Calling Attention

While too busy to write up a post myself, I have the pleasure to direct my readers to two very important articles online.

The first is Stephen Soldz's posting of An Open Letter to the President of the APA. Signed by close to 40 psychologists, it is a indictment of the APA's failed policy of endorsing psychologist participation in national security interrogations, which have too often veered into outright torture. Rather than acting as protectors against abuse, some military psychologists have been involved in implementing it.

The second article is by Mark Benjamin over at Salon.com, "The CIA's favorite form of torture". And what might this favorite form be? Sensory deprivation, which I've written on before. Benjamin argues, persuasively I think, that the CIA is not too worried about losing some of the more controversial methods of coercive interrogation -- such as waterboarding (which was really a SERE technique. The Agency has used sensory deprivation techniques in building up its stock repetoire of psychological torture procedures since at least the days of the KUBARK counterintelligence manual of the early 1960s. For the CIA, sensory deprivation is:

a measure long favored.... [This] benign-sounding form of psychological coercion has been considered effective for most of the life of the agency, and its slippery definition might allow it to squeeze through loopholes in a law that seeks to ban prisoner abuse. Interviews with former CIA officials and experts on interrogation suggest that it is an obvious choice for interrogators newly constrained by law. The technique has already been employed during the "war on terror," and, Salon has learned, was apparently used on 14 high-value detainees now held at Guantánamo Bay.

Sec. Gates: Stop SERE-type Torture! Drop Appendix M from Army Field Manual

Also posted at NION

On May 18, the Office of the Inspectory General (OIG) of the Defense Department declassified a report on detainee abuse. This report verified and amplified earlier stories about the reverse engineering of torture techniques by some psychologists who work in the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, programs. Stephen Soldz wrote a great article on this, which is posted at Never In Our Names.com (NION).

Now, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has written a letter to Bush Defense Secretary Robert Gates demanding the following:

1. Fully implement the OIG’s recommendation to “preclude the use of Survival, Evasion, esistance, and Escape physical and psychological coercion techniques” in all interrogations. (Id, p. 29-30.) This includes rescission of Appendix M of the new Army Field Manual and specific prohibition, by name, of each of the known SERE-based methods and their equivalents.

2. Abolish the BSCTs and rescind the June 6, 2006 Department of Defense Instruction(Medical program Support for Detainee Operations), which established guidelines for the BSCTs and other health personnel. Establish new unambigious guidelines holding all health care professionals, regardless of their designated role or assignment, to the well-established health professional principle to prevent, avoid and minimize harm.

3. In the interest of transparency reflected in the declassification of the OIG Report, declassify and release all other documents shedding light on US interrogation policy and practices, including but not limited to SERE-based methods. [Emphases mine]

Pardon me if I can't restrain a yelp of satisfaction. The Pentagon is finally beginning to feel some of the heat it so richly deserves to feel for all the illegal and immoral practices that have passed under its purview these last six years (and really longer).

I take some personal satisfaction as practically alone in the blogosphere, and surely alone against the larger mainstream press, I took on the lies about the cleansing of torture in the 2006 revised Army Field Manual. You can read my original article from last October, with some correspondence I had with PHR at the time on the matter, at this NION link:

New Army Interrogation Manual Promotes Torture/PHR Responds

Besides NION, I also posted versions of this article at Progressive Historians and Daily Kos. I kept up a correspondence on the issue with PHR, and made my political points to others where and when I could. Now PHR has added the need to change the AFM to their campaign against torture, as it has become clearer that the military and intelligence agencies have made a determined effort to spread coercive interrogation techniques throughout all theatres of U.S. military activities.

When interviewed in Time magazine recently, PHR Executive Director Rubenstein reiterated his organization's position. This is from a story at Stephen Soldz's blog, but the original quote can also be found at Time's website:

In response to fallout over the well-documented cases of prisoner abuse — which included prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation (visual and auditory), forced removal of clothing, exploiting prisoners phobias (notably fear of dogs), and threats against family members — the Pentagon began scaling back the use of SERE tactics in 2002 and eventually banned them altogether. The Army Field Manual, which serves as a primary guide for U.S. military interrogation, now specifically rules out the use of a variety of SERE-founded techniques including water-boarding, a form of simulated drowning, as well as the use of dogs.

But critics remain concerned that the Pentagon’s clean-up has not gone far enough. In the letter to Secretary Gates, dated May 31, 2007, the non-profit Physicians for Human Rights cites an appendix of the current Army Field Manual that “explicitly permits what amounts to isolation, along with sleep and sensory deprivation.” The letter, signed by retired Army General Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist and former senior medical commander, and Leonard Rubenstein, the organization’s executive director, also points out that the current Field Manual remains “silent on a number of other SERE-based methods (including sensory overload and deprivation) creating ambiguity and doubt over their place in interrogation doctrine.”

Onward to the Senate Investigation

As PHR and others politically pressure the government, Senator Carl Levin (D), chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee is preparing for hearings into the use of torture, and more specifically, the utilization of SERE and military psychologists to spread torture from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib to Afghanistan and secret U.S. prisons around the world. It's evident, from this selection of an interview with Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo, a psychologist who worked with an American Pscyhological Association (APA) commission last year into the ethical practice of psychologists in interrogations -- a commission that whitewashed psychologist collaboration with the military and intelligence agencies -- that Sen. Levin has been looking into this issue for some times. Dr. Arrigo, along with others, have gone on record as calling for overturning the recommendations of the APA commission, known by its acronym PENS (the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security), and for a moratorium against psychologist participation in national security interrogations. She is a social psychologist, who founded the Intelligence Ethics Collection at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; she's also a founder of the International Intelligence Ethics Association.

When the PENS committee met, APA bigwigs, pushed by military psycholgogy protests, made the procedings confidential. This was extraordinary in and of itself. Notes were also forbidden to be taken. Dr. Arrigo fought to get out the truth about the procedings. From her interview at Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo, did you archive the entire listserv of the task force and send it to the Senate Armed Services Committee?

DR. JEAN MARIA ARRIGO: Yes, I did. I archived the listserv, my notes and other materials at Stanford in July 2006, and I want to add that I am not a Stanford faculty member. I simply have a relation with the archive. And on April 4th, 2007, I sent the entire listserv and my notes to the Senate Armed Service Committee.

So, Senate oversight has been building since at least early Spring. The APA officially responded to the Democracy Now! interview, which also included psychologist and PENS board member Dr. Nina Thomas, Leonard Rubenstein, executive director of PHR, and Dr. Eric Anders, a psychoanalyst who formerly underwent SERE training. (Obviously the entire interview is a great read and/or listen.)

Renewal of a Call to Action

I have made a call to action to influence the leadership at APA to change course and support that part of the membership that is calling for a moratorium on participation in national security interrogations, which have too often taken place in the torture chamber of SERE and Kubark-style abuse.

As I wrote then, anti-torture psychologists need our help. Moreover, the campaign to stop psychologist invovlement in Bush's interrogations will be a blow against their legitimacy, and hamper the use of coercive interrogations, given the special place behavioral health personnel serve in that process.

How you can help

Write or call the APA:

American Psychological Association, 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242

(800) 374-2721 or (202) 336-5500

Write and call, now. Let them know how upset you are.

Send an email to the Public Affairs Office of the APA, expressing your outrage:

public.affairs@apa.org

Phone the Ethics Office directly at (202) 336-5930 or use APA's toll free number (800) 374-2721, extension 5930, and give them a piece of your mind.

And finally, write to the President of the APA, Dr. Sharon Stephens Brehm. Be nice, be polite, but be firm (this is true for ALL communications).

Dr. Brehm has a web page, Ask the President. Follow the link to leave an email message directly for her.

If we apply enough pressure, it might make the APA stand up and take notice. If you are a Daily Kos diarist or front pager, you might want to help and make this fight yours, too. And, don't forget to write your congressman/congresswoman and senator, too!

WE CAN DO IT!

We don't have to be powerless. We aren't helpless. Write, call, email today. Copy this diary's URL and send it to your friends.

I want to see APA inundated with thousands of messages saying "Stop torture. Stop psychologist participation in coercive interrogations. Support the anti-torture moratorium".

Together, we can prevail.

Where is Jose Padilla on the Night of the Democratic Debate? (Silent enim leges inter arma )

"The law is silent in wartime."

Lewis Z. Koch is doing a fabulous job over at firedoglake with his series coverage of the Padilla trial (and I borrowed the Latin quote from him, via Cicero). Koch reports on the inanity of the government's case, and on the ban on evidence that is keeping much of the truth of Padilla's treatment and torture interrogations from the jury. Now Judge Marcia Cooke has ruled FBI wiretaps will be included as evidence,

rejecting arguments by defense attorneys that phone conversations that mentioned Osama bin Laden were irrelevant and threatened to prejudice the jury.

The government picks and chooses its evidence, doing its best to fob off this phony show trial as the work of an intrepid government on the trail of wrong-doers.

Arrested in May 2002 at O'Hare Airport in Chicago for supposedly plotting to set off a "dirty bomb" for Al Qaeda, small-time ex-hood Jose Padilla, who converted to Islam in jail, is on trial with two others, co-defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, for vague conspiracy charges of helping Islamic terrorism. Held incommunicado for years at the Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and tortured psychologically with intense isolation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload, forced stress positions, and, according to Mr. Padilla's attorneys, psychoactive drugs, Padilla was transferred from "enemy combatant" status to federal indictee after the Supreme Court delivered their decision in the Hamdan case.

The torture Padilla endured was of the Kubark variety, a CIA interrogation formula that relies on psychological and neuroscientific research done forty to fifty years ago. Sometimes you will hear the press say that the U.S. is applying ex-Soviet or Korean or Chinese torture techniques, but the reality is that, while based on study of those techniques, the U.S., through the CIA, the School of the Americas, and the military's SERE programs, fine-tuned their own style of torture, and then exported it around the world.

I recommend that readers check out Koch's well-written essays on the Padilla trial. I'll try and look at a wide range of coverage and report it back here.

Democrats Speak Out Loudly for Habeas, Against Torture, for Human Rights... Not!

Meanwhile, why link the Padilla case to the Democratic debate? Because, with only a few very brief exceptions, nothing was said about the debasement of both democracy and basic decency by this country's descent into being a militarist, torturing country. (Kucinich may have been a partial exception, and Chris Dodd got in a shot against the Bush war on civil liberties at the very end, with Wolf Blitzer trying to cut him off. I'm sure others will feel I'm unfair to their candidate, and I hope you put their documented positions on militarism and torture in the comments of this piece, for all our sakes.)

Sure, I've both researched and reported that U.S. torture goes back decades. But the difference now is that it's openly debated, voted on, and supported still by the Congress and many public media voices. Bush has made torture into a talking point! and turned the direction of political discourse in this country towards the pre-Enlightenment era, i.e., backwards some two or three hundred years.

And this after the bloody tirades by GOP candidates at their FOX debate, clamoring one over the other (not to mention John McCain's political corpse) to make themselves more to the right than Bush and Gonzales on "rough" interrogations. And no Democrat will say nary a word about a U.S. citizen held without right to a hearing, in isolation, tortured for years, and now placed on a show trial where gag orders keep the jury from even hearing much of the evidence -- because the evidence was educed via torture of both the defendant, and also of the supposed witnesses to the "dirty bomb" plot (like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who no one can believe because of the non-stop torture of the man). Hence, the "dirty bomb" plot, the linchpin of John Ashcroft's pathetic career, was dropped, and is forgotten except by Koch and a handful of bloggers.

The Padilla trial should be getting top coverage across the blogosphere, but aside from Koch's articles at firedoglake, and the work of others, like Jeralyn at TalkLeft, and David Markus at the Southern District of Florida Blog, the case gets precious little coverage.

We should demand the release of Padilla and his co-defendants, victims of Bush's demagogic "war on terror" and pawns in his ambition to turn the United States into a torture nation. We can not afford to be silent. Not in a time of war. Not ever.

"The Task Force Report Should Be Annulled"

Here's a quick link to a Democracy Now! interview of utmost importance to those who are following the fight within the American Psychological Association to stop collaboration with torture and coercive interrogations at America's "war on terror" prisons abroad.

The entire title is ""The Task Force Report Should Be Annulled" - Member of 2005 APA Task Force on Psychologist Participation in Military Interrogations Speaks Out". It's another great interview by national treasure Amy Goodman. Here's the introduction from Democracy Now's website:

In 2005, the American Psychological Association convened a Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security that concluded psychologists' participation in military interrogations was "consistent with the APA Code of Ethics." It was later revealed that six of nine voting members were from the military and intelligence agencies with direct connections to interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere. In a Democracy Now! broadcast exclusive, we speak with two members of the task force, Dr. Jean Maria Arrigo and Dr. Nina Thomas. Arrigo says the task force report "should be annulled," because the process was "flawed." As an example, Arrigo says she was "told very sharply" by one of the military psychologists not to take notes during the proceedings. She later archived the entire listserve of the task force and sent it to Senate Armed Services Committee. Dr. Arrigo also calls for a "moratorium" on psychologists involvement in military interrogations at Guantanamo Bay. We also speak with Dr. Eric Anders, a former Air Force officer who underwent harsh training in "SERE" (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) techniques, as well as Dr. Leonard Rubenstein, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights.

(Tip of the hat to Stephen Soldz for bringing this to our attention.)

"U.S. Building Massive Embassy With Slaves?"

I just saw this. The U.S. is shanghaiing workers from across the Middle East and putting them to work with substandard wages, inadequate food, with raw river water to drink, all to build their bloated imperial palace of an embassy in occupied Baghdad. It seems almost impossible to believe, and yet... Go read the entire article by Maccabee at Daily Kos.

Here's a snippet:

Every US labor law was broken,” says an American labor foreman, John Owens, who adds that he never witnessed a safety meeting. Once an Egyptian worker fell and broke his back and was sent home. No one ever heard from him again. “The accident might not have happened if there was a safety program and he had known how to use a safety harness,” charges Owen, who left the embassy project last June…Owen offers a different take on the workers he supervised. After having worked construction on US embassy sites in Armenia, Bulgaria, Angola, Cameroon and Cambodia, nothing compares to the mess he saw in Baghdad. “I’ve never seen a project more fucked up.”

Bush Justice Department Cripples Immigration Courts (the Goodling Connection)

What do you get when you mix an explosive social issue with a cup of desperation and a fillip of Monica Goodling? The answer is a hell of a mess. And that's a polite way to describe the shambles that has become our immigration and asylum court system.

The New York Times has an important article on the subject in yesterday's paper: Big Disparities in Judging of Asylum Cases. The article dissects a new study being published in the Stanford Law Review, "Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication". The abstract for this study reads, in part:

This study analyzes databases of merits decisions from all four levels of the asylum adjudication process: 133,000 decisions by 884 asylum officers over a seven year period; 140,000 decisions of 225 immigration judges over a four-and-a-half year period; 126,000 decisions of the Board of Immigration Appeals over six years; and 4215 decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeal during 2004 and 2005. The analysis reveals significant disparities in grant rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country....

The cross tabulations show that the chance of winning asylum was strongly affected by whether or not the applicant had legal representation, by the gender of the immigration judge, and by the immigration judge's work experience prior to appointment.

As the NYT article puts it, graphically:

In one of the starker examples cited, Colombians had an 88 percent chance of winning asylum from one judge in the Miami immigration court and a 5 percent chance from another judge in the same court.

But I think the statistic that will interest many readers is one the Times placed in the final sentence of the article.

Immigration judges are appointed by the attorney general, and 49 of 226 current judges were appointed during the tenure of Mr. Gonzales. [emphasis mine]

So, over 20% of the new immigration judges were appointed by Bush-Gonzales's Justice Department. (I don't know how many were appointed during the reign of John Ashcroft.) This is important for two reasons. One, procedural changes in asylum adjudication have given more weight to immigration judges' initial decisions because the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) has been eviscerated, with Ashcroft cutting the number of BIA board members from 23 to 11 back in 2002. The result was a “'sudden and lasting decline' in appeals that were favorable to asylum seekers".

But the shadow of the ongoing U.S. attorneys firing scandal hangs over the asylum-immigration issue as well.

The immigration courts have been in the spotlight after Justice Department officials said last week that the investigation of Monica M. Goodling, a former aide to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, has been expanded to include her role in helping to appoint immigration judges.

Ms. Goodling testified last week that she had “crossed the line” in applying political considerations to candidates for nonpartisan legal jobs. (emphasis mine)

So we see that political cronyism and litmus tests for civil service employees -- like the immigration court justices -- are attempts to foist a one-party system upon the state bureaucracy. The result, as the Stanford Law Review study suggests, is an immigration court system that is riddled with injustice and unfairness.

This study was nothing new to those of us who have followed the vagaries of the immigration courts adjudication of asylum law. (And remember, asylum refugees are those fleeing their countries because of persecution, torture, rape, political oppression, ethnic cleansing and genocide, etc.)

Meanwhile, Seven Long Years Ago

In October 2000, the San Jose Mercury News published a study, which was a

...statistical analysis of the decisions of each Immigration Judge in the U.S. comparing their grant rates on requests for asylum. Using the Freedom of Information Act, they obtained a 1,134-page printout of a table from the Justice Department. DMR Associates of Springfield, Virginia analyzed the data.

The former INS attorney who prints the raw results (see link directly above) cautions against reading too much into the data, but over at VisaLaw, they report the conclusions of the SJ Mercury News analysis.

The study... reveals what many instinctively knew about the asylum process – that whether a person is granted asylum depends less on the merits of the person’s case and more on the judge before whom they present their case. The paper examined 176,465 cases that came before the 219 Immigration Judges between 1995 and 1999.

Some judges granted asylum in half of the cases they heard, while other judges granted asylum in less than two percent of cases. Some judges even routinely deny asylum to applicants from countries such as Bosnia and Somalia, where conditions mean that most applicants are granted asylum....

According to the Mercury News analysis, there was one factor that was key in determining how an Immigration Judge would rule according their legal background. Judges who worked in the private sector before being appointed granted asylum at a 50 percent higher rate than judges who had previously worked for the government. There are twice as many former government lawyers working as Immigration Judges as former private sector attorneys.

Another important factor was the gender of the judge. Ten of the 24 judges most likely to grant asylum were women, while the six judges least likely to grant asylum were men. Only three of the 24 judges least likely to grant asylum were women. The overwhelming majority of Immigration Judges – 72 percent – are men.

You'd think the New York Times would have provided the perspective on the new study from the Mercury News article from seven years ago. Of course, if they did, it would show that little has changed since the sunset months of the Clinton Administration, despite the best efforts of Bush, Ashcroft, and Gonzales/Goodling. The most obvious change has been the near-destruction of the appeals process.

Immigration Demagoguery

Immigration has been the issue most beloved of demagogues, appealing as it does to nativism, fears of unemployment and jingoistic campaigns for buying only domestic products ("put the foreign workers out of work!"). The Democratic Party, backed by the parochial and conservative trade union bureaucracy, has often bought into the protectionist scam, which pits U.S. workers against their brothers and sisters around the world. And the worst victims have been, of course, the most powerless -- the men, women, and children fleeing for their lives to the U.S., asking for political asylum. As the studies reported above show, the United States has long since ceased standing for justice and fairness.

We must demand that political litmus tests for immigration judges be stopped, and their proponents fined and jailed. Attorney General Gonzales should be impeached, for this and other crimes, e.g., legalizing torture. And the Immigration Appeals Board must be reconstituted and strengthened, and judges in the immigration courts (now run by the Department of Homeland Security) monitored and held accountable for discriminatory practices.

Two Important Articles Expose Government Torture Practices

Stephen Soldz has a new article out at Counterpunch: Pentagon IG Report Details Central Role of Psychologists in Detainee Interrogations and Abuse -- Shrinks and the SERE Technique at Guantanamo. Additionally, the New York Times has an article today on the growing chorus of official criticism aimed at Bush's interrogation policies. The NYT article validates, though with much less details, Soldz's reporting on the use of "reverse engineering" by the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape Program (SERE) of its POW training into torture practiced on detainees in the government's "war on terror". The use of torture by the U.S. has been documented from Guantanamo Bay to Iraq to Afghanistan to U.S. secret prisons abroad.

Dr. Soldz based his article on the declassification of a Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (OIG) report, "Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse". The report was dated August 26, 2006. One result of this investigation was that it seemed to expedite the issuance of the new Army Field Manual 2-22.3, "Human Intelligence Collector Operations" (AFM). I have critiqued the AFM before, which even in its "new" version still contains interrogation techniques that are abusive and constitute psychological torture.

Soldz highlights portions of the OIG report that detail the use of SERE psychologists in the implementation of coercive interrogation techniques in Guantanamo, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He writes, quoting the OIG report:

Central to SERE is the role of psychologists. A psychologist is required to be present during certain aspects of the process, such as waterboarding as a "safety officer," to stop the training if (s)he perceives the trainee is being overly-traumatized....

"On September 16, 2002, the Army Special Operations Command and the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency co-hosted a SERE psychologist conference at Fort Bragg for JTF-170 [the military component responsible for interrogations at Guantanamo] interrogation personnel. The Army's Behavioral Science Consultation Team from Guantanamo Bay also attended the conference. Joint Personnel Recovery Agency personnel briefed JTF-170 representatives on the exploitation techniques and methods used in resistance (to interrogation) training at SERE schools. The JTF-170 personnel understood that they were to become familiar with SERE training and be capable of determining which SERE information and techniques might be useful in interrogations at Guantanamo. Guantanamo Behavioral Science Consultation Team personnel understood that they were to review documentation and standard operating procedures for SERE training in developing the standard operating procedure for the JTF-170, if the command approved those practices. The Army Special Operations Command was examining the role of interrogation support as a " Sere Psychologist competency area" (p. 25, emphasis added.)

For those of opposed to the participation of psychologists in abusive interrogations, this document contains the first definitive proof that the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs), consisting at that point of psychologists and psychiatrists (later, the military announced that they preferred psychologists for this role), were deliberately trained in abusive SERE techniques.

The NYT article also mentions the SERE training, as well as Senator Carl Levin's announcement that he will hold hearings into the SERE torture trainings.

Senator Carl Levin, a Michigan Democrat and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he found the report “very troubling” and intended to hold hearings on how the SERE training methods became the basis for interrogation. “They were put to a purpose that was never intended,” Mr. Levin said.

The NYT highlighting of various critiques of the administration's interrogation policies comes at an opportune time, as the article makes clear:

The Bush administration is nearing completion of a long-delayed executive order that will set new rules for interrogations by the Central Intelligence Agency. The order is expected to ban the harshest techniques used in the past, including the simulated drowning tactic known as waterboarding, but to authorize some methods that go beyond those allowed in the military by the Army Field Manual.

President Bush has insisted that those secret “enhanced” techniques are crucial, and he is far from alone. (emphases mine)

Dr. Soldz's article returns to the important subject of the use of psychologists in Bush's torture plans, and the facilitating role of the American Psychological Association in giving institutional cover to these inhumane and criminal policies.

...like the Bush administration, the APA is always against torture and abusive treatment but never actually sees it. Thus, the APA has never expressed concern as reports have come flooding out suggesting that abuse treatment (whether formally "torture" or merely "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment") is common in US detention facilities holding so-called enemy combatants. Neither has the APA expressed concern at the repeated reports of psychologist participation in abusive interrogations. Rather, they have attacked the critics of psychologist abuse....

However, the APA, like other health provider professional organizations felt the heat as these reports escalated. Thus, in June 2005 they convened a Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), clearly designed to provide a rubber stamp on the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations....

Especially relevant, given the revelations in this newly-released OIG, at least two of the members of this Task Force had direct SERE connections....

Given what the OIG's report reveals about the central role of SERE in the development of US abusive interrogation techniques, as well as revelations regarding other PENS members, it appears ever more likely that the APA appointed some of this country's top torturers to formulate its policy on participation in abusive interrogations. The PENS report lacks any credibility. If the APA maintained a shred of decency, they would take the opportunity provided by the release of the OIG report to admit that they made a mistake in creating the PENS Task Force and would immediately set aside the PENS report and begin a new open discussion of the facts and the ethics involved in participation in national security interrogations.

Please go read Soldz's entire article, for he has done a terrific job of parsing the OIG's over 100 page report. And also, support his call, along with Physicians for Human Rights and torture researcher Dr. Steven Miles, for congressional investigations. Now that Senator Levin has apparently responded to this call, I'd suggest calling his office and offering support.

The Bush Administration plans to issue "guidelines" for CIA interrogation that will go beyond what is already allowed in the Army Field Manual. The AFM already allows, for "special" cases, use of sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation, debilitation of the prisoner, and techniques that enhance fearfulness. Long ago, Dr. Lawrence E. Hinkle demonstrated how these activities alone can bring about a state of "disordered brain syndrome", producing organic states of confusion, mental impairment, and delirium, often with long-term effects.

Turn up the heat now on the Bush administration and demand NO to ALL Torture Practices!

Shocking: 2003 CIA/APA "Workshop" Plots New Torture Plans

Imagine that the top behavioral scientists of this country got together with top secret intelligence agencies, not 20, 30 or 50 years ago, but today, to plot new ways to conduct torture interrogations. Imagine that there was irrefutable proof of this. And finally, imagine they did this all in plain view.

Imagine no longer, and read how the CIA, the RAND Corporation, and the American Psychological Association (APA) met on July 17-18, 2003, and in a workshop entitled the "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory" discussed new ways to utilize drugs and sensory bombardment techniques to break down interrogatees. The latter are signal techniques of psychological torture long utilized by the CIA and other intelligence agencies and military around the world.

The kicker is: the CIA denies it uses torture, and the APA claims that its official position is against torture and involvement in psychologists in research, planning or implementation of coercive interrogation. So what's going on?

Let's get to the meat of the revelations right away. At Arlington, Virginia, at the headquarters of the privately-held but long linked-to-the-government think tank, the RAND Corporation, approximately 40 participants met at a "workshop" to discuss the issue of deception in interrogations, with "generous financial support" from the CIA, which also provided "operational expertise". The participants included:

...research psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists who study various aspects of deception and representatives from the CIA, FBI and Department of Defense with interests in intelligence operations. In addition, representatives from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security were present.

What did they discuss?

According to APA's Public Policy Office, who publishes an online newspaper called, with perhaps an unconscious taste for irony, "Spin":

The scenarios dealt broadly with issues such as embassy walk-in informants, threat assessment, intelligence gathering, and law enforcement interrogation and debriefing. Participants were prompted in advance to think about research issues and practical considerations they wanted the broader group to consider. Across the two days, there were a number of thought-provoking discussions suggesting the need to develop both short-term and long-term research programs on deception

Research into Torture

The workshop proceeded to discuss various "scenarios", per their program. Some of these scenarios -- really questions for consideration by the agencies involved -- are not remarkable in and of themselves. Others appear potentially sinister.

But none are more sinister than those that appear in the section "Law Enforcement Interrogation and Debriefing". (All following quotes, unless otherwise noted, come from the APA's Government Policy: Science Policy website.)

Law enforcement routinely question witnesses and suspects regarding criminal activity. How do you tell if the individual is telling the truth, lying, or something in between? Acts of omission and acts of commission are both important to identify.

This truly is an ancient problem. The accused of former times were brought before judges and called to "the question". In the Parlements of France that preceded the French Revolution, the accused would be first given the question ordinaire, which only consisted of arms and legs stretched on the rack. If that didn't work, the accused would be encouraged to confess via the question extraordinaire, i.e., compelled to drink up to 20 jugs of water. (Thanks to Ian Davidson and his research in the marvelous book, Voltaire in Exile, for info on French medieval torture.)

But the modern APA and their police and intelligence cohorts have another idea.

How do we find out if the informant has knowledge of which s/he is not aware?

How important are differential power and status between witness and officer?

What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?....

What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?

The Unknown History of Psychological Torture, or How They Do It

Using drugs to influence interrogations; using sensory deprivation, distortion and overload or bombardment; these were signal techniques in a decades-long research program that came to be known by its most famous moniker, MKULTRA. Its techniques were codified by the early 1960s in a CIA Counterinsurgency Interrogation Manual, also known by its codename, KUBARK.

According to numerous researchers, the CIA, and the psychologists and psychiatrists they contracted to work with them, including many of the top behavioral scientists of their day, experimented with many drugs in their quest to find a "truth" drug that would open up the recalcitrant and expose the liar and the dissembler. It's not hard to find information on this in many places, some dubious, some not, on the Internet. The CIA has declassified a paper from its in-house intelligence journal from the early 1960s, "'Truth' Drugs in Interrogation", where they discuss research on drugs for interrogation ranging from scopolamine, amphetamine and barbiturates to cannabis, LSD, and mescaline. The CIA authors discuss the limitations of using drugs, based on research, and conclude that a special use for drugs may be found in detection of deception.

The general abhorrence in Western countries for the use of chemical agents "to make people do things against their will" has precluded serious systematic study (at least as published openly) of the potentialities of drugs for interrogation....

...at best a drug can only serve as an aid to an interrogator who has a sure understanding of the psychology and techniques of normal interrogation. In some respects, indeed, the demands on his skill will be increased by the baffling mixture of truth and fantasy in drug-induced output. And the tendency against which he must guard in the interrogatee to give the responses that seem to be wanted without regard for facts will be heightened by drugs: the literature abounds with warnings that a subject in narcosis is extremely suggestible.

It seems possible that this suggestibility and the lowered guard of the narcotic state might be put to advantage in the case of a subject feigning ignorance of a language or some other skill that had become automatic with him. Lipton found sodium amytal helpful in determining whether a foreign subject was merely pretending not to understand English. By extension, one can guess that a drugged interrogatee might have difficulty maintaining the pretense that he did not comprehend the idiom of a profession he was trying to hide.

But the quotes from the CIA/RAND/APA deception workshop are not from 40 years ago. They are from 2003! Evidently the research into using drugs on captured or arrested or incarcerated prisoners or "enemy combatants" has not ended.

Sensory Bombardment, or Why Can't We Watch the Movie "The Ipcress File?

In the hit 1960s spy drama, The Ipcress File, starring a young Michael Caine as the British intelligence agent Harry Palmer. Palmer stumbles upon a secret government project codenamed Ipcress, which stands for "Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS".
In the film, Palmer is himself tortured by the proponents of Ipcress, shut into a small chamber and bombarded for hours by extremely loud noises and music, meant, it seems to drive him insane. He keeps his sense of personal self by jamming a secretly hidden nail into the palm of his hand: the pain keeps him centered and helps him resist the brainwashing.

I've gone into the plot because if you live in the U.S., you cannot obtain this film new on DVD or video. Despite the fact it stars the popular star Michael Caine, and despite the fact it won British awards for Best Screenplay and the BAFTA Award for Best British Film of 1965, and despite siring three sequels, the picture has not been released in the U.S. for many years. It's probably some legal hang-up, but given the subject matter, one wonders.

Research into sensory deprivation, sensory and perceptual distortion, and sensory overload or bombardment constituted a gigantic research project in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience from the early 1950s through the late 1970s. Subsequently, the research, which had engendered hundreds if not thousands of papers, many of them with research funded by the Pentagon, seemed to disappear. Yet strangely, the topic did not disappear. It remained part of the apparatus of secret intelligence programs, and one would presume, classified research.

I have written some on this before in my recent essay, "Heart of Darkness: Sensory Deprivation and U.S. Torture -- Where from Here?" But what is needed is a full history, and an explanation that the layman will understand. I will attempt a small example of the latter here. But those wishing to investigate further will have to send away to their local used bookseller to find two important books that document this history and research:

Sensory Deprivation, A Symposium held at Harvard Medical School, Solomon, Philip, Jack H. Mendelson, Philip E. Kubzansky, Richard Trumbull, P. Herbert Leiderman & Donald Wexler, Editors, 1961, Harvard University Press

Sensory Deprivation: Fifteen Years of Research, John Zubek, Editor, 1969, Appleton-Century-Crofts

Sensory Bombardment and Deprivation: A Crash Course

The brain needs a certain amount of stimulation. Early developmental studies show that early sensory deprivation during formative periods of development often results in the failure of the somatosensory systems to develop normally, both neuroanatomically and neurochemically. For those of you into such disputes, "nature" needs "nurture" to express itself.

What the research on sensory deprivation/distortion/overload demonstrated was that the nervous system is adapted to a range of stimuli, and requires an certain minimum of cortical activation. If this range is exceeded (sensory overload) or is lacking (sensory deprivation), the brain does not operate correctly. A special case is sensory or perceptual distortion. As the researchers got more deeply into it, they found that distortion of expected stimuli, or producing a vague, featureless visual field, caused greater disruption of psychological functioning than sensory deprivation per se.

What all this comes down to is that the CIA and Pentagon, searching for ways to disrupt the will and functioning of those being interrogated, found in the various modalities of sensory disruption a shiny new tool in their armamentarium of coercive techniques, joining it to isolation (itself a special form of deprivation), stress positions, sleep deprivation, and the induction of fear and physical debility (e.g., starvation).

According to the British writer Dominic Streatfeild, in his recent book Brainwashed: The Secret History of Mind Control (2007, St. Martin's Press), both the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) at Guantanamo Bay, and the British Intelligence Corps have lately experimented with the effects of loud, overpowering sounds upon interrogatees, including "babies crying, discordant car horns, bloodcurdling screams and Chinese opera tapes" (p. 360). Americans preferred to torture via thrash-metal music and white noise.

The actual choice of noise doesn't appear to make much difference: what matters is that it's loud, repetitive and annoying. To an interrogation subject who hasn't been allowed proper sleep for a couple of days, an unexpected cacophony will cause him to jump out of his skin. This is how the big boys maintain the shock of capture.

How CIA Uses This Kind of Torture

The CIA's torture manual, known as KUBARK, declassified in part some years ago, but still bearing many redactions, describes in its Chapter IX, "Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources" its theory and practice of coercion. I will highlight what it says on sensory forms of torture, as it also describes in this chapter alone use of threats and fear, induction of weakness and debility, hypnosis, narcosis (drugs), and pain.

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

All coercive techniques are designed to induce regression. As Hinkle notes in "The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject as it Affects Brain Function" (7), the result of external pressures of sufficient intensity is the loss of those defenses most recently acquired by civilized man: "... the capacity to carry out the highest creative activities, to meet new, challenging, and complex situations, to deal with trying interpersonal relations, and to cope with repeated frustrations. Relatively small degrees of homeostatic derangement, fatigue, pain, sleep loss, or anxiety may impair these functions." As a result, "most people who are exposed to coercive procedures will talk and usually reveal some information that they might not have revealed otherwise."

So much for the idea that torture produces nothing. It does in fact produce information, it's the reliability of the information that is often in question. But this author has direct experience of talking with people who have been interrogated under torture, and I can tell you that it does sometimes produce actionable intelligence, at the expense of the humanity and suffering of the "subject". Much of the time, however, it produces nothing, because the arrested person is innocent, or has been made too disabled by the torture, or is producing what he or she hope the interrogator wants, irregardless of truth value.

The CIA puts it this way:

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

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

As for sensory distortion:

...a person cut off from external stimuli turns his awareness inward, upon himself, and then projects the contents of his own unconscious outwards, so that he endows his faceless environment with his own attributes, fears, and forgotten memories....

(1) the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; (2) the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; (3) the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli; and (4) some subjects progressively lose touch with reality, focus inwardly, and produce delusions, hallucinations, and other pathological effects.

The astute reader will note that KUBARK does not mention sensory overload (although it does mention disruption of familiar "patterns" in a person's life). But the research literature is clear: sensory overstimulation is meant to disrupt a person's normal functioning, and like other forms of psychological torture, leaves scars upon a person's psyche, having been subjected to a regimen of dependency, debility and dread.

I've gone into some detail here so the casual but interested reader can understand the import of what is here discovered.

Stop Psychological Research into Coercive Interrogation -- Summary

1. The CIA bankrolled a meeting of behavioral scientists, including psychologists, psychiatrists, and neuroscientists, under the banner of the American Psychological Association, and hosted by the RAND Corporation. Also present were officials from the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and the White House.

2. At this workshop, the participants considered ways of combatting deception in interrogations. Two ways they discussed were consistent with a long-standing use of coercive interrogation techniques -- use of drugs in interrogation, and the use of sensory manipulation of subjects, both in order to produce debilitating changes in subjects that make them more pliable in interrogations

3. This meeting proves that the research that made up the mind control project of the 1950s and 1960s is not dead, and that psychological forms of torture and mind manipulation are studied at the highest levels of government, and with the connivance and collaboration of major U.S. academic and social institutions, in this case the American Psychological Association.

A group of psychologists in the APA are fighting to stop the use of psychologists in the kinds of interrogations discussed in this article. You can read about it here and here. I suggest the following: write to the President of the APA, and tell her your opposition to the kinds of activities documented herein.

I would also suggest that these activities and the deception workshop itself involved unethical, if not illegal, actions, and that the members involved should be sanctioned. -- You can contact Sharon Brehm, Ph.D., President of the APA at her webpage, where there is a form for this purpose. Or you can write APA at

American Psychological Association, 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002-4242

Or call the Ethics Office of APA and complain directly: (800) 374-2721, extension 5930. Tell them to direct your message to Dr. Stephen Behnke, the APA flack working on these issues.

Democrats Cave to Bush on Iraq Funding

An AP story published online at the New York Times today reports the Democratic Party Congressional leadership has decided to give Bush his war funding for the occupation of Iraq, at least until the end of the fiscal year in September.

In grudging concessions to President Bush, Democrats intend to draft an Iraq war-funding bill without a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and shorn of billions of dollars in spending on domestic programs, officials said Monday....

While details remain subject to change, the measure is designed to close the books by Friday on a bruising veto fight between Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress over the war. It would provide funds for military operations in Iraq through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. [emphases mine]

The story adds that Democrats "are expected to seek other opportunities to challenge Bush's handling of the unpopular conflict later this year". Additionally, they are said to be tying passage of the long-stymied minimum wage hike to the Iraq funding. But nothing can hide their craven capitulation to the Bush veto and the war party's thirst for militarist imperialism.

The minimum wage maneuver is all the more obscene, as it attempts to link the needs of the lowest and most vulnerable strata of workers to the needs of the war machine. One would have thought that only the GOP could turn the minimum wage into the equivalent of blood money, but the Democrats appear to be outdoing themselves these days.

The article also states that the legislation was "subject to change", and the story's author could get no Democrat to speak on the record about the pending legislation. What a surprise!

It remains to see if this is a trial balloon, or the last popgun shot in the Democrat's phony antiwar stance.