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.

SSCI Report Reveals CIA Torture Program Originated in Same Department as MKULTRA

The release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) executive summary (PDF) to their report, "Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program," has rightly gotten a wide amount of press coverage.

The sheer brutality of the program's use of torture is overwhelming, from the use of forced enemas on detainees -- the CIA called it "rectal hydration" and "rectal feeding" -- to intense use of solitary confinement, threats to kill prisoners' families, homicide, and more. Revelations from this report will continue to be reported and absorbed into the world's understanding of the criminal extent of the U.S. torture program for months or years to come.

But one revelation has gone notably unreported. The man associated with implementing the most brutal part of the interrogation program was drawn out of the same division of the CIA that some decades ago had been responsible for the notorious MKULTRA program. As a CIA history of OTS explains, MKULTRA "involved Agency funding for the testing and use of chemical and biological agents and other means of controlling or modifying human behavior" (p. 19).

OTS Contractor James Mitchell Comes to Thailand

According to the SSCI report, James Mitchell, one of the two CIA contractor psychologists widely associated with the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" torture program, was working for the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS). In late 2001, Mitchell and his former psychologist associate at the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), John Bruce Jessen, were "commissioned" by OTS to write a study based on a purported Al Qaeda manual, called the Manchester Manual, after the city in England where the document was discovered.

The paper Mitchell and Jessen produced supposedly addressed countermeasures to interrogation that were discussed in the manual. According to the SSCI investigation, we learn for the first time that Mitchell was working for the CIA's OTS at the time he was ostensibly recruited or volunteered for the CIA's new interrogation program.

The Senate report states that Mitchell and Jessen were central in advocating a set of torture techniques that were gathered from the SERE training program for which they used to work at JPRA. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, and is a long-standing Defense Department program that is meant to prepare military, intelligence, and other certain important government personnel for the rigors of capture and possible torture by a determined and ruthless enemy. But the narrative that Mitchell and Jessen were solely responsible for the program, or that they even originated it, is not totally true.

According to the SSCI report, on or around April 1, 2002, Mitchell was recommended from within OTS for the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then being touted as a major Al Qaeda figure (he wasn't):

While Abu Zubaydah was still hospitalized, personnel at CIA Headquarters began discussing how CIA officers would interrogate Abu Zubaydah upon his return to DETENTION SITE GREEN [CIA's Thailand black site]. The initial CIA interrogation proposal recommended that the interrogators engage with Abu Zubaydah to get him to provide information, and suggested that a "hard approach," involving foreign government personnel, be taken "only as a last resort." At a meeting about this proposal, [1-2 words redacted] CTC Legal, [2-3 words redacted] recommended that a psychologist working on contract in the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS), Grayson SWIGERT [James Mitchell], be used by CTC to "provide real-time recommendations to overcome Abu Zubaydah's "resistance to interrogation." SWIGERT had come to [1-2 words redacted]'s attention through [2-3 words redacation] who worked in OTS. Shortly thereafter, CIA Headquarters formally proposed that Abu Zubaydah be kept in an all-white room that was lit 24 hours a day, that Abu Zubaydah not be provided any amenities, that his sleep be disrupted, that loud noise be constantly fed into his cell, and that only a small number of people interact with him. CIA records indicate that these proposals were based on the idea that such conditions would lead Abu Zubaydah to develop a sense of "learned helplessness." CIA Headquarters then sent an interrogation team to Country [one letter redaction, but represents most likely Thailand], including SWIGERT [Mitchell], whose initial role was to consult on the psychological aspects of the interrogation. [pg. 26 of report; footnote notations have been removed from original]

"Novel interrogation methods"

On April 1, 2002, a cable was sent from OTS at the request of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and ALEC Station, which was the group within CIA supposedly hunting down Osama bin Ladin, discussing the possible use of "novel interrogation methods" on Abu Zubaydah.

The new proposed interrogation strategy proposed "several environmental modifications to create an atmosphere that enhances the strategic interrogation process." The cable continued, "[t]he deliberate manipulation of the environment is intended to cause psychological disorientation, and reduced psychological wherewithal for the interrogation," as well as "the deliberate establishment of psychological dependence upon the interrogator," and "an increased sense of learned helplessness."

"Learned helplessness" (LH) was a theory associated with a famous American psychologist, Martin Seligman. LH was a lab-derived set of propositions which postulated that when an animal (or human being) is faced with inescapable shock or otherwise unescapable or uncontrolled stress, the ability to cope collapses. LH has long been a theoretical model used to explain clinical depression, for instance.

Seligman is believed to have met with James Mitchell on three occasions. Seligman admits having met both Mitchell and Jessen at a SERE event in San Diego in May 2002. He also confirmed to me in an email that press reports were correct and that he met with Mitchell at Seligman's home in December 2001. But he denied an account by Georgetown professor Gregg Bloche that he met Mitchell yet again in late March or very early April 2002, only days before Mitchell flew to Thailand for the interrogation/torture of Abu Zubaydah. Seligman said that account, supposedly given to Bloche by CIA psychologist Kirk Hubbard, was "fiction." Nevertheless, Bloche has never rescinded his story, nor has Hubbard ever disavowed his alleged account, at least publicly.

The meetings with Seligman, in conjunction with the fact Mitchell was brought into the CIA interrogation program as a contractor for OTS, strongly suggests that the implementation of the torture program and use of SERE techniques was not solely the brainchild of James Mitchell, or Mitchell and Jessen together. Instead, it seems more likely, for reasons that will be further explored below, that the program was initiated by OTS itself, and constituted at least in part an experimental program. What exactly the experiment consisted is not totally clear. But it may have involved the use of wireless or other medical devices to measure biological markers of "uncontrollable stress," in an effort to establish a scientific calibration of torture and overall behavioral or mental control of prisoners. That such a "mind control" effort would originate or be carried out by the same institution that spent millions of dollars on the MKULTRA program is not difficult to believe.

It's impossible to know if the SSCI report ever mentions Seligman, as the report redacted or used pseudonyms for CIA agents and other personnel.

Where exactly did the EITs originate?

By July 2012, the report goes on to say that Mitchell and other CIA officers "held several meetings at CIA Headquarters to discuss the possible use of 'novel interrogation methods' on Abu Zubaydah." It is worth noting that up to that point, the CIA had used extreme isolation, sensory deprivation, denial of medical treatment and sleep deprivation on Abu Zubaydah. The "enhanced interrogation" torture had not even begun. Meanwhile, while the FBI agents present had complaints about CIA's approach, they had participated in some of this up to mid-June 2002, when all the interrogators abruptly left, leaving Zubaydah in total isolation for over a month. (One FBI agent, Ali Soufan, had left even earlier, in May, upset over how the CIA was handling the interrogation.)

According to SSCI authors, at these July meetings Mitchell proposed a number of techniques that later became the full "enhanced interrogation program," including at least one, "mock burial," that was ultimately rejected. The techniques were drawn from the SERE program Mitchell had worked in for years. But instead of familiarizing students with what such torture should look like, and helping them practice ways to survive or resist such torture, now the techniques would be applied to break down prisoners.

Oddly, the CIA's 2013 response to the SSCI on these matters, argued the turn towards torture did not originate with Mitchell. This is in contrast to mainstream reports about the origins of the EIT program, but it is consistent with the facts as stated by the SSCI itself in the report's executive summary.

According to the CIA, "Drs. [SWIGERT] and [DUNBAR] [Mitchell and Jessen] had the closest proximate expertise CIA sought at the beginning of the program, specifically in the area of non-standard means of interrogation. Experts on traditional interrogation methods did not meet this requirement. Non-standard interrogation methodologies were not an area of expertise of CIA officers or of the US Government generally. We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program" (italics and emphasis in original)."

The SSCI report editorializes: "As noted above, the CIA did not seek out SWIGERT and DUNBAR after a decision was made to use coercive interrogation techniques; rather, SWIGERT and DUNBAR played a role in convincing the CIA to adopt such a policy."

Certainly Mitchell and Jessen "played a role," but that is not the same as originating the program. Indeed, much later in the report, SSCI explains that in the April 1 meeting, the interrogation proposals then under consideration came from Mitchell/SWIGERT "and the CIA OTS Officer who had recommended SWIGERT to [1-2 words redacted]." Mitchell is said to be advocating even then the development of "learned helplessness" in CIA prisoners. (See pp. 463-464).

It is worth repeating: it was CTC and ALEC Station which initiated the request for "novel" techniques from OTS, and later apparently asked for Mitchell to come to Thailand.

I don't think we know the full story yet. For instance, for some reason, the SSCI report does not include the fact that the OTS was the department of the CIA that sent data on the effects from SERE torture techniques to the Office of Legal Council, which under John Yoo was writing an opinion that would allow the CIA to "legally" use the controversial techniques, which the CIA knew could be considered torture.

OTS, MKULTRA, and SERE Research

OTS's role in vetting the EITs was mentioned in the CIA's Inspector General report on the interrogation program. Like other aspects of the torture scandal concerning the OTS division of the CIA, the press has generally ignored this. But this was something I reported on back in 2009, when the IG report was first released.

The fact OTS was involved in vetting the EITs to OLC gains greater significance when you realize that James Mitchell was working with OTS, and that OTS and their contractor Mitchell were intricately involved with both CTC and ALEC Station in creating the torture program.

There's one final aspect to the OTS angle worth mentioning. OTS apparently told OLC that the SERE techniques would not seriously harm CIA prisoners. But that was certainly wrong. Moreover, it's highly unlikely OTS didn't know that.

OTS has been part of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) since the early 1970s. It was transferred from the Directorate of Plans (clandestine operations, renamed around that time, the Directorate of Operations). OTS had earlier gone under other names itself, including Technical Service Staff and Technical Services Division. OTS and its predecessors had been involved in arranging the technical aspect of covert operations, including audio surveillance, forgery, secret writing, spy paraphenalia, sophisticated electronics, and assassination devices.

Then, there was the massive MKULTRA project, which had other names as well, and was coordinated in various ways with similar military programs. MKULTRA had well over a hundred "subprojects," and contracted with many of the U.S.'s top universities and medical and psychological researchers. (For listing of subprojects see here and here.)

MKULTRA research is probably best known for its use of hallucinogens, like LSD, which were sometimes used on unsuspecting civilians, and resulted in damaged lives and even deaths. Sometimes derided as subject matter for conspiracy theorists, MKULTRA and its assorted programs were all-too-real. While the vast majority of its documentation was destroyed by CIA leaders when the program was exposed in the early 1970s, what we do know is terrifying.

Today, within the DS&T is another shadowy CIA entity, the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (ITIC). One Yale psychiatric researcher associated with ITIC is Charles A. Morgan, III. Morgan has produced a prodigious amount of research on the effects of "uncontrollable stress." Many of his research subjects were SERE students at a mock torture camp.

Morgan's research showed that the debilitating effects of SERE techniques caused stress cortisol levels, according to one Morgan research paper, to soar to “some of the greatest ever documented in humans.” Another study cited “neuroendocrine changes... [that] may have significant implications for subsequent responses to stress,” including massive drops in testosterone levels when exposed to even mock torture. Yet another study showed the effects of dissociation under the stress of even SERE "stress inoculation" mock torture.

Morgan used to deny his CIA links, but lately he has taken to admitting his CIA past. He was interviewed by James Risen for Risen's new book, Pay Any Price, but told Risen he did not have any associations with interrogations. But he did admit he had met James Mitchell.

It is possible that Mitchell knew of Morgan's work. It is even possible that Morgan had more to do with the interrogation program than we know. Morgan told Risen that he left the CIA because of a dispute over torture with his colleagues. Morgan has stated his opposition to torture. But Risen never followed up with that part of the story, or at least reported on it in any detail.

Some of the research under MKULTRA and associated programs, like BLUEBIRD or ARTICHOKE, included emphasis on hypnosis, drugs, and sensory deprivation, all techniques that were later incorporated into an early 1960s CIA torture manual, known as KUBARK. The SSCI report mentions KUBARK, and earlier this year, I obtained via FOIA the most complete version of the KUBARK document we currently have.

Risen also never mentioned Morgan's history of research on SERE. Hence a chance to learn more from Morgan about his own actions and the possible effect or interactions of his work with the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques by the OTS, which is under the same CIA directorate where Morgan worked, was lost, at least for the time being.

"Novel Telemetric Technology"

One possible way OTS could have used Morgan's work concerns a project he worked on, "The Warfighter's Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment." That study, undertaken in 2001 and 2002, used SERE mock torture students, among others, to develop "novel telemetric technology... for untethered measurements of heart rate variability (HRV)."

Morgan and his co-authors concluded, "The results show that assessment of HRV provides a noninvasive means of evaluating the neural systems intimately involved in the capacity to attend to and respond to a threat. These findings linking HRV to cognitive performance robustly support the utility of HRV in the assessment of human performance." It is not impossible to imagine that such "novel telemetric technology" would be used to assess the response of CIA prisoners to the experience of torture, or that OTS would be interested in providing and perfecting such technology for the CIA's clandestine services.

The SSCI report has helped bring the origins of the CIA post-9/11 interrogation/torture program into even sharper focus. But the failure of the press to even notice, with rare exception, the role of OTS, or its history in clandestine actions, including MKULTRA work, means that a full exploration of CIA's torture program cannot take place.The release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) executive summary (PDF) to their report, "Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program," has rightly gotten a wide amount of press coverage.

The sheer brutality of the program's use of torture is overwhelming, from the use of forced enemas on detainees -- the CIA called it "rectal hydration" and "rectal feeding" -- to intense use of solitary confinement, threats to kill prisoners' families, homicide, and more. Revelations from this report will continue to be reported and absorbed into the world's understanding of the criminal extent of the U.S. torture program for months or years to come.

But one revelation has gone notably unreported. The man associated with implementing the most brutal part of the interrogation program was drawn out of the same division of the CIA that some decades ago had been responsible for the notorious MKULTRA program. As a CIA history of OTS explains, MKULTRA "involved Agency funding for the testing and use of chemical and biological agents and other means of controlling or modifying human behavior" (p. 19).

OTS Contractor James Mitchell Comes to Thailand

According to the SSCI report, James Mitchell, one of the two CIA contractor psychologists widely associated with the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" torture program, was working for the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS). In late 2001, Mitchell and his former psychologist associate at the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), John Bruce Jessen, were "commissioned" by OTS to write a study based on a purported Al Qaeda manual, called the Manchester Manual, after the city in England where the document was discovered.

The paper Mitchell and Jessen produced supposedly addressed countermeasures to interrogation that were discussed in the manual. According to the SSCI investigation, we learn for the first time that Mitchell was working for the CIA's OTS at the time he was ostensibly recruited or volunteered for the CIA's new interrogation program.

The Senate report states that Mitchell and Jessen were central in advocating a set of torture techniques that were gathered from the SERE training program for which they used to work at JPRA. SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, and is a long-standing Defense Department program that is meant to prepare military, intelligence, and other certain important government personnel for the rigors of capture and possible torture by a determined and ruthless enemy. But the narrative that Mitchell and Jessen were solely responsible for the program, or that they even originated it, is not totally true.

According to the SSCI report, on or around April 1, 2002, Mitchell was recommended from within OTS for the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, then being touted as a major Al Qaeda figure (he wasn't):

While Abu Zubaydah was still hospitalized, personnel at CIA Headquarters began discussing how CIA officers would interrogate Abu Zubaydah upon his return to DETENTION SITE GREEN [CIA's Thailand black site]. The initial CIA interrogation proposal recommended that the interrogators engage with Abu Zubaydah to get him to provide information, and suggested that a "hard approach," involving foreign government personnel, be taken "only as a last resort." At a meeting about this proposal, [1-2 words redacted] CTC Legal, [2-3 words redacted] recommended that a psychologist working on contract in the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS), Grayson SWIGERT [James Mitchell], be used by CTC to "provide real-time recommendations to overcome Abu Zubaydah's "resistance to interrogation." SWIGERT had come to [1-2 words redacted]'s attention through [2-3 words redacation] who worked in OTS. Shortly thereafter, CIA Headquarters formally proposed that Abu Zubaydah be kept in an all-white room that was lit 24 hours a day, that Abu Zubaydah not be provided any amenities, that his sleep be disrupted, that loud noise be constantly fed into his cell, and that only a small number of people interact with him. CIA records indicate that these proposals were based on the idea that such conditions would lead Abu Zubaydah to develop a sense of "learned helplessness." CIA Headquarters then sent an interrogation team to Country [one letter redaction, but represents most likely Thailand], including SWIGERT [Mitchell], whose initial role was to consult on the psychological aspects of the interrogation. [pg. 26 of report; footnote notations have been removed from original]

"Novel interrogation methods"

On April 1, 2002, a cable was sent from OTS at the request of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center and ALEC Station, which was the group within CIA supposedly hunting down Osama bin Ladin, discussing the possible use of "novel interrogation methods" on Abu Zubaydah.

The new proposed interrogation strategy proposed "several environmental modifications to create an atmosphere that enhances the strategic interrogation process." The cable continued, "[t]he deliberate manipulation of the environment is intended to cause psychological disorientation, and reduced psychological wherewithal for the interrogation," as well as "the deliberate establishment of psychological dependence upon the interrogator," and "an increased sense of learned helplessness."

"Learned helplessness" (LH) was a theory associated with a famous American psychologist, Martin Seligman. LH was a lab-derived theory which postulated that when an animal (or human being) is faced with inescapable shock or otherwise unescapable or uncontrolled stress, the ability to cope collapses. LH has long been a theoretical model used to explain clinical depression, for instance.

Seligman is believed to have met with James Mitchell on three occasions. Seligman admits having met both Mitchell at a SERE event in San Diego in May 2002. He also corroborated to me in an email that press reports were correct and he met with Mitchell at Seligman's home in December 2001. But Seligman denied an account by Georgetown professor Gregg Bloche that Seligman met Mitchell yet again in late March or very early April 2002, only days before Mitchell flew to Thailand and the torture of Abu Zubaydah. Seligman said that account, supposedly given to Bloche by CIA psychologist Kirk Hubbard, was "fiction." Bloche has never rescinded his story, nor has Hubbard ever disavowed the story, at least publicly.

The meetings with Seligman, as well as the fact Mitchell was brought into the CIA interrogation program as a contractor for OTS, argues that the implementation of the torture program and use of SERE techniques was not solely the brainchild of James Mitchell, or Mitchell and Jessen together. Instead, it seems more likely, for reasons that will be further explored below, that the program was initiated by OTS itself, and constituted at least in part an experimental program. What exactly the experiment consisted is not totally clear. But it may have involved the use of wireless or other medical devices to measure biological markers of "uncontrollable stress," in an effort to establish a scientific calibration of torture and overall behavioral or mental control of prisoners. That such a "mind control" effort would originate or be carried out by the same institution that spent millions of dollars on the MKULTRA program is not difficult to believe.

It's impossible to know if the SSCI report ever mentions Seligman, as the report redacted or used pseudonyms for CIA agents and personnel.

Where exactly did the EITs originate?

By July 2012, report goes on to say that Mitchell and other CIA officers "held several meetings at CIA Headquarters to discuss the possible use of 'novel interrogation methods' on Abu Zubaydah." It is worth noting that up to that point, the CIA had used extreme isolation, sensory deprivation, denial of medical treatment and sleep deprivation. The "enhanced interrogation" torture had not even begun. Meanwhile, while there were complaints, the FBI had participated in some of this up to mid-June 2002, when all the interrogators abruptly left, leaving Zubaydah in total isolation for over a month. (One FBI agent, Ali Soufan, had left even earlier, in May, upset over how the CIA was handling the interrogation.)

According to SSCI authors, at these July meetings Mitchell proposed a number of techniques that later became the "enhanced interrogation program," including at least one, "mock burial," that was ultimately rejected. The techniques were drawn from the SERE program Mitchell had worked in for years. But instead of familiarizing students with what such torture should look like, and helping them practice ways to survive or resist such torture, now the techniques would be applied to break down prisoners.

Oddly, the CIA's 2013 response to the SSCI on these matters, owned up to fact the turn towards torture did not originate with Mitchell. This is in contrast to mainstream reports about the origins of the EIT program, but is consistent with the facts as stated by the SSCI itself in the report's executive summary.

According to the CIA, "Drs. [SWIGERT] and [DUNBAR] [Mitchell and Jessen] had the closest proximate expertise CIA sought at the beginning of the program, specifically in the area of non-standard means of interrogation. Experts on traditional interrogation methods did not meet this requirement. Non-standard interrogation methodologies were not an area of expertise of CIA officers or of the US Government generally. We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program" (italics and emphasis in original)."

The SSCI report editorializes: "As noted above, the CIA did not seek out SWIGERT and DUNBAR after a decision was made to use coercive interrogation techniques; rather, SWIGERT and DUNBAR played a role in convincing the CIA to adopt such a policy."

Certainly Mitchell and Jessen "played a role," but that is not the same as originating the program. Indeed, much later in the report, SSCI explains that in the April 1 meeting, the interrogation proposals then under consideration came from Mitchell and SWIGERT, and the CIA OTS Officer who had recommended SWIGERT to [1-2 words redacted]. Mitchell is said to be advocating even then the development of "learned helplessness" in CIA prisoners. (See pp. 463-464). It was CTC and ALEC Station which initiated the request for "novel" techniques from OTS, and later apparently asked for Mitchell to come to Thailand.

I don't think we know the full story yet. For some reason, the SSCI report does not include the fact that the OTS was the part of the CIA that sent data on the effects from SERE torture techniques to the Office of Legal Council, which under John Yoo was writing an opinion that would allow the CIA to "legally" use the controversial techniques, which the CIA knew could be considered torture.

OTS, MKULTRA, and SERE Research

OTS's role in vetting the EITs was mentioned in the CIA's Inspector General report on the interrogation program. Like other aspects of the torture scandal concerning OTS division, the press has generally ignored this. But this was something I reported on back in 2009, when the IG report was first released.

The fact OTS was involved in vetting the EITs to OLC gains greater significance when you realize that James Mitchell was working with OTS, and that OTS (and their contractor Mitchell) was intricately involved with both CTC and ALEC Station in creating the torture program.

There's one final aspect to the OTS angle worth mentioning. OTS apparently told OLC that the SERE techniques would not seriously harm CIA prisoners. But that was certainly wrong. Moreover, it's highly unlikely OTS didn't know that.

OTS has been part of the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) since the early 1970s. It was transferred from the Directorate of Plans (clandestine operations, renamed around that time, the Directorate of Operations). OTS had earlier gone under other names itself, including Technical Service Staff and Technical Services Division. OTS and its predecessors had been involved in arranging the technical aspect of covert operations, including audio surveillance, forgery, secret writing, spy paraphenalia, sophisticated electronics, and assassination devices.

Then, there was the massive MKULTRA project, which had other names as well, and was coordinated in various ways with similar military programs. MKULTRA had well over a hundred "subprojects," and contracted with many of the U.S.'s top universities and medical and psychological researchers. (For listing of subprojects see here and here.)

MKULTRA research is probably best known for its use of hallucinogens, like LSD, which were sometimes used on unsuspecting civilians, and resulted in damaged lives and even deaths. Sometimes derided as subject matter for conspiracy theorists, MKULTRA and assorted programs was all-too-real. While the vast majority of its documentation was destroyed by CIA leaders with the program was exposed in the early 1970s, what we do know it terrifying.

Today, with the DS&T is another shadowy CIA entity, the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (ITIC). One Yale psychiatric researcher associated with ITIC is Charles A. Morgan, III. Morgan has produced a prodigious amount of research on the effects of "uncontrollable stress." His research subject were SERE students at a mock torture camp.

Morgan's results showed that the debilitating effects of SERE techniques caused stress cortisol levels, according to one Morgan research paper, to soar to “some of the greatest ever documented in humans.” Another study cited “neuroendocrine changes... [that] may have significant implications for subsequent responses to stress,” including massive drops in testosterone levels when exposed to even mock torture.

Morgan used to deny his CIA links, but lately has taken to admitting his CIA past. He was interviewed by James Risen for Risen's new book, Pay Any Price, but told Risen he did not have any associations with interrogations. But he had met James Mitchell.

It is possible that Mitchell knew of Morgan's work. It is even possible that Morgan had more to do with the interrogation program than we know. He told Risen that he left the CIA because of a dispute over torture with his colleagues. But Risen never followed up with that part of the story, or at least reported on it in any detail.

Some of the research under MKULTRA and associated programs, like BLUEBIRD or ARTICHOKE, included emphasis on hypnosis, drugs, and sensory deprivation, all techniques that were later incorporated into the early 1960s CIA torture manual, known as KUBARK. The SSCI report mentions KUBARK, and earlier this year, I obtained via FOIA the most complete version of the KUBARK document we currently have.

Risen also never mentioned Morgan's history of research on SERE, and a chance to learn more from Morgan about his own actions and the possible effect or interactions of his work with the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques by the OTS, which is under the same CIA directorate where Morgan worked, was lost, at least for the time being.

"Novel Telemetric Technology"

One possible way OTS could have used Morgan's work concerns his work on "The Warfighter's Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment." That study, undertaken in 2001 and 2002, used SERE mock torture students, among others, to develop "novel telemetric technology... for untethered measurements of heart rate variability (HRV)."

Morgan and his co-authors concluded, "The results show that assessment of HRV provides a noninvasive means of evaluating the neural systems intimately involved in the capacity to attend to and respond to a threat. These findings linking HRV to cognitive performance robustly support the utility of HRV in the assessment of human performance." It is not impossible to imagine that such "novel telemetric technology" would be used to assess the response of CIA prisoners to the experience of torture, or that OTS would be interested in providing and perfecting such technology for the CIA's clandestine services.

The SSCI report has helped bring the origins of the CIA post-9/11 interrogation/torture program into even sharper focus. But the failure of the press to even notice, with rare exception, the role of OTS, or its history in clandestine actions, including MKULTRA work, means that a full exploration of CIA's torture program cannot take place.

To watch VICE News' exclusive interview with James Mitchell, go here.

This story is cross posted at The Dissenter/FDL

PHR Report: Bush Administration Engaged in Illegal Human Experimentation on Torture

"Law must apply to everyone equally or it's not law at all. Those who are pushing the other view have a misguided idea of what law is all about." - Benjamin Ferencz

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released today the results of a landmark investigation that, according to the organization's press release, "uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody." PHR is asking President Obama to "order the attorney general to undertake an immediate criminal investigation of alleged illegal human experimentation and research on detainees conducted by the CIA and other government agencies following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001." They are also seeking other investigations by Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice.

As PHR's White Paper -- "Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program" (PDF) -- makes clear, illegal experimentation upon human subjects was an integral part of the Bush/Cheney/CIA "enhanced interrogation" program (EIP) from the very beginning. Medical and psychologist monitors were used to collect and analyze data from the EIP interrogations in order "to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations." The use of illegal experimentation both reveals the actual parameters of the torture program, and raises the stakes surrounding the need for accountability for these actions to a new level.

According to PHR's White Paper:

Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges are expected to resonate throughout the legal, human rights and religious communities. The executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), Rev Richard Killmer, commenting in a press release on PHR's report, said he deplored the "deeply disturbing evidence that our government committed, in our names, forced human experimentation that recalls some of humanity's darkest days — charges from which no person of faith can afford to turn away." (NRCAT has also released a new video today, "Accounting for Torture.")

Research Violated U.S. and International Law

PHR's CEO Frank Donaghue states, “The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation."

PHR examined three instances of the CIA's illegal medical research, although it should be understood this most likely does not constitute the full extent of the torture research program. Some of the experiments concerned the elaboration of more extensive forms of waterboarding, testing the use of large-volumes of water, the use of saline solution as a substitute for plain water, as well as the use of ancillary equipment, such as a gurney that could swing the prisoner into different angles, and use of a blood oximeter to measure subject vital signs and calibrate them with experimental techniques. The CIA also experimented on different levels of sleep deprivation in order to assess effects and coordinate practice with legal definitions constructed by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different "enhanced interrogation" techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to "susceptibility to severe pain," attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

The purpose of this experimental program was apparently to help provide legal cover for the torture program, as well as both examine the effects of torture upon live subjects, and further the design of the torture program itself. No existing research protocol has come to light, and the evidence has been organized via the use of open source documents and FOIA releases. From these sources, one can see that the use of medical monitors and experimental medical data was used as supposed "good faith" evidence against possible prosecution for torture.

A Legal Limbo

The actions of the Bush Administration to legally justify their torture program via the use of executive orders and OLC rulings has been well-documented. Only last February, the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Conduct released their finding that the actions of Yoo and Bybee in constructing the 2002 memos that authorized torture did not amount to unprofessional or unethical conduct, but simply constituted "bad judgment." Whatever the judgment upon the OLC memos, it is apparent the use of torture pre-dated the OLC approval of the EIP.

While there is some evidence that the Bush administration was concerned with loosening the legal parameters surrounding research using human subjects (story to come), there is no evidence, as PHR's White Paper points out, that OLC ever considered the legality of the medical monitoring of prisoners as part of the CIA torture program. According to Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture and lead report author, Nathaniel A. Raymond, “Justice Department lawyers appear to have never assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture.” But, after a number of Supreme Court decisions, culminating in the Hamdan v Rumsfeld ruling in June 2006, the government apparently had second thoughts about its legal liabilities.

One of the most original pieces of research in the PHR report concerns the rewriting of the War Crimes Act (WCA) as part of the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). Concerned, it would seem, over their vulnerability to criminal prosecution for illegal and unethical research conducted upon detainees, including, as I've pointed out before, Abu Zubaydah, the Bush administration amended the WCA language in the MCA to weaken the protections against the strict prohibitions against scientific experiments on prisoners found in the Geneva Conventions. These changes were then made retroactive to 1997, which suggests the U.S. government was shielding interrogators and other officials for illegal acts going back four years prior to 9/11. And to their shame, Congress passed this legislation, and the language on the WCA was then retained by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress when the MCA was amended in 2009.

One of PHR's recommendations in their report is that Congress undertake a revision of the War Crimes Act "to eliminate changes made to the Act in 2006 which weaken the prohibition on biological experimentation on detainees, and ensure that the War Crimes Act definition of the grave breach of biological experimentation is consistent with the definition of that crime under the Geneva Conventions."

Outstanding Issues To Be Resolved

It has been some years since the experimental aspects of the torture program were first recognized. The breach of medical ethics by doctors was first discussed by M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2005. In July 2005, a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, "The Experiment," looked at the "reverse-engineering" of the SERE techniques, and noted both the prohibition on scientific experiments of prisoners in Geneva, and the "[n]umerous experiments aimed at documenting trainees’ stress levels... conducted by sere-affiliated scientists."

One of the authors of the PHR report, Stephen Soldz, wrote about the experimental aspects of "behavioral science-based torture techniques" in use at Guantanamo in a August 2006 article. In 2007, physician Steven Miles noted the experimental aspects of the Al Qahtani interrogation at Guantanamo in late 2002 - early 2003. The experimental aspect of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah was broached by FBI agent Ali Soufan in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2009. Soufan's presence at the Zubaydah interrogation in April-May 2002 led him to characterize a CIA contractor's treatment of Zubaydah as an experiment ("Once again the contractor insisted on stepping up the notches of his experiment..."). The contractor is believed to have been former SERE psychologist, James Mitchell.

The PHR report should not be seen as a full history of the torture-experimentation program, but is a blueprint offering the outlines of what that program consisted of and how it progressed. For instance, except for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, none of the CIA prisoners are named in the report, although it is noted that "the authorized policy of using multiple ["enhanced interrogation" techniques] simultaneously was officially based on medical observations of 25 detainees."

A full understanding of all that happened awaits future investigations. A more comprehensive understanding of the issues raised, e.g., the development of the waterboarding and sleep deprivation techniques, has been investigated by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel/Firedoglake, while the torture of Abu Zubaydah has been intensively covered by Jason Leopold at Truthout. Leopold noted the "extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials" on matters such as "medical updates" and "behavioral comments."

In an article last April, I noted that "psychologist's notes" had been cataloged as a part of Abu Zubaydah's interrogation materials. Such notes would indicate just what variables of interest were being recorded by the psychological experimenter, especially given recent revelations in a story by Jason Leopold that a second taping system was used in the interrogation of Zubaydah, with "torture sessions that were stored on computers and separate hard drives."

Variables of interest to CIA psychologists might include head movements and hand movements, facial expressions or microexpressions, used in detecting deception or behavioral manifestations of stress. These types of observation are synonymous with computer analysis and argue for the use of a digital video system or the transfer of analog video into data stored on magnetic or optical media. The same release of documents... also described CIA officials asking for "instructions" regarding the "disposition of hard drives and magnetic media" associated with the torture of Zubaydah.

Among the various threads left dangling from the PHR investigation, none concerns me more than the links between the SERE research undertaken by investigators led by Dr. Charles A. Morgan and the CIA experimental torture program, as reported in an appendix to PHR's report. In an appendix to their report, PHR describes the SERE research undertaken during the years prior to the issuance of the OLC memos, and explains that the results of that research demonstrated how the risk of harm was inherent in the SERE techniques. In addition, they note, "the experimental framework of these studies intentionally or unintentionally laid the groundwork for unethical and illegal human experimentation that would follow."

The full details of my own investigation into those links were published back in September 2009.

What is indisputable is that by virtue of his position, Dr. Morgan had access to CIA officials just at the time that another department of the CIA, one to which he is affiliated, was, according to the CIA’s own Office of Inspector General Report (large PDF) involved in vetting the SERE techniques for use in interrogations....

... it looks like the CIA used DOD/JPRA as a cover for the safety of techniques that it knew were in fact harmful from their own analysis of the “data.” [JRPA, or Joint Recovery Personnel Agency is, among other things, the "Executive Agency" for the SERE training schools.]

One especially lingering thread concerns the assertion in the PHR report that all of Dr. Morgan's SERE research had been properly vetted by Institutional Research Boards. While this is true for his published research, a report for which Dr. Morgan is listed as second author, The War Fighter's Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment, conducted on behalf of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Ft. Detrick, beginning approximately in November 2001, states -- even by its final addendum in October 2003 -- that "due to Institutional Review Board delays no human subjects data are available."

The exact interactions between CIA and DoD/JPRA, between the White House and both DoD and CIA, the role of other actors, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command, not to mention the actual origins of the torture research program, remain unclear. It is a vital necessity that that investigations take place, and hopefully PHR's report will provide the added impetus to push this issue to the forefront of a tired, confused, and frightened country, a country misled in so many ways over the past decade, and now forced to confront the full panoply of evil that has resulted from having a portion of the government held apart from public scrutiny. That must end now.

Originally posted at Firedoglake

DoJ's OPR Report Released on Yoo, Bybee Torture Memos (and David Margolis's Whitewash Memo, too)

Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered the release of the report of the Office of Professional Responsibility's (OPR) investigation into the culpability of the Office of Legal Counsel's activities in constructing the torture memos of August 2002 and beyond. These memos, written by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Stephen Bradbury and others were rescinded in whole by Barack Obama soon after becoming president.

The OPR release is both interesting and frustrating. It contains both the first draft of the report, the second draft, the final report itself, and the memorandum for Holder written by David Margolis, which, as a Newsweek report predicted, partly exonerated Yoo and Bybee from charges of professional misconduct found in the OPR report itself, reducing their culpability to the much lesser charge of "bad judgment." (I wrote about Margolis's history at DoJ in running point guard on such cover-ups in an article at Firedoglake/The Seminal on a few weeks back. Scott Horton at Harpers also wrote his own article on some of Margolis's checkered career.)

Marcy Wheeler is currently holding forth, with her distinguished crew of commenters, in an open thread on the report over at Emptywheel/FDL. My H/T for the links above for the report go to her; and she also has links to the official replies of both Yoo and Bybee to the reports earlier drafts.

My frustrations regarding the release center around the amount of redactions. Many, if not most of them center around discussions or interactions concerning the CIA. It's clear the CIA played a central role in the vetting of the supposed safety of the SERE-centered torture techniques. CIA psychologists are said to have made representations regarding the safety of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," and solicited similar statements from SERE's parent agency, JPRA. CIA-contract psychologists, including James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, apparently ran the torture interrogations in the Spring/Summer 2002, for which the initial torture memos were written as after the fact justifications. One thing the OPR report does is corroborate that such "EIT" interrogation took place before the memos were written.

What is not well-known is that both government military research, funded through Ft. Detrick, with the participation of CIA researchers, were involved in studying the "uncontrollable stress" of SERE-style torture in 2002. The actual deleterious effects of such torture were well-known to the military and CIA, who either kept such information from the OLC attorneys (which seems less likely now, given the amount of interaction between Yoo and the others with CIA and military attorneys like William Haynes), or lied about it to them, or they all collaborated in submarining such information.

When CIA psychiatrist-expert Charles A. Morgan (one of the key researchers in the Ft. Detrick study mentioned above) denied that his research was for anything but PTSD studies, and also denied links to the CIA, going so far as to scrub such attributions from his Wikipedia page, he didn't count on the fact that online references to his military research, which was not related centrally to PTSD, was available (see long PDF), or that an early draft version of the Intelligence Science Board's Educing Information report specifically lists him with CIA organizational ties, listed as part of the study's twelve man committee of interrogation "experts." (These are documents in my possession, not currently online.) This is a story I will be telling in full in the very near future.

Center for Constitutional Rights has released a statement on news of the report's release, and makes the following points:

In response to the release of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) report on the conduct of the lawyers involved in crafting and providing legal cover for the illegal torture program, the Center for Constitutional Rights issued the following statement:

At first look, the long-awaited OPR report makes it abundantly clear that the decisions about the torture program took place at the highest level, and the damning description of the program further show that the torture memos were written to order by the lawyers from the Office of Legal Counsel who played a key role in creating the program. The report underscores the need for a more thorough investigation that has more scope and powers to follow the evidence.

Among others, the lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury have caused incalculable damage to our country and to thousands of victims as a result of the twisted legal advice they provided while at the Office of Legal Counsel. The OLC opinions were intended to provide legal cover for what everyone knew was illegal conduct. They advised the establishment of the prison at Guantanamo outside the law through the purposeful evasion of the Geneva Conventions and they advised the creation of a secret detention network for “enhanced interrogations” in flagrant violation of domestic and international law. Once unthinkable, they authorized and justified torture, rendition and secret CIA detention, often in a hands-on manner so detailed that it gives the lie to the notion they were giving abstract legal advice rather than making policy decisions to use torture

Ultimately Jay Bybee must be impeached, tried and removed from his seat as a federal judge on the 9th Circuit, but he should have the decency to resign immediately.

While the OPR should have recommended state bar associations professionally sanction the attorneys for ethics violations, and it is clear these men should be disbarred and prevented from ever practicing law again, we call on Attorney General Eric Holder to order these men criminally investigated by an independent special prosecutor who is allowed to follow the facts where they lead, all the way up the chain of command. We further call on the state bar associations, who are in no way bound by the conclusions of the report, to sanction the torture lawyers.

In addition, we demand that the OLC and CIA release the all of the records CCR is seeking with co-counsel through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in Amnesty International, CCR, et al. v. CIA, about the CIA’s torture, rendition and secret detention practices. The time has come for the public to see all of the documents that show the role these lawyers played in fashioning one of the most shameful sets of practices ever to emanate from Washington. A review of the OPR Report further confirms the illegal nature of the CIA’s practices; the government cannot abuse the FOIA to conceal these illegal or embarrassing government actions.

Smoking Gun on CIA Torture Conspiracy? Human Experimentation Central to EIT Program

Originally posted at Firedoglake and The Public Record
A close reading of the CIA's Inspector General Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee's narrative on the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) torture memos reveals a more detailed picture of the CIA's involvement in the construction of the OLC memos. What emerges is consistent with recent charges of CIA experimentation on prisoners, and of the overall experimental quality of the torture program itself. It also points to a crucial piece of "analysis" by the CIA's Office of Technical Services, a memo which may or may not include damning medical and psychological evidence of the damaging effects of SERE techniques, and which the IG report maintains was utilized "in substantial part" in the drafting of the August 1, 2002 Bybee memos. If one is looking for a smoking gun in the torture scandal, in my opinion, one doesn't have to look much further than this.
The quote below is from the April 22, 2009 Senate Intelligence Committee narrative of the Office of Legal Counsel's opinions on the CIA's interrogation program. Please keep in mind as you read the quote and the added bolded emphasis, that recent documentation has shown that for years the CIA and Special Operations had researchers studying the effects of SERE training. Moreover, the research had been published in peer-reviewed journals, in part because the research was also meant to add to the psychiatric community's understanding of the mechanisms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Some of the research had also been published in the June 2000 edition of Special Warfare, "The Professional Bulletin of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School."
So, keeping this all in mind, consider the following from the Intel Committee's narrative (emphasis added):

According to CIA records, because the CIA believed that Abu Zubaydah was withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions, attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel met with the Attorney General, the National Security Adviser, the Deputy National Security adviser, the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council, and the Counsel to the President in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S. military and intelligence community. At this meeting, the CIA proposed particular alternative interrogation methods, including waterboarding.
The CIA’s Office of General Counsel subsequently asked OLC to prepare an opinion about the legality of its proposed techniques. To enable OLC to review the legality of the techniques, the CIA provided OLC with written and oral descriptions of the proposed techniques. The CIA also provided OLC with information about any medical and psychological effects of DoD’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) School, which is a military training program during which military personnel receive counter-interrogation training.

While the fact that the OLC accepted at face value the CIA's statements regarding the safety or the effects of the interrogation procedures they were proposing is no surprise to anyone who has read the torture memos -- and evidence of the unprofessionalism and bias of the memo's authors -- the degree to which the conspiracy (by CIA or OLC, or both) to withhold evidence of the real effects of the "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" (EITs) by the CIA has never been made more concrete than now.
To my knowledge, we do not have the specific document wherein the CIA provides the "medical and psychological effects" of SERE school. I have been told that this document is still classified. But it seems possible that the CIA did pass on the details of the research that was available to it, including the debilitating effects of SERE techniques, which sent stress hormone levels, according to one research report, "some of the greatest ever documented in humans." Another report cited "neuroendocrine changes... [that] may have significant implications for subsequent responses to stress."

CIA/SERE Experiments Evidence of Attempt to Mislead on OLC Torture Memos

Originally posted at Firedoglake

Professor Shane O’Mara at Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin has written an article which has caught the attention of the mainstream media. Pamela Hess at Associated Press described Prof. O'Mara's article,"Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating ‘enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques,’" as showing that the CIA's "severe interrogation techniques appear based on... a layman's idea of how the brain works as opposed to science-based understanding of memory and cognitive function." (Bmaz also reported on this.)

What neither Ms. Hess nor Professor O'Mara apparently realized is that in conducting his research for his review on how the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" caused debilitating damage to the brain and nervous system -- producing confabulation more readily than information -- one of the scientific papers O'Mara relied upon was itself produced by a CIA researcher. Such close participation between CIA and military researchers and the world of stress research adds a sinister dimension to the production of the OLC memos, which Professor O'Mara otherwise believes were based on naive "folk" beliefs and a faulty neuropsychobiological model.

But this is not the case. The CIA was well-aware of the type of research he cites -- because it was a major contributor to such research!

In an article posted at The Public Record last week, CIA Experiments on US Soldiers Linked to Torture Program (later picked up by Truthout), I showed how a Yale psychiatrist, and researcher for the National Center for Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, had received hundreds of thousands of dollars to do research on the psychological and physiological effects of stress produced by SERE techniques. The researcher, Charles A. Morgan, III, has identified himself, in certain settings, as a CIA behavioral scientist.

(SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, and is the name for the military survival schools that provide select members of the armed forces with "stress inoculation" training by subjecting them to a reduced amount of torture and captivity. The CIA's EITs were famously reverse-engineered by SERE psychologists from the techniques utilized during SERE training.)

In the AP article, Hess writes, "A 2006 Intelligence Science Board report on interrogation also noted possible negative effects of certain methods." But Hess doesn't mention, nor does she likely know, that one of the primary members on the ISB board that produced the report was the same Dr. Morgan.

... in the Information Science Board (ISB) document, Educing Information [PDF] — which was heavily drawn upon by President Obama’s task force on interrogations, for recommendations on the interrogations issue — Dr. Morgan is identified as a member of the 11-person “Government Experts Committee,” and listed as affiliated with the Intelligence Technology Innovation Center (ITIC). According to Intelligence Online, ITIC is “a research organization under the CIA’s authority,” which “answers directly to the CIA’s Science and Technology directorate.”

Research on SERE Techniques and the OLC Memos

The "CIA Experiments" article described some of the research Dr. Morgan and his associates have conducted using SERE trainees, many of them Special Forces personnel. (Professor O'Hara cites one of Morgan's articles himself -- see footnote 9 to his paper.) In a June 2000 article, “Assessment of Humans Experiencing Uncontrollable Stress: The SERE Course,” in Special Warfare (PDF), Morgan and his Special Operations psychologist co-author cite "recorded changes in cortisol levels" among individuals subjected to SERE techniques as "some of the greatest ever documented in humans." As Professor O'Mara notes in his own essay, a "substantial increase in cortisol levels has a deleterious effect on memory." The same article described testosterone levels falling in male subjects to below castration levels.

Another article by Morgan and his team looked at dissociative psychological effects of SERE techniques upon human subjects. (Dissociation produces symptoms such as depersonalization, derealization, psychic or emotional numbing, and general cognitive confusion.)

RESULTS: In study 1, 96% of subjects reported dissociative symptoms in response to acute stress. Total scores, as well as individual item scores, on the dissociation scale were significantly lower in Special Forces soldiers compared to general infantry troops. In study 2, 42% of subjects reported dissociative symptoms before stress and 96% reported them after acute stress.

Professor O'Mara's essay is an excellent brief review of the relevant literature on stress, as it pertains to the kinds of torture conducted by the CIA, and its effects upon memory, and the presumed ability to produce accurate information. It easily deserves wide dissemination. But evidence of CIA participation in the very research that was suppressed in the OLC memos shows that the conclusions drawn in the torture memos were not simply due to "bad faith" lawyering. As I wrote in my original article:

The frenzied search for data on waterboarding, sleep deprivation, isolation, confinement in a small box, etc., to submit to OLC attorneys making legal determinations on whether proposed interrogation techniques constituted torture, was a kabuki organized by the CIA. The OLC attorneys involved — John Yoo, Stephen Bradbury, Jay Bybee, and others — were witting or unwitting partners in suppression of CIA research on torture (as future investigations will disclose). Given the participation of members of the Office of the Vice President, particularly David Addington and Vice President Cheney himself, in the promulgation of the torture program, and the composition of the memos, it seems likely they were also involved in the suppression of this material. As a result, the memos produced authorizing the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were composed as the result of fraud and bad faith, the result of a criminal conspiracy to implement illegal torture techniques.

In this earlier article, I had taken Dr. Morgan at his word, as reported in a 2007 New York Times article, that he was incredulous at how SERE techniques could have migrated over to the torture program. But, as I recently discovered (H/T to fellow psychologist Brad Olson), the CIA scientist had a different take on the uses of SERE research in an essay in the 2006 book, Military Psychology, Clinical and Operational Applications (p. 252):

The SERE platform offers a unique opportunity to evaluate old and new assessment techniques under conditions that are more realistic than traditional laboratories....
The SERE training environment affords the military services the opportunity to collaborate with various other government agencies in exploring old and new techniques in gathering human intelligence.

The O'Mara essay and AP article appear only a few weeks after Physicians for Human Rights released a "white paper" highlighting evidence of illegal human experimentation on U.S.-held “terrorism” prisoners undergoing torture. The allegations of torture experimentation are consistent with reports of CIA experimentation upon Abu Zubaydah, and of the Pentagon running an interrogation "Battle Lab" at Guantanamo. In his book, Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors, bioethicist Steven Miles calls Mohammed al-Khatani’s interrogation an experiment: “The peculiar content and structure of this document makes sense if it is the log of research on coercive interrogation....” (p. 176).

Experimentation upon subjects to further "scientific" understanding of the effects of torture is also not new. In the 1950s, the CIA and Pentagon funded top psychologists and psychiatrists in research upon the effects of SERE training. These researchers established a protocol for psychological torture, based on torture tactics that induced "debility, dependency, and dread." (See West LJ., Medical and psychiatric considerations in survival training. In: Report of the Special Study Group on Survival Training (AFR 190 16). Lackland Air Force Base, Tex: Air Force Personnel and Training Research Centers; 1956.) This protocol was later incorporated into an early 1960s CIA (KUBARK) interrogation manual.

It is not enough to understand what research the Office of Legal Counsel attorneys failed to include in their infamous torture memos. One must understand why this research was not included, and who was involved in that. The evidence points to a deliberate attempt to implement and then hide a torture program, whose very basis for existence may have been, in part, to study the effects of torture upon involuntary subjects, in order to implement (or hide) an updated protocol for coercive interrogation. Only a full, wide-ranging, and open investigation -- including not only politicians, academics, lawyers, and blue-ribbon, distinguished experts, but representatives of human rights organizations, church and labor leaders, and other important societal participants -- will, given full subpoena power, be able to get to the bottom of this sinister program that seized hold of the governmental apparatus, and steered it towards brutality and a catastrophic breakdown of law.

"For the Record"

Dr. Morgan has left a comment about the original article at The Public Record. In it, he criticizes the story as "inaccurate and misleading." He offers no examples of the purported inaccuracies, but does state:

The research conducted by our research team at the National Center for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is not, and never has been, conducted for any other purpose than to help us understand the pathophysiology of stress disorders and we might better help in the treatment of veterans. Our research on PTSD and our studies of stress in healthy soldiers began in the 1990s – long before 2001 and the Bush Administration’s policies. We will continue to investigate how we might better help individuals who suffer from trauma related disorders.

I will answer Dr. Morgan's comment at greater length in the very near future, but suffice it to say that nothing said in my articles, including this one, was untrue or misrepresented the facts. I take Dr. Morgan's statement as a denial that his research for the National Center for PTSD was meant for purposes of conducting torture.