Torture and Political Alienation

Cross-posted from Firedoglake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feds Entrap Teen into "Terrorism", Provided Fake Bomb, Drove Him to "Terror" Site, Paid Him Thousands

What an excellent post by Glenn Greenwald on the utterly outrageous set-up of a youth by the FBI, so they can get their "war on terror" candy. This kid was no threat, though after cozening whatever disgruntled adolescent angst he had into "terrorist" expression, they just might have succeeded in birthing a new jihadist. Here's Glenn rationally setting out the case that 19-year-old Somali-American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud was set-up:

All of the information about this episode -- all of it -- comes exclusively from an FBI affidavit filed in connection with a Criminal Complaint against Mohamud.  As shocking and upsetting as this may be to some, FBI claims are sometimes one-sided, unreliable and even untrue, especially when such claims -- as here -- are uncorroborated and unexamined.  That's why we have what we call "trials" before assuming guilt or even before believing that we know what happened:  because the government doesn't always tell the complete truth, because they often skew reality, because things often look much different once the accused is permitted to present his own facts and subject the government's claims to scrutiny.  The FBI affidavit -- as well as whatever its agents are whispering into the ears of reporters -- contains only those facts the FBI chose to include, but omits the ones it chose to exclude.  And even the "facts" that are included are merely assertions at this point and thus may not be facts at all.

It may very well be that the FBI successfully and within legal limits arrested a dangerous criminal intent on carrying out a serious Terrorist plot that would have killed many innocent people, in which case they deserve praise.  Court-approved surveillance and use of undercover agents to infiltrate terrorist plots are legitimate tactics when used in accordance with the law.

But it may also just as easily be the case that the FBI -- as they've done many times in the past -- found some very young, impressionable, disaffected, hapless, aimless, inept loner; created a plot it then persuaded/manipulated/entrapped him to join, essentially turning him into a Terrorist; and then patted itself on the back once it arrested him for having thwarted a "Terrorist plot" which, from start to finish, was entirely the FBI's own concoction.  Having stopped a plot which it itself manufactured, the FBI then publicly touts -- and an uncritical media amplifies -- its "success" to the world, thus proving both that domestic Terrorism from Muslims is a serious threat and the Government's vast surveillance powers -- current and future new ones -- are necessary.

There are numerous claims here that merit further scrutiny and questioning.  First, the FBI was monitoring the email communications of this American citizen on U.S. soil for months (at least) with what appears to be the flimsiest basis: namely, that he was in email communication with someone in Northwest Pakistan, "an area known to harbor terrorists" (para. 5 of the FBI Affidavit).  Is that enough to obtain court approval to eavesdrop on someone's calls and emails?  I'm glad the FBI is only eavesdropping with court approval, if that's true, but certainly more should be required for judicial authorization than that.  Communicating with someone in Northwest Pakistan is hardly reasonable grounds for suspicion.

Second, in order not to be found to have entrapped someone into committing a crime, law enforcement agents want to be able to prove that, in the 1992 words of the Supreme Court, the accused was "was independently predisposed to commit the crime for which he was arrested."  To prove that, undercover agents are often careful to stress that the accused has multiple choices, and they then induce him into choosing with his own volition to commit the crime.  In this case, that was achieved by the undercover FBI agent's allegedly advising Mohamud that there were at least five ways he could serve the cause of Islam (including by praying, studying engineering, raising funds to send overseas, or becoming "operational"), and Mohamud replied he wanted to "be operational" by using exploding a bomb (para. 35-37).

But strangely, while all other conversations with Mohamud which the FBI summarizes were (according to the affidavit) recorded by numerous recording devices, this conversation -- the crucial one for negating Mohamud's entrapment defense -- was not.  That's because, according to the FBI, the undercover agent "was equipped with audio equipment to record the meeting.  However, due to technical problems, the meeting was not recorded" (para. 37).

Hm, a missing tape, just when they were to nail down the evidence. What a coincidence! The FBI must think this is a country of morons. Maybe it is. But I'd like to believe that they will get their political comeuppance one of these days.

An entire country needs to wake up and smell the coffee. The FBI and the rest of the government agents drank some evil kool-aid, and, eager to serve their masters, they will do anything to justify their love of police-state tactics. They even think, I believe, they are saving America. That's what makes them so dangerous. How odd that in fighting the "true believers," they became the same themselves, and now threaten to bring us all down to the level of a police state.

Wikileaks' First Release of U.S. Embassy Cables Goes Live

They're up. Long awaited, and the subject of U.S. government condemnation, the Wikileaks publication of 251,257 U.S. embassy cables has begun. As explained in their statement reproduced below, Wikileaks will be publishing the full catalog of files over the next months. Those interested in reading and studying the cables can click here to be taken to the relevant Wikileaks site. UK Guardian is also posting their analysis of the data, which was released before hand also to four other news agencies, including the New York Times.

The following is a reposting of the introduction to the Secret U.S. Embassy Cables release at Wikileaks. In it, we can see the political reasoning behind this extraordinary leaking of materials -- a belief that with public knowledge and political transparency the lies governments tell cannot be maintained.

Wikileaks began on Sunday November 28th publishing 251,287 leaked United States embassy cables, the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US Government foreign activities.

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

The embassy cables will be released in stages over the next few months. The subject matter of these cables is of such importance, and the geographical spread so broad, that to do otherwise would not do this material justice.

The cables show the extent of US spying on its allies and the UN; turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuse in "client states"; backroom deals with supposedly neutral countries; lobbying for US corporations; and the measures US diplomats take to advance those who have access to them.

This document release reveals the contradictions between the US’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors – and shows that if citizens in a democracy want their governments to reflect their wishes, they should ask to see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Every American schoolchild is taught that George Washington – the country’s first President – could not tell a lie. If the administrations of his successors lived up to the same principle, today’s document flood would be a mere embarrassment. Instead, the US Government has been warning governments -- even the most corrupt -- around the world about the coming leaks and is bracing itself for the exposures.

The full set consists of 251,287 documents, comprising 261,276,536 words (seven times the size of "The Iraq War Logs", the world's previously largest classified information release).

The cables cover from 28th December 1966 to 28th February 2010 and originate from 274 embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions.

"Tu che di gel sei cinta"

Renata Tebaldi singing Liu's aria from the second act of Giuseppe Puccini's opera Turandot. The slave Liu is being tortured to give her owner's name, but she resists, even as the crowd around her screams for her to speak and give up the name. In the end, she grabs a nearby knife and stabs herself, as the crowd continues to scream for her to reveal her secret.

"Parla! Parla! Parla!
Il nome! Il nome!"

Despite its grisly ending and subject matter, this is one of the world's most beautiful and recorded arias.

Sign Petition to Free Guantanamo Prisoner Fayiz al-Kandari

Supporters of Guantanamo prisoner Fayiz al-Kandari have a petition to Attorney General Eric Holder posted at the PetitionSite.com. It urgently calls upon the United States government "to immediately release Fayiz al-Kandari to the care of the Kuwaiti government."

Like a number of idealistic Muslims, Fayiz al-Kandari was caught up at a young age by the suffering of Muslims in the war in Bosnia. He became very active in charity work, and this work led him to Afghanistan. Originally from a well-to-do Kuwaiti family, Fayiz was captured in 2001, becoming one of a number of Arabs sold to the Americans in Afghanistan for bounty money. He has been imprisoned for more than eight years.

Andy Worthington describes what happened next:

In Guantánamo, Fayiz al-Kandari’s refusal to accept that “there is no innocent person here” has marked him out as a particularly resistant prisoner — and resistant prisoners are given a particularly hard time. Over the years, he has been subjected to a vast array of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which, as Lt. Col. Wingard described them, “have included but are not limited to sleep deprivation, physical and verbal assaults, attempts at sexual humiliation through the use of female interrogators, the “frequent flier program,” the prolonged use of stress positions, the use of dogs, the use of loud music and strobe lights, and the use of extreme heat and cold.”

Despite all this, he has not been “broken,” and has been able, unlike Fouad al-Rabiah and numerous other prisoners, to resist making false confessions about his own activities. He has also refused to make false confessions about the activities of other prisoners, despite being offered many opportunities to do so, and despite being told about others who have made false allegations against him.

Al Kandari's attorney, Major Barry Wingard, has made clear that the evidence against his client is based on far-fetched hearsay evidence. Wingard has been outspoken in his criticism of the Guantanamo military commissions and the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and other inhumane types of treatment.

What follows is from the petition website. You can go sign the petition immediately by clicking here.

Free Fayiz al-Kandari to the Care of the Kuwaiti Government Now!

Fayiz al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti citizen, has been a detainee in Guantanamo since 2002 after being captured by Pakistani forces and sold into US custody. Despite over 400 interrogations, suffering through endless hours of torture, including but not limited to beatings, sleep deprivation, threats and forced stress positions, the US government has failed to gather any of the coveted information that this treatment was ostensibly designed to garner. Furthermore, the US government has not produced any evidence against Fayiz al-Kandari aside from hearsay accusations of other Guantanamo prisoners and unidentified Afghanis, evidence which, under any other circumstances, would not be allowed in court.

With this in mind, we urgently call upon the United States government to immediately release Fayiz al-Kandari to the care of the Kuwaiti government. Kuwait has made various requests for the repatriation of Mr. al-Kandari which have been refused by the United States on the basis of concerns with Kuwait's ability to monitor and rehabilitate previously returned citizens. In response Kuwait has poured enormous resources into vastly improving the monitoring of returned citizens as well as building a multi-million dollar rehabilitation centre. In consideration of these efforts on the part of Kuwait, combined with the length of Mr. al-Kandari's detention without trial, the questionable nature of the evidence against him and his continued and passionate insistence on his innocence, it is unquestionably incumbent upon the United States Department of Justice, the State Department and the Office of the President to negotiate and arrange with the Kuwaiti government for the return of Fayiz al-Kandari to Kuwait immediately.

For further background information regarding Fayiz al-Kandari, please see these posts by Lt. Col Barry Wingard, the military defense lawyer for Fayiz: Barry Wingard - No Justice Today at Guantanamo - washingtonpost.com http://wapo.st/gsuzX5 and http://www.truth-out.org/nine-years-too-long65253

NYT Releases Unredacted Report on “U.S. Aid for Ex-Nazis”

The New York Times has released a full unredacted version of the Department of Justice's Office of Special Investigation (OSI) report, "Striving for Accountability in the Aftermath of the Holocaust." According to NYT reporter Eric Lichtblau, "The Justice Department has resisted making the report public since 2006." A "heavily redacted" version was released last month to the private National Security Archive (NSA), and now a leaked version of the entire document has been released to the public.

According to a November 13 NSA press release:

The National Security Archive posted today its original FOIA request, the government's response, our appeal by counsel David Sobel, the legal complaint in the case National Security Archive v. Department of Justice, the interim response from DoJ, the "Vaughn index" of withheld pages and alleged justifications for the withholding, and the 45 pages of partial and highly-redacted response.

The evocation of words like "accountability" in the context of suppressed documents, leaks, and war crimes has an eerie resonance in the context of the current struggle to gain accountability for current and recent U.S. war crimes surrounding the methods by which "intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy" of invading Iraq, the widespread use of torture and extraordinary rendition by the government and its allies, and a policy of illegal human experimentation on "war on terror" prisoners.

The fact that DoJ would still be trying to hide information from decades-old files surrounding the U.S. recruitment of Nazi war criminals does not bode well for those trying to force the U.S. government from President Obama's "Don't Look Back" policy towards war crimes. In fact, it took almost fifty years to get a significant opening of U.S. archives to look at government actions at the close of World War II. The NYT leaked document is but the latest in a string of revelations about the use of both high and low ranking Nazis by the U.S. government. Author Christopher Simpson wrote the first major book, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, documenting this history in 1988, followed by Linda Hunt's excellent Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945 to 1990, and other books, many of them unfortunately now out of print.

Anyone wanting to become an archival researcher in Nazi or Japanese war crimes can begin at the National Archives webpage for the Interagency Working Group (IWG), where there are links to tens of thousands of documents and millions of pages from the files of the CIA, FBI, military intelligence, OSS and other agencies. The IWG issued their Final Report of the Nazi War Crimes and [Japanese] Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group in April 2007, and is available online.

Revelations on U.S. Recruitment of Nazis

The OSI report is not without its new revelations. According to Lichtblau:

The full report disclosed that the Justice Department found “a smoking gun” in 1997 establishing with “definitive proof” that Switzerland had bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish victims of the Holocaust. But these references are deleted, as are disputes between the Justice and State Departments over Switzerland’s culpability in the months leading up to a major report on the issue.

Another section describes as “a hideous failure” a series of meetings in 2000 that United States officials held with Latvian officials to pressure them to pursue suspected Nazis. That passage is also deleted.

In its paranoia and animus against its former Soviet ally (a paranoia and animus that ran in two directions), the United States turned to the recruitment of former Nazis in an attempt to gain intelligence and military superiority over the Soviet Union. The Times article describes how the report details the stories of infamous Nazi war criminals protected by the United States.

There was Arthur L. Rudolph, a Nazi scientist who used slave labor to operate Mittelwerk underground factories that produced the V-2 rocket. Twenty-five thousand slave laborers perished in the terrible conditions and treatment meted out at Mittelwerk. But Rudolph was protected from prosecution and went on to work for NASA as a primary designer of the Saturn rockets that took U.S. astronauts to the moon.

The article also notes the CIA's recruitment of "Otto Von Bolschwing, an associate of Adolf Eichmann who had helped develop the initial plans 'to purge Germany of the Jews.'" The Times article gentlemanly forbears the whole story, which was revealed in a 2006 UK Guardian story on new information found in a massive release in that year of CIA documents on its Nazi past. (CIA watchers should note the ironies entailed in the fact the release was approved by then CIA director Porter Goss.) Von Bloschwing, it turns out, had also been Heinrich Himmler's representative in Romania.

According to the UK Guardian:

After the war Bolschwing had been recruited by the Gehlen Organisation, the prototype German intelligence agency set up by the Americans under Reinhard Gehlen, who had run military intelligence on the eastern front under the Nazis. "US army intelligence accepted Reinhard Gehlen's offer to furnish alleged expertise on the Red army - and was bilked by the many mass murderers he hired," said Robert Wolfe, a historian at the US national archives.

Of even more interest, perhaps, was the U.S. recruitment of Nazis and war criminals for its clandestine secret military groups after the war. Such secret armies were organized across Europe in the aftermath of World War II, and were later implicated in a number of right-wing terrorist actions and coups. The headquarters for this was ultimately centered in the NATO high command, and its various activities, including false flag operations to implicate leftists as terrorists became known as Operation Gladio.

Again, from the UK Guardian article:

Alongside the Gehlen Organisation, US intelligence had set up "stay-behind networks" in West Germany, who were supposed to stay put in the event of a Soviet invasion and transmit intelligence from behind enemy lines. Those networks were also riddled with ex-Nazis who had horrendous records.

One of the networks, codenamed Kibitz-15, was run by a former German army officer, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Kopp, who was described by his own American handlers as an "unreconstructed Nazi".

A more detailed description of the U.S. organization of stay-behind networks is told in an essay by Timothy Naftali at the University of Virginia (PDF).

The New York Times is to be commended for the release of this important new document, whose 600-plus pages will take awhile to be fully digested. The Times also was one of four news outlets to release, against considerable government pressure, the Wikileaks war logs from Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Times editorial stance for accountability for torture has not been met with action by the U.S. President, Justice Department, or Congress. The Democrats had two years of full control of both houses of Congress and never brought any substantive hearings or investigations on the issue of torture or the machinations behind the invasion of Iraq. While there is no doubt that much was withheld from Congress by the Pentagon and White House, the Democrats demonstrated no appetite to press for accountability, and this will be their ignoble legacy.

We must not wait fifty, sixty, or seventy years for the truth about recent and ongoing war crimes to come fully out, and for accountability for these crimes. It appears that will only happen if the citizens of the United States take history into their own hands and form new political entities or parties capable of handling the truth and meting out justice. Such new political forces will be unlikely to stop there, and turn towards implementing the kinds of change we desperately need in this society.

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

VIDEO: TSA Out of Control - "The everyday people are now the terrorists... This is bullshit"

If you can't see the video above, click here.

There's a definite feeling of mass protest filling the air around the new full-body scanners and "enhanced" pat-downs (i.e., molestations) at U.S. airports. Many feel it is the means to soften up the population for mass police state procedures. They should be rescinded by the government, who is using "terrorism" hysteria to further hoodwink and control the populace.

Pilots unions are starting to boycott the scanners, while Reddit users have formed a grass-roots site, Fly with Dignity, which is providing information on which airports have the back-scatter scanners, and is attempting to form actions to oppose this new policy.

Do Americans, who have shown a lackluster attitude, to say the least, about confronting their government on human rights abuses, such as torture, have the balls to stand up against being multiply X-rayed and having their children groped by government agents at airports? I don't know, but I hope so. Telling people they have to be sexually molested for their safety is the height of Orwellian madness.

What was the CIA's MKNAOMI?

The following is reproduced from the August 1977 MKULTRA hearings (Appendix A) in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research of the Committee on Human Resources, United States Senate. While it is not the last word by any means on this subject, information on the MKNAOMI program is scarce, and this is one of the primary source materials we have.

MKNAOMI was another major CIA program in this area. In 1967, the CIA summarized the purposes of MKNAOMI:

(a) To provide for a covert support base to meet clandestine operational requirements.

(b) To stockpile severely incapacitating and lethal materials for the specific use of TSD [Technical Services Division].

(c) To maintain in operational readiness special and unique items for the dissemination of biological and chemical materials.

(d) To provide for the required surveillance, testing, upgrading, and evaluation of materials and items in order to assure absence of defects and complete predictability of results to be expected under operational conditions. [9]

Under an agreement reached with the Army in 1952, the Special Operations Division (SOD) at Fort Detrick was to assist CIA in developing, testing, and maintaining biological agents and delivery systems. By this agreement, CIA acquired the knowledge, skill, and facilities of the Army to develop biological weapons suited for CIA use.

SOD developed darts coated with biological agents and pills containing several different biological agents which could remain potent for weeks or months. SOD developed a special gun for firing darts coated with a chemical which could allow CIA agents to incapacitate a guard dog, enter an installation secretly, and return the dog to consciousness when leaving. SOD scientists were unable to develop a similar incapacitant for humans.

SOD also physically transferred to CIA personnel biological agents in "bulk" form, and delivery devices, including some containing biological agents.

In addition to the CIA's interest in biological weapons for use against humans, it also asked SOD to study use of biological agents against crops and animals. In its 1967 memorandum, the CIA stated:

Three methods and systems for carrying out a covert attack against crop and causing severe crop loss have been developed and evaluated under field conditions. This was accomplished in anticipation of a requirement which was later developed but was subsequently scrubbed just prior to putting into action. [9a]

MKNAOMI was terminated in 1970. On November 25,1969, President Nixon renounced the use of any form of biological weapons that kill or incapacitate and ordered the disposal of existing stocks of bacteriological weapons. On February 14, 1970, the President clarified the extent of his earlier order and indicated that toxins -- chemicals that are not living organisms but are produced by living organisms -- were considered biological weapons subject to his previous directive and were to be destroyed. Although instructed to relinquish control of material held for the CIA by SOD, a CIA scientist acquired approximately 11 grams of shellfish toxin from SOD personnel at Fort Detrick which were stored in a little-used CIA laboratory where it went undetected for five years. [10]

[9] Memorandum from Chief, TSD/Biological Branch to Chief, TSD "MKNAOMI: Funding. Objectives, and Accomplishments." 10/18/67, p. 1. For a fuller description of MKNAOMI and the relationship between CIA and SOD, see p. 360.
[9a] Ibid. p. 2.
[10] Senate Select Committee, 9/16/75, Hearings, Vol. 1.

For more on MKNAOMI, see this article by H.P. Albarelli and Zoe Martell.

Texas State Board of Psychologists Consider Complaint Against Torture Psychologist James Mitchell

The New York Times has posted an article on the complaint lodged against James Mitchell with the Texas Board of Psychologists. A copy of the complaint itself is available online (PDF). I examined the role of the American Psychological Association in the Mitchell complaint in an article last August. A similar complaint against SERE psychologist and APA member Major John Leso, made by the Center for Justice and Accountability, was rejected by the New York Office of Professional Discipline last July. The APA has not taken any known actions on its own accord against Maj. Leso.

As the NYT article on Mitchell states:

Along with Dr. Bruce Jessen, a fellow military psychologist, Dr. Mitchell was a primary developer of post-Sept. 11 C.I.A. interrogation methods that are currently under a criminal torture investigation by the Department of Justice.

Dr. Mitchell, who did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this article, parlayed his experience in training American soldiers to survive as prisoners of war into a lucrative consulting business with the C.I.A. He orchestrated — and, according to the complaint, participated in — the harsh interrogation of terror suspects using sexual humiliation and the drowning technique called waterboarding.

Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University law professor, and Dicky Grigg, an Austin lawyer, worked with a Texas psychologist, Jim L. H. Cox, to bring the complaint, which documents in lurid detail Dr. Mitchell’s role in the questioning of prisoners.

The actions taken at a state level against psychologists or other medical providers involved in torture appear to be one of few legal avenues left for those who are pursuing accountability against the torturing U.S. government, by going after its ready servants. It remains to be seen if this is a fruitful approach, but it deserves both following and our support.