Ex-APA President Part of Torture-linked Firm -- APA: See No Evil, Hear No Evil

A former president of the APA, now almost a generation ago, Joseph Matarazzo, has been outed by SpokesmanReview.com as one of five "governing people" in the firm Mitchell, Jessen and Associates in Spokane, Washington. Mitchell-Jessen's primary partners, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen have been linked to the CIA and military use of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq. Matarazzo is also said to have a financial interest in the firm.

From the SpokesmanReview story by Bill Morlin:

Matarazzo refused repeated interview requests but said in an e-mailed statement that he "is not and never has been involved in the company's operational decisions," and that he only "attends brief and infrequent company meetings."

Matarazzo added in the e-mailed statement: "I have never been involved in the use either of torture or the legal or illegal interrogation of prisoners or anyone else. And I would strongly advise against it. I also have no knowledge of anyone who has been involved in such torture or interrogation."

Brad Olson, chairman of the APA Divisions for Social Justice, called the revelations "shocking and distressing".

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that besides being a well-known psychologist-teacher at Oregon Health & Science University's Department of Behavioral Neuroscience, Matarazzo, who retired last June, was heavily involved in the assessment of police officers, and was also a "Distinguished Visiting Professor" at an APA doctoral program for the Air Force at Andrews Air Force Base. The program included a "choice of optional rotations in the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, [and] the National Security Agency", among other more health-oriented internship possibilities. (There's nothing necessarily sinister about these latter associations, but they are suggestive of the milieu with which Matarazzo associated.)

According to a recent New Yorker article, Mitchell and Jessen, Matarazzo's partners, were involved in some pretty heavy duty bad behavior:

... the SERE experts’ theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah’s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a “dog box,” which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of “learned helplessness.” (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)....

The C.I.A.’s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. “It’s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,” an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. “At every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you’ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.”

Despite all this, according to Bill Morlin's article, the APA responded with a sputtering utterance of bizarre denial:

APA President Sharon Brehm and Stephen Behnke, the director of APA's Ethics Directorate, both declined comment last week when asked about Matarazzo's ties to the private psychology firm working for the CIA.

"Dr. Matarazzo was president of APA 18 years ago," Rhea Farberman, the organization's director of public affairs, said in a prepared statement.

"Since that time, he has had no active role in APA governance but has been actively involved in the American Psychological Foundation (APF), the charitable giving arm of APA. Dr. Matarazzo currently holds no governance positions in either APA or APF," the statement said.

Matarazzo's "professional activities are outside and independent of any role he has played within APA and APF," the statement said. "We have no direct knowledge about the business dealing of Mitchell's and Jessen's company; however, APA's position is clear – torture or other forms of cruel or inhuman treatment are always unethical." [emphasis added]

So, being involved in torture or associated with torturers, if it is part of one's "professional activities", are not considered any business of the oh-so-staid-but-"liberal" American Psychological Association, as long as those activities are "outside and independent of any role... played within APA". No words of condemnation or distress! Without shame, the leadership of the APA continues to bury their head in the sand, the better to assure long-time links between their organization and some of their members with military and intelligence agencies.

Later this week, the APA's Council of Representatives is meeting to consider the role of psychologists in interrogations. With revelations falling upon their heads left and right, they would do well to consider the fate of the APA as any kind of respectable institution and vote to pass a moratorium resolution forbidding the collaboration of psychologists in the U.S. government's illegal and immoral program of coercive interrogation.

Inside Secret CIA Interrogation Program

Also posted at Daily Kos

The August 8 interview Amy Goodman of Demcracy Now! conducts with New Yorker writer Jane Mayer and Jameel Jaffner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Program, makes for more impeachment fodder. Mayer reveals that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) labelled the CIA's detention and interrogation methods "tantamount to torture". The ICRC warned that "U.S. officials responsible for the abusive treatment may have committed 'grave breaches' of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act". Mayer reported on much of this in her recent New Yorker article on the "black sites".

Even more disturbing, if that's possible, the ICRC, which keeps its reports to the government confidential, the better to maintain access to prisoners, reported on all this to the Bush Administration last year, but access to the report was limited to only a trusted few. Following Jaffner's analysis quoted below, I'll bet Gonzales was one of them.

Jaffner is involved in a Freedom of Information Act request for records regarding oncerning treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. He is also author of an upcoming book about torture: Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. He began his comments with an indictment of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and his role in the Bush Administration's use of torture.

Well, it's actually, I think, a little frustrating that senior officials, including Alberto Gonzales, have not been held accountable for the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, but also elsewhere. We now know that prisoners were abused in US custody all over the world -- Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. We know that they were abused because of policies that were adopted at the highest levels. Alberto Gonzales is one of the people who participated in constructing the policies that led to the abuse and, in many cases, the torture of prisoners, and yet neither Mr. Gonzales nor any of the other senior officials who were involved in creating those policies have been held to account. I think that, you know, actually, most of the senior officials who should have been held to account have been rewarded instead.

Jaffner also spoke about the linkage between CIA and the military on interrogations:

But one of the things that struck me in reading the article is the numerous similarities between what happened in CIA custody and what happened in military custody. And if you look at how the military developed its techniques, its techniques that led to the abuse of prisoners at Guantanamo, for example, they were developed in exactly the same way: by reverse-engineering, these SERE methods, the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. These are methods that the military used ultimately against prisoners in its custody, and they are apparently the same methods that the CIA used against prisoners in its custody....

Later in the joint interview, Jane Mayer discusses "the use of psychologists in interrogations as "a way by the CIA to skirt the Convention Against Torture, among other international treaties":

Well, if you take a look at the so-called torture memos, the forty pages or so of memos that were written by Jay Bybee and John Yoo way back right after 9/11, and you take a look at how they -- they're busy looking at the Convention Against Torture, basically, it seems, trying to figure a way around it. One of the things they argued, these lawyers from the Justice Department, is that if you don't intend to torture someone, if your intention is not just to inflict terrible pain on them but to get information, then you really can't be necessarily convicted of torture.

So how do you prove that your intent is pure? Well, one of the things they suggest is if you consult with experts who will say that what you're doing is just interrogation, then that might also be a good legal defense. And so, one of the roles that these SERE psychologists played was a legal role. They were the experts who were consulted in order to argue that the program was not a program of torture. They are to say, “We've got PhDs, and this is standard psychology, and this is a legitimate way to question people.”

And now the government is trying to continue their campaign, taking it right into the convention of the American Psychological Association, where military psychologists stand ready to introduce a "substitute" resolution on psychologist participation in interrogations, the aim of which is to torpedo an earlier resolution calling for a moratorium on psychologists operating at foreign detention prisons! Jane Mayer hit the nail on the head, asked about the fate of the protest within APA on psychologists invovled in military/CIA interrogations:

And some of the psychologists who were key players in this actually are officials at the APA who have set the policy here. So there's a bit of a sort of a sense of the foxes guarding the chicken house.

So we await the next stage of the fight against the government and its insistence on maintaining the instruments of coercion, of abuse, of torture.

Moment of Truth Arrives: APA & Participation in U.S. Torture

On August 16, the American Psychological Association (APA) opens a five day convention in beautiful San Francisco. Behind the mise en scene of cable cars, wind-whipped fog, hot sourdough bread, and old Victorian gingerbread homes, a crucial political struggle is taking place over the future of coercive interrogation techniques and inhumane detention conducted by U.S. forces in the wrongly-named "war on terror".

In previous posts, I have explained how psychologists have participated in Pentagon and CIA-run torture of so-called "illegal enemy combatants", how there is a long history of this, and how a large group of APA internal critics and anti-torture activists have proposed a moratorium against use of psychologists in all operations concerning detention and interrogation of detainees in foreign prisons and at Guantanamo. A recent article by Jane Mayer at The New Yorker describes the fight within the Pentagon and CIA by some government behavioral scientific professionals against use of torture techniques:

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”

Unfortunately, this internal opposition by some CIA and military psychologists and psychiatrists proved impotent. No doubt, however, some of what we know about what's going on internally must have come from leaks by such disgruntled and disgusted personnel.

Bureaucratic Vertigo: Resolutions, Amendments, and Votes

Now the scene shifts to the civilized convention meeting rooms of the APA, where, somewhere, the APA's Council of Representatives will meet on Sunday, August 19 to vote on possibly two separate resolutions: one calls for a moratorium against psychologist participation at Guantanamo, in addition to detainee sites in Iraq, Afghanistan, and secret prisons abroad. The APA Board of Directors has proposed a different resolution, which details a number of prohibited interrogation techniques, but fails to support a moratorium, and will allow psychologists to still work in certain defined ways at prisons that allow indefinite detention. Forces within APA are working to derail the first proposal (on a moratorium) in favor of the weaker, new APA-crafted resolution. I detailed all this in my recent article: Will APA Psychology Convention Endorse Indefinite Detention?

Since the existence of this second proposal appears in part meant to remove the moratorium resolution from consideration, i.e., undemocratically not allow it to come to a vote, a number of the moratorium proponents have been working hard to amend the Board's resolution to make it more like the original proposal to ban psychologist participation (a "ban" by the way that was only advisory, with no enforceable provisions).

These amendments, some of which are very helpful, still have a number of problems. Not least is they leave intact the Board resolution's reliance on a definition of "cruel, unusual, inhumane and degrading treatment" (so-called "torture-lite") that is rooted in shifty and inadequate U.S. constitutional so-called protections, and not on international laws and treaties, which are much more specific in their protections. Consider the barbaric practices that exist in U.S. "supermax" prisons, and you get the idea. Additionally, the amendments fall short on nailing down the definition of certain prohibited techniques, creating loopholes for CIA and Pentagon torture proponents.

Closing the Loopholes

Recently, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) sent a letter to APA President Sharon Brehm calling for a vote on both proposals, and suggesting changes of their own to the Board's proposal to strengthen it. Their changes are worth noting:

We understand, of course, that the list of techniques in the proposed resolution is, by the very nature of a list, incapable of addressing all possible forms of torture; but the list does cover virtually all abusive psychological techniques used by the military and CIA and the Department of Defense since 2002....

To avoid creating loopholes, we urge that the resolution be amended in certain key respects that should not be objectionable:

A. Assure that the description of prohibited techniques leaves no room for ambiguity....

1. The use of isolation and sleep deprivation in interrogation is never permissible (thus eliminating the qualifier that they are condemned only if there is a detriment to health....

2. The use of psychotropic drugs is prohibited;

3. Any exploitation of fears or psychopathology (not just phobias) is unacceptable; and

4. Participation “during” interrogation is expanded to include “or in connection with detention,” because we now know that practices such as isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of persistent loud music have been used as part of a strategy to break down individuals both inside and outside the interrogation room....

The Board’s resolution serves to underscore the importance of other actions we urged in my letter of June 14, especially adopting a stance that psychologists not participate in the interrogation of individual detainees by performing pre-interrogation assessments, designing interrogation plans, assisting in interrogation, monitoring interrogation, or otherwise.

Brehm the Decider

Addressing the PHR letter to Sharon Brehm is more than just an organizational gesture, one organization speaking to the administrative head of another organization. In the APA internal struggle -- one you can be sure is monitored by the military, the CIA, and perhaps even by the White House itself, as the loss of APA support would be a huge blow to the attempt to make Bush's "war on terror" antidemocratic and torture techniques legitimate -- the battle of the two resolutions is likely to be partly decided by Brehm herself, as she is both APA President and also the presiding officer of the Council. This is because the APA Parliamentarian has asked her to judge the procedural matter in such a way that she may make the key decision as to whether the moratorium decision is allowed to come to a vote.

As one insider explained:

Thus, a member — indeed, THE most important member of the Board of Directors — is in a position to rule on the legitimacy of a motion that has been put forward by herself and her own Board of Directors!

Is the "fix" in? Or will Brehm allow, as many suggest, both resolutions to come to a vote? (The idea that the Board's resolution was meant to overturn the moratorium resolution and by the Council's own rules should be thrown out and only the moratorium resolution come to a vote is, while supported by a few, probably a non-starter.)

No one knows what Brehm will do. But one wonders if she wants to go down as the APA president that allowed continued psychologist participation in coercive detentions, and de facto endorsement of working at facilities that allow hellish indefinite (and often solitary) detention. Then again, the blandishments of the White House, the Pentagon and the CIA must be considerable, and the voice of the APA's own Society for Military Psychology (Division 19 of the APA) remains strong and vociferous against any moratorium.

Summing Up

This has been a long and complicated post, especially for those who may not have kept up with this political fight in the Siberia of American politics. But it is not an insignificant tussle. As recent articles in Vanity Fair, the Washington Monthly, The New Yorker, and elsewhere have made clear, the fight over psychologist participation in torture is central to how Bush and Cheney conduct their criminal "war on terror" abroad, with its black site secret prisons, its use of extensive torture and abuse, and its arrogant dismissal of international law and treaties. It's evident the U.S. Congress has little appetite to oppose the Bush regime in any substantive way. That leaves it up to us -- to the rank and file of various civilian organizations, such as the APA -- to fight back against the antidemocratic and criminal impulses and policies both proposed and implemented by the Bush Administration and its compliant Pentagon and CIA toadies.

But perhaps not everybody at Langley and the Pentagon complex are so compliant! There are those within these institutions who want to see the torture and inhumane treatment stop. Perhaps some of these will stand up and reveal more of the inner connections of the Bush war machine with torture and affronts to international law. Perhaps even a few may have something yet to whisper into Sharon Brehm's ear.

Still, it would be foolish to hope much for anything along such lines, as the socialization and organizational pressures of being in the military or intelligence organizations, not to mention on the APA Council or Board of Directors, shapes the context within which these people think and behave. No. It will be up to the APA rank and file, and the general public at large, to the degree they can be mobilized to pressure the APA and their Council of Representatives.

Rally for an Ethical APA

There will be a rally to end APA collaboration with illegal interrogations and torture on Friday, August 17, 4-5:30pm at Yerba Buena Gardens, right by the APA convention. It is endorsed by many psychological organizations, including sections of the APA, as well as by prominent individuals and organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee, Nobel Peace Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights, Tikkun, School of the Americas Watch, Robert Jay Lifton, MD, Steven Miles, MD, and others. There will be speakers and music. Come show your support.

Pentagon Endorses Christian Apocalyptic Video Games for Troops

Max Blumenthal has an article up at The Nation's blog, The Notion, entitled "Kill or Convert, Brought to You by the Pentagon". It describes how an evangelical Christian group, Operation Straight Up (OSU), has received Pentagon permission to send a controversial video game entitled "Left Behind: Eternal Forces" in their "Freedom Packages" to U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Like much of politics today, the entire story has an air of unreality about it, the kind of unreality that one feels after awaking from a particularly disturbing and frightening nightmare.

From Blumenthal's article:

The game is inspired by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' bestselling pulp fiction series about a blood-soaked Battle of Armageddon pitting born-again Christians against anybody who does not adhere to their particular theology. In LaHaye's and Jenkins' books [which have sold 65 million copies and are second only to the Bible in sales of Christian books], the non-believers are ultimately condemned to "everlasting punishment" while the evangelicals are "raptured" up to heaven.

The Left Behind videogame is a real-time strategy game that makes players commanders of a virtual evangelical army in a post-apocalyptic landscape that looks strikingly like New York City after 9/11. With tanks, helicopters and a fearsome arsenal of automatic weapons at their disposal, Left Behind players wage a violent war against United Nations-like peacekeepers who, according to LaHaye's interpretation of Revelation, represent the armies of the Antichrist. Each time a Left Behind player kills a UN soldier, their virtual character exclaims, "Praise the Lord!" To win the game, players must kill or convert all the non-believers left behind after the rapture. They also have the option of reversing roles and commanding the forces of the Antichrist. (Video preview here).

According to some accounts, the video game makers hope to distribute a million copies of this game to churches throughout the U.S., so soldiers will not be alone in getting their chance to fantasize being a soldier of God who gets to kill (or convert -- does one get more points for one over the other?) infidel Jews, Muslims, Hindus, athiests, Wiccans, etc. This should go over big in neighborhoods from Fallujah to Karachi! One wonders how many pimply-faced church goers or bored and terrified soldiers will choose to play the game with the reverse option, as a general serving Antichrist.

More seriously, how many U.S. soldiers will now die because of inflamed passions against this neo-Crusader propaganda?

One of OSU's biggest names is Stephen Baldwin, the actor, whose craft is protected by the same first amendment which, by his organizational affiliations, he desecrates along with unknown Pentagon officials allied with OSU. But then, this is a secular desecration, isn't it?

I'm reminded of a passage by Milton, someone who knew Satan intimately, and Jesus, too.

For neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible...

Ah, Milton, not invisible anymore, but manipulated by joysticks, right-wing generals, pulp fiction zealots, and oblivious politicians.

6 August 1945

We remember.

From the Uranium Information Centre (UIC) in Australia, Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper No. 29.

The Effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombs

The devastating effects of both kinds of bombs depended essentially upon the energy released at the moment of the explosion, causing immediate fires, destructive blast pressures, and extreme local radiation exposures. Since the bombs were detonated at a height of some 600 metres above the ground, very little of the fission products were deposited on the ground beneath. Some deposition occurred however in areas near to each city, owing to local rainfall occurring soon after the explosions. This happened at positions a few kilometres to the east of Nagasaki, and in areas to the west and north-west of Hiroshima....

In Hiroshima, of a resident civilian population of 250 000 it was estimated that 45 000 died on the first day and a further 19 000 during the subsequent four months. In Nagasaki, out of a population of 174 000, 22 000 died on the first day and another 17 000 within four months. Unrecorded deaths of military personnel and foreign workers may have added considerably to these figures....

From the estimated radiation levels, however, it is apparent that radiation alone would not have been enough cause death in most of those exposed beyond a kilometre of the ground zero below the bombs. Most deaths appear to have been from the explosion rather than the radiation....

The total number of casualties at the Japan bomb sites is estimated at around 200,000. Estimates of casualties is a complicated affair, and a detailed discussion and breakdown of figures can be found at atomicarchive.com.

From the UIC paper:

The atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons up to 1963 caused people to be exposed to radiation in a quite different way. The Japanese atomic bombs had caused lethal exposures locally from radiation at the time of the explosions, but very little radiation more than a few kilometres away. On the other hand, subsequent atmospheric tests did not cause any substantial direct exposures of people at the time of the tests. However, the fission products released into the atmosphere caused the whole world population to be exposed to very low but continuing annual doses from fallout. In at least two instances these fission products also caused substantial irradiation to small populations exposed to local fallout close to the site of testing.

A Hiroshima Victim Remembers

CBS television reporter David R. Ford visited the Atomic Bomb Hospital in Hiroshima, twenty years to the day the bomb fell on that city. He interviewed a woman there suffering from terminal radiation poisoning. She had no hair or nose, and a bandage around her eyes. She recounted the day that destroyed her life and changed the world:

"I was 13. I was in our school yard chatting with schoolmates, waiting for the bell to ring for school to begin. I saw a blue-red flash. It was like another sun. Minutes later, thousands of people were screaming in agony. Many were naked from the concussion, their bodies black. Blood was coming from all their body openings. For many, the flesh had been stripped, and hung so that one could see the bones. For some, it was like someone cut you with a razor at least a quarter-inch deep from shoulder to shoulder, then pulled the meat all the way down to your hips. Then burned you with a blow torch. I didn't know then how badly I was injured. A school friend raised her hand for me to help her. I reached for her hand. The skin came off like a glove, to the elbow. I vomited. Thousands of people were screaming and crawling to the river, desperate for water. As they drank, they died in horrible pain, filling the river like pieces of driftwood."

Pause. Think. Feel. Only silence is appropriate at this point.

Operation Phoenix Reborn: New Yorker Expose on CIA "Black Sites"

Jane Mayer at the New Yorker has written a riveting piece on the recent history of the CIA recent torture program, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program. The article helps us better piece together the history of CIA and military interrogation post 9/11, even if some of the information is fragmentary and contradictory.

One of the most startling revelations is that the CIA turned to its own history, resurrecting the techniques and model of its Operation Phoenix terror-torture program in Vietnam in the mid-1960s. While a program of "state-sanctioned torture and murder", where over 97% of the Vietnamese victimized were "of negligible importance", "C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model".

A Wikipedia article on "psychological warfare" notes:

The Phoenix Program had the dual aim of assassinating Viet Cong personnel and terrorizing any potential sympathizers or passive supporters. When members of the VCI were assassinated, CIA and Special Forces operatives placed playing cards in the mouth of the deceased as a calling card. During the Phoenix Program, over 19,000 Viet Cong supporters were killed.

Researcher Michael Otterman in his superlative examination of CIA/Pentagon torture over the years, American Torture, wrote of the Phoenix Program:

Phoenix was a CIA operation aimed at eliminating the Vietcong civilian infrastructure (VCI).... Unlike standard military operations, Phoenix targeted civilians, not soldiers. Phoenix was launched in 1965 -- the same year the USA announced it would abide by the Geneva Conventions in Vietnam....

There were two main components to the Phoenix Program: Provisional Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) and regional interrogation centers. The PrUs would kill VCI members, terrorise civilians and capture those deemed to have knowledge about VCI structures. At the interrogation centres, CIA interrogators, alongside their Vietnamese counterparts, would torture VCI prisoners in an effort to learn the identity of VCI members in each province....

PRUs were financed by the CIA, composed of Vietnamese fighters, and led on missions by members of the Navy SEALs. (pp. 60-62)

The CIA publishes on its own website the tale of one of Phoenix's prisoners, Nguyen Tai: The Man in the Snow White Cell.

As Tai must have anticipated, his confession did not end his ordeal. After giving him a short rest as a reward, his South Vietnamese interrogators came back with a request that he provide details about his personal background and history. Tai refused, and the torture resumed. He was kept sitting on a chair for weeks at a time with no rest; he was beaten; he was starved; he was given no water for days; and he was hung from the rafters for hours by his arms, almost ripping them from their sockets. After more than six months of interrogation and torture, Tai felt his physical and psychological strength ebbing away; he knew his resistance was beginning to crack. During a short respite between torture sessions, to avoid giving away the secrets he held in his head during the physical and psycho-logical breakdown he could feel coming, Tai tried to kill himself by slashing his wrists.

Hung by his arms from the rafters? Bashing his head against the wall? This is exactly what we read in Jane Mayer's article Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Queda "mastermind" kept in isolation and tortured by the CIA endured, along with other "high-profile" detainees, endured.

According to sources, Mohammed said that, while in C.I.A. custody, he was placed in his own cell, where he remained naked for several days. He was questioned by an unusual number of female handlers, perhaps as an additional humiliation. He has alleged that he was attached to a dog leash, and yanked in such a way that he was propelled into the walls of his cell. Sources say that he also claimed to have been suspended from the ceiling by his arms, his toes barely touching the ground....

Professor Kassem said his Yemeni client, Kazimi, had told him that, during his incarceration in the Dark Prison, he attempted suicide three times, by ramming his head into the walls. “He did it until he lost consciousness,” Kassem said. “Then they stitched him back up. So he did it again. The next time, he woke up, he was chained, and they’d given him tranquillizers. He asked to go to the bathroom, and then he did it again.”

The Mayer piece also describes a confidential International Red Cross report on the secret detentions that according to sources makes it clear that torture took place:

One of the sources said that the Red Cross described the agency’s detention and interrogation methods as tantamount to torture, and declared that American officials responsible for the abusive treatment could have committed serious crimes. The source said the report warned that these officials may have committed “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions, and may have violated the U.S. Torture Act, which Congress passed in 1994. The conclusions of the Red Cross, which is known for its credibility and caution, could have potentially devastating legal ramifications.

You can see in Mayer's New Yorker article the tension between two competing narratives. On one hand, like the recent Katherine Eban piece in Vanity Fair, some of Mayer's seek to make SERE psychologists responsible for the CIA's fall into torture, believing the CIA not to have any experienced torturers, oops, I mean interrogators on hand in October 2001. Elsewhere in the New Yorker article, someone tries to tell her the CIA has no experience in running prisons, something which the Phoenix history itself contradicts. On the other hand, Mayer alludes to the previous history of the Agency (the Phoenix material, the decades of sensory deprivation research, the quick transformation of the CIA program into strict professionalism, etc.), which is steeped in torture experience.

As the Red Cross report points to some serious legal and political repercussions -- someone seems to feel that congressional scandal and prosecutions are inevitable -- a scramble is taking place to selectively leak and to mold the narrative of what happened and who's responsible.

The history of American torture is a veritable lost continent of criminal activity with links to the highest levels of the U.S. government and civilian establishment. The time has come to expose the entire substance of this awful truth, and bring those responsible for crimes against humanity, ostensibly done in our names, to justice -- fair, swift, humane, and inevitable.

"Enhanced" Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality

Human Rights First (HRF) and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) have jointly published a new report, "Leave No Marks: 'Enhanced' Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality" (download the full report (PDF) here).

The context of its release involves the Bush Administrations issuance of new interrogation guidelines to the CIA, guidelines that appear to allow the continued use of torture and cruel and degrading or inhumane treatment of government detainees in the "war on terror". The other major context concerns the ongoing battle to keep medical professionals from participating in coercive interrogations in illegal places of detention -- a battle that is being fought out most imminently in the listservs and council chambers of the American Psychological Association.

From the HRF/PHR Executive Summary (footnotes in text must be referenced through link):

All U.S. personnel who engage in the CIA's so-called "enhanced" interrogation techniques and similarly abusive techniques are at serious risk of violating U.S. law. Under U.S. law, as detailed below, the severity of physical pain or mental harm caused by an interrogation technique is key to determining whether the technique can be considered torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. An extensive body of medical literature, derived from the treatment and study of torture survivors worldwide, demonstrates that the "enhanced" techniques are likely to cause significant physical and mental harm to detainees. As a result, officials and interrogators who authorize and participate in interrogations using these techniques face a substantial risk of criminal liability under the provisions prohibiting "torture" and "cruel or inhuman treatment" in the U.S. War Crimes Act (WCA), as amended by the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA),[1] and under The Torture Convention Implementation Act of 1994 (the Torture Act).[2] Many of these interrogation techniques may also be prohibited by the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA).[3] To protect U.S. officials and personnel from potential criminal liability and to ensure that all U.S. personnel adhere to U.S. law, these techniques should not be authorized.

The CIA "Enhanced" Interrogation Methods

On July 20, 2007, President George W. Bush issued an executive order interpreting the application of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to a program of detention and interrogation by the CIA.[4] The order does not clarify what techniques the CIA can and cannot lawfully engage in. Press accounts, citing anonymous Administration officials, suggest that at least one of the "enhanced" techniques, waterboarding, may no longer be used. The fact that the Administration officials may have ruled out some "enhanced" techniques, though, raises serious questions about whether the CIA guidelines implementing the Executive Order will permit Agency interrogators to resume the other techniques previously authorized.[5]

While the details of the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation program remain classified, credible reports have disclosed several of the techniques that were authorized in March 2002 for use in the program, including water-boarding (mock drowning), exposure to extreme cold (including induced hypothermia), stress positions, extreme sensory deprivation and overload, shaking, striking, prolonged sleep deprivation, and isolation, among others.[6] Without identifying specifically approved techniques, the President has, in the past, publicly endorsed "alternative interrogation methods," and declared that the MCA, which he signed into law in October 2006, allows the CIA "program" to continue.[7] The new executive order fails explicitly to rule out the use of the "enhanced" techniques that the CIA authorized in March 2002.

The Executive Order does state clearly that any program of detention and interrogation approved by the Director of Central Intelligence may not include any acts prohibited by the War Crimes Act or the Torture Act. Yet a close analysis of the War Crimes Act and other U.S. law, informed by medical and psychological expertise, reveals that these "enhanced" interrogation techniques, may constitute "torture" and/or "cruel or inhuman treatment" and, consequently, authorization of their use under the Executive Order would place interrogators at serious legal risk of prosecution for war crimes or other violations.

A recently declassified report by the Pentagon's Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that these techniques were based in large part on techniques of torture and cruelty used by the U.S military in its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program. The SERE program was intended to train personnel to resist interrogation under such abuse if captured.[8] According to the OIG, these techniques were transformed, with the assistance of military psychologists, into "standard operating procedure" (SOP) for interrogations at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. This Guantánamo SOP, the OIG reports, also was brought to Afghanistan and Iraq and, according to media reports, provided a basis for techniques used by CIA personnel, also with assistance from psychologists.[9] The origin of these techniques is directly related to the focus of this report. They were designed to inflict physical and psychological harm for the purpose of breaking down interrogation subjects. This report describes the nature and extent of that harm and the legal consequences to interrogators of employing techniques that cause it....

There must be no mistake about the brutality of the "enhanced interrogation methods" reportedly used by the CIA. Prolonged sleep deprivation, induced hypothermia, stress positions, shaking, sensory deprivation and overload, and water-boarding (which may still be authorized), among other reported techniques, can have a devastating impact on the victim's physical and mental health. [emphases added in bold]

Interested readers should go read the whole report.

Who said this?

What should one think about the massive inequality in the world?

"... one should think in this regard about the sort of inequality that reigns among all civilized people, for it is obviously contrary to the law of nature, however it may be defined, for a child to command an old man, for an imbecile to lead a wise man, and for a handful of people to gorge themselves on superfluities while the starving multitude lacks necessities."

Hint: This was written before prophecies were stocked in grocery store bins, and after a hangman burned a blind man's books.

MKULTRA Redux: New CIA Scandal Heads for Hearings

Cross-posted at NION and Daily Kos

Last May, I reported on an American Psychological Association (APA) workshop entitled "Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory". It was held in July 2003 at RAND headquarters in Arlington, VA, "with generous funding by the CIA". Geoff Mumford, APA Director of Science was liaison to the CIA for the meeting.

This workshop scandalously included a section that looked at the use of "pharmacological agents... known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior", i.e., so-called truth drugs. It also asked workshop attendees to consider:

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? [emphasis added]

As I wrote then, use of drugs in interrogation and sensory overload techniques are "signal techniques of psychological torture long utilized by the CIA and other intelligence agencies and military around the world".

A Torturer's Tea Party?

Now, according to an important recent article in Vanity Fair, we know that two military psychologists, on contract to the CIA, and implicated in use of torture in U.S. interrogations in Afghanistan and Iraq, attended this "workshop". Also attending were other psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, CIA and FBI agents, representatives from the Defense Department, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security. This must have been some get together!

The author of the Vanity Fair article, Katherine Eban, was interviewed by Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! a few days ago, and Goodman questioned her about the APA/CIA workshop. Eban's tale closely follows my own reporting.

James Elmer Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, who are referred to in the following quote are two former psychologists for the military's Survivial, Evasion, Resistance, Escape or SERE program, training U.S. military to withstand the POW experience. Recent revelations from the Pentagon itself show that SERE psychologists were involved in reverse engineering SERE techniques for use in coercive interrogations for the CIA and military in recent years.

From the Goodman-Eban interview:

AMY GOODMAN: But what didn't happen was a call for a moratorium on military -- psychologists’ involvement in military interrogations. Can you talk about the APA-RAND meeting with these two CIA psychologists, where they spoke?

KATHERINE EBAN: Yeah. The APA-RAND meeting proved to be very important to my reporting, because I was able to obtain the attendance list, which is basically a catalog of the psychologists who are most involved in studying deception and interviewing, which is effectively those who are involved in interrogation policy. And lo and behold, Mitchell and Jessen were on the attendance list.

The attendance list is divided into two parts. One was really academic researchers, and the other one was operational, operational psychologists. So these were a lot of people who were associated with the CIA, some whose identity was so classified that they were only listed by first name in italics. Mitchell and Jessen were there on the list, listed as CIA contractors. And I think without that attendance list, I don't know if we would have been able to put out this article.

AMY GOODMAN: The CIA funded this APA-RAND conference?

KATHERINE EBAN: Correct. And one of the main CIA participants and organizers, a man named Kirk Hubbard, told a key participant before the meeting, “Don't ask these psychologists what they do for a living. Don't ask them to identify themselves, because basically their identity is secret and classified.”

AMY GOODMAN: They debated the effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive techniques.

KATHERINE EBAN: Right. That's correct.

Eban had more to say in her article:

A key participant said that, before the conference, [Kirk] Hubbard [chief of the C.I.A.'s Research and Analysis Branch] called and warned him not to publicly identify attendees from the C.I.A. or ask them what they do, saying, "These people have jobs where deception and interviewing is very important."

Hubbard, who recently retired from the C.I.A., told me when I called him at his home in Montana that he has "no use for liberals who think we should be soft on terrorists." Asked about the work of Mitchell and Jessen, he was silent for a long time, then said, "I can't tell you anything about that."

"Secrecy is the freedom tyrants dream of"

So one participant is told not to even reveal names of who attended this CIA/APA/RAND affair. At least one APA member has written to Geoff Mumford and Stephen Behnke (the latter is Director of the APA's Ethics Office) asking for more information on the content of the meeting. To date, they have not bothered to respond. Whenever I have asked those who may know even a little about the conference and workshop, they have assured me that nothing sinister necessarily happened there, or that discussions were only "hypothetical", not operational.

Then why the secrecy? I'd be deceptive myself if I didn't admit that I believe I know why. The APA and CIA have a very long history of working together on interrogation techniques, in particular on sensory deprivation and use of drugs like LSD and mescaline in interrogations, and other methods of breaking down the mind and the body of detainees.

Katherine Eban's recent article goes a long way towards understanding what went wrong when Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Gonzales, and Rumsfeld started ordering U.S. forces to start torturing, or as Cheney put it, go to "the dark side". But in concentrating on Jessen and Mitchell, one runs the danger of forgetting that this is only one episode in a long and scary history of torture by the U.S., which was exemplified by the abomination that was MKULTRA, the CIA's mind control program of the 1950s and 60s. In addition, the use of psychologists and the efforts of their official organization, the APA, in assisting the CIA and Pentagon in its research and implementation of coercive interrogation is far greater than is typically known. I wonder what the military psychologists who must have talked to Ms. Eban have to say about the use of sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, techniques such as "Fear Up Harsh", and the like? Up until now, no one is asking them.

Something very rotten is going on at the heart of American behavioral science, and I'm not talking about scandals now decades old, I'm talking about right now. Along with collaboration with the CIA on possible new abusive interrogation methods, the APA is fighting to keep its links with the military, and to keep psychologists as essential components of their interrogation practice. Other psychologists are struggling to stop the unethical use of psychological expertise in Bush's "war on terror", from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib and the secret CIA prisons that span Europe to Asia.

Next up... Senate Investigations

Senator Carl Levin is said to have the Senate Armed Services Committee investigating the SERE-CIA-torture connection, and I call on Senator Levin to pay close attention to the July 2003 APA/CIA so-called workshop. (One APA member, who was on a hand-picked APA committee to make policy last year on psychologists and interrogations, turned over her notes on the meeting to Senator Levin after realizing that the committee was stacked with military psychologists, and the proceedings were atypically held in -- what else? -- secrecy.) Only when we get the individuals involved, like Geoff Mumford, Susan Brandon, Kirk Hubbard, and others, in front of a congressional committee, under oath, do we have any chance to find out what this motley crew is really up to.

You can do something about this! Write to Sen. Levin and tell him you want this investigated. Write the APA and tell them you want them to go public about the contents of the workshop. The Pentagon and the CIA have, in the Bush-Cheney era, stepped up the process of integrating intelligence agencies into the organizations of civilian society in a way that hasn't been seen since the Cold War. These are dangerous times.

Write your representatives, write or call Sen. Levin, write or call the APA.

Senator Carl Levin, 269 Russell Office Building, U.S. Senate, Washington, DC 20510-2202

Phone (202) 224-6221, Fax (202) 224-1388

Stephen Behnke, Ph.D., Director, APA Ethics Office, 750 First Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002.

Phone (202) 336-5930 or use APA's toll free number (800) 374-2721, extension 5930, FAX: (202) 336-5997

P.S. For those wondering, the "secrecy" quote in the subhead above is reportedly from Bill Moyers.