New Document Details Arguments About Torture at a JSOC Prison

Journalist Michael Otterman, author of the excellent book, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, was kind enough to forward to me some months ago a document he obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. The document consists of the after-action reports made by Colonel Steven Kleinman and Terrence Russell, two of the three team members sent by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) to a top-secret special operations facility in Iraq in September 2003.

The reports, written shortly after both JPRA officials finished their assignment, present two starkly different accounts of what took place that late summer in the depths of a JSOC torture chamber. Even more remarkable, Col. Kleinman, who famously intervened to stop torture interrogations at the facility, had his own report submitted to Russell for comment. Indeed, Kleinman's report as released contains interpolations by Russell, such that the documents become a kind of ersatz debate over torture by the JPRA team members, and at a distance, some of the Task Force members.

This extraordinary document is being posted here in full for the first time. Click here to download.

"Cleared Hot"

Kleinman told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), which in 2008 was investigating detainee abuse in the military (large PDF), that he thought as Team Leader (and Intelligence Director at JPRA's Personnel Recovery Academy) he was being sent to the Special Mission Unit Task Force interrogation facility to identify problems with their interrogation program.

Much to his surprise, he and his JPRA team were being asked to provide training in the kind of techniques originally used only for demonstration and "classroom" experience purposes in the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE program. (JPRA has organizational supervisory control over SERE, though the constituent arms of the military services retain some independence in how they run their programs.)

But not far into his mission, JPRA's Commander, Colonel Randy Moulton, told Kleinman and his team they were "'cleared hot' to employ the full range of JPRA methods to include specifically the following: Walling - Sleep Deprivation - Isolation - Physical Pressures (to include stress positions, facial and stomach slaps, and finger pokes to chest) - Space/Time Disorientation - White Noise".

The story of the JPRA team visit and how it went bad, how Kleinman intervened when he saw a kneeling prisoner being repeatedly slapped, how he refused to write up a torture interrogation protocol for use at the TF facility -- widely believed to be Task Force 20 (as reported by Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals) -- has been told at this point a number of times.

But never has the degree of acrimony and conflict that went on between Kleinman and his other JPRA team members, and the back and forth with superiors and TF personnel been so carefully detailed.

Russell, who was a civilian manager for JPRA's Research and Development division, was in particular open about why the team had been sent, and who they were helping. Kleinman, on the other hand, explained in his report at the outset that a nondisclosure agreement put "significant limitations on the details of our actions that can be reported herein."

Russell was not so reticent. He's quite clear the purpose of the TDY (temporary assignment) was "To provide support to on-going interrogation efforts being conducted by JSOC/TF-20 elements at their Battlefield Interrogation Facility (BIF).... At the request of JSOC, a JPRA support team was formed to advice [sic] and assist in on-going interrogations against hostile elements operating against Coalition Forces in Iraq. The mission of the TF-20 interrogation element, J2-X, was to exploit captured enemy personnel and extract timely, actionable intelligence to support operations that would lead to the capture of 'Black List' and other high-value and terrorist personnel."

According to Russell, "TF-20's deputy commander and JPRA/CC [that is, Commander, who was Col. Randy Moulton] approved the support team to become fully engaged in interrogation operations and demonstrate our exploitation tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) to the J2-X staff."

"A lack of clear guidance"

Whatever the understanding of the team when it arrived, from the very beginning there was a debate over the "effectiveness" of the techniques being discussed. Kleinman noted "a lack of clear guidance on the legal status of the detainees and the absence of definitive directions pertaining to the treatment of those detainees."

According to the 2008 SASC report, TF-20 was operating under the same interrogation SOP that a similar special forces task force had used in Afghanistan. But this was also a time when there was a lot of turmoil with the Department of Defense over exactly what interrogation techniques were "legal." Indeed, only days before Kleinman and his team arrived at the BIF, Major General Geoffrey Miller had come to Iraq to assess detention and interrogation operations five months after the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces. He counseled the military in Iraq to "get tougher with detainees."

The 2002 Special Forces TF interrogation SOP for Afghanistan is apparently still classified, but we know from other sources that it included use of sensory overload ("loud music"), sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, stress positions, "controlled fear," and use of dogs, among other torture techniques.

Once at the BIF, Kleinman saw "clear violations" of the Geneva Conventions and "acted to terminate the activity," according to his own after-action report. It's amazing to then have the opportunity to see what the other senior JPRA-SERE official at the site had to say.

Russell commented on this portion of Kleinman's report: "I think the clear violation of the TF policy was of a minor nature -- that being a 10-minute extension of the kneeling policy. The use of insult slaps was, in the opinion of [one or two words redacted], serious enough to stop the interrogation -- an action I did not then or now feel warranted his [Kleinman's] direct intervention.... This direct intervention by JPRA staff, vs. having their own chain of command step in, resulted in irrevocable damage of our relationship with [TF] staff."

While Russell was given an opportunity to counter Kleinman's narrative, Kleinman received no such reciprocal courtesy. He told me in a voicemail message in January 2012 he had written his report assuming it was "eyes only for the commander."

He continued: "And oddly enough, I never saw Terry’s [i.e., Terrence Russell's report] until months and months later, I think when the investigation started. And what I didn’t know was Terry was given immediate access to mine and was able to try to respond point for point without me being able to respond to his responses. Also my copy, when I went to look for it on the official email, had disappeared for quite a while. And so anyway, there was a lot of weird things going on at the time, as you can imagine."

The "Effectiveness" Question

A full analysis of this remarkable document would take up too much space for a blog post, but it's important to point out one exchange between Kleinman and Russell in regards to differences over the "effectiveness" of the SERE and other interrogation and torture techniques, as the discussion strangely presages the debate about the efficacy of torture that has surrounded the controversial film Zero Dark Thirty.

Kleinman argued to his commander in his after-action report, "While JPRA simulates methods employed by nations not compliant with the GC [Geneva Convention] provisions, U.S. interrogators are bound by federal law to operate in strict accordance with those guidelines. [2 lines redacted] Intelligence interrogation involved, to a considerable degree, the recruitment of a detainee's willing cooperation through the skilled employment of psychological levers that do not include the presentation of threats either explicitly or implicitly."

Russell countered: "While some few of the tools employed, namely some physical pressures, are outside GC guidelines, [1-1/2 lines redacted] This is routinely done with little use of tactics prohibited by the GCs."

Kleinman then discussed his own experiences as an interrogator, concluding, "... the use of non-coercive methods have proven far more effective in obtaining reliable and actionable intelligence than coercive methods. Recent studies of interrogation in support of the global war on terrorism corroborate this finding; conversely, the use of coercive methods has consistently proven to be ineffective and counterproductive."

Russell took umbrage at this, and referencing studies on interrogation done at Guantanamo, made his case for the use of coercive techniques, unconsciously echoing the words of Bruce Jessen, made years before in notes for the construction of a SERE instruction class that he and James Mitchell (and possibly others) would reverse-engineer into the "enhanced interrogation program" of the Bush years.

"In regards to the recent study on effectiveness at GTMO," Russell wrote, "of which there is plenty of room to debate whether or not that have had [sic] much success, there are a number of major variables not here addressed. GTMO is a strategic interrogation/debriefing facility -- not a battlefield interrogation facility. In addition, a key component of the process of exploiting a source is to get them to a mental state of despair and recognition of the omnipotence of the interrogator. Once in that state, the exploiter can offer a way out -- namely cooperation via non-coercive methods. At GTMO they have the luxury of holding a person for 18-24 months in a facility cut off from family, country, and support systems, with seemingly no end in site [sic], that would cause most rationale [sic] persons to move into a state of despair. A battlefield/tactical interrogation facility does not have that time luxury -- the requirement to put a resistant detainee into a state of despair must and can be accelerated though the use of coercive exploitation applied IAW [in accordance with] directives, well-considered SOPs and ROEs [Rules of Engagement]. Once there, non-coercive methods are employed to gain the reliable information sought."

Russell's statement is remarkable enough, but I asked Kleinman some time ago what "effectiveness" studies he and Russell were referring to. Kleinman told me that he was referring to many different kinds of studies going back to the Cold War years. He didn't believe Russell had any "study on effectiveness at GTMO" that he could actually refer to.

But after checking around, I discovered there appears to be such a study done by Major General Miller himself. In early 2003, Miller, who was then Commander Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, had submitted a document to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Working Group on interrogations, looking into what extended set of coercive methods would be allowable for use by DoD interrogators. Miller titled his four page paper, Effectiveness of the Use of Certain Category II Counter-resistance Strategies. It was published later as Enclosure 66 of the Schmidt-Furlow Report, "Investigation into Federal Bureau of Investigation Allegations of Detainee Abuse at Guantánamo Bay Detention Center."

According to the ACLU, the memo "is a response to the Director's request for info concerning the effectiveness of interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary of Defense. 'Included with this memo is a timeline of interrogation techniques used, info obtained as a result and justifications for their use', but this info is either redacted or not present. 'Numerous detainees demonstrated counter-resistance techniques. Consequently, [redacted] Commander, JTF-170 requested authorization to employ specific techniques in addition to those in the Field Manual. These techniques were approved by the Secretary of Defense.'"

I can't know for sure if this was Russell's GTMO "effectiveness" document or not, but it would seem like a prime candidate (unless Kleinman was right and Russell never knew of any actual study). Since the document is nearly entirely censored, we can't know for sure, nor we do know how such "effectiveness" was studied.

I was unable to find a way to reach Russell to obtain his comment.

Today, Kleinman is Director for Strategic Research for The Soufan Group, according to a webpage at the company's website.

High-Value Interrogation Group and Current Research on Interrogation "Effectiveness"

The current official DoD directive on interrogation specifically disallows the use of SERE-derived interrogation techniques. However, it does task the Director, Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), with "assessment of the effectiveness of intelligence interrogations."

According to a March 2011 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (large PDF), the administration's High-Value Interrogation Group (HIG) is currently responsible for some of this research. The report states, "The HIG also has responsibilities concerning improving the training of interrogators and sponsoring research on interrogation." Presumably, that includes research on the "effectiveness" of interrogation methods.

How that research is conducted, and the ethics that inform such a project, are kept secret. Recently, however, one HIG researcher, psychologist Susan Brandon, who also works for DCHC, was known to be involved in research on the case of the supposed (and confessed) Iranian-American would-be assassin, Mansour Arbabsiar.

The HIG's tasking for interrogation research was echoed in remarks to the press by then Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in February 2010, according to a story by AFP.

An elite US interrogation unit will conduct "scientific research" to find better ways of questioning top suspected terrorists, US intelligence director Dennis Blair said Wednesday.

"It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area," Blair told the House Intelligence Committee, without elaborating on the nature of the techniques being tested.

A spokesman for Blair, Ross Feinstein, also declined to detail "specific research projects" but stressed that any such projects would follow US law, which forbids torture, and abide by internal review safeguards.

Newly Released Document Shows FBI Interrogation Advice Draws on CIA Torture Manuals

A 2010 FBI interrogation “primer” (PDF), apparently a fifth version of earlier FBI manuals dealing with “Cross-cultural, Rapport-based” “intelligence-oriented interrogations in overseas environments,” repeatedly draws upon advice from two CIA torture manuals, the 1963 KUBARK Counter-intelligence Manual and the 1983 Human Exploitation Resource Manual.

According to the National Security Archive, the KUBARK manual “includes a detailed section on ‘The Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources,’ with concrete assessments on employing ‘Threats and Fear,’ ‘Pain,’ and ‘Debility.’ “ Even so, the manual is on the FBI’s “Recommended Reading” list for agents conducting overseas interrogations.

The 1983 Human Exploitation manual, which has been connected with atrocities by Latin American governments, drew upon both KUBARK and U.S. Army Intelligence manuals, describing the interrogator as someone “‘able to manipulate the subject's environment… to create unpleasant or intolerable situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception.’”

The FBI document quotes the 1983 manual twice. While not referenced by name in the body of the document, the source is noted in the footnotes. One such quote from the 1983 torture document describes “the principle of generating pressure inside the source without the application of outside force.”

“This is accomplished by manipulating [the prisoner] psychologically until his resistance is sapped and his urge to yield is fortified,” the Human Exploitation Resource manual states, and FBI agents are so advised. The quote is in bold in the FBI instructions and reproduced as such here.

Meanwhile, the KUBARK manual is repeatedly mentioned in the body of the FBI work. “There are two purposes of screening according to the KUBARK Manual,” the “primer” states. According to the FBI, the “wise Interrogator” will follow “KUBARK Manual guidance.”

According to an ACLU blog posting, the FBI document was “written by an FBI Section Chief within the counterterrorism division.”

The rehabilitation of the KUBARK document began with an essay by U.S. interrogation consultant Colonel (ret.) Steven Kleinman. The essay was published in an Intelligence Science Board (ISB) December 2006 monograph, Educing Information. Kleinman noted KUBARK’s “disturbing legacy,” but added he felt the manual contained “the potential for lessons learned that could be derived from a highly controversial document.”

The FBI “rapport-based” manual repeatedly references another ISB document. Written in 2009, Intelligence Interviewing: Teaching Papers and Case Studies, includes in its two case studies a long discussion of a case of years-long isolation of a very senior North Vietnamese military official. While the interrogator in charge, Frank Snepp, said the treatment of this official ultimately disillusioned him about what the U.S. was trying to achieve in Vietnam, the ISB authors found Snepp had been successful in establishing “some operational accord” with the prisoner.

In his essay, Kleinman seriously played down the nature of the CIA’s manual, which had drawn upon years of MKULTRA research into use of drugs, sensory deprivation and the induction of fear and debility in interrogation subjects.

“Although criticized for its discussion of coercion, the KUBARK manual does not portray coercive methods as a necessary — or even viable — means of effectively educing information,” Kleinman wrote.

But in fact the CIA manual devotes fully a fifth of its instructions to coercive interrogation techniques, or torture, including isolation, “deprivation of sensory stimuli,” induction of physical weakness, use of “fear and threats,” hypnosis, and “narcosis”, i.e., use of drugs (including use of drugs as a placebo to fool prisoners).

Kleinman is the Director for Strategic Research for The Soufan Group, an organization named after ex-FBI agent Ali Soufan, and includes ex-FBI interrogators on its list of experts. It would seem that unwittingly Kleinman’s focus on what was of use to the legal interrogator in the KUBARK manual did not stop some FBI officials from allowing certain forms of coercive interrogation, i.e., reliance on use of isolation and manipulation of human emotional needs to get information and confessions. At times this is taken to extremes that amount to torture.

Kleinman himself is on the record as opposing all coercive interrogation methods. The 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee investigation into detainee abuse described then-Col. Kleinman's efforts to stop torture occurring at a JSOC interrogation facility in Iraq. The criticism of his KUBARK essay is not meant to imply that he supports in any way the kinds of coercive techniques described therein.

[Update, 8/6/12: Furthermore, it is worth noting, and after hearing critique regarding the first version of this article from Mr. Kleinman himself, that in his  essay on the CIA manual, Kleinman specifically says  "long-term isolation"  causes "profound emotional, psychological, and physical discomfort, and that such abuse would therefore fail to measure up to the standards for the treatment of prisoners as set forth in international accords and U.S. Federal statutes" (p. 138)]

FBI Uses Isolation to Achieve “Rapport”

The FBI manual also argues for the use of isolation to achieve rapport by leveraging the isolation or solitary confinement of a detainee.  Kevin Gosztola highlighted this aspect of the FBI “primer” in an August 2 article at Firedoglake’s The Dissenter blog.

What both Gosztola and the ACLU miss in their otherwise important commentary about the coercive isolation technique (even the CIA’s KUBARK manual recognizes isolation is a coercive technique, i.e., torture) is how the FBI intends to leverage the effects of isolation to achieve effects under their “rapport” paradigm. This psychological aspect of the use of isolation has not been generally publicized.

“The need for affiliation is one of the advantages the Interrogator has if a subject has been isolated from fellow detainees, “ the FBI “primer” states.  

In this matter, the FBI is following in the footsteps of the CITF doctrine it followed in DoD interrogations under an October 2003 directive that stated, “The use of isolation facilities will not be employed as an interrogation tactic; however, on a case-by-case basis it can be used as an incentive.” Perversely, the use of isolation under this directive was supposed to be “approved” by the detainee.

The KUBARK manual describes the anxieties, emotional discomfort and psychological regression that follow from enforced isolation, and how the interrogator exploits this situation (italics added for emphasis):

“As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject's mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact, and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role….

“At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject's tendencies toward compliance.”

The Appendix M Torture Virus Spreads to FBI Doctrine

Writing in an August 2 letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, ACLU Director Laura Murphy and Legislative Counsel Devon Chaffee make the important connection between FBI policy on using isolation and current Department of Defense interrogation policy.

As official interrogation doctrine of the Obama administration, Army Field Manual FM 2-22.3 (AFM), Human Intelligence Collector Operations made use of isolation part of their “Separation” technique, as described in its Appendix M.

Murphy and Chaffee write:

“By recommending that FBI agents ask the U.S. military to isolate detainees in its custody, the FBI primer appears to be encouraging the application of Appendix M of the Army’s interrogation manual—a controversial, restricted appendix that allows detainee isolation only in certain circumstances not involving prisoners of war. The FBI primer states that in a Department of Defense facility ‘a formal request from the FBI must be made to isolate the detainee’ and that this request ‘must be approved by the first O-6 in the chain of command.’ Appendix M of the military’s interrogation manual (which requires O-7 level approval) permits the use of isolation—as well as the placement of goggles, blindfolds, and earmuffs on the detainee—to ‘foster a feeling of futility.’ Experienced interrogators and human rights groups, however, have called for Appendix M to be revoked, questioning the technique’s effectiveness and highlighting the risk that its use will lead to serious human rights abuses.”

The abusive techniques of Appendix M, which also includes sleep deprivation and allowed environmental manipulations, along with the AFM’s allowance for use of fear techniques and even use of drugs, were approved in a 2006 Office of Legal Counsel memorandum for the files (PDF) by torture memo author Steven Bradbury.

Although President Obama, with the advice of Attorney General Eric Holder, revoked the 2002, 2005 and a few other OLC Bush-era torture memos, the administration never revoked the memo on Appendix M.

Use of isolation was something the FBI adopted early on, and its use was in evidence even in the early days at Guantanamo, where FBI Special Agent Ali Soufan was in charge of the interrogation of Mohamed Al Qahtani. While Al Qahtani’s interrogation was later the subject of an escalation of use of torture techniques by the military, which was itself a matter of some protest within DoD and FBI circles, while the FBI was in charge, Soufan had Al Qahtani placed in harsh isolation.

Soufan went so far as to remove Al Qahtani from the usual cellblock and built a special cell for him alone, meant to duplicate the hard isolation conditions Jose Padilla had been placed into in a Charleston, South Carolina Navy brig. When Soufan, NCIS Chief Psychologist Mark Gelles, and others protested use of other techniques of physical and psychological torture on Al Qahtani, their alternate proposal was to put the already near-psychotic and ailing prisoner in months more intense isolation.

The use of isolation to break prisoners has a long history. When two former prisoners in the USSR gulags, writing under the pen names F. Beck and W. Godin, published their account of Soviet torture in 1951 in a book entitled Russian Purge and the Extraction of Confession, they described the use of isolation at the start of their detention by the Stalin secret police:

“When a man was arrested he was completely isolated from the outside world….

“Each prisoner was carefully isolated from fellow prisoners who knew him. Consultation with defense counsel was unheard of, and in the overwhelming majority of cases no defense of any kind was permitted.” (pp. 40-41)

American sociologist Albert Biderman studied the effects of coercive interrogation on prisoners. His famous “chart of coercion” was taught to interrogators at Guantanamo. With its emphasis on isolation to deprive the prisoner of all social report and the will to resist, it could be a blueprint for modern FBI interrogation, minus Biderman’s emphasis on induction of debility.

For instance, Biderman’s chart describes demonstrating interrogator “omnipotence” and the use of threats and degradation of the prisoner. The FBI manual explicitly allows AFM “techniques” that play exactly on this, including “Emotional Fear Up,” “Emotional Pride and Ego Down,” “Emotional Futility,” and “The All Seeing Eye or We Know All.”

Changes in Procedures for Law Enforcement Interviews Overseas

Unremarked by the ACLU or other commentators is the FBI manual’s Annex B, “Conducting Custodial Law Enforcement Interviews Overseas.” The first FBI concern is evidence tainted by torture (though they don’t use the word “torture” anywhere in the document, at least in its redacted form).

The FBI counterterrorism Section Chief notes, drily, “Given the extensive media coverage of interrogation activities at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram and other facilities the threshold is particularly high for establishing that any statement you obtained overseas was not coerced in some way.”

Three sentences in the document are then redacted, and the text continues, “The assumption of the court may be that you used prior knowledge of the subject’s statements to obtain a statement which you are asserting is admissible even if you did not confront the subject with information he previously provided. Always keep in mind that you may one day be on the stand swearing that you had no knowledge of the subjects previous statements during intelligence interviews.” [Bold emphasis in original]

A second concern is the videotaping of interrogations. Recognizing that DoD routinely videotapes all interrogations, the FBI manual infers that the government may destroy or has destroyed such interrogation recordings.

“This creates a tremendous suppression hearing issue,” the FBI notes, “because the defense will become aware that the U.S Government (USG) taped the interview but the tape cannot be provided to the defense if a copy was not retained. The obvious accusation will be that the tape was destroyed to hide the fact that the confession was coerced. Seek out information on the videotaping policy for any facility you work in and document it.”

A third concern is the reading of rights to a subject held by a DoD or a foreign power, while emphasizing that the FBI agent has “no control” over such detainees and how they are held. While it requires the agents to document the subject’s condition, the manual does not forbid agents from interrogating subjects held in tortuous or cruel, degrading or inhuman conditions. In fact, the FBI manual’s section about “Recommended practices” regarding agents in such situations is entirely redacted.

A further distortion of normal FBI functioning concerns the advice of rights given to interrogation subjects held by DoD or another state.  The FBI uses a “modified advice of rights” form in such cases, which begins with standard wording regarding the right to remain silent, to have an attorney present.

The “modified” rights form continues:

“If you cannot afford lawyer, one will be appointed for you before any questioning, if you wish.

“Our ability to provide you with counsel at this time, however, may be limited by the decisions of local authorities or the availability of an American or qualified attorney.”

The “modified” form concludes the same as the FBI standard form, informing the individual that even if they talk without an attorney present, they “have the right to stop answering at any time.”

The modification of procedure is necessary because, as the FBI manual states, “there is no way that a detainee in DOD or foreign custody will be allowed access to an American defense attorney…”

Conclusion

The FBI is often contrasted with the military and the CIA in regards to its use of abusive procedures during interrogation. While eschewing “enhanced interrogation” techniques that amount to torture, such as waterboarding, close confinement, and stress positions, the FBI relies instead on psychological manipulations of “rapport” building procedures, while using the harsh pressure of isolation and sensory deprivation to break down the prisoner psychologically.

Isolation itself is a form of sensory deprivation, and is described as such in the KUBARK manual.

This form of psychological torture is added to standard police techniques, and in particular a form of interrogation procedure known as the Reid Technique. The FBI manual references several times the 1963 work on this technique, Criminal interrogation and confessions.

A 2009 study of this kind of interrogation technique in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology found “innocent people are sometimes induced to confess to crimes they did not commit as a function of certain dispositional vulnerabilities or the use of overly persuasive interrogation tactics.”

These are exactly the tactics the FBI uses, though they are then supercharged via use of isolation of a prisoner, which, as the FBI itself notes, “advantages” the interrogator by playing off the human need for “affiliation” or communication with others. Modern psychological and neuroscience investigators understand that this “need” is hard-wired in the brain, and deprivation of such social stimulation is a direct attack on the nervous system of the individual.

The failure to hold anyone accountable for the use of torture by U.S. officials, including accountability for those who planned and sanctioned such torture, meant that forms of torture were institutionalized in U.S. policy documents, such as the Army Field Manual.

The declassification of this FBI interrogation manual has allowed us to understand that such institutionalization has extended as well to the Department of Justice and the FBI. 

[This article has been altered to reflect feedback from Col. Steven Kleinman received after the story was first published.]

Cross-posted at MyFDL/Firedoglake

"Guidebook to False Confessions": Key Document John Yoo Used to Draft Torture Memo Released

Originally published at Truthout
by Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye

In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency's first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was "withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions," according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, "attorneys from the CIA's Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S."

One of the key documents handed out to Bush officials at this meeting, and at Principals Committee sessions chaired by Rice that took place between May and July 2002, was a 37-page instructional manual that contained detailed descriptions of seven of the ten techniques that ended up in the legal opinion widely referred to as the "torture memo," drafted by Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, three months later. According to Rice, Yoo had attended the Principals Committee meetings and participated in discussions about Zubaydah's torture.

That instructional manual, referred to as "Pre-Academic Laboratory (PREAL) Operating Instructions," has just been released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The document sheds additional light on the origins of the Bush administration's torture policy and for the first time describes exactly what methods of torture Bush officials had discussed - and subsequently approved - for Zubaydah in May 2002.

The PREAL manual was prepared by the Department of Defense's (DOD) Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) and used by instructors in the JPRA's Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) courses to teach US military personnel how to withstand brutal interrogation techniques if captured by the enemy during wartime. The manual states one of the primary goals of the training is "to give students the most reliable mental picture possible of an actual peacetime governmental detention experiences [sic]."

A US counterterrorism official and an aide to one of the Bush officials who participated in Principals Committee meetings in May 2002, however, confirmed to Truthout last week that the PREAL manual was one of several documents the CIA obtained from JPRA that was shared with Rice and other Principals Committee members in May 2002, the same month the CIA officially took over Zubaydah's interrogation from the FBI. As National Security Adviser to President George W. Bush, Rice chaired the meetings.

Rice and Bellinger have denied ever seeing a list of SERE training techniques. But in 2008, they told the Senate Armed Services Committee, which conducted an investigation into treatment of detainees in custody of the US government, that they recalled being present at White House meetings where SERE training was discussed.

Sarah Farber, a spokeswoman at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Rice teaches political economy, said she would pass on Truthout's queries about claims that Rice reviewed and discussed the PREAL manual to Rice's office. But Rice's office did not respond to our inquiries.

Guidebook to False Confessions

Air Force Col. Steven Kleinman, a career military intelligence officer recognized as one of the DOD's most effective interrogators as well a former SERE instructor and director of intelligence for JPRA's teaching academy, said he immediately knew the true value of the PREAL manual if employed as part of an interrogation program.

"This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence," Kleinman said in an interview. "If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using."

Indeed, in their newly published book "The Hunt for KSM," which refers to self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, investigative reporters Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer wrote that the torture of the top al-Qaeda figure resulted in false confessions about pending attack plans.

Kleinman, who has testified before four committees of Congress about interrogation and detainee policy - and the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" - has publicly called for a thorough investigation into how a program such as this could have found its way into the interrogation doctrine that guided US-sanctioned operations.

"In SERE courses, we emphatically presented this interrogation paradigm as one that was employed exclusively by nations that were in flagrant violation of the Geneva Conventions and international treaties against torture," Kleinman said. "We proudly assured the students that we - the United States - would never resort to such despicable methods."

Rice said she was assured the interrogation methods that were used on Zubaydah, which she and other officials signed off on, "had been deemed not to cause significant physical or psychological harm," according to written responses to questions about the origins of the torture program Rice provided the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Kleinman, however, said that's simply untrue.

"Dr. Rice is clearly an exceptionally bright individual, as were her colleagues. At the same time, however, they understood little about human intelligence gathering and even less about resistance to interrogation training. I simply don't understand how they could have promoted the assertion that, because these techniques have been used safely with tens of thousands of US military personnel in a carefully controlled training environment, they would also be employed safely in a real-world interrogation environment?" said Kleinman, who testified before the Armed Services Committee about the use of SERE techniques. "A critical distinction that has been consistently overlooked is that detainees have no idea whether interrogators are using [techniques like waterboarding] to intimidate them or to kill them. In a training environment, waterboarding would end as soon as you raised your hand, and the student could be absolutely confident that SERE instructors and medical personnel were always ready to respond to ensure they wouldn't be injured. In contrast, from the detainee's perspective, he is in the presence of the enemy."

Kleinman pointed to one of the techniques in the PREAL manual to demonstrate how the safety of detainees subjected to the methods was clearly not a cause for concern among the government officials who designed and approved of Bush's torture program. In a section describing the use of cramped confinement, one of the torture techniques Zubaydah was subjected to, the training manual says, "The maximum time allowed for a student to be in cramped confinement in 20 minutes." But the Yoo/Bybee torture memo says, "Confinement in the larger space can last up to eighteen hours; for the smaller space confinement lasts no more than two hours."

The PREAL document notes that the purpose of cramped confinement, like the 55-gallon drum and the water pit, is used to "demonstrate the reaction to uncooperative behavior, inconsistent logic, or to accelerate the physical and psychological stresses of captivity."

It also appears that James Mitchell, the psychologist under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of Bush's torture program, received some form of authorization to use cramped confinement and sleep deprivation in May 2002, the same month the PREAL manual appears to have been accessed and discussed among top Bush officials and the CIA.

The introduction of a cramped confinement box in May 2002 is what led Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who first interrogated Zubaydah shortly after he was captured, to leave the CIA black site prison in Thailand that month.

Soufan had complained to officials at FBI headquarters that Mitchell's interrogations of Zubaydah amounted to "borderline torture," according to a report released in 2008 by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine related to the FBI's role in harsh interrogations.

Soufan's partner on the other hand, FBI Special Agent Steve Gaudin, opted to remain at the black site prison. He told Fine's investigators that unlike Soufan, he had no "moral objection" to the interrogation techniques Mitchell subjected Zubaydah to because they were "comparable" to the "harsh interrogation" techniques he "himself had undergone" as part of the US Army's SERE training.

In his book, "The Black Banners," published last September, Soufan refers to the methods of interrogation Mitchell subjected Zubaydah to during May 2002 as "experiments."

Breaking Down the Prisoner

The CIA, apparently, was not legally authorized to subject detainees to some of the more extreme forms of torture described in the manual, such as immersion in an icy "Water Pit" and forced confinement in a 55-gallon drum or barrel, the purpose of which was to "demonstrate the reaction to uncooperative behavior and accelerate the physical and psychological stresses of captivity."

But other techniques cited in the PREAL instructional manual, such as walling, cramped confinement, facial slap, sleep deprivation, attention grasp, facial hold and stress positions were included in Yoo and Bybee's August 1, 2002 torture memo.

The manual also describes how the use of hooding (a form of sensory deprivation) and sexual humiliation can be used as a form of torture, which military interrogators employed against detainees at Guantanamo. Moreover, SERE trainees were also subjected to isolation, according to the PREAL manual (another form of torture detainees underwent), including a harsh form where the isolated prisoner was hooded and cuffed in what the manual called "Iso-stress." OLC, however, never signed off on isolation as a specific interrogation technique.

Where the PREAL manual and the torture memo differ is in the detailed descriptions of the purpose of subjecting a prisoner to these torture techniques. For example, the PREAL manual says the purpose of walling, where a prisoner is slammed against a "flexible" wall, would be to instill "fear," "despair" and "humiliation." The torture memo, however, states "walling" is a method used to "shock" or "surprise" the detainee.

The most controversial of the ten torture techniques used on Zubaydah - waterboarding - is not included in the PREAL manual. Waterboarding was cited in other SERE documents the CIA and DOD obtained from JPRA, according to an investigation by the Senate Armed Services Committee that probed the treatment of detainees in custody of the US government.

The PREAL manual also includes a lengthy description on the use of water as a torture method, such as "water dousing." That technique, which the manual says was used to "create a distracting pressure, to startle" and to "instill humiliation or cause insult," was not approved until August 2004, when the head of OLC, Steven Bradbury, drafted a second torture memo to replace the one by Yoo and Bybee.

However, high-level intelligence source told Truthout in April 2010 that Zubaydah was repeatedly doused with cold water from a hose (an example cited in the PREAL manual's of how water could be used to torture a prisoner) while he was naked and shackled by chains attached to a ceiling in the cell he was kept in at the black site prison in Thailand.

The harsh physical techniques included in the manual are consistent with notes written by psychologist Bruce Jessen for a SERE survival-training course more than two decades ago, which said enemies who captured US personnel used methods of torture, such as those outlined in the PREAL manual, as a way of gaining "total control" over the prisoner. The "end goal," according to Jessen's handwritten notes, was to make the prisoner feel "completely dependent" on his captors so they would "comply with [their] wishes."

The purpose of such dependence, according to Jessen, who worked with Mitchell in designing Bush's torture program, was to coerce the prisoner's cooperation, the better to use the prisoner for "propaganda, special favors, confession, etc." Jessen's handwritten notes provided the first look into the true purpose of the "enhanced interrogation" program and were the subject of an exclusive investigative report published by Truthout last year.

The PREAL manual also notes the importance of propaganda in the prisoner of war setting. For instance, in a mock torture scenario prisoners are brought before a "press conference" to answer questions from "reporters." According to the manual, "reporters play the role of legitimate American newspersons," raising the question as to whether professional reporters were recruited as part of the PREAL training.
 
"Found" in OLC's Files

The PREAL manual was first identified in a report released by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) in February 2010, which was the result of an investigation conducted by OPR over five and a half years into the legal work Yoo and Bybee did prior to writing the August 2002 torture memo. (Jeffrey Kaye was the first reporter to discuss the PREAL manual in a report published in Truthout in March 2010.)

The OPR report states that the "May 7, 2002" PREAL manual, marked "For Official Use Only," was found in OLC's files, but investigators said there was "no indication of how or when it was obtained."

Aaron Graves, a spokesman in DoD's FOIA division, said he did not know if the May 7, 2002, date at the bottom of each page of the manual meant it was drafted on that date, accessed from  a government hard-drive, or placed into OLC's files on that date.

Jason Darelius, a DoD FOIA officer, told Truthout Monday that the manual was cleared for release late last year and posted to DoD's FOIA reading room March 15. It was requested under FOIA by McClatchy Newspapers, but the news organization never filed a report about the significance of the document as it pertains to the origins of the Bush administration's torture program.

"Learned Helplessness"

The Justice Department's OPR report stated that interrogation methods US military personnel may experience after enemy capture differed from the mock prisoner of war scenarios SERE trainees underwent "in one significant respect ..." Quoting from the PREAL manual, the OPR report said, "Maximum effort will be made to ensure that students do not develop a sense of 'learned helplessness'" during role-playing scenarios.

That citation, we now know, can be found on page 4 of the PREAL manual, under "[P]re-Academic Laboratory Goals." It underscores how military and CIA interrogators deviated from the lessons of the SERE training when they subjected detainees to the same torture techniques used in the role-playing scenarios.

"Learned Helplessness" was one of the main goals of the Bush administration's torture program as overseen by Mitchell and Jessen. It is defined as "a laboratory model of depression in which exposure to a series of unforeseen adverse situations gives rise to a sense of helplessness or an inability to cope with or devise ways to escape such situations, even when escape is possible," according to the American Heritage Medical Dictionary.

The learned helplessness theory was developed by psychologist Martin Seligman, who discussed it in May 2002 at the SERE training school in San Diego, the same month Mitchell, who attended the lecture, began subjecting Zubaydah to various torture techniques. The CIA sponsored Seligman's lecture.

Brent Mickum, Zubaydah's habeas attorney, reviewed the PREAL document and said it confirms what he has long believed: that Zubaydah's torture took place prior to the issuance of Yoo and Bybee's August 2002 torture memo.

"This document confirms, in my view, that my client's torture was over before that memo was ever issued," said Mickum. "I can't go into detail and why that is the government can only explain. I have been muzzled wrongfully even though the government contends that everything it did was legal."

Echoing Kleinman, Mickum added he was also struck by the PREAL manual's extensive warnings to SERE instructors about the safety of trainees subjected to brutal interrogation methods.

"Without commenting about anything that my client told me about what was done to him, what I can tell you is that there is no correlation between the safe treatment of SERE trainees listed in this particular document and what happened to my client. None whatsoever."

Author's Note: When the Department of Defense released the PREAL manual last month, several pages were missing from the PDF file and the file also contained a number of duplicate pages. We contacted the FOIA office about the issue and officials there restored the missing pages, except for one: page 33, which a FOIA officer said he is unable to track down.

A Colonel Takes on the Torturers: More on SERE Torture Details

At the center of the bottom of the lowest circle of hell, one finds the souls abandoned to torture. They are placed so far from heaven and earth because they are totally forgotten. The witnessing of their torture is almost unnoticed, trivial, when matched against the "great" issues of the day.

And so it was that in a week of elections, economic meltdowns, and other shenanigans, a lonely U.S. Senator sat alone in the hearing room of his own committee and listened to an Air Force instructor and sometime historian, Col. Steven Kleinman, tell his fantastic tale of witnessing the migration of SERE-style torture to Iraq. Kleinman's testimony belies years of excuses from the government that claims Abu Ghraib's "excesses" were merely the work of a "few bad apples," or "behavioral drift" at worst.

Joby Warrick at the Washington Post told the story in his article, "Air Force Instructor Details Harsh Interrogations."

In dramatic testimony before a Senate panel yesterday... [Kleinman] gave a rare account of how the Pentagon adapted an Air Force training program to squeeze information from captured Iraqis.

What Kleinman witnessed in Baghdad in September 2003 prompted him to order a stop to three interrogations, and to warn his superiors that the military's interrogation practices were abusive and, in his opinion, illegal.

"I told the task force commander that the methods were unlawful and were in violation of the Geneva Conventions," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Senator Carl Levin's Committee has already established that techniques from the Defense Department's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program had been reverse-engineered by military psychologists into an "exploitation" or torture program of purported interrogation techniques. These techniques -- stress position, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, beatings, and more -- were gathered secondary to a Cold War propaganda program regarding "brainwashing" by the Soviets and Chinese, which programmatic elements were debunked by the government's own researchers. But never mind, the torture inoculation program continued for decades.

In 2003, Col. Kleinman, a long-time intelligence officer, was working with the Air Force Combat Interrogation Course and was DOD Senior Intelligence Officer for Special Survival Training. As of 2006, he was Reserve Senior Intelligence Officer and Mobilization Augmentee to the Director, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, HQ Air Force Special Operations Command. He is also an independent contractor for the MITRE Corporation, which works on "scientific" ways to "educe information" from prisoners.

The Colonel Says No to Torture

According to an AP report:

The special forces task force asked Kleinman's team to teach them the interrogation methods used in the SERE course. Kleinman refused. He was overruled by the task force's lawyers.

They then demanded that Kleinman's team demonstrate the techniques on an Iraqi prisoner. Kleinman again refused and again was overruled, according to testimony from retired Air Force Col. John Moulton II, Kleinman's commander at the time as the head of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency.

The interrogation went forward. Kleinman stopped it. He and his team subsequently were sent home by the task force, according to Moulton.

According to the Washington Post article, Kleinman "was shocked in 2003 to see the same harsh methods used haphazardly on Iraqis in a U.S. prison camp." The colonel said he witnessed detainees being slapped repeatedly, subjected to sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and stripped naked.

Col. Kleinman's protests to his superiors went unheeded. They agreed the "techniques" violated Geneva, but by then the government already had in place cover-your-ass legal memos citing the abuse of detainees as "legal" because they were "unlawful enemy combatants."

I commend Col. Kleinman for coming forward to testify, and for his actions protesting the torture of prisoners. However, I wish someone had asked him whether, as military trainer for JPRA, he or Moulton had knowledge of DoD's approach to JPRA/SERE in December 2001 about ways to utilize SERE's "exploitation" techniques in the interrogation of prisoners in Afghanistan. (I also wish someone had asked if contracting interrogators, such as those from CACI or Titan, had any contact with the SERE instructors.)

The timeline is of some importance, because it would prove criminal malfeasance by the administration in abusing prisoners prior to any determination (not made by them until February 2002) that such prisoners were "unlawful enemy combatants," and therefore a clear violation of international and domestic war crimes laws.

Kleinman's Revisionist History

While praising Col. Kleinman's stance in Iraq, I take exception to his description of the origins of SERE techniques. From the WP article:

Kleinman said the Air Force's training program was distorted into an offensive program. He noted that the harsh techniques were adapted from torture methods used by Chinese communists, and were never regarded as useful in eliciting intelligence. Instead, they break a prisoner psychologically and make him eager to say anything to stop the pain.

I have painstakingly documented elsewhere statements by U.S. researchers at the time (1950s) that Soviet and Chinese interrogation techniques were nothing unusual, and SERE techniques didn't necessarily derive from them. U.S. researcher Albert Biderman explained, in a 1957 essay entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War." Regarding the origin of communist interrogation methods, Biderman and his colleagues, working for the Air Force, concluded (emphases added):

It is that the finding of our studies which should be greeted as most new and spectacular is the finding that essentially there was nothing new or spectacular about the events we studied. We found, as did other studies such as those of Hinkle and Wolff, that human behavior could be manipulated within a certain range by controlled environments. We found that the Chinese Communists used methods of coercing behavior from our men in their hands which Communists of other countries had employed for decades and which police and inquisitors had employed for centuries....

It should be understood that only a few of the Air Force personnel who encountered efforts to elicit false confessions in Korea were subjected to really full dress, all-out attempts to make them behave in the manner I have sketched. The time between capture and repatriation for many was too short, and, presumably, the trained interrogators available to the Communists too few, to permit this.

While the origin of inhumane treatment may be a marginal issue for most, it is important to understand because discussion and utilization of modern torture techniques by the United States has, since its inception, been linked to disinformation by the government. In the case of the 1950s, the "brainwashing" scare, regarding POWs in the Korean War, was linked to a massive cover-up of the use of biological weapons by the United States in that conflict. See my article covering this aspect of the story, posted last July.

Kleinman's historical bias surfaced, as well, in an essay published in an essay on the CIA's KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual he wrote in 2006 for the Intelligence Science Board's report, "Educing Information." In it, he makes, for a historian, a remarkable statement:

The KUBARK manual offers unique and exceptional insights into the complex challenges of educing information from a resistant source through noncoercive means. While it addresses the use of coercive methods, it also describes how those methods may prove ultimately counterproductive. Although criticized for its discussion of coercion, the KUBARK manual does not portray coercive methods as a necessary — or even viable — means of effectively educing information. [p. 133]

Not necessary? The CIA manual expends twenty percent of its exposition upon coercive interrogation techniques. Not viable? Here's what the manual has to say about the "counterproductive" methods of torture:

Psychologists and others who write about physical or psychological duress frequently object that under sufficient pressure subjects usually yield but that their ability to recall and communicate information accurately is as impaired as the will to resist. This pragmatic objection has somewhat the same validity for a counterintelligence interrogation as for any other. But there is one significant difference. Confession is a necessary prelude to the CI interrogation of a hitherto unresponsive or concealing source.

Col. Kleinman stubbornly maintains that torture doesn't work, that torture, as he put it in an interesting interview, is poor at gaining operational information, and "largely counterproductive in that... [it] stiffen[s] the resolve of detainees under questioning and undermine[s] the stature of the U.S. on the world stage." Of course, Kleinman is correct, in so far as it goes.

But he seems to misunderstand the purpose of torture on a larger, political, military-operational scale. He misunderstands the use of torture to cow the populace, an important component of counterinsurgency work. He minimizes the opinion of many of his colleagues over the decades who in fact approved of coercive methodology. He would do well to study the techniques of Edward Lansdale, applied in the Philippines and Vietnam over a 20 year period, as described in John Prados's recent book, Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA. Like Kleinman, Lansdale was an Air Force officer. (He was also a CIA officer.)

I am in agreement with Col. Kleinman (it goes without saying) that torture is morally wrong, illegal, and should never be used. But I wonder how this military intelligence officer could work so long for special forces, intelligence agencies, and the military, and not understand the coercive nature of U.S. foreign and military policy in general. Perhaps Col. Kleinman could take on, as another project, a study of the use of torture by the U.S. in Vietnam, either directly, or in supervision of their Vietnamese allies. (He could title the paper, "Barriers to Success: Critical Challenges in Understanding the Current and Long-Standing Educing Information Paradigm.")

How SERE Took Over

For me, the picture is getting quite clear. When Bush initiated his "war on terror" in 2001, it consisted in sending in special operations forces into Afghanistan. This small scale kind of intervention on the ground was congruent with Rumsfeld's go-small kind of military. But special operations combat teams, while peppered with CIA personnel, like the ill-fated Johnny Spann, did not have the expertise in interrogating large groups of prisoners. There was a CIA program of psychological torture, exemplified by sensory deprivation, isolation, and the physical weakening or debility of the body (possibly through drugs), all meant to induce fear, psychological dependency and a weakened will in a prisoner. The program had been constructed by psychologists and psychiatrists as one outcome of the CIA's notorious MK-ULTRA program. It was codified in the CIA's KUBARK manual.

But the Special Ops teams in Afghanistan either didn't know KUBARK, or didn't have time to construct the proper environment for that kind of treatment. So they turned to the SERE program, who, as recent documents have made clear, aggressively courted the military for the assignment of reverse-engineering SERE and teaching it as coercive interrogation (i.e., torture). The Department of Defense and the White House, in a panic after 9/11, and staffed by incompetents and careerists with little sense of history or legal process, pushed the SERE-related torture, and then had their attorneys write memos to cover themselves legally after the fact.

The SERE-style techniques took off, though there was protest from interrogation professionals, like Kleinman, who well understood the counterproductive nature of that kind of treatment. Only later, as the CIA began to establish control over the "war on terror," and built a network of secret black prisons, did the SERE techniques recede somewhat into the background. A parallel process occurred at Guantanamo. The CIA utilized the worst of the SERE techniques, such as waterboarding, and propagated wide-scale knowledge of their use, mainly to instill fear of such treatment in prisoners, knowing full-well that induction of fear is a far more "effective" technique than physical brutality itself. At Guantanamo, a KUBARK-style prison routine was implemented, based upon isolation, psychological derangement, and the inculcation of dependency.

The Historical Meaning of Torture

Facts don't fall out of the sky. They are gathered based upon hypotheses, and if you are a historian or a social critic, with some narrative in mind. In a stepwise process of induction and deduction, one tries to determine what has actually occurred. The use of torture by the United States can only be understood as part of a decades long official program, involving well-funded covert study by the military and the academic establishment -- primarily physicians, psychiatrists, and psychologists -- in addition to the implementation of this program in a number of operational theaters, including Vietnam, Central and South America, Afghanistan, and the Middle East (among others).

The use of torture is closely tied to U.S. foreign policy goals. It is good to see the U.S. Senate try to take on the Pentagon and executive branch generally over this uncivil, criminal activity. Military critics, like Kleinman, or psychologist Michael Gelles, are to be commended for standing up against tremendous internal pressures within the organizations to which they belong. I also salute the courageous military attorneys working for little recompense and against tremendous odds to defend the charges made against the pariah-prisoners at Guantanamo, held without recourse to basic human rights.

I would hope all critics would agree that something as basic as stopping or banning torture involves both operational and political changes of a profound nature. One cannot happen without the other. And neither will happen, as the path of these investigations and hearings makes clear, without significant political, and perhaps, social struggle.

Also posted at Never In Our Names

Beware Misdirection on Torture Scandal (The "DDD" Story)

The New York Times had a front page article on the legal peregrinations of the Bush Administrations as it seeks safe harbor for its ship of torturers. The next day, the scandal spills out into official Washington, and the stubborn evil denizens at 1600 Pennsylvania trot out for a desultory press conference. There's the snarling, contemptuous Bush, explaining, “This government does not torture people.”

Away, in countless rooms in millions of houses, the populace reads the stories and sighs and does nothing. Politicians screech, and pundits blather, and the war their generation shouldered with both protest and calm continued its carnage. Slowly, the news media formed a tight narrative around the new scandal: Bush's Justice Department had found a way to legally, and yet secretly (and only in 2007 America can this occur without oxymoron), legitimate forms of torture too bestial to contemplate -- beatings, simulated drownings, freezing men half to death... you know, Bush had growled, interrogation techniques that were “tough, safe, necessary and lawful.”

But no one knew, no one could know, that in the bowels of CIA headquarters at Langley, a group of men and women were safeguarding a group of techniques that were already exposed, and already forgotten, that were carefully cozened, that men were trained in, that were meant to outlast the worst New York Times editorial or Congressional investigation. And if they were referred to, if anyone should have to whisper them, they could use the awful acronym that had referenced them for over fifty years now: DDD.

There are those, interrogation professionals, who know only too well how imperfect and imprecise the more violent methods of third-world torturers are. The Egyptians may wish to hang men from their arms until their sockets burst out of their shoulders. The Syrians may wish to attach electric wires to generators and to men's genitals, and crank up the current. The Uzbeks may want to drown men in boiling water, or rip their fingernails out. But the CIA knew such methods were not, well, scientific.

In 1956, in the pages of an obscure academic journal, Sociometry, I.E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow, and Louis Jolyon West published a classic work of the interrogation field, Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread). It was based on a report for the Study Group on Survival Training, paid for by the U.S. Air Force. The article states that "permission is granted for reproduction, translation, publication, use, and disposal in whole and in part by or for the United States government".

Who Were the Men Who Developed It?

Harry Harlow

Harlow was a Stanford educated psychologist. His career, however, unfolded mostly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He became President of the Midwestern Psychological Association, and President of the Division of Experimental Psychology in the American Psychological Association (APA). In 1958, Harry Harlow was elected President of the APA itself.

But what Harlow was most famous for were his experiments on maternal deprivation and isolation, utilizing monkeys. His famous wire/cloth "mother" monkeys, nicknamed "iron maidens" by him, demonstrated the profound need for affection and attachment in all primates. In later years, he was demonized by animal rights activists for his unethical experiments on animals.

The Wikipedia article on Harlow mentions the maternal-deprivation and isolation experiments on infant macaque monkeys, noting:

The monkeys were left alone for up to 24 months, and emerged severely disturbed....

The experiments were controversial, with some researchers citing them as factors in the rise of the animal liberation movement.

The standard biographical references fail to mention the DDD article.

I. E. Farber

Farber was a psychologist at the University of Iowa. He was researching the "Effects of Anxiety, Stress, and Task Variables on Reaction Time", and had already co-authored, at the time of the DDD essay, an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, "Conditioned fear as revealed by magnitude of startle response to an auditory stimulus".

Louis Jolyon "Jolly" West

Those of you who went to UCLA probably know the Louis Joylon West Auditorium at the Neuropsychiatric (or NPI) Building. West had been chairman of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and a controversial figure in his own right. Famously, he worked with Dr. Margaret Singer in a pre-trial examination of Patty Hearst. He also examined the imprisoned Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. Some of West's causes stamp him as a liberal: he was against the death penalty. He supported the sit-in protesters of the civil rights movement, and travelled to South Africa to testify for prisoners of the apartheid regime there.

Dr. West also participated in a symposium for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) in November 1956. It was titled "Methods of Forceful Indoctrination: Observations and Interviews", and I've written on it before. "Jolly" West told his Asbury Park, New Jersey, psychiatric audience that DDD consisted of "constant attempts to induce anxiety and despair".

The New York Times obituary of West, who died at 74 in 1999, describes this famous/infamous figure (emphases added):

...Dr. West was part of a panel appointed to find out why 36 of 59 United States airmen captured in Korea confessed or cooperated in charges of war crimes against the United States. What seemed to be a collapse of will led some to call the airmen cowards, and others raised the fear that the Communists had found drugs or mysterious methods to induce "brainwashing"....

"What we found enabled us to rule out drugs, hypnosis or other mysterious trickery," he once said in an interview. "It was just one device used to confuse, bewilder and torment our men until they were ready to confess to anything. That device was prolonged, chronic loss of sleep." That, combined with the constant fear of harm and the total dependency on their captors, led the airmen into startling and fairly long-lasting personality changes.

The Times article fails to mention Dr. West's links to the shadowy MKULTRA program of the CIA. He was linked as a CIA researcher into LSD in John Marks's The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, and in later documents the litigious Scientologists and others dug up, as West was active in anti-cult activities. But most importantly, as Chief Investigator of the Study Group on Survival Training, he co-authored the DDD article, which was to become the blueprint for a style of interrogation embraced by the CIA in its KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual circa 1963 (photocopies here).

Basics of Scientific, Psychological Torture

While today's headlines scream about waterboarding and beatings, CIA and military researchers had concluded two generations ago that such torture produced unreliable results. In addition, they left marks. Questions could be asked. Dead bodies, the "failures" of coercive interrogation, would have to be disposed of. But what if there were a way to torture someone without leaving any physical sign of outward mishandling: no bruises, no broken bones, no burn marks?

According to Farber, Harlow and West's analysis (hereafter referred to as BCD), the purported confessions of Air Force and Marine Corps airmen held by the Chinese communists during the Korean War, to the effect that the U.S. had used "germ warfare" as a military tactic, were to be explained by the abusive conditions of captivity and the stress these prisoners underwent. (Whether the confessions of the airmen were false or not is a matter of some controversy. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman's book, The United States and Biological Warfare, University of Indiana Press, 1999, makes a compelling case that they were not.)

BCD examined the various types of stress undergone by prisoners, and narrowed them down to "three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread".

Debility was a condition caused by "semi-starvation, fatigue, and disease". It induced "a sense of terrible weariness".

Dependency on the captors for some relief from their agony was something "produced by the prolonged deprivation of many of the factors, such as sleep and food... [and] was made more poignant by occasional unpredictable brief respites." The use of prolonged isolation of the prisoner, depriving an individual of expected social intercourse and stimulation, "markedly strengthened the dependency".

Dread probably needs no explanation, but BCD described it as "chronic fear.... Fear of death, fear of pain, fear of nonrepatriation, fear of deformity of permanent disability.... even fear of one's own inability to satisfy the demands of insatiable interrogators."

The bulk of BCD explains the effects of DDD in terms of Pavlovian conditioning and the learning theories of American psychologist Edward Thorndike. They also found the "collapse of ego functions" to bear some resemblance to "postlobotomy syndrome".

By disorganizing the perception of those experiential continuities constituting the self-concept and impoverishing the basis for judging self-consistency, DDD affects one's habitual ways of looking at and dealing with oneself. [p. 275]

BCD is full of nuggets of useful information, the kind that can explain material that otherwise appears insane. Take the painful stress positioning of prisoners documented at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run detainee prisons. BCE explains: it's all part of inducing dependency through expectation of relief, but in a diabolical way. Forced stress positions are a "self-inflicted punishment", one which increases the expectancy of relief via "voluntary" means. But the latter is "delusory... since the captor may select any behavior he chooses as the condition for relieving a prisoner's distress" [pp. 276-277].

This form of carrot and stick torture may not seem that sophisticated, but it is the use of basic nervous system functioning and human instinctual need that makes it "scientific" and effective. The need for sensory stimulation and social interaction, the need to eat, to sleep, to reduce fear, all of these are used to build dependencies upon the captor, using the fact that "the strengthening effects of rewards -- in this instance the alleviation of an intensely unpleasant emotional state -- are fundamentally automatic" [p. 278].

The CIA Perfects the Technique

This impairment of higher cognitive states, this disruption and disorganization of the very self of the prisoner, producing something like "a pathological organic state", but one "perhaps rendering the prisoner susceptible to relatively simple conditioning techniques", was subsequently modified and used by the CIA in its interrogations of countless individuals. If more brutal forms of torture sometimes were used, especially by over-eager foreign agents or governments, DDD remained the gold standard, the programmatic core of counterintelligence interrogation at the heart of the CIAs own intelligence manuals.

Chapter Nine of the CIA KUBARK manual, "Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources", describes coercive interrogation procedures as

designed not only to exploit the resistant source's internal conflicts and induce him to wrestle with himself but also to bring a superior outside force to bear upon the subject's resistance....

All coercive techniques are designed to induce regression.

The anonymous authors of KUBARK then quote the BCD article specifically:

Farber says that the response to coercion typically contains "... at least three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread." Prisoners "... have reduced viability, are helplessly dependent on their captors for the satisfaction of their many basic needs, and experience the emotional and motivational reactions of intense fear and anxiety....

The subheads to the chapter are evocative of the DDD paradigm: "Deprivation of Sensory Stimuli", "Threats and Fear", "Debility", "Pain", "Heightened Suggestibility and Hypnosis", and "Narcosis".

CIA Reformers Thread the Needle

It may be worth noting here that modern apologists for the CIA, who appear in the guise of reformers, such as Steven Kleinman, a historian who wrote on World War II interrogation practice, and was a former Air Force intelligence officer himself, are big advocates for "rapport-building" interrogation. They despise the "bad cop" stuff, the violence that sends even professional interrogators over the edge, and makes the prisoner a bloody mess of dubious information.

Kleinman wrote an essay on KUBARK for last year's "Educing Information" report for the Intelligence Science Board. In it, he makes, for a historian, a remarkable statement:

The KUBARK manual offers unique and exceptional insights into the complex challenges of educing information from a resistant source through noncoercive means. While it addresses the use of coercive methods, it also describes how those methods may prove ultimately counterproductive. Although criticized for its discussion of coercion, the KUBARK manual does not portray coercive methods as a necessary — or even viable — means of effectively educing information. [p. 133]

Not necessary? The CIA manual expends twenty percent of its exposition upon coercive interrogation techniques. Not viable? Here's what the manual has to say about the "counterproductive" methods of torture:

Psychologists and others who write about physical or psychological duress frequently object that under sufficient pressure subjects usually yield but that their ability to recall and communicate information accurately is as impaired as the will to resist. This pragmatic objection has somewhat the same validity for a counterintelligence interrogation as for any other. But there is one significant difference. Confession is a necessary prelude to the CI interrogation of a hitherto unresponsive or concealing source.

In other words, torture is used to test the veracity of information otherwise obtained during the normal course of counterintelligence work. Its use to "educe information" is also not without its hard-grained efficacies. The CIA is very clear on this:

And the use of coercive techniques will rarely or never confuse an interrogatee so completely that he does not know whether his own confession is true or false. He does not need full mastery of all his powers of resistance and discrimination to know whether he is a spy or not. Only subjects who have reached a point where they are under delusions are likely to make false confessions that they believe....

The profound moral objection to applying duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage has been stated. Judging the validity of other ethical arguments about coercion exceeds the scope of this paper. What is fully clear, however, is that controlled coercive manipulation of an interrogatee may impair his ability to make fine distinctions but will not alter his ability to answer correctly such gross questions as "Are you a Soviet agent? What is your assignment now? Who is your present case officer?"

So much for Kleinman's analysis. But what about other contemporary commentators, like Time Magazine's in-house ex-CIA man, Robert Baer? In a recent Time column, Baer rightly condemns Bush for his specious denial of governmental torture. He derides torture as ineffective, and a tool of political intimidation. But it's what he doesn't say that is important. By making waterboarding, slapping, and freezing of prisoners what torture is all about, the DDD paradigm of coercive interrogation is kept out of sight. This is the same strategy used with great effectiveness in the reissuing last year of the Army Field Manual for interrogation.

This new AFM was lauded for banning the beating of prisoners, threatening them with dogs, sexual humiliation, performing mock executions, electrocution of prisoners, and waterboarding, among other noxious techniques. But in an appendix to the manual, the following procedures are authorized for certain prisoners: complete separation, sometimes with forced wearing of goggles and earmuffs, for up to 30 days (after which approval for more must be sought); limiting sleep to four hours a day, for 30 straight days; and other concurrent techniques, including "futility", "incentive", and "fear up harsh". In the latter, fear within a detainee is significantly increased, through knowledge of the person's phobias, if possible.

Why "Enhanced" Torture?

In the press, and in the speeches of politicians on both sides of the aisle, the new AFM was praised as a model of reform. The CIA was urged to embrace the AFM's policies, but has demurred. Why, one wonders, as it's evident the AFM has maintained a core DDD operational capacity (isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, fear)?

One reason may be that when a prisoner doesn't know what to expect, or in fact expects something truly awful, that increases the captive's fear. Increased fear also enhances the negative effects of techniques like sensory deprivation. It is very likely that whatever is really done in dark CIA prisons, making it well-known that the CIA can waterboard you, or freeze you, or beat you is all about ratcheding up the Dread component of DDD. Similarly, indefinite detention has the effect of increasing the Dependency component of DDD: elimination of habeas corpus tells the prisoner "you have no escape". The prisoner depends on the captor for his life, if not the existence (in its earthly form) of his very soul.

While I believe this explains the CIA's stubborn adherence to "enhanced interrogation techniques", but there may be other, convergent reasons. It's difficult to know what goes on within the CIA, as its business is covert by definition, and misdirection, lying, and obfuscation are its tools in trade. Perhaps the CIA is holding out on its more atrocious forms of torture, waiting to pull an AFM-like manuever of its own, if it has to. It's also possible that the CIA -- a rogue governmental agency if there ever was one -- simply doesn't like to be told what to do.

But we citizens should not let induced ignorance become societal indifference. It is important that all elements of the U.S. torture program be exposed and made illegal. If the country can not rise morally to this, then a terrifying future lies before us.