New Evidence on CIA Medical Torture: Injection "to the Bone" on Former Black Site Prisoner Majid Khan

Quite recently, U.S. authorities allowed the declassification of notes from Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) attorney Wells Dixon that described what his client, high-value detainee Majid Khan, told him about his torture at the hands of the CIA. Khan, a Pakistan citizen, is currently at Guantanamo, and awaits trial by military commission.

Dixon has described the hideous torture of his client, which comes on the heels of revelations in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary of their report on the CIA's torture program.

According to a June 2 Reuters report, Dixon described from interview notes with Khan, CIA use of solitary confinement; sexual abuse, including frequent touching of "private parts"; threats of physical harm; being hung naked from a pole for days; so-called "rectal feeding" (a form of anal rape); denial of food; water immersion and waterboarding, among other atrocities.

According to a CCR press release on Khan's torture, CIA doctors onsite were among the "worst torturers." Both Reuters and CCR have noted how doctors would check Khan's condition, ignore his appeals for help, and send him back into extreme forms of torture.

In a June 10 phone interview with Wells Dixon, Khan's attorney revealed there was more unreported material left out of the Reuters and CCR reports. In particular, Dixon revealed that Khan told him he was "also injected with a needle to the bone, and screamed in pain, then lost consciousness."

According to my research, an injection that just happens to hit a bone does not usually cause great pain. But an injection that enters the bone can. The latter is called an intraosseous or IO injection, and is used to quickly infuse drugs, particularly in instances where a person's life is at stake. It is usual medical procedure to insert lidocaine, a pain reliever, with or prior to injection because of the great pain associated with IO injections. Certain kinds of drugs can also cause great pain upon injection.

Did the CIA have medical need to make an IO injection, and withhold lidocaine or other pain reliever? Did CIA use the IO injection specifically to cause pain? Was a drug injected into Khan that specifically, or as side effect, caused great pain, in order to further torture him?

We don't know exactly what the CIA did with this, or any other injection, but the evidence of such forms of medical torture cannot be denied, despite recent attempts by the CIA to minimize allegations of such medical torture, such as the use of drugs in interrogation. In fact, a recent FOIA release from CIA obtained by Jason Leopold at VICE News showed that the CIA used blood thinners to prolong certain forms of torture.

It has not been easy to obtain this information. As Dixon noted in a June 22 op-ed at Al Jazeera, "The CIA has long tried to bury evidence of its crimes. When we filed a legal case challenging Majid's detention after his arrival at Guantanamo, the government prevented us from meeting with him for a year so that we would not learn about his torture."

UN Special Rapporteurs' "Letter of Allegation" to U.S. on Medical Torture and Experimentation

A new article by Adam Goldman at the Washington Post revealed that hundreds of photos from the CIA black sites exist. The fact they may be evidence at any future military commissions trial is currently being determined, as military prosecutors review the photos, which are said to include pictures of naked detainees, CIA personnel, and "photographs of confinement boxes where detainees such as Abu Zubaydah... were forced into for hours."

But it seems highly unlikely the public will see these photos, and we will have to rely on detainee testimony, and other various attempts by journalists, domestic and international bodies and organizations to pry out the information from the U.S. government. Along those lines, CCR has called for the full Senate CIA torture report and the Panetta Review to be released. A letter initiated by ACLU and signed by approximately 100 national and international rights groups on the need to ensure accountability for the U.S. CIA Torture Program was delivered to the most recent session of the UN Human Rights Council.

In another attempt to gain more information and some degree of accountability on CIA torture, last January 15 two UN Special Rapporteurs wrote a letter to U.S. officials. In the wake of the revelations in the release of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence executive summary of their report on the CIA's torture program, the rapporteurs, Dainius Puras (Special Rapporteur on the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health) and Juan E. Méndez (Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) asked the U.S. to respond to charges that doctors and other medical personnel were involved in torture and experimentation on detainees held by the CIA.

The letter was made public in relation to a periodic report submitted to the Human Rights Council earlier this year. (See this webpage, and then page 40 at document linked at A/HRC/29/50, "Communications report of Special Procedures.")

The UN officials also expressed "concern at the reported lack of investigation into these allegations."

Puras and Méndez  asked U.S. officials to respond to these charges and "explain how the role of health professionals in the CIA interrogation program is compatible with international human rights standards, including those ratified by the United States of America."

CIA health professionals played a central role in the CIA interrogation programme to an extent not understood or seen before. These health professionals designed, directed and profited from the CIA interrogation program; intentionally inflicted harm on detainees; enabled the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) lawyers to treat the interrogation practices as safe, legal and effective; engaged in potential human subjects research to provide legal cover for torture; monitored detainee torture and calibrated levels of pain; evaluated and treated detainees for purposes of torture; conditioned medical care on cooperation with interrogators; and failed to document physical and/or psychological evidence of torture.

The role and conduct of these health professionals, which included psychologists, psychiatrists, and physicians assistants, would not only imply a gross violation of medical and professional ethics but also violations of domestic and international law given the seriousness of the crime of torture, which is subject to universal jurisdiction.

Puras and Méndez also asked the U.S. to "provide details, and where available the results, of any investigation, medical examination, judicial or other inquiries carried out in relation to this case. If no inquiries have taken place, or if they have been inconclusive, please explain why."

The Special Rapporteurs gave the U.S. 60 days to reply.

State Department Kicks the Can on UN Charges

Last week I asked the State Department about the UN letter and whether the U.S. had replied. On June 24, a State Department official told me, "Our exchanges with mandate holders, such as the Special Rapporteurs, are private correspondence. We expect the mandate holders to treat these exchanges as such, and we do the same on our part."

The State Department didn't mention -- and likely does not want people to know -- that the communications are actually posted online a year after the initial communications take place. See this example of an October 2013 statement by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture on the situation of detainees held at Guantanamo, and its link at bottom to the actual communication, or "letter of allegation" to the U.S., originally sent to U.S. authorities on November 2012.

Or maybe the State Department doesn't want the public to know that many communications from the U.S. to these "letters of allegation" and "urgent appeals" from UN human rights officials go unanswered. Indeed, in the past 4 years, according to one U.N. document, 95 such communications were sent by UN officials to the United States, but the U.S. only replied to 56 of them. (Hat-tip to Jamil Dakwar, director of the ACLU's Human Rights Program, for this stat.)

Perhaps nothing portrays the weakness at present of international human rights mechanisms as the degree to which UN member states ignore these "special procedures" or communications from UN officials on human rights matters. Indeed, this is a large-scale problem. In a 2005 report summarizing statistics on these "letters of allegation" and "urgent letters" from different UN Special Rapporteurs, the overall government response rate from 137 member countries was only 46%. (The U.S. rate described above is 59%. Examples of recent non-responses by the U.S. to urgent appeals and letters of allegation from UN officials can be examined here.)

Feinstein Hiding Information on CIA Medical Experimentation

It's not only State Department officials who are reticent to engage dialogue on torture. The Senate Select Committee has determinedly stated they will not release their full report on CIA torture. As explained below, medical experimentation by the CIA is presumably included in the classified portions. Over 90% of the report remains classified.

I remembered that back in 2010, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, then chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me that in response to a revelatory report by Physicians for Human Rights on the question of CIA experimentation on detainees she would issue further comment on the matters discussed in the PHR report after the SSCI's report was done.

"The findings of the new report from Physicians for Human Rights will be considered in our review," Feinstein said, "and I will have further comment on this when the report is completed.”

A few days ago, Feinstein's press secretary Tom Mentzer replied to my query about Feinstein's 2010 promise, "The study’s executive summary includes details about CIA medical and psychological personnel involved in the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. Any additional information included in the full report is classified. The committee did closely examine the Physicians for Human Rights report, and the senator commented on the more recent APA report here."

Mentzer's link is to an April 30, 2015 statement by Sen. Feinstein in relation to allegations of links between the American Psychological Association and the CIA torture program.

Feinstein's statement said she was "troubled" by the allegations. "I understand an independent review has been commissioned by the APA and look forward to reviewing its conclusions," she wrote. "This is a stark reminder that torture can corrode every institution it touches, including medical and psychological professions.”

I wrote back to Mentzer to ask whether Sen. Feinstein was aware of links I've made between Chicago attorney David H. Hoffman leading the supposed "independent review... commissioned by the APA" and CIA figures George Tenet and Kenneth J. Levitt, and Rand Corporation figure Newton Minow. Tenet was CIA director when the "enhanced interrogation" and "extraordinary rendition" programs were initiated.

Mentzer did not respond to my query. (An Illinois psychologist has recently written calling for the resignation of Hoffman for conflict of interest in the APA matter.)

Feinstein's reply to my recent query, to the point that "any additional information in the full report" on CIA experimentation on detainees is "classified," constitutes a cover-up of possible grave war crimes. At the very least, PHR should demand that Feinstein release all materials in the Committee's possession that bear on medical torture and human experimentation by the CIA.

As I told Mentzer in my request to Sen. Feinstein, "the issue of experimentation arises in the Executive Summary in the context of an interchange between OMS personnel and the CIA Inspector General on the feasibility of doing research on the 'effectiveness' of the CIA techniques. The PHR report, however, was concerned with specific data requested and transmitted regarding the operations of the techniques themselves, including measuring oxygen levels in waterboarding victims, and adjusting temperatures in detention settings for maximum discomfort."

It is likely that CIA experimentation went well beyond this, including new ways to measure physiological correlates of supposed deception, as well as physiological markers of being overwhelmed by the various torture techniques applied.

If, as Mentzer/Feinstein now maintain, the SSCI did take up PHR's charges of medical experimentation, the SSCI is not revealing what they found, and has no recommendations about what to do about it.

Sadly, the authors of the 2010 PHR report on CIA experimentation tried to steer public outrage into a complaint made to the Office of Human Research Protections (OHRP) at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But OHRP referred the complaints back to the CIA, as such is their policy. 

The authors of the PHR report knew this was OHRP policy to begin with, but led their supporters down the dead end of OHRP "protections." In personal correspondence, one of the report authors told me they knew the appeal to OHRP was a "long shot," but that "PHR lawyers went through law journals and found evidence that OHRP could be interpreted as having jurisdiction, though the situation was ambiguous." (Because this was personal correspondence, I am not using the person's name.)

Another example of the kinds of information being kept from the public was revealed recently by Jason Leopold at VICE News, who released a letter from former Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who was himself a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to the CIA complaining about their refusal to show him "four written passages — located in an unknown document that may still be classified — related to the agency's destruction of interrogation videotapes."

Did this information ever surface in the classified SSCI report? We don't know. Just as we don't know what the U.S. will say to UN Special Rapporteurs about charges of medical torture and illegal experimentation, or if they even bother to respond. (Actually, we will know that, but not for another six months or so.)

For now, all we have -- and it is hideous enough -- are the cries from the torture chamber itself, as witnessed and reported by the detainees' attorneys. Will such cries be loud enough to stir real action and change?

Crossposted at Firedoglake

New Horrific Details of Former CIA Detainee Majid Khan’s Torture Finally Made Public

Attorneys for CIA "high-value detainee," Majid Khan, currently held at a highly-classified prison at Guantanamo, have released recently declassified details of the torture their client endured in CIA black site prisons. It is powerful, and I fear that the common psychological response to turn away from horror will once again manifest itself in response to these new revelations.

Commenting on the release of the Khan account, Cori Crider, an attorney at the international human rights NGO, Reprieve, said. It has long been clear that the Senate torture report was only the tip of the iceberg. Some of the worst CIA abuses we know of were absent from the public version of the study."

Crider cited the case of the Belhaj and al Saadi families, where both the U.S. and the UK's MI6 were involved in rendition to torture in Gaddafi's Libyan prisons back in 2004.

The Khan story is being carried by the Reuters news agency. According to their account, "Khan's is the first publicly released account from a high-value al Qaeda detainee who experienced the "enhanced interrogation techniques" of President George W. Bush's administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S."

Reuthers reports that Khan's torture narrative "is contained in 27 pages of interview notes his lawyers compiled over the past seven years."

Khan's story is truly horrifying. Something of the agony he endured under long CIA torture is captured in the Reuters article. Khan hallucinated at times under the ongoing abuse. According to his own testimony, "I lived in anxiety every moment of every single day about the fear and anticipation of the unknown."

One thing I noticed right away is the new findings regarding use of waterboarding and other forms of water torture. Such torture was used extensively by both CIA and the Department of Defense, and the long myth that "only" three prisoners were waterboarded should be jettisoned at last.

It is a scandal of the highest sort that this kind of treatment could take place and there is zero accountability for it in U.S. society.

What follows is a press release on the subject from Center for Constitutional Rights:

Former CIA Detainee Majid Khan’s Torture Finally Public

Details Go Beyond Senate Torture Report to Include Waterboarding, Further Sexual Assault, Threat with Tools

June 2, 2015, New York – Today, unclassified information detailing the CIA’s torture of Guantánamo prisoner Majid Khan was made public for the first time by Reuters, including the fact that he was waterboarded on two separate occasions. Khan’s attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), J. Wells Dixon, commented:

“Majid Khan’s personal experiences, notes of which were cleared by the government for release, confirm that the CIA has repeatedly and continuously lied about the torture program. As layers of secrecy have been peeled away throughout the Obama administration, we see more and more evidence of CIA savagery and treachery. There must be greater transparency and accountability for what happened in the CIA torture program:

• CIA Director John Brennan should be fired;

• The full Senate torture report and the Panetta Review should be disclosed publicly; and

• The Justice Department should reopen its criminal investigation of the CIA torture program, including how it was authorized and carried out, as well as new questions raised by Khan’s recollections and the continuing cover up and minimization by the CIA about what actually happened in the black sites.

This is the only way to ensure that the U.S. never again resorts to torture, and the only way to move the country forward.”

Khan’s torture, according to the declassified notes, included the following:

Khan was waterboarded on two separate occasions, in May and July 2003

“Guards and interrogators brought him into a bathroom with a tub. The tub was filled with water and ice. Shackled and hooded, they placed Khan feet-first into the freezing water and ice. They lowered his entire body into the water and held him down, face-up in the water. An interrogator forced Khan's head under the water until he thought he would drown. The interrogator would pull Khan's head out of the water to demand answers to questions, and then force his head back under the water, repeatedly. Water and ice were also poured from a bucket onto Khan's mouth and nose when his head was not submerged.”

Khan was raped while in CIA custody (“rectal feeding”) and sexually assaulted

“As described in the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Khan was raped while in CIA custody (‘rectal feeding’). He was sexually assaulted in other ways as well, including by having his ‘private parts’ touched while he was hung naked from the ceiling.”

Khan was hung on a wooden beam for days on end

“Interrogators and guards at a black site hung Khan by his hands from a wooden beam for three days. He was naked and shackled. He was provided with water but no food.”

Khan spent much of 2003 in total darkness

“Majid had an uncovered bucket for a toilet, no toilet paper, a sleeping mat and no light…. For much of 2003 he lived in total darkness.”

Khan was held in solitary

“Khan was essentially held in solitary confinement from 2004 to 2006.”

Khan’s family was threatened by interrogators

“They also threatened to harm his family, including his young sister. He was told, ‘son, we are going to take care of you. We are going to send you to a place you cannot imagine.’”

Khan experienced repeated beatings and threats to beat him with tools, including a hammer

“They would come in with a bag of tools and set them down next to Majid. They would pull out a hammer and show it to Majid. One of them threatened to hammer Majid’s head. They sometimes smelled like alcohol.”

Doctors were among Khan's worst torturers; Khan was hung on a metal bar

“When a physician came to examine him, Khan begged for help. In response, the physician instructed the guards to take Khan back into the interrogation room with the metal bar and hang him. Khan remained hanging there for another 24 hours before being interrogated again and forced to write his own ‘confession’ while being filmed naked if he wanted some rest. He was finally placed in a cell, where he remained numb and immobile for several days.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights has represented Majid Khan since he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay in 2006 after being held in secret overseas CIA “black sites” for more than three years. After he was transferred, CCR had to fight the government for a year to meet with our client, and Khan’s own memories of his torture remained classified until May 2015.

For more information, please visit Majid Khan’s case page on the CCR website.

CCR has led the legal battle over Guantanamo since 2002 – representing clients in two Supreme Court cases and organizing and coordinating hundreds of pro bono lawyers across the country to represent the men at Guantanamo, ensuring that nearly all have the option of legal representation. Among other Guantánamo cases, the Center represents the families of men who died at Guantánamo, and men who have been released and are seeking justice in international courts. In addition, CCR has been working through diplomatic channels to resettle men who remain at Guantánamo because they cannot return to their country of origin for fear of persecution and torture.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change. Visit www.ccrjustice.org; follow @theCCR.

The Wages of Fear: What the Waterboarding Debate is Really About

In the famous verse from Romans 6:23, "the wages of sin is death." For U.S. policymakers (for the entire government is now implicated in this, not just the Bush Administration), terrorism is the ultimate "sin." And if they capture you and believe or choose to believe you are a terrorist, then you, or anyone, can expect waterboarding and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" torture. Worst of all, you will certainly fear them. And that fear is debilitating over time. It breaks a person down psychologically. Of course, that is the whole point of the whole waterboarding brouhaha.

Yesterday the White House announced what we already knew in our heart of hearts was their position.

Waterboarding is legal, White House says:

WASHINGTON -- The White House said Wednesday that the widely condemned interrogation technique known as waterboarding is legal and that President Bush could authorize the CIA to resume using the simulated-drowning method under extraordinary circumstances.

The surprise assertion from the Bush administration reopened a debate that many in Washington had considered closed. Two laws passed by Congress in recent years -- as well as a Supreme Court ruling on the treatment of detainees -- were widely interpreted to have banned the CIA's use of the extreme interrogation method.

But in remarks that were greeted with disbelief by some members of Congress and human rights groups, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said that waterboarding was a legal technique that could be employed again "under certain circumstances."

The day before:

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden acknowledged that his agency used the simulated-drowning technique on Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, his lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a suspect in the USS Cole bombing in Yemen in 2000.

Finally, today Michael Mukasey demonstrated that he can drink the kool-aid with the best of them, telling House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers that the waterboarding of past suspects in the "war on terror" will not be prosecuted because they were, at the time -- surprise! -- "authorized."

From today's Washington Post (emphases in bold are added):

In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Mukasey said that because waterboarding was part of a program approved by Justice lawyers, there is no way the department can open a criminal investigation into the practice....

"That would mean that the same department that authorized the program would now prosecute someone for taking part" in it, he said.

Mukasey's remarks were a direct rebuff to demands from many leading Democrats this week that the Justice Department open a criminal probe into the CIA's use of waterboarding, an interrogation technique that simulates drowning in an attempt to force information from a prisoner.

The statements also appear to conflict with his testimony in the Senate last week, when Mukasey said on several occasions that a special U.S. attorney's probe into the CIA's destruction of videotapes could be expanded to include a probe of interrogation tactics shown on the tapes.

I'd add that the statements also appear to conflict with basic decency and humanity, but then, that's me.

Meanwhile, in a just released Time.com story:

Lawyers representing one current Guantanamo detainee tell TIME that they plan to present evidence that he was subjected to videotaped interrogation, in addition to unspecified "systematic torture" when he was held in secret CIA prisons. The lawyers, from the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based legal non-profit with a long record of advocacy for prisoners at Guantanamo, note that their client has said the videotaping occurred after his arrest in 2003.

The Guantanmo detainee in question is 27 year old Majid Khan. Arrested in Pakistan, and ultimately transferred to Guantanamo with other "high-level detainees," like Khalid Sheik Mohammad, Khan's case threatens to break through the legal restrictions of secrecy surrounding the government's "terror" prosecutions:

Khan's lawyers have said their client has gone on a hunger strike to protest the conditions of his confinment, and appears pale and gaunt. In the course of meetings with counsel and the Red Cross, Khan also handed over neatly penned, handwritten letters. Several have been made public, after heavy redactions imposed by U.S. military censors. One of Khan's messages begins: "In this letter I am going to mention some of the things I have been through." Then the next 19 lines of text are blacked out.

But Khan's private declarations to his lawyers cannot be censored, and it is those that the Intelligence Committee will hear on Friday. His allegations come at a time when Congress is considering passage of a new intelligence bill that would effectively outlaw many of the CIA's interrogation methods by forcing the Agency to use only those techniques permitted in the U.S. Army Field Manual.

While it will be good to hear evidence examined without censorship, I want to concentrate at this point on the last claim in the Time quote above.

Why Can't They Torture the Good Way?

The ACLU and other liberals (and even some Republican types, most famously GOP candidate John McCain) make a big deal out of the fact that the Army Field Manual proscribes waterboarding and other "enhanced" forms of interrogation. It's as if the AFM provides a good set of non-coercive techniques, as asserted in Senate hearings the other day.

Both Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told lawmakers that their agencies had successfully obtained valuable intelligence from terrorism suspects without using what Mr. Mueller called the “coercive” methods of the C.I.A.

But [CIA Director] General Hayden bristled when asked about Congressional attempts to mandate that C.I.A. interrogators be required to use the more limited set of interrogation methods contained in the Army Field Manual, which is used by military interrogators.

For Hayden and his administration backers, the CIA is a special case. But then, it has been for six decades now, as the agency has engaged in assassinations, coup d'etats abroad, organized secret armies, and both researched and engaged in torture (also taught to willing overseas acolytes serving U.S. client states).

But no matter what Hayden or the ACLU says, no matter what Senators Hagel and Feinstein advocate respecting interrogation guidelines in their new intelligence bill, the Army Field Manual is not about non-coercive interrogation. The military lawyers who drafted the AFM waited to the end of the document to provide the proverbial fine print about certain "restricted" techniques, describing them in an obviously little-read "appendix" (Appendix M).

From an earlier article of mine:

Briefly, it allows for complete separation, sometimes with forced wearing of goggles and earmuffs, for up to 30 days (after which approval for more must be sought). It allows for keeping sleep to four hours a day, for 30 straight days. It allows for the use of other concurrent techniques, including "futility", "incentive", and "fear up" (It does ban "hooding").

Maybe you heard of "fear up" and "futility"? They're listed in CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, authored by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in 2003:

Fear Up Harsh: Significantly increasing the fear level in a detainee [usually through invoking a detainee's phobias, if known]....

Fear Up Mild: Moderately increasing the fear level in a detainee.....

Futility: Invoking the feeling of futility of a detainee.

....What does separation or isolation do to an individual? In a review by Lawrence Hinkle Jr, written back in 1961, it was understood how debilitating this technique was, causing "disordered brain function"....

It is well known that prisoners, especially if they have not been isolated before, may develop a syndrome similar in most of its features to the "brain syndrome"... they cease to care about their utterances, dress, and cleanliness. They become dulled, apathetic, and depressed. In due time they become disoriented and confused; their memories become defective and they experience hallucinations and delusions. In these circumstances their capacity of judgment and discrimination is much impaired, and they readily succumb to their need for talk and companionship; but their ability to impart accurate information may be as much impaired as their capacity to resist an interrogator.

Classically, isolation has been used as a means of "making a man talk," simply because it is so often associated with a deterioration of thinking and behavior and is accompanied by an intense need for companionship and for talk. From the interogator's viewpoint it has seemed to be the ideal way of "breaking down" a prisoner, because, to the unsophisticated, it seems to create precisely the state that the interrogator desires... However, the effect of isolation upon the brain function of the prisoner is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of sleep.
"Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject" in The Manipulation of Human Behavior, 1961, John Wiley & Sons.

Waterboarding: Who Benefits... and How?

The administration back and forth on the subject of waterboarding can represent both fear in such circles over eventual prosecution, or a clever campaign to keep one's enemies off-guard regarding U.S. interrogation practices. Things got even murkier this very afternoon, as CIA Director Michael Hayden evidently told the House Intelligence Committee, in what must have been a busy day of hearings on Capitol Hill, that "in my own view, the view of my lawyers and the Department of Justice, it is not certain that that technique would be considered to be lawful under current statute." Of course, he also maintains it was legal back in 2002 and 2003, when they used it. Get it? Got it? Good.

The CIA as an institution is all about misdirection and secrecy. It is both their ethos and their M.O. Everything I have learned about the history and practice of torture in the U.S. leads me to believe that the public story is not the full story. While there is fear about prosecution among individual interrogators in the field, the recent obfuscatory statements and actions by administration officials points to a more ominious conclusion: the CIA wants to keep waterboarding as an option, at least in the mind of the public. This is part of a torture paradigm that is centered around Fear, not just physical abuse. The CIA, and also the Army Field Manual, center the coercive portion of their agenda around the right to induce fear, whether by threatening waterboarding of prisoners, or whatever else they may do to produce Fear Up Harsh, the better to heighten anxiety and dependency in those they interrogate (torture). That's how they use and understand torture, and the sooner we all understand that, the better.

Mukasey's statement that there would be no waterboarding prosecution may make it a red letter day for government interrogators and torturers. It goes without saying that it is a dark day for this country as a whole.