Top U.S. Psychologist Admits He Met with CIA Interrogator Days Before Zubaydah Torture

In December 2013, I wrote an account of a meeting by famous U.S. psychologist Martin Seligman with James Mitchell only days before the latter flew to Thailand to begin the CIA torture of purported Al Qaeda figure Abu Zubaydah. The account drew upon original reporting by Georgetown University law professor M. Gregg Bloche in his 2011 book, The Hippocratic Oath.

After the article was written, Seligman wrote both Bloche and myself to criticize my article as "entirely fiction." Until recently, that's how the matter stood.

But among the many interesting factual tidbits included in the release of Chicago attorney David H. Hoffman's "independent review" on the American Psychological Association's "Ethics guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture," was an admission by Seligman that the Spring 2002 meeting with Mitchell indeed took place, vindicating Bloche's account and my article.

"So much for 'fiction,'" Bloche wrote in an email to me.

"Entirely fiction"

Mitchell's own connection with the CIA torture program has been the subject of analysis by various Congressional investigations (most recently by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence), various books, articles, and even interviews with Mitchell himself.

I argued in a December 2013 article at The Dissenter/Firedoglake (still available online at FDL's successor website, Shadowproof) that the April 2002 meeting between Seligman, CIA Chief of Behavioral Sciences Staff Kirk Hubbard, James Mitchell, and potentially others, was important, as it came just before Mitchell left to take over the black site interrogation of Abu Zubaydah. It was this interrogation, with its implementation of the CIA's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques," including waterboarding, that led to the first in a series of Department of Justice memoranda essentially legalizing torture.

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

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

I emailed Seligman to ask him to confirm or deny Bloche’s allegation, and offered him plenty of space in this article to explain himself. I never heard back from him.

But I did hear back from Seligman after the article was published. I published the December 9, 2013 email from Seligman in full as an "update" to the original article:

Dr. Seligman has emailed me this morning with a reply to this article. It states, in full: 

“Dr. Kaye: Your allegation is entirely fiction.

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

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

“Martin Seligman”

Note the precision of his complaint: "exactly twice."

Seligman was evidently furious about the charges I published (taken from Bloche's account). He also wrote to the editor of the Firedoglake/Dissenter blog where it was published, and to Jane Hamsher, the owner and founder of the blog.

But Seligman's account later changed. Here's how the events surrounding the Spring 2002 meeting were described in Hoffman's report. (The footnote numbers refer to emails by Hoffman's team with Seligman, and in one case, an interview with Mitchell himself by Hoffman or Hoffman's associates. See full report for full details - large PDF).

... [CIA psychologist Kirk] Hubbard stated that he, Mitchell, and Jessen met with Seligman in his home to invite him to speak about learned helplessness at the SERE school in Spring 2002.⁶⁵³ As discussed above, Seligman said that he could not recall meeting with Mitchell or Jessen apart from the December 2001 meeting at his home. Rather, Seligman thought that he was invited to speak at the SERE school during the April 2002 meeting with Hubbard and a female lawyer.⁶⁵⁴ However, after discussing the meeting with Hubbard during the course of the investigation, Seligman "surmise[d]” that there must have been an additional meeting in April with Mitchell and Jessen, and that it must have been at that meeting that he was invited to speak at the JPRA conference in May 2002.⁶⁵⁵

Kirk Hubbard: Chief of CIA's Behavioral Sciences Staff

Kirk Hubbard is a key figure in the torture scandal. He was ostensibly an employer or agent running Mitchell and Jessen for the CIA (though Mitchell earlier worked for CIA's Office of Technical Services). Hubbard describes himself many times in emails quoted in the Hoffman report as "Chief of the Research & Analysis Branch, Operational Assessment Division, Special Activities Group, CIA." However, on a few other occasions he also refers to himself in emails as "Chief of the Behavioral Sciences Staff at the Central Intelligence Agency."

According to a brief professional biography submitted for his participation in the 2003 APA/RAND Corporation/APA "Science of Deception: Integration of Theory and Practice" workshops, Hubbard spent the 1990s "working for the CIA as an operational psychologist."

In general," Hubbard said, "this involves supporting covert operations in the area of recruiting and handling spies. I conducted cross-cultural psychological assessment for nine years throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. In 2000, I started a Research & Analysis component within the Operational Assessment Division" [OAD].

According to Hubbard, R&A's work at OAD was focused on "issues such as cross-cultural assessment models (including psychometric and non-psychometric methodology), terrorism and counter-terrorism, detecting deception, motivation and social influence, computer modeling for predicting behavior, and other issues within the realm of the behavioral sciences."

In fact, Hubbard's work with Mitchell and Jessen — and the fact he later joined the latter's company that contracted on interrogations and torture at the CIA's "black site" detention centers — shows he was heavily involved in interrogations work and probably on research on interrogations. "Detecting deception," models for "predicting behavior," "counterterror" are all codewords or euphemisms for work related to interrogation. And when one talks about the CIA and interrogation, it is widely understood now that we are talking about torture.

Failing to Connect the Dots

It is an ancient nostrum that where there is smoke, there is fire. But Hoffman, who my previous research showed had past and somewhat recent associations with top CIA figures George Tenet and Kenneth J. Levit (see here and here), fails to connect the dots on APA and CIA collusion, even as his research adds a number of new "dots" to connect.

In his report, Hoffman and his team couldn't help but see that former top APA officials, including APA ex-presidents Ronald Fox, Joseph Matarazzo, and Martin Seligman "were clearly brought closer to the circle of knowledge through important interactions with Hubbard and Mitchell." Still they said "we did not find evidence that there was a significant link between APA and their interactions or communications with the CIA."

Hoffman's report contains separate sections looking at evidence of CIA/APA connections concerning Joseph Matarazzo, Philip Zimbardo, Martin Seligman, Melvin Gravitz, and yet another former APA president, Robert Sternberg. Yet in each and every case, despite lots of evidence showing connections between all these individuals and contemporary staff at APA and CIA, the individuals in question are found unworthy of further investigation. Other important figures are mentioned, like ex-APA president Ronald Fox, only to be dropped, the significance of his actions left dangling.

Hoffman's own researchers found evidence that Seligman was very important to the CIA's Kirk Hubbard. A March 2004 email from Hubbard to the APA's Geoff Mumford and Susan Brandon plaintively described, "My office director would not even reimburse me for circa $100 bucks for CIA logo t-shirts and ball caps for Marty Seligman's five kids! He's helped out alot over the past four years so I thought that was the least I could do."

In his report, Hoffman seems to accept Seligman and Hubbard's contention that Hubbard's email refers to Hubbard thanking Seligman "only for his involvement in the meetings that have become public knowledge." Indeed, Hoffman contends his research had "not uncovered evidence that Seligman had interactions with the CIA beyond the isolated meetings and lectures in the year after 9/11 that are a matter of public record." (Hoffman report, p. 164)

Yet Hoffman did discover that Seligman had met Hubbard and Mitchell (and it turns out, Bruce Jessen) at a Spring 2002 meeting that Seligman had disavowed. The significance of that lapse of memory, if it was that, is never explored by Hoffman, nor is the temporal link between that meeting and Mitchell's abrupt departure to Thailand and an ominous encounter with supposed high-value prisoner Abu Zubaydah, falsely labelled for years as a top Al Qaeda figure.

Most egregious, perhaps, is Hoffman's treatment of Matarazzo, who was himself a member of both Mitchell and Jessen's contracting company and a CIA "ethics" advisory panel (see section below). According to Hoffman, "We did not find any connection between this topic [Matarazzo's role in Mitchell and Jessen's company] and APA actions or decisions about its ethics policies or government interrogation policies or activities, and therefore did not consider this a central part of our investigation. We therefore did not take further steps to determine what Matarazzo’s role was in Mitchell Jessen & Associates."

Here was a key APA and CIA figure at the very heart of the CIA's torture program, who many emails and other documentary evidence showed was involved in numerous interactions with other former and contemporary APA figures. According to Hoffman, it was Matarazzo who introduced Seligman to the CIA's Hubbard, and yet Matarazzo is not deemed "central" to "government interrogation policies or activities"? Matarazzo, who Hoffman documents was on a CIA ethics board staffed by psychologists, and wrote a special document on the ethics of using "sleep deprivation" has nothing to do with "ethics policies"?

Training people to keep things secret

The Hoffman report did add an escape hatch for its authors, in a key caveat to their report findings regarding the CIA (bold emphasis added):

It is a fair question whether important interactions between these very prominent former APA officials also entailed, led to, or were connected to important interactions between APA and CIA. Except for very limited instances, we did not see any evidence of this in our examination of APA emails and other documents, and in our interviews, despite having found a very substantial amount of email and documentary evidence establishing important interactions between APA and government officials in other contexts, as set out above and below. On the one hand, this makes sense, since prominent psychologists who are former APA Presidents and Board members would not necessarily think that their interactions with the CIA about these issues would call for them to contact the APA, unless the CIA had specifically requested something from APA. On the other hand, we keenly recognize that in investigating activities involving the CIA, an agency that trains people to keep things secret for a living, we are especially limited in our ability to determine definitively what occurred, and therefore we are aware that our conclusions can only be based on the evidence available to us. This is especially true when the interactions are between CIA officials and individuals who were not APA officials or employees at the time, since their emails would not necessarily have been within APA’s system. [p. 46]

Indeed, Hoffman's conclusions and emphases appear in part to be an artifact of exactly what information was available to him. This may be appropriate for the role he was in, but even with the facts before him, Hoffman made certain choices of emphasis that were questionable. In addition, the process of gathering information was flawed, as no recordings — and therefore, no reliable transcripts — of his interviews were made, as Hoffman himself told me. All representations of what witnesses said came from notes from investigators, and those notes from interviews have not been released.

Hoffman's conclusions about the CIA's influence appear in part based on assurances given to him by former (?) CIA psychiatrist/researcher Charles Morgan: "CIA contract psychiatrist Andy Morgan told us that he saw no indication that APA officials were read into or received any information about the interrogation program or the interrogation activities of Mitchell, Jessen, or others" [p. 40]. Of course, if Morgan had seen some indication APA officials were "read into" any top secret CIA program, he would not have told Hoffman, or anyone else without a "need to know." In fact, such assurances by a CIA official are meaningless, unless they were given specific permission to speak in that regard by the CIA.

Hoffman, who used to work in a Congressional office that was responsible for intelligence oversight, certainly knows about these kinds of secrecy. His statement seems disingenuous, and possibly deliberately misleading. Yet, Hoffman went out of his way to state that he considered Morgan a "credible source of information," something he did not say about almost anyone else in his investigation.

A full analysis of the interactions of CIA with APA will be matter for a future article. I think it is fair to say that Hoffman and his team minimized the impact and influence of the CIA. Even in a section that briefly summarized the past history of CIA financial support for behavioral research, Hoffman failed to mention a number of key CIA researchers who also had histories as APA presidents, including D.O. Hebb and Harry Harlow. The latter two are important as they supplied key elements to the CIA torture program, namely its emphasis on sensory deprivation, and the use of dependency instilled via fear and induced debility to break prisoners' will.

But because real events in the world, as opposed to say, ideologies, are gray, and not black and white in their effects and implications, the Hoffman report also presents a great deal of value, as for whatever reason, Hoffman saw his role as conducting, within the constraints given to him, a real investigation. As a result, there is much in the report, and even more so in the binders of documentary material gathered by the Hoffman investigation that APA released along with the report, that is valuable to those trying to construct a true history of the U.S. torture program.

CIA's Professional Standards Advisory Committee

One key element is the elucidation of the role of the CIA's Professional Standards Advisory Committee (PSAC). PSAC's members were all high APA officials, past or present, including (either as official members or sometime consultants) former APA presidents Matarazzo and Fox, and CIA psychologists Kirk Hubbard and Mel Gravitz, and possibly also Phil Zimbardo. PSAC invited other psychologists to their meetings.

While the full story behind PSAC's role in interrogations remains to be discovered, Hoffman did mention the fact that two key members of the group, Matarazzo and Gravitz, were involved in interpreting the "ethics" of interrogation techniques.

One PSAC meeting discussed in the report took place on January 25, 2002, and included participation by James Mitchell and Susan Brandon. Mitchell is well-known, if not notorious, but Brandon is much less known, even though today she is a top research official on interrogation in the Obama administration, affiliated with the government's High-value Interrogation Group, also known as the HIG. Hoffman concludes that despite the fact "reasonable people" would have concluded Brandon, and APA associate Geoff Mumford, would have thought Mitchell, Jessen, and other CIA personnel were involved in interrogations at black sites, he finds "denials that they knew about the CIA’s interrogation program to be credible." (Hoffman report, p. 45)

Hoffman states he did not find any "current APA officials like Mumford and Brandon were read into or were aware in any significant way of the CIA’s interrogation program, which was classified, or had any meaningful knowledge of what Mitchell, Jessen, or other CIA personnel involved in interrogations were doing." Of course, such evidence of being "read into" a covert program would not have been available to Hoffman, as the report elsewhere notes.

In 2003, Brandon worked closely with Hubbard and other APA officials, as well as a RAND researcher, Scott Gerwehr, on a workshop sponsored by both APA and CIA that looked into the issue of "deception." The APA later scrubbed references to a workshop to this conference, held at RAND's Virginia headquarters, which discussed ways to "overwhelm the senses" of someone interrogated, and asking, "What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?"

Hoffman, almost teasingly, let the significance of such topics go unexamined.

Jessen's Resume

The Hoffman report states, "Hubbard said that his work within OAD had absolutely no connection to interrogations, and that OAD was totally separate from the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (“CTC”).⁶¹³ Hubbard was aware of only two individuals in OAD who had any involvement in interrogations: Mike McConnell, an operational psychologist in a different branch of OAD, and Judy Philipson,⁶¹⁴ who did work on interrogations before joining Hubbard’s Research and Analysis Branch.⁶¹⁵ Hubbard explained that he was introduced to Mitchell and Jessen through McConnell, and that he later introduced Mitchell and Jessen to Jim Cotsana, the Chief of Special Missions within the CTC." (Hoffman report, pp. 157-158)

One thing for sure: both Mitchell and Jessen were more highly connected in the national security community than the press or Congress will admit. Jessen's own 2003 resume included reference to consultations conducted with the CIA, FBI, DoD, Department of State, Department of Homeland Security, the NSA, DIA, and "Allied Nations, Civilian Corporations, State and Private Institutions." One of those private institutions was certainly Tate, Inc., whose chair, David Ayers, was also on the executive board of Mitchell-Jessen and Associates. Jessen also notes he worked as a "counter-terror expert" and a "debriefer" for one or another IC organization. (Jessen's resume is on PDF pages 1345-1349 of Hoffman-APA's Binder 2 material [large PDF]. Note, the third page of Jessen's resume is totally blanked out, without explanation.)

Back in September 2003, Ayers told APA Science Directorate staffer Heather Kelly that Jessen worked for Tate. It was Ayers -- whose company also supplied contract psychologists to the military's SERE program, and possibly for other classified purposes -- who sent APA's Kelly Bruce Jessen's resume, with a suggestion APA might use him as a consultant or resource of some sort at some point. Indeed, Jessen's resume touted his connections with special operations, noting "18 years of experience in all aspects of research, selection, training, clinical intervention, and operations of USG Special Mission Units."

Ayers would become, along with Matarazzo, another member of Mitchell-Jessen's governing board.

The mention of CIA psychologist Judy Philipson above is notable as it brings us full around to the Spring 2002 Seligman meeting with Hubbard and Mitchell. According to Seligman's account to Hoffman's investigators, he met Philipson and another CIA-OAD psychologist, Liz Vogt, at a meeting to discuss "learned helplessness" sometime before the April 2002 meeting with Hubbard and Mitchell. In addition to his meeting with one important and well-linked CIA "operational psychologist," Seligman's new account also adds another important piece of information: Bruce Jessen was also at that April 2002 meeting.

According to Hubbard, Judy Philipson was married to Jonathan Fredman, chief counsel to the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center. Fredman famously visited Guantanamo in October 2002, informing Gitmo interrogators how to obtain "more license to use more controversial techniques." Even more famously, at the same Guantanamo meeting, according to a set of minutes taken there, Fredman reportedly said, "If the detainee dies you're doing it wrong."

Vogt was also said to be married to another CTC attorney. Was this a coincidence, or were the psychologists acting as messengers, or covert actors, for CTC figures -- happened to be their husbands -- who were involved in the CIA's "enhanced interrogation program"? (Was Vogt actually a psychologist, though? According to this December 2007 article, she was a CIA attorney. Maybe she was both?)

There is much to learn from the diligent work of Hoffman and his investigators. There is also much work to be done to link the dots that these same investigators and Hoffman failed to connect, and construct an alternate narrative of the material he covers. Philipson's meeting with Seligman is yet another link between the CIA and top U.S. psychologist Seligman, the author of the theory of "learned helplessness," used by Mitchell and Jessen and other unnamed CIA officials in the construction of their torture program.

A Dubious Narrative

One recent alternate, if dubious, narrative was recently published (PDF) by those who defend the role of the Department of Defense and APA in relation to the torture scandal, and in particular Hoffman's condemnation of DoD-APA collusion in the construction of APA's Psychological Ethics and National Security, or PENS, task force. This new "report" is self-serving and dubious, but worthy also of its own analysis. The report was authored by Colonel (Ret.) L. Morgan Banks (former chief of the Directorate of Psychological Applications of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command); Colonel (Ret.) Debra L. Dunivin (former Behavioral Science Consultant at Guantanamo); Colonel (Ret.) Larry C. James (former chief psychologist at Guantanamo); and former chief of the APA's practice directorate, Dr. Russ Newman.

Banks, et al., have asked that Hoffman release all his interview notes. It is the only supportable argument they make, as their report retails the same alibis and falsehoods DoD and the U.S. government has used for years to hide abusive interrogations. One key lie concerns DoD's supposed adherence to the Convention Against Torture, while masking the fact that the U.S. Reservations and Understandings to that document eviscerated compliance with it. The latter was in fact a key component of the Bush-era OLC memos that used legalese to legitimate torture. It's no prettier when Banks, Dunivin, James and Newman do it.

Most of what has been published in the mainstream press on the Hoffman report has almost no original analysis, but presents the spin of APA critics who have their own agenda. That agenda is certainly worthwhile, i.e., to turn APA away from being a mere facilitator for the national security state. Already the report has had the effect of making APA change its policy (at least on paper) regarding the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations something now forbidden. Whether or not that will ever be enforced is another battle that is now underway within that organization.

Meanwhile, a number of top psychologists and psychiatrists and other scientists and medical officials have managed to once again slip away from full accountability for their actions during the construction and implementation of the U.S. torture program. Given that the torture program was never completely dismantled, and portions of it remain within the official military manual mandated for use by both the military and the CIA, all of the issues discussed herein remain of top relevance.

The full story is still not out there, but with the publication of the SSCI report and now the Hoffman report and associated materials, we are edging closer.

US Congress Delays Review of Current US Torture Protocols

In what Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein called a "minor" change to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a mandated review of the Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogation was moved from one year to three years from now.

According to a "Q&A" at Human Rights First last June, the mandated review of the AFM was part of the McCain-Feinstein amendment to the NDAA, and was meant "to ensure that its interrogation approaches are lawful, humane, and based on the most up-to-date science."

The fact there was any "review" at all was really a response to criticism from the United Nation's Committee Against Torture, which demanded a review of the AFM's Appendix M, which has been long criticized as allowing abusive interrogation techniques, including isolation, sleep deprivation, and sensory deprivation. In Beth Van Schaack's Dec. 2014 article on the UNCAT review, published at Just Security, Schaack quoted one UN critic who complained the US delegation would not answer his questions on abuse:

My question related to the field expedient separation, which involves a deprivation of sensory inputs that have scientifically been demonstrated to provoke psychotic conditions, so I did not get any response to the considerations of whether this might involve ill-treatment.

Of course, US officials told the UN committee that interrogations were conducted under "all applicable legal, regulatory and policy principles and guidelines."

In fact, the UN CAT criticism of the Army Field Manual was if anything too soft. The AFM allows other forms of abuse amounting to torture, including use of drugs that can change consciousness, use of techniques that heighten fear (including pretending that interrogators are from other countries), and a variety of procedures gathered under the label "Futility."

The Futility "approach" is meant to induce feelings of "hopelessness and helplessness" in a prisoner. Military documents show that when loud music and strobe lights for hours on end were used for this purpose, the military called it "Music Futility."

While the NDAA was vetoed by the GOP-controlled Congress, and is the subject of ongoing negotiations between Congress and the Obama administration, nothing about the controversy over the veto concerns interrogation or the rules for same as laid out in Army Field Manual 2-22.3.

The changes in the timespan allocated for the "review" were made in Congressional conference to "reconcile" the differing versions of the NDAA bill between that of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Such reconciliation conference is common and part of the process of bringing a bill to the president's desk.

Feinstein's Press Release on NDAA

In an October 7, 2015 press release from Sen. Feinstein lauded the supposed "anti-torture" provisions of the NDAA. The California senator, who was previously chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, was specifically referring to the part of the bill that made adherence on interrogation policy to the Army Field Manual a matter of statutory law for military and intelligence agencies. This so-called "anti-torture provision" was meant to forestall any repeat of the institution of torture procedures such as those used by the CIA in its "enhanced interrogation program."

While it is a good thing that waterboarding and other SERE-derived forms of torture are not to be allowed anymore -- and they were part of an experimental program in any case -- long-standing forms of torture are now protected by law because they are part of the Army Field Manual itself.

The idea that the AFM allows torture is not unique or bizarrely limited to myself. Last year, as the Just Security link above shows, the UN also leveled such a critique. I've written in various venues and with differing emphases just how the AFM allows such abuse. As a small example, see this article, or this, or this.

When the pre-veto version of the NDAA was passed -- the version that made the Army Field Manual on interrogation literally the law of the land -- all the liberals and human rights groups stood up and applauded. None of them mentioned that only months before the UN had criticized the document for use of abusive techniques, and in particular the use of isolation, and sleep and sensory deprivation noted above. Not one.

Some of those human rights groups and individuals had previously been highly critical of the AFM. One that in particular stands out is Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). Back in 2006 they uniquely saw the problems with the AFM and criticized that document publicly. In 2010, PHR, along with Amnesty International, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, the Open Society Foundations, the Center for Victims of Torture, Human Rights First and Human Rights Watch, sent a letter to the Pentagon calling for the elimination of the AFM's Appendix M.

Today, none of these organizations have opposed the NDAA enshrinement of the AFM as the guide for interrogations, which includes the UN-condemned Appendix M. It's not as if they give critical support, or anything like that. They are simply silent about the presence of torture. I suppose they believe -- given the fight, for instance, over closing Guantanamo, which also is intertwined with the politics of the NDAA's passage, or language in the NDAA that supposedly guarantees the U.S. cannot delay in notifying the International Red Cross when it holds a prisoner -- that quibbling over the presence of torture techniques in the nation's primary interrogation manual would be politically inexpedient.

Delayed and "Disappointed"

There have been a very few who were aware or sensitive to this issue - and that included people associated with interrogation policy and research as it is pursued by the government's High-value Detainee Group, or HIG. Some of them assured me, prior to the language of further delay that came out of the conference version of the bill, that the review process in the NDAA was meant to take care of the offenses currently in the AFM. Later, when the review process was then delayed for three more years, one of these individuals, Mark Fallon, a former whistleblower on Pentagon torture, tweeted that he was "disappointed" by the Congressional change.

But Feinstein was not disappointed. Here's how she described the shift in policy related to the AFM "review" in her press release, which bore the title, "Feinstein Hails Congressional Passage of Anti-Torture Legislation." Please bear with me, as her explanation is quite lengthy for such a "minor" change, but then it takes awhile to lay out the terms of a double talk explanation. I've bolded a few places I thought worth emphasizing:

Mr. President, in order to make sure that the legislative history is clear, I’d like to describe the minor changes that were made to the language of this anti-torture provision during the conference.

As described in the Joint Explanatory Statement of the Committee of the Conference, the following two minor changes were made to the amendment....

The second minor change to the anti-torture amendment that was made in the conference committee is that the timing for the completion of the required update to the Army Field Manual — after the specified “thorough review” — was changed from “[n]ot later than one year” to “[n]ot sooner than three years” in subsection (a)(6)(A) of Section 1045.

This change does not alter the importance of the required review, the imperative that it be initiated in the immediate future, and that it be completed in three years time.

The language of the provision is clear: the conferees wanted the Secretary of Defense to be thorough and gave him three years to complete the review. But the amendment says that he “shall complete” a thorough review after three years, not that he “shall initiate” a thorough review after three years.

It is also important to point out that, regardless of the timing of this statutorily required review, this administration or the subsequent administration may at any time revise portions or the entirety of the Army Field Manual.

As Section 1045(a)(6)(A) states, revising the Army Field Manual is not optional; it is a “Requirement to update.” Moreover, the provision makes clear that this requirement must be undertaken every three years. Therefore, it would be inconsistent with the title, structure, and purpose of this subsection to suggest that the initial review following enactment can be postponed indefinitely.

Also, as the amendment notes, revisions to the Army Field Manual may be necessary to ensure that it complies with the legal obligations of the United States, a requirement that the Executive Branch is obligated to adhere to at all times.

In addition, no matter when the updates to the Army Field Manual are made, the manual “is designed to reflect best practices for interrogation to elicit reliable statements,” as the conferees also wrote their Joint Explanatory Statement. America’s best and most experienced interrogators have consistently and emphatically stated that best practices for eliciting reliable, actionable intelligence solely involve non-coercive techniques that elicit voluntary statements.

The double-talk starts immediately. The delay doesn't mean the review isn't important. It was only done to allow the Secretary of Defense plenty of time to be "thorough." Besides, the AFM could be revised anytime the administration desired!

If the latter is true, then why does the Obama administration allow portions of the AFM that have been widely hailed as torture to continue? We can only assume that he intends it to.

Tip of the Spear

The entire discussion of torture by the United States is so distorted, so hypocritical, and filled with misdirection and falsehood that is is not surprising that any thinking or sensitive person would just want to turn away, or bury their heads in the sand.

The use of the Army Field Manual is the tip of the spear in the use of torture techniques by the United States today, not the CIA's old EIT program, which ended by executive order of by President Obama in 2009 (or the CIA says even earlier).

The AFM techniques embody the program created by the military and CIA during the Cold War, described best in the CIA's 1963 KUBARK interrogation manual, which relies on the use of fear, sleep and sensory deprivation, including profound use of isolation of the prisoner, and other forms of producing debility and dependency, as a means to control and demand cooperation, the better to "exploit" the prisoner for whatever use the government agency deems fit. The latter usually includes provision of information and/or demand the prisoner work as an agent of the intelligence component itself.

The government, despite claims that it is "transparent" now about interrogation issues, and that policies are well-reviewed, produces literally nothing to back up its claims when it comes to the Army Field Manual. The reader can judge for themselves by the frustrating non-results of my various FOIA requests to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the DIA, and SOUTHCOM, regarding supposed mandated requests for review of the AFM or use of Appendix M.

The failure of U.S. civil society, by which I mean academics, intellectuals, news media and bloggers, professional medical societies, human rights and legal organizations, and politicians, to respond to the fact of torture in the Army Field Manual -- and in some cases, as with PHR, to turn their back on former positions -- is profound and depressing.

One significant exception are the psychologists around the group Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR), who publicly came out against Appendix M last year. But when the pressure to pass the NDAA with its provision on use of the AFM was put forward, the psychologist-based organization suddenly went silent. One leading member told me that it was because so much effort and time was being put into changes in policies on interrogation and torture in the larger American Psychological Association that leading members of PsySR were involved in. That may be true, but how much time does it really take to stand up and say something is wrong?

Still, the individuals around PsySR have done far more than any other group, and uniquely helped engineer the APA's recent letter to administration officials on torture policy, which included the first statement by a professional medical organization calling for the U.S. to end its "understandings and reservations" to the UN Convention Against Torture treaty itself. (See October 28, 2015 letter sent by APA to President Obama, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, and others.) The US reservations to the UNCAT were fashioned by attorneys for the Reagan and Bush administrations and were uniquely meant to eviscerate protections against use of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners. But APA's position on that has been universally ignored by the press.

It is difficult to know how or if the mendacity surrounding U.S. interrogation policy and use of the Army Field Manual will change. Feinstein's double-talk demonstrates that administration and Congressional figures are sensitive to the fact that torture remains. The real problem now lies with the press, who appear unable to take on the issue, wedded only to topics that are approvable by editors, and really don't challenge the current status quo.

It's easy, in a way, to criticize at this point the CIA's old EIT program. But the presence of abuse in the Obama-sanctioned use of the Army Field Manual, or use of foreign intelligence agencies as torture proxy agents via rendition (an important aspect of the torture issue I did not touch upon in this article), go unregarded and unremarked. I cannot let that be so, but who really will join me on this?

[Acknowledgment to VICE's reporter, Jason Leopold, who forwarded Feinstein's October 2015 press release to me. Thanks as always, Jason!]

Google Publishes Free Ebook Facsimile of Famous Soviet 1949 War Crimes Trial of Unit 731

"Question: So it would be correct to say that all persons brought to Detachment 100 for experimental purposes, were doomed to die.
"Answer: That is so."

-- Page 325, Materials on the Trial of Former Servicemen of the Japanese Army Charged with Manufacturing and Employing Bacteriological Weapons

Google Books is to be congratulated for shining a light on one of the most heinous and yet still largely unknown episodes of World War II, via the free publication for the general public of the English language version of the materials released on the 1949 Khabarovsk War Crimes trial. Published originally by Moscow's Foreign Languages Publishing House in 1950 (see full title above), "Materials" documents the examination of the use of biological weapons and illegal human experimentation, including thousands of "terminal" experiments, by members of the Japanese military unit most closely identified with this program, Unit 731.

Written off by some as a Stalinist "show trial" -- and there undoubtedly are some elements of that here -- the facts examined at Khabarovsk have been established to be true by Western historians. "Materials" is divided into pages of documentary proof, testimony by the accused and various witnesses, the state prosecutor's case, statements by the defendant's attorneys, and of course the verdict itself. I have personally found the reading of this trial material to be one of the most amazing and emotional experiences I've ever had. You cannot read this book and be unaffected.

It may be of interest to readers to know that none of the criminals indicted and convicted were executed for their crimes, though some did die in captivity. The majority were released early, as the USSR in the 1950s trying to win political points with the post-WWII Japanese state.

The question remains: why has the worst use of biological weapons and illegal human experiments, even dwarfing the crimes of the Nazis, gone mostly unremarked for almost three generations?

The ramifications of the decision by the Japanese government to research bacteriological or "germ" warfare on prisoners, killing thousands of them via inoculation of biological toxins, and then wage biological warfare across China and parts of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s, are still resonant in Asia today. It is not unusual to hear in Chinese or North Korean propaganda references to the crimes of Unit 731. An article by AFP, and published in Feb. 2015 by Japan Times, documents the fact that "70 years on, Unit 731’s wartime atrocities fester in China’s memory."

The actions of the Japanese emperor and his Army to unleash biological warfare -- led by the infamous general Shiro Ishii -- went unremarked during the Toyko War Crimes trials at the end of World War II. The reason for this was likely due to the established fact that the U.S. made at the time a secret agreement to amnesty all the personnel involved in Japan's Unit 731, "Detachment 100," and other assorted BW experimental and operational units, with the aim of gathering all the data gathered by Japan's illegal human experiments and operational experience with biological weapons for itself.

The Soviets, stymied in their attempt to get the matter brought up at the Tokyo trials -- the U.S. dragged its feet on even letting the Soviets interview BW chief Ishii, who was under house arrest by the Americans -- turned to their own separate trial of captured personnel from Unit 731 and the Kwantung Army, spurred on by popular resentment against the Japanese imperialist army and the dreaded Kampetei, who had kidnapped hundreds of Soviet and Chinese citizens for terminal use as guinea pigs in the Unit 731 dungeons at Pingfan, Manchuria. At moments, the anger of those in attendance at trial is even noted in the proceedings.

Some of the documentary material regarding the decision by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE, or Tokyo War Crimes trials) not to pursue biological warfare charges against the Japanese have been published digitally online at a special site dedicated to the Tokyo trials by the University of Virginia Law Library.

The information obtained by the Americans, and, if some reports are true, in some cases the personnel, went to the U.S. Army's biological weapons labs at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (According to the official military historian at Ft. Detrick, years later documents about Unit 731 were destroyed by order of Ft. Detrick's commander, leading to Congressional action to release what documentation still existed.) During the Korean War, the Chinese and the Soviets claimed the U.S. tested use of such materials during limited biological warfare operations against North Korea and China. Famously, captured U.S. airmen confessed to such use after interrogation (leading to the "brainwashing" scare pushed by the CIA and the U.S. media in the 1950s and 1960). The U.S. strenuously denied using biological weapons, but the accusations remain, and the evidence is still being sifted, much of it still classified after 60 years.

Indeed, for historians, both amateur and professional, finding original materials, such as the prosecutor's examination of the general leading the Kwantung Army's BW unit during WWII, was next to impossible, unless you had the money and perspicacity to search out rare copies of the printed version of selected materials. Now, thanks to a review of the copyright legality of publishing this material, initiated at my request, Google has published this important historical text for all readers to use. I am grateful to them, and hope that the general availability of this important original documentation will facilitate greater recognition of the crimes that took place during World War II, and throw greater light on the aftermath of the Unit 731 episode, one that reaches far across the historical divide to allegations of the use of biological and chemical weapons today.

For further reading: Here are two articles of interest. The first from a bioethics journal, "The West's dismissal of the Khabarovsk trial as 'communist propaganda': ideology, evidence and international bioethics."

The second article is a 2001 article in The Japan Times, which recounts the trial itself: "The trial of Unit 731". The following is an excerpt from that article (the link to Harris's book is added):

Russians aware of the atrocities in Harbin were outraged. Josef Stalin responded by ordering trials of his own. On Dec. 25, 1949, the trial of Unit 731’s doctors began, with orders to finish by the end of the year, before implementation of a decree reinstating the death penalty in the Soviet Union. Stalin apparently feared that Japan might execute Soviet prisoners of war if the physicians were hanged in Khabarovsk, Permyakov said.

Nevertheless, the proceedings “were not a show trial on the Stalinist model,” said Sheldon Harris, the American author of “Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare 1932-45.”

“It was a strange affair, having the trial take place in Khabarovsk rather than in Moscow or Leningrad,” Harris said. “However, the evidence presented at the trial was reasonably faithful to the facts. It was discredited in the U.S. and elsewhere because of the notoriety of earlier show trials in the U.S.S.R. Nevertheless, the [U.S.] State Department and MacArthur’s people were in a panic that some evidence would come out at the trial that there were American POWs who were [victims of] human experiments.”

Book Review - Michael Kearns & Richard Solomon's novel about torture & drones, "Broken"

The following is reproduced from my review of the novel Broken, taken from its posting at Amazon.com. I've been able to add some links here that are not allowed in Amazon reviews.

******************

Michael Kearns and Ronald Solomon have written one of the most important books of the year, and one of the most entertaining. Drawing on Kearns' experience in the military, especially his years training military personnel, intelligence agents, and other government employees in the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE, program for the Pentagon's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, Kearns and Solomon have constructed a thriller about a high-tech, drone-enabled takeover of America that seems all too real, chiseled out of the headlines we read every day. And just as scary!

Kearns' extensive knowledge is on display, whether it's a low-approach parachute jump, reading satellite maps, or teaching others how to withstand torture. The book provides a close-up look at how the SERE school psychologists and trainers interacted and worked with CIA and Special Ops as integral parts of their operations. It is easier to see after reading this book how SERE psychologists became embroiled with the government's torture plans. And it is with torture that the book is largely concerned (although you could make an argument that the growing reliance by the U.S. on drone surveillance and killing is just as important thematically). The book's primary villain, Breskin, seems to be based on real-life CIA contractor James Mitchell, identified as one of the primary architects of the CIA's "enhanced interrogation program."

"Broken" posits more research on high-tech torture than we've been told exists, but its vision of mechanized torture is not far off from the kinds of research done on torture by the CIA and the Pentagon. The book is, via its hero Chauncey, unashamedly anti-torture, and it's refreshing to see that in a culture whose mainstream news sources find the existence of "torture" itself to be reducible to a hypothesis, even when the torture is waterboarding.

Kearns, whose alter-ego is Chauncey, has contributed in the past to the anti-torture discussion in this country, and he released notes from Mitchell's associate Bruce Jessen that were later published in a 2011 article at Truthout by myself and journalist Jason Leopold. Those notes were the basis for the SERE class SV-93, which is mentioned in "Broken." So while you may consider this review slightly biased, I can tesitfy that Kearns is someone who, like Chauncey, though perhaps not as dramatically, puts his anti-torture beliefs to the test of public exposure of government wrongs.

But "Broken" is not merely political. Its characters are well-drawn and interesting. Unlike other action heroes and villains, they suffer. They get PTSD. They break. They drink to forget traumatic memories forged in the service of their country, or blasted into them at the tip of an inhumane drone campaign to find "terrorists" and assassinate them. Indeed, there were some portions of the book that were so intense I had to put it down for a bit, to catch my breath, look around and normalize my surroundings.

Kearns and Solomon want you to feel the emotional reality of what their characters suffer, and they do an excellent job! In many ways the characters are broken in the way the nation's soul has been "broken" by its turn to undemocratic and inhumane policies like torture and burgeoning Panopticon-style surveillance and assassination. In such a world, Kearns and Solomon seem to be saying, no one is immune from being broken like this.

Finally, on the level of a pure "read," the book is full of twists and turns, and as entertaining as a Ludlum yarn. There's a reason it's getting lots of great reviews. I'm hoping for a sequel!

[Postscript: Since I've mentioned that I've had some professional and personal contact with Kearns in the past, I want to state for the record this review was not written for any compensation, and my review was based on my own personally purchased Kindle copy of the book.]

APA Torture & Ethics Scandal Highlights Fact No Medical Professionals Have Been Held to Account for Torture

In her very interesting analysis of the American Psychological Association's new policy calling for withdrawal of psychologists from national security interrogations and sites identified with torture and abuse, such as Guantanamo, Deborah Popowski ("The APA’s Watershed Move to Ban Psychologists’ Complicity in Torture," August 11) writes:

I predict that ultimately, this resolution [Motion 23B passed by APA's Council of Representatives] will be more powerful than its AMA and American Psychiatric Association counterparts precisely because it took years of dogged advocacy to achieve. The APA’s bad behavior was a mobilizing force for psychologists of conscience. The organization now faces a savvy group of reformers that understand its playbook and will keep pressing for enforcement. I look forward to seeing how they ride this wave of momentum.

I think this is a good point, but it, like most of the analysis on the APA's new interrogations policy has a certain unreal character, as its analysis exists outside of the realities of the Department of Defense justifies its use of health professionals, including psychologists and psychiatrists, in interrogations.

DoD and the American Psychiatric Association "Ban" on Psychiatrists in Interrogations

Popowski mentions AMA and the American Psychiatric Association (APsyA) because both of these practitioner groups previously issued policies forbidding their members to participate in interrogations. Such participation is unethical, they said, although the psychiatrist's group did allow their members to "provide training to military or civilian investigative or law enforcement personnel... on the possible medical and psychological effects of particular techniques and conditions of interrogation..."

But what these powerful organizations condemn and how they enforce these policies are two different things. In addition, how the Pentagon chooses to interpret the policies of these organizations is yet another thing.

In a September 2008 letter to then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the APsyA president, Dr. Nada Stotland, quoted an article by George Annas, who noted, "The DOD's new position that its physicians not follow nationally and internationally accepted medical ethics represents a major policy change." Stotland was complaining about how the Pentagon continued to train psychiatrists for interrogation despite the APsyA's opposition to the their participation. It is not known if or how Gates replied, but DoD's policy in the matter itself never changed.

But the psychiatrist association itself never put any teeth in their policy. It never moved to sanction any member for participation in interrogations, which is done under the auspices of the Pentagon's Behavioral Science Consultation (BSC) program. Later, then-APA president Gerald Koocher would use APsyA's stated preference not to bring any such charges as an example of the rightness of APA's own policy. (See "President's Column," APA Monitor, July/August 2006)

Indeed, no doctor, psychiatrist, psychologist, nurse, medical technician, or any medical professional involved in interrogations has ever been brought up on charges by any medical or professional association. Attempts to bring charges by state licensing agencies were undertaken by private individuals -- attempts with which Ms. Popowski has assisted -- and such attempts universally failed (thus far), though not for trying.

But as important as the attempts to get at the torturers via licensing board complaints are, is a strategy aimed at prosecution via state licensing agencies really going to be effective? As one state licensing agency official told me, "How do you expect us to prosecute these cases when the U.S. government will not do so?" It would indeed take a great deal of courage to buck the federal government. There is also the issue that legal actions against health professionals would be subject to "graymail" defenses, in that defendants will argue that (supposedly, or potentially) exonerating evidence is classified and highly unlikely to be made available from the government. What happens then?

Applicable DoD policy on BSCs goes back to the 2006 DoD Instruction 2310.08E, "Medical Program Support for Detainee Operations." This policy allows DoD to use psychiatrists or physicians with the approval of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, despite the policy by the American Psychiatric and American Medical associations.

E2.2 As a matter of professional personnel management, physicians are not ordinarily assigned duties as BSCs, but may be so assigned, with the approval of ASD(HA), in circumstances when qualified psychologists are unable or unavailable to meet critical mission needs.

In case some might think this old Bush-era instruction is not in force, it is. The most current policy, DoD Directive 3115.09, "DoD Intelligence Interrogations, Detainee Debriefings, and Tactical Questioning" (in its most up-to-date version of 11/15/13) references the 2006 DoD 2310.08E instruction as "reference (r)", i.e., for policy on BSCs.

Manipulation of Phobias

It's worth noting, 3115.09 has also made allowance for the ongoing use of SERE techniques, as they are used in the Army Field Manual, which I pointed out some time back. The only recent change in 3115.09 has to do with BSC manipulation of detainee phobias, a change that has not been publicly noted before: "Behavioral science consultants may not be used to determine detainee phobias for the purpose of exploitation during the interrogation process." That appears to be the one concession made by the Obama administration to criticisms of its interrogation policy. The reference was to phobias as addressed in Army Field Manual 2-22.3 in its description of the "Fear Up" approach. Before this change was made in 2012, BSCs were allowed to manipulate or create phobias in prisoners in a style of coercive interrogation that an earlier version of the Field Manual noted some nations -- though not the United States -- would find illegal.

The fact is, the opponents of existing policy at APA, not to mention officers at AMA, APsyA, and a number of human rights watchdog groups are aware of current Pentagon policy on using physicians in interrogations in lieu of psychologists, and despite the opposition on paper of physicians organizations, but nothing is ever said about it. One has to ask why this is. Psychologists, who still have a fight on their hands in making the new APA policy enforceable within APA, have not mentioned DoD's policy on such use, about which nothing has changed since the days of the Bush administration.

The Enforcement Question

Except for an Aug. 8 article in Al Jazeera America, no news accounts have noted that when APA opponents of the old interrogation policy were putting forth their motion to ban members from participation in interrogations or at sites where human rights abuses take place, the first draft of that motion had a strong enforcement proviso, which stated, "Be it resolved that the APA will direct staff to contact the licensing boards of all states and territories informing them that it is the sense of the Council of Representatives that any complaint against a psychologist who refuses to comply with the call to leave Guantanamo be reviewed ‘with prejudice’."

The final version of the motion that passed, and is hailed as a victory, omitted that provision. Such a step back from enforcement does not bode well for the future effectiveness of the APA action.

Other arguments regarding the efficacy of enforcing the APA's new policy were raised by psychologist John Grohol at his blog PsychCentral last week. Grohol quoted an August 18, 2015 email from APA’s Associate General Counsel Jesse Raben to psychologist and ethics exert Ken Pope, who resigned from APA in 2008 over APA's slippery ethics policies.

With regards to 23B (and therefore with the 2008 [member-initiated] resolution [banning psychologists from interrogation at human rights violating sites]) while this new Council resolution invokes Ethical Principle A to “take care to do no harm,” it does not amend the Ethics Code and is not enforceable as a result [emphasis added]. However, Council’s implementation plan for the new policy requests that the Ethics Committee consider a course of action to render the prohibition against national security interrogations enforceable under the Ethics Code.

Grohol's article must have made some impact, because Nadine Kaslow and Susan McDaniel, both members of the Special Committee for the Independent Review by David Hoffman that excoriated APA's connivance with the Department of Defense on interrogation issues, responded to Grohol's charges in an email to APA's Division 48, The Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence. (Kaslow is also an APA past president, while McDaniel is the organization's president-elect.)

APA Officials Respond

Kaslow and McDaniel's full reply is not online, but what follows is an edited version of the high points. The two APA officials sympathized with Grohol's skepticism, but felt "that this reaction is misplaced at this time in the history of APA."

The authority and processes regarding policy development and modifications to the APA Ethics Code are stipulated in APA’s Bylaws and Association Rules. The first very important step is for a policy, such as the national security interrogation prohibition, to be passed by Council. For those policies with ethical aspects such as this one, the next step is for it to be considered by the Ethics Committee. The independence of the Ethics Committee is important, as described in the Hoffman Report. According to our Bylaws and Association Rules, the Ethics Committee has authority for formulating the Ethics Code, overseeing the process for changing the Ethics Code (which involves governance review and public comment), and for enforcing it. The movers of New Business Item #23B -- Scott Churchill, Jean Maria Arrigo, and Frank Farley, supported by Steven Reisner and Dan Aalbers -- were well aware of the necessary process. They successfully achieved the policy change, the all-important first step to achieving their ultimate goal of an enforceable prohibition, in keeping with the American Medical Association. (The American Psychiatric Association's policy is not part of their Ethics Code.)

.... The movers also included a provision in the implementation section of the resolution for Council to request that the Ethics Committee "consider pursuing an appropriate course of action in as expeditious a manner as possible to incorporate into the Ethics Code the prohibitions surrounding psychologist participation in national security interrogations, as set forth in this policy." The next step is for the Ethics Committee to carry out this recommendation. An amendment to the Ethics Code will provide the necessary “teeth” for the policy to be enforced. In the interim, I would like to point out that the Ethics Committee considers APA policies, guidelines, and other documents when interpreting the Standards of the Ethics Code.

.... As noted above, although the 2013 policy is not enforceable under the Ethics Code, it provides valuable guidance to the Ethics Committee in this regard....

Changing policy, aspects of the Ethics Code, and creating a culture that is transparent and trustworthy in all parts of the organization will take time and considerable effort. But it is a commitment we feel deeply in support of our public, our discipline, and our members....

Reading Kaslow and McDaniel's email, I think Ms. Popowski may have a point about the sanguinary effect of the new APA policy. From my own standpoint, I believe it was a huge step forward for the new APA policy to bring the recondite and legal struggle against the U.S. Reservations to the UN Convention Against Torture treaty out into the open, and put the imprimatur of a huge medical and professional organization behind the goal of removing those reservations, which in action eviscerated enforcement of that treaty in the U.S., and which were used by John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury to alibi torture in their infamous OLC memos on interrogation.

Loopholes on Unethical Research to Remain

But there are also giant holes in APA's new policy, particularly as it pertains to psychologist research for the military and intelligence agencies. Since that is really where the bulk of federal money to psychologists and psychology programs go, that means the haze of unreality around these issues is a veritable fog of obfuscation. APA ethics code 8.05 allows psychologists to suspend informed consent -- which is the bedrock of ethical research on human subjects -- "where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations." In addition, ethics code 8.07 allows psychologists to use deception in research on "prospective participants," unless such deception would be "reasonably expected to cause physical pain or severe emotional distress." The emphasis on "severe" emotional distress is a weakening of earlier language, and allows great discretion for research using deception that would allow, say, "moderate" levels of emotional distress. Indeed, a section of the Hoffman report contains a section on the research issue, and I will examine it more fully in the near future.

Nevertheless, when it comes to interrogations or psychologists presence at national security detention sites, the APA policy is much more stringent that that passed by APsyA or AMA, and demands that psychologists not even involved in interrogations at sites such as Guantanamo be transferred out. But will DoD listen to that? And if psychologists continue to work in such secret circumstances, how will APA or anyone else know? And what if anything will happen about that? I don't imagine anyone in DoD is losing much sleep over this... yet.

There is also the force of moral suasion, which if not terribly powerful, does play some role in historical circumstances. The leaders of the fight against APA's previous torture policy, and against an APA leadership that worked with government forces to allow torture and abuse of prisoners during interrogation and detention, are to be congratulated. I know from private conversations they are aware that more battles lie ahead. I suggest those battles lie directly with the Obama administration itself, and the leadership of other medical professional and human rights organizations to hold the administration's metaphoric feet to the fire, and end the use of all medical professionals in interrogations and under cruel conditions of confinement at so-called national security detention sites that are known to abuse prisoners, like Guantanamo.

On the 70th Anniversary of Hiroshima: "The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs"

Transcribed below is the entire text of Japanese historian Shingo Shibata's 1996 essay in Seisen Review, "The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs." I've posted on it before, including a link to a photocopy of the entire essay. The text was transcribed independently by Wikispooks, and the copy I used below is based upon it (with some quiet corrections and formatting changes). (Wikispooks did not transcribe Shibata's Bibliography, but it can be found on pages 11-12 of the online version directly below.)



The medical condition of the Japanese atomic bomb survivors, or Hibakusha, for years was the subject of censorship by the Occupation forces of the U.S. and later Japanese censorship. It is still effectively so, by media and scholarly neglect rather than government order.

The Hibakusha were studied and examined by U.S. doctors and scientists organized as the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC), in conjunction with staff from the Japanese National Institute of Health (JNIH)., In the course of their research, medical treatment was withheld from the atomic bomb victims, arguably because it interfered with their research goals.

Researcher Susan Lindee wrote about these topics in her excellent (and out-of-print) 1994 book, Suffering Made Real: American Science and the Survivors at Hiroshima (Univ. of Chicago Press). Amazingly, U.S. refusal to offer medical care to the survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was because U.S. authorities believed "that medical treatment of the survivors by the ABCC would constitute atonement for the use of atomic weapons."

"From the beginning," a 1955 report to the Atomic Energy Commission stated, US researchers of the effects of the atom bomb on civilians were "not permitted to attempt medical therapy of the patients who had been injured by the two bombs.... to do so would have given confirmation to the anti-American propagandists... [who would] insist that such treatment should be an act of atonement for having used the weapons in the first place." (Lindee, pgs. 134-135.)

The U.S. has never apologized for the use of atomic weapons. Indeed, the policy of the U.S. is to frighten and terrorize the world with its awful arsenal.

One might ask, what did the Japanese Government do to aid the Hibakusha? In his essay, Shingata replies, "I am ashamed to say that the Japanese government did nothing to help the Hibakusha either."

Stop U.S. Plan to Modernize and Replace Nuclear Arsenal

In October 2009, President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in part because of his supposed position in favor of nuclear disarmament. But since then, Obama has moved to increase spending on nuclear weapons, stating the supposed need to modernize weaponry and spent hundreds of millions of dollars to revitalize a nuclear weapons plant in Kansas City, Missouri.

New estimates made by Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington D.C.-based think tank, and reported at Al Jazeera America, say U.S. plans to modernize its nuclear arsenal will cost nearly $1 trillion dollars over the next 30 years.

In an August 5 press release by Peace Action, formerly SANE/Freeze, on the 70th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan (August 6th and 9th), Paul Kawika Martin, the policy and political director of Peace Action, and a guest of one of Japan's largest peace groups, Ginsuikin, commented from the official commemoration in Hiroshima:

“Here in Hiroshima, on the 70th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of this city and Nagasaki, we remember the hundreds of thousands of casualties caused by the most basic of nuclear weapon designs and know that we never want another populace to suffer from such a bomb. Even worse, today’s nuclear weapons are several to hundreds of times more destructive.

Clearly, these horrific weapons are no asset to any country. The current U.S. plan to waste $1 trillion over the next thirty years modernizing, maintaining and replacing delivery systems must be stopped.

President Obama should heed his Prague speech and live up to U.S. obligations under the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) by significantly reducing America’s 7,100 nuclear warheads.

Additionally, the agreement reached with Iran will verifiably block it from getting a nuclear weapon, making it paramount that the U.S. Congress support the accord.”

The issues above are amplified and expanded in Professor Shingo Shibata's essay below. I encourage readers to email or tweet or post on Facebook or otherwise send this article far and wide, as an action YOU can take on this, the 70th anniversary of the great crime of the atomic bombings, in the hopes it will aid in stopping atomic weapons from being used again.

The Atomic Victims as Human Guinea Pigs

Shingo SHIBATA

In connection with the Smithsonian flap, the United States Senate Resolution 257 was passed on 22 September 1994. It reads: "...The role of the Enola Gay during World War II was momentous in helping to bring World War II to a mercy end, which resulted in saving the lives of Americans and Japanese." (emphasis added) Further, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was repeatedly contended that President Truman was right when be ordered the use of the atomic bombs because thereby numberless lives of not only American soldiers but also Japanese were saved. But such an argument has been proved groundless by some leading researchers. (Blackett, 1949; Alperovitz, 1965, 1985 and 1995; Tachibana, 1979)

What aim did the U.S. government have in carrying out the atomic bombing?

Firstly, by demonstrating the enormous destructive power of the atomic bomb, it wanted to establish U.S. hegemony over the world after World War II.

Secondly, it aimed to make mass experiments of the uranium bomb on Hiroshima and the plutonium bomb on Nagasaki to test numberless humans as guinea pigs and thereby to obtain data on its effects in order to make use of them for development of nuclear weaponry.

In this paper I am going to demonstrate my conception of the atomic bombing as being human experimentation.

I. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE VICTIMS

What did U.S. Military Forces do after the Atomic Bombing?

First of all, I would like to examine the post-bombing policy of the U.S. Forces.

The first order of the U.S. Forces immediately after the occupation was to ban all publication of reports concerning the genocide and destruction caused by the atomic bombs. Thus they wanted to monopolize all information on the bombing. Until the end of the occupation on 28 April 1952, Japanese journalists, writers, cameramen, novelists and scientists were prohibited from reporting on the real situations of the atomic destruction. If they dared to do so, they were threatened with trial before the military tribunals of the Occupation Forces. Many books, including novels, poems and accounts of the events, were censored and often confiscated by American authorities. (Braw, 1986; Horiba, 1995a and 1995b) As a result, the urgent necessity to give medical and other social aid to the atomic victims (the “Hibakusha” in Japanese) was not reported even among Japanese.

Their second step was to prohibit all doctors in Japan from communicating and exchanging, even among themselves, the records of clinical experience and research on the Hibakusha. At that time they, especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tried to do their best to find ways to cure the unheard-of terrible burns and internal disorders caused by atomic heat and radiation. The U.S. Forces further confiscated the samples of burnt or keloid skins, internal organs and blood and the clinical records of the dead and living Hibakusha. (Committee, 1981)

Their third step was to force the Japanese government to refuse any medical aid offered by the International Red Cross.

If a laboratory animal were cured, it would be utterly useless from the standpoint of medical scientific observers. Maybe it was by the same reasoning that the U.S. authorities did their utmost to prevent any medical treatment given to the Hibakusha. “As far as medical aid is concerned, the less the better” was their policy.

Their fourth step was to establish the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC) as two institutions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the purpose of observing, not curing, of the hibakusha. Thus, almost all Hibakusha have been treated as if they were only human guinea pigs. Suppose that an assailant continues only to observe a wounded victim for many years after an assault. There is no doubt that such observance itself is nothing but an infringement on human rights.

What did the Japanese Government do to aid the Hibakusha?

I am ashamed to say that the Japanese government did nothing to help the Hibakusha either.

Firstly, its bureaucrats did their utmost to cooperate with the above policy of the U.S. Army toward the Hibakusha. Only two months after the atomic bombing they dissolved the governmental hospitals in charge of medical treatment of the Hibakusha in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As a result, many Hibakusha were left on the streets of the devastated cities without any medical treatment, compounding the many difficult post-war economic and social conditions they had to contend with.

Secondly, by orders of the General Head Quarters (GHQ) of the U.S. Occupation Forces, on 21 May 1947, the Japanese National Institute of Health (JNIH, YOKEN in Japanese abbreviation) was founded with half of the staff of the Institute of Infectious Diseases (IID) attached to the University of Tokyo.

During the period of the Japanese invasion of China from 1931 to 1945, the IID had fully cooperated with the notorious Unit 731, that is, the Army unit for bacteriological warfare. (Williams & Wallace, 1989; Harris, 1994) Most of the staff of the JNIH transferred from the University of Tokyo to the Health and Welfare Ministry were medical scientists who had intimately cooperated with the network of Unit 731 in China and Singapore as well as the Laboratory for Infectious Disease Control (LIDC) attached to the Imperial Army's Medical College. The LIDC in Toyama, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, was the headquarters for the network of the bacteriological warfare program and its institutions, including most of the medical schools of many universities.

The officially declared aims of the JNIH were to make research on pathogens and vaccines and also to screen the safety of biological products (vaccines, blood products and antibiotics), and thereby to contribute toward preventive medicine and public health under the control of the GHQ. However, there were two hidden objectives of the JNIH. The first was to cooperate with the ABCC. The second was to continue, under the guidance and control of the U.S. Army 406th Medical Laboratory,[1] some uncompleted studies of biological warfare program as schemed up by Unit 731. (Shibata, 1989 and 1990)

As for the first hidden objective, only 13 days after the establishment of the JNIH the GHQ asked it to help the ABCC. Dr. Saburo Kojima, then the first Vice-Director and later the second Director of the JNIH, in his commemorative essay, “Memories on the Past Ten Years of the JNIH,” looking back on its initial stage of cooperation with the ABCC, wrote, “We, the intelligent scientists had equally thought that we must not miss this golden opportunity” [2] to record the medical effects of the A-bomb on humans. He was reportedly one of the leading medical scientists who committed vivisection on Chinese prisoners as human guinea pigs in the network of Unit 731 in China. [3] As such a scientist, very positively appreciating the proposal of the GHQ, he never showed humanistic sentiments towards the Hibakusha, still less a counter-proposal for medical treatment of them. He only betrayed such cold-blooded and calculating words as is cited above.

It is clearly reported in the 1948 Annual Report of the JNIH how eagerly and positively the staff of the JNIH, following the directive of the ABCC, drafted and submitted the “Atomic Bomb Casualty Research Program" to the GHQ. [4] At that time the JNIH branches were set up in the same rooms of the ABCC buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The directors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Branches of the JNIH served the vice-directors of the ABCC in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of the directors of the ABCC were American high ranking military officers (e.g. colonels). 

The JNIH staff intimately helped and cooperated with the staff of the ABCC as a kind of branch of the U.S. Military Forces to check up on conditions of the Hibakusha, doing follow-up research. The staff of the ABCC-JNIH went around threatening the Hibakusha that they would be on trial before the military tribunal of the U.S. Forces if they would not cooperate. With such threats they took the Hibakusha to the ABCC buildings and took off their clothes to photograph them in the nude, took x-rays, collected blood samples, so they could record the relationship between the quantity of radiation and the after-effects of the atomic bomb. (Hiroshima City Council against A and H Bombs, 1966; Chugoku Shimbun, 1995) 

They did not respect the human dignity of the Hibakusha. They treated them as human guinea pigs and recorded them as “samples.” When the Hibakusha died, the ABCC-JNIH staff put pressure on the bereaved to consent to autopsies, and their inner organs, burnt skins and other parts were dissected and taken away.

In such cold and inhumane sentiments, Dr. Keizo Nakamura, the third Director of the JNIH, proudly wrote that the ABCC could not have attained their objective without the cooperation of the JNIH. [5] The information thus collected about the atomic mass experiment on humans was never made public in Japan. It was secretly reported to the U.S. Department of Defense, the Atomic Energy Commission (later the Department of Energy) and other military institutions to be utilized for the improvement of nuclear weapons and reactors.

The post-war Responsibilities of the Japanese Government and the JNIH in Violation of Human Rights of the Hibakusha

Some may excuse the Japanese government and the JNIH under the pretext that they were only forced by the authoritarian power of the GHQ. But this was not the case, because the positive cooperation of the JNIH with the ABCC continued for 28 years from 1947 through to 1975. In 1975 the ABCC had to reorganize itself, and the JNIH was also forced to divorce itself from the former in the face of increasing denunciation on the part of the Hibakusha and the Japanese people. The ABCC was reorganized and renamed the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (RERF), funded by both U.S. and Japanese governments. Of course, their character and tasks are almost the same. Their main operations have been and are the follow—up research on the Hibakusha and the renewed cooperation with U.S. military institutions and the nuclear industry.

Thus the physical sufferings and mental agony of the Hibakusha were and have been aggravated by the post-war policy of the U.S. and Japanese governments toward them.

Of course, the Japanese government is to blame for its aggressive wars against Asian countries and then the first-strike on Pearl Harbor. [6] However, this doesn’t justify the U.S. atomic bombing. The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be denounced as the unheard-of cruel genocide and destruction as well as the most serious violation of international law. (NHK, l977: Committee, 1981) The further misery of the Hibakusha has also been aggravated by the nature of the atomic bombing as a massive test on innocent men and women, young and old.

Someone may still try to justify the atomic bombing on the pretext that it saved a number of lives. Even if true, such a pretext could never justify the fact that the U.S. government, supported by the Japanese government, has done so much to leave the Hibakusha abandoned, uncared-for and uncured after the end of the war. If the above pretext had been true, why didn't it do the best to give medical and other social aid to victims produced by an act of “mercy”? Its post-bombing and post-war policies themselves have demonstrated what so-called “mercy” of the atomic bombing was in reality.

For over fifty years since the bombing, both governments have arrogantly continued to treat and alienate the Hihakusha as human guinea pigs. It is evident that such a political attitude itself deprived them of the feeling of human dignity. If the Japanese government had resisted the U.S. government policy of neglecting the Hibakusha and had done their best to provide them with medical and other social aid immediately after the bombing, the life span of the dead Hibakusha would have been much longer. Their will to live would not have diminished.

The Japanese government and the JNIH should feel deeply responsible in this respect. Why don’t the prime ministers and the directors of the JNIH apologize for their negligence toward the Hibakusha? Why don't they try, in this way, to restore the feeling of human dignity which for almost a half century they have denied these people?

As a professor of Hiroshima University, I have for many years been involved in the sociological, philosophical and ethical study of the agony of the Hibakusha. In this chapter as a result of my research, I tried to shed new light on one of the most important, but hitherto overlooked, aspects of the atomic bombing and the sufferings of the Hibakusha.

As explained, there is no doubt that the Japanese government is responsible for its post-war policy of negligence toward the Hibakusha as well as its violation of their human rights. If the government feels responsible for them, there must he no objection to legislation providing state compensation for the Hihakusha.

II. FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE U.S. MILITARY FORCES AND THE MANHATTAN PROJECT SCIENTISTS

In the previous chapter I submitted my thesis mainly on the basis of the analysis of the post-bombing and post-war policies of the U.S. government toward Hibakusha, especially the no-treatment policy of the ABCC-JNIH. 

As for the prebombing policy of the U.S. government, I don't think that all the principle characters at that time, including Truman, had a conscious intention to use the A-bombs as a means of experimenting on humans from the military and scientific viewpoints.

However, I am convinced there were surely some leading people who, with the cool eyes of an " experimental observer, "viewed the bombing as an experiment on human beings from the military and scientific points of view.

From the Military Standpoint

I checked the following main documents of the Manhattan Project (MP): 

---- Captain W.R. Parson's memorandum "Notes on Initial Meetings of Target Committee" to Rear Admiral W.R. Purnell (l2/12/1944);
---- Brigadier General L. Norstad’s memorandum to Director, Joint Target Group (28/ 4/45);
---- Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer’s memorandum to Brigadier General T.F. Farrell ( 11/5/45);
---- Major J.A. Derry's and Dr. N.F. Ramsey's memorandum to Major General L.R. Groves (12/5/45);
---- Brigadier General L. Norstad's memorandum "Notes of the Interim Committee" to Commanding General, XXI Bomber Command (29/5/45).

Having examined these documents (Yamagiwa, Tachibana & Okada, 1993), I came to the conclusion that the U.S. Armed Forces deliberately planned not only to use the A-bombs on civilians to make the destruction most effective, but also to gain as much information as possible about the “ effects" of the bombs. I think that my thesis is proved by the very quick organization of the Manhattan survey teams going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Jones, 1985, pp. 543f.)

I cannot but conclude that the atomic bombings were nothing but a kind of massive experiment on human beings from the military point of view.

From the Standpoint of the Manhattan Scientists

I was shocked to learn about one terrible scheme of Oppenheimer in the Manhattan Project (MP). He had a plan to produce radioactively contaminated foods "sufficient to kill half a million men." (Oppenheimer’s letter to Fermi, 25/5/43 ) Such a plan should surely have needed a series of human experiments.

It seems to me that it was in this atmosphere that a number of scientists, in their studies on the effects of radioactivity on the human body. deliberately injected plutonium into humans, including children, hospital patients, veterans, and other people.

According to an important source (The Albuquerque Tribune and Hirose, 1994), Dr. D. L. Hempelman, a leading scientist in the Health Department, Los Alamos Laboratory, sent a plan for human experiments to Oppenheimer on 29/8/44.

Dr. Stafford Warren, chairman of the Radiology Department at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, who was a consultant to the MP, also proposed a program of experiments to compare the effects of radioactivity on human beings and mice.

In March 1945, medical scientists of the MP had a meeting in Los Alamos to make a program of experiments to inject plutonium into patients hospitalized at the University of Rochester and University of Chicago. In a letter of 29/3/45 Oppenheimer assured Stafford Warren that he would help with his plan of human experiments.

As a result, on 10/4/45 Ebeneezer Cade (HP-12), who was hospitalized in the hospital attached to the MP at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, became the first victim injected with plutonium. It was the first plutonium experiment committed by the MP staff.

On 26/4/45 Arthur B. Hubbard (CHI-1) was injected with plutonium at the hospital attached to the University of Chicago. He died on 3/l0/45. Two other patients were also injected with plutonium.

On 14/5/45 Albert Stevens (CAL-1) was injected with plutonium at the hospital of University of California, San Francisco.

As for plutonium experiments on Americans performed after August 1945, I would be able to add a long list of many who were made human guinea pigs, including several hundred thousand "atomic soldiers." (Rosenberg, 1980) 

It is noteworthy that the leading scientists of the MP systematically committed the crime of human experiments even during the pre-bombing period. They sacrificed many fellow Americans as human guinea pigs.

It seems therefore that it would be reasonable for us to assume that these MP scientists also observed “Japs" in atom-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki as human guinea pigs from their scientific point of view.

It was also interesting and not accidental that Dr. Warren, one of the pioneering scientists of human experiments in the MP, was one of two leading American scientists who later strongly recommended the establishment of the ABCC. Another person who also recommended setting up the ABCC was Dr. Shields Warren. The two Warrens were not related by family. (Lindee, 1994)

In the Light of other Facts

I submitted my conception of the atom bombings as human experiments in the light of the pre- and post-bombing policies of the United States government and the MP scientists toward Americans and Hibakusha. Their post-bombing policies toward the latter were assisted by the Japanese government as well, especially the JNIH.

I appreciate Lindee’s description of the inferiority of the JNIH very much. I think that she accurately describes the no-treatment policy of the ABCC-JNIH. I have to stress the fact that the U.S. government, assisted by the Japanese government, not only applied its no-treatment policy to Hibakusha, but also did their utmost to obstruct Hibakusha from receiving care as proved.

Why? In my opinion it can be explained only when we look at the bombings as human experiments. I would like to reinforce my argument by submitting some additional facts.

1. In the light of the above mentioned mentality and morals of some leading American scientists in the period of the pre-bombing, it seems that it was natural for them to see the bombing as such. In this context, the opinion of J.B. Koepfli, scientific advisor to the State Department, deserves to be cited. He wrote the following in a letter to Shield Warren, Director, Division of Biology and Medicine, AEC on 1/6/51:

"The atomic bomb casualty areas in Japan constitute an unparalleled natural laboratory and a unique opportunity particularly for pursuing certain long phases of the studies." (emphasis added). [7]

It seems to me that such an opinion represented a common understanding among most of the MP and ABCC-JNIH scientists.

2. According to a 5/2/93 story from the Kyodo News Agency at Los Angeles the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were described as "experiments" or "tests" in the official records of the nuclear tests issued by the Nevada Office, Department of Energy (DOE).

Every year since the beginning of the 1980s, the revised version of these records, supplemented with the record of new tests, has been published for the mass media and researchers by this Nevada office. Since the first version, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings have been recorded as the second and third "tests," following the first one at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The bombings have been counted as the second and third as a part of the subsequent test series that included the blasts on the Bikini Atoll, the Nevada site and others from 1945 through to the 1990s.

These facts were reported on 7/2/93 in a major article in the Ciwgoku Shimbun. This is an influential local newspaper with a circulation of 700,000 in Hiroshima Prefecture. It is important to recognize that even the Nevada Office, DOE, understood the bombings to be "tests."

III. NECESSITY OF A NEW WAY OF THINKING

Someone might disagree with me because I might have committed a mistake of confusing post-bombing curiosity about the A-bombs’ effects with pre-bombing motives. But I think that I have reconsidered and proved my thesis on the basis of the analysis of not only the post-bombing but also the pre-bombing policies of the U.S. government.

In connection with the above critical comment, I would like to cite my concept of history:

“What is history? History is a process in which, when the past is looked back on, the implication of the past becomes the present, and its historic significance is revealed. History is also a process in which the implication of the past is re-examined and re-written from the standpoint of the present, thereby making clearer the truth about the past, in which process the historic conception of both past and present is changed. This can be said about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ‘damage’ of those events. The historic implication of this is found in the fact that its truth has been revealed in the process of history." (Shibata, 1982)

I applied this concept of history to the bombings and argued one of the motives of their being carried out was human experimentation.

ln this context, it is further noteworthy that Professor S. Harris submitted an important thesis toward the critique of all kinds of human experimentation in our age. [8] I would say the implication of my concept of the bombings might well be interpreted and understood in the light of his thesis. lt is also ironical that the ABCC was assisted by the JNIH as one of the heirs of the tradition of the medical scientists who committed experiments on humans in the Japanese biological warfare program. Their crimes were covered-up by the American Forces. I fully agree with Professor Susan Lindee, when she characterizes the ABCC and the JNIH as the "colonial science." (Lindee, 1994. Chapter Two)

Not only Japanese but also Americans, including soldiers who were affected by the atomic blast, were treated as guinea pigs. (Sternglass, 1972; Rosenberg. l9B0; Freeman, 1981; Saffer & Kelly, 1982; Wasserman, et al, 1982; Haruna, 1985; Lifton & Mitchell. 1995)

A pioneering American, Hermann Hagedorn had an admirable insight into the atomic bombing i.r1 his poem. (l-lagedorn, 1946) He pointed out that the bombs were dropped not only on Japanese but also on Americans. Another pioneering American philosopher. John Somerville coined the word “ omnicide. " According to him. a nuclear war is no longer a kind of war, but an "omnicide." (Somerville, 1980) This was already proved by the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The victims of nuclear destruction are humanity as a whole, including the so-called enemy as well as friends and allies.

It is in this context that Albert Einstein warned us, "If mankind is to survive, then we need a completely new way of thinking." I hope that those who have tried to justify the Truman argument and supported the Senate Resolution 257 cited at the beginning of this paper will listen to Einstein and reconsider the implication of the nuclear age from the new way of thinking.

Notes

1. The US. Army 406th Medical Laboratory was to be a research unit for preparation of biological warfare in Asia. lt was set up in Yokohama and then in Tokyo immediately after the beginning of the occupation. Later it moved to Sagamihara City near Tokyo and existed there until around 1965. I have no space here to deal with the second hidden aim. 

2. The 1956 Annual Report of the NIH, Tokyo. 1957. p. 30, emphasis added, in Japanese. 

3. See the documentary report entitled "The Unit [or Bacteriological Warfare still Exists," Monthly Shinsu (Truth), N0, 40, April 1959. in Japanese; Williams, P. & Wallace, D. 1989, p. 238. 

4. The 1948 Annual Report of the NIH, Tokyo. 1949. pp. 58-61, in Japanese. 

5. NIH and ABCC, 20 Years of the ABCC, Tokyo, 1966, p. 1, in Japanese. 

6. When we Japanese declare, “No More Hiroshimas!”, Americans very often reply, "Remember Pearl Harbour”. We completely understand and support Americans when they do so. ln fact, Americans and Japanese have to remember Pearl Harbor forever, firstly because those who committed the war crimes in the invaded Asian and Pacific countries including Pearl Harbor have not always been punished, secondly because the bombing of Pearl Harbor was nothing but the first-strike. Nevertheless, it is the U.S. government that has continued to support these Japanese war criminals including Shiro Ishii, the Commander of the infamous Unit 731 and Nobusuke Kishi who was one of the then ministers of the Tojo government. Ishii was later hired and Kishi supported by the U.S. government. It is also strange to see that the U.S. government still sticks to the first-strike policy in a possible nuclear war. Isn't it another Pearl Harbor in a nuclear war, more correctly a global nuclear omnicide? 

7. I am grateful to Mr. Kazuo Yabui, a reporter of the Chugoku Shimbun, who kindly provided me with a copy of this letter. 

8. His thesis deserves to be cited: "Most distressing is the tact that the ultimate disclosures in the mid to late l940s of Japanese biological warfare human experimentation did not appall those individuals who were apprised of these criminal acts. Instead, the disclosures whetted the appetites of scientists and military planners among both the victors and the vanquished. Rather than being motivated to abandon such actions, research using involuntary or uninformed subjects has proliferated over the past fifty years. Scientists in the United States alone conducted at least several hundred tests with human subjects who were not informed of the nature of the experiments, or of the danger to their health." (Harris, 1995, p. x) 

 [The Bibliography goes here in the document. See link to original or embedded version above.] 

Postscript and Acknowledgment

The original version of the chapter I of this paper was written in 1994. A condensed text of it was published in Japanese in the Evening edition of the Mainichi Shimbun, 6/9/1994. Its condensed but longer text in English in the Mairtichi Daily News, 11/11/1994.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1995. I had an opportunity to meet Dr. Klaus Gottstein, Emeritus Professor at the Max Planck Institute in Munich, and gave him a copy of the paper for his comment. He kindly paid much attention to my paper and sent it to Professor Barton Bernstein at Stanford University, Stanford, California, and asked him to make a comment on it. The kind comments of Professors Gottstein and Bernstein, scientists of international repute, meant a great deal and honor to me. It motivated me to reconsider my thesis and to write a long letter to reinforce my argument as a reply to them. This letter was rewritten and incorporated as Chapter II of this paper. This text is a new enlarged one with added references. I am grateful to both of them for their warm and sincere comments.

I am also grateful to Professor Seiitsu Tachibane, Dr. David Tharp and Mr. David Jordan for their kind and informative suggestions.

When I almost completed this paper for the Seisen Review, Dr Rosalie Bertell, the editor of the International Perspectives in Public Health, Toronto, kindly told me that she would like to print its original text in this journal. It is a great honor to me. However. needless to say, I don’t like to see the old text published in any journal. In this context I asked her to print this new text in her journal as well. I hope the readers of the Seisen Review kindly understand the present paper would soon be printed in the International Perspectives in Public Health, too.

Communication to the author should be addressed : 1-18-6 Toyame, Shinjuku-ku, Toyko 162....

I would add that this copy of Dr. Shingata's essay is reproduced as a public service and under fair use criteria. No money is, has, or will be received for this publication, which is published here to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Additional reading:
"Japanese Biomedical Experimentation During the World-War-II Era" by Sheldon Harris, Ch. 16 of Military Medical Ethics, Vol. 2

"The Pentagon and the Japanese Mengele: The Abominable Dr. Ishii" by Christopher Reed, published at Counterpunch, May 27, 2006

Commission and Omission of History in Occupied Japan (1945-1949) by Stephen Buono, Journal of History, SUNY Binghamton, no date (Accessed 12/8/2012)

Promoting Health in American-Occupied Japan: Resistance to Allied Public Health Measures, 1945-1952 by Sey Nishimura, PhD (see especially the section, ""Suppression of Reports on Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs")

The Atomic Bomb Suppressed: American Censorship in Japan, 1945-1948, by Monica Braw

"Medical Censorship in Occupied Japan, 1945-1948" by Sey Nishimura, Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 1-21.

Commission and Omission of History in Occupied Japan (1945-1949) by Stephen Buono, Binghamton University website