Gagged Whistleblower Speaks: U.S. Cover-Up on Sale of Nuclear Secrets Abroad

Sibel Edmonds, a former Turkish translator for the FBI, has told the Sunday Times "how foreign intelligence agents had enlisted the support of US officials to acquire a network of moles in sensitive military and nuclear institutions." These intelligence assets then sold, according to Sibel, "highly classified information, not only from the State Department but also from the Pentagon, in exchange for money, position and political objectives.”

Sibel's charges are only coming out now, even though she has given classified testimony to Congress and to the 9/11 Commission. While Edmonds and some in the FBI were tracing the transfer of nuclear technology and other secrets to the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency via Turkish conduits, other elements within government were moving to shut down any investigation. As for the stolen information, it was passed on to the notorious A.Q. Khan, "father" of the Pakistani atomic bomb, and of a network of nuclear proliferation that went around the world.

The blogger lukery has put names to pictures Edmonds has posted on some of those culpable in the bribery-intelligence scandal, and they are among some of the most famous names in Bush's foreign policy apparatus, including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Eric Edelman, Marc Grossman (supposedly the State Department official quoted anonymously in the Sunday Times article), and congressional bigwigs from both sides of the aisle, like Dennis Hastert, Tom Lantos, Roy Blount, Stephen Solarz, and others.

Given the blackout in the U.S. mainstream press, I don't know how far this scandal will become public and operational in this country. The entire story demonstrates just how dangerous and corrupt the present political order is. A cover-up of massive proportions has kept this story from coming out, fingering, as it does, major political players from both political parties in treasonous activity. Yet, treason may be one of the lighter charges, as these individuals have manipulated the most dangerous technology in the world for both profit and political exigency, thereby destabilizing the world far more than anyone like Osama bin Laden could have ever dreamed.

But even beyond that the major question hangs ominously: who gave the green light to help the Pakistanis (and possibly the Israelis) get the bomb? And to spread these nuclear secrets around the globe? Could it be the same folks who refused to press for the extradition or questioning of A.Q. Khan, now under luxurious house arrest in Pakistan?

Following the story in the Sunday Times article (bold remarks are mine):

One of Edmonds’s main roles in the FBI was to translate thousands of hours of conversations by Turkish diplomatic and political targets that had been covertly recorded by the agency.

A backlog of tapes had built up, dating back to 1997, which were needed for an FBI investigation into links between the Turks and Pakistani, Israeli and US targets. Before she left the FBI in 2002 she heard evidence that pointed to money laundering, drug imports and attempts to acquire nuclear and conventional weapons technology.

“What I found was damning,” she said. “While the FBI was investigating, several arms of the government were shielding what was going on.”

The Turks and Israelis had planted “moles” in military and academic institutions which handled nuclear technology. Edmonds says there were several transactions of nuclear material every month, with the Pakistanis being among the eventual buyers. “The network appeared to be obtaining information from every nuclear agency in the United States,” she said.

They were helped, she says, by the high-ranking State Department official who provided some of their moles – mainly PhD students – with security clearance to work in sensitive nuclear research facilities. These included the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory in New Mexico, which is responsible for the security of the US nuclear deterrent....

The Turks, she says, often acted as a conduit for the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s spy agency, because they were less likely to attract suspicion. Venues such as the American Turkish Council in Washington were used to drop off the cash, which was picked up by the official....

The Pakistani operation was led by General Mahmoud Ahmad, then the ISI chief.

Intercepted communications showed Ahmad and his colleagues stationed in Washington were in constant contact with attachés in the Turkish embassy.

Intelligence analysts say that members of the ISI were close to Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11. Indeed, Ahmad was accused of sanctioning a $100,000 wire payment to Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, immediately before the attacks.

The results of the espionage were almost certainly passed to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist.

Khan was close to Ahmad and the ISI. While running Pakistan’s nuclear programme, he became a millionaire by selling atomic secrets to Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also used a network of companies in America and Britain to obtain components for a nuclear programme.

Khan caused an alert among western intelligence agencies when his aides met Osama Bin Laden. “We were aware of contact between A Q Khan’s people and Al-Qaeda,” a former CIA officer said last week. “There was absolute panic when we initially discovered this, but it kind of panned out in the end.”

It's not certain what this cryptic latter comment means, but I'd like to know more about what they knew about the Khan/Al-Qaeda contact. It does seem likely that the CIA is up to its ears in this business.

It is likely that the nuclear secrets stolen from the United States would have been sold to a number of rogue states by Khan....

Following 9/11, a number of the foreign operatives were taken in for questioning by the FBI on suspicion that they knew about or somehow aided the attacks....

“A primary target would call the official and point to names on the list and say, ‘We need to get them out of the US because we can’t afford for them to spill the beans’,” she said. “The official said that he would ‘take care of it’.”

The four suspects on the list were released from interrogation and extradited.

Edmonds also claims that a number of senior officials in the Pentagon had helped Israeli and Turkish agents....

Once acquired, the nuclear secrets could have gone anywhere. The FBI monitored Turkish diplomats who were selling copies of the information to the highest bidder....

Edmonds’s employment with the FBI lasted for just six months. In March 2002 she was dismissed after accusing a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving Turkish nationals.

She has always claimed that she was victimised for being outspoken and was vindicated by an Office of the Inspector General review of her case three years later. It found that one of the contributory reasons for her sacking was that she had made valid complaints.

The US attorney-general has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations.

Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing....

In researching this article, The Sunday Times has talked to two FBI officers (one serving, one former) and two former CIA sources who worked on nuclear proliferation. While none was aware of specific allegations against officials she names, they did provide overlapping corroboration of Edmonds’s story.

Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg has reportedly called the Sibel Edmonds revelations (and we don't know all of them yet) "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers. When we add these revelations to others coming out around the CIA destroyed tapes scandal, and recent publications linking CIA mind control experiments to biological warfare crimes by the U.S. government -- including the long-denied use of bacteriological warfare by the U.S. during the Korean War -- we may have the makings of a crackdown on the intelligence agencies not seen in decades.

But given the craven capitulations of a majority Democratic Congress, a U.S. media controlled by military-linked corporate interests, and a political culture enamoured of electoralism (while controlled by the aforesaid corporations), I wouldn't hold my breath. This country awaits the awakening of the population as real political actors in society, and not iPod and T.V. mesmerized participants in American Idol-like spectacles of inanity and nihilistic meaninglessness.

Harman Releases CIA Correspondence on Destroyed Tapes

Congresswoman Jane Harman (D-Venice, CA) has released on her website copies of her letter to "then CIA General Counsel Scott Muller, urging the Agency to reconsider its plan to destroy videotape of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah," and Muller's reply letter to her. I'll have more to say on this later, but I encourage readers to follow up the discussion on this latest information to surface in the CIA scandal over at Balkinization and Psyche, Science and Society, the blogs of Marty Lederman and Stephen Soldz, respectively.

Meanwhile, here's Rep. Harman's letter, for reference. It's followed by Scott Muller's. As to my own take on these matters, for the moment all I can do is refer the reader to my original posting on this when the scandal first broke last month: No Moral Compass: Pelosi, Democrats, & the WP Revelations.

Dear Mr. Muller:

Last week’s briefing brought home to me the difficult challenges faced by the Central Intelligence Agency in the current threat environment. I realize we are at a time when the balance between security and liberty must be constantly evaluated and recalibrated in order to protect our nation and its people from catastrophic terrorist attack and I thus appreciate the obvious effort that you and your Office have made to address the tough questions. At the briefing you assured us that the [redacted] approved by the Attorney General have been subject to an extensive review by lawyers at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Justice and the National Security Council and found to be within the law.

It is also the case, however, that what was described raises profound policy questions and I am concerned about whether these have been as rigorously examined as the legal questions. I would like to know what kind of policy review took place and what questions were examined. In particular, I would like to know whether the most senior levels of the White House have determined that these practices are consistent with the principles and policies of the United States. Have enhanced techniques been authorized and approved by the President?

You discussed the fact that there is videotape of Abu Zubaydah following his capture that will be destroyed after the Inspector General finishes his inquiry. I would urge the Agency to reconsider that plan. Even if the videotape does not constitute an official record that must be preserved under the law, the videotape would be the best proof that the written record is accurate, if such record is called into question in the future. The fact of destruction would reflect badly on the Agency.

I look forward to your response.

Sincerely, Jane Harman

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Dear Ms. Harman:

Thank you for your letter of 10 February following up on the briefing we gave you and Congressman Goss on 5 February concerning the Central Intelligence Agency’s limited use of the handful of specially approved interrogation techniques we described. As we informed both you and the leadership of the Intelligence Committees last September, a number of Executive Branch lawyers including lawyers from the Department of Justice participated in the determination that, in the appropriate circumstances, use of these techniques is fully consistent with US law. While I do not think it appropriate for me to comment on issues that are a matter of policy, much less the nature and extent of Executive Branch policy deliberations, I think it would be fair to assume that policy as well as legal matters have been addressed within the Executive Branch.

I enjoyed meeting you, albeit briefly, and I look forward to seeing you again.

Sincerely, Scott W. Muller

Conyers Raps New AG on CIA Tapes Investigation

Before everybody praises Michael "Is Waterboarding Torture?" Mukasey, Bush's new Attorney General, for appointing U.S. Prosecutor John Durham as head of a Justice Department criminal investigation into the CIA videotape destruction scandal, consider these succinct comments from an old Washington hand, Congressman John Conyers (remarks in bold are my emphases):

While I certainly agree that these matters warrant an immediate criminal investigation, it is disappointing that the Attorney General has stepped outside the Justice Department’s own regulations and declined to appoint a more independent special counsel in this matter. Because of this action, the Congress and the American people will be denied –- as they were in the Valerie Plame matter –- any final report on the investigation.

Equally disappointing is the limited scope of this investigation, which appears limited to the destruction of two tapes. The government needs to scrutinize what other evidence may have been destroyed beyond the two tapes, as well as the underlying allegations of misconduct associated with the interrogations.

The Justice Department’s record over the past seven years of sweeping the administration’s misconduct under the rug has left the American public with little confidence in the Administration’s ability to investigate itself. Nothing less than a special counsel with a full investigative mandate will meet the tests of independence, transparency and completeness. Appointment of a special counsel will allow our nation to begin to restore our credibility and moral standing on these issues.

So Durham is supposed to have cornered the mob, and have jailed some Connecticut pols... This is starting to smell like the Fitzgerald prosecution, with its Dudley Do-Right prosecutor, the limited scope of investigation, and likely many months before anything ever comes out about the destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice.

I agree with Congressman Conyers that a special prosecutor is needed in this case. But Rep. Conyers... really... wouldn't impeachment be a more direct way to "restore our credibility and moral standing on these issues"? And who could do more about that than... YOU!

"Battlefield of the Mind": U.S. Behavioral Specialists to "Deprogram" Iraqi Prisoners

This article details how U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies organize counterinsurgency operations against Iraqi prisoners, now numbering in the tens of thousands. No matter how they label and package it, it's counterinsurgency operations that are being described. And it was the special place of "behavioral specialists" in this plan that caught my attention. So please pardon this prefatory diversion into the world of science politics.

Psychologists at the American Psychological Association (APA) have been fighting for their place at the governmental funding table for decades now. A good part of what passes for politics in the field of behavioral sciences concerns the contest between psychologists and their institutional rivals (psychiatrists, and other types of behavioral "specialists"), most recently over the spoils of the lavishly-funded post-9/11 "war on terror". The internal split within APA over how or if psychologists should participate in CIA "black site" interrogations, and other such collaboration with U.S. torture, has roiled that organization.

An article over at the Psi Chi website, originally written in 2000, rehashes the issue of masters-level training for psychologists (Psi Chi being the honor society for psychologists), noting, in passing:

..."The master's degree in psychology continues to be the subject of considerable controversy".... Trent's (1993) opening statement in a more recent article followed the same vein when he said, "When the topic of master's-level training in psychology is broached, controversy abounds ..." (p. 586) and, citing Woods (1971), that "... Wilhelm Wundt raised questions about subdoctoral training even as psychology was establishing itself as a scientific discipline" (p. 586).

The American Psychological Association (APA) does not actively discourage pursuing the master's degree. APA, instead, tends to ignore it. For example, whereas APA's publication Getting In: A Step-By-Step Plan for Gaining Admission to Graduate School (1993) does discuss some pros and cons of a master's degree, there are only two pages of text devoted to the topic in this 221-page book.

Even more recently, the school psychologists of APA's Division 16 were shocked to find that APA's hierarchy, in the course of rewriting their Model Licensure Act (designed to guide states in the drafting of legislation and policies related to psychological licensure), planned to strip master's level practitioners in educational settings of the "psychologist" label, even though they have held this distinction for decades now. (You can read Division 16's Oct. 2007 reply to APA here).

Bitva over Plennies (apologies to A. Burgess)

Why is this discussion about masters-level practitioners relevant here? Well, if you have a well-attuned sense of irony, then you can appreciate the bitter humor that lurks among the larger atrocity that is U.S. treatment of its Iraqi detainees, and the role of medical and behavioral professionals in assisting the military and the intelligence agencies in this crime. What follows is from a Dec. 23 article in the Washington Post, "Deprogramming" Iraqi Detainees, by Walter Pincus. Bold emphases are mine.

Marine Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, the commanding general in charge of detainee operations in Iraq, is seeking reinforcements from a contractor as he continues to maneuver on what he has called "the battlefield of the mind" and win over the roughly 25,000 Iraqi prisoners under his control.

In a proposal put out for bid Dec. 15, the Joint Contracting Command is seeking a team of professionals, including "teachers, religious and behavioral science counselors," who will "execute a program that effectively reintegrates [into Iraqi society] detainees, particularly those disposed to violent, radical ideology through education and counseling," according to the statement of work.

Part of the program will involve small detainee groups, possibly led by an Iraqi cleric and a behavioral scientist, "undergoing enlightenment, deprogramming and de-radicalization sessions" for six weeks.

The U.S. is looking for a contractor -- are you listening Blackwater? Or CACI International? Or Titan? -- to assemble the team, to be led by an American with managerial experience, and a "secret" level security clearance. Besides some years experience analyzing Middle Eastern affairs, this team leader should hopefully have, in addition, a master's degree in psychology or behavioral science. Why is this? Let us wait and see.

The No. 2 in the group is to be a "lead analyst" who must also be a U.S. citizen, have a secret-level clearance and have management experience. This person must also have five years of background in intelligence gathering and interrogation.

Looking for a Few Good Brainwashers

The emphasis on intelligence gathering and interrogation belies the programs purpose as one of "deprogramming and de-radicalization". But it makes sense when you realize one of the main non-enlightenment purposes of the Team is assembling "comprehensive individual assessments" of juvenile and adult prisoners, which could be used to "enable prudent decision-making on release or continued detention of detainees."

The third person in the proposed "leadership team" is supposed to be an an Iraqi cleric or some other person with a formal Islamic education, and an Arabic-speaker, as they will serve as the front man -- I mean, the "lead trainer/counselor for the deprogramming and de-radicalization efforts." And to make sure the Islamic specialist doesn't get too far off the enlightenment path, he will be assisted "by a 'psychological enlightenment' specialist who must have a master's degree in behavioral science. This assistant has the privilege of interviewing

"radicalized detainees to collect information about their motivations and pathways to radicalization" in order to "identify openings for change."

If that weren't enough, this battle for the Iraqi mind will include Iraqi social workers, teachers, and a cleric counselor, not to mention a specialists in "juvenile psychological enlightenment" (with the requisite master's degree in behavioral science, naturally).

The New Thought Reform

It seems the U.S. government is going to try and reprogram Iraqi prisoners, including children, using the same level of expertise used at your typical U.S. public mental health service. And APA, who has sworn to work with the National Security government, as their best handmaidens, gets to see its precious jobs go to non-doctoral workers. APA, as an advocacy group for its membership, has long posited the special role doctoral-level psychologists can play in society at large, and for the military in particular. (See their 2006 book, Psychology in the Service of National Security, edited by A. David Mangelsdorff.) But, here's the U.S. government placing a major new initiative on detainees and interrogation in the hands of -- gasp -- non-doctoral behavioral "specialists".

That's the "irony" part. The more substantive point is that once again the U.S. government is going to use these behavioral "specialists" in a mass campaign of interrogation and "re-education", of the sort that was decried when the Chinese did it in the 1940s and 1950s. Robert Jay Lifton described it as "thought reform and the psychology of totalism". The CIA paid journalists to label it "brainwashing". Now, the U.S. wants to call it "deprogramming", "deradicalization", and even more sinisterly, "enlightenment." Major General Stone refers to it generically as "the battlefield of the mind", channelling perhaps British psychiatrist William Sargant's 1957 classic of interrogation "science", Battle for the Mind: A Physiology of Conversion and Brain-washing. The choice of words is likely coincidental, but isn't Maj. Gen. Stone looking for something like this, when he thinks of his new "team", deprogramming Iraqi detainees. Perhaps, like many religions, a "confession" will be involved. And Dr. Sargant happened to have a word or two to say about that battle over the mind:

To elicit confessions, one must try to create feelings of anxiety and guilt, and induce states of mental conflict if these are not already present. Even if the accused person is genuinely guilty, the normal functioning of his brain must be disturbed so that judgment becomes impaired. If possible he must be made to feel a preference for punishment -- especially if combined with a hope for salvation when it is over rather than a continuation of the mental tension already present, or now being induced by the examiner. (pp. 203-204, Malor Books, 1997)

Now, I ask any member of the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association, do you want masters-level psychologists taking on this level of work? Of course, the real question is, why would any organization of behavioral professionals even endorse the intent and goals of such abhorrent procedures as proposed by Sargant, or in whatever form the Marines' new counterinsurgency program is taking in Iraq today?

However you want to portray Maj. Gen. Stone's new "team" of behavioral specialists, interrogators, intelligence agents, social workers, and clerics, it represents a particularly sick form of imperialist intervention, and one that any mental health advocacy group, such as APA, should denounce forthwith, if it had any healthy bones left in its corrupted body.

Oh, and for those interested:

Bids for the three-year program must be submitted by Jan. 8. The contracting agency has capped the cost at $210 million, with a minimum offer of $5 million.

(H/T on this item goes to "skywriter". Thanks.)

CIA to Release Videotape Docs to Senate Committee

Originally posted at Daily Kos

In a turnabout, the CIA said "it would begin handing over documents to Congress about the destruction of videotapings showing the harsh interrogation of two terror suspects after the House Intelligence Committee threatened to subpoena two agency officials," according to a breaking story from Associated Press.

This comes after the bombshell revelations earlier yesterday that at least four administration officials, including David Addington, Harriet Myers and Alberto Gonzales, were involved in discussions about what to do with these incriminating videotapes. dday had an excellent diary on this earlier.

The turnabout also comes after House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said he was going to subpoena former and current CIA officials and attorneys if they didn't agree to appear before the committee. The agreement by CIA apparently also includes agreement on the testimony of CIA general counsel John Rizzo, the official who is said to have ordered the destruction of the tapes, though CIA won't commit him to a specific date.

According to the AP story:

The committee's announcement is another sign of increasing tensions between Congress, the judiciary and the White House over the interrogation tapes. Congressional overseers are angry they were not fully informed of the tapes and their destruction, and want to know what else they have not been told. A federal judge has summoned Justice Department lawyers to his courtroom Friday to determine whether the destruction of the tapes violated a court order to preserve evidence about detainees.

Reyes also wants the CIA to make available CIA attorneys Steve Hermes, Robert Eatinger, Elizabeth Vogt and John McPherson to testify before the committee. Former CIA directors Porter Goss and George Tenet, former deputy director of operations James. L Pavitt, and former general counsel Scott Muller are also on his list.

Reyes also denounced the Justice Department for trying to interfere with Congressional investigation into the matter, when the CIA inspector general sent a letter to his committee last Friday, telling Congress to suspend its investigation, arguing (speciously) that such an investigation would interfere with the joint Justice Department/CIA internal (bullshit) investigation into the matter.

It would be folly to believe that victory here is total. It's not clear Reyes will get all the participants the Committee wants to agree to testify. Also, it would be hard to believe that the CIA will not turn over highly redacted "documents", much less all the relevant documents.

Still, the speed of this about-face speaks to the intense heat flaring around this scandal, with its tentacles so obviously extended up into the Oval Office itself. Today's story comes on the heels of the announcement by U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy that he would order a hearing into whether the Bush administration violated a court order, breaking a great many laws thereby, by destroying in November 2005 the interrogation videos of suspected Al Qaeda operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. Judge Kennedy, too, had to confront Justice Department warnings to back off. Vyan had a good diary on this aspect of the scandal yesterday.

The AP story ends with an amusing (to us) bit about Dana Perino's pique on the New York Times article that pointed to the White House.

White House press secretary Dana Perino called the Times story "pernicious and troubling." In a tense back-and-forth with reporters, Perino was adamant her opposition to one of the headlines on the story that said: "White House role was wider than it said"....

She said the headline made it appear that the White House had been misleading the public.

"The White House has not commented on anybody's involvement or knowledge, save for me telling everybody that the president had no recollection of being briefed on the existence or the destruction of the tapes before he was briefed by (CIA Director Michael) Hayden," Perino said. "After that, I did not comment on anybody's knowledge or involvement. So if somebody has information that contradicts the one thing that I've said, then this would be true — but it's not. And that is why I asked for a correction and The New York Times is going to correct it."

Update: Scott Shane at the New York Times has an article up now covering this new aspect of the tapes story (Tapes-gate?). He emphasizes that the appearance of "Jose A. Rodriguez, who as chief of the agency’s clandestine service ordered the tapes destroyed in 2005" is not a done deal. There might have to be "complex negotiations over legal immunity", due to that dubious DoJ/CIA internal review. Reading between the lines, it seems Bush/CIA are hoping this will cool things between the Administration and Congress, i.e., keep this out of the headlines.

The agreement marked at least a partial resolution of a standoff between the Bush administration and Congress....

In a conciliatory statement Wednesday night, Brian Roehrkasse, a Justice Department spokesman, said the department has “no desire to block any Congressional investigation” and has not advised the C.I.A. against cooperating with the committee.....

A C.I.A. spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said the agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, was eager to accommodate the committee as it performed its oversight role.....

An intelligence official, offering more details on condition of anonymity, said the top-secret documents would be made available either on Capitol Hill or at the agency, as soon as the logistics could be worked out, as early as Thursday afternoon.

In a final show of just how incapable, though, the administration is of talking straight on both torture, and now this latest cover-up of its crimes, Judge Mark Filip, Bush's nominee for deputy attorney general, apparently told his Congressional interviewers yesterday that "he might have counseled the C.I.A. not to destroy the tapes."

“It might be the better practice to keep those in any event, given the interest in the subject matter that was on the tapes,” Mr. Filip told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Nothing like principle to make one give a strong statement of right and wrong.

Out of the Depths: CIA Torture Victim Speaks

Blogger Deep Harm over at Daily Kos did a nice job of writing up a review on Mark Benjamin's recent article at Salon.com, Inside the CIA's notorious "black sites". Benjamin's article details the case of CIA Yemeni prisoner (now released), Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah.

Mr. Bashmilah was held for 19 months in a succession of prisons, trapped inside the CIA's secret worldwide gulag. Now the one-time CIA torture victim has filed a declaration as part of a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a subsidiary of Boeing Company, and implicated in secret CIA rendition flights.

According to Mark Benjamin, Mr. Bashmilah -- a businessman who had travelled from his home in Indonesia to Jordan to help arrange a surgery for his mother -- was subjected to extreme psychological torture and physical maltreatment, first by the Jordanians:

After his arrest, the Jordanians brutally beat him, peppering him with questions about al-Qaida. He was forced to jog around in a yard until he collapsed. Officers hung him upside down with a leather strap and his hands tied. They beat the soles of his feet and his sides. They threatened to electrocute him with wires. They told him they would rape his wife and mother.

It was too much. Bashmilah signed a confession multiple pages long, but he was disoriented and afraid even to read it.

Psychological Torture in Action

Apparently the confession wasn't enough for the Americans, and the Jordanian interrogators dumped Bashmilah into the CIA gulag in October 2003. And, it was not waterboarding that the CIA in its black sites practiced upon their new prisoner, but, as I've been warning, severe psychological torture:

Flight records show Bashmilah was flown to Kabul....

He was then placed in a windowless, freezing-cold cell, roughly 6.5 feet by 10 feet. There was a foam mattress, one blanket, and a bucket for a toilet that was emptied once a day. A bare light bulb stayed on constantly. A camera was mounted above a solid metal door. For the first month, loud rap and Arabic music was piped into his cell, 24 hours a day, through a hole opposite the door. His leg shackles were chained to the wall. The guards would not let him sleep, forcing Bashmilah to raise his hand every half hour to prove he was still awake....

"During the entire period of my detention there, I was held in solitary confinement and saw no one other than my guards, interrogators and other prison personnel," he wrote in his declaration.

The loud music, the isolation, the temperature extremes... all these are hallmarks of CIA psychological torture, and meant to break down prisoners' will and psyche. At some point Mr. Bashmilah was moved to another cell. This time there were two video cameras, another stock staple of CIA torture, as photography of prisoners was mentioned as far back as the early 1960s in CIA interrogation manuals. Think of that while you follow the ongoing controversy over CIA destruction of videos of interrogations of two of their more famous prisoners. No congressional committee to my knowledge is calling for the release of Mr. Bashmilah's tapes.

At the new prison, it was more of the same:

It was another tiny cell, new or refurbished with a stainless steel sink and toilet. Until clothes arrived several days later, Bashmilah huddled in a blanket. In this cell there were two video cameras, one mounted above the door and the other in a wall. Also above the door was a speaker. White noise, like static, was pumped in constantly, day and night. He spent the first month in handcuffs. In this cell his ankle was attached to a 110-link chain attached to a bolt on the floor.

The door had a small opening in the bottom through which food would appear: boiled rice, sliced meat and bread, triangles of cheese, boiled potato, slices of tomato and olives, served on a plastic plate.

Guards wore black pants with pockets, long-sleeved black shirts, rubber gloves or black gloves, and masks that covered the head and neck. The masks had tinted yellow plastic over the eyes. "I never heard the guards speak to each other and they never spoke to me," Bashmilah wrote in his declaration.

One of the more revealing aspects of the Bashmilah case is the appearance of mental health professionals, either psychologists or psychiatrists, or both, in the CIA prisons. Their job appeared to be one of patching up the psyche/emotional state of the prisoner so they didn't break down too much. Or conversely, it was part of a perverse good cop/bad cop regime that contributed to the prisoner's despair and confusion.

Here's what Benjamin reports:

It may seem bizarre for the agency to provide counseling to a prisoner while simultaneously cracking him mentally -- as if revealing a humanitarian aspect to a program otherwise calibrated to exploit systematic psychological abuse. But it could also be that mental healthcare professionals were enlisted to help bring back from the edge prisoners who seemed precariously damaged, whose frayed minds were no longer as pliable for interrogation. "My understanding is that the purpose of having psychiatrists there is that if the prisoner feels better, then he would be able to talk more to the interrogators," said Bashmilah....

He said the doctors told him to "hope that one day you will prove your innocence or that you will one day return to your family." The psychiatrists also gave him some pills, likely tranquilizers. They analyzed his dreams. But there wasn't much else they could do. "They also gave me a Rubik's Cube so I could pass the time, and some jigsaw puzzles," Bashmilah recalled.

PHR Noodges APA

Stephen Soldz reports that Physicians for Human Rights has recently circulated an email highlighting a renewed call for the American Psychological Association to call for a moratorium of psychologists working at national security interrogation sites like Guantanamo's Camp Delta, or CIA "black sites". Signed by Frank Donaghue, PHR's new Chief Executive Officer, it reads in part:

You have probably seen recent news reports about the CIA’s destruction of video recordings of interrogations allegedly showing the use of waterboarding and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques. Last week, PHR released a statement, calling on the Attorney General and Congress to immediately launch independent investigations into both the alleged destruction of evidence of torture and the “enhanced” interrogation program itself. As PHR noted in our report Leave No Marks, waterboarding and other techniques can constitute war crimes.

Recent statements on ABC News and the Today Show by former CIA operative John Kiriakou allege that doctors were present during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, which involved the use of sleep deprivation and waterboarding. PHR is calling for the Department of Justice, Congress and major health professional associations to conduct legal and ethical investigations. Those investigations must determine how physicians and psychologists participated in harsh interrogations as monitors and interrogators.

We continue to urge the American Psychological Association (APA) to place a moratorium on the participation of its members in all national security interrogations. Though PHR applauded the APA’s passage of a resolution this August stating that the tactics used by the CIA are unethical, the APA can take more steps to protect detainees from harm and US personnel from engaging in illegal abuse. PHR is asking the APA to follow the examples of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in refusing to allow its members to engage in abusive interrogations.

Finally, the House yesterday passed a bill which would make the Army Field Manual the unified standard for detainee treatment, prohibiting the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program. Now it must go before the full Senate.

Reformism and Nihilism in the Fight Against Torture

Well, the House bill passed, but then was blocked on a procedural motion by GOP representatives. But, I've been leery about the whole House bill, and any "reform" that outlaws waterboarding and other atrocities, but leaves intact the kind of psychological torture performed on Mr. Bashmilah -- like sensory deprivation and sensory overload, sleep deprivation, and solitary confinement, not to mention other kinds of psychological manipulations. The Army Field Manual allows manipulation of fear in prisoners, along with isolation, sleep deprivation, and forms of sensory deprivation. And that's what's "legal".

Additionallly, it is a truism by now that all actors and organizations involved in these by now multitudinous stories on torture deny they torture. While the American Psychiatric Association and American Medical Association have enacted their own kind of moratorium of doctor participation in interrogations, it's not clear this ever really stopped. The situation with the American Psycological Association is, if anything, even murkier.

What's left for us critics of U.S. use of torture amounts to a kind of activist nihilism. It's not clear to me that anything has changed in U.S. prisons and GWOT interrogation centers. The recent revelations over the Standard Operation Procedure manuals for Guantanamo got a little play in the press, before dropping like a stone out of sight into the dark pond that is U.S. media coverage (and that includes the bloggers).

Fifty years or more of torture, human rights abuses, covert wars, and hidden histories, have amounted to very little change. There was the UN Convention Against Torture. But then, there was were the Geneva Conventions, too. And the Magna Carta. And this country has chosen to abrogate them all.

It seems to me that only serious political change will bring about an end to the practice of torture. Lawyers will not do it. Doctors and psychologists will not do it. Even Congress will not do it. Only when humanity seizes the reins of history again and steers it back onto the road of progress will we see again appreciable movement against the evils that confront us in the form of torture, repression, and inequality.

This doesn't mean it's not worth fighting. The ACLU, PHR, Amnesty International, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, Human Rights First, etc., all are holding the line against the barbarism of untrammelled militarism and political repression. All of them deserve your support.

No Moral Compass: Pelosi, Democrats, & the WP Revelations

Notoriously (depending upon your point of view), this past weekend the Washington Post published an article revealing that a number of top Democrats and Republicans were briefed in September 2002 on CIA interrogation methods. They were "given a virtual tour of the CIA's overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk." The reported techniques are said to have included waterboarding.

Yesterday, Pelosi released a statement clarifying what happened from her perspective. This must have shocked even a little those Democratic Party stalwarts, but no, as we'll see, their Nancy can make no mistake. She was, you see... helpless.

All of this comes in the wake of recent revelations on the machinations of the Bush/Cheney clique and how they have cozened their favorite torture techniques over the years. There was the revelation of secret memos authorizing torture in 2005. There was last weeks report on the destruction of video tapes of the torture of al-Queda suspect Abu Zubaydah. Before all that, there have been years of exposes on waterboarding, sensory deprivation, secret renditions to foreign torture chambers, training of foreign torturers, a CIA handbook of torture and the history of its development... it goes on and on.

Pelosi Releases a Statement

Now, Spencer Ackerman over at TPMmuckraker has published Pelosi's latest statement on her CIA 2002 briefing. Is it meant to stanch the growing controversy, or a someday prosecution?

"On one occasion, in the fall of 2002, I was briefed on interrogation techniques the Administration was considering using in the future. The Administration advised that legal counsel for the both the CIA and the Department of Justice had concluded that the techniques were legal.

"I had no further briefings on the techniques. Several months later, my successor as Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee, Jane Harman, was briefed more extensively and advised the techniques had in fact been employed. It was my understanding at that time that Congresswoman Harman filed a letter in early 2003 to the CIA to protest the use of such techniques, a protest with which I concurred."

Let's summarize: Pelosi admits she was briefed in 2002 on CIA "interrogation techniques" (she doesn't elaborate), and that both CIA and DoJ had concluded they were "legal". Pelosi says nothing about the Washington Post reporting about briefings concerning CIA overseas detention sites -- were these the "secret prisons" not exposed publically until November 2005 by Dana Priest at the (now reviled by Pelosi defenders) Washington Post? (The story first came out via Amnesty International.)

"No further briefings on the techniques"... but what about the program in general, Nancy? Then there is the revelation that it was Harman that was advised the techniques were "employed". Harman's (classified) letter of protest was something with which Pelosi "concurred." How, why, or when Pelosi concurred she saw not fit to elbow into her two paragraph explanation.

The Powerlessness of Power

Meanwhile, the standard apologia for Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller, and other Democrats made privy to CIA crimes is that they were powerless to protest because their actions were stifled by national security secrecy provisions. This is the thesis of MediaFreeze at Daily Kos, who sees it all as a clever GOP trap, now sprung five years later:

Back in 2002 around the one year anniversary of 9/11, when the nation was being whipped up in a froth of warmongering and hatred, a very very short list of Democrats where given a super secret briefing on the Thug's plans to torture some people. Since it was classified they couldn't tell anyone else about it. Who knows what they were told, but it was enough to make them complicit. That was the intent of the briefing. It was a torture trap. (emphasis in original)

Here's a different take from Phoenix Woman, also at Daily Kos on the general powerlessness of the minority party, which tied Nancy's hands:

Again, this was 2003....

There wasn't much else she could do, especially under the House rules that were in effect then, which essentially stripped the minority party of any power. (The Democrats, either generously or foolishly, undid those rules when they took over this January, which is one reason why the Republicans currently have such blocking power even in the minority.)

Glenn Greenwald, whose blog sits on Kos's own blogroll, questions much of this CHA (cover her ass) bloviating:

I continue to be amazed and disturbed by the number of people willing to defend the actions of Rockefeller and his comrades by claiming that these poor, victimized Congressional members just have no ability to do anything when they learn about outright lawbreaking by the administration. As I asked yesterday, why would they even bother to attend briefings if they believed that they were "powerless" to act even upon learning of serious illegalities? Here is the central purpose of the Select Committee on Intelligence -- the primary reason it exists, as stated by the resolution which created the Committee:

It is further the purpose of this resolution to provide vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.

The Intelligence Committees were created as a response to the discovery in the 1970s of illegal conduct by the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The core function is to monitor what the intelligence community does and to "assure that such activities" are legal. It is a complete travesty for the senior Democrats on those Committees (and their apologists) to claim that they are powerless to act when learning of lawbreaking.

Reformism and Torture, With a Nod to to the APA

It has not gone unnoticed in some quarters that the Democrats, with some GOP allies (like Chuck Hagel), have a bill currently in Congressional Conference Committee that seeks to ban all "harsh interrogation techniques" in favor of adherence by all U.S. entities, such as the CIA, to the current practices of the Army Field Manual.

When Sharon Brehm, current president of the American Psychological Association wrote a letter to the New York Times supporting the current Congressional bill, some at APA felt that organization had finally made a turn toward seriously opposing U.S. torture policy. I have no link, but my copy shows President Brehm writing:

I applaud this week’s vote of the House and Senate conference committee on the intelligence authorization bill to outlaw harsh interrogation tactics and to require all U.S. interrogators to abide by the Army Field Manual when questioning suspected high-level terrorists (The New York Times, Dec. 6). This requirement would make clear once and for all that “waterboarding” and several other “enhanced” interrogation techniques are illegal.

It is deplorable that the White House is already threatening to veto this measure, should it pass the full House and Senate. Harsh interrogation techniques are not only illegal they are ineffective. Effective interrogations are based on establishing trust and building rapport with the subject, whose human dignity is preserved. As one World War II interrogator recently told the Washington Post, "We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture."

The position of the American Psychological Association is that any and all harsh interrogation tactics, including so-called “no-touch torture” and “torture light,” constitute torture and are always unethical. It is our fervent hope that the conference committee’s proposed prohibition will soon be extended to all interrogators acting on behalf of the United States, whether military or CIA.

But as I wrote to a member of an APA listserv:

In the latest letter, APA says nothing about indefinite detention (and neither does the new bill). Indefinite detention, of course, feed right into the Army Field Manual (AFM) technique of "futility". It is good that APA says that it opposes "torture-lite", but it does so while politically supporting a resolution that would enshrine torture-lite, via the AFM. It is this kind of obfuscation that is precisely why one has learned not to trust practically anything that comes out of Washington these days, whether Congress, or APA HQ.

The problem with attacking so-called "harsh" techniques before stopping psychological types of torture is that it misinforms the public, and feeds into the idea that "torture-lite" kinds of coercive treatment, such as sensory and sleep deprivation, and isolation, are in fact not as bad as the "harsh" kind. The political manifestation of this is the kind of bill now in conference committee, a bill, by the way, certain to face a Bush veto, and, surviving that, the kinds of signing statements Bush has made the hallmark of his regime.

Those complicit in earlier forms of torture and coercive interrogation, e.g., the Democrats and the APA, are trying to insulate themselves against the growing scandal that is U.S. torture, while also preserving CIA-approved forms of earlier coercive interrogation that centers around the old isolation and sensory deprivation paradigm of the KUBARK manual. (Harsher methods can be obtained via secret extraordinary renditions to foreign prisons, which apparently still go on unabated.)

The Compass Points to Moral and Political Degradation

The issue of covering up complicity brings me back to where this article began: the gyrations by Pelosi, Rockefeller, and much of the rest of the Democratic leadership and their supporters around the country, especially among the pro-Democratic "netroots".

I ask the latter: where is your moral compass? If Bush didn't care who he tortured, as long as he maintains power for his administration and the corporations and contractors that prosper from the hogfeed that is the "war on terror", then how are the Democrats any different if in the name of electoral success evidence of complicity in inhumane forms of behavior is ignored. The saliency is only enhanced when one realizes I'm talking about the leader of the Democratic Party, second in line to the Presidency, and the leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee, among others.

Pelosi's admissions over the weekend show that her participation in briefings on torture are not a "CIA smear", or the lies of CIA old-time hack Porter Goss. But not all Democrats are sleeping on this -- though I've heard no outrage from Congressional members themselves, as yet. For instance, there was this excellent piece by Deep Harm over at Daily Kos. And a hat tip to shpilk, also at Daily Kos, for his referencing of Jonathan Turley on the concatenation of scandals around torture, executive power, and Congressional capitulation that have surrounded the revelations around waterboarding (the Mukasey nomination), destruction of CIA torture tapes, and the briefings to Congressional leaders:

The news would serve to explain why the Democrats have repeatedly act to protect the White House from a showdown on torture. The most obvious and distressing example was when Sens. Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein saved Attorney General Michael Mukasey from having to admit that waterboarding is torture. The Democrats clearly do not want to have such a moment, which would trigger an investigation (and possible impeachment proceeding) where they own knowledge would be revealed.

Voters are likely to look harshly on the fact that their leaders knew of a criminal act and failed to reveal it — while professing disgust at the notion of torture....

If true, the knowledge of Democratic leaders shows a deep disconnect and possible dishonesty between our representatives and the voters. In many ways, this will be the test of our political system. If the public returns to its prior slumber after this story, there is little hope for a system that seems to replicate this type of conduct.

Over the weekend, I saw the movie The Golden Compass with my young daughter. In the movie, the evil Marisa Coulter (played by Nicole Kidman) explains to her daughter that some of the evil she does to others -- brainwashing and even killing young children -- is defensible because it's done in the name of some (peculiarly defined) good. This is the morality of the Bush Administration, and it appears to be the morality, too, of much of the leadership of their opponents in the Democratic Party. If one crime is one of commission, the other is one of ommission.

Pelosi and Rockefeller Should Step Down

Let not those who profess progressive politics and really want to change this country sit back in silence or disbelief and let this kind of betryal stand. Now is the time to change things. Not tommorrow. Not in November 2008. Not in some other lifetime. If we fail to speak out now, our acquiescence weakens the entire progressive cause, and all the elections in the world will not make such a stain any cleaner, or go away.

We could start by asking for the resignation from the Speakership of Nancy Pelosi, and the resignation from the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairmanship of John D. Rockefeller.

Iran NIE and the Hall of Mirrors

More than one author has described writing about the intelligence world as akin to walking into a hall of mirrors. It's difficult to know what's what, who to believe, or even know where you stand. Truths are fungible. Lies are opaque versions of tomorrow's news.

When the U.S. released its limited version of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the revelation that Iran does not have a working nuclear arms program landed with a thud upon the collective heads of the D.C. pundits. Bush's pugnacious news conference which followed, wherein he repeated ad nauseaum his intention that Iran never get the "knowledge" to construct a nuclear weapon, signalled no real change in direction from the administration that was only weeks before dangling World War III before the glazed eyes of a fearful electorate.

In discussions with colleagues, I was struck by the fact that the authorship of the new NIE was from the same man who wrote the previous NIE, and the same man who assured the administration that there was a nuclear weapons program in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, CIA stalwart, Robert Walpole, who was (if he in fact is still), according to the Washington Post, "chief CIA officer for nuclear programs". In other words, I smelled a rat. But how to make sense of the CIA's role, the timing of the release, even what the NIE was intending to say? Was it a fusillade unleashed upon Cheney's minions? Or was it a clever way to install the "fact" that Iran had conducted covert nuclear weapons research, laying the groundwork for further U.S. interventionist policies? Or yet again, was it a plea for diplomacy over war?

I don't know the answer to these questions. And they may be the wrong questions.

Arthur Silber wrote a magnificent piece the other day on his blog, Once Upon a Time. It's worth quoting in some detail, as I believe it provides a set of bearings upon which we can steer through some very confused waters. You may not agree with his assessment of the Democratic Party, but his grip on history is firm and accurate.

It deserves emphasis that this latest NIE tells us nothing -- let me repeat that, nothing -- that was not entirely obvious to a reasonably intelligent layperson who followed mainstream media reports about Iran for the last several years. As just one example, see my post, "Iran: The Growing Threat that Isn't," from close to a year ago. It is true that "official" government recognition of the non-threatening status of Iran, but only in this one respect, is of marginal importance, but it is only that: marginal. It simply means that the warmongers -- whether of the Republican or Democratic variety (and please let us not forget the Democratic warmongers, who have been far more resolute and consistent in the pursuit of the glories of war over the last century than the Republicans, with the hugely notable exception of the criminal gang in charge of the executive branch at present) -- cannot easily avail themselves of this particular bogeyman for the moment. For those who seek to begin the next phase of this neverending war, there are many other bogeymen available for use to the identical end, as we shall see in a moment.

Let us start with the most crucial point. The reaction from all quarters to the NIE relies on several interrelated central assumptions, ones that are regarded as so unquestionably true that no one thinks they need to be stated: that major policy decisions, including decisions of war and peace, are based on intelligence in the first place; that a decision to go to war is one made only after cool and careful rational deliberation; and that nations go to war for the reasons they announce to the world.

ALL OF THIS IS ABSOLUTELY, UNEQUIVOCALLY FALSE.

What Silber is saying strikes me as absolutely true. The history of modern warfare, from the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, bringing on the slaughter of World War I, through the "missed" communications about a Japanese raid on the U.S. (stimulated by a U.S. oil boycott), through the Nazi stunt of dressing soldiers in Polish uniforms to prove an "invasion" of Germany by Poland, through the fake Gulf of Tonkin "attack" the U.S. manufactured, all the way to the WMD in Iraq, governments don't use their intelligence to start or stop wars, they go to war because they want to, and for reasons that have very little to do with purely military considerations.

More Silber:

To repeat: the decision to go to war is one of policy, and the intelligence -- whatever it is alleged to show -- is irrelevant. Don't argue in terms of intelligence at all. If you do, you'll lose. The administration knows that; many of its opponents still haven't figured it out, even now.

....may it be duly noted that the leading Democrats are just as "hawkish" and "nuts" on this issue: Hillary Clinton, who speaks of our inalienable "right" to take "offensive military action against Iran" ; Barack Obama ("In today's globalized world, the security of the American people is inextricably linked to the security of all people," which is license to intervene anywhere and everywhere, on any pretext whatsoever, real or imagined); and all the other prominent Democrats, with their endless trash talk of keeping "all options on the table."

Note how Digby {I've added the link so readers can judge for themselves -- V.} implicitly relies on the erroneous notion that if the intelligence had been correct on Iraq, a reasonable conclusion might have been reached, and thus the invasion of Iraq might have been forestalled. That is the meaning of, "how the CIA supposedly screwed up the Iraq WMD assessment..." If only the CIA had been allowed to tell the "truth" without political interference, there might have been a better chance that all would have been well. But that only makes sense if one assumes that policy decisions are based on intelligence. Again: they are not....

In the most critical sense, I don't care about this latest assessment, just as I did not care about the earlier ones, about Iran or on any other subject at all -- for in addition to the rather important fact that such assessments are invariably wrong, I recognize that policy decisions are made on different grounds altogether. Moreover, in terms of U.S. foreign policy, I don't care if Iran does get nuclear weapons. As I have noted before, I do not view it as a remotely good thing that any nation has nuclear weapons, including the U.S. -- and I remind you once again that it is only the U.S. that has used them, when it did not have any legitimate reason for doing so and when it lied about every aspect of its actions and their consequences. But in terms of an Iran with nuclear weapons five or ten years in the future: "So Iran Gets Nukes. So What?" But the bipartisan commitment to American world hegemony has not altered in the slightest degree. The criminal catastrophe of Iraq is irrelevant to our ruling class, and it has not caused them to alter any of their most crucial goals.

As I said above, this latest NIE makes it considerably more difficult for the administration to use this particular argument to justify a criminal act of aggression against a non-existent threat. But if the administration is determined to attack Iran, they have plenty of other arguments to use, and many of those arguments have the full and enthusiastic support of the Democrats.

But where does this lead us? Down a hall of mirrors of our own making, of hope and fear, of misplaced faith, and an attachment to a political wilderness that promises nothing good. Silber doesn't say, at least in this article, what is needed.

But in a world led by a militaristic empire who sees it as their destiny to control the power of states internationally, what's needed is nothing less than an overturn of power, of political and economic relations. I don't wish for such a cataclysm of world events, but they come in the train of failed empires. The leaders of the U.S., no less than the varied leaderships of Europe, China, Russia and the Third World and of the assorted insurgencies, including all sorts of liberal and conservative nationalists, revanchists, and religious fundamentalists, will unleash a real World War III unless humanity can find a way to rise to the consciousness of the seriousness of the situation. And then act upon it.

A Real Mensch Leaves APA

Uwe Jacobs is the clinical director of Survivors International in San Francisco, California. SI is regional torture treatment center, and one of the best in the country. A typical non-profit struggling to survive itself in a hostile political and economic environment, Dr. Jacobs work and dedication is one of the main reasons it still exists and thrives.

Dr. Jacobs is a clinical psychologist, and an eminent member of the profession. He has been prominent in the struggle against torture, and in particular against participation by medical and mental health professionals in U.S. coercive interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

He's done more than speak. Dr. Jacobs assisted in the preparation of the currently existing international guidelines for the examination of torture, the "Istanbul Protocol," published by the UN High Commissioner. He also took a major role in helping write the handbook on assessment of asylum seekers for Physicians for Human Rights. He has spoken on the torture issue from both a political and a treatment perspective. A really unique individual.

You would think any psychological organization worth its salt would be proud to have him as an exemplary member. But the tawdry organizational and political activities of the American Psychological Association around the torture issue have driven many to withhold their dues from that organization, or to quit. Now Dr. Jacobs joins those who have left the organization.

What follows is his letter of resignation to APA, posted here with permission, as originally posted at Psyche, Science and Society.

Farewell to the APA

After a couple of years of struggling with the leadership of the American Psychological Association over the issue of its complicity with the governments torture politics, I have decided to leave the APA for now. As the latest resolution against torture was passed by the APA Council this summer, there was on one side the appearance of a compromise between different factions within the organization and an outcome that received sufficient praise for it to pass as an honest human rights effort in public opinion. On the other side, there was my private sense of resignation and queasiness over the dirty pool that had been played. Much could be said about all that but suffice it to summarize the deciding moment, which came when I learned from an article in Salon that Dr. Stephen Behnke, the Director of the Ethics Office, ”insisted on Saturday that Physicians for Human Rights had suggested some qualifying language with respect to sleep and sensory deprivation.”

Since those of us who were involved in the process knew that Len Rubenstein of PHR had, in fact, pleaded with Behnke in a series of letters to drop the language in question, not to retain it, I asked for clarification. Rather than making a claim of misunderstanding, Dr. Behnke did not even deny having made that statement to Salon. However, nobody missed a beat in the aftermath and everyone prepared for their next statement or press release. The show, or as Robin Williams would have it, the hoe, must go on.

I conclude, at least for now, that the APA (and yes, I still think we ought to use an article in front of saying or writing "APA") is not a club I care to belong to, not because any majority of it, or even some of its obnoxious leadership, would actively push the use of torture but because its essential character as a careerist, corporate structure does not seem to promote telling the truth and carrying forward an upright posture. I have never shared the belief of some members that APA leaders had a primary interest in promulgating either torture or lesser forms of prisoner oppression. Being blissfully ignorant of how many APA functionaries are involved with the CIA and how many psychologists actively implement and support a regime of sensory deprivation and other forms of cruelty, I have felt that the primary motivation has been to appear as stalwart supporters of the military apparatus, as long as it would curry favor with the regime that might or might not trade a good horse for it. I am allowing for the possibility that it may be worse than that but I simply do not know.

Be that as it may, the APA's alignment with Washington politics is quite likely preparing for the end of the Bush era and getting ready to become more pleasing to its liberal wing before long. The many excellent people I had the privilege of working with during this time certainly deserve that and I salute them all, as it were, for staying on and keeping the faith. I am not excluding the possibility of re-joining them if things change more than I expect they will. I could withhold my APA dues, along with others, but I do not honestly see the precise conditions under which I would subsequently release them. I simply will not let the APA have any more of my money. In the interest of full disclosure, I might not even care quite that much if the dues weren’t so high and if top APA employees weren’t being paid corporate-style salaries. Given that fact, however, I am past due in firing them for their performance. For this year, I will donate the amount of my APA dues to PHR, an organization I have been proudly associated with for long time (but, unlike SI, does not issue my paycheck), and I will do that with pleasure, rather than regrets.

Uwe Jacobs, Ph.D.
San Francisco, December 4, 2007

Uwe, whom I consider both a friend and a colleague, will go on, I know, continuing to do his important work, and fighting against the attitudes and institutions that support or try to minimize the use of torture and inhumane treatment. That he will do so from the outside of an organization like APA is no loss to him, but only to APA, and a reflection on its moral and political bankruptcy.