faced, with a winning if seldom-seen smile. After 9/11, he was put in command of the Defense Department's Criminal Investigative Task Force (C.I.T.F.), which was charged with assessing which detainees at Guantánamo Bay should be prosecuted. Mallow, who has an advanced degree in Middle East studies and a working knowledge of Arabic, foresaw that the interrogations would be culturally difficult. So his team called on Dr. Michael Gelles, of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, to form a Behavioral Science Consultation Team (bsct, pronounced "biscuit") of non-clinical psychologists. Its mission was to help establish rapport with detainees.

By the summer of 2002, Mallow was hearing disturbing reports of blasting music and strobe lights coming from the interrogation booths. This was the work of Task Force 170, the Pentagon unit in charge of intelligence gathering in the Southern Command. According to one of Mallow's deputies, the members of Task Force 170 considered the C.I.T.F. to be soft on detainees. They were "hell-bent" on using harsher tactics, another C.I.T.F. official says.

"There were a number of claims that coercive methods had achieved results" during "interrogations in other places," Mallow says. The other C.I.T.F. official recalls that a Task Force 170 officer told him, "Other people are using this stuff, and they're getting praised." (A Pentagon spokesman said all questioning at Guantánamo is lawful and falls within the limits set by the army field manual.)

At a Pentagon meeting where Mallow protested the methods, he says that a civilian official named Marshall Billingslea told him, "You don't know what you're talking about." Billingslea insisted that the coercive approach worked.

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Just months after Zubaydah's interrogation, the myth of Mitchell and Jessen's success in breaking him had made its way from Thailand to Guantánamo to Washington, and the reversed sere tactics had become associated with recognition and inside knowledge.

In late spring, Mallow met with Major General Michael E. Dunlavey, who was about to take over as commander of the newly combined JTF-GTMO 170 (Joint Task Force Guantánamo). Mallow briefed Dunlavey on his bsct team's rapport-building efforts and offered him full access to the psychologists. About a month later, he claims, Dunlavey had appropriated the acronym but set up a separate bsct team, cobbled together in part from clinical psychologists already at Guantánamo. Before activating the new bsct team, Dunlavey sent its members to Fort Bragg for a four-day sere-school workshop. (Dunlavey, now a juvenile-court judge in Erie, Pennsylvania, did not respond to requests for comment.)

On December 2, 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted JTF-GTMO 170's request to apply coercive tactics in interrogations. The only techniques he rejected were waterboarding and death threats. Within a week, the task force had drafted a five-page, typo-ridden document entitled "JTF GTMO 'SERE' Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure."

The document, which has never before been made public, states, "The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics used at US military sere schools are appropriate for use in real-world interrogations" and "can be used to break real detainees."

The document is divided into four categories: "Degradation," "Physical Debilitation," "Isolation and Monopoliztion [sic] of Perception," and "Demonstrated Omnipotence." The tactics include "slaps," "forceful removal of detainees' clothing," "stress positions," "hooding," "manhandling," and "walling," which entails grabbing the detainee by his shirt and hoisting him against a specially constructed wall.

"Note that all tactics are strictly non-lethal," the memo states, adding, "it is critical that interrogators do 'cross the line' when utilizing the tactics." The word "not" was presumably omitted by accident.

It is not clear whether the guidelines were ever formally adopted. But the instructions suggest that the military command wanted psychologists to be involved so they could lead interrogators up to the line, then stop them from crossing it.

In a bizarre mixture of solicitude and sadism, the memo details how to calibrate the infliction of harm. It dictates that the "[insult] slap will be initiated no more than 12–14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee's face … to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut." And interrogators are advised that, when stripping off a prisoner's clothes, "tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance." In short, the sere-inspired interrogations would be violent. And therefore, psychologists were needed to help make these more dangerous interrogations safer.

Soon, the reverse-engineered sere tactics that had been designed by Mitchell and Jessen, road-tested in the C.I.A.'s black sites, and adopted in Guantánamo were being used in Iraq as well. One intelligence officer recalled witnessing a live demonstration of the tactics. The detainee was on his knees in a room painted black and forced to hold an iron bar in his extended hands while interrogators slapped him repeatedly. The man was then taken into a bunker, where he was stripped naked, blindfolded, and shackled. He was ordered to be left that way for 12 hours.

At the Abu Ghraib prison, military policemen on the night shift adopted the tactics to hideous effect. In what amounted to a down-market parody of the praise heaped on Mitchell and Jessen, Specialist Charles A. Graner Jr., a former prison guard from Pennsylvania, received a commendation for his work "softening up" detainees, according to the documentary The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. He appears repeatedly in photographs, smiling and giving thumbs-up before human pyramids of naked detainees. In 2005, he was convicted on charges of abuse. In their statement, Mitchell and Jessen said that they were "appalled by reports" of alleged abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo and had not been involved with them in any way.

Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia recently made his case for heavy-handed interrogation tactics via a surprisingly current pop-culture reference. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles," he told a panel of judges, referring to the torturer protagonist of the Fox series 24. "Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?"

In the real world, however, it is increasingly clear that the U.S. has sacrificed its global image for tactics that are at best ineffective. "We are not aware of any convincing evidence that coercive tactics work better than other methods of obtaining actionable intelligence," said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Under Levin's leadership, the Senate Armed Services Committee has been probing the military's alleged mistreatment of detainees and intends to hold hearings. In a statement to Vanity Fair, Levin says that he finds the reported use of sere tactics in interrogations "very troubling," and that his committee is looking specifically at "the accountability of officials for actions or failures to act."

Mitchell and Jessen have become a focus of the investigation. In June, the online news magazine Salon reported that the Defense Department, responding to a request from Levin's committee, ordered top Pentagon officials to preserve any documents mentioning the two psychologists or their company in Spokane.

Meanwhile, business appears to be booming at Mitchell, Jessen & Associates. It has 120 employees and specializes in "understanding, predicting, and improving performance in high-risk and extreme situations," according to a recruitment ad at a recent job fair for people with top security clearances.

The principals of Mitchell, Jessen & Associates are raking in money. According to people familiar with their compensation, they get paid more than $1,000 per day plus expenses, tax free, for their overseas work. It beats military pay. Mitchell has built his dream house in Florida. He also purchased a BMW through one of his companies. "Taxpayers are paying at least half a million dollars a year for these two knuckleheads to do voodoo," says one of the people familiar with their pay arrangements.

Last December, the nation's best-known interrogation experts joined together to release a report, called "Educing Information," that sought to comprehensively address the question of which methods work in interrogations.

Scott Shumate served as an adviser to the report, which concluded that there is no evidence that reverse-engineered sere tactics work, or that sere psychologists make for capable interrogators. One chapter, authored by Kleinman, concludes: "Employment of resistance interrogators—whether as consultants or as practitioners—is an example of the proverbial attempt to place the square peg in the round hole."

But it is one of the features of our war on terror that myths die hard. Just think of the al-Qaeda–Iraq connection, or Saddam Hussein's W.M.D. In late 2005, as Senator John McCain was pressing the Bush administration to ban torture techniques, one of the nation's top researchers of stress in sere trainees claims to have received a call from Samantha Ravitch, the deputy assistant for national security in Vice President Dick Cheney's office. She wanted to know if the researcher had found any evidence that uncontrollable stress would make people more likely to talk.

Katherine Eban is a Brooklyn-based journalist and Alicia Patterson fellow who writes about issues of public health and homeland security. Her book, Dangerous Doses: A True Story of Cops, Counterfeiters, and the Contamination of America's Drug Supply, was excerpted in the May 2005 issue of Vanity Fair.

The coercive principle Must be proven Here in order to maintain its potency when applied to "Polite" society. It supports our Carrot and Stick Foreign Policy and a more Fascist-leaning
goverment at home.

Prisoner torture and abuse should not be tolerated by our government even when our government is the one doing it.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17847.htm
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Psychologists responsible for the development and migration of abusive interrogation techniques

Open Letter to the President of the American Psychological Association

The following Open Letter to Sharon Brehm, President of the American Psychological Association was sent by over 40 psychologists. [It is also available in pdf format at http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/wp...rehmfinalnp.pdf ]

See also the related briefing paper: Q&A: How the Pentagon’s Inspector General Report Contradicts What the APA Has Said About the Involvement of Psychologists in Abusive Interrogations. http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/wp...eportsaysnp.pdf ]


06/07/07 "ICH" -- -

June 6, 2007

Sharon Brehm, Ph.D.
President
American Psychological Association

Dear President Brehm:

We write you as psychologists concerned about the participation of our profession in abusive interrogations of national security detainees at Guantánamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the so-called CIA “black sites.”

Our profession is founded on the fundamental ethical principle, enshrined as Principle A in our Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.” Irrefutable evidence now shows that psychologists participating in national security interrogations have systematically violated this principle. A recently declassified August 2006 report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG) –Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse—describes in detail how psychologists from the military’s Survival, Evasion Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program were instructed to apply their expertise in abusive interrogation techniques to interrogations being conducted by the DoD throughout all three theaters of the War on Terror (Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq).

SERE is the US military’s program designed to train Special Forces and other troops at high risk of capture to resist “breaking” during harsh interrogations conducted by a ruthless enemy. During SERE training, trainees are subjected to extensive abusive treatment, including sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, isolation, cultural and sexual humiliation, and, in some cases, simulated drowning (”waterboarding”). By SERE’s own admission, these techniques are classified as torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

The OIG report details a number of trainings and consultations provided by SERE psychologists to psychologists and other personnel involved in interrogations, including those on the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT), generally composed of and headed by psychologists. The OIG confirms repeated press accounts over the last two years that SERE techniques were “reverse engineered” by SERE psychologists in consultation with the BSCT psychologists and others, to develop and standardize a regime of psychological torture used by interrogators at Guantánamo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The OIG report states: “Counterresistance techniques [SERE] were introduced because personnel believed that interrogation methods used were no longer effective in obtaining useful information from some detainees.”

The OIG report also clearly reveals the central role of psychologists in these processes:

“On September 16, 2002, the Army Special Operations Command and the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency [the military unit containing SERE] co-hosted a SERE psychologist conference at Fort Bragg for JTF-170 [the military component responsible for interrogations at Guantánamo] interrogation personnel. The Army’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team from Guantánamo Bay also attended the conference. Joint Personnel Recovery Agency briefed JTF-170 representatives on the exploitation techniques and methods used in resistance (to interrogation) training at SERE schools. The JTF-170 personnel understood that they were to become familiar with SERE training and be capable of determining which SERE information and techniques might be useful in interrogations at Guantánamo. Guantánamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team personnel understood that they were to review documentation and standard operating procedures for SERE training in developing the standard operating procedure for the JTF-170, if the command approved those practices. The Army Special Operations Command was examining the role of interrogation support as a ‘SERE Psychologist competency area‘” (p. 25, emphasis added).

It is now indisputable that psychologists and psychology were directly and officially responsible for the development and migration of abusive interrogation techniques, techniques which the International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled “tantamount to torture.” Reports of psychologists’ (along with other health professionals’) participation in abusive interrogations surfaced more than two years ago.

While other health professional associations expressed dismay when it was reported that their members had participated in these abuses and took principled stands against their members’ direct participation in interrogations, the APA undertook a campaign to support such involvement. In 2005, APA President Ron Levant created the PENS Task Force to assess the ethics of such participation. Six of the nine voting psychologist members selected for the task force were uniformed and civilian personnel from military and intelligence agencies, most with direct connections to national security interrogations. Perhaps most problematic, it is clear from the OIG Report that three of the PENS members were directly in the chain of command translating SERE techniques into harsh interrogation tactics. Although we cannot know exactly what each of these individuals did, their presence in the chain of command is troubling.

One such task Force member is Colonel Morgan Banks who, according to his Task Force biography “is the senior Army Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) Psychologist, responsible for the training and oversight of all Army SERE Psychologists, who include those involved in SERE training…. He provides technical support and consultation to all Army psychologists providing interrogation support…. His initial duty assignment as a psychologist was to assist in establishing the Army’s first permanent SERE training program involving a simulated captivity experience…. In November 1991 [sic: 2001], he deployed to Afghanistan, where he spent four months over the winter of 2001/2002 at Bagram Airfield, supporting combat operations against Al Qaida and Taliban fighters.”

Thus, according to the OIG report, Colonel Banks had direct command responsibility for the SERE psychologists training, consulting, and participating in interrogations and provided “support and consultation” to other psychologists involved in abusive interrogations. In fact, reading the OIG report renders it difficult to imagine that Colonel Banks was not himself directly involved in developing and/or implementing these abusive activities. The OIG report appears to confirm what has been suspected at least since the publication in July 2005 of Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article “The Experiment”: that Colonel Banks was intimately involved in the teaching and development of the abusive interrogation tactics documented by the International Committee of the Red Cross, and now by the Department of Defense, as being used at Guantánamo.

Colonel Larry James, a second PENS member, “was the Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba” (PENS Task Force member biographies) starting in January 2003. Col. Larry James has often been cited by Gerald Koocher, Stephen Behnke, and others, as the one who ‘cleaned up’ Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. The OIG report, however, makes it clear that Guantánamo BSCTs played an essential role in transforming SERE techniques into standard operating interrogation procedure; that the Commander of Guantánamo detainee operations requested official approval for the use of these torture techniques in October, 2002; and that permission was granted by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in December 2002. Additionally, as stated in his PENS biography, in 2003 James “was the Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba.” In 2004, James was Director, Behavioral Science Unit, Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib. It should be noted that that in 2004, according to many sources, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, Guantánamo Commander, too, went from Guantánamo to Iraq, and brought the SERE techniques with him. James was the commander of the BSCTs at the time the FBI and other law enforcement agents were reporting that severe abuses were occurring at Guantánamo. The FBI and other Criminal Investigative Task Force agents reporting these abuses referred to them as “SERE” and “counter-resistance” tactics in documents obtained by the ACLU under the Freedom of Information Act.

Yet another task Force member, Captain Bryce Lefever, had previously been a SERE psychologist where he supervised “personnel undergoing intensive exposure to enemy interrogation, torture, and exploitation techniques.” He “was deployed as the Joint Special Forces Task Force psychologist to Afghanistan in 2002,” presumably replacing Col. Banks who had previously held that role. Capt. Lefever “lectured to interrogators and was consulted on various interrogation techniques” (PENS Task Force member biographies). That is, he had the requisite SERE background and it appears that he was involved in interrogations in Afghanistan at the time that, as the OIG report reveals, the abusive SERE-based techniques were being utilized through Special Forces units.

In addition to these three members who were directly in the military chain of command responsible for employing the SERE techniques as interrogation tactics, another member of the PENS Task Force, Scott Shumate, stated in a conference biographical statement that “From April 2001 until May of 2003 he was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC)…. He has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists.” The CTC, according to press reports, is responsible for managing the CIA’s Black Site facilities where the top 14 Al Qaeda operatives in US custody were initially held and interrogated. The “key apprehended terrorists” that Shumate refers to are very likely those Al Qaeda operatives subjected to the CIA’s brutal “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Thus, the available evidence strongly suggests that the PENS Task Force included a number of individuals who oversaw or directly participated in torture or other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment that is allegedly banned by the APA.

Not surprisingly, given its membership, the PENS Task Force report concluded that “[i]t is consistent with the APA Code of Ethics for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes….” The Task Force report further echoed the Department of Defense cover story for employing BSCT psychologists: “While engaging in such consultative and advisory roles entails a delicate balance of ethical considerations, doing so puts psychologists in a unique position to assist in ensuring that such processes are safe and ethical for all participants.”

Since the release of the PENS report, numerous articles in the press have documented that psychologists at Guantánamo and elsewhere have utilized abusive SERE techniques on detainees. (Jane Meyer’s New Yorker article appeared one week after the PENS report.) All the while, the APA leadership has ignored the mounting evidence to the contrary and reiterated this flawed PENS premise, as you yourself did in response to such an article in the Washington Monthly: “[t]he Association’s position is rooted in our belief that having psychologists consult with interrogation teams makes an important contribution toward keeping interrogations safe and ethical.”

Every report of horrific abuses occurring at Guantánamo and elsewhere has not only cast doubt upon this basic premise of APA policy, these reports have repeatedly highlighted psychologists’ abuse of psychological knowledge for purposes of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Yet the APA has never made any public attempt to investigate such reports. Even if certain psychologists attempted to “keep interrogations safe and ethical,” the OIG report demonstrates once and for all that BSCT and SERE psychologists, among others, were responsible for the development, migration, and perpetration of abuses.

It is time for the APA to acknowledge that the central premise of its years-long policy of condoning and encouraging psychologist participation in interrogations is wrong. It has now been revealed by the DoD itself that, rather than assuring safety, psychologists were central to the abuse. This remains true even if some psychologists made efforts to reduce such harm during their involvement in these interrogation contexts at some point in time. It is critical that APA take immediate steps to remedy the damage done to the reputation of the organization, to our ethical standards, to the field of psychology, and to human rights in this age where they are under concerted attack. The following steps will begin the process of correcting this egregious error by the organization and its leadership.

We urgently recommend that:

1. The President of the APA acknowledge errors and abuses and chart a new direction re-emphasizing human rights. In light of the recent revelations, you, as President of the APA, should issue a clear public statement that acknowledges the errors made by APA, in both policy and public statements, and abuses perpetrated by psychologists; you should call on the association to go in a new direction, giving primary emphasis to human rights concerns in forging policy around ethics and national security.

2. The APA Board of Directors and Ethics Committee endorse the APA Moratorium on psychologist participation in interrogations of foreign detainees. It is critical to immediately disengage psychologists from any direct or supervisory participation in interrogations of individual detainees. Such a step would do much to bring the APA in line with the positions adopted some time ago by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Nurses Association. Thus, the APA leadership should support and the Council of Representatives must, at the August Convention, pass the Moratorium on Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations at US Detention Centers for Foreign Detainees proposed by Dr. Neil Altman and scheduled for a vote at Council.

3. The APA Board of Directors encourage, support, and cooperate with the Senate investigations of detainee treatment. It is essential that the APA support and cooperate fully with the announced investigation of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) into the role of SERE in the creation of abusive interrogation strategies, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s announced investigation into the CIA’s handling of detainees in their custody. In fact, the APA Board of Directors should do what it can to expedite this and other external, non-partisan investigations of all localities that utilize BSCT psychologists.

4. The APA Board of Directors commence a neutral third-party investigation of its own involvement, and that of APA staff, in APA-military conflicts of interest. It is essential that the APA membership and the concerned public develop an in-depth understanding of how and why the APA accepted a rationale for psychologist involvement in interrogations that has been revealed to have been advanced by involved psychologists, and which permitted their continued participation and supervision of abusive interrogation processes. The concept of “legal, ethical, safe, and effective” has been exposed as a euphemism for psychologist oversight of abuse; these activities can only be considered “ethical” because the APA Ethics Code (Standard 1.02) was rewritten in 2002 to define complying with any law or military regulation as “ethical.”

The membership has a right to know why, in the face of continually emerging sets of tangible evidence suggesting that the its policy was flawed and that psychologists were systematically employing expert psychological knowledge for purposes of abuse, the APA leadership refused to investigate, and continued to give cover for these abuses. (According to APA Ethics Director, Dr. Stephen Behnke, the BSCTs attach a copy of the PENS report to their training manuals.) Therefore, it is critical that an independent investigation be launched – conducted by individuals well-known for their commitment to human rights – into the development of APA policy in this area, and into the broader issues that likely contributed to a series of suspicious procedural activities. Among the issues this investigation must examine are:

a) the numerous procedural irregularities alleged to have occurred during the PENS process;

the role of the military and intelligence agencies in the formation and functioning of the PENS Task Force;

c) the reasons the APA and its leadership have systematically ignored the accumulating evidence that psychologists participating in interrogations are contributing to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, rather than helping to prevent it;

d) the overall nexus of close ties between the APA staff/leadership and the military and intelligence agencies, ties that may have contributed to a climate that permits undo influence of military and intelligence agencies in the creation of these policies and that encourages turning a blind eye to abuse;

e) the transformation of the APA Ethics Code, from one that protects psychologists’ ethical conduct when such conduct conflicts with law and military regulations to one that protects psychologists who follow unethical law and military regulations.

Only such an investigatory process can restore the faith of the membership and the broader public in the APA and in the profession of psychology. To fail to act now would be to continue an organizational policy that maintains and protects psychologists’ roles as the architects of what can only be interpreted as a torture paradigm; one that has intentionally violated the Geneva Conventions, our nation’s values, and our professional ethics.

We look forward to your affirmation, acceptance, and action in regard to this call for immediate steps to remedy this saddening situation for our organization and our discipline.

Sincerely*,


Stephen Soldz, Director, Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development & Professor, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; University of Massachusetts, Boston

Brad Olson, Assistant Research Professor, Northwestern University

Steven Reisner, Senior Faculty and Supervisor, International Trauma Studies Program, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University; Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry, New York University Medical School

Mike Wessells, Former Member, PENS Task Force; Columbia University

Rhoda Unger, Brandeis University

Uwe Jacobs, Director, Survivors International, San Francisco

Ed Tejirian, New York

Bernice Lott, University of Rhode Island

Jeffrey Kaye, San Francisco

Elliot Mishler, Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Ghislaine Boulanger, Steering Committee, withholdapadues.com

Morton Deutsch, E.L. Thorndike Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Director Emeritus of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR) Teachers College, Columbia University

Faye J Crosby, Psychology Department, University of California, Santa Cruz

Marc Pilisuk, Professor Emeritus, the University of California; Professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center

Marybeth Shinn, Professor of Applied Psychology and Public Policy, New York University

Stephan L. Chorover, Professor of Psychology, MIT

Mary Brydon-Miller, Director, Action Research Center, Associate Professor, Educational Studies and Urban Educational Leadership, College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services, University of Cincinnati

M. Brinton Lykes, Associate Director, Center for Human Rights & International Justice,
Associate Dean, Lynch School of Education, Boston College

Ben Harris, Department of Psychology, University of New Hampshire

Barbara Gutek, PrEller Professor of Women and Leadership, Department of Management and Organizations, University of Arizona

Frank Summers, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University Medical School

Kevin Lanning, Wilkes Honors College, Florida Atlantic University

Alice Shaw, San Francisco

Lila Braine, Professor Emerita, Barnard College, Columbia University

Stuart Oskamp, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Claremont Graduate University

Linda M. Woolf, Professor of Psychology and International Human Rights, Webster University

Arlene Lu Steinberg, President, Division 39 Section IX, APA: Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility

Lew Aron, Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy

Scot D. Evans, Community Psychology, Wilfrid Laurier University

Susan Torres-Harding, Roosevelt University

Allen L. Roland, Sonoma, CA

Emily K. Filardo, Director, Women’s Studies, & Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Kean University

Maram Hallak, Borough of Manhattan Community College; the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP)

Anthony J. Marsella, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii

Barbara Eisold, New York Medical College

Kathleen Malley-Morrison, Department of Psychology, Boston University

Chrysoula K.E. Fantaousakis, Kean University

Karen Rosica, Faculty, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California; Director of Special Projects, SalusWorld.org

Hal S. Bertilson, University of Wisconsin-Superior

Ibrahim Kira, Access Community Health and Research Center, Dearborn, MI

Lynne Layton, Harvard Medical School

Allen M. Omoto, School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences, Claremont Graduate University

Richard V. Wagner, Bates College

* Affiliations listed for identification purposes only.

Note: Additional signatories will continue to be recruited.

Contact:

Stephen Soldz
ssoldz@bgsp.edu

Steven Reisner
SReisner@psychoanalysis.net

Brad Olson
b-olson@northwestern.edu

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0723,hentoff,76862,6.html
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Give Me Liberty
The Torture Doctors
These physicians have a strange way of preserving the American way of life
by Nat Hentoff
June 6th, 2007 11:12 AM

For all the press coverage of abuses, including torture, of our "detainees," most Americans are unaware of the partnership between military interrogators and military doctors and psychiatrists in "breaking" prisoners who refuse to provide information. A chilling account of this utter betrayal of medical ethics appeared in the July 2005 New England Journal of Medicine ("Doctors and Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay"), hardly a widely circulated publication.

It was preceded on July 1 by an op-ed column in The Washington Post, "The Stain of Torture," by Dr. Burton J. Lee II, former personal physician to President George H.W. Bush. Lee was horrified that "military medical personnel have played a role in the torture of prisoners."

I thought these modern versions of Émile Zola's "J'Accuse"—which famously denounced the French military in 1898 for its anti-Semitic persecution of Alfred Dreyfus—would be followed by Congressional investigations and fiery editorials, but the only substantial follow-up I've seen to this indictment of the Defense Department's torture doctors has been a book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror by Dr. Steven Miles, an expert on medical ethics and international human rights.

The book was published by Random House last year, but has largely disappeared from press and public attention. In his April 7 interview with Miles, Peter Rowe of the The San Diego Union-Tribune noted that "Amazon reported that 227,826 other volumes were outselling Oath Betrayed."

I am not surprised, therefore, to have seen no follow-up in the press or in Congress on Miles's documented proof that it was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who authorized the collaboration between interrogators and doctors preparing prisoners for torture.

In an April 2003 memorandum, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that "interrogations must always . . . take into account . . . a detainee's emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses . . . [and] manipulate [those] emotions and weaknesses."

This is how it works, as described in the New England Journal of Medicine. At Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, under Rumsfeld's policy, "approved the creation of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team" (BSCT, pronounced biscuit). Psychiatrists and psychologists on the team at Guantánamo "prepared psychological profiles [of the prisoners whose personal health information they had access to] for use by interrogators. They also sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators."

In another medical publication, American Journal of Bioethics, Miles added, "The BSCT doctors suggested . . . how to break the prisoners down. . . . [One] approach aimed at a prisoner's personal vulnerabilities, his worst fears, for example."

No detail was too insignificant for these specialists in cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment. A BSCT psychologist authorized the use of snarling dogs to "exploit individual phobias." And another psychologist, a chair of the BSCT team at Guantánamo and a major in rank, "suggested putting the prisoner in a swivel chair to prevent him from fixing his eyes on one spot and thereby avoiding the guards."

Moreover, Steven Miles reports in Oath Betrayed that "a civil lawsuit and an FBI memo describe four prisoners—three at Guantánamo and one apparently in Afghanistan—who were "denied a prosthetic limb [and] antibiotics for festering wounds . . . until they cooperated with interrogators."

Another detailed source of how the torture doctors operate is the soon-to-be-updated 2005 report, "Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces" from the Physicans for Human Rights (phrusa.org). (PFHR has offices in both Washington and Cambridge, Mass.)

A key indictment in this report on the legal responsibilities of health professionals cooperating with interrogators should lead to a Congressional investigation now that the Democrats are in power, but Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are clueless in these human-rights matters:

"Health personnel employed by the Department of Defense and other agencies in the 'war on terror' are bound by international law," reads the report. Also, "they should abide by ethical standards of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association [both of which have yet to be heard from concerning the discipline of torture doctors]. The Declaration of Tokyo, adopted by both bodies, prohibits participation by physicians in torture and all forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This includes providing knowledge to 'facilitate the practice of torture' [and other degrading treatment]. It also prohibits the physician's presence when any of these practices takes place."

Are none of the doctors in these prisons troubled by what they see, even if some are not directly involved? "There is evidence," says Physicians for Human Rights, "of failure on the part of health professionals to report abuse as well as evidence of complicity in acts of physical and psychological torture."

There are FBI agents with much higher ethical standards than these health professionals. A number of them, appalled at what they saw during Army interrogations while on assignment at Guantánamo, sent urgent e-mails to FBI Director Robert Mueller reporting these abuses, adding that some of the torturers pretended to be FBI agents. Mueller took no action until persistently prodded by Vermont Democratic Senator Pat Leahy; he then said he'd look into it. But as far as I know, no torturer cited by the FBI agents has been held accountable.

I asked Miles what actions have been taken against these health professionals who have abandoned medical ethics. "Only very minor reprisals," he said. "A medic who watched some abuse. A nurse who witnessed other abuses. But no one higher has been disciplined." A source at Physicians for Human Rights tells me: "It's been a complete whitewash."

Not only Army interrogators and doctors are committing these war crimes under our own War Crimes statute. Two years ago, The Washington Post's Dana Priest reported that in a CIA Rendition Group of kidnappers, "case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists . . . figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside. . . . "

The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that in ancient times, when a physician arrived, a patient was not sure whether the doctor had come to treat him or kill him. So much for advanced civilization. But why, I wonder, are American doctors who are not in our military prisons remaining silent?

Physical & Sexual Abuse of Prisoners "Routine" in US
Fox Butterfield, NY Times, 5/9/2004

Excerpts:

"Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates.

In Pennsylvania and some other states, inmates are routinely stripped in front of other inmates before being moved to a new prison or a new unit within their prison. In Arizona, male inmates at the Maricopa County jail in Phoenix are made to wear women's pink underwear as a form of humiliation.

At Virginia's Wallens Ridge maximum security prison, new inmates have reported being forced to wear black hoods, in theory to keep them from spitting on guards, and said they were often beaten and cursed at by guards and made to crawl.

The corrections experts say that some of the worst abuses have occurred in Texas, whose prisons were under a federal consent decree during much of the time President Bush was governor because of crowding and violence by guards against inmates. Judge William Wayne Justice of Federal District Court imposed the decree after finding that guards were allowing inmate gang leaders to buy and sell other inmates as slaves for sex.

The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.

The Utah official, Lane McCotter, later became an executive of a private prison company, one of whose jails was under investigation by the Justice Department when he was sent to Iraq as part of a team of prison officials, judges, prosecutors and police chiefs picked by Attorney General John Ashcroft to rebuild the country's criminal justice system.

Mr. McCotter, 63, is director of business development for Management & Training Corporation, a Utah-based firm that says it is the third-largest private prison company, operating 13 prisons. In 2003, the company's operation of the Santa Fe jail was criticized by the Justice Department and the New Mexico Department of Corrections for unsafe conditions and lack of medical care for inmates. No further action was taken.

-- snip --

In a 1999 opinion, Judge Justice wrote of the situation in Texas, "Many inmates credibly testified to the existence of violence, rape and extortion in the prison system and about their own suffering from such abysmal conditions."

In a case that began in 2000, a prisoner at the Allred Unit in Wichita Falls, Tex., said he was repeatedly raped by other inmates, even after he appealed to guards for help, and was allowed by prison staff to be treated like a slave, being bought and sold by various prison gangs in different parts of the prison. The inmate, Roderick Johnson, has filed suit against the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, said Kara Gotsch, public policy coordinator for the National Prison Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing Mr. Johnson.

Asked what Mr. Bush knew about abuse in Texas prisons while he was governor, Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said the problems in American prisons were not comparable to the abuses exposed at Abu Ghraib.

-- snip --

When Mr. Ashcroft announced the appointment of the team to restore Iraq's criminal justice system last year, including Mr. McCotter, he said, "Now all Iraqis can taste liberty in their native land, and we will help make that freedom permanent by assisting them to establish an equitable criminal justice system based on the rule of law and standards of basic human rights."

A Justice Department spokeswoman, Monica Goodling, did not return phone calls on Friday asking why Mr. Ashcroft had chosen Mr. McCotter even though his firm's operation of the Santa Fe jail had been criticized by the Justice Department.

Mr. McCotter has a long background in prisons. He had been a military police officer in Vietnam and had risen to be a colonel in the Army. His last post was as warden of the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth.

After retiring from the Army, Mr. Cotter was head of the corrections departments in New Mexico and Texas before taking the job in Utah. In Utah, in addition to the death of the mentally ill inmate, Mr. McCotter also came under criticism for hiring a prison psychiatrist whose medical license was on probation and who was accused of Medicaid fraud and writing prescriptions for drug addicts."


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http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/911review/2006...ssador_to_italy

“Among our president's appointments of GOP activists to important posts, we've done worse than Melvin Sembler, the Ambassador to Italy who couldn't speak Italian.. … But where Melvin Sembler, 74, demands attention is as an object lesson in how cruelty can be redeemed by the transformative power of political donations. For 16 years, Sembler, with his wife Betty, directed the leading juvenile rehab business in America, STRAIGHT, Inc., before seeing it dismantled by a breathtaking array of institutional abuse claims by mid-1993…. ranging from sexual abuse, beating and stomping to boys called "faggots" for hours while being spat upon -- humiliation so bad that a Pennsylvania judge recently ruled it potentially mitigating of a Death Row sentence for a former STRAIGHT teen who committed a homophobic murder.

Although prosecutors closed the clinics, six-figure settlements sucked it dry, and state health officials yanked its licenses after media reports of teen torture and cover-up, Sembler himself escaped punishment…. coast-to-coast trail of human wreckage had ensued during STRAIGHT's reign from 1976 to 1993 -- its survivors claimed physical, sexual and psychological trauma. … "My best guess is that at least half of the kids were abused," says Dr. Arnold Trebach, a professor emeritus at American University who created the Drug Policy Foundation to find alternatives to harsh laws. He has singled out STRAIGHT in his book "The Great Drug War" as among drug warriors' worst mistakes….

"While at the facility," wrote Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services Acting Inspector General Lowell Clary on May 19, 1993, "the team [of inspectors in 1989] received a phone call informing them that no matter what they found, STRAIGHT would receive their license." "If you do anything other than what I tell you on this issue, I will fire you on the spot," an HRS official was told. Clary wasn't positive, but evidence suggested that "pressure may have been generated by Ambassador Sembler and other state senators."

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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article8451.htm
Torture Inc.: Americas Brutal Prisons

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Control Unit Prisons (SHU) by Frank J. Atwood, MA

"Control units are supermax prisons that have been designed by government and prison authorities to control the thinking of prisoners, to determine what the prisoners will think about, through carefully contrived sensory deprivation tactics and by focusing the attention of prisoners on immediate concerns. These strategies disable prisoners through psychological, physical, and spiritual breakdown in order to compel mindless compliance by humiliation, intimidation, and demoralization."

http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Rotun...ontrolunits.htm


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See also “It Didn’t Start With Abu Ghraib: Dick Cheney, Vice President for Torture and War”
by Jeffrey Steinberg, Executive Intelligence Review, November 11th, 2005
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/...berg-Cheney.pdf

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Cruel Science: The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research
by Alfred W. McCoy
Counterpunch, May 29/31, 2004
http://www.counterpunch.org/mccoy05292004.html

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According to Harry V. Martin and David Caul, as published in the Napa Sentinel August/September/October/November 1991 (http://www.whale.to/b/caul.html) :

‘Funding and experimentations of mind control have been part of the U.S. Health, Education and Welfare Department, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Central Intelligence Agency through the Phoenix Program, the Stanford Research Institute, the Agency for International Development, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and the National Science Foundation.”

“Those subject to the mind control experiments would be given indefinite sentences, his freedom was dependent upon how well the experiment went. One individual, for example, was arrested for joyriding, given a two-year sentence and held for mind control experiments. He was held for 18 years.” (Sound like the Texas Youth situation?)

“A naked inmate is strapped down on a board. His wrists and ankles are cuffed to the board and his head is rigidly held in place by a strap around his neck and a helmet on his head. He is left in a darkened cell, unable to remove his body wastes. When a meal is delivered, one wrist is unlocked so he could feel around in the dark for his food and attempt to pour liquid down his throat without being able to lift his head.

Another experiment creates a muscle relaxant. Within 30 to 40 seconds paralysis begins to invade the small muscles of the fingers, toes, and eyes and then the intercostal muscles and diaphragm. The heart slows down to about 60 beats per minute. This condition, together with respiratory arrests, sets in for as long as two to five minutes before the drug begins to wear off. The individual remains fully conscious and is gasping for breath. It is "likened to dying, it is almost like drowning" the experiment states.”

(Sound like Abu Ghraib and water-boarding?)

--snip --


“The Violence Control Center was actually the brain child of William Herrmann as part of a pacification plan for California. A counter insurgency expert for Systems Development Corporation and an advisor to Governor Reagan, Herrmann worked with the Stand Research Institute, the RAND Corporation, and the Hoover Center on Violence. Herrmann was also a CIA agent who is now serving an eight year prison sentence for his role in a CIA counterfeiting operation. He was also directly linked with the Iran-Contra affair according to government records and Herrmann's own testimony.

In 1970, Herrmann worked with Colston Westbrook as his CIA control officer when Westbrook formed and implemented the Black Cultural Association at the Vacaville Medical Facility, a facility which in July experienced the death of three inmates who were forcibly subjected to behavior modification drugs. The Black Cultural Association was ostensibly an education program designed to instill black pride identity in prisons, the Association was really a cover for an experimental behavior modification pilot project designed to test the feasibility of programming unstable prisoners to become more manageable.

Westbrook worked for the CIA in Vietnam as a psychological warfare expert, and as an advisor to the Korean equivalent of the CIA and for the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia. Between 1966 and 1969, he was an advisor to the Vietnamese Police Special Branch under the cover of working as an employee of Pacific Architects and Engineers.

His "firm" contracted the building of the interrogation/torture centers in every province of South Vietnam as part of the CIA's Phoenix Program. The program was centered around behavior modification experiments to learn how to extract information from prisoners of war, a direct violation of the Geneva Accords.

-- snip --

As a counterinsurgency consultant for Systems Development Corporation, a security firm, Herrmann told the Los Angeles Times that a good computer intelligence system "would separate out the activist bent on destroying the system" and then develop a master plan "to win the hearts and minds of the people". The San Francisco-based Bay Guardian, recently identified Herrmann as an international arms dealer working with Iran in 1980, and possibly involved in the October Surprise. Herrmann is in an English prison for counterfeiting. He allegedly met with Iranian officials to ascertain whether the Iranians would trade arms for hostages held in Lebanon.

The London Sunday Telegraph confirmed Herrmann's CIA connections, tracing them from 1976 to 1986. He also worked for the FBI. This information was revealed in his London trial.

In the 1970's, Dr. Brian and Herrmann worked together under Governor Reagan on the Center for the Study and Reduction of Violence, and then, a decade later, again worked under Reagan. Both men have been identified as working for Reagan with the Iranians.”

“A U.S. Navy psychologist, who claims that the Office of Naval Intelligence had taken convicted murderers from military prisons, used behavior modification techniques on them, and then relocated them in American embassies throughout the world.”