Doctors without boundaries
by digby
In the course of writing about the torture regime, I came across some previous work I did in real time on the subject that are relevant again.
The idea that after all this time they are still convinced of their rectitude — and that a majority of the public is behind them is mind-boggling. I thought the one below from 2009 was as chilling today as it was when I wrote it. I’ll never get used to the fact that we are unrepentant torturers.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Professional Courtesyby digby
In reading the Bybee torture memo, you see that he refers constantly to the “professionals” and the medical personnel who oversaw the interrogations. He uses the fact that American military personnel who had undergone SERE training had suffered little lasting damage due to their training in these techniques. (No metion of the logical conclusion that American military personnel knew that the people who were inflicting the torture were only doing it for demonstration purposes and therefore had a completely different psychological reaction.)
Names have been redacted and much of the advice Bybee relies upon is not revealed with any specificity. But rely on it he does, through the entire opinion. Indeed, when you read this classic CIA CYA memo, you get the clear feeling that Bybee was trying to cover his own ass by constantly referring to these “experts” who stipulated that Zubaydah was in good health (despite the fact that the man had almost died of gunshot wounds just a few months before), was completely in control (except for being a schizophrenic) and was handling his interrogation with equanimity (by compulsively masturbating.)
One has to assume that at least some of the CIA personnel the Obama administration promised not to prosecute today were among those to whom Bybee refers. So who are they?
There is actually quite a bit of information out there about how this whole thing happened so it’s not hard to figure it out. First, it’s important to recall that the Zubaydah case was special for a number of reasons, the most important of which was that it spelled the end of the battle between the FBI and the CIA as to how to properly interrogate Al Qaeda prisoners. The FBI believed that that the best way to get actionable info from these people was to use approved interrogation techniques (which in Zubaydah’s case was quite effective.) But the CIA objected, insisting that he knew more than he was saying and that only by using torture could they get it out of him.
Jane Meyer published many of the details about the people involved and the program they used several years ago in the New Yorker:
The C.I.A. program’s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”
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.”
Nevertheless, 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.)
Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that “learned helplessness was his whole paradigm.” Mitchell, he said, “draws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners’ ability to forecast the future—when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn’t after intelligence.”
As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency’s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.’s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.’s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that “if subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.”
Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks—or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs—regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that “they bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they’ll turn to you like their daddy.” McCoy added that “after the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn’t just bring back the old psychological techniques—they perfected them.”
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.”
Mayer names the two senior psychologists involved in the reverse engineering of the SERE program in her book The Dark Side: James Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen whom she described as ”good looking, clean-cut, polite Mormons.”
KGB torture techniques are what the Bybee memo legalized — at the behest of retired CIA “psychologists.” And they recommended it over the objections of trained FBI interrogators and behavioral scientists in the CIA itself. Those were the experts he relied upon to assure him that Zubaydah was a seasoned terrorist warrior who could only be “broken” by using torture. He ignored plenty of others who said otherwise.
We know now that the information that was gleaned from Zubaydah under torture was completely useless. That’s what that torture program is designed to do, after all — elicit false confessions. And it cost this country millions and millions of dollars and uselessly scared the hell out of people:
Ron Susskind, who also wrote extensively about Zubaydah in The One Percent Solution and wrote this in TIME Magazine when Zubaydah was transferred to Guantanamo:
What is widely known inside the Administration is that once we caught our first decent-size fish–Abu Zubaydah, in March 2002–we used him as an experiment in righteous brutality that in the end produced very little. His interrogation, according to those overseeing it, yielded little from threats and torture. He named countless targets inside the U.S. to stop the pain, all of them immaterial. Indeed, think back to the sudden slew of alerts in the spring and summer of 2002 about attacks on apartment buildings, banks, shopping malls and, of course, nuclear plants. What little of value he did tell us came largely from a more sophisticated approach, using his religious belief in predestination to convince him he miraculously survived his arrest (he was shot three times and nursed to health by U.S. doctors) for a reason: to help the other side. It’s that strange conviction that generated the few, modest disclosures of use to the U.S. Complicating matters is that Zubaydah was more a facilitator–a glorified al-Qaeda travel agent–than the operational master the Administration trumpeted him as. Also, he suffers from multiple personalities. His diary, which the government refuses to release, is written in three voices over 10 years and is filled with page after page of quotidian nonsense about housekeeping, food and types of tea.
So, it’s not just a matter of morality, although this program was so immoral and depraved as to be nearly unbelievable. It was also excessively counterproductive in almost every way, to the point where I’m convinced that the US can probably never get its reputation back and will be seen as a brutal, threatening giant among many people around the world who never thought that before.
When Bybee was searching for legal justifications to do what the CIA wanted to do (and probably Cheney and the rest as well) here’s what the man at the top was saying when he was being briefed about the torture of Zubaydah:
“I said he was important,” Bush reportedly told Tenet at one of their daily meetings. “You’re not going to let me lose face on this, are you?” “No sir, Mr. President,” Tenet replied. Bush “was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind writes, and he asked one briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?” Interrogators did their best to find out, Suskind reports.
James Risen described this scene in his book State of War:
Risen makes much of an anecdote he heard from one of his trusty White House sources about a conversation in 2002 between then-CIA director George Tenet and George Bush after the capture of Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan, a known and high-ranking al Qaeda operative. Tenet was briefing Bush on the matter, explaining that not much intelligence had been pulled from Zubaydah in the early stages because he had been put on pain medication to deal with the injuries he sustained during capture. Bush asked Tenet: “Who authorized putting him on pain medication?” Risen speculates whether Bush was “implicitly encouraging” Tenet to order the harsh treatment of a prisoner “without the paper trail that would have come from a written presidential authorization.” Risen writes, “If so, this episode offers the most direct link yet between Bush and the harsh treatment of prisoners by both the CIA and the U.S. military.”
Risen does say that sources close to Tenet have challenged this account, but spends pages after writing about the significance of Zubaydah’s interrogation as “the critical precedent for the future handling of prisoners both in the global war on terror and in the war in Iraq.” Risen writes, “The harsh interrogation methods the CIA used on Zubaydah prompted the first wide-ranging and legal policy review establishing the procedures to be followed in the detention of future detainees. ‘Abu Zubaydah’s capture triggered everything,’ explained a CIA source.” Risen describes a turf war process that eventually had the CIA in charge of all the high-profile al Qaeda prisoners.
And everyone else at the top knew exactly what they were doing too. Mark Danner’s recent mind-blowing story on the Red Cross report backed up this earlier bombshell:
Shortly after Abu Zubaydah was captured, according to ABC News, CIA officers “briefed high-level officials in the National Security Council’s Principals Committee,” including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, who “then signed off on the [interrogation] plan.” At the time, the spring and summer of 2002, the administration was devising what some referred to as a “golden shield” from the Justice Department -— the legal rationale that was embodied in the infamous “torture memorandum,” written by John Yoo and signed by Jay Bybee in August 2002… Still, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet regularly brought directly to the attention of the highest officials of the government specific procedures to be used on specific detainees —- “whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subject to simulated drowning” — in order to seek reassurance that they were legal. According to the ABC report, the briefings of principals were so detailed and frequent that “some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed.” At one such meeting, John Ashcroft, then attorney general, reportedly demanded of his colleagues, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”
They are all war criminals, from the nice looking Mormon sadists who call themselves doctors, to the twisted bureaucrats in the Justice Department who call themselves lawyers, to the top leadership of the Bush administration who sat there and watched choreographed torture sessions in the White House and have the utter gall to call themselves human. They all knew that what they were doing was repulsive and immoral. That’s why went to such lengths to ensure that all of it was approved with all the is dotted and all the ts crossed all the way to the very top and back down again. They all implicated each other.
Apparently, they assumed that nobody would ever prosecute even one of these very important, upstanding members of their professions for horrific crimes such as these because if onw went down they would all go down. And apparently they were right.
Update: Oh, and let’s be sure to add Steven Bradbury to the list. He’s just as much of a sadistic madman as Bybee, Yoo and the rest of them — and his opinions were in effect until he left office three months ago. More on his memos tomorrow. Warning: they will make you sick.
And no reflection or retribution is not the answer. Prosecution is the answer. If these aren’t criminal acts, nothing is. It’s the stuff of nightmares.
Update: Apparently we are being disrespectful of the military to try war criminals because it’s exactly the same as calling average Vietnam War Vets baby killers. At least according to our new Director of National Intelligence. William Calley was a hero I guess.
Oh, and while it may seem terrible and disturbing to read these things in the bright light of 2009, we need to remember that our country went crazy after 9/11. All the way up until May of 2005, when the Bradbury memos were written.
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