Guantanamo Psychologist "Ban" Incomplete, Evidence of FBI Torture Ignored

While it is certainly a victory, or partial victory, to have psychologists removed from national security interrogations at Guantanamo, as James Risen reports in The New York Times, it turns out psychologists are not actually completely removed from that Cuban-based prison facility.

Note the careful wording of Risen's story (bold emphasis added):

The United States military has sharply curtailed the use of psychologists at the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in response to strict new professional ethics rules of the American Psychological Association, Pentagon officials said.

Gen. John F. Kelly, the head of the United States Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, has ordered that psychologists be withdrawn from a wide range of activities dealing with detainees at the prison because of the new rules of the association, the nation’s largest professional organization for psychologists. The group approved the rules this past summer.

Risen's article relates a statement by SOUTHCOM spokeswoman, Navy Cmdr. Karin Burzynski, which explains that the removal of psychologists was due to APA's new policy about psychologists and national security interrogations, and the military was concerned about possible licensing or ethics board charges for military psychologists.

Those new APA rules state: "in keeping with Principle A (Beneficence and Nonmaleficence) of the Ethics Code to 'take care to do no harm,' psychologists shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation. This prohibition does not apply to domestic law enforcement interrogations or detention settings that are unrelated to national security interrogations."

Hence, in my reading it seems as if psychologists could be allowed at Guantanamo, in order to advise on conditions of confinement insofar as such advice does not "facilitate" interrogation. Perhaps that is what General Kelly is referring to when Risen quotes him as ordering psychologists withdrawal from "a wide range of activities dealing with detainees," i.e., not from all activities dealing with detainees.

As almost a side note, Risen quotes DoD's Burzynski as saying that all interrogations have now ceased at Guantanamo, except so-called "voluntary interviews" detainees wish with make to officials. No one questions how, at a facility under total control by the military, with detainees kept under conditions of indefinite detention (which themselves constitute torture), such "voluntary interviews" can be offered.

According to Risen, APA officers will meet with administration officials from the Pentagon and the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) later this month. In Risen's article, APA's Senior Policy Adviser Ellen Garrison seems to stand up to the Pentagon, and tell them APA will not change its policy to please them.

But back in 2008, when the APA membership voted on a petition to ban psychologists from sites like Guantanamo, Ms. Garrison worked with now-resigned Ethics chair Stephen Behnke to craft a "con" statement calling for defeat of the petition. It will be interesting to see how the old guard APA bureaucracy, now working with some of its former opponents on the interrogation issue, will address outstanding issues surrounding implementation of the new "ban."

But, no one is arguing for a total "ban" of psychologists from Guantanamo. Furthermore, it remains to be seen how anyone will be able to tell if the Pentagon stands by its word, not to mention how anyone will monitor the CIA for adherence to APA's new policy.

"Banned" psychologists and paper opposition

Risen's NYT article states, "Psychologists will still provide mental health care for American military personnel who work at the prison, which is allowed under the association’s rules."

Such psychologists apparently will continue to serve in a clinical function for troops or other U.S. personnel serving at the base, and presumably, the prison. This is indeed in line with the letter and spirit of "Resolution 23B," which mandated the new association rules (PDF), including a provision that psychologists could remain "at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, 'black sites,' vessels in international waters, or sites where detainees are interrogated under foreign jurisdiction" if "providing treatment to military personnel."

That particular exception was a weakness with the resolution. Nevertheless, the resolution passed overwhelmingly by the APA's Council of Representatives last August was supported by anti-torture psychologists, such as those at Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR). But the resolution's "ban" still allows for Guantanamo to function, and for psychologists to work there if "providing treatment to military personnel." I believe that aspect was a compromise made to get support for the resolution as a whole, and has been a matter of compromise between pro-participation and anti-participation forces within APA for some years now. But with the new resolution passed changing rules on interrogations, there is no reason not to take up this broader issue now.

It is disturbing to see the responses to this development by press and anti-torture activists and not see any condemnation of the American Psychiatric Association (APsyA) or the American Medical Association (AMA) for their paper opposition to use of their membership in interrogations, as apparently psychiatrists (along with other nurses and technicians) are to replace psychologists in detainee interrogation, detention and/or detainee clinical matters.

Indeed, I've searched high and low to find any mainstream critic of U.S. interrogation policy or torture denounce the hypocrisy of APsyA or AMA in this matter. One partial exception is Stephen Miles, author of Oath Betrayed: America's Torture Doctors. Miles has called out AMA for a lack of leadership on the question of doctors working for the CIA interrogation program, and in general has assailed the field for its silence on medical participation in or planning of torture. But I have not seen a similar criticism by anyone of APsyA's failure to enforce its own policy banning psychiatrists from work at Guantanamo.

The fact remains, to date, no U.S. medical professional has ever been held accountable for their role in the "war on terror" torture scandal.

FBI interrogations and torture

Nor does the new policy stated by DoD have any bearing on interrogations conducted by CIA, foreign intelligence services, or the FBI. Obama's 2009 reforms of the Bush-Cheney era torture interrogations meant shutting down CIA's long-term black sites, and resting interrogation policy on the relevant Army Field Manual and ongoing reliance on rendition of "terror" suspects to interrogation and detention by foreign intelligence services ("extraordinary rendition").

But the Army Field Manual has been condemned by the UN's Committee Against Torture as containing abusive forms of interrogation, even as Congress has enshrined it in U.S. law. And human rights groups and legal groups have assailed the empty "assurances" of foreign governments that renditioned prisoners will not be tortured or abused.

Meanwhile, the role of the FBI in coercive interrogations is something that has been completely passed over. Previously, there were reports of torture of renditioned prisoners in the aftermath of the 2010 World Cup bombing in Kampala, Uganda. The FBI's activity in the latter investigation was said to be the largest between that time and 9/11. A number of prisoners renditioned from Kenya and Tanzania have accused the FBI of torture under interrogation in Uganda, including death threats and physical abuse by FBI agents.

One such affidavit of torture in my possession, by Kenyan national Yahya Suleiman Mbuthia, details such alleged FBI torture. The claims are consistent with charges by other prisoners also interrogated in the Kampala bombing.

"... [FBI] officers said, "Don't lie to us -- we know everything about you. We will finish your family -- first your wife and then your two kids..."

"... one (1) FBI officer, with blue eyes, cocked his gun as if he were going to shoot me, saying that there was a bullet inside with my name on it.... the same officer told me he would kill me or leave me to rot in Luzira."

"... I was severely ill-treated during interrogation, including having an FBI officer standing behind me hitting me on the back of the head with his fist... when the FBI wanted to do their dirty work, they would ask the Ugandans to leave, and by dirty work I mean beating, forcing me to sign papers and threatening me...."

"... during interrogation, if I refused to do something, I would be hooded for 30 minutes to an hour, during which time FBI officers would cock their guns as if they were about to shoot me..."

In a separate affidavit, another Kenyan national, Idris Magondu, who also was renditioned to Uganda and interrogated by both Ugandan police and FBI, wrote, "after the Court appearance at which I was not represented by legal Counsel, I was ordered to be remanded to Luzira Upper Prison where the FBI officers interrogated me several times... during the interrogations, the FBI officers shouted and threatened me, telling me that President Museveni had ordered his army to kill me, and the officers were banging on the table and were very aggressive."

According to Magondu, "one of the FBI officers had a pistol which he kept drawing my attention to."

In November 2012, Open Society Justice Initiative released a report on human rights abuses by the FBI in the wake of the World Cup bombing. In June 2013, the FBI responded to the OSJI report: "The FBI has found these claims to be without merit, because no evidence was identified by the FBI or any other independent entity to support them. The type of abuse alleged is wholly contrary to the FBI’s policy on interrogating suspects in foreign countries. The FBI’s policy is consistent with internationally recognized standards of conduct such as those set forth in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions."

OSJI noted in its own response, "the FBI has not provided sufficient detail regarding its investigation of the allegations of detainee abuse by the FBI in Uganda or its basis for the conclusion that the allegations are without merit."

FBI and Mitchell-Jessen

FBI officials also figured prominently in the APA-initiated "independent" review of APA's activities around the interrogation-torture scandal. The report produced by Chicago attorney David H. Hoffman (large PDF), despite mainstream accolades, was a limited hangout on the torture issue, as it minimized or explained away for top U.S. psychologists collaboration with the CIA. Such minimization included the fact a former APA president had been part of the partnership of Mitchell-Jessen and Associates, contractors to the CIA's torture machine. Hoffman found this fact unworthy of further investigation in relation to APA's ethics.

But Hoffman and his investigators uncovered a wealth of new information which APA subsequently has posted on its website. This material shows what the report only covers tangentially, that is, that top FBI psychologists worked closely with APA, CIA and the military in discussing interrogation matters, including detection of deception that could affected by use of sensory overload or use of drugs in interrogation.

At the close of 2004 report on a July 2003 APA-CIA-RAND workshop, "The Science of Deception: Integration of Theory and Practice," there is a list of participants, and we can see that top FBI psychologists, such as then-FBI Behavioral Science Unit Chief Stephen Band and Anthony Pinizzotto, attended along with other academics and CIA officers, including psychologist Kirk Hubbard and psychiatrist Andy Morgan, and CIA contractors James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.

The report was marked "Not for distribution."

"Research challenges" discussed at the 2003 meeting included "What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?" and "How might we overload the system or overwhelm the sense and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?"

Participants also discussed how to manipulate or increase subjects's anxieties. They also proposed research to discover "how interrogators might take advantage of some of the transference and counter-transference strategies used by psychotherapists."

A fuller analysis of this document awaits, but who will attempt it?

Hoffman passed without comment over this material. APA anti-torture activists (including former APA members who quit over the APA's interrogation policy) have not seen fit to comment either on the documented collaboration of the APA with key FBI officials, or on the release of this document. Even when it was revealed that James Mitchell had been invited as an expert to February 2002 FBI conference at its Quantico headquarters, links between FBI and the CIA torture program have been ignored. (Mitchell's invite came almost two months before he went to the CIA black site in Thailand and helped initiate the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" torture program.)

Part of the issue is that the mainstream narrative is that FBI agents, such as Ali Soufan, blew the whistle on CIA torture. While some FBI agents were queasy about torture techniques used by both the Department of Defense and the CIA, it seems there's a lot of house cleaning to do within the agency itself.

Even the story of Soufan's protest at Mitchell and Jessen's intervention in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah is more nuanced than normally reported. For instance, Soufan told a Senate panel in May 2009 that his interrogation techniques with Zubaydah were not compliant with Geneva Common Article 3. In fact, Soufan said none of the FBI's interrogations were so compliant after 9/11. (See video of back and forth between Soufan and Sen. Lindsey Graham, beginning at 2:17, downloadable at this link.)

Doctors who said "no"

During the Vietnam War, there were doctors who refused to serve a corrupt and evil military regime. Navy doctor, Captain Howard Levy was court-martialed, not because he refused to torture, but to even serve as a trainer for Special Forces personnel. According to a follow-up story from 2002 in the New York Times, Levy survived his court-martial to carve out a career in medicine.

How was Levy's refusal to serve the military fighting an imperialist war in Vietnam any different really from the question of whether or not doctors or psychologists or nurses should refuse to serve in Guantanamo or other black sites? Capt. Levy charged (according to a legal look at his case) "that had he trained the [Special Forces] aidmen he would have been complicitous in war crimes committed by Special Forces."

Nor was Levy alone. An essay from the book Military Medical Ethics documents that more than 300 U.S. medical students and young doctors signed a pledge not to serve in the Armed Forces in Vietnam during that conflict.

Will APA, which is rumored to be assembling a new ethics panel to consider future ethics policy, continue to allow psychologists to still serve military forces at Guantanamo or other interrogation sites? It would seem so, if one considers recent activities around reforming psychological ethics.

[Note on personal connection to this subject: I have at times been a member of PsySR, and remain active on their listserv.]

Forbidden Book: Douglas Valentine's "The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam"

Article originally posted at FDL/The Dissenter

On June 10, Open Roads publishers announced a new "Forbidden Bookshelf" series. Curated by New York University Professor Mark Crispin Miller, "Forbidden Bookshelf" aims to "fill in the blanks of America’s repressed history by resurrecting books that focused on issues and events that are too often left in the dark."

One of the first books published in the series is Douglas Valentine's invaluable, in-depth history of one of America's most egregious counterinsurgency, torture and assassination programs, as described in his 1990 book The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam.

The book is intricately and densely written, yet reads like a Rashomon-like detective story, as Valentine allows many of the actors involved speak for themselves. Never has such an in-depth look at a major CIA operation been written. You know who did what and when. The larger picture is not lost either, as, for instance, Valentine refers to earlier counter-terror programs that influenced Phoenix, such as the UK's counterinsurgency-terror program in Malaysia after World War II.

An encyclopedic attention to detail is Valentine's forte, as those will know who have read his two-volume history on the rise of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The Phoenix Program itself was created by the CIA as a way to coordinate numerous counterinsurgency programs during the Vietnam war, using methods of blanket surveillance, kidnapping and extrajudicial detention, interrogation and torture, and the paramilitarization of the police. The goal, beyond gathering of intelligence, was to eliminate -- via murder, mass use of informants, and terror -- what the U.S. called the "Viet Cong Infrastructure" (VCI), especially the top and middle levels of VC leadership.

Instead, Phoenix sank under the weight of institutional corruption and interagency competition, not to mention Washington's demand to produce results -- even if there were no results to produce. Phoenix itself grew out of the CIA's theory of "Contre Coup," or "counter-terror." The idea was the U.S. would match the terror used by opponent forces, but do it even better.

As Valentine wrote in a May 2001 article: "The object of Contre Coup was to identify and terrorize each and every individual VCI and his/her family, friends and fellow villagers. To this end the CIA in 1964 launched a massive intelligence operation called the Provincial Interrogation Center Program [PICs].... Staffed by members of the brutal [South Vietnamese] Special Police, who ran extensive informant networks, and advised by CIA officers, the purpose of the PICs was to identify, through the systematic 'interrogation' (read torture) of VCI suspects, the membership of the VCI at every level of its organization...."

As the Vietnam War grew in intensity and the U.S. intervention neared half-a-million troops, the CIA tried to rationalize their anti-terror campaign, uniting their counter-insurgency, police, and intelligence aims, while working closely with their fractious South Vietnamese partners.

What followed was murder and torture and graft and corruption on a grand scale. Untold thousands died and were tortured. The figures for those killed in the "counter-terror" program range from the CIA's admitted 20,000 to over 40,000.

A vast number of those killed had no connection with the VC at all. Valentine explains in his book, "most Vietnamese jailed under Phoenix were anonymous pawns whose only value was the small bribe their families offered for their release." The bribes didn't help thousands, as Phoenix managers imposed quotas as high as 1,800 "neutralizations" per month.

Phoenix and Torture

The PICs became an integral part of Phoenix, and torture was standard operating procedure, while CIA "advisers" stood by. Later, CIA personnel argued they had tried to teach their South Vietnamese partners more effective kinds of interrogation, but in practice, they often were present during torture sessions, and countenanced much of what went on. Indeed, CIA's Support Services Branch was in charge of training police Special Branch officers in interrogation methods.

Valentine describes the torture in the PICs: "rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour')," as well as suspension in air, beatings with rubber hoses and whips, "use of police dogs to maul prisoners,"and more. But as the first director of the PIC program in Vietnam, John Patrick Muldoon, told Valentine, "You can't have an American there all the time watching these things."

The situation will sound familiar to those who have followed the actions of U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who routinely turned over prisoners for torture to local authorities, while shadowy U.S. agents lurked in the background of the foreign torture chambers. (A direct report on such actions in Iraq can be seen in Peter Maass's video report, Searching for Steele. More recent revelations in a new FOIA of the CIA's interrogation manual from the 1960s shows such interactions with foreign intelligence and police services during interrogation and torture was something the CIA thought and planned about a great deal.)

When the CIA was in control of their own captives, they used the kinds of "touchless" torture they had perfected and described in their KUBARK interrogation manual. Valentine describes the torture of high-level North Vietnamese officer Nyguyen Van Tai, who was kept in a specially-built prison cell, kept in isolation and constant surveillance by hidden cameras, in a room painted "snow-white," all the while exposed to frigid air conditioning. The solitary confinement continued over four years without Van Tai ever admitting who he was.

"Colby's imprimatur"

In her August 2007 New Yorker article on the CIA black sites, Jane Mayer noted the interest of the CIA in the Phoenix Program as a model for the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

"A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance," Mayer wrote. "But, after September 11th, some CIA officials viewed the program as a useful model."

While as a work of history The Phoenix Program is one of the most important books ever written on the CIA and the military, on the birth of US "counter-terror" policy, and government sponsored torture and assassination programs, its relevancy to post-9/11 history is self-evident. Anyone trying to understand the chaos and crimes committed by US and associated forces in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars must know this book.

There's a good reason national security historian and author John Prados has called Phoenix a "must read." Heavily researched over a number of years, more than any other book I know of about the period (with Nick Turse's book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, a close second), Valentine's book relied on over 200 interviews with participants, including top CIA and special forces personnel. How the author obtained such access, and what happened as a result is a story in itself.

Valentine described the story in an email exchange with The Dissenter:

"I began work on The Phoenix Program in the summer of 1984," Valentine wrote. "I approached the subject from two angles. First, I made a direct approach to William Colby, the former Director of the CIA and the individual most closely associated with Phoenix, based on his defense of the program before several Congressional committees. Colby agreed to help and referred me to several CIA officers who played prominent roles in Phoenix. These former, and in some cases current, agents spoke openly to me, simply because I carried Colby’s imprimatur.

"Colby generated access lasted into 1987, when I started to notice doors closing and people avoiding me. I’d always known it would happen sooner than later, and I’d pretty much made the rounds, so it didn’t bother me too much. I’d hustled the CIA, I’d gotten inside its walls and rummaged around, and now the CIA was going to exact its revenge. That’s just how it works. If you fuck with he bull, you get the horns. Everyone knows that.

"I also got asked by CIA officer Bob Wall to join the CIA before the door slammed shut altogether.

"But I wasn’t ready to quit, and I wanted to back the CIA off a bit, so I filed a Privacy Act request, and in 1992 I got some results, thanks to the ACLU and a sympathetic judge in the federal district in Springfield, Massachusetts."

"It may cause damage"

More of the story is documented in John Prados' book, The Family Jewels:

"Elements at Langley became uncooperative after one retiree asked CIA lawyers, in the summer of 1986, what things were safe to talk about. When a Publications Review Board lawyer checked to see whether Phoenix was off-limits (the Board had previously cleared Phoenix material in works by Colby himself and agency officer Ralph McGehee), he was advised to caution interviewees not to talk to Valentine....

"By April 1988 the Publications Review Board was advising clandestine service officers of a concern that Valentine’s 'forthcoming book will contain so much detailed information about Agency operations and officers that... it may cause damage,' and asking that senior management of the Directorate of Operations should have the entire matter brought to their attention. Spooks, including some in the ostensibly impartial Inspector General’s office, were ranging the halls telling each other that the author was bad news and hoping they might escape his attention. Valentine eventually discovered this stonewalling due to the reticence of CIA veterans—and the materials quoted here emerged in the course of legal discovery in the lawsuit Douglas Valentine brought against the Central Intelligence Agency."

Valentine has posted online some of the legal documents from his lawsuit against the CIA. His papers collected in the writing of the book are held by the National Security Archives, and available to researchers. Many of his taped interviews, including interviews with William Colby and other senior Phoenix personnel, can be heard online (thanks Cryptocomb.org).

What Phoenix Wrought

While a good knowledge of the Phoenix Program in necessary to understand how U.S. counterinsurgency acts in reality in countries around the globe, in a new introduction for the Open Roads edition of the book, Valentine writes about the corrupting influence of Phoenix upon democratic processes domestically.

Valentine speaks of the "insidious" spread of Phoenix methods in the United States for the purpose of "the political control of its citizens through terrorism, on behalf of the rich military-industrial-political elite who rule our society."

"Indeed, America's security forces were always aware of the domestic applications of the Phoenix," Valentine writes, "and the program has not only come to define modern American warfare, it is the model for our internal 'homeland security' apparatus as well. It is with the Phoenix program that we find the genesis of the paramilitarization of American police forces in their role as adjuncts to military and political security forces engaged in population control and suppression of dissent."

For Valentine, who makes a compelling case, the building of Guantanamo, the use of black sites and torture, the provision -- even as late as 2013 -- for the indefinite detention of Americans and other "war on terror" prisoners, "was easy to predict," if you knew about Phoenix.

I am grateful to Doug Valentine and Mark Crispin Miller for giving The Phoenix Program a new publishing life, to help educate a new generation, which faces a fight against forces of state repression every bit as difficult and important as any faced in this country's history.

Other books released as part of Open Road Media's "Forbidden Bookshelf" series include Christopher Simpson's landmark history, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy; The Search for an Abortionist: The Classic Study of How American Women Coped with Unwanted Pregnancy Before Roe v. Wade by Nancy Howell Lee, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football by Dan E. Moldea; and The Lords of Creation: The History of America’s 1 Percent by Frederick Lewis Allen. More titles are promised in the near future.

The Most Secret Place on Earth: the CIA's Covert War on Laos (video)

The following is an amazing must-see documentary by German documentary film-maker Marc Eberle. It was released in 2008, but I don't believe it got much attention, certainly not in the U.S. (According to one source, the film was "screened at ten international film festivals and in German cinemas early 2009 and was nominated for the Golden Panda at Sichuan intl. Film Festival, China, the History Makers’ Award, New York, the Banff World Television Award, Canada, and the North German Film Award." It's currently posted on YouTube. Hopefully it stays up there. (H/T Doug Valentine)



From a review of the film by Andrew Nette:

PHNOM PENH, Aug 22, 2008 (IPS) - It was known as the ‘secret war’, a covert operation waged by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) throughout the sixties and early seventies against communist guerrillas in Laos.

And the most secret location in this clandestine war was the former CIA air base of Long Chen, in central Laos, a place that remain off limits even today.

A new film, ‘The Most Secret Place on Earth’, to be released in cinemas across Europe later this year, explores this little known conflict.

The film, which previewed for the first time in Phnom Penh in mid-August, includes images of Long Chen shot by the first Western camera crew to enter the base since the communists took control of the country in 1975.

"I first got the idea to do the film when I visited the Plain of Jars in Laos in 2002," recalled Marc Eberle,36, the German director in an interview with IPS.

"You could still see the craters from the air bombing and unexploded ordnance was everywhere."

"Then I heard about Long Chen and the fact that no one had got there since the war and I thought, how do I visit and how do I make a film about it?"

Little is known about the Lao conflict despite the fact that it remains the largest and most expensive paramilitary operation ever run by the U.S.

It was completely run by the CIA using largely civilian pilots from the agency’s own airline, Air America, and mercenaries recruited from the Hmong, an ethnic tribe living in mountainous areas in central and northern Laos.

Despite being the centre of the covert operation and, at its peak, one of the world’s busiest airports with a population of 50,000 people, Long Chen’s location was never marked on any map.

"I found it bizarre that at one time this was the second biggest city in Laos and it was completely secret," Eberle says.

Long Chen remains off limits to foreigners and most Lao due to clashes with remnants of the CIA’s Hmong army. Until recently it formed part of a special administrative zone under the direct control of the Lao army.

Renewed interest in the Laos’ secret war was briefly rekindled in 2003 when two Western journalists made contact with members of the Hmong resistance, the first white people they had seen since the CIA abandoned them 27 years ago.

Although pictures from the encounter were printed in Time Asia and won a world press award, U.S. media failed to pick up the story and it died....

"Laos was the progenitor of the way America fights wars in the 21st century," [Eberle] says.

"Outsourcing the war to private companies, gathering public support by falsifying intelligence and documents, embedded journalism and automated warfare including the use of so-called ‘smart weapons’, all these methods were first tested in Laos."

The conflict began in the late fifties, as Washington sought to counter communist Pathet Lao forces and their North Vietnamese allies who had began building the Ho Chi Minh trail through the jungles running down the eastern border of Laos.

The operation was placed under CIA control to get around Laos’ supposed political neutrality and the conditions set by the Geneva Accords.

Vang Pao, then an officer in the Royal Lao Army, was recruited in 1960 to lead the Hmong troops drafted to fight the communists, which at the peak of the fighting numbered up to 30,000.

The largest of hundreds of airstrips built by the CIA throughout Laos, Long Chen was established soon after.

The Most Secret Place examines the conflict through the stories of players involved in the covert, diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, including former diplomats, CIA officers and Air America pilots.

It also draws on critics such as Alfred McCoy, author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and a reporter in Laos at the time, and Fred Branfman, an aid worker turned anti-war activist who worked to expose the conflict.

Ordinary Lao people at the receiving end of the world’s most technologically sophisticated military machine get a chance to tell their story....

This film’s analysis sets it apart from other books and documentaries on the subject, most of which justify the conflict, lauding the CIA operatives and their Air America pilots as heroes.

The reality, as Alfred McCoy says towards the end of the film, was very different. "We destroyed a whole civilisation, we wiped it off the map. We incinerated, atomised human remains in this air war and what happened in the end? We lost."

The covert nature of the conflict meant that U.S. forces were able to ignore virtually all the rules of engagement operating in Vietnam. Every building was a potential target and the civilian toll was huge.

The situation grew worse in 1970 when U.S. President Nixon authorised massive B-52 bombing strikes on Laos, which remained classified information until many years later.

American planes dropped an average of one planeload of bombs on targets in Laos every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years, making it the most heavily bombed country on earth per capita in the history of warfare....

"Marc Eberle has previously directed award-winning documentaries for ARTE, Discovery Channel, NDR, WDR, SWR, BR, MDR and ZDF in Oman, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. He holds an MA in Film and TV from Royal Holloway, University of London." (Link)

Compensate the Victims! 50th Anniversary of Start of US Chemical Warfare Program in Vietnam

Also posted at FDL/The Dissenter

As Thomas Jefferson School of Law professor Marjorie Cohn notes at CommonDreams, "Today marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the chemical warfare program in Vietnam without sufficient remedial action by the U.S. government." More than 3 million people, including Vietnamese, Vietnamese-Americans, US veterans, and their children have either died, sickened or been disabled, and their children may, too, as the result of the wide-scale use of chemical agents by US forces during the Vietnam War.

From 1961 to 1971, approximately 19 million gallons [80 million liters] of herbicides, primarily Agent Orange, were sprayed over the southern region of Vietnam. Much of it was contaminated with dioxin, a deadly chemical. Dioxin causes various forms of cancers, reproductive illnesses, immune deficiencies, endocrine deficiencies, nervous system damage, and physical and developmental disabilities.

Among the many war crimes conducted by the United States, its use of biological agents in Vietnam may have been the worst. According to a 2008 report in The Globe and Mail, "Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed by the defoliants, 500,000 children have been born with defects from retardation to spina bifida and a further two million people have suffered cancers or other illnesses. Yet they have received no compensation from those who produced the chemicals and those who made them a weapon of war."

When the white powder started falling from the sky, the soldiers were puzzled. Usually the American planes dropped bombs. Now, they were unleashing clouds of something that looked like fog, smelled like garlic and burned their eyes.

“The whole earth was covered with it,” remembers Tong Van Vinh, who was a 26-year-old truck driver in the North Vietnamese military at the time. “We thought they were dropping smoke bombs on us. We didn't know it was a chemical"....

First sprayed in 1968, Mr. Vinh was plagued by muscular and skeletal disorders. But after the war ended in 1975, his health deteriorated rapidly. By 1994, he was paralyzed and spent six months in hospital, being fed liquids through his nose. He recovered, but not enough to work on his rice farm. Today, his voice is hoarse, he can't swallow solid food, his spine is numb and often he is too weak to walk or even to turn over in bed.Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2011

Now, Cohn reports, Congressman Bob Filner has introduced House Resolution 2634, the Victims of Agent Orange Relief Act of 2011. The bill would "provide crucial assistance for social and health services to Vietnamese, Vietnamese-American, and U.S. victims of Agent Orange."

AP Repeats Fable: “CIA never had been in the interrogation and detention business”

Originally posted at Firedoglake/FDL

In an otherwise interesting article summarizing much of what is wrong with the non-accountability policies of the U.S. state when it comes to punishing its torturers, Associated Press reporters Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo repeat in passing an old canard about the CIA’s previous activities in regards to interrogation.

The CIA had never been in the interrogation and detention business, so agency lawyers, President George W. Bush’s White House and the Justice Department were writing the rules as they went.

While the comment may have been made in passing, and Goldman and Apuzzo mindlessly accepted a piece of history they were told, the significance of the statement is of more than passing interest, as it provides the framework for understanding the entire episode of torture and detention in the Bush II years, not to mention what is happening now under President Obama, at least in regards to the CIA. The article doesn’t mention that key Pentagon officials, not least Donald Rumsfeld, who has a self-serving and well-publicized biography just published, and many generals, admirals, and other officers, as well as officials of the Defense Intelligence Agency and JSOC, have also escaped punishment for their actions in the Defense Department torture and detention scandal.

As the article points out, a number of key CIA officials in the Obama administration were themselves key actors in the rendition and torture program of the CIA. Marcy Wheeler has nicely summarized Goldman and Apuzzo’s list. But the intrepid AP reporters — they spend a couple of paragraphs explaining why they took the supposedly courageous step of mentioning the first names of CIA agents (pseudonyms anyway, at least in one case that I know of) — are off the mark in believing this non-accountability is something new. The promotions and the rewards are standard operating procedure for a government that has used the CIA as a praetorian guard and shock troops for U.S. control abroad.

Not in the Interrogation Business? How About KUBARK?

There have been a number of excellent histories of CIA research into and operational use of torture. One of the most recent was Professor Alfred McCoy’s A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. Another excellent resource is H.P. Albarelli’s long investigation into the CIA killing of DoD Special Operations Division researcher Frank Olson, published last year. (Albarelli also was the fascinating subject of an FDL Book Salon last year, too.)

These authors, and there are plenty of others as well, detail the decades-long research project into coercive interrogation and torture that was undertaken by the CIA and the Defense Department, going back to the immediate post-World War II period. The research undertaken in such programs as Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, MKCHICKWIT and others, utilized both CIA and academic contract researchers to study the effects of drugs like mescaline and LSD, sensory deprivation, isolation (such as inflicted upon alleged Wikileaks leaker Bradley Manning), stress positions, dietary and environmental manipulation, and numerous psychological and physical stressors on prisoners under their control.

The research was well-advanced by the early 1960s, when the CIA produced their secret manual of “Counterintelligence Interrogation”. Known as by its CIA in-house acronym KUBARK, one section of the manual is specifically dedicated to a discussion of “coercive counterintelligence interrogation of resistant sources.” CIA noted that “detention in a controlled environment and perhaps for a lengthy period is frequently essential to a successful counterintelligence interrogation of a recalcitrant source,” and mentions techniques such as “bodily harm”, “deprivation of sensory stimuli,” hypnosis, use of threats and fear, as well as situations where “medical, chemical, or electrical methods or materials are to be used to induce acquiescence.”

Even the use of photography in the torture of prisoners was discussed in the KUBARK manual, which noted “The interrogation room affords ideal conditions for photographing the interrogatee without his knowledge by concealing a camera behind a picture or elsewhere.”

The KUBARK methods were later used, along with Army manuals compiled from the U.S. military’s Vietnam experience -- part of a still quite secretive “Project X” -- into a “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual” distributed by U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) to military and intelligence organizations in five Latin American countries (Peru, Columbia, Ecudaor, El Salvador, and Guatemala) in the 1980s. The Project X material had been stored at the Army intelligence center at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona.

The torture techniques were also taught, even as late as 1991, to military and intelligence officers from throughout Latin America at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. For reference, see the DoD 1992 report on the Exploitation manuals delivered to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (PDF).

In 2002, SOUTHCOM became the military command responsible for oversight of the detention and torture policies at the new Guantanamo detention facilities. The provenance of the Guantanamo techniques from within the CIA can be clearly established, although military research and experimentation also played a significant role. The use of military torture survival schools (known today as SERE school) as laboratories for studying such techniques can be documented back to the 1950s.

CIA Detention Centers Predate the “War on Terror”

The CIA has had extensive experience in running detention centers, and was well-known for assisting and helping staff foreign military and intelligence services’ interrogation and detention centers. No full history of this activity is available, but there are plenty of references sprinkled about. An article by investigative journalist Douglas Valentine report quotes John Patrick Muldoon, “the first director of the CIA’s PIC [Province Intelligence Committee] Program in Vietnam,” that “[t]here was a joint KCIA-CIA interrogation center in Yon Don Tho, outside Seoul.”

The PIC program itself revolved around detention centers set up by the CIA in the hundreds across South Vietnam. The PICs became an integral part of the U.S. Phoenix Program, which tortured and murdered tens of thousands of people during its reign of terror in Vietnam.

In December 1970, U.S. and South Vietnamese forces captured a high North Vietnamese security officer, Nguyen Tai. According to the story as it is related on the CIA’s own website, Tai was tortured by the South Vietnamese, and resistant to this brutal treatment, he was taken into custody by the CIA, where he was held in CIA control for a number of years. His chief interrogator was “Peter Kapusta, a veteran CIA Soviet/Eastern Europe counterintelligence specialist with close ties to the famed and mysterious chief of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton.”

In early 1972, Tai was informed he was being taken to another location to be interrogated by the Americans. After being blindfolded, he was transported by car to an unknown location and placed in a completely sealed cell that was painted all in white, lit by bright lights 24 hours a day, and cooled by a powerful air-conditioner (Tai hated air conditioning, believing, like many Vietnamese, that cool breezes could be poisonous). Kept in total isolation, Tai lived in this cell, designed to keep him confused and disoriented, for three years without learning where he was.

The CIA has been involved in vetting and help establish entire intelligence establishments, from the Korean CIA to the former SAVAK of the Shah, to innumerable Latin American agencies. As John Marks has documented, the CIA even sent its psychologists to vet the operatives for use in these establishments.

On a smaller scale, the CIA has run a series of so-called “safe houses” that included small detention facilities. The recent reports concerning secret CIA prisons in Poland and Lithuania appear to describe facilities that are not much more than slightly elaborated or enlarged safe houses. For instance, the description of the New York and San Francisco “safe houses” used in the CIA’s MKULTRA experiment, Operation Midnight Climax, are highly suggestive of the kinds of regimes set up by the CIA in Thailand, Poland and elsewhere, complete with two-way mirrors, recording and bugging equipment, drugging facilities, etc.

Some researchers have charged the CIA with the use of “terminal experiments” at its various detention facilities, though this is hard to document (even if the discussion did reach the pre-9/11 pages of the New York Times).

It is very hard, if not impossible, to square the myth of CIA incompetence and inexperience with interrogation and running detention centers with the historical record. Goldman and Apuzzo are only repeating the establishment line concerning the CIA scandal, albeit, perhaps with good intentions, and with the aim of bringing some accountability to bear upon the process. But they and other reformers will be forever confused and stymied by the policies by high government officials protecting these torturers. In this, we see that responsibility for torture goes to the highest levels of the U.S. political establishment.

War Criminal Kissinger Top Speaker at State Department Conference

There was also a deficiency in imagination likely to circumscribe the value of any study by Kissinger of Kissinger. Asked about his role in the Cambodian war, in which an estimated five hundred thousand people died, he’d said, "I may have a lack of imagination, but I fail to see the moral issue involved." — Joseph Heller, Good as Gold (Kissinger’s original quote is from William Shawcross’s Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia)

Fred Branfman has a great article up over at AlterNet pillorying the State Department’s invitation to Henry Kissinger to address a conference on "the American Experience in Southeast Asia, 1946-1975." The conference was scheduled for September 29-30 at the George C. Marshall Conference Center at the U.S. Department of State. Along with bona fide war criminal Kissinger, the other invitees included current Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, and Former Deputy Secretary of State, and Former Director of National Intelligence John D. Negroponte.

It was only last April here at The Seminal/Firedoglake that I reported on the declassification of a 1976 State Department cable from Henry Kissinger to "his assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, Harry Shlaudeman, to cancel a formal demarche to the Uruguayan government, protesting the assassinations and other activities of Operation Condor." Only five days later, former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronnie Moffat were assassinated on the streets of Washington, D.C. by a CIA-supported Chilean secret police killer.

But, as the Obama administration rehabilitation of the odious Kissinger demonstrates, memory is short in Washington, even when there is blood on the streets… unless that blood can be turned in for demagogic currency, as is the case with the deaths on 9/11. To have Kissinger honored as an authority on the Indochinese War is an obscenity of the first order. Branfman recalls some of the essential history:

Kissinger orchestrated the most massive bombing in world history, dropping 3,984,563 million tons on an area inhabited by some 50 million people, twice the 2 million tons dropped on hundreds of millions through Europe and the Pacific in World War II. He dropped 1.6 million tons on South Vietnam, as many as Lyndon Johnson at the height of U.S. involvement; quadrupled the bombing of Laos, from 454,200 to 1,628,900 million tons; initiated widespread bombing of previously peaceful Cambodia, including B52 carpet bombing of undefended villages, for a total of 600,000-1 million tons; and vastly expanded the bombing of civilian targets in North Vietnam….

In Cambodia, Kissinger told Alexander Haig to undertake "a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies or anything that moves," the clearest possible violation of international law requiring the protection of civilians. Two million people in Khmer Rouge zones, as estimated by the U.S. Embassy, were driven underground by massive U.S. bombing that featured regular B52 carpet-bombing of undefended villages.

But when it comes to crimes, we’re just getting started here. Christopher Hitchens positioned part of his career as a would-be prosecutor for war criminal Kissinger. A quick review of just the first part of his March 2001 article at Harpers, "The Making of a War Criminal," notes Kissinger’s activities. For instance, there was the "recruitment and betrayal of the Iraqi Kurds, who were falsely encouraged by him to take up arms against Saddam Hussein in 1972-75, and who were then abandoned to extermination on their hillsides when Saddam Hussein made a diplomatic deal with the Shah of Iran…" Or consider "Kissinger’s orchestration of political and military and diplomatic cover for apartheid in South Africa." Or read Hitchen’s detailed, documentary discussion of Kissinger’s brain-trusting for assassination and coup plotting in Chile.

What Has Hillary Wrought?

Of course, Hillary Clinton deserves her own share of obloquy for inviting Kissinger and friends, including former Kissinger protege Holbrooke and the latter’s former Saigon Foreign Service roommate, the unsavory John Negroponte. (Negroponte worked at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon from 1964-68… uh huh.) One could write an entire column about the war crimes of Mr. Negroponte, who, according to the introduction by the National Security Archive (NSA) to a slew of documents implicating him, as former U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s "sought to undermine regional peace efforts" in the Nicaraguan Civil War. NSA also cites "multiple reports of meetings and conversations [by Negroponte] with Honduran military officers who were instrumental in providing logistical support and infrastructure for CIA covert operations in support of the contras against Nicaragua."

Holbrooke, of course, was recently implicated in a controversy with General Stanley McChrystal over policy in Afghanistan. MrChrystal got the heave-ho for being injudicious in his comments to a Rolling Stone reporter, and even though Holbrooke has been critical of U.S. goals in Afghanistan, it’s Holbrooke on the State Department podium, while McChrystal is out in the wilderness (for the time being). Branfman notes the ironies, and political agenda, behind the invite:

Clinton has also invited Richard Holbrooke, who as State Department head of Afghanistan/Pakistan policy has learned nothing from history and is repeating precisely the same policies that caused the U.S. to lose in Indochina — support of a corrupt and unpopular regime that cannot stand on its own. Inviting Holbrooke is particularly egregious, because following Obama’s strategy review, according to Bob Woodward’s new book, "perhaps the most pessimistic view came from Richard Holbrooke. "It can’t work," he said. Lacking even a fraction of the integrity and moral courage of a Daniel Ellsberg, Holbrooke continues to promote in public a policy he privately believes is doomed to fail.

Branfman also notes that Kissinger is on hand to promote his "we lost Vietnam" garbage, claiming it was Congressional betrayal that failed the U.S. mission in Vietnam at the end. And sure enough, Kissinger was true to form at the conference, as reported by WRGW News:

“I believe most of what went wrong in Vietnam we did to ourselves,” said Kissinger, speaking candidly about his Vietnam experience in front of a capacity audience, including the Vietnamese Embassy….

Henry Kissinger… explained that during the Vietnam War “the faith of Americans in each other became destroyed in the process” of America reaching the limits of its foreign policy….

“America wanted compromise, Hanoi wanted victory,” he stated.

According to Dr. Kissinger, lack of support at home ultimately lost the war for South Vietnam and the United States.

Kissinger, Holbrooke, and Negroponte at the podium represent the true face of U.S. diplomacy today, which relies on the nostrums and machinations of an entire post-WWII generation which saw nothing wrong in ruling American Empire by means of mass murder, assassination, and the bombing of civilians. Today, the Obama administration steps up bombings in Pakistan, escalates the war in Afghanistan (as an exit strategy?), and conducts a world-wide Murder, Inc., which grants itself the right to execute without due process American citizens by Hellfire missiles, even as it trumpets secrecy for everything it does.

Obama’s embrace of Kissinger tells you all you need to know about what this administration is about. Behind the special treatment for war criminal Kissinger is the current administration’s aggressive pursuit of war in Afghanistan and military and covert operations around the world.

I try to imagine how the left would have responded if Bush had invited Kissinger to reflect for history upon the Vietnam War. I’d like to think there would have been universal derision. Today, there’s very little outrage expressed by this official government appearance by a bona fide war criminal. Whether it is fealty to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or a U.S. military and national security apparatus that says it stands for democracy but really stands for endless war, the state right to assassinate U.S. critics, and to intervene anywhere in the world that U.S. "interests" are involved, what stands for politics in this country is a joke. Something is very, very rotten at the core of this country. The falsification of history by the very criminals who conducted crimes against humanity is a primary exhibit of the degeneration of political discourse in America.

Originally posted at Firedoglake/The Seminal

Remember "Tiger Force" Special Operations Atrocities

With the recent controversies as to whether U.S. forces were involved in the brutal murder of eight young students in Afghanistan, it might provide some perspective to look back at the history of other crimes perpetrated in earlier wars by U.S. soldiers, as many might find the news of a possible massacre by U.S. military forces to be unthinkable.

Back in late 2003, the Toldeo Blade ran a series of articles on a U.S. special operations task force called Tiger Force, which belonged to the United States Army, 1st Battalion (Airborne) , 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade (Separate), 101st Airborne Division.

The Blade's investigation began after the newspaper obtained 22 pages of classified Army records detailing atrocities by Tiger Force.

The records of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command were just the start.

Reporters reviewed volumes of research on the Vietnam War, finding no mention of the Army's investigation of the platoon's atrocities.

They inspected thousands of declassified records of the case from the National Archives in suburban Washington and obtained hundreds of additional classified documents of the case. They also interviewed dozens of former Tiger Force soldiers.

The following is a selection from one of the Blade articles, "DAY 1: Rogue GIs unleashed wave of terror in Central Highlands," by Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss. The entire series is very much worth reading.

For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public.

They dropped grenades into underground bunkers where women and children were hiding - creating mass graves - and shot unarmed civilians, in some cases as they begged for their lives.

They frequently tortured and shot prisoners, severing ears and scalps for souvenirs.

A review of thousands of classified Army documents, National Archives records, and radio logs reveals a fighting unit that carried out the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War - and commanders who looked the other way.

For 41/2 years, the Army investigated the platoon, finding numerous eyewitnesses and substantiating war crimes. But in the end, no one was prosecuted, the case buried in the archives for three decades.

No one knows how many unarmed men, women, and children were killed by platoon members 36 years ago.

At least 81 were fatally shot or stabbed, records show, but many others were killed in what were clear violations of U.S. military law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

For those who cannot believe that U.S. forces could ever participate in crimes as terrible as the handcuffing and killing of school-age children (never mind that the U.S. has killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, many by pilotless drones and Hellfire missles), consider the tales of Tiger Force, and reflect on the terrible thing that is war without accountability.

Self-professed War Criminal Robert McNamara Dies (1916-2009

Clips from Errol Morris's documentary, The Fog of War - Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2004)

From Joe Costello's obit at AlterNet:

Today, Mr. McNamara's ilk remain very much in charge. Our political system is even more centralized than it was when he was at Defense. The idea that technocrats can run a large and unwieldy government is the true-faith of DC. While we are no longer bombing SE Asia, we kill with the same technical ferocity in the illegitimate wars of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. While our auto companies, no longer the shining star of global industry, still remain vital to the health of the US economy, or so we are told from DC. And behind the present financial fiasco, we find any number of well educated young men working in elaborate offices and manipulating numbers and formulas thinking they control the world. And yes, at the same time committing fraud after fraud, and lying through their teeth every step of the way.

Mr. McNamara's America is a fairly ugly place, it is in so many ways against the politics of this republic's founding. It is imperial, elitist, and predatory.

For me, Robert McNamara represented everything that was wrong about America. I grew up with his face on television, telling smooth lies about the Vietnam War. He served the titans of industry, from Ford Motor Company to the World Bank, and in the Pentagon, of course. He was involved in the murder of over a million of people, many of them burned to death.

If you want to know who this man was -- and there is a complexity to the man, as there is a complexity to our civilization, so full of marvels and mass murder -- watch Morris's documentary, The Fog of War, from which the clip above are drawn. In the film, McNamara comes closer than he ever would to acknowledging the immensity of his crimes:

"I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb. The U.S.-Japanese War was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history -- kamikaze pilots, suicide, unbelievable. What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time -- and today -- has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it, 'the rules of war.' Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in one night?

"[World War II General Curtis] LeMay said, 'If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.' And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

Unfortunately, no era dies with McNamara's death. The struggle against imperialist wars and policies continues, and the "might makes right" ethos that is the unpronounced ideology of the governmental and societal leadership of this country.