"You are completely destroyed": Testimony on Torture from Shaker Aamer's Medical Report at Guantanamo

On April 7, 2014, Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantanamo, and his attorneys filed a habeas petition (PDF) asking for his release due to chronic health problems that can not be treated at Guantanamo. The worst of these problems apparently stems from PTSD from the torture Shaker has endured since he was captured by the Northern Alliance, then turned over to the Americans on Christmas Eve, 2001.

The details of his torture at Bagram, Kandahar and Guantanamo are described in lengthy quotations from a February 2, 2014 medical psychiatric report by Dr. Emily Keram, a forensic psychiatrist who has evaluated a number of Guantanamo detainees at the request of the U.S. courts, the Military Commissions, and various habeas attorneys. The report is appended to the habeas filing.

What follows here is a long section from her report (PDF), where Dr. Keram quotes Shaker's narrative about his experiences under torture after his capture. From my experience, it is one of the most remarkable and disturbing documents to have come out of Guantanamo, as Shaker Aamer is an intelligent, sensitive man who speaks English. He has left us a record of his torture that cries out to be read.

I reproduce portions of Shaker's testimony here in the hopes of mobilizing support for freeing him from Guantanamo (he has been "cleared for release" for years now). I also hope this helps mobilize support for freeing or transferring all the detainees/prisoners to humane incarceration with the certainty of quick adjudication of their cases. Those detainees who are not guilty of anything should be released, and at this point -- read the following and you will understand fully -- given the surety of medical treatment as long as they need it.

Both the habeas filing and the medical report were linked in a story by long-time Guantanamo expert and passionate advocate for an end to torture and indefinite detention, Andy Worthington. His article, "Gravely Ill, Shaker Aamer Asks US Judge to Order His Release from Guantánamo," is posted at the Close Guantanamo website.

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From Shaker Aamer's Medical Report (verbatim):

Mr. Aamer and I reviewed his conditions of confinement at Bagram Airfield. He reported severe maltreatment by guards, interrogators, and medical personnel working in concert, by means of humiliation, sleep deprivation, exposure to cold, manipulation of food and water, stress positions, threats of sexual assault against his young daughter, and beatings.

“The nakedness made me feel animal-like. I was not a human being anymore. I meant nothing to them. I lost my dignity, my pride, being a man. I had to take off my underwear and hand it to them. You lose your humanity. You are an animal. You know if you don’t do it, they will do it by force and it will be a lot worse. I respected and believed they would give me a fair chance because they were Americans. I was happy that I was with Americans because of their human rights.

I had sleep deprivation for 11 days. That made me crazy. They poured cold water over me. They kept me standing for 20 hours a day. I had to hold my hands and arms out. If I dozed off they would bang on the concrete with an axe. The sleep deprivation caused hallucinations. It started with noise. Then I heard old music from my childhood. I wondered, ‘Where did they get those tapes?’ I heard people talking. I started looking for who was talking. There was no one there. No one else heard them. Finally I heard music from my childhood that I knew they never could have found. I talked to the doctor about it. He said I was going crazy. He told me, ‘You should talk to the interrogators so then you can relax.’

They withheld food, except for frozen MRE’s. They would give you a bottle of frozen water. You didn’t want to drink because it would make you have to pee. The guards won’t take you to pee so I peed where I was sitting. I didn’t have a bowel movement for 25 days. My stomach became like a stone. I didn’t see a doctor initially because the interrogators were happy because I was telling them everything, whatever they wanted. [Interrogators controlled access to medical personnel] Then the doctor gave me a laxative. They took me to a hole. Female and male guards were watching. A guard pulled down my coveralls and told me to shit. It was very hard. I had to push hard. The female and male guards were joking. A female said, ‘Look, he’s having a baby.’ I passed what felt like stones. The guards gave me a tissue from an MRE to wipe myself. It was bloody. I felt so humiliated.

All of the statements I made at Bagram were during the sleep deprivation. I would have said anything. I told them, ‘I will tell you I am bin Laden if you want me to tell you I am bin Laden.’”

Mr. Aamer described the effects of maltreatment on his mental state.

“It’s a process of losing your mind. First it’s knowing you are not in control of yourself anymore. Someone else is in control of you. So you fool yourself and think, ‘Well, he’s only controlling me physically, but not mentally.’ They’re not in your head. But then you realize you’re wrong and they control your mind.

Then it’s welcome to the microwave. It’s easy to crack an egg from the outside. It’s hard to blow up the egg from the inside. They let you recover so you think you’re strong again. And then they break you again. And you thought you were strong again. And you don’t know your thoughts anymore. Like the microwave, they boil you from the inside to the outside until you explode.

After the microwave, the eggshell may be intact because the heat penetrated to the inside. The shell looks strong. But if you crack the egg, inside you will see charcoal.

So I would go to the interrogators thinking, ‘How can I lower the level of torture? What can I say to please him? I am going to be so easy with him today, I will please him.’”....

“It makes me scared to talk about it. I’ve been keeping it all inside. I’m scared because they are listening to us now and they’re learning; I’m teaching them how to interrogate. And now they will write a whole new book on interrogation with what they have learned....

“It’s a terrible procedure. The interrogator starts to talk with you about things that are small and well known. You agree. But he is driving you to a cliff. The more you drive with him on his interrogation, he starts throwing out fish bait, so little by little they show you that they are interested in knowing who you are. They do this by saying, ‘Shaker Aamer, we know you; we know who you are. We know you are nobody. We know you are a small fish rubbing shoulders with the big fish.’

My goal is, ‘How can I minimize the torture? I just want to sleep.’ I never had a goal more than that. It was never my goal to get out of the facility and be freed. My goal was just to lessen the torture. The problem is, not all the small fish know the big fish; but you want to lessen the torture.

So, their interest in you makes you trust them. You start to tell them the truth; you build the truth by telling the story in chronological order. You build the building one story at a time. Until I separated from my wife and go [sic] to hide in the mountains and wait for the man to take me through the mountains. The interrogators asked me the name of the mountains, the name of the man who would guide me. I didn’t know. And that’s when the interrogators went crazy.

The interrogators threw chairs. They put me in a grey disc with my legs spread. They banged the chairs. And you are just trying to avoid any hit. They shook me. They threw me on the ground. They banged my head into the wall.

I was telling them the truth. Their interest made me trust them. It made me hope the torture will decrease. But when I couldn’t tell them what they want [sic] to hear they made me stand for hours, they scream at me, they bang into me. You aren’t even thinking beyond how to protect yourself and not attack them so that you don’t get a bullet in your head. They do that until you are shivering, until they have broken you, until your mind is completely empty. You feel like you’re not real anymore. Like it’s a dream.

And now the worst part comes. They treat you with kindness. It destroys you completely. Your thinking is paralyzed. Your feeling is paralyzed. And the interrogator says, ‘I am trying to help you.’ You don’t know what to love and what to hate because it’s all happening at the same time. You don’t know anything anymore. You can’t tell apart good and bad, kind and evil. You lose the sense of the meaning of kindness.

You ask yourself, ‘Are they really trying to hurt me or are they trying to help me?’ You can’t tell anymore. They bang your head on the wall and then they give you a hot meal. One interrogator talked about what he would do to my five-year-old daughter in details that destroyed me. He said ‘They are going to screw her. She will be screaming, ‘Daddy! Daddy’’ You are completely disorganized. You are completely destroyed.

It happened many times. You learn they don’t really want to hear what the truth is. The truth only results in the same; more torture. So you begin to follow their story; they ask you questions, they give you descriptions and you agree. What was the color of the car? Did the driver look like this? Was the driver from al Qaeda? I answered, ‘How should I know.’ They said, ‘Well, a taxi driver wouldn’t drive to this compound would he, so he must be al Qaeda. The taxi driver takes you to the Arab guesthouse so the taxi driver is al Qaeda and the Arab guesthouse is al Qaeda.’

The interrogators give you the details, but they don’t want you to agree. They say have you seen a fat guy? A guy with a turban? This guy? That guy? Guess what? Those guys are al Qaeda. And then you feel like that you are al Qaeda. Then the interrogators tell you that al Qaeda recruited you without you knowing it; they were behind funding your travel.

Then they ask you to sign a statement. When I say no, the whole thing starts again. In the end, I offered to my interrogator to sign that I am al Qaeda, everything the interrogator wanted me to sign, if the interrogator would agree not to interrogate and torture me anymore. And the interrogator said, ‘I can’t tell you that we won’t interrogate you anymore.’

No matter what you said, they still wanted more. So they kept torturing me no matter what. The degree of the torture would change. Maybe they would let me sit for a brief period of time and then it would get worse again.

For the first 25 days at Bagram it was constant severe torture. For the last week they left me alone with the other detainees in a room with a heater. We all had frostbite. The interrogators only asked what we knew about certain people, but they weren’t pushing me for specific information. I didn’t see the sun except twice while I was at Bagram. And then there was ‘The Big Goodbye Party’ when you leave for Kandahar. I was beaten, shackled, and hooded. The guards laughed and cursed me. I was roped together with other detainees. Then the plane didn’t come. The next day they gave us another ‘Goodbye Party.’ We weren’t allowed to use the toilet. The plane came. I was fearful, thinking, ‘If this is happening right now, what is coming next? Maybe they’re getting ready to shoot me? Maybe it will be something worse than this.’”

Mr. Aamer experienced severe maltreatment at Kandahar Airfield with identical effects on his physical and mental state.

"I was shipped to Kandahar. The airplane was freezing cold. Someone took my socks from me. And then the ‘Welcome Party.’ They told the soldiers they could do anything they wanted with the detainees. We landed. They put us face first on cold concrete. We were shivering. They hit me with gun butts, kicked me with boots, and stomped on my back. There was a 17-year-old detainee. They put a gun up his rectum. He was screaming, ‘I’m no woman! I’m no woman!’ I yelled at the guards to stop in English. Then, because I spoke English the soldiers said, ‘He’s a traitor. He speaks perfect English.’ They beat me even harder. A black female soldier stopped them, saying, ‘You’ve had your fun.’

At about 0600, after 20 minutes of not being beaten, they put me in a cage with a blanket. They put me on my face and unshackled me. Then they ran out. They gave me bread. At about 0730 or 0800 they yelled at me to get up. They put my head on the ground, hooded and shackled me and took me to the interrogators tent. I was kept awake for 10 days.

The torture in Kandahar was more physical than in Bagram. They shook me, threw me on the floor, made me hold my arms out, hit my hands. There was no blanket, just lying on the ground. There was a nice thick blanket lying on the floor, but if I reached for it they would start beating me.

Two interrogators named John and Tony and a guy named Sallie or Sal took turns for three to six hours at a time or two to three hours at a time. There was also an Egyptian. They were with me almost all the time. At least I had my own place in Bagram; I was in a cage and the guards were on the outside. That was a comfort to me. But at Kandahar there was nothing between me and the guards. They were in the tent. If I closed my eyes, the guard would say to open them.

The interrogations at Kandahar had the same process as at Bagram in terms of the interrogators being both cruel and kind. The worst was Sal. He was so kind. He sat me outside the tent with the guards and heated up my food. The guards were starting [sic?] at me. I felt humiliated. Sal talked to me as if I were a human being. Then Sal would say he was going to screw my five-year-old daughter; he was going to do this and that to my daughter sexually; how my daughter would scream and scream. I thought about attacking Sal and getting killed. But I wouldn’t do anything aggressive. Force is the weapon of the coward.

This went on for 10 days. It was constant interrogation and torture. I told them the exact same truth that I had told the interrogators in Bagram, plus they had more true information about me. I also told the interrogators things that weren’t true in order to decrease the intensity of the torture I was suffering.

In those ten days, I only went to the toilet once. I had sleep deprivation. The ICRC came to see me in Bagram one time. Then they came to Kandahar to see me. They took me to a cage with other detainees. The judge from the ICRC saw me there, a Swiss judge. He gave me a card with my number on it.

After 10 days they sent the Egyptian guy who told me I was going to Guantanamo. They put me in a cage for four days and pretty much left me alone. A British agent came to see me, a young officer with a red beret. I wouldn’t talk with him because he said he couldn’t do anything to help me. The Americans only asked me questions those last four days at Kandahar like the last days at Bagram. They didn’t press me to lie about anything.

After four days they gave me the ‘Goodbye Party’ at Kandahar and a far worse ‘Welcome Party’ at Guantanamo.”

The maltreatment and its physical and mental effects continued at Guantanamo.

“The interrogations at Guantanamo have twists. There’s a 'frequent flyer program' where they move you every two hours. The guards shout at you in the same block. They switch the water off. They spray Pine Sol in my clothes.

It’s the same process psychologically; I can’t tell cruelty and kindness apart. I told the interrogators everything to decrease the torture severity. Another thing that was at Guantanamo that was not at Bagram was the circles within circles. The guards were connected with medical, were connected with the people who gave supplies like linens, were connected with the administration like the NCO’s, were connected with the Navy or the Army, were connected with the CIA, were connected with the FBI, were connected with the Republicans and the Democrats. All of these people want to squeeze my neck at the center of all of the circles. You tell them what they want to hear to decrease the severity of the torture.

For example, an internist came to see me. I asked for a blanket because I have arthritis and the cold air conditioning makes it worse. The doctor said the arthritis is in my record and agreed that it was cold. The doctor said, ‘I will ask permission from the Joint Detention Group (JDG) for a blanket for you.’ And the doctor says he’s independent.

The worst thing about torture is that you don’t know how to think, what to do, how to feel. You know you have your mind, but you don’t now how to react, which is horrible because you feel vulnerable. It’s terrible. We believed that the people here; the CIA, the interrogators, use ‘djinn.’ [spirits] The evil djinn. Some of the things that happened, you can’t explain. Some people with think that it was drugs or something, but 95% of us believe we got possessed by djinn.”

Also posted at Firedoglake/The Dissenter

More Evidence of Water Torture "Depravity" in Rumsfeld's Military

Reposted from Truthout, written by Jeffrey Kaye

There have been a number of cases of detainees held by the Department of Defense (DoD) who have been subjected to water torture, including some that come very close to waterboarding, according to an investigation by Truthout. The prisoners have been held in a number of settings, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantanamo Bay.

In a number of settings, DoD spokespeople in the past  - most notably former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld - have denied the use of waterboarding by DoD personnel. But as examples of DoD water torture have multiplied, it appears government denials about "waterboarding" were overly legalistic, and that behind them, DoD personnel were hiding torture involving similar methods of choking, suffocation or near-drowning by water.

Reports of water-related torture by the military include having water forced into the nose or mouth by a hose, repeated dunking in water, pouring water over the head in such a way that it is difficult to breathe or over a piece of cloth or hood, dousing with high-pressure hoses, dousing or partial drowning in combination with the application of a chemical agent, and in a few instances, actually being thrown into a large body of water, such as a river.

An article in Truthout earlier this month documented a half-dozen cases of DoD prisoners subjected to waterboarding-style torture. The article also detailed discussions among high-ranking military and intelligence officials around the use of waterboarding, and the fact that interrupted or simulated drowning at a military site in Kandahar, called "water treatment" in this instance, was revealed at a Congressional hearing in May 2008.

Human rights and civil liberties groups have expressed concern over news of DoD water torture and have asked for further investigation.

Asked to respond on behalf of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the reports of such water torture, spokesperson Kathleen Long said the committee had "no comment."

One web site, Lawfare, co-founded by former Department of Justice official Jack Goldsmith, who was involved in internal decisions surrounding torture inside the Bush administration, seemed confused by the Truthout report, complaining that "reports of waterboarding-like tortures at Guantanamo" lacked "any examples of the military's using waterboarding, but refers to the repeated use of water in interrogations instead."

Truthout continues to investigate further instances of DoD waterboarding-style torture at US military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.

"Waterboarding-style" torture refers to the use of water to provoke choking or suffocation by water, and, in some cases, the triggering of the sensation of drowning, if not actual drowning itself, but without actually following the CIA's description of the waterboard procedure. It is has also been called "water treatment," "water torture" and "drown-proofing."

"The Interrogators Asked Me to Confess to Being a Part of 9/11"

In an affidavit filed on April 21, 2009, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Muhammad al-Ansi, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, described his torture in a tent at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan in the early weeks of 2001. According to al-Ansi, it began after a female interrogator became angry he would not "confess."

Four American soldiers came and took me into another room. It was not a tent. They put me on a slab (the size and shape of a bed) made of bricks. I was made to lay on my stomach with my head hanging over the edge. They brought in a big water container and placed it under my head. They would [handwritten: forced [sic]] my head and shoulders [handwritten: under] into the water until I almost drowned and lift my head out at the last minute. They did this over and over. During this time, the interrogators asked me to confess to being a part of 9/11, confess I am part of al Qaeda, confess that I swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, confess I have explosive weapons training, and confess to knowing several names that I had never heard of. This continued for one to two hours. I said nothing other than: "Have mercy on me."

In another instance of torture in Afghanistan, in June 2008, Tom Lasseter reported for McClatchy that Ghalib Hassan, "a district chief in Nangarhar province for the Afghan Interior Ministry," was detained "in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003" by Special Forces troops.

According to Hassan, "At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket.... They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness."

Once again, the military personnel involved demanded that the prisoner confess, in this instance to supporting a former Taliban official. In fact, the Taliban had expelled Hassan in 1996, and he had fought with US-backed forces at Tora Bora against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another case from Afghanistan concerned Saudi national Ahmed al-Darbi. Arrested by authorities in Azerbaijan in 2002 and later turned over to the Americans, he is the brother-in-law of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. Al-Mihdhar is also famous for being one of two al-Qaeda suspects who US intelligence knew was attending a meeting with other suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. As it turned out, this meeting likely involved the planning of the 9/11 and USS Cole terrorist attacks.

In a recently aired video interview with filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism "czar" who resigned during the Bush administration, charged former CIA director George Tenet and top CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee with suppressing information about al-Mihdhar's intent to enter the United States after the Malaysia meeting. The CIA deliberately had withheld cables to the FBI about al-Mihdhar entering the United States and failed to notify the State Department to put him and his traveling companion on the State Department watch list.

Al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law, al-Darbi, was renditioned from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan in 2002 and was later sent to Guantanamo, where he remains to this day. In a declaration dated July 1, 2009, al-Darbi cited a number of instances of abuse and torture at both the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantanamo.

At Bagram, al-Darbi stated, at times, "a sand bag or hood was placed over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered." The covering over the head while water is poured sounds very much like waterboarding. Al-Darbi also indicated that a powder, perhaps pepper spray, was applied to him and then water sprayed on him, so that the "water absorbed the powder and it burned my skin and made my nose run."

More Water Torture at Guantanamo

In an August 2 Truthout article, six cases of water torture were described at the Cuban naval base prison. Two of these cases, including "near asphyxiation from water," were described in an article published in an online medical journal earlier this year, but the identities of the detainees were kept anonymous.

Further investigation has found three more reports of such torture at Guantanamo and two cases of unique water torture, something between water dousing and waterboarding-style interrupted drowning.

One of the cases, of British citizen Tarek Dergoul, who was released from Guantanamo in 2004, involved treatment very similar to that reported by Omar Deghayes and Djamel Ameziane in the earlier Truthout article. According to an interview given to UK Guardian reporter David Rose, when Dergoul refused to have his cell searched for a third time on one day, an Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) squad was called.

"They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting," Dergoul reported, "in all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed." They continued to beat him and finally shaved off his hair, beard and eyebrows.

In another interview, Guantanamo detainee Salim Mahmoud Adem, a Sudanese national released in 2007, ?told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that he had witnessed another prisoner having his head shoved repeatedly into a toilet. Interestingly, the story came up after Goodman asked about waterboarding.

AG: Salim, did – Salim, did you witness anyone waterboarded?

SMA: I did not see waterboarding, but my neighbor, they insulted the Qu'ran, so we refused to listen to the guards. So they would come with the riot police and enter into the cells, one by one. So they went into the cell of a Yemeni brother, whose name is Othman [phonetic]. After they tied him, his hands to his back, they put his head to the toilet and turned on the flush many times. And all of us could see it. This was a horrible sight.

The torture of Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held at Guantanamo for seven years and finally released in 2008, presents a unique instance of torture involving forced application of water. Al-Haj was a hunger striker who, along with a number of other hunger strikers, was put on a forced feeding schedule. Civil rights attorney Candace Gorman, who has also represented some of the Guantanamo detainees, described the procedure in a May 2007 article for In These Times.

According to Gorman, al-Haj described his experience of forced feeding to his attorney. Al-Haj said he was strapped into a chair and had a tube painfully inserted through his nose twice each day. The attendants would blow air into the tube in order to ascertain its placement. Al-Haj would suffer in silence, "until tears stream down his cheeks."

But sometimes things went even worse:

Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it went into his lungs. When they think that has happened they check by putting water into the tube, which makes him choke. Al-Haj says that never once have the hospital personnel apologized when the tube entered his lung.

Extreme "Water Dousing"

In a few reports, detainees have described a form of "water dousing" that went far beyond the description of the procedure given by the CIA. According to the 2004 CIA Inspector General (IG) report on "counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities," which looked at the implementation of the so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques of the Bush administration, "water dousing" involved "laying a detainee down on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes." The room was to be maintained at room temperature.

In a 2008 Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and its Impact," PHR quoted testimony by a detainee, Haydar (not his real name), who recalled having been sprayed with pepper spray and then hosed with high-pressure water. "This one female soldier subjected me to pepper gas and then sprayed me with water with extreme force - and I was writhing on the ground in pain," Haydar said.

Another Guantanamo detainee, British citizen Jamal al-Harith, noted in a 2004 statement to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly that he knew of "three or four occasions guards using an industrial strength hose to shoot strong jets of water at detainees. This was done to me on one occasion. A guard walked along the gangway by the cages sending the hose into each alternate cage. When it happened to me I was hosed down continuously for about one minute. The pressure of the water was so strong it forced me to the back of the cage. It soaked the cage including my bedding and my Koran."

Such cases of "water dousing" by Guantanamo guards, including the use of high-pressure hoses, went far beyond what was even contemplated by such a technique even under CIA torture procedures.

Drownings in Iraq

A review of news reports from Iraq reveal two separate instances of actual drowning of Iraqi detainees by US and British forces. In one case, soldiers were court-martialed and received light sentences. In the other case, the men were acquitted.

In January 2005, Army Sgt. First Class Tracy Perkins was convicted for ordering men under his command one year earlier to throw Iraqi detainees into the Tigris River. One of the Iraqis, 19-year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, drowned. Perkins was sentenced to six months in military prison and his rank was reduced to staff sergeant.

Perkins claimed he was ordered to throw the men in the river by his platoon leader, Army First Lt. Jack Saville. According to an account by the UK Guardian, Saville "pleaded guilty to assault and dereliction of duty," and was sentenced to 45 days in military prison and ordered to pay a $12,000 fine. The light sentence was reportedly because "Lt. Saville agreed to testify against his captain, who had given him a hit list of five Iraqis who were to be executed on the spot if they were captured in a raid."

But there was more. According to a July 2004 Associated Press article, the actions by Saville, Perkins, and two other soldiers, Sgt. Reggie Martinez and Spec. Terry Bowman, were initially covered up by their commanding officers. At an Article 32 hearing, and under grants of immunity, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, Maj. Robert Gwinner and battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman said they told Saville and his men to "to clam up because they feared higher-ups in the chain of command would use the incident against them."

In another case, British soldiers, operating as part of the US-led alliance that invaded Iraq, arrested and beat an Iraqi teenager, who was then ordered to swim across the Shatt al-Basra canal. According to an account in the Guardian, 17-year-old (some reports say 15-year-old) Ahmed Jabbar Kareem was too weakened by his injuries and drowned. All four soldiers involved were acquitted of manslaughter in the case. One of the soldiers, Irish guardsman Joseph McCleary, told the press, "We were told to put the looters in the canal. I was the lowest rank, and we were always told we weren't paid to think. We just followed orders."

The acquittal of the British soldiers and the light sentences for US soldiers involved in the drowning of captives represent an attitude towards prisoners in general - including the use of water torture and drowning - that carried minimal consequences in the Iraq war theater.

Indeed, in a US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigatory report dated May 27, 2004 (pg. 70), the special agent in charge reported that a team leader for 5th Special Forces group (Airborne), based in Al Asad, Iraq, gave "special instructions for the guarding and handling of EPWs" [enemy prisoners of war], including "maintaining a sandbag over their heads, playing loud music and pouring water over their heads."

The torture of the Iraqi EPWs is very similar to the description Ahmed al-Darbi gave of his treatment at Bagram.

Reactions to New Revelations

The examples of water torture described in this and the earlier Truthout article are certainly not the only occurrences of water torture. For instance, one further example exists of a Guantanamo detainee who suffered water being poured over his head while it was covered, but further details could not be given due to legal restrictions covering his case.

It is also assumed that some instances of such torture have not yet been revealed. The press and human rights groups have not interviewed most prisoners released from US custody. Furthermore, detainees released from Guantanamo must sign an agreement that twice notes they can be "immediately" re-imprisoned if the United States finds any condition of the agreement, which includes prohibitions against conspiracy or vague "preparation of" "combatant activities," violated. Fear of re-imprisonment and psychological traumatization from their experience have led many former detainees to maintain a silence about their experiences.

Not all observers or participants in DoD activities have indicated they witnessed or heard of water torture at DoD sites.

Morris Davis, who was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, told Truthout that his office, "focused on about 75 of the detainees we were assessing for potential prosecution." He added he, "did not have the time or the manpower to examine the many others that were not likely candidates for prosecution."

Even so, Davis told Truthout, "I never saw any evidence that any detainee was waterboarded or subjected to any similar technique at Gitmo," though "others things [were] done to some of them that I believe constitute torture."

In addition, some guards, even if critical of abuses at Guantanamo, have said they did not witness waterboarding or water torture at the Cuban prison camp. In an interview with The Talking Dog blog in March 2009, former guard Terry Holdbrooks Jr. said, "In my time in Camp Delta, I didn't see or hear of any waterboarding."

But testimony and evidence offered in this investigation strongly suggest that water torture similar to waterboarding or of other extreme nature was inflicted on some prisoners under US military control, and also by allied forces.

Some sources have been adamant that waterboarding did in fact occur, for instance, at Guantanamo.

In an April 2007 statement to the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, Guantanamo detainee attorney Brent Mickum said that a guard who had worked at the prison camp told him "prisoners at Guantanamo were routinely waterboarded." Mickum reiterated this point in an interview with the blog The Talking Dog later that year.

Mickum said the guard "confirmed that waterboarding, which he called 'drown-proofing' took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity."

Mickum has also said he heard from a civilian contractor that he heard interrogators talking about waterboarding at Guantanamo in 2003.

In a telephone interview, Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) National Security Project, responding to the accumulated evidence compiled on DoD water torture, told Truthout, "The suggestion that the use of water to torture is more widespread than previously thought is extremely troubling, and reaffirms the need for greater transparency and a broader investigation into the abuse committed under the Bush administration."

In an emailed statement, Vince Warren, executive director for Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have represented a number of Guantanamo detainees, said, "It's clear even from the accounts of men who were released from Guantánamo that many more people were subjected to different forms of water torture or simulated drowning than the three victims of waterboarding the government has admitted to. Our attorneys can't talk about what happened to our all of clients because they are under a protective order, but public documents show the widespread extent of this barbarity. It's simply shameful."

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Torture and Political Alienation

Cross-posted from Firedoglake

There are times when the general political discourse just sails right by me. The perspective of living with the torture issue, and assisting torture survivors, transfers the day-by-day fray of partisan politics into a gray zone inhabited by half-sensible humans, whose actions and passions seem unreal. The following testimonies are what seem real to me, taken from the testimonies gathered by the good folk at the Refugee Media Project, who are producing a video documentary on immigrant survivors of torture who have settled in the United States:

R. had been imprisoned and tortured by Uganda’s Idi Amin. “When you’re thrown in military detention,” he says, “you are there to be killed. They did a lot of bad things, a lot of castration. They cut people up and all kinds of stuff. Those still alive – your job was to clean it up.”

C. was a pediatrician and a softball player – on her national team in Guatemala: “On my way to a game I was intercepted by a couple of cars. They crashed my car from the back and stopped me with guns…. “They had broken a couple of my ribs, and had kept me with handcuffs the entire time, but they didn’t touch my face. They beat me in my thighs – my thighs were by then the color of eggplant, but they were very careful not to beat me in the parts that could be visible.”

A. was only eighteen when he was arrested in his west African country. “I was tortured, you know. Sometimes they make you stand for hours. Beatings…I went through all that. They tried to get information that I don’t even know. It’s like telling somebody to find a nail in the ocean, because you don’t know what they are talking about. Do I have to lie? Sometimes, yes, you have to lie, just for them to stop the pain.”

S. was betrayed by a friend who had invited him for tea…. It was three years and two months that I was in prison, and it was solitary confinement for three whole years…. They just kept me isolated and they wouldn’t let me sing or say anything. If I said anything they would come and threaten physical punishment. So it was not that bad compared to what happened to other people; it was not that bad… I say it was not bad, but it ruined me. It ruined me in many ways. It disabled me.”

What a contradiction that the same country that takes in torture survivors more than any other, the United States, should also run their own torture prisons. (Certainly, too, I could have gathered stories from within the prisons and jails inside the United States, where the most cruel conditions often prevail, from beatings and killings to soul-crushing solitary confinement.) The following is from the 2005 testimony of Shaker Aamer, a Saudi-born British resident who was cleared for release from Guantanamo two years ago, but the United States refuses to release to British custody, most likely because he acted as a moral leader among the detainees, and refused to turn informer.  . . .

I am dying here every day, mentally and physically. This is happening to all of us. We have been ignored, locked up in the middle of the ocean for many years…I have problems many problems from the filthy yellow water…I have lung problems from the chemicals they spread all over the floor…I am already arthritic at 40 because I sleep on a steel bed, and they use freezing air conditioning as part of the interrogation process. I have ruined eyes from the permanent, 24-hour fluorescent lights. I have tinnitus in my ears from the perpetual noise…I have ulcers and almost permanent constipation from the food. I have been made paranoid, so I can trust nobody, not even my lawyer. I was over 250 lbs. I dropped to 130lbs in the hunger strike. I want to make it easy on everyone, I want no feeding, no forced tubes, no ‘help’, no ‘intensive assisted feeding.’

Today, while researching an article I’m writing for Truthout, which I’m writing with the journalist Jason Leopold — we’re going to publish an exclusive investigatory report in a few days on the use of a particularly harmful drug on the detainees at Guantanamo — I noticed that the SOP for the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) at Bagram included the following sentence, as it described the BSCTs’ duties: “BSCs can assist in ensuring that everything that a detainee sees, hears, and experiences is a part of the overall interrogation plan.”

Such a totalistic environment is constructed by two psychologists and two psych techs, the members of the BSCT team (psychiatrists having opted out some years back, when their professional association wouldn’t allow them to participate). It is purely evil the way that psychological and medical knowledge is put to use for such destructive ends. The BSCTs supposedly ensure safety for the detainees, but eight years of revelations shows that to be a complete lie.

I became involved in writing about torture because of the shame and anger I felt, as a psychologist, at seeing the field and work I loved, to which I had dedicated a large portion of my life, and around which I had formed a crucial piece of self-identity, deformed and utilized for inhumanity and military-political gain.

Unbeknown to much of the country, there has grown in recent years a huge network of torture treatment centers, assisting survivors with their medical and psychological needs, while also helping, when they can, with the onerous asylum process in this country. (See list of such agencies here.) Such work is satisfying to those who do it, and necessary. I do some of this work myself. But we, as a country, cannot be satisfied with this. Already the torture virus eats through every social institution it touches, debasing ordinary human discourse and means of association, brutalizing some and defeating others.

The Obama administration has been shown to be lying about torture, but nothing is done. The Democratic Party-led Congress showed itself morally bankrupt in more ways than one, done in by political opportunism and accomodationism, by its adherence to the war aims of the Bush-Cheney clique and the manifold military, scientific, healthcare, and industrial interests that grow rich off the “war on terror” and its various campaigns. The Democrats share rule with the awful GOP in Congress, tolerated only because the populace sees no other alternative, as political discussion in this country is limited to discourse between these two bankrupt political parties. I cannot engage in that kabuki, though I understand it.

The voices of the tortured keep speaking to me. They will not be quieted. They will continuing speaking long after I am old and gone. Will they be heard, or buried again in a spiritual dungeon built out of human indifference, ignorance, and fear?

Soros' Foundation Links AFM's Appendix M to U.S. Torture in Afghanistan

Cross-posted from The Seminal/Firedoglake

Last week, George Soros's Open Society Foundations (OSF) published an important policy brief, "Confinement Conditions at a U.S. Screening Facility on Bagram Air Base." The report has been widely described in the press, as in this article by AFP:

The US military is mistreating detainees -- and violating its own rules -- at a secret prison in Afghanistan, a US think tank said Friday in a report.

The 16-page report by the Open Society Foundation said Afghans call the secret site "Tor Jail," or "Black Jail," and that consistent accounts from detainees refer to being kept without adequate shelter or food or other basic rights.

The independent investigation by OSF is consistent with news reports of torture and abuse at secret black sites run by JSOC in Afghanistan, including articles by the New York Times and Washington Post. Last May, BBC reported that they received confirmation on the existence of the black site from a Red Cross spokesman, while Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic described the JOSC black site as being "manned by intelligence operatives and interrogators who work for the DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC)... [performing] interrogations for a sub-unit of Task Force 714, an elite counter-terrorism brigade." The spate of news articles led Physicians for Human Rights to opine last May whether it was "possible that officials were relying on Appendix M of the 2006 Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations (AFM)," noting that the "appendix authorizes the use of two of the tactics — sleep deprivation and isolation — allegedly being applied to detainees."

In an article for The Seminal, also posted last May, I noted that the Chief for Research for the DCHC’s Behavioral Science Program, psychologist Susan Brandon, was a primary organizer of a CIA/American Psychological Assocation/Rand Corporation workshop on "deception" in July 2003. This workshop asked questions about how to use sensory overload techniques and truth drugs to "overwhelm the senses" of prisoners, in order to detect deception. Scott Horton also picked up the connection between Brandon and the torture reports from Afghanistan. In a major investigative report at Truthout last week, Jason Leopold and I reported that changes in a DOD directive on human subjects experimentation protections signed by Paul Wolfowitz in March 2002 were implicated in "a top-secret Special Access Program at the Guantanamo Bay prison, which experimented on ways to glean information from unwilling subjects and to achieve 'deception detection.'"

There is most likely much more to the detention story in Afghanistan than we know thus far, but the new OSF report is a welcome corroboration of most unwelcome and brutal facts about U.S. prisoner abuse and counterinsurgency practice in Afghanistan. But whether it's AFP, AP, Reuters, BBC, or even Aljazeera, with only one exception, no press article on the OSF report indicated that as one of the OSF report's "main findings" the abuse in the Bagram secret prison derives from the use of the Army Field Manual's Appendix M. Appendix M is a portion of AFM dealing with prisoners who are held in other than Prisoner of War status. Appendix M techniques, concentrating on isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, use of fear techniques, and ambiguous "prohibitions" on "extreme" environmental manipulations, amount to torture and/or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and they are in use today. Only my fellow psychologist and anti-torture activist, Stephen Soldz, noted this most salient finding of the OSF investigation.

A link to the Army Field Manual, with its Appendix M, can be downloaded in PDF format here.

Jonathan Horowitz, author of the OSF report (PDF), described how he determined the use of Appendix M techniques:

The interviewees consistently described being held in a location where they were interrogated and held in small single person cells that prohibited verbal and visual communication with other detainees. This strongly suggests that the detainees were “screened” and subjected to interrogation methods described in Appendix M of the U.S. Army’s Human Intelligence Collector Operations Field Manual 2-22.3, which allows detaining authorities to physically separate detainees from other detainees and the outside world for the purposes of intelligence gathering—a technique known as “separation.”

Horowitz's mention of Appendix M is not incidental. It is mentioned on fifteen different occasions in the text of the report's 16 pages. OSF is very specific about its concerns regarding the current Army Field Manual on interrogation:

Despite the government’s insistence that Appendix M meets the minimum requirements for the protection of detainees under international law, analysts from the Open Society Foundations have expressed concerns with Field Manual 2-22.3 prior to this research, especially with regard to its authorization of sleep deprivation, refusing to classify stress positions as torture, and the deletion of key policy statements that, prior to the 2006 update of the manual, had informed interrogators that “[e]xperience shows that the use of prohibited techniques is not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources.”14 As this report demonstrates, additional concerns with the Field Manual 2-22.3 are warranted....

Field Manual 2-22.3 states, “[w]hile using legitimate interrogation techniques, certain applications of approaches and techniques may approach the line between permissible actions and prohibited actions. It may often be difficult to determine where permissible actions end and prohibited actions begin.”

The report notes that the totality of conditions and interrogation abuses at the Tor (or "Black") prison at Bagram call into question whether fair assessment of enemy status can be made by the new-fangled Detainee Review Boards, meaning God knows how many innocent people are being picked up and held as prisoners, awaiting the day that a viable Afghan court system can supposedly try these "insurgents".

The Detainee Review Boards taking place at the DFIP [Detention Facility in Parwan] prohibit the submission of information and evidence obtained through the use of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. If detainees are being held in conditions at an interrogation facility that rises to this level of abuse, the information obtained from those detainees should be rejected by the Detainee Review Boards.

I have been writing on the serious, indeed criminal, problems with the Army Field Manual since the new version was introduced in September 2006. I wrote a major piece on the problems with it for AlterNet in January 2009, and have followed up with reporting at Firedoglake (see here and here, for example; also coverage at this site by Emptywheel/Marcy Wheeler and bmaz).

But this kind of exposure, and the work of others, like Matthew Alexander, Stephen Rickard, Physicians for Human Rights and Center for Constitutional Rights, among other, has not been enough to fix the centrality of the use of Appendix M torture in the general political consciousness of the population. This can be largely attributed to the massive silence by politicians on this issue, and the assurances of the Obama administration that the AFM and Appendix M are safe, legal, and humane. So when a complacent and cowardly press and blogosphere are faced with the truth of the situation emanating from an establishment source such as the Open Society Foundations, what do they do? They ignore the truth.

Such is America in 2010, lost, rudderless, obsessed with trivia, as a monstrous war/intelligence/surveillance apparatus lurches on to either conquest or disaster (or maybe both) in its overseas campaigns, oblivious to how many are killed (the U.S. claims it doesn't keep track of the killed in Afghanistan), maimed, displaced, lives destroyed and national ideals trampled.

It's time the campaign against Appendix M went mainstream.

UN Report Documents Secret Detention Practices by U.S., Other Countries

Also posted at FDL/The Seminal

Andy Worthington is posting portions of the United Nations’ “Joint Study on Global Practices in Relation to Secret Detention in the Context of Counter-Terrorism,” a detailed, 186-page report issued last February (PDF). As he explains it, he’s "posting the section of the report that deals with US secret detention policies since the 9/11 attacks [section 4 of the original report], in the hope that it might reach a new audience — and provide useful research opportunities — as an HTML document." Andy adds:

I do, however, urge everyone to read the whole report, because the introduction and conclusions are important, as are the sections establishing the legal approach to secret detention and its historical context, the section detailing current practices in 25 other countries worldwide, and the annexes, which contain government responses to a questionnaire about secret detention, and a number of case studies.

The report concludes:

In many contexts, intelligence agencies operate in a legal vacuum with no law, or no publicly available law, governing their actions….

Secret detention as such may constitute torture or ill-treatment for the direct victims as well as for their families. As many of the interviews and cases included in the present study illustrate, however, the very purpose of secret detention is to facilitate and, ultimately, cover up torture and inhuman and degrading treatment used either to obtain information or to silence people….

The generalized fear of secret detention and its corollaries, such as torture and ill-treatment, tends to effectively result in limiting the exercise of a large number of human rights and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of expression and freedom of association.

Part One of the report is here. Part Two is linked here. I’ll post the link to Part Three when he uploads it. All links are easy to download HTML.

I’d follow Andy’s advice and download the whole thing, especially as the full details for all the footnotes can only be followed in the original report. He says he’s added what he can in square brackets, and also kindly supplied some hyperlinks — a distinct bonus over the report itself!

The report was prepared by "Martin Scheinin, the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, Manfred Nowak, the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Shaheen Ali, the vice-chair of the Working Group on arbitrary detention, and Jeremy Sarkin, the chair of the Working Group on enforced or involuntary disappearances." The scope of the report is quite large, including 66 countries, including various European states, China, Canada, Iraq, Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Israel, Libya, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and many more.

The UN experts’ conclusions were criticized by a number of countries, including some grumbling over the report’s "methodology" from Eileen Donahoe, U.S. ambassador to the Human Rights Council. As Worthington noted in his original story on the report on June 15:

Despite the experts’ hopes, Deutsche Welle noted that a detailed questionnaire that experts sent to the UN’s 192 member countries was only answered by 44 of those countries, and, moreover, “Of these, not one admitted to the existence of secret prisons. The report’s authors depended on independent sources for their investigation and many countries denied them any kind of access to relevant materials or sources.”

The article also noted, “During the debate, China, Russia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Syria, Algeria and other African nations denied that any secret detention facilities existed on their territory.” Revisiting the complaints they made when the report was first published, “They accused the report’s authors of sloppy research, of overstepping their mandate and of compiling the report without being commissioned to do so by the UN Human Rights Council"….

Nevertheless, reflecting on the discussion, Martin Scheinin told IPS, “It went better than expected. The report has been very controversial and now there appears to be acknowledgement that the issue is serious enough not to be trivialized by procedural filibustery.”

While the UN experts were dismayed over the U.S. failure to close Guantanamo, as promised by President Obama, they reportedly were somewhat understanding, in that they believed "The [U.S.] government is unable to do anything when the legislature prohibits part of the options available: namely taking a single person from Guantanamo to the mainland United States." Maybe the report’s authors were simply pleased the U.S. had not opposed the report in general. Given the fact that in the past year new secret prisons have been revealed at both Guantanamo and Bagram Air Base, the role of the current administration in relation to secret detention sites and abuse of prisoners in U.S.-run secret prisons, and those of its allies, like Iraq, remains the least reported scandal of the Obama years.

The UN report on secret detentions in the name of "counter-terrorism" was hardly reported by either the U.S. press or the blogosphere. This is not a subject fit for discussion in the era of Obama. While part of the country chokes on a diet of corporate-supplied oil swill, the military-industrial-technical might of the country is engaged in military adventures and empire-building that is bankrupting the nation, and sowing ill-will world-wide.

What the UN report also demonstrates is that the U.S. practice of holding "ghost prisoners" in undocumented and hidden prisons is by no means unusual, that in a world run by corrupt elites and nationalist dictators dreaming revanchist dreams, and running ethnic cleansing enterprises, the practice of secret detention has a wide dissemination. In this we can see the U.S. is only one among many malefactors, if perhaps more responsible (or more cynical) for the breadth of their enterprise, their use of allies utilizing secret prisons for the rendition program, and their long practice of such detentions, going back to the secret backing for Operation Condor, the kidnapping-assassination-secret detention program in South America in the 1970s. (See the article Operation Condor: Deciphering the U.S. Role, by historian J. Patrice McSherry.) Condor is specifically singled out in the UN report as a precursor to the current practice of secret detentions in a number of countries.

According to an IPS article on the report, "The study’s recommendations included an explicit prohibition of secret detention, and the keeping of clear detention records, even at times of armed conflict, as stipulated by the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war." Both the report itself and its recommendations should be broadcast widely and well. I thank Andy Worthington for his tireless pursuit of the issue of prisoners held without legal standing, as his long reporting on Guantanamo demonstrates.

Soldz on "The 'Black Jail'"

With permission, I am reposting an important recent article by psychologist, researcher and social activist Stephen Soldz. Dr. Soldz is also the current president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility.

The "Black Jail"

A recent pair of articles by Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has shed new light upon activities in the secret so-called “black jail” on the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Among other aspects, these new revelations suggest that psychologists may be playing a major role inside the facility, raising questions about the reasons for American Psychological Association (APA) lobbying activities in support of the agency that Ambinder reports is running the detention center.

In recent months the Washington Post, New York Times, and BBC reported on a secret prison on fringes of the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. Referred to by former prisoners as the “black jail,” this institution is reportedly a site where prisoner abuse is regular and systematic. The BBC reported that all nine former prisoners they interviewed:

told consistent stories of being held in isolation in cold cells where a light is on all day and night.

The men said they had been deprived of sleep by US military personnel there.

Thus, we can assume that psychological torture techniques of isolation, sleep deprivation, and hypothermia are routine aspects of treatment inside the facility.

The Washington Post provided additional details through interviews with two youths imprisoned in the black jail. As one young man, Rashid, who is “younger than 16” described:

At the beginning of his detention, he was forced to strip naked and undergo a medical checkup in front of about a half-dozen American soldiers. He said that his Muslim upbringing made such a display humiliating and that the soldiers made it worse.

"They touched me all over my body. They took pictures, and they were laughing and laughing," he said. "They were doing everything."

He said he lived in a small concrete cell that was slightly longer than the length of his body. Food was tossed in a plastic bag through a slot in the metal door. Both teenagers said that when they tried to sleep, on the floor, their captors shouted at them and hammered on their cells.

When summoned for daily interrogations, Rashid said, he was made to wear a hood, handcuffs and ear coverings and was marched into the meeting room. He said he was punched by his interrogators while being prodded to admit ties to the Taliban; he denied such ties. During some sessions, he said, his interrogator forced him to look at pornographic movies and magazines while also showing him a photograph of his mother.

"I was just crying and crying. I was too young," Rashid said. "I didn't know what a prison looks like or what a prison is."

Ambinder received confirmation from the Defense Department of the existence of this secret detention center at Bagram that Department had previously consistently denied existed. [Ambinder has a picture of the facility here.] He reports that the center is run, not by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), as was previously reported, but by the Defense Intelligence Agency's (DIA) Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC) in course of its providing intelligence services for Task Force 714. For those with long memories, DCHC is essentially where the Defense Department stuffed the old Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) after the latter was "disbanded" due to several major scandals involving spying on Americans and fraud connected with former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.

It isn't clear if it really makes a difference if the "black jail" is run by JSOC or DCHC. After all, Task Force 714, which DCHC is serving, is itself a JSOC special ops force:

McRaven runs a secretive detachment of Special Forces known as Task Force 714 — once commanded by McChrystal himself — that the NSC staffer described as “direct-action” units conducting “high-intensity hits.” In an email, Sholtis said that because Task Force 714 was a “special ops organization” he “can’t go into much detail on authorities, etc.” But the NSC staffer — who called McRaven “McChrystal Squared” — said Task Force 714 was organized into “small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go” in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush administration that President Obama has not revoked.

[Scott Horton has made a similar point here.]

As Ambinder reports, the Defense Department now admits that this secret Afghan prison uses interrogation techniques from the Army Field Manual's infamous Appendix M. This appendix authorizes abusive techniques, including sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and "environmental manipulation [think freezing someone or blinding light] that often amount to torture.

Consistent with the multitudinous reports of severe abuse in the black jail, Ambinder reports that there is a top secret Special Action Program authorizing DCHC interrogations. As Jeff Kaye pointed out in an emptywheel comment, if only Appendix M-based techniques -- which are covered by the Army Field Manual -- are used, why the need for a Special Action Program? Thus, we must wonder what, exactly, DCHC is doing at Bagram and other sites. Whatever it is, it apparently isn't something they want us, the public, to know about.

For those who think that President Obama banned torture centers like this, think again. Obama's Executive Order only banned CIA secret prisons. This administration thus apparently intended from the beginning to maintain its torture facility, only under a Defense Department rather than CIA label.

Further information about the black jail is provided in a follow-up post, where Ambinder provides this description of the “black prison”:

From what information I've been able to gather, the interrogation environment is much like a social science laboratory, with psychologists and experts in human behavior looking for clues to see who might know more than they do, alternating with interrogators trained to ferret out actionable intelligence information. [emphasis added]

If the detention facility is being run as a “social science laboratory,” it raises concerns that the psychologists and others may be conducting research on the detainees without these detainees’ consent. As a result of the abusive research of the Nazi doctors and research on poor black men in this country denied by the US Public Health Service well-known treatments for syphilis as they got sick and died in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, informed consent has been a requirement in this country for all but the most benign research for decades. Thus, Ambinder’s report raises the prospect that detainees in the black jail may be subjects of otherwise banned research procedures.

Wherever psychologists are involved in national security work, links to the APA are seldom hard to find. In this case, the APA has regularly lobbied for funding for DCHC while a former top APA research scientist was until very recently at CIFA and its successor DCHC investigating “deception detection,” like that reportedly occurring inside the “black jail.”

Over the years, the APA has devoted considerable lobbying resources to maintaining Congressional funding for CIFA. Thus, in a report on APA lobbying for fiscal year 2009, the APA ignored all the issues regarding corruption and illegal spying at CIFA as they advocated for protecting the agency’s funding:

Dr. Boehm-Davis concluded her testimony by noting another APA concern – the potential loss of invaluable behavioral science programs within DoD’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) as it reorganizes and loses personnel strength. APA’s testimony urged Congress to provide ongoing funding in the next fiscal year for CIFA’s behavioral research programs on cyber security, insider threat, and other counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence operational challenges.

After CIFA was folded into DCHC in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the APA lobbied Congress for money for "behavioral science" to support the DIA's activities, including the counterintelligence work now located in DCHC. Here is a section from the written APA testimony to the US Senate Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense regarding appropriations for the Fiscal Year 2010 budget:

APA... is concerned with maintaining invaluable human-centered research programs formerly within DoD’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) now that staff and programming have been transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Within this DIA program, psychologists lead intramural and extramural research programs on counterintelligence issues ranging from models of “insider threat” to cybersecurity and detection of deception. These psychologists also consult with the three military services to translate findings from behavioral research directly into enhanced counterintelligence operations on the ground.

APA urges the Subcommittee to provide ongoing funding in FY10 for counterintelligence behavioral science research programs at DIA in light of their direct support for military intelligence operations.

There have been strong personal contacts between APA and CIFA/DCHC psychologists. The former Director of Behavioral Science for CIFA, Scott Shumate, was selected for the APA’s 2005 PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] taskforce, where he and the majority of other members from the military-intelligence establishment proclaimed it ethical, even essential, for psychologists to aid Bush-era interrogations at Guantánamo and elsewhere. Shumate had previously served with the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and was present for at least part of the 2002 torture of Abu Zubaydah; Shumate claims to have left in disgust, but the New York Times’ Scott Shane reports skepticism about this claim. He quotes “[o]ne witness [who] said he believed that ‘revisionism’ in light of the torture controversy had prompted some participants to exaggerate their objections.”

More recently, Susan Brandon – a former APA Senior Scientist who brought together psychologists and “operational personnel” from the intelligence community and later served as Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral and Educational Sciences for the Bush White House – landed at CIFA and after the reorganization at DCHC. Brandon was one of the silent observers at the PENS taskforce described by dissident taskforce member Jean Maria Arrigo as exerting pressure on members to adopt a likely pre-approved policy in favor of participation in Guantánamo, CIA, and other interrogations. Throughout her career, including her time at CIFA/DCHC, Brandon worked on “deception detection” and other matters relevant to interrogations.

Thus, personal ties as well as a general desire to curry favor with the military-intelligence establishment likely influence APA support for CIFA and counterintelligence efforts within DIA – that is, for DCHC. While these agencies employ a number of psychologists – CIFA reportedly employed 20 psychologists when Shumate was director of behavioral sciences there – the numbers of psychologists potentially affected by budget cuts alone cannot explain APA support over the years.

In pursuit of influence and a seat at the table with the national security apparatus, the APA has usually bought into unsubstantiated claims that these and other military-connected intelligence psychologists were opposed to torture and abuse, even as evidence mounted that many intelligence psychologists were participants in torture and other abuses that permeated much of US detention operations at Guantánamo, Bagram, and Iraq in recent years. That is, claims that psychologists were preventing abuses were cover for the fact that APA’s leadership apparently never cared what it was that these psychologists might be doing.

Given this history of APA’s leadership turning a blind eye to reports of psychologist involvement in abuses, we shouldn't hold our breath expecting the APA to change its position on DIA/DCHC funding now that the defense department admits that DCHC runs a detention facility using techniques like sleep deprivation that the APA itself has proclaimed unethical and amounting to either torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. After all, for the APA leadership in recent years, professional opportunities for psychology have always trumped professional ethics, at least in the national security sector.

Psychology as a profession is at a crossroads. As the connections discussed here illustrate, the profession has long-standing ties to the military-intelligence establishment that, outside of the awareness of many members, permeate much of its public policy making. While it is, perhaps, too much to expect that these relations will totally end, they must become more transparent and subject to public discussion and debate. A first step would be for APA leaders to express concerns and call for an independent investigation of the possibility that psychologists are studying or otherwise aiding abuses at the “black jail.” That, alas, is a simple step that is extremely unlikely from the profession’s current leadership.

ACLU Press Release: Federal Court Rules No Habeas Rights for Bagram Prisoners

The following is an important ACLU press release on today's federal court of appeals ruling on whether or not non-Afghan prisoners, kidnapped via rendition and sent to Bagram can challenge their incarceration in a U.S. court. As the ACLU explains, the court ruled in favor of the position of the Obama administration, which is continuing and seeking to extend the heinous prisoner policies of the Bush/Cheney years. I hope to write more about the news here, and the Stephen Soldz story mentioned below, as time allows. (Bold emphasis below is added.)

Federal Court Rules Bagram Prisoners Can't Challenge Their Detention In U.S. Courts

Decision Gives Government Unchecked Power To Detain Individuals Indefinitely Without Due Process Or Transparency, Says ACLU

NEW YORK - May 21 - A federal court of appeals ruled today that three prisoners who are being held by the United States at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan cannot challenge their detention in U.S. courts. The non-Afghan prisoners, some of whom were captured outside of Afghanistan far from any battlefield and "rendered" or transferred to Bagram, have been held at the detention facility for more than seven years without access to a court or counsel. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed habeas cases on behalf of several Bagram detainees and a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit for records relating to the detention, rendition and treatment of prisoners held there. The ACLU's Bagram habeas cases were not addressed by the court of appeals ruling today; the cases at issue were brought by the International Justice Network, the organization coordinating Bagram habeas litigation.

"Today's decision ratifies the dangerous principle that the U.S. government has unchecked power to capture people anywhere in the world, unilaterally declare them enemy combatants and subject them to indefinite military detention with no judicial review and little to no process for challenging their detention in any forum. The rule embraced by the court of appeals permits the executive branch to manipulate whether its actions will or will not be subject to judicial scrutiny, simply by choosing whether to fly a prisoner to Bagram or Guantánamo," said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. "Locking up people who were picked up far from any battlefield for years without telling them why, without giving them access to lawyers and without giving them a fair chance to contest the evidence against them is unlawful and un-American."

In response to the ACLU's FOIA lawsuit for records related to the detention, rendition and treatment of prisoners at Bagram, the Defense Department in January released for the first time a list of the people imprisoned at the notorious detention facility. The list contains the names of 645 prisoners who were detained there as of September 2009, but other vital information including their citizenship, how long they have been held, in what country they were captured and the circumstances of their capture has been withheld. The ACLU is challenging the withholding of this information in court.

The government also continues to withhold information about the implementation of its new detainee status review procedures as well as information about a separate "secret jail" on the base, reportedly run by either the Joint Special Operations Command or the Defense Intelligence Agency, where detainees maintain they have been abused and guards and interrogators may not be subject to the same rules that apply at the main Bagram detention facility.

"Today's decision makes the need for greater transparency at Bagram all the more pressing. The Obama administration has instituted a new military process for determining whether prisoners should be released but has not disclosed any information about the implementation of the process, such as transcripts of the new Detainee Review Board proceedings," said Goodman. "The military disclosed this kind of information about Guantánamo proceedings and should do the same for the Bagram proceedings. The military should also come clean about the secret 'second' prison at Bagram Air Base the Red Cross confirmed existed last week."

More information about the ACLU's Bagram FOIA lawsuit is available online at: www.aclu.org/national-security/bagram-foia

More information about the ACLU's Bagram habeas cases is at: www.aclu.org/national-security/aclu-files-habeas-corpus-petitions-behalf-four-bagram-detainees

CONTACT: ACLU
Rachel Myers, National ACLU, (212) 549-2689 or 2666; media@aclu.org

For more on the situation with the second, secret black site at Bagram see the excellent article by Stephen Soldz, The "Black Jail": Obama's Afghan Torture Center and the American Psychological Association. Soldz ties together the American Psychological Association and CIFA/DCHC psychologists, some of whom may be tied to ongoing secret interrogation activities, including abuse of prisoners, at Obama's black site prisons.

Finally, see also Glenn Greenwald's article today on the court decision:

One other point: this decision is likely to be appealed to the Supreme Court, which serves to further highlight how important the Kagan-for-Stevens replacement could be. If the Court were to accept the appeal, Kagan would be required to recuse herself (since it was her Solicitor General's office that argued the administration's position here), which means that a 4-4 ruling would be likely, thus leaving this appellate decision undisturbed. More broadly, though, if Kagan were as sympathetic to Obama's executive power claims as her colleagues in the Obama administration are, then her confirmation could easily convert decisions on these types of questions from a 5-4 victory (which is what Boumediene was, with Stevens in the majority) into a 5-4 defeat. Maybe we should try to find out what her views are before putting her on that Court for the next 40 years?