The findings of this study demonstrate that allegations by these nine detainees of torture were corroborated by forensic evaluations by non-governmental medical experts and that DoD medical and mental health providers at GTMO failed to document physical and/or psychological evidence of intentional harm.

In each case we reviewed, detainees alleged forms of abuse that are highly consistent with torture as defined by the UN Convention Against Torture as well as the more restrictive US definition of torture that was operational at the time [12]. In one case, unclassified interrogation plans and interrogation summaries provided precise corroboration of the methods of torture and ill treatment that the detainee alleged.

….

The medical evaluations in this case series revealed evidence of severe physical and severe and prolonged psychological pain as stipulated in the Bybee definition of torture. But, according to the Bybee definition of torture, even if the requisite pain thresholds had been exceeded, the infliction of such pain had to be the interrogator’s “precise objective” to constitute torture.

….

The medical doctors and mental health personnel who treated the detainees at GTMO failed to inquire and/or document causes of the physical injuries and psychological symptoms they observed. Psychological symptoms were commonly attributed to “personality disorders” and “routine stressors of confinement.” Temporary psychotic symptoms and hallucinations did not prompt consideration of abusive treatment.

The documentation of torture and ill treatment in medicolegal evaluations conducted by non-governmental medical experts indicates that each of the detainees continues to experience severe, long-term and debilitating psychological symptoms that are likely to persist for many years, and possibly a lifetime.

The Defense Department has issued a response to Iacopino and Xenakis which, in its failure to even mention their main charges can be taken as an official confirmation that Guantanamo health professionals do no investigate or document the terrible abuses suffered by many prisoners there:

DoD personnel working in detention facilities operate under a high level of scrutiny and consistently provide the most humane and safe care and custody of individuals under their control. The Joint Medical Group is committed to providing unconditional appropriate comprehensive medical care to all detainees regardless of their disciplinary status, cooperation, or participation in a hunger strike. The healthcare provided to the detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay rivals that provided in any community in the United States. Detainees receive timely, compassionate, quality healthcare and have regular access to primary care and specialist physicians. The care provided to detainees is comparable to that afforded our active duty service members. All medical procedures performed are justified and meet accepted standards of care. A detainee is provided medical care and treatment based solely on his need for such care and the level and type of treatment is dependent on the accepted medical standard of care for the condition being treated. Diagnosis of such conditions and medical care and treatment for them are not affected in any way by a detainee’s cooperation, or lack thereof, during an interrogation session. Similarly, medical care is not provided or withheld based on a detainee’s compliance or noncompliance with detention camp rules or on his refusal to end a hunger strike. Medical decisions and treatment are not withheld as a form of punishment. Additionally, the medical staff has no involvement in discipline decisions made by detention personnel.

This DoD reesponse also neatly elides the Iacopino and Xenakis claims in another way in that it is written in the present tense and thus only applies to current practices. Yet Iacopino and Xenakis, by their methodology of examining medical records, are talking about past practices. The DoD “response” makes no claims whatsoever recording the appropriateness of past practices. It thus seems likely that some of those practices were indefensible, even by Defense Department spokespeople not usually noted for their truthfulness.

The Iacopino and Xenakis findings are entirely consistent with my experience reading medical files on one Guantanamo prisoner on whom I consulted. Despite claims that he had been subjected to abuse, and mental health symptoms consistent with abuse, there was no indication in the hundreds of pages I read that any health professional had made any attempt to find out if he had been abused or to document possible abuse. Rather, the mental heath staff seemed only interested in whether the prisoner might make a suicide attempt. Beyond that, his obvious anguish appeared to be of no interest to the psychologists and other mental health staff.

Further, the Guantanamo medical unit and the Obama Justice Department fought tooth and nail to prevent any independent examination of these records, much less of the prisoner himself. The prisoner’s attorneys requested, and the habeas judge ordered, that the records be made available for examination by an independent psychologist, me, to determine if there was a possibility that mental health issues might interfere with the prisoner’s ability to cooperate with his attorneys. The Guantanamo medical staff filed a declaration denying any need for independent evaluation. And the Justice Department appealed every step. First they opposed any access to records as too burdensome. Then they appealed access to more than the past few month’s records. They appeared to objected to any scrutiny on principle, which in itself in a sign of inadequate transparency at Guantanamo and is the exact opposite of what should occur in an institution run by a democratic government. We cannot take the word of officials at an institution absent meaningful independent scrutiny that abuses and ethical lapses were, or are, absent.

The Iacopino and Xenakis paper contributes to existing evidence, including the questionable use of anti-malarial drugs, that Guantanamo healthcare was often problematic and deserves independent scrutiny. While the Bush and Obama administrations have made every effort to keep those records secret, health professionals should challenge that secrecy. We should demand that Guantanamo medical records be opened, with prisoner consent, to independent inspection. Further, all detainees desiring it should be able to receive independent medical evaluations.

Additionally, independent of the issues of possible abuse, the complete medical records of released prisoners should be made available to those prisoners and/or their current health providers. To suppress medical records for years of a person’s life is unethical as it interferes with released individuals’ ability to obtain required care in the present and the future. Health professionals from all disciplines should make clear that denial of access to their records by released prisoners is in simply unacceptable.

Katherine Hawkins, an expert on the US’s rendition-to-torture program, in an email, has sent some critical texts where Suleiman pops up. Thus, Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, pointed to Suleiman’s role in the rendition program:

Each rendition was authorized at the very top levels of both governments….The long-serving chief of the Egyptian central intelligence agency, Omar Suleiman, negotiated directly with top Agency officials. [Former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt] Walker described the Egyptian counterpart, Suleiman, as “very bright, very realistic,” adding that he was cognizant that there was a downside to “some of the negative things that the Egyptians engaged in, of torture and so on. But he was not squeamish, by the way” (pp. 113).

Stephen Grey, in Ghost Plane, his investigative work on the rendition program also points to Suleiman as central in the rendition program:

To negotiate these assurances [that the Egyptians wouldn't "torture" the prisoner delivered for torture] the CIA dealt principally in Egypt through Omar Suleiman, the chief of the Egyptian general intelligence service (EGIS) since 1993. It was he who arranged the meetings with the Egyptian interior ministry…. Suleiman, who understood English well, was an urbane and sophisticated man. Others told me that for years Suleiman was America’s chief interlocutor with the Egyptian regime — the main channel to President Hosni Mubarak himself, even on matters far removed from intelligence and security.

Suleiman’s role in the rendition program was also highlighted in a Wikileaks cable:

the context of the close and sustained cooperation between the USG and GOE on counterterrorism, Post believes that the written GOE assurances regarding the return of three Egyptians detained at Guantanamo (reftel) represent the firm commitment of the GOE to adhere to the requested principles. These assurances were passed directly from Egyptian General Intelligence Service (EGIS) Chief Soliman through liaison channels — the most effective communication path on this issue. General Soliman’s word is the GOE’s guarantee, and the GOE’s track record of cooperation on CT issues lends further support to this assessment. End summary.

Suleiman wasn’t just the go-to bureaucrat for when the Americans wanted to arrange a little torture. This “urbane and sophisticated man” apparently enjoyed a little rough stuff himself.

Shortly after 9/11, Australian citizen, Mamdouh Habib, was captured by Pakistani security forces and, under US pressure, tortured by Pakistanis. He was then rendered (with an Australian diplomats watching) by CIA operatives to Egypt, a not uncommon practice. In Egypt, Habib merited Suleiman’s personal attention. As related by Richard Neville, based on Habib’s memoir:

Habib was interrogated by the country’s Intelligence Director, General Omar Suleiman…. Suleiman took a personal interest in anyone suspected of links with Al Qaeda. As Habib had visited Afghanistan shortly before 9/11, he was under suspicion. Habib was repeatedly zapped with high-voltage electricity, immersed in water up to his nostrils, beaten, his fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks.

That treatment wasn’t enough for Suleiman, so:

To loosen Habib’s tongue, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a gruesomely shackled Turkistan prisoner in front of Habib – and he did, with a vicious karate kick.

After Suleiman’s men extracted Habib’s confession, he was transferred back to US custody, where he eventually was imprisoned at Guantanamo. His “confession” was then used as evidence in his Guantanamo trial.

The Washington Post’s intelligence correspondent, Jeff Stein, reported some additional details regarding Suleiman and his important role in the old Egypt the demonstrators are trying to leave behind:

“Suleiman is seen by some analysts as a possible successor to the president,” the Voice of American said Friday. “He earned international respect for his role as a mediator in Middle East affairs and for curbing Islamic extremism.”

An editorialist at Pakistan’s “International News” predicted Thursday that “Suleiman will probably scupper his boss’s plans [to install his son], even if the aspiring intelligence guru himself is as young as 75.”

Suleiman graduated from Egypt’s prestigious Military Academy but also received training in the Soviet Union. Under his guidance, Egyptian intelligence has worked hand-in-glove with the CIA’s counterterrorism programs, most notably in the 2003 rendition from Italy of an al-Qaeda suspect known as Abu Omar.

In 2009, Foreign Policy magazine ranked Suleiman as the Middle East’s most powerful intelligence chief, ahead of Mossad chief Meir Dagan.

In an observation that may turn out to be ironic, the magazine wrote, “More than from any other single factor, Suleiman’s influence stems from his unswerving loyalty to Mubarak.”

If Suleiman succeeds Mubarak and retains power, we will likely be treated to plaudits for his distinguished credentials from government officials and US pundits. We should remember that what they really mean is his ability to brutalize and torture. As Stephen Grey puts it:

But in secret, men like Omar Suleiman, the country’s most powerful spy and secret politician, did our work, the sort of work that Western countries have no appetite to do ourselves.

If Suleiman receives praise in the US, it will be because our leaders know that he’s the sort of leader who can be counted on to do what it takes to restore order and ensure that Egypt remains friendly to US interests.

There are some signs, however, that the Obama administration may not accept Suleiman’s appointment. Today they criticized the rearrangement of the chairs in Egypt’s government. If so, that will be a welcome sign that the Obama administration may have some limits beyond which it is hesitant to go in aligning with our most brutal “friends.”

We sure hope that the Egyptian demonstrators reject the farce of Suleiman’s appointment and push on to a complete change of regime. Otherwise the Egyptian torture chamber will undoubtedly return, as a new regime reestablishes “stability” and serves US interests.

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius profusely apologized for a study conducted by the US Public Health Service in which nearly 700 incarcerated people and soldiers in Guatemala were, without their knowledge, deliberately infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in order to test if penicillin could prevent infection. In a statement the two Cabinet secretaries expressed their outrage at “such reprehensible research.” In fact, so disturbed is the US government at this research that President Obama reportedly will call the Guatemalan president to apologize again.

This research violated the basic ethical principles that were supposed to guide research done on people — “human subjects research” in the professional lingo — since World War II. These principles were codified in the Nuremberg Code internationally and in the Common Rule guiding most research on people conducted or funded by US government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services of which the Public Health Service is a part as well as the Defense Department and the CIA. Fundamental to these and all other recent codes of research ethics are two basic principles: informed consent and minimization of harm. Thus, the Nuremberg Code, containing principles developed for the trials of German doctors who conducted horrific experiments in the Nazi concentration camps, begins with the principle of informed consent:

The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonable to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

A little later the Nuremberg Code states the obligation of medical researchers to minimize harm resulting from experimental procedures:

The experiment should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.

No experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur; except, perhaps, in those experiments where the experimental physicians also serve as subjects.

The Guatemalan study egregiously violated both these principles and deserves opprobrium. Rather than informed consent, the purpose of the study was deliberately hidden from those infected. These individuals were infected with dangerous, often deadly, illnesses. This research was awful, reprehensible, even horrific, and should never have been contemplated, let alone, conducted. I am glad that it only took a short time since historian Susan M. Reverby of Wellesley College revealed the abuses in a soon-to-be-published paper — available in preprint form on Reverby’s website — until US government officials vociferously condemned it.

But the US government does not need to look back nearly 65 years to find horrific research conducted by US government researchers. In June 2010, Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) issued a report, Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the “Enhanced” Interrogation Program, that documented research and experimentation conducted in this century by CIA physicians and psychologists related to the abusive techniques used as part of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” torture program.

These researchers observed the torture of CIA prisoners in the so-called “black sites” and recorded the tortured prisoners’ responses. They paid special attention to the possibility that the torture would kill the prisoners. At times they recommended changes in torture techniques, such as the addition of salt to the water used for the partial drowning techniques that have come to be known as “waterboarding” so as to prevent possible death from induced electrolyte imbalance. This change in procedure allowed the prisoners to be waterboarded many dozens of times while preventing their escape into death. As PHR argued, the main reason for this apparent safety-related research was not the protection of prisoners, but to provide legal cover for the torturers and torture policy-makers by allowing them to claim that medical professionals were assuring the prisoners’ safety.

These abuses were reported by PHR in its peer-review report back in June. (I am one of the authors of that report.) Secretary of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was notified by letter of these abuses, abuses that violate the same research ethics principles — informed consent and minimization of harm — that were violated by the Guatemalan STD research. But, rather than express her outrage at this “reprehensible research,” Secretary Sebelius maintained her silence, as did every government official, other than a CIA press spokesman who denied our claims without presenting the slightest bit of evidence. Secretary Sebelius’ department referred an official complaint regarding unethical CIA research to the very same CIA that had already publicly denied the charges. So far, no government agency has committed to investigating these CIA abuses, which occurred far more recently than the Guatemalan horrors.

In response to the over 60 year old Guatemalan abuses, the Secretaries of HHS and State announced the creation of a commission that will undertake to assure that all human subjects research conducted by US researchers meets the highest ethical standards. As NBC News reported:

In addition to the apology, the U.S. is setting up commissions to ensure that human medical research conducted around the globe meets ‘rigorous ethical standards.’ U.S. officials are also launching investigations to uncover exactly what happened during the experiments.

If the purpose of the commission is really “to ensure that human medical research conducted around the globe meets ‘rigorous ethical standards,’” there cannot be a double standard. The same rules must apply to all researchers, everywhere, and to all research subjects, whoever they are. Ethics are there to protect the despised and powerless, not just those deemed deserving. Those researchers aiding CIA or other classified activities cannot get a free pass. We are at an important juncture, either unethical CIA research is investigated and those responsible are held accountable or the whole regime preventing unethical research that has been developed since the world became aware of Nazi horrors will collapse in hypocrisy. We cannot afford to let that happen.

IMMI attempts to tip the world balance toward press freedom by setting up Iceland as a Mecca of press and information freedom. Key provisions of the IMMI include: whistleblower protections; strong protections for anonymous sources and the journalists and media organizations who deal with them; a strengthening of protections against prior restraint by governments or through use of the courts; and protection for Internet Service Providers [ISPs], preventing them from being held responsible for information passing through their networks.

IMMI also includes provisions against the use of lawsuits to suppress information. Thus, under IMMI, Iceland would not enforce foreign judgments against ISPs and media organizations based in Iceland. Further, Icelandic-based organizations would have the right to file counter-suits in Iceland against attempts to suppress their free speech in other countries.

Additionally contained in IMMI are protections against misuses of court processes to suppress speech, allowing judges to decide that an issue before the court involves freedom of speech and thus trigger protections before those being sued are coerced into settling cases or submitting to abusive subpoenas due to inadequate resources to defend themselves.

If IMMI passes, Iceland’s actions could affect press freedoms elsewhere. Iceland’s internet servers would become available to reporters and bloggers around the world. These servers could hold documents and reports that governments or corporations are attempting to suppress and would come under Icelandic protections. The right to countersue against attempts at suppressing free speech elsewhere will provide some protection for journalists and media organizations in other countries used Icelandic servers.. While there is no guarantee that the right to countersue will deter all abuses, in many cases the threat of litigation, or even criminal penalties, in Iceland will constrain those who might otherwise move to suppress information.

In other cases, attempts to suppress free expression, such as a subpoena seeking the identity of a confidential source in other countries would be in violation of Icelandic laws, providing reporters and other information providers with leverage in their own countries. Thus, a reporter under pressure to reveal a source could argue that these demands would place that reporter afoul of Icelandic law. Some courts may respect this claim, since they would be unable to guarantee immunity for the reporter.

The IMMI arose out of last summer’s outrage at efforts by a Icelandic bank to suppress television reporting on a document leaked to Wikileaks — the internet haven for leaked documents — regarding the bank’s questionable financial dealings. Icelanders were outraged that their television station was enjoined from reporting on a document that was freely available on the web.

Wikileaks editors Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt originally spearheaded the creation of IMMI and have moved to Iceland to help secure its passage. Wikileaks is well aware of the dangers of censorship as banks and several countries, including Australia and South Africa, have attempted to censor materials posted on Wikileaks. If IMMI passes, Iceland would become the perfect environment for Wikileaks to base its servers. Other media and information providers will likely follow suit and base their servers in Iceland to take advantage of its new protections.

IMMI thus could be a boon to Iceland’s economy, making it a center of the new information economy. But IMMI, because of its strong assist to transparency efforts like Wikileaks, also is seen by many Icelanders as a critical tool in preventing the next economic collapse through shedding light on murky questionable financial and other corporate dealings. As parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir stated:

“The collapse woke up the nation and by rallying together we pushed through historical changes. The government was forced to resign, the central bank manager was forced to resign, the head of the financial supervisory authority was forced to resign. The people of Iceland realized that by joining forces real change could and would take place.

People woke up to the fact that the infrastructure they had put their trust in, had failed. Our academics, the government, the parliament, the central bank, and the media had all failed. It made us understand that the media was weak, that there was a lack of transparency and that in order to live in a healthy society, we had take part in shaping it.

We have come to understand that fundamental changes need to take place to strengthen our democracy and that a new legislative package is needed to that promotes transparency and political accountability.

Because the world is connected by financial and information flows, suppression of the truth is not only our problem, but everyone’s problem. The right of the people to understand what is happening to their societies needs to be strengthened. I believe in supporting the world’s most courageous journalists and writers with the best legislation possible. That is why I am proud to be a part of the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.

IMMI was introduced into parliament February 17 by 19 parliamentary representatives from all parties in parliament, almost a third of the 63 MPs. It will be voted on in April or May of this year. Passage will constitute one of the most important blows for democracy and transparency anywhere in years. It will also be a rare rebuke to the growing power of corporations and governments to restrict information flow world-wide.

As reported by Bill Dedman, Phillipe Sands, and Jane Mayer, Gelles objected to the “harsh” interrogation tactics being used at Guantanamo. In particular, he strenuously objected to the plans to “reverse engineer” the tactics used by the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program to inculcate strategies for resistance to torture in US service members at high risk for capture.

In November 2002, the military planned to use these SERE-based techniques on prisoner 063, Mohammed al Qahtani, one of several US captives dubbed the “20th hijacker.” Gelles and colleagues from the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), the FBI, and other agencies proposed an alternative interrogation plan for al Qahtani, one that did not involve use of SERE techniques. This plan was rejected. Instead, al-Qahtani was subjected to an interrogation that met the legal definition of “torture,” according to Bush Administration appointee Susan Crawford, convener of the Guantanamo Military Commissions. [Phillipe Sands detailed the development of the al-Qahtani torture plan in his book, The Torture Team, an extract from which was published in Vanity Fair. Sands also describes the alternate CITF/FBI plan as written by "Gelles' team" (p. 130).] Gelles reported his concerns regarding use of SERE techniques and the al-Qahtani interrogation up the chain of command, leading Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora to protest and force at least temporary change in official interrogation policy in early 2003.

A few weeks ago, in response to an ACLU’s years-long Freedom of Information Act Request, the alternative interrogation plan for al-Qahtani was quietly released, apparently unnoticed between other documents on FBI and CITF concerns about Guantanamo practices. According to the alternative plan document, it was drafted:

“by representatives of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU), and behavioral specialists, psychiatrists and psychologists with the Criminal Investigation Task Force (ClTF).”

Given the prominent roles of mental health professionals in its drafting, the alternative “rapport-based” plan should be examined for consistency with Gelles’ and the other authors’ ethical responsibilities as psychologists and psychiatrists.

At the time the plan was written, on November 22, 2002, al-Qahtani had been in isolation for three months and was exhibiting signs of severe mental deterioration to the extent of psychosis. An FBI agent described this deterioration in a report to headquarters:

“In September or October of 2002 FBI agents observed that a canine was used in an aggressive manner to intimidate detainee __ after he had been subjected to intense isolation for over three months. During that time period, __ was totally isolated (with the exception of occasional interrogations) in a cell that was always flooded with light. By late November, the detainee was evidencing behavior consistent with extreme psychological trauma (talking to non-existent people, reporting hearing voices, crouching in the corner of a cell covered with a sheet for hours on end).”

Gelles and the other authors on the CITF/FBI interrogation plan also noticed his psychological distress:

“#63′s behavior has changed significantly during his three months of isolation. He spends much of his day covered by a sheet, either crouched in the corner of his cell or hunched on his knees on top of his bed. These behaviors appear to be unrelated to his praying activities. His cell has no exterior windows, and because it is continuously lit, he is prevented from orientating himself as to time of day. Recently, he was observed by a hidden video camera having conversations with non-existent people. During his last interview on 11/17/02, he reported hearing unusual sounds which he believes are evil spirits, including Satan.”

After discussing whether al-Qahtani was faking his symptoms, without coming to a conclusion, the interrogation plan proposed exploiting al-Qahtani’s distress from his prolonged isolation:

“Although we are uncertain as to his mental status and recommend a mental evaluation be conducted, there is little doubt that #63 is hungry for human interaction. Our plan is designed to exploit this need and to create an environment in which it [is] easier for #63 to please the interviewer with whom he has come to have complete trust and dependence thus developing a motivation to be forthright and cooperative in providing reliable information.”

In order to exploit this hunger for human contact, the CITF/FBI plan recommended that he be kept in continued isolation for up to an additional year:

“The long-term strategy would be to create an environment in which total dependence and trust between #63 and the interviewer is established at its own pace. Such a plan should be given up to a year to complete although the actual time may be considerably shorter depending on how events unfold.”

Al-Qahtani’s hunger for human contact would be exploited by making his interrogator the only person he saw over this year:

“To help foster an environment conducive to the establishment of dependence and trust, we propose that the interviewer initially meet with #63 every other day. This should be his only contact with other people, and we believe he will anxiously look forward to these meetings.”

It was recommended that al-Qahtani be periodically subjected to additional stresses so that his interrogator could become his savior:

“Built into this plan will be periodic stressors such as the stripping of certain items of comfort from him by guards, such as the removal of his mirror or the issuance of a sheet, half the size of the one he likes to drape around himself. These and other stressors will be carefully and subtly introduced not by the interrogator, but by guards. We believe that #63 will likely look to his only human contact, his interviewer, in an attempt to gain help. The interviewer status as a caregiver and problem-solver will thus be increased…. [D]emands by #63 for restoration of things taken from him should be honored slowly so as to create the impression that the interviewer can ultimately help him although not necessarily quickly or with ease.”

This plan for prolonged manipulation to develop al-Qahtani’s complete dependency might or might not be ethical as an interrogation strategy. However, former police investigator and veteran Army counterintelligence operative David DeBatto, who has supervised many hundreds of interrogations, disparaged the use of isolation in the CITF/FBI interrogation plan for al Qahtani (personal communication, November 28, 2009):

“That [the initial three-months isolation] is an excessively long time and on the face of it, violates the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] and international law. Two major problems I have with this is first, solitary is a punishment reserved for the worst kind of behavior by inmates in a prison, not for refusing to answer questions. Second, it is the worst possible way to interrogate anyone and will almost always produce negative results.”

At a minimum, there is no question that the participation of psychologists and psychiatrists in the development of this interrogation plan led to the recommendation of strategies that would be likely to cause severe psychological distress and clearly violated psychological and psychiatric ethics.

Prolonged isolation frequently causes severe emotional distress, including psychotic symptoms identical to those appearing in al-Qahtani, such as hearing non-existent voices and talking to non-existent people. Physicians for Human Rights summed up the psychological and psychiatric evidence regarding the harmful effects of isolation or “solitary confinement” in their Leave No Marks report on the US use of psychological torture:

“Findings from clinical research performed by prominent psychologists such as Dr. Stuart Grassian and Dr. Craig Haney, highlight the destructive impact of solitary confinement. Effects include depression, anxiety, difficulties with concentration and memory, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucinations and perceptual distortions, paranoia, suicidal thoughts and behavior, and problems with impulse control.

“According to Dr. Haney many of the negative effects of solitary confinement are analogous to the acute reactions suffered by torture and trauma victims, including posttraumatic stress disorder and the kind of psychiatric consequences that plague victims of what are called ‘deprivation and constraint’ torture techniques” (pp. 32-33).

The American Psychiatric Association, concerned about the conflicts inherent in such interrogation assistance, in 2006 explicitly condemned any direct involvement of their members in interrogations of specific detainees or prisoners, in domestic or national security settings. The Association stated in May 2006:

“No psychiatrist should participate directly in the interrogation of persons held in custody by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities, whether in the United States or elsewhere. Direct participation includes being present in the interrogation room, asking or suggesting questions, or advising authorities on the use of specific techniques of interrogation with particular detainees.”

Until the membership forced a change in APA policy in September 2008, psychologists were allowed to aid interrogations as long as they did not participate in torture or “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” and followed the APA’s ethics code. Psychologists like Michael Gelles are subject to the APA ethics code, if they are members of the Association, as is Dr. Gelles. In addition, the military requires psychologists consulting to interrogations to be licensed by a state as health providers and most states require adherence to the APA ethics code as a requirement of licensure.

According to the APA, the prolonged use of isolation to aid interrogations, as was clearly the case with al-Qahtani, constitutes “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” In August 2007, the APA, under member pressure, banned psychologist participation in a number of interrogation techniques as constituting either “torture” or “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” including

“the following used for the purposes of eliciting information in an interrogation process… isolation… used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.”

After this resolution was passed, it came under withering criticism from dissident psychologists and the press. As a consequence, the APA’s Ethics Director was forced to issue a clarifying statement in response to reports of four weeks mandatory isolation for new detainees at Guantanamo:

“[T]he 2007 Resolution should never be interpreted as allowing isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation, or sleep deprivation either alone or in combination to be used as interrogation techniques to break down a detainee in order to elicit information.”

In February 2008, in response to criticism, the APA amended its 2007 Resolution to unambiguously condemn psychologist involvement in the use of isolation. The revised resolution proclaimed:

“An absolute prohibition against the following techniques…: … isolation…. Psychologists are absolutely prohibited from knowingly planning, designing, participating in or assisting in the use of all condemned techniques at any time and may not enlist others to employ these techniques in order to circumvent this resolution’s prohibition.”

The CITF/FBI interrogation plan for al-Qahtani indicates that Gelles clearly engaged in a prohibited activity: “knowingly planning, designing… the use of … condemned techniques… and may not enlist others to employ these techniques….” Interestingly, when I raised concerns about the loophole regarding isolation in the 2007 Resolution at the APA convention the day after its passage, Gelles said to me “Steve, you have to understand that isolation is often used only very temporarily, only for a few hours” [quote from memory]. He did not mention its use for months at Guantanamo nor his team’s recommendation that it be used for up to a year on al-Qahtani.

Another ethical concern arises from the reported psychological distress that al-Qahtani was experiencing prior to the CITF/FBI interrogation plan being developed. The interrogation plan notes al-Qahtani’s psychotic symptoms, but, other than suggesting a mental evaluation, they simply view his vulnerability as an opportunity for exploitation. This ignoring of al-Qahtani’s mental distress violates the fundamental Principle A undergirding the entire APA ethics code:

“Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm. In their professional actions, psychologists seek to safeguard the welfare and rights of those with whom they interact professionally and other affected persons…. When conflicts occur among psychologists’ obligations or concerns, they attempt to resolve these conflicts in a responsible fashion that avoids or minimizes harm.”

There is simply no evidence that Gelles and the other authors of this plan sought to “avoid or minimize harm.” Rather, as the plan makes clear, their intention was to systematically increase and exploit distress and disorientation experienced by al-Qahtani, in violation of the ethics code.

The entire plan, with its emphasis on “exploit[ing]” al-Qahtani’s need for human contact violates the ethic’s code’s ban on exploitation:

“Psychologists do not exploit persons over whom they have supervisory, evaluative, or other authority such as clients/patients, students, supervisees, research participants, and employees.” [Ethics Standard 3.08]

Clearly Gelles and the other mental health professionals had, at a minimum, “evaluative authority” over al-Qahtani as they developed their plans to exploit his weaknesses.

Counterintelligence operative DeBatto also expressed concerns regarding the plan’s proposal to impose additional stressors on al-Qahtani in order to render him more dependent upon the interrogator. As expressed by DeBatto:

“Depriving him of sheets, a mirror and adding other `stressors’ is utter nonsense and counterproductive. He has already endured months of stressors. Forcing him to endure more as a form of a ‘stick and carrot’ approach will produce nothing of value. It also violates the interrogators’ ethical training and is blatantly in violation of U.S. and international law.”

Gelles’ proposals in the al-Qahtani case must be deemed unethical and, if executed, would have constituted gross violations of the APA Ethics code, as the APA itself asserted in detailing unethical conduct in detainee treatment in its resolutions of 2007 and 2008. The APA’s parading Gelles as a “heroic” upholder of ethical standards for military interrogations must be revisited. Gelles now joins the ranks of other APA psychologists, including Morgan Banks, Larry James, and Bryce Lefever, whom the organization upheld as models for ethical military interrogation processes, but who subsequently appeared sympathetic to or may have aided abusive practices.

As psychologist Jeffrey Kaye pointed out last summer in two articles [see my commentary here] ethical concerns about Gelles’ pre-Guantanamo interrogation actions had already been raised with the APA long prior to APA’s lauding him as the standard-bearer for psychological ethics in interrogations. Attorney Jonathan Turley reported filing an APA ethics complaint against Gelles for abuses in the prolonged isolation and interrogation of Navy Chief Petty Officer Daniel King, following an ambiguous polygraph result. As described by Turley in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee, King requested a mental health consultation because he felt he was losing his grip on reality. Dr. Gelles met with King for a consultation and, according to Turley, ignored King’s reports of suicidal thoughts. Instead, Gelles made help for King contingent upon King’s confession to espionage charges he had denied. Turley, who represented King, reports that the APA did not respond to his ethics complaint against Gelles. To our knowledge, the APA has never commented publicly on Turley’s charges, or on the ethics of Gelles’ treatment of King.

In any case, it turns out that Gelles was well aware of the potential ethical conflicts involved in his work with the CITF. In a 2003 paper in the Journal of Threat Assessment, apparently written at about the same time, Gelles and colleague Patrick Ewing argued that psychiatrists and psychologists involved in national security work should not be subject to professional ethics codes:

“Given the grave dangers faced by the United States and its allies post September 11, the government can ill afford to lose the input of psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals in cases involving national safety and security. Such input has been and will continue to be vital to protecting the lives of many Americans, civilian and military, at home and abroad. In order to maintain the ability and willingness of these dedicated professionals to continue in these roles, we cannot continue to place them in situations where the ethics of their conduct will be judged, post hoc, either by rules that have little if any relevance to their vital governmental functions or by professional organizations or licensing authorities based upon the weight the members of these bodies chose to afford competing interests…” (p. 106).

In 2005, two years after this article appeared, Gelles, along with James, Banks, and Lefever, was appointed by the APA, to the seminal APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). This military- and intelligence-dominated group gave the ethical go-ahead for psychologists to aid detainee interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

In an open letter in 2007, psychologist Uwe Jacobs posed a series of questions to Dr. Gelles including:

“[W]hat were the techniques used that you did not find objectionable? To cite a few examples, did you believe it was ethical to transport prisoners to Guantanamo under conditions of sensory deprivation, i.e. wearing hoods, goggles, earmuffs, and other devices designed to create sensory deprivation and isolation, along with very restrictive shackling? Did you believe it was ethical to keep prisoners in solitary confinement for very long periods of time? Is it ethical to deprive prisoners of sleep? Is it ethical to subject them to severe heat and cold, constant noises or lights, stress positions, short shackling, screaming abuse etc.? You know the list I am referring to. Do you agree that these techniques have long been proven to produce severe nervous system dysregulation and often lasting psychological damage? Do these techniques not by definition constitute torture, just as stated by the UN?”

Gelles refused to answer Jacobs’ questions. We can surmise, from his earlier statements, that Gelles simply did not believe that intelligence psychologists should “be judged, post hoc, either by [ethical] rules that have little if any relevance to their vital governmental functions….” The APA has yet to explain why it appointed to the PENS task force someone who had already expressed disdain for the APA ethics code and why it continues to extol Gelles as a paragon of psychological ethics in interrogations.

Note: I would like to thank Jeffrey Kaye for pointing me to the Ewing and Gelles paper.

The APA letter follows years of reports that psychologists designed, helped conduct, disseminated, and legitimated the use of abusive interrogation techniques carried out under the Bush administration. While other health professional organizations adopted policies prohibiting their members participation in interrogations at Guantanamo, CIA “black sites,” and elsewhere, the APA stood alone in claiming, against evidence, that psychologists’ presence at the detention sites was necessary “to protect” detainees. In fact, the APA went further, allowing psychologists involved in these very interrogations to design APA ethical policy on interrogations.

Although recent revelations, including a Senate Armed Services Report, have debunked the claim that psychologists were preventing torture, the APA leadership still refuses to acknowledge the extent of the harm psychologists have done. Nor does it propose adequate steps to address past abuses by psychologists or to prevent psychologists from contributing to future abuse. The organizations’ statement ‘calls for the APA to take five immediate steps to begin this process of corrective action. Among these steps are a call for an independent body to pursue accountability for psychologists found to be involved in torture or abusive interrogation practices, and further, for an independent investigation of possible collusion between the APA and the military/intelligence establishment that may have contributed to the APA’s polices in this area.

***********

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 29. 2009

CONTACT:
Stephen Soldz
ude.psgbnull@zdloss

Open Letter in Response to
the American Psychological Association Board

On June 18, 2009, the American Psychological Association [APA] Board issued an Open Letter on the subject of psychologists’ involvement in abusive national security interrogations. The letter is among the first formal acknowledgements from APA leadership that psychologists were involved in torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. We welcome this progress.

Similarly, the letter acknowledges APA’s member-initiated referendum prohibiting psychologist participation in detention centers that are in violation of international law and overturning APA Council’s repeated refusals to do so. This is an improvement over very recent messages from APA officials that characterized press descriptions of APA policy as supporting psychologist participation in such interrogations as “fair and balanced.”

Nevertheless, the letter is profoundly disappointing. It continues the long tradition of APA leaders minimizing the extent of psychologists’ involvement in state-sanctioned abuse as well as APA’s own defense of such involvement. The authors speak as though the information about psychologist’s involvement in torture is fresh news even though it has been available for a long time. Even now, the Board relies on the Bush Administration tactic, employed in the Abu Ghraib debacle, of blaming the abuse on a “few bad apples.” This minimization of the greatest ethical crisis in our profession’s history by those who claim to lead the profession is unacceptable. Similarly the APA Board continues to take no responsibility for its own grievous mismanagement of this issue. Instead, the tone of the letter suggests we should all come together and “reflect and learn,” because this has been difficult for all of us, collectively. The Board also presumes the authority to continue to speak for psychologists in the future with neither redress nor evidence of remediation for what they have done:

This has been a painful time for the association and one that offers an opportunity to reflect and learn from our experiences over the last five years. APA will continue to speak forcefully in further communicating our policies against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment to our members, the Obama administration, Congress, and the general public. [Board letter, June 18, 2009.]

Any meaningful approach to this issue must start by acknowledging the fact that psychologists were absolutely integral to our government’s systematic program of torture. When the Bush administration decided to engage in torture, they turned to psychologists from the military’s SERE [Survival, Evasion, resistance, and Escape] program for help in designing and implementing the torture tactics. This fact was first reported in 2005, within days of the release of the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] report and was officially acknowledged by the Defense Department in its Inspector General’s Report, declassified in May 2007. Other psychologists monitored torture to calibrate how much abuse a detainee could tolerate without dying. Nonetheless, APA leaders continued, and still continue, to pretend that psychologists’ participation in abuse was the behavior of rogue members of the profession.

Similarly, the APA Board still refuses to acknowledge the evidence of apparent collusion between APA officials and the national security apparatus in providing ethical cover for psychologists’ participation in detainee abuse. This collusion was most notable in the creation of the military-dominated PENS task force. Only a policy that comes to terms with this APA collusion can begin to reduce the furor among APA members, psychologists, and the general public.

APA leadership has much work ahead to begin to repair the harm they have caused to the profession, the country, former and current detainees and their families. At a minimum the APA leadership should do the following:

1. Fully implement the 2008 referendum as an enforceable section of the APA Code of Ethics. This entails a public announcement that APA policy and ethical standards oppose the service of psychologists in detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Bagram Air Base, CIA secret prisons, or in the rendition program.

2. Annul the June 2005 PENS Report due to the severe and multiple conflicts of interest involved in its production.

3. Bring in an independent body of investigative attorneys to pursue accountability for psychologists who participated in or otherwise contributed to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. APA should also: (a) clarify the status of open ethics cases and (b) remove the statute of limitations for violations involving torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, so as to allow time for information on classified activities to become public.

4. Develop a clear and rapid timetable to remove Sections 1.02 and 1.03 [the "Nuremberg defense" of following orders] from the APA Code of Ethics. [We note that the APA Ethics Committee has stated that they will not accept a defense of following orders to complaints regarding torture; this statement is a welcome improvement but it is clearly inadequate as it is not necessarily binding on future committees nor does it cover abuses falling under the category of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.] Revoke the equally problematic Section 8.05 of the Code, which dispenses with informed consent “where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations,” and Section 8.07, which sets an unacceptably high threshold of “severe emotional distress” for not using deception in the ethics of research design.

5. Retain an independent investigatory organization to study organizational behavior at APA. Due to potential conflicts of interest, independent human rights organizations should be enlisted to select this investigatory entity. The study should address, among other things, possible collusion in the PENS process and the 2003 APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception, attended by the CIA’s apparent designers of their torture program [James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen] during which “enhanced interrogation” techniques were discussed. The study should explore how the APA governance system permits the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of individuals who are unresponsive to the general membership. It should also propose measures to return the APA to democratic principles, scientific integrity, and beneficence, including restructuring for greater transparency and the assimilation of diverse viewpoints.

These five steps will not remove the terrible stain on the reputation of American psychology. However, by taking these steps the APA leadership would make both symbolic and substantive progress toward accountability for psychologists’ contributions to detainee abuse and the APA’s failure to adequately respond to the public record. These actions would constitute an important step toward rehabilitating the Association and restoring the good name of the profession itself.

Signed by:

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

Physicians for Human Rights

Psychologists for Social Responsibility

Center for Constitutional Rights

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Network of Spiritual Progressives

National Lawyers Guild

Amnesty International USA

Program for Torture Victims, Los Angeles

American Friends Service Committee, Pacific Southwest Region

Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles

Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture (MACAT)

New York Campaign Against Torture (NYCAT)

Both Katherine Eban and Jane Mayer referred to and described the SERE SOP back in the summer of 2007. A bit of it was included in documents released by the Senate Armed Services Committee June 17, 2008. But the bulk of the text remained classified and unavailable until today. An FBI commentary on the SERE SOP has been available since February 2006 at least, in heavily redacted form which obscured the content, but not the existence of the SOP.

Here is the document. It is also available in pdf. [as this was a draft, the formatting was inconsistent. I have corrected some formatting. I have not corrected any typos. Thus, presumably, the word "NOT" is missing after "DO" from the sentence "IT IS CRITICAL THAT INTERROGATORS DO "CROSS THE LINE" WHEN UTILIZING THE TACTICS DESCRIBED BELOW.." Obviously, despite my best efforts at accuracy, this text should be checked against the pdf before citing.]

“FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY”

JTF GTMO SERE SOP

10 DECEMBER 2002

JTF GTMO “SERE” INTERROGATION STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

Subj: GUIDELINES FOR EMPLOYING “SERE” TECHNIQUES DIRING DETAINEE INTERROGATIONS

Ref: (a) FASO DETACHMENT BRUNSWICK INSTRUCTION 3305.3D

1. Purpose. This SOP document promulgates procedures to be followed by I I P-GTMO personnel engaged in interrogation operations on detained persons. The premise behind this is that the interrogation tactics used at U.S. military SERE schools are appropriate for use in real-world interrogations. These tactics and techniques are used at SERE school to “break” SERE detainees. The same tactics and techniques can be used to break real detainees during interrogation operations.

The basis for this document is the SOP used at the U.S. Navy SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) school in Brunswick, Maine and is defined by reference (a).

Note that all tactics are strictly non-lethal.

STRICT COMPLIANCE WITH THE GUIDELINES LAID OUT IN THIS DOCUMENT IS MADATORY!

2. Training. All interrogators will undergo training by certified SERE instructors prior to being approved for use of any of the techniques described in this document.

3. Scope. Applicable to military and civilian interrogators assigned to JTF-GTMO, Cuba.

TED K. MOSS
LtCol, USAF

INTERROGATION TACTICS

1. GENERAL STATEMENT

a. This document describes in detail the interrogation tactics authorized for use in detainee interrogation operations at JTF_GTMO and the safety precautions that must be used to prevent injuries. The tactics are the same as those used in U.S. military SERE schools.

b. ANY PHYSICAL CONTACT NOT EXPRESSLY AUTHORIZED HEREIN IS
PROHIBIIED.

c. INTERROGATION TACTICS FOLLOWED BY: ******* MAY ONLY BE USED BY THOSE INIERROGATORS DESIGNATED IN WRITING BY THE ICE CHIEF.

2. INTERROGATION SAFETY

a. Approved interrogation tactics are found in Sections 3-6.

b. Additional safeguards are as follows:

1. Detainee behavior and reactions are continuously observed and evaluated by the interrogator.

2. Both the detainee’s and the interrogators behavior are monitored by the Watch Officer.

3. IT IS CRITICAL THAT INTERROGATORS DO “CROSS THE LINE” WHEN UTILIZING THE TACTICS DESCRIBED BELOW. Therefore, verbal coded messages or nonverbal signals will be used by the Watch Officer (or other interrogators) when giving instructions to adjust interrogation procedure. For example, two kicks on the door indicated the interrogator should discontinue the current approach and move on to another approach. The statement, “Stop wasting time with this pig,” means to discontinue the current training tactic and take a break.

3. DEGRADATION TACTICS

a. SHOULDER SLAP. The shoulder slap is a moderate to hard, glancing blow to the back of the shoulder with an open hand. It is used as an irritant.

b. INSULT SLAP. *****

(1) The insult slap is used to shock and intimidate the detainee. The slap is aimed at the detainee’s cheek only. Contact will be made only with the fingers in the open hand position and the fingers will be slightly spread and relaxed. The slap will be initiated no more than 12-14 inches (or one shoulder width) from the detainee’s face.

To ensure this distance is not exceeded and to preclude any tendency to wind up or uppercut, the slap will be initiated with the slap hand contacting the detainee’s body on the top of the shoulder. The target area is slightly below the cheekbone, away from the eyes and ears. Extreme care must be taken not to strike the lower jaw. Slaps aimed at the ears, mouth, nose eyes or throat are prohibited.

(2) Uninterrupted or consecutive slaps are prohibited because the detainee will duck or dodge the slap, creating possibility for an injury. Experience has shown that after a second slap, the effectiveness of the slap tactic is significantly reduced. Interrogators will cease using the slap if detainee begins ducking. At this point, a threatened slap with the hand will achieve the same purpose as a slap. Blows with the back of the hand, fists, elbows, feet and knees are prohibited. Insult slaps are only to be used by those interrogators designated in writing by the ICE CHIEF.

C. STOMACH SLAP. ******

(1) As with the insult slap, the stomach slap is used to shock and intimidate the detainee. The tactic is delivered with the back of the bare hand. The slap will be directed towards the center of the abdomen. The detainee will not be struck in the solar plexus, ribs, sides, and kidneys or below the navel. The slap will not be performed against the bare skin. Slaps will be initiated with the interrogator’s upper arm parallel to his/her body, extending the striking hand in a swinging motion to the target area. Detainees will be either facing or to the side of the interrogator when the slap is administered.

(2) Uninterrupted or consecutive slaps are prohibited. Blows to the stomach with the palm of the hand fist, knees or elbows are prohibited.

D. STRIPPING

(1) Stripping consists of forceful removal of detainees’ clothing. In addition to degradation of the detainee, shipping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee. Interrogator personnel tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.

4. PHYSICAL DEBILITATION TACTICS

a. STRESS POSITIONS. Stress positions are used to punish detainees. ALL STRESS POSITIONS ARE -RESTRICTED TO A MAXIMUM TIME OF TEN MINUTES AND A LOGBOOK ENTRY IS REQURED. An interrogator/guard will remain with detainees during use of stress positions. The authorized positions are:

(1) Head Rest/Index Finger position – Detainee is placed with forehead or fingers against the wall, then the detainee’s legs are backed out to the point that the detainee’s leaning weight is brought to bear on fingers or head.

(2) Kneeling position – Administered by placing detainee on knees and having him lean backward on heels and hold hands extended to the sides or front, palms upward. Light weights such as small rocks, may be placed in the detainee’ s upturned palms. The detainee will not be placed in a position facing the sun or floodlights.

(3) Worship-the-Gods – The detainee is placed on knees with head and torso arched back, with arms either folded across the chest or extended to the side or front. The detainee will not be placed in a position facing the sun or floodlights.

(4) Sitting Position – the detainee is placed with his back against a wall, tree or post; thighs are horizontal, lower legs are vertical with feet flat on floor or ground as though sitting in a chair. Arms may be extended to sides horizontally, palms up and boots on.

(5) Standing position – While standing, the detainee is required to extend arms either to the sides or front with palms up. Light weights such as small rocks may be placed in upturned palms.

5. ISOLATION AND MONOPOLIZATION OF PERCEPTION TACTICS

a. HOODING

(1) Hoods are lightweight fabric sacks large enough to fit loosely over a detainee’s head and permit unrestricted breathing.

(2) Flooding us used to isolate detainees. Individually hooded detainees may be moved provided an interrogator/guard leads the detainee. Detainees may not be left standing alone with the hood on. They must be placed either on their stomachs, kneeling, or sitting. Detainee medical limitations must be considered.

6. DEMONSTRATED OMNIPOTENCE TACTICS

a. MANHANDLING. Manhandling consists of pulling or pushing a detainee. It is used as an irritant and to direct the detainee to specific locations. Detainees must be handcuffed and must grasp their trousers near mid-thigh with both hands. The interrogator firmly grasps detainee’s clothing and then moves the detainee at a walking pace. The interrogator must maintain positive control of the detainee The detainee is not released until the interrogator is positive the detainee has regained balance.

b. WALLING. ***** Walling consists of placing a detainee forcibly against a specially constructed wall. Walling will only be performed in designated areas where specially constructed walls have been built. Walling is used to physically intimidate a detainee. The interrogator must ensure the wall is smooth, firm, and free of any projections. If conducted outside, footing area must be solid and free of objects that could cause detainee or interrogator to lose their balance. A detainee can be taken to tfio wall a maximum of three,times per.shift. Walling is done by firmly grasping the front of the detainee’s clothing high on each side of the collar„ ensuring the top of the clothing is open. Care should be taken to ensure detainees with long hair do not get their hair tangled into the folds of clothes being grasped by the interrogator. To avoid bruising the detainee, roll hands under folds of clothing material and ensure only the backs of the hands contact detainee’s chest. Maintain this grip throughout, never allowing the detainee to be propelled uncontrollably. Ensure only the broad part of the shoulders contact the surface of the wall. Grip the detainee’s clothing firmly enough so the collar acts as a restrictive constraint to preclude the detainee’s head from contacting the wall does this. If the detainee’s head inadvertently touches the wall, walling will be ceased immediately. Walling is to be used by those interrogators designated in writing by the ICE CHIEF.

After reviewing the disturbing background of psychologists crucial role in U.S. torture and detainee abuse, the referendum’s crucial clause states:

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in isolation of, either International law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

Jean Maria Arrigo, the psychologist who served on the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] task force in 2005 and exposed the PENS report as a rubber stamp for an already determined government policy, has succinctly explained the importance of a “Yes” vote on the referendum:

The ballot arrived today from APA, and I just voted Yes on the Referendum. To my mind, the timeliness of the Referendum as social action supersedes the problem of misinterpretation of the text.

My thinking on this matter has been most strongly influenced by military and intelligence personnel I know, including senior interrogators.

At an emotional level, I was much affected by audience responses to my February presentations to anti-torture symposia at two universities in Sao Paulo and the regional psychological association. Audiences were outraged by the APA endorsement of psychologists at military interrogation centers (people standing up and shouting) and truly horrified that I had agreed to the PENS report. (In Brazil, the word “interrogation” is virtually synonymous with “torture.”) If the APA leadership accommodates current government policy on interrogations, well, Brazilian psychologists can understand…, but if the APA membership defeats the Referendum, at this point in our history, that sends a bad message I cannot explain away. They are worried about the passivity of the APA legitimizing torture by our government, which legitimizes torture by their government and delegitimizes their own protests as psychologists.

Respectfully,

Jean Maria Arrigo

In response to the rferendum, the APA has launched a strong effort to convince members that they should not support this “well-intended” referendum because it would restrict the ability of psychologists to work in domestic prisons and mental hospitals. Although legally informed psychologists have opined that any such risk is extremely far fetched, the referendum authors have issued a clarifying statement that would put these concerns to rest for those sincerely concerned about the domestic application of the referendum:

This referendum is focused on settings such as Guantánamo Bay and the CIA ‘black sites’ set up by the U.S. as part of its ‘global war on terror’; settings where the persons being detained are denied the protections of either constitutional or international law, settings which have been denounced by the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We are well aware of the harms and legal struggles facing certain prisons and jails inside the domestic U.S. criminal justice system. However, the referendum takes no position on such settings where prisoners have full access to independent counsel and constitutional protections; nor does the referendum take a position on settings that now exist within the domestic mental health system where clients and patients also possess these basic rights.

The campaign of confusion has, however, only intensified since this clarification was issued.

Psychologist and attorney Bryant Welch, who founded the organization’s Practice Directorate and then served as its Executive Director for eight years, has himself penned a piece explaining what is at stake in this referendum [included here with permission]:

Vote to End the Shame APA has Inflicted on all Psychologists

By Bryant L. Welch, J.D., Ph.D.

In the eyes of the world psychologists are being seen as aiders and abettors of torture. The damage to the profession grows day by day, and the shamefulness of it reflects on all of us, whether we like it or not.

This is the third consecutive annual convention in which APA has presented new reasons for refusing to explicitly state that psychologists are not to participate in detention centers where torture is being used. In 2006 we were told, among many things, that torture was not occurring, and that it was sufficient for APA to reiterate its 1986 resolution “opposing torture.” Last year we were told that psychologists’ presence at the detention centers was actually necessary to prevent the torture whose very existence these same APA officials denied the previous year. Bizarrely, APA outlawed nineteen specific forms of torture, as if in some way the large number of proscribed techniques would cripple torture efforts.

As a result, for the first time in APA history, APA rank and file members have secured the necessary signatures to petition the APA and force APA to submit the torture issue to a referendum by the membership.

Persisting in its support for psychologists’ participation in Bush detention centers and appearing insensitive to the moral concerns of its members, APA leaders are now advising APA members to oppose the referendum because the language of the referendum might be interpreted to preclude psychologists working in certain institutional settings. This argument is based on scenarios that are extremely far fetched and could readily be addressed even were they to occur. To the public, of course, the message would be that psychologists are not willing to stop torture now if there is even a remote risk of losing jobs in the future.

Since the Bush Administration will be out of office by the next time APA meets, this will be the last opportunity psychologists will have to remove this terrible stain from our reputation and our history

Torture is not a nuanced issue.

Vote No to torture. Vote YES on the referendum.

For more information see Why Did the American Psychological Association Do It?.

Several nationally prominent and respected organizations which have long been active in the anti-torture struggle have spoken out in support of the referendum. The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International has issued this statement in support:

The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) is an organization each of whose members is a survivor of torture. Our mission is two-fold: to support torture survivors in any way we can and to oppose torture wherever it may be practiced.

We understand the petition submitted by Ethical APA Psychologists to be entirely consistent with this mission. That such a petition is necessary seems, at the very least, distressing but since it is, we express our support for it and thank psychologists for this action.

In solidarity,
Harold Nelson
Advocacy Coordinator
Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC)

www.tassc.org

School of the Americas Watch also has expressed support for the referendum:

We at School of the Americas Watch are all too familiar with the practice of institutional secrecy in which torture and brutality thrives. We therefore recognize and support the vital role that Psychologists for Social Responsibility and Psychologists for an Ethical APA have played in the fight to end torture and other human rights abuses.

We further support Psychologists for an Ethical APA’s petition and referendum with the American Psychological Association (APA). We urge the American Psychological Association to put an end to the unhealthy relationship between psychology and the torture by removing all APA psychologists from the secret detention centers where torture and cruelty prevail. We stand in solidarity with all of those psychologists who are working to advance human rights throughout the world and who support survivors of torture.

Mike Baney
Operations and Development Coordinator
School of the Americas Watch, Washington, DC

www.soaw.org

TASSC and School of the Americas Watch understand all too clearly what is at stake here. Let’s hope that, despite the campaign of confusion and fear, the members of the APA grasp this opportunity to heed the words of Drs. Welch and Arrigo and vote for this referendum. This would send a strong message to those in the forefront of the anti-torture struggle — like TASSC and School of the Americas Watch — that psychologists will no longer give their tacit or active consent to torture and other detainee abuse. Neither the profession nor the country can afford to miss this opportunity to issue a rebuke to the Bush administration and to those in our profession who have abetted it. As Dr. Welch states: “Vote No to torture. Vote YES on the referendum.”

In a letter to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), The APA’s Dr. Behnke stated:

In carefully reviewing the documents, we note that according to the information obtained by the ACLU, psychologists supporting interrogations ‘emphasized their separation from detainee medical care,’ and that a psychologist who suspected abuse ‘recommended the interrogation not proceed and brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee.’ According to these documents, APA’s policy of engagement served the intended purpose: to stop interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety.

To give Dr. Behnke credit, he did acknowledge the abuses described in the newly released material as “abhorrent.” However, any unbiased “careful review” of the documents falls far short of supporting Dr. Behnke’s conclusion. Quite the contrary, the report raises new concerns about the roles of psychologists in US interrogations.

Dr. Behnke’s letter to the ACLU was widely distributed within the APA as a defense of the association’s long-contested policy. It therefore important to carefully examine his claims in the context of what is known about interrogation abuses in Iraq. In a separate article, Trudy Bond responded to Dr. Behnke’s claims in the same letter, questioning his assertions that the APA is willing to adjudicate reports of psychologists participating in detainee abuse. I will focus instead here on examining Dr. Behnke’s claim that the Church Report supports the APA’s policy of participation in detainee interrogations. In this process I briefly revisit previous justifications for APA policy.

Newly Released Church Report Materials

On May 30, 2008, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced the release, under the Freedom of Information Act, of previously redacted portions of the Church Report on US military detainee abuses. This material contains numerous reports of physical and mental abuse, including several detainee deaths. The report makes clear that:

[M]edical personnel often have exposure to the circumstances of detainee treatment.

In discussing a number of these deaths the report states:

We do not know if medical personnel reported suspicions of detainee abuse in this case, but the circumstances probably should have led them to consider detainee abuse.

Although the language is sanitized, this statement nevertheless strongly points to the failure of medical personnel to take appropriate action in the face of likely interrogation abuse. Yet, in only one of eight deaths judged “suspicious for abuse” is there evidence that an Army physician reported the abuse. Thus, even in the face of potential homicide, medical personnel, for the most part, appear to have remained silent.

With regard to psychologists, the report stated:

In Iraq, we interviewed two military personnel and one civilian serving in this capacity. All three emphasized their separation from detainee medical care. Only one believed he had observed or suspected detainee abuse. No details were offered, except that, when this occurred, he recommended the interrogation not proceed and brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee.

The newly released material also reports that interrogation techniques [authorized by a September 2003 memorandum from commanding General Ricardo Sanchez] continued to be widely used until at least July 2004, well after some techniques were retracted in October 2003. Other techniques were banned in May 2004 [in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal]. These included:

Isolation.

Environmental Manipulation: Altering the environment to create moderate discomfort (e.g. adjusting temperature or introducing an unpleasant smell)…. [Caution: Based on court cases in other countries, some nations may view application of this technique in certain circumstances to be inhumane. Consideration of these views should be given prior to use of this technique.]

Presence of Military Working Dog: Exploits Arab fear of dogs while maintaining security during interrogations.

Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control: Used to create fear, disorient detainee and prolong capture shock.

Sleep Management: Detainee provided minimum 4 hours of sleep per 24 hour period, not to exceed 72 continuous hours.

Stress Positions: Use of physical postures (sitting, standing, kneeling, prone, ect.) for no more than 1 hour per use. Use of technique(s) will not exceed 4 hours and adequate rest between use of each position will be provided.

As was confirmed by the just released Justice Department Inspector General report on FBI involvement in abusive interrogations, these techniques were derived from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program to train US military personnel how to resist breaking under torture. As the Defense Department Inspector General reported, these techniques were “reverse engineered” by military and intelligence psychologists into US interrogation techniques. Authorization to use these techniques was hidden as, even after the Abu Ghraib scandal, the administration refused to release the Sanchez memo for nearly a year. These techniques, according to the Church Report, continued in widespread use long after their use had been retracted.

Special Forces

According to accounts by individuals like former Iraq Army interrogator Tony Lagouranis, these SERE techniques were regularly used by Special Forces in Iraq. Other interrogators learned of them, directly or indirectly, from Special Forces and attempted to imitate the techniques used by these revered units. Abuses by the Navy SEALS, a Special Forces unit, were reported by Lagouranis:

They would actually have the detainee stripped nude, laying on the floor, pouring ice water over his body. They were taking his temperature with a rectal thermometer. We had one guy who had been burned by the navy SEALs. He looked like he had a lighter held up to his legs. One guy’s feet were like huge and black and blue, his toes were obviously all broken, he couldn’t walk.

Further reports of abuse by Special Forces include the New York Times‘s March 19, 2006 article chillingly entitled “In Secret Unit’s ‘Black Room,’ a Grim Portrait of U.S. Abuse“:

American soldiers made one of the former Iraqi government’s torture chambers into their own interrogation cell. They named it the Black Room.

In the windowless, jet-black garage-size room, some soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, yelled and spit in their faces and, in a nearby area, used detainees for target practice in a game of jailer paintball….

Placards posted by soldiers at the detention area advised, “NO BLOOD, NO FOUL.” The slogan, as one Defense Department official explained, reflected an adage adopted by Task Force 6-26: ‘If you don’t make them bleed, they can’t prosecute for it.’

This unit combined elements from throughout the Special Forces:

The task force was a melting pot of military and civilian units. It drew on elite troops from the Joint Special Operations Command, whose elements include the Army unit Delta Force, Navy’s Seal Team 6 and the 75th Ranger Regiment.

There are numerous other reports of pervasive abuse by troops across Iraq. Thus Capt. Ian Fishback and two other members of the 82nd Airborne Division told Human Rights Watch in 2005 that the abuse in their unit was routine. As reported in the New York Times:

In separate statements to the human rights organization, Captain Fishback and two sergeants described systematic abuses of Iraqi prisoners, including beatings, exposure to extremes of hot and cold, stacking in human pyramids and sleep deprivation at Camp Mercury, a forward operating base near Falluja.

Capt. Fishback also quoted an Army Ranger, a Special Forces unit, as saying (after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in April 2004):

I talked to an officer in the Ranger regiment and his response was, he wouldn’t tell me exactly what he witnessed but he said “I witnessed things that were more intense than what you witnessed,” but it wasn’t anything that exceeded what I had heard about at SERE school.

Military Intelligence

Military Intelligence units in Iraq were also involved in much of the detainee abuse. Thus, the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC] inspected detention facilities across the country and, in a leaked February 2004 report, described systematic abuse by military intelligence throughout Iraq. It states:

persons deprived of their liberty under supervision of the Military Intelligence were at high risk of being subjected to a variety of harsh treatments ranging from insults, threats and humiliations to both physical and psychological coercion, which in some cases was tantamount to torture, in order to force cooperation with their interrogators (p. 3-4).

The ICRC further reported:

In certain cases such as in Abu Ghraib military intelligence section, methods of physical and psychological coercion used by the interrogators appeared to be part of the standard operating procedures by military intelligence personnel to obtain confessions and extract information. Several military intelligence officers confirmed to the ICRC that it was part of the military intelligence process to hold a person deprived of his liberty naked in a completely dark and empty cell for a prolonged period to use inhumane and degrading treatment, including physical and psychological coercion (p. 11).

It is important to note that no one was prosecuted or convicted at Abu Ghraib for isolating or humiliating prisoners, or for putting prisoners in ‘stress positions.’ These were considered standard operating procedures by the prosecution. The convictions were handed down for taking the infamous photographs or when there was evidence of physical abuse that went beyond these techniques.

The Church Report

It is relevant to understand that the Church Report is widely viewed as an attempt to whitewash detainee abuse through sidestepping the extent to which abuse was standard operating procedure and thus reducing command responsibility for that abuse. Thus Human Rights Watch characterizes the Church Report as a partial cover-up containing patent falsehoods:

The Church report was supposed to be the definitive report on the development of interrogation techniques and detainee abuse in the “global war on terror” but the unclassified summary suggests a careful attempt – months after the Schlesinger and Fay/Jones report put the Pentagon on the defensive – to present a version of the facts that would not cause any trouble for the hierarchy. Time and again, the summary goes out of its way to rebut any inference that government policy was to blame, to the point of straining credibility and flatly contradicting the earlier reports. The report concluded that there was ‘no single, overarching explanation’ for the ‘few’ cases in which detainees had not been treated humanely.

Although Secretary Rumsfeld and General Sanchez both approved the use of guard dogs to strike fear in detainees, and although guard dogs were featured prominently in the Abu Ghraib photos, the Church executive summary states that ‘it is clear that none of the pictured abuses at Abu Ghraib bear any resemblance to approved policies at any level, in any theater.’ Indeed, the only mention of dogs in the entire summary is the patently false statement that in Afghanistan and Iraq ‘interrogators clearly understood that abusive practices and techniques – such as … terrorizing detainees with unmuzzled dogs … – were at all times prohibited.’

Given the nature of this report, it should be taken as a statement of what cannot be denied, and not as a definitive account of the nature or the extent of detainee abuse.

Previous APA Policy Justifications

The APA has utilized many questionable arguments and deceptive tactics to justify psychologists’ participation in interrogations. In 2005, the APA appointed a Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). This Task Force was given the mandate to determine APA policy on psychologists’ participation in detainee interrogations. The majority of the Task Force membership, it turns out, consisted of military and intelligence psychologists who played roles in post 9/11 interrogations at Guantánamo, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the CIA’s “black site” torture centers. Not surprisingly, this task force emphasized psychologists important role is aiding national security by participating in these interrogations.

In support of its policy the APA has highlighted every available report of psychologists resisting interrogation abuses. While finding small pockets of resistance would hardly defend the policy, the APA has been able to offer only three incidents of psychologists ostensibly opposing the abusive interrogation policy. This despite the central role of psychologists in interrogations at Guantánamo and the CIA black sites and their participation in interrogations in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The most noteworthy example offered thus far has been that of Michael Gelles, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service psychologist. Gelles forcefully opposed opposed some of the worst abuses committed at Guantánamo and reported them to his commander, leading to policy changes. While Dr. Gelles acted honorably and may have helped change policies, one should remember that, long after these interventions the ICRC found conditions at Guantánamo continued to be abusive. As the New York Times described the ICRC findings during their June 2004 visit:

[I]nvestigators had found a system devised to break the will of the prisoners at Guantánamo, who now number about 550, and make them wholly dependent on their interrogators through ‘humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions.’ Investigators said that the methods used were increasingly ‘more refined and repressive’ than learned about on previous visits.

The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,’ the report said. It said that in addition to the exposure to loud and persistent noise and music and to prolonged cold, detainees were subjected to ‘some beatings.’ The report did not say how many of the detainees were subjected to such treatment.

Thus, whatever successes Dr. Gelles’ achieved, they did little to dismantle the abusive system, described in the ICRC report as “tantamount to torture.” Even Dr. Gelles’ valiant attempt to oppose these interrogation techniques did little, in the end, to keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.”

The APA has also at times pointed to Col. Larry James as an example of a psychologist successfully opposing torture. But there is simply no evidence to support this claim. Col. James was the Chief Psychologist on the Joint Intelligence Task Force in charge of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) at Guantánamo in early 2003. As the Red Cross noted when they returned to Guantánamo a year after col. James’ departure, conditions had only become increasingly “more refined and repressive” since Col. James was stationed there. Additionally, during Col. James’ tour at Guantánamo, the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures were adopted mandating a minimum of four weeks isolation for all new detainees:

to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator.

The Joint Intelligence Task Force, of which Col. James was the Chief Psychologist, was in fact assigned the role of deciding when a detainee had been sufficiently disoriented, disorganized, and dependent on his interrogator enough to be released from this isolation. When this policy was described in Harpers online, Dr. Behnke, the APA’s Ethics wrote a letter agreeing that this use of isolation was unethical for psychologists:

With the recent posting on the Internet of what has been identified as the U.S. military’s 2003 operating manual for the Guantánamo detention center, attention has been directed to the use of isolation and sensory deprivation as interrogation procedures. APA policy specifically prohibits using any such technique, alone or in combination with other techniques for the purpose of breaking down a detainee.

Nonetheless, even after this information became public, APA officials have continued to cite Col. James to audiences as an anti-torture hero.

APA and the Newly-Released Materials

Contained in the newly released sections of the Church Report is an official acknowledgement that psychologists in so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs) functioned in both Iraq and Afghanistan. But what had not been clear before is that these BSCTs are “mostly within Special Operations, where they provide direct support to military operations.” That is, the BSCT psychologists were, as described above, within the units especially known for using brutal means for dealing with detainees (Arrigo & Bennett, 2007).

Given this context, it is especially misleading that the APA’s Ethics Director points to two vague sentences in the report to argue that this material supports the APA’s policy of “engagement” with the Bush administration’s interrogation regime. Here are the relevant sentences from the Church report:

In Iraq, we interviewed two military personnel and one civilian serving in this capacity. All three emphasized their separation from detainee medical care. Only one believed he had observed or suspected detainee abuse. No details were offered, except that, when this occurred, he recommended the interrogation not proceed and brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee.

Given that these BSCT psychologists are “mostly within Special Operations” and are assigned to military intelligence, a curious reader might wonder about the routine nature of interrogations witnessed or participated in by the BSCT psychologists. These routine interrogations likely included techniques approved by the September 2003 memorandum from Gen. Sanchez which the very same Church Report materials document were still in widespread use through at least July 2004. Given this background, there is a more plausible reading of these sentences. It is most likely that what was “abuse” to a BSCT psychologist were interrogation tactics that went beyond those authorized by the September 2003 memo as ‘standard operating procedure.’ That is, given the “No Blood, No Foul” attitude of many Special Forces units, “abuse” would very likely be tactics that led to serious and visible physical harm. The fact that the BSCT “brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee” also supports such an interpretation. In years of reading and writing about detainee abuse in Iraq and elsewhere, I have never seen accounts of medical personnel being brought in to examine victims exposed “merely” to psychological abuse such as isolation, stress positions, sleep deprivation, or exposure to loud noises or freezing temperatures. It is unlikely that this sole report of a psychologist reporting abuse was referring to these widespread, but standard, abuses.

Can I prove my interpretation of this passage is the correct one? No. The wording is ambiguous and “no details were offered.” But Dr. Behnke’s claim that these newly released materials provide evidence that “APA’s policy of engagement served the intended purpose – to stop interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety” – is totally unsupported. In contrast, my interpretation is grounded in knowledge about detainee abuse in Iraq and about the Church report. Dr. Behnke’s “careful” review of these documents does not attempt to understand the role of psychologists in abuse of detainees but, like U.S. “intelligence” about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, fixes the data around established APA policy.

Reference

Arrigo, Jean Maria, & Bennett, Ray. (2007). Organizational Supports for Abusive Interrogations in “The War on Terror.” In Torture Is for Amateurs, special issue of Peace and Conflict, 13 (4): 411-421.

Today’s revelation is of a set of letters between Senator Wyden and the Department of “Justice” on the legal basis for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation,” aka torture, program. The letters seek to clarify the reasoning and impact of President Bush’s executive order last summer that reauthorized CIA torture.

Sandy Levinson at Balkinization explains why the reasoning in the letters will justify virtually any torturous action. Levinson starts by quoting from the Times article:

In one letter written Sept. 27, 2007, Mr. Benczkowski [a deputy assistant Attorney General] argued that “to rise to the level of an outrage” and thus be prohibited under the Geneva Conventions, conduct “must be so deplorable that the reasonable observer would recognize it as something that should be universally condemned.”

There is, of course, a certain logical paradox here: The very fact that the some US interrogator would suggest that some particular conduct is “reasonable” in some situation would, by definition, mean that there is not “universal” condemnation of the practice. This is especially true if one accepts the DOJ argument that “The fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation or abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.” Once one allows what might be termed “purity of utilitarian motive” to dominate the analysis, the game is over, for there will always be those who will argue that it is worth doing practically anything to forestall any “terrorist attack.”

A reading of the letters shows that they admit that “torture” is always banned, but that they seek to redefine the constraints of the Geneva Conventions Common Article 3, so that the banned “outrages upon personal dignity” depend upon a “shocks the conscience” definition of prohibited conduct. This criterion is combined with the question of whether activities are “for the purpose of humiliation and abuse” [emphasis added]. Thus, the sentence reads:

Similarly, the fact that an act is undertaken to prevent a threatened terrorist attack, rather than for the purpose of humiliation and abuse, would be relevant to a reasonable observer in measuring the outrageousness of the act.

As David Luban explained, the “shocks the concsience” is extremely problematic and can be bent to justify almost anything behavior. See also Luban’s “Were You Really Surprised?” where he explains how:

the Justice Department already told us that no interrogation tactic can possibly be cruel, inhuman, and degrading. In some sense, the only surprise is that Congress now acts surprised. Why the outrage now? DoJ told them its position more than two years ago, in a letter to three Democratic Senators.

This situational argument does not apply to the definition of “torture,” the letter states. Hence the importance of restricting the definition of “torture”, such as the intensive efforts to avoid admitting that waterboarding is “torture.” We should therefore push to define activities as “torture” wherever reasonable and not allow administration defenders to restrict it as they have. In this light, see the Physicians for Human Rights/Human Rights Watch Leave No Marks.

The Times kindly provides copies of the letters: Wyden’s August 2007 Letter; DoJ Reply; Wyden’s December 2007 Letter; DoJ Reply.

We must also remember the psychic toll on Americans exacted by this war and its attendant destruction. There are, of course, the thousands and thousands of troops suffering from post traumatic stress, from traumatic brain injuries, and from the myriad other diagnoses attributable to this war. But there is also the despair that untold others will experience as they return and realize that their experiences of fear, chaos and destruction alienate them from their neighbors who live in a safe world of shopping malls and American Idol.

And there is the effect upon all of us, citizens of the United States and of many other countries, knowing that the post-Cold War opportunity to create a new, more peaceful world order of international cooperation has been ruthlessly abandoned in pursuit of this mad dream of world dominance.

Each of us has within the potential to create and to destroy. For five long years we have seen what the potential to dominate and destroy has wrought. We must each reach within to tap the potential to create, to unite, and to love, as we struggle to create a more just and peaceful world.

Now censorship has extended to the United States of America, land of the First Amendment. As of Friday, February 15, those going to Wikileaks.org have gotten Server not found messages. Today I received a message explaining that a California court has granted an injunction written and requested by lawyers for the Cayman Island’s Bank Julius Baer. It seems that the bank is trying to keep the public from accessing documents that may reveal shady dealings. Wikileaks was only given a couple of hours notice “by email” and was not even represented at the hearing where a U.S. judge took such a drastic step attempting to totally shut down an important information outlet. The result was this totally unprecedented attempt to totally wipe out the existence of Wikileaks:

“Dynadot shall immediately clear and remove all DNS hosting records for the wikileaks.org domain name and prevent the domain name from resolving to the wikileaks.org website or any other website or server other than a blank park page, until further order of this Court.”

There have, of course, been previous attempts by the U.S. Government and others to block publication of particular documents, most famously in 1971 when the Nixon administration attempted to stop publication by the New York Times of excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. But trying to close down an entire site in this way is truly unprecedented. Not even the Nixon administration, when they sought to block publication of the Pentagon Papers, considered closing down the New York Times in response.

If this injunction stands, it will set an incredible precedent for all of us who use the web to unveil misbehavior by the rich and powerful. Fortunately, Wikileaks is fighting this unconstitutional attack on press freedom, aided by six pro bono attorneys in San Francisco. While Wikileaks has so far not issued any particular call for support, all who value freedom should stand ready to offer whatever support they need.

Meanwhile, Wikileaks still exists. Its founders, knowing that governments and institutions will go to extreme lengths to censor the truth, have created an extensive network of cover names from which one can access their materials or continue leaking the secrets of governments and the corrupt rich and powerful. Thus, everything is available at Wikileaks.be, among other names. Let the leaks continue!

Among several interesting nuggets in the ROE, it provides indications that U.S. attacks likely to result in civilian deaths required authorization at the top of the Pentagon, by the SECDEF (Secretary of Defense). Thus, the ROE states repeatedly; “If the target is in a HIGH CD [collateral damage] area, SECDEF approval is required.” And what is the definition of a High Collateral Damage area? The ROE contains a set of explicit definitions of its terms. There we find High Collateral Damage Targets defined as:

“Those targets that, if struck, have a ten percent probability of causing collateral damage through blast debris and fragmentation and are estimated to result in significant collateral effects on noncombatant persons and structures, including: (A) Non-combatant casualties estimated at 30 or greater; (B) Significant effects on Category I No Strike protected sites in accordance with Ref D; (C) In the case of dual-use facilities, effects that significantly impact the non-combatant population, including significant effects on the environment/facilities/infrastructure not related to an adversary’s war making ability; or (D) Targets in close proximity to known human shields.”

Thus, all attacks, except those in self-defense or active pursuit, with a reasonable possibility of harming 30 or more civilians needed approval from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. Presumably such approval would need to be in writing. The ROE thus suggest that there may exist an extensive documentary record of requests, and possibly Rumsfeld’s approval or rejection, for attacks with the potential for resulting in significant civilian casualties. Congress should demand access to these documents to determine the extent to which attacks resulting in civilian casualties were authorized, potentially providing insight into who was responsible for possible war crimes committed in the course of the occupation.

While much of the rest of the ROE appears rather unsurprising, there are a couple of other interesting aspects to the document. One is that the main “hostile forces,” from the U.S. perspective are the Baath remnants, such as the Special Republican Guard and the Baath Party Militia. There is no mention of Iraqi al-Qaida or its predecessors. These predecessors, led by al-Zarqawi, had identified with and pledged allegiance to al-Qaida as early as October 2004, yet they receive no mention in the ROE. The ROE rather refers to Baath forces that “have transitioned from overt conventional resistance to insurgent methods of resistance.”

While the Sunni al-Qaida predecessors do not make the list of hostile forces, the Shia-based Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr does make the list of “Declared Hostile Forces,” However, as of the ROE’s writing, this status was “suspended and such individuals will not be engaged except in self-defense.”

Another interesting feature of the ROE is a complete ignoring of the language barriers separating U.S. troops from the Iraqi populace. Thus, in a section on graduated force, the first stage is “shout verbal warnings to halt.” There is not even a mention of the fact that most Iraqis cannot understand warnings shouted in English. In general, the ROE is notable for lacking any recognition that, in an “insurgency,” there are at best blurry boundaries between combatants and noncombatants. Thus, there is no emphasis of the need to take extraordinary measures to protect the civilian population. Rather, it provides a rationale for virtually any attacks:

“US Forces may always use force, up to and including deadly force, to neutralize and/or detain individuals who commit hostile acts or exhibit hostile intent against US Forces or Coalition Forces.”

As we have seen repeatedly, from the numerous roadblock killings of civilians to the Haditha massacre, this ROE authorization to use force can be used to provide cover for virtually any civilian killings. The ROE suggests that preventing such deaths was low on the priority list of those officials writing the rules of engagement for the occupation. Even so, a military study found that less than half of US occupation soldiers would report a unit member for violating an ROE. Thus, even the limited protections provided civilians in the ROE were often not present on the ground.

The first battle for Fallujah (the second, in November 2004, resulted in the city’s capture by occupation forces) began when images circulated of four contractors being lynched from a bridge in the city. This new document confirms that the attack on Fallujah was designed to crush a symbol of resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq:

“On 31 March 2004, four American Blackwater contractors were killed and images of their bodies being burned and mutilated were broadcast on television around the world. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, CENTCOM Commander GEN Abizaid, and Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) Ambassador Bremer decided a military response was needed immediately. Fallujah had become a symbol of resistance that dominated international headlines.”

Media War

As befits a symbolic battle, the analysis makes clear that the information war was primary. The failure of the Marines’ attack to retake Fallujah was caused, the authors claim, by resistance (“insurgents” in their lingo) forces’ success in getting their message out to the world.

“Insurgents demonstrated a keen understanding of the value of information operations. IO was one of the insurgents’ most effective levers to raise political pressure for a cease-fire. They fed disinformation [sic] to television networks, posted propaganda on the Internet to recruit volunteers and solicit financial donations, and spread rumors through the street.”

The report echo’s the concern of American leaders about the influence of Al Jazeera and other Arab media at conveying the rebel’s side of the story:

“Arab satellite news channels were crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations. For example, CPA documented 34 stories on Al Jazeera that misreported or distorted battlefield events between 6 and 13 April. Between 14 and 20 April, Al Jazeera used the “excessive force” theme 11 times and allowed various anti-Coalition factions to claim that U.S. forces were using cluster bombs against urban areas and kidnapping and torturing Iraqi children. Six negative reports by al-Arabiyah focused almost exclusively on the excessive force theme. Overall, the qualitative content of negative reports increasingly was shrill in tone, and both TV stations appeared willing to take even the most baseless claims as fact.

“During the first week of April, insurgents invited a reporter from Al Jazeera, Ahmed Mansour, and his film crew into Fallujah where they filmed scenes of dead babies from the hospital, presumably killed by Coalition air strikes. Comparisons were made to the Palestinian Intifada. Children were shown bespattered with blood; mothers were shown screaming and mourning.”

The report also makes clear that, in the military’s opinion, the Western press is part of the U.S.’s propaganda operation. This process was facilitated by the embedding of Western reporters in U.S. military units. The U.S. failure in this battle was largely attributable, the authors claim, to the absence of embedded reporters to convey the military’s story.

“The absence of Western media in Fallujah allowed the insurgents greater control of information coming out of Fallujah. Because Western reporters were at risk of capture and beheading, they stayed out and were forced to pool video shot by Arab cameramen and played on Al Jazeera. This led to further reinforcement of anti-Coalition propaganda. For example, false allegations of up to 600 dead and 1000 wounded civilians could not be countered by Western reporters because they did not have access to the battlefield.

“Western reporters were also not embedded in Marine units fighting in Fallujah. In the absence of countervailing visual evidence presented by military authorities, Al Jazeera shaped the world’s understanding of Fallujah.”

This account, however, is false. There were at least two “Western reporters,” as well as other Western civilians, inside Fallujah giving detailed information on the effects of the fighting on civilians. While briefly detained by rebels, they were quickly released, rather than beheaded. The report ignores these reporters as they were independents, neither embedded with the U.S. military nor bound by the implicit rules of the mainstream media to give special consideration to U.S. military claims and perspectives. Further, the accounts of these reporters and observers contradicted American military claims.

Civilian Casualties

Dahr Jamail, at that time a reporter for the now defunct New Standard, felt obligated to go into the besieged city.

“As I was there, an endless stream of women and children who’d been sniped by the Americans were being raced into the dirty clinic, the cars speeding over the curb out front as their wailing family members carried them in.

“One woman and small child had been shot through the neck — the woman was making breathy gurgling noises as the doctors frantically worked on her amongst her muffled moaning.

“The small child, his eyes glazed and staring into space, continually vomited as the doctors raced to save his life.

“After 30 minutes, it appeared as though neither of them would survive.”

Contrary to the army report’s claim that no cluster bombs were used in the attack, Jamail saw wounds suspiciously like those from that weapon:

“There had been reports of this, as two of the last victims that arrived at the clinic were reported by the locals to have been hit by cluster bombs — they were horribly burned and their bodies shredded.”

Another of these nonexistent Western reporters was Rahul Mahajan, who wrote for various alternative news sites, as well as his Empire Notes blog. He reported from Fallujah on April 11, 2003. Since Mahajan was in the same group with Jamail, it is perhaps not surprising that he also reported extensive civilian casualties:

“During the course of the roughly four hours we were at that small clinic, we saw perhaps a dozen wounded brought in. Among them was a young woman, 18 years old, shot in the head. She was having a seizure and foaming at the mouth when they brought here in; doctors did not expect her to survive the night. Another likely terminal case was a young boy with massive internal bleeding. I also saw a man with extensive burns on his upper body and wounds in his thighs that might have been from a cluster bomb; there was no way to verify in the madhouse scene of wailing relatives, shouts of ‘Allahu Akbar’ (God is great), and anger at the Americans.”

The intelligence report claims that “Red Crescent ambulances transported fighters” yet does not discus how this alleged situation was dealt with by the U.S. troops. Mahajan, like other Westerners in the city, provides elucidation of this gap by reporting that the Americans were firing on ambulances, including ones containing civilians:

“I had heard these claims at third-hand before coming into Fallujah, but was skeptical. It’s very difficult to find the real story here. But this I saw for myself. An ambulance with two neat, precise bullet-holes in the windshield on the driver’s side, pointing down at an angle that indicated they would have hit the driver’s chest (the snipers were on rooftops, and are trained to aim for the chest). Another ambulance again with a single, neat bullet-hole in the windshield. There’s no way this was due to panicked spraying of fire. These were deliberate shots to kill people driving the ambulances.

“The ambulances go around with red, blue, or green lights flashing and sirens blaring; in the pitch-dark of a blacked-out city there is no way they can be missed or mistaken for something else). An ambulance that some of our compatriots were going around in, trading on their whiteness to get the snipers to let them through to pick up the wounded was also shot at while we were there.”

Jo Wilding, a British observer also among the Westerners in Fallujah, was in one of the ambulances fired upon, on a trip to pick up a pregnant woman and transport her to the hospital. She and the ambulance staff hoped that the presence of Westerners would help protect from American attack. They were wrong:

“Azzam is driving, Ahmed in the middle directing him and me by the window, the visible foreigner, the passport. Something scatters across my hand, simultaneous with the crashing of a bullet through the ambulance, some plastic part dislodged, flying through the window.

“We stop, turn off the siren, keep the blue light flashing, wait, eyes on the silhouettes of men in US marine uniforms on the corners of the buildings. Several shots come. We duck, get as low as possible and I can see tiny red lights whipping past the window, past my head. Some, it’s hard to tell, are hitting the ambulance I start singing. What else do you do when someone’s shooting at you? A tyre bursts with an enormous noise and a jerk of the vehicle.

“I’m outraged. We’re trying to get to a woman who’s giving birth without any medical attention, without electricity, in a city under siege, in a clearly marked ambulance, and you’re shooting at us. How dare you?”

Even back in Baghdad, Mahajan and Jamail were the only Western reporters who attended a press conference of the Iraqi Minister of Health, who confirmed that the Americans had fired upon ambulances in Fallujah (and also in Sadr City in Baghdad):

“During the questions, when asked about shooting at ambulances, Abbas confirmed that U.S. forces shot at ambulances, not only in Fallujah and the approaches to Fallujah, but also in Sadr City. He agreed that the acts were criminal and said he has asked the IGC ([Interim] Governing Council) and Bremer [U.S. governor of occupied Iraq] for an explanation.”

While in Fallujah, Jo Wilding also saw civilians fired upon by U.S. troops, illustrating the “Coalition’s concern for collateral damage” that the intelligence analysis refers to:

“There’s a man, face down, in a white dishdasha, a small round red stain on his back. We run to him. Again the flies [h]ave got there first. Dave is at his shoulders, I’m by his knees and as we reach to roll him onto the stretcher Dave’s hand goes through his chest, through the cavity left by the bullet that entered so neatly through his back and blew his heart out.

“There’s no weapon in his hand. Only when we arrive, his sons come out, crying, shouting. He was unarmed, they scream. He was unarmed. He just went out the gate and they shot him. None of them have dared come out since. No one had dared come to get his body, horrified, terrified, forced to violate the traditions of treating the body immediately. They couldn’t have known we were coming so it’s inconceivable tat anyone came out and retrieved a weapon but left the body.

“He was unarmed, 55 years old, shot in the back.”

Also relevant to the issue of “collateral damage” is the way in which the U.S. forces divided civilians into potential “insurgents” – all males considered to be of “military age” – and all others. The others were allowed to leave the city or areas of active combat (“Throughout the fight Coalition forces allowed nonmilitary-age men, women, and children to exit through the cordon”), but males considered to be of fighting age – many tens of thousands in a city of perhaps 250,000 population – were not allowed to leave and were thus subject to being shot, as was the man described above by Wilding, upon the least suspicion. Wilding describes the implementation of this policy as a group of volunteers attempted to evacuate civilians before a planned American attack:

“‘We’re going to be going through soon clearing the houses,’ the senior one says.

“’What does that mean, clearing the houses?’

“’Going into every one searching for weapons.’ He’s checking his watch, can’t tell me what will start when, of course, but there’s going to be air strikes in support. ‘If you’re going to do t[h]is [evacuate] you gotta do it soon….’

“The people seem to pour out of the houses now in the hope we can escort them safely out of the line of fire, kids, women, men, anxiously asking us whether they can all go, or only the women and children. We go to ask. The young marine tells us that men of fighting age can’t leave. What’s fighting age, I want to know. He contemplates. Anything under forty five. No lower limit.”

Any military forcing tens of thousands of mostly noncombatant civilians to stay in a war zone under siege is obviously not putting the reduction of civilian casualties (reduction of “collateral damage”) high on its list of priorities. Not surprisingly, an analysis by Iraq Body Count concluded that almost 600 (“between 572 and 616 of the approximately 800 reported deaths”) civilians were among the dead in Fallujah.

The intelligence report also contains chilling phrases that, while subject to multiple interpretations, suggest both the difficulties of fighting a guerilla resistance in a city and the possibility of horrifying actions. Thus, in describing the structure of homes in Falluja, the report calmly states:

“The houses also are all made of brick with a thick covering of mortar overtop. In almost every house a fragmentation grenade can be used without fragments coming through the walls. Each room can be fragged individually.”

Absences in Report

It is striking that, for all its emphasis on claims that U.S. troops followed the “Laws of War” in the battle, avoiding, they claim, extensive “collateral damage” (i.e., civilian casualties) there is no discussion of any strategies designed to accomplish this in the “complex environment” of a city with tens to hundreds of thousands of residents in place. Of course, the accounts of Jamail, Mahajan, and Wilding suggest that the claim that collateral damage was largely avoided is exaggerated at best.

While providing useful analyses of the nature of the Fallujah fighting, and of the information war, this intelligence report demonstrates yet again the difficulties that U.S. occupation forces, including intelligence analysts, have in coming to terms with the nature of nationalist opposition to occupation. While it contains interesting discussions of the organization of the Fallujah resistance, including their decentralized command and control structures which were hard to destroy, the authors cannot resist repeating the Marine attackers description of the resistance fighters as ” an “evil Rotary club” rather than a military organization.”

The report also illustrates American blinders in analyzing the political context of the Fallujah battle. The report does refer to the growing opposition to the assault among the Iraqi Governing Council, a group of Iraqi officials hand-picked by the United States:

“The Iraqi Governing Council began to unravel. Three members quit and 5 others threatened to quit…. The Sunni politicians considered the operation ‘collective punishment.’”

The intelligence analysis, however, doesn’t mention the extreme unpopularity, at the time of the Fallujah battle, of the occupation among many Iraqis as part of the context that hampered the U.S. in its assault. For example, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup poll of Iraqis taken in late March and early April 2004 found:

“Only a third of the Iraqi people now believe that the American-led occupation of their country is doing more good than harm, and a solid majority support an immediate military pullout even though they fear that could put them in greater danger…

“Asked whether they view the U.S.-led coalition as ‘liberators’ or ‘occupiers,’ 71% of all respondents say ‘occupiers.’

“That figure reaches 81% if the separatist, pro-U.S. Kurdish minority in northern Iraq is not included….

“53% say they would feel less secure without the coalition in Iraq, but 57% say the foreign troops should leave anyway. Those answers were given before the current showdowns in Fallujah and Najaf between U.S. troops and guerrilla fighters.”

In failing to come to terms with the unpopularity of the occupation, the report continues the American blindness to the difficulties of sustaining an occupation as opposition mounts. The report thus pays insufficient attention to the extent to which the Fallujah population supported the resistance fighters. Perhaps, however, the absence of any discussion of “winning hearts and minds” is an implicit recognition that this was an impossible goal, and one irrelevant to the U.S. desire to crush Fallujah as a symbol of organized opposition to occupation.

In the end, the most surprising aspect of this leaked report is the absence of any information or analysis in the classified document that was not readily available in the public domain. Its failure to deal with the real situation the U.S. faced in Iraq during the Fallujah assault raises the question as to why, even in a classified intelligence analysis, the military, and perhaps the entire U.S. government, did not analyze reality, rather than relay propaganda. Many possible explanations can be contemplated: a fear of the document being leaked, military leaders and even intelligence analysts being infected with the same propaganda being fed to the press and the public, or systems for relaying information that reward those who support the prevailing ideology. Most likely is some combination of these factors. But the result, this report illustrates, is that, as with prewar intelligence, the intelligence during the Iraq occupation has in many cases reinforced existing beliefs rather than provide new insights designed to allow the U.S. forces to adapt to the real conditions they faced.

Preparing for November Attack

The report does provides several glimpses into the tactics used to prepare for the later November 2004 attack in which Fallujah was captured by the Americans at the cost of thousands of damaged buildings, many tens of thousands of refugees, and an unknown number of both rebel and civilian casualties. In preparing for the November attack, U.S. forces had more time for pre-attack “shaping operations”:

“Shaping operations that clear civilians from the battlefield offers [sic] many positive second-order effects. In Fallujah in April 2004, IMEF [I Marine Expeditionary Force] only had a few days to shape the environment before engaging in decisive combat operations. The remaining noncombatants provided cover for insurgents, restrained CJTF-7′s[Coalition Joint Task Force 7] employment of combat power, and provided emotional fodder for Arab media to exploit.”

In preparing for the November attack, the U.S. engaged in months of massive bombing and artillery strikes, perhaps in order to terrorize into leaving many of the population who were not of military age and hence allowed to leave. As the Guardian reported October 31, 2004:

“US warplanes and artillery pounded targets in the city amid prolonged clashes with insurgents. A marine at a nearby US base described the strikes as the heaviest artillery bombardment he had heard in two months. At least a dozen airstrikes hit a southeastern district of the Sunni Muslim city during the afternoon, witnesses said.”

These “shaping operations” largely worked, as Reuters reported on October 26, 2004:

“‘Three-quarters of the people have fled to other towns to avoid the American air strikes, especially the women and children,’ said Abdel Aziz Ibrahim, a teacher.

“Bank employee Mohammed al-Alwani said: ‘Whoever looks around Falluja now can only feel saddness. The damage is so heavy the suburbs look like they were hit by an earthquake.’”

Having failed to destroy Fallujah as a symbol of resistance to occupation in April, the U.S. designed the November attack to accomplish this goal once and for all, as the Christian Science Monitor explained on the eve of the attack:

“‘One thought going around now is: “Why doesn’t Iraq look like [post-World War II] Germany or Japan, which knew they had been defeated?”’ says John Pike, a military analyst who heads Globalsecurity.org in Alexandria, Va. ‘One of the challenges we are facing now is these people don’t know they have been defeated,’ he says. ‘Fallujah will be an opportunity for them to be crushed decisively and for them to taste defeat.’”

Or, as explained by another Western analyst in the same article:

“‘The logic is: You flatten Fallujah, hold up the head of Fallujah, and say “Do our bidding, or you’re next,”‘ says Toby Dodge, an Iraq analyst at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London.”

The U.S. also learned from its perceived failure in the information war during the April attack, which led, in the view of the intelligence report, to calling off the attack before victory. In November they got many reporters, including even Iraqi reporters, to embed with U.S. troops, so that they could act, in the words of the intelligence report, as the propaganda arm of U.S. forces.

The greater success in manipulating the information war in November was offset, however, by the U.S.’s inability to hide from reporters and thus, from the world the country’s descent into full-scale civil war. It remains to be seen if the relative lull in civil war currently occurring as the various factions reevaluate the situation will allow the U.S. greater success in the information war, if not in the real war of occupation.

While the entire article is well worth reading, a few of Dr. Brehm’s comments as cited there are especially worth commenting upon. Either they reflect an unacceptable level of ignorance of the basic facts about psychologists’ roles in American torture or they are simply willful falsehoods. For example, Dr. Brehm stated:

“Brehm said psychologists only acted in an advisory role during questionings, working with interrogators to develop effective strategies that will elicit “accurate information.””

There is now overwhelming evidence from reporters and government documents that this statement is not simply false, but almost the exact opposite of the truth. Thus, three major journalists (Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair, and Mark Benjamin at Salon) have reported that the basic torture techniques used by the CIA in its black sites were initially developed and implemented by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. This role is far from Brehm’s “…psychologists only acted in an advisory role during questionings, working with interrogators to develop effective strategies that will elicit ‘accurate information.’ ” On the contrary, as Eban reported in Vanity Fair:

psychologists weren’t merely complicit in America”s aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A..

Thus, Dr. Brehm’s “effective strategies” include months of total isolation, freezing, being chained up in painful positions for hours and days on end, and it seems, waterboarding.

The Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG), in a report declassified last May, documented the central role of psychologists, including those from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program in the development of what the OIG itself saw as abusive. [See our summary of the OIG report and in pdf format.] The OIG report documents how SERE psychologists trained Guantanamopsychologists in the use of SERE-based torture techniques. The OIG report also documents how SERE and Guantanamostaff went to Iraq to train US soldiers there in abusive SERE-based “counter-resistance” techniques. The OIG report made clear that these techniques were, in the OIG’s opinion, abusive.

Just last month the Guantanamo Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures manual was leaked. As I wrote, this document details the systematic use of a month of isolation on all new detainees “to foster dependence on interrogators and ‘enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process.‘” The decision about how long a detainee would be held in isolation, the SOP states, was to be made by the GTMO Joint Intelligence Group (JIG). The Chief Psychologist for the JIG at the time the SOP was issued was Col. Larry James. The APA appointed Col. James, along with five others with military or intelligence ties (including the head SERE psychologist), to its Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security to formulate “ethics” to decide if it was “ethical” for psychologists to participate in national security interrogations. Further, the APA selected Col. James to present its “anti-torture” policy to the 2007 Convention.

To this extensive record that psychologists were active and central participants in some of the worst of the Bush administration’s abuses, Dr. Brehm contrasts her faith:

“We have great confidence that at least most of our members are really good people and that they would not do bad things,” Brehm said, adding her belief that psychologists had the ability to be heroes in fighting against torture.

Given the historical record, Dr. Brehm’s belief only makes sense if the words “heroes,” “against,” and “torture” no longer mean what they used to mean.

Another of Dr. Brehm’s statements is similarly astounding, given that she is a social psychologist:

All of our ethical policies are based on individual responsibility,” Brehm said. “If you violate the behaviors that are prescribed then, if it is a serious violation, we’ll kick you out of the association and you may not be able to make a living anymore. It is that basic.

Social psychologists are taught from the first day that the social environment often overrules individual behavioral tendencies. Those in abuse-generating situations are likely to participate in abuse. Social psychologists routinely study why “good” people do “bad” things. There is no evidence that psychologists are uniquely able to resist these pressures. Indeed, at the APA Convention last August, Craig Haney, a social psychologist who studies the US criminal justice system, stated that in 30 years of research in prisons, he knew of not a single instance in which a psychologist stopped existing abuse.

Dr. Brehm, like the rest of the APA leadership, ignores that we live in a country which, at this time, is committed to detainee abuse as national policy. Those aiding interrogations in that system are, at best, complicit in the numerous abuses we know are occurring, the kidnapping of detainees from around the world, the purchase of detainees, the lack of any legal rights, the removal of the centuries-old right to habeas corpus, not to mention the abusive interrogations. Rather than denouncing this organized regime, the APA talks obsessively about “influencing policy” through engagement, but has precious little to show for it. The CIA still tortures, using the techniques that were designed by psychologists. We all know it. The press reports on it. But the APA has yet to utter a word condemning these misuses of psychological knowledge and expertise.

Jane Mayer, in an August 8, 2007 Democracy Now! interview pointed out that not only the knowledge and expertise but the prestige of psychology was central to the Bush administration’s torture regime. The administration figures ordering torture hoped psychologist participation would prove to be a “get out of jail free” card, in the event of future investigation of and trial for their crimes:

[I]f 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.”

We have written Dr. Brehm directly documenting in detail reports that psychologists were central in creating, implementing, standardizing as policy, and disseminating the abusive interrogation techniques used by American military and the CIA. We sent Dr. Brehm an Open Letter signed by over 700 psychologists. We sent her our summary of the OIG report. She never responded. I sent her my article on the systematic use of isolation at Guantanamo. Again, no response. So, if Dr. Brehm is truly ignorant of the central role of psychologists in US abusive interrogations, it was not for lack of opportunity to inform herself.

Or do APA leaders know the facts, but simply not care? After all, the military and intelligence agencies hire hundreds, or even thousands of psychologists and provided many tens of millions in grant funding for psychological research. Further, psychologists have a preferred position over their long-time rivals, the psychiatrists, aiding interrogations in US detention centers. A little willful ignorance is, perhaps, a small price to pay for the APA leadership when millions of dollars and preferential treatment for psychologists are at stake.

But whether ignorance or willful avoidance, Dr. Brehm’s lack of responsiveness to the legitimate concerns of so many of the APA’s membership comes at a high price. The issue is increasingly dividing the organization, and threatens its hegemony as the primary representative of organized psychology at a time when rival psychological organizations are gaining membership and energy.

Only the APA’s members can decide that closing one’s eyes to abuse is too high a price to pay for government funding and other favors from the powerful.

The interview can be “watched” on YouTube :

Those preferring can read the transcript (reproduced with permission of the Pinky Show):

Transcript: Fear, Aggression, & Empire
Note: The following is a verbatim transcript of the program’s spoken dialogue.

[ phone ringing ]

Stephen Soldz: Hi.

Pinky: Hi, is this Dr. Stephen Soldz?

Soldz: Yes it is.

Pinky: Hi, this is Pinky… from the desert.

Soldz: Hi, how you doing?

Pinky: Um, fine thank you. Dr. Soldz, may I ask you some questions about psychoanalysis and fear and… empire building and stuff?

Soldz: Sure.

Pinky: Okay… Um, maybe first can you please tell me about psychoanalysis — like, what’s it for? And what is the objective of therapy?

Soldz: Well, psychoanalysis is based on the assumption that in addition to the things we’re aware of that there’s a lot of mental life that we’re unaware of, you know, the concept of ‘unconscious’. In particular, wishes and motives that we’re unaware of because they conflict with other aspects of life — with reality, with the way we think we should be, and that these unconscious wishes and motives frequently get in the way of us having a enjoyable, meaningful life. So, the essence of analysis is to get people to talk and to try and find out why people are avoiding certain areas. Technically we call it resistance, but what it is that people are avoiding and why they are avoiding it, and to try and reduce this resistance to knowing yourself. So that people then develop greater flexibility and can live their life with less compulsion and a wider range of thoughts and feelings guiding them. So that is sort of the essence of what the process is about.

Pinky: When people construct these kinds of — can I call them self-narratives? — if these narratives differ from outward ‘reality’ too much, is this merely annoying or can this be dangerous?

Soldz: That’s a good question. I mean, all of our self narratives, as you put it, differ from reality in various ways. None of us lives totally ‘in reality’. So, but, if too much of it differs from… and especially the internal reality, for example, someone who thinks of themselves as only being a nice person who never gets angry, that can be very limiting. There are many things in the world that do get one angry and if one has to keep that out of awareness that one never gets angry, then it can express itself in various other ways that can cause problems. So no, it’s not always a problem, but it often is.

Pinky: In one of your talks, I heard you characterize America as suffering from a sort of ‘social narcissism’. Can you please explain what you mean by this?

Soldz: Well, I’m sort of using a metaphor from clinical narcissism, which involves a self-absorption, a general unawareness of other people. It’s not that you don’t know that there’s physically another person and they, you know, they’ve got a different body and a different name, but you’re not really aware that they’re different than you, that they have different thoughts, different wishes. You think that they’re just like you. You know, like a patient who says “I know what you’re thinking!”, and it’s what they’re thinking. It doesn’t occur to them that you might be thinking something different than what they’re thinking or you might have different feelings than them. So, in a clinical sense narcissism involves this sense that others are just like oneself, and therefore an unawareness of others as real, separate people.

In some sense I think the United States suffers from this at a social level. We have this ideal that we’re the best people on Earth. President Reagan described it as the, I think it was “the shining city on a hill” from the New Testament, you know, we’re this beacon to the world and all and the rest of the world should just realize that and emulate us. They should aspire to have our cars, our political system, our Coca-Cola, and there’s very little interest in or concern that different cultures have different values, different interests. You know: “Why are they so weird?”. And I think that, you know, it’s true of all countries to some degree, but I think the United States has been particularly true partly because we’ve been relatively isolated by the oceans and by being such a big country, you know we’ve had a huge influx of immigrants over the centuries. And we’ve been relatively spared from internal wars, at least since the Civil War, and… many Americans do not travel overseas, knowledge of foreign languages is like much lower than most other countries, at least most other industrial countries, and there’s just a lack of curiosity about other people. I mean, the most extreme of this is our president, you know, I believe who just about never traveled outside of the country, he can barely stand to sleep in a bed different than his own, he needs a very controlled environment, and he just doesn’t seem to be curious about anyone in the rest of the world. It never occurs to him that maybe Iraqis have different interests. Maybe they don’t want what exactly what he thinks we want. But I think it’s true of a lot of Americans in general.

Pinky: Okay, so I assume that these kinds of problems are only compounded when the individual or the nation is very powerful, is that correct?

Soldz: You probably can only keep it up either in isolation or when you’re extremely powerful. You know, those at the bottom of the rung probably don’t have the luxury of really believing that because they’re constantly impinged upon by others. So, in that sense, I think you’re probably right.

Pinky: In one of your talks I was listening to, you cited a very interesting statistic re: trust in America. You said that from 1960 to 2000, the amount of people who would agree with the statement “Most people can be trusted” dropped from approximately 55% to 35%, and something like 25% among high school students. What’s happening?

Soldz: Well we seem to have a much more fearful society. Since 2001, we’ve seen the results of this, and the deliberate exploitation of it by certain politicians. But I think it’s been true for a long time. There was this myth of this shining city on a hill that lasted through much of the Cold War to a great degree, and it got challenged. In the 60s, it got challenged by the Civil Rights Movement, by the social movements spawned in opposition to the Vietnam War. I know I’m of that generation. In the sense that our country was doing something pretty wrong in Vietnam. It was a pretty rude awakening for a lot of people. And, we’ve also had increased social tensions around the cities, and then, especially since around 1980, a large increase both in inequality, you know, it’s now become accepted, but it’s been true for a long time, there’s been a large and growing gap between the upper few percent of the population and the majority of the population in income, in social power, which I think is probably almost as important as income. The institutions of popular power in the country have decreased, say, unions, neighborhood organizations, things that allowed ordinary people to exert influence over their lives have decreased radically. So there’s much more of a sense of powerlessness, of being driven by external forces.

To a large percentage of the population, there’s a decline of security. We know that, for example, retirement, that there used to be a good number of jobs which had pension plans that were guaranteed pension plans, and you put in your 20 or 30 or whatever years and you were taken care of pretty well. And that’s gone. Now we have a fractured.. you take care of yourself with a 401k that’s never anywhere near equal to an old pension plan. You know, the social welfare net has been frayed in various ways, and people sense it. They don’t have a good understanding of it but, there’s in many ways people just feel afraid. Unfortunately, I think people often end up attributing it to sort of the wrong things. For a long while the danger was from poor people, and essentially black people, that was exploited. You know, the fear of crime. And I don’t want to say that crime isn’t a real problem, but we’ve noticed that as violent crime has declined for the last almost 15 years now, fear of crime has increased. The amount of crime and the danger doesn’t reflect your fear of it. I mean, it partially has to do with the media, but it also partially has to do with there’s a reflection of an overall sense of just ‘Danger’, of that things are not safe. And we focus on particular things like crime or most recently like terrorists in order to give some structure to this sense that something’s not quite right, that things are getting worse. You know, we’ve seen in recent polls that there’s a radical increase in the sense that the nation is going in the wrong direction, and that leads to this general sense, well, it’s easier to find a scapegoat in some sense than to live with that uncertainty and fear.

Pinky: So… into this era of instability and insecurity, from a psychoanalytic perspective, how does one control the population by manufacturing fear in the form of an external enemy?

Soldz: Well, it seems the structure the way people think and in certain circumstances it pulls people together. You know, you think of WWII and the sense of the nation ‘being together’. In recent years, is this odd quality. We have this external enemy which is of a very unfocused character, you know, terrorism, which is – “What in the world is terrorism? Where is it located? Who does it manifest?” The administration if they wanted to mobilize, and I’m sort of the opinion that they had at some level consciously or not that unconsciously were aware of creating a new enemy to replace the Cold War enemy. I remember watching Bush’s speech after 9/11, his speech to Congress, and I was struck how he defined terrorism in very vague terms, so that the ‘war on terrorism’ could never be won. I mean, how can you win a war on a tactic? Terrorism has been around for thousands of years. There’s no way you can win this war, so therefore, you know, he didn’t define it in terms of Al-Qaeda or any particular enemy. And, I think it was deliberate, but we have this war combined with this sort of lack of a war footing in the country because I think that they guessed that they couldn’t sustain it, that opposition to their policies would have increased a lot if they actually asked for sacrifice. So if I recall correctly, the same speech told people to go to the mall and go shopping in order to prevent some economic collapse.

So you have this formless enemy. I mean, terrorism can be anywhere, can be anyone, and this sense that there’s nothing concrete you’re doing about it. This is in some sense the worst situation. If you remember you know you have these fears, go out and buy duct tape, and other nonsense like that that just leads to this increase in fear, but in a formless fear. It’s not a fear of the Nazis which is much more concrete. So, it becomes our manifestation of all our worst fears, and it also becomes I think to some sense a manifestation of our guilt, that Americans in some sense know that we have this privileged status in the world, we use a far greater fraction of the resources of the world than our population, which suggests we should, and that it’s built upon a world where other people have to be kept down if we’re going to keep having these resources. So there is a real danger, and it gets focused but in it’s undifferentiated way so that it doesn’t work as well psychologically, as more traditional enemies, and I think it leads to greater anxiety.

Pinky: Hmm, this is really interesting. It kind of sounds like, sort of, a cycle, like we’re projecting… Is that what you’re talking about? Projection?

Soldz: Yes, yeah, I’m talking about projection, trying not to use the technical word! [laugh] But yes, projection. And remember, projection is projecting what’s in us. Which doesn’t mean, you know, there’s the old saying “just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get you” but, it’s our own fears and our own hatred, you know, “it’s not me who hate those other people for trying to get what I’ve taken from them or what I’m getting unfairly, but it’s them who hate me” is the process of projection. And in fact, it goes to a further step, to what psychoanalysts now call ‘projective identification’. Projective identification is where you project your feelings, wishes into another person and you then act in such a way as to get that person to enact it. So you act in such a way as to get the other person to give you grounds to be paranoid of them. You make them so uncomfortable, you know, “Why are you staring at me?” You say that and someone’s likely to get hostile. Again these are somewhat metaphors. But in projective identification it’s analogous to ‘blowback’ that Chalmers Johnson and others have talked about. We do things in such a way as to arouse others to take us on and to be a greater danger. I’m not trying to claim, I don’t want to be misunderstood as saying that there aren’t dangers, let’s say Al-Qaeda, or certain Islamic extremists aren’t potentially dangerous, but that we act in such a way as to magnify those dangers and increase them rather than to reduce them. Take the war in Iraq, which is you know, in every poll around the world has led to precipitous decline in respect for the United States. That can’t be making us safer.

Pinky: Okay, in terms of your work, how would you go about trying to help someone who’s suffering from these kinds of mental projections, or narcissism? How do you help them to overcome this?

Soldz: Well, that’s a good question, and unfortunately it doesn’t easily generalize to the social sphere. You know the first thing is you have to create a safe environment, and that’s what we try and do in the office. One where a person can have any thought or feeling and not be afraid that’s going to cause problems for them. So it’s of course a gradual process. Then, you have to be not too challenging, you don’t go telling people, “Hey, you’re projecting! Why are you projecting on to me?” That doesn’t usually work, that usually arouses greater defensiveness. So you accept whatever it is the person has to say, whatever it is they feel and at the same time you try not to be too alien to them, not to be so “good and understanding” that we increase the feelings a person has for themselves. And so then there’s a gradual process of trying to get a person to put into words rather than act to experience. Because a lot of what people do is they act in order not to experience – in order not to feel angry, or not to feel ashamed, or not to feel terrified – they act. You know, it feels safer and more in control if I yell at you instead of having some feeling that I’m in danger or I don’t understand what’s going on. Or, I’m terrified of myself. It takes a long time for people to get to a point where they will admit that it’s primarily themselves that they’re most scared of – what they don’t know, or what they think they shouldn’t know about themselves that’s most terrifying. I mean if you can accept that then you can deal better about the external world.

Pinky: Hmm. I know you started out by saying that it’s difficult to generalize these kinds of things to the social sphere, but are there maybe like, at least general patterns that psychiatrists can see that might help us to approach these kinds of problems at a societal or international scale?

Soldz: Yeah, I mean we know some things and they’re not profound. I wish I had the profound answers but I don’t think anybody does. I think, you know, we psychoanalysts are just one small part of trying to piece together these issues. I don’t want to foster the megalomania that any field has the answers to human problems. But we certainly know that belligerence is the opposite of understanding and it’s not gonna lead to increased harmony. That you have to come to try and understand others and understand that they’re different. Part of the problem that the Bush administration got into Iraq was that they had this image of Iraqis as children. I mean they wouldn’t quite express it that way, but you know, there are phrases like “we have to help them grow up”, “we have to educate them”, “we have to teach them democracy” or whatever it is. And the problem is, Iraqis aren’t children. They’re grown ups. And they have their own wishes, their own fears, their own desires, and their own culture. And that psychological orientation, which is often been the one of colonialism, that the Natives are children who, you know, we need to be this paternalistic parent. It doesn’t work very well, and in the modern world seems to work not at all.

So… I mean I don’t know if we can generalize exactly from the consulting room, but we know that you have to develop a greater awareness of others, the ability to talk and to listen, and the acceptance, and this is for Americans a major major problem, the acceptance that our country, like all other countries, it’s good and it’s bad, and our motives are no less pure than any other countries’ motives. This is something that Noam Chomsky has focused on a lot. You know, the myth of American exceptionalism, that the United States is somehow the only country in human history which only has pure motives. So for example, the history of the Vietnam War has been re-written in the school books and even in the newspapers and the press as one of American idealism that was sort of too idealistic and pure to deal with a dirty world. So we went in to bring democracy and all these good things to Vietnam and we couldn’t really acknowledge that, you know, Vietnam was corrupt and had these dictators and things, but it was all the goodness of our motives, which is a total violation of history. The United State’s motives were anything but pure and democracy was the last thing on the US agenda there as witnessed at the elections that were called for and a number of treaties were always cancelled under US pressure because the North Vietnamese would win them. And a similar thing in Iraq. There’s this myth that the United States went into Iraq to bring democracy and yes, there’s the language of democracy, but we know that in fact one of the first actions of Paul Bremer was to cancel local elections. And why did they cancel local elections? Because they didn’t think that the pro-US factions who had been in exile, and didn’t have local roots, they thought that they would lose. So democracy simply meant electing a pro-US government. So in that sense, one step is to become self-aware. To accept that the United States, no worse than any other country, but also not much different than other countries, has its own interests, and pursues them, and sometimes for good, and sometimes for ill, but unless we can recognize our own motives, how in the world are we gonna deal with other people with their complex motives?

So that’s one lesson we have there, and certainly an increased belligerence toward the world that we’ve seen in the last number of years is little question that leads to increased belligerence on the other side. You know there was the belief that the United States was so powerful with its shock and awe, that we could overwhelm any country, and we see how well that worked — this tiny little country of Iraq with about a twelfth our population and no military to speak of has defeated the United States military. So, at some point you have to come to terms and listen to others, which unfortunately we’re not ready to do in Iraq. I mean, we still have Congress debate “What’s the proper government for Iraq?” It doesn’t occur to Congress that it’s not for the United State’s Congress or anyone in the United States to choose that. [laugh] You know, whether or not federalism is a good policy, I don’t know, but that’s for Iraqis to decide. It’s not for the US Congress to adopt. And until the U.S. learns that lesson, it’s not going to have much success. So I don’t know if I’ve answered your question there or not because I think, you know, it takes psychoanalysis, it takes years for an individual. And I wish I knew what the analog at the social level is, but it’s hard to do that, other than to know that some of what we need to accomplish is the same.

Pinky: Yeah, thank you. I mean, I think that gives us something to think about because that’s not the direction that public discourse is going over the last few years, to say the least.

Soldz: Yeah, and unfortunately it’s on all sides. I mean, all a politician has to say is “Why don’t we try talking to Iran?” and they’re in deep trouble.

Pinky: Right. I was wondering if I could ask you this semi-personal question. Psychoanalysts are not popularly known as being very politically engaged. I mean, we don’t generally see a ton of you guys on television protesting this or that. What has been the connection for you that’s led you to be more public in your opposition to the so-called ‘War on Terror’, and to empire building in general?

Soldz: Well let me say two things. One, I think your assumption is partly wrong. Psychoanalysis was born as a radical set of ideas. It was a great challenge to the status quo and in fact almost all of the early psychoanalysts were political radicals of one stripe or another. In pre-war Europe, it was often allied with various social movements. But when it came to the United States, what happened was that psychoanalysts came from Europe as the Nazis took over and in this country, they sort of gave up their radical beliefs partly out of fear I think, and partly out of the general processes that it were occurring in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, and it became a much more sedate and established profession in this country. But that’s not been its history everywhere and for example, in Latin America, there are long traditions of psychoanalysts working very closely with social movements in Argentina, in Nicaragua, in Brazil, and so in some sense the United States’ form of psychoanalysis in its particular sort of social quietism is the exception, perhaps more than the rule. But even in this country, there’s been an increasing number of psychoanalysts who are becoming more activist. There are a lot of people. It’s not the dominant mainstream, but it’s not a total excluded fringe either. So I think to some degree psychoanalysis gets a bad rap from some of the sort of Hollywood-ish stereotypes.

For me personally, I mean, in fact, my history is sort of the other way. I was a political radical first from very early in my teens and the social movements of the 60s. Now that said, that was a long time ago and I have been less active over the decades. I have a family and you know, like many of us, we’re raising kids, and doing this and that, but when the Iraq war came, my activism came out. I could not believe that at the end of the Cold War, we had an opportunity to try and create a more peaceful world, to try and reduce belligerence, to reduce the number of, or even eventually abolish the nuclear weapons in the world, and I couldn’t believe that the country and the world were launching into another round of belligerence and warfare. That without without much thought, without much opposition, without anybody really discussing “Why are we doing this?” I don’t mean “Why Iraq in particular?”, but realizing the magnitude of what we gave up. By doing this we gave up the possibility for a long time of trying to find more peaceful solutions. And this is an enormous loss, as I think people are just starting to realize. And so, I could no longer remain quiet and so I thought, well, where’s the place to start? Well you know there are all kinds of activists but why don’t I start among my own? Among psychoanalysts and more recently among other psychologists, and try and get them more involved, and try and take some of the tools that we have because I think one of the lessons of psychoanalysis is that we’re all complex and that ambivalence is central to life, that no one is all good and probably no one or very few are all bad, that we all have anger, we all have destructive tendencies, and we all have constructive and loving tendencies, and the world has to accept that that’s in all of us. And creating myths of us good, them bad is a recipe for failure as we’ve seen in the last ten years or so.

Pinky: Well, thank you Dr. Soldz, this has been really helpful.

Soldz: Well thank you, I appreciate it.

Pinky: Okay, take care.

Soldz: Okay, well thanks. Okay, bye bye.

Pinky: Thank you. Take care. Oh! Bye bye. [laughs] That was Dr. Stephen Soldz, Director at the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis in Brookline, Massachusetts.

The Miami Herald describes the manual and its importance and give a flavor of its bureaucratic contents:

" A how-to manual, it draws back a curtain on the secretive, isolated base in 2003, more than a year into operation of the Bush administration prison.
And it lays out -- with typical military attention to detail -- everything from when to use pepper spray to who should witness a cavity search to how to dig a proper Muslim grave.
It also offers the mundane details of what detainees were given at the open-air prison camp overlooking the Caribbean, where the Pentagon today holds about 300 war-on-terror captives at Guantánamo for possible interrogation and trial by Military Commission.
No hair dye, it says on one page. But a double amputee got to keep a bucket in his cell, it says."

The manual is classified 'for official use only' and access was "limited to those requiring operational and procedural knowledge in the direct performance of their duties as well as those directly associated with JTF-GTMO." The Department of Defense has attempted to avoid its release and has denied the American Civil Liberties Organization [ACLU] access under the Freedom of Information Act.

In addition to the mundane, but often chilling details – destroying a Styrofoam cup was a punishable offense and receiving extra toilet paper required being at the highest level of privileges while the interrogators determined one’s ration of this “comfort item” – of the running of this high security facility designed to facilitate interrogations and intelligence gathering, the manual contains two major revelations. The first of these revelations, which is the focus of both the Reuters and the New York Times reports, is that, despite claims to the contrary, the US was hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross [ICRC]. As Reuters puts it:

“The manual also indicates some prisoners were designated as off limits to visitors from the International Committee of the Red Cross, something the military has repeatedly denied.”

Each detainee is assigned to one of four ICRC visitation levels. Level A is:

“No Access: No contact of any kind with the ICRC. This includes the delivery of ICRC mail.” [p. 17.1]

In fact, for only one of the four levels was the IRC allowed unrestricted access to ask the detainee whatever questions they deemed appropriate. The other levels allowed only visual access or questions about “health and welfare only.” The camp commander seemed determined to prevent the ICRC from being able to obtain accurate information about detainee treatment.

This denial of ICRC access was in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which state, as the Center for Constitutional Rights points out, that all prisoners “shall have access to all premises occupied by prisoners of war” and that “duration and frequency of these visits shall not be restricted.” The restriction of ICRC access may have been one reason that the administration tried, unsuccessfully, to deny Geneva protections to Guantanamo detainees. Given the repeated denials that detainees were withheld from the ICRC, we have here additional evidence that, when it comes to what occurs in US detention facilities, no claims of the government should be taken as true without independent confirmatory evidence.

The second major revelation from the SOP, mentioned in passing by Reuters, concerns the routine use of isolation and sensory deprivation on Guantanamo detainees in order to weaken them and make them ready for interrogations. As Reuters reports:

“It [the SOP] says incoming prisoners are to be held in near-isolation for the first two weeks to foster dependence on interrogators and ‘enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process.’”

Here is the actual language from the SOP [Section 4-20, p. 4.3] demonstrating the precision with which abuse was administered. In fact, it makes clear that Reuters got it partially wrong in that the “near-isolation” was to last at least four weeks, not two, and that it could be continued indefinitely, beyond the four-week (30 day):

“a. Phase One Behavior Management Plan (First thirty days or as directed by JIG [Joint Intelligence Group]). The purpose of the Behavior Management Plan is to enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process. It concentrates on isolating the detainee and fostering dependence of the detainee on his interrogator. During the first two weeks at Camp Delta, classify the detainees as Level 5 and house in a Maximum Security Unit (MSU) Block. During this time, the following conditions will apply:
(1) Restricted contact: No ICRC or Chaplain contact
(2) No books or mail privileges
(3) MREs for all meals.
(4) Basic comfort items only:
(a) ISO Mat
(b) One blanket
(c) One towel
(d) Toothpaste/finger toothbrush
(e) One Styrofoam cup
(f) Bar of soap
(g) Camp Rules
(h) No Koran, prayer beads, prayer cap.
(5) Mail writing and delivery will be at the direction of the J-2.
b. Phase Two Behavior Management Plan. The two-week period following Phase 1 will continue the process of isolating the detainee and fostering dependence on the interrogator. Until the JIG Commander changes his classification, the detainee will remain a Level 5 with the following:
(1) Continued MSU
(2) Koran, prayer beads and prayer cap distributed by interrogator
(3) Contacts decided by interrogator
(4) Interrogator decides when to move the
detainee to general population.”

Isolation has long been a preferred measure of abuse in US detentions. As Mark Benjamin pointed out last July in Salon, isolation and the associated sensory deprivation, not waterboarding or other more commonly discussed techniques, is the CIA’s favorite form of torture. It has been know for years that isolation was authorized for use at Guantanamo, even after some of the harshest techniques used in 2002 and known to have been deployed against Mohammed al-Qahtani were stopped from routine use and restricted in 2003 to the so-called “varsity program.” Isolation was one of the interrogations techniques authorized by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in his April 16, 2003 memo. However, that memo gives a sense that isolation is a severe, possibly illegal, technique:

“Caution: the use of isolation as an interrogation technique requires detailed implementation instructions, including specific guidelines regarding the length of isolation, medical and psychological review, and approvals for extension of the length of by the appropriate level in the chain of command. This technique is not know to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days. Those nations that believe that detainees are subject to POW protections may view use of this technique as inconsistent with the requirements of Geneva III, Article 13 which provides that POWs must be protected against acts of intimidation; Article 14 which provides that POWs are entitled to respect for their person; Article 34 which prohibits coercion and Article 126 which ensures access and basic standards of treatment. Although the provisions of Geneva are not applicable to the interrogation of unlawful combatants, consideration should be given to these views prior to application of this technique.”

The Guantanmo SOP now provides official documentation that, at the time of the Rumsfeld memo and despite its warnings regarding the techniques’ potential illegality and physical and psychological dangers, isolation was routinely used by the Defense Department at Guantanamo on all new detainees. The Rumsfeld memo complements the SOP in that it documents the central role of “medical and psychological review,” and, thus, medical and psychological personnel in the administration of this technique.

Isolation is as damaging as other, more prominent, abusive interrogation techniques. The recent Physicians for Human Rights-Human Rights First report, Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality, details the negative effects of isolation and sensory deprivation:

“People who are exposed to isolation for the first time develop a group of symptoms that include ‘bewilderment, anxiety, frustration, dejection, boredom, obsessive thoughts or ruminations, depression, and, in some cases, hallucination’….
Prolonged isolation has been demonstrated to result in increased stress, abnormal neuroendocrine function, changes in blood pressure and inflammatory stress responses….
Findings from clinical research performed by prominent psychologists such as Dr. Stuart Grassian and Dr. Craig Haney, highlight the destructive impact of solitary confinement. Effects include depression, anxiety, difficulties with concentration and memory, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucination and perceptual distortions, paranoia, suicidal thoughts and behavior, and problems with impulse control” [p. 32].

These findings regarding negative effects make clear that attempts to prevent torture and detainee abuse need to curtail the use of isolation to an absolute minimum, only potentially acceptable when needed for temporary management of unruly or dangerous detainees. It should never be sanctioned as a routine tool for “fostering dependence on the interrogator.” Such uses are immoral and are likely violations of the UN Convention Against Torture and the US Torture and War Crimes Acts. As thee PHR-HRF report argues:

The medical impact of sensory deprivation and prolonged isolation supports the conclusion that both techniques of interrogation may be considered prosecutable acts of ‘torture’ or ‘cruel or inhuman treatment’ under the WCA or Torture Act because they cause ‘severe’ and “serious” mental pain and suffering. The lasting depression and posttraumatic stress disorder that victims of isolation suffer constitute the prolonged and/or non-transitory mental harm required for mental pain to be considered severe or serious. Moreover, isolation and sensory deprivation in interrogations is likely calculated to ‘disrupt the senses or personality.’

Of relevance to those of us struggling to change American Psychological Association policy on psychologist participation in interrogations, the APA included clauses in its 2007 resolution against torture that allows continued participation in the use of isolation [and sensory deprivation] in certain circumstances:

This unequivocal condemnation includes, but is by no means limited to, an absolute prohibition for psychologists against… the following used for the purposes of eliciting information in an interrogation process: … isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation and/or sleep deprivation used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.

The APA inclusion of this carefully-qualified language led many APA critics, as well as certain reporters to wonder will psychologists still abet torture? It is therefore essential that the APA clarify the meaning of these apparent “loopholes.”

Recent attempts by the APA to address the meaning of these “loopholes” raise the possibility that APA leaders, reeling under the impact of massive protests among members and criticism in the press, are looking to resolve any ambiguities in the 2007 Resolution. But so far, the APA leadership have failed to make a clear, unequivocal statement that this use of isolation at Guantanamo is unethical. In a recent widely circulated letter by the APA Director of Ethics, he stated:

“The third and final category of techniques consists of techniques that may not be “used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm.” In my opinion, the description of these behaviors—isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation, and sleep deprivation—suffered from not having adequate time to find wording that conveyed the authors’ intention. As I’m sure you recall, the discussions focused on the definition of these words and precisely what the implications of an absolute prohibition would be. As an example, an individual in detention may be separated and placed in a cell in isolation, in order to prevent that individual from colluding with another detainee in formulating a story that is consistent between them. Likewise, the regimen of a camp may require that detainees begin their daily routines at a very early hour. I believe that everyone will agree neither example would constitute impermissible isolation or sleep deprivation, but it is important to find language that clearly separates what is permissible from what is impermissible.”

If the APA really intended that the “loophole” clauses allowing isolation in certain circumstances, was just to cover routine uses of the kind here mentioned, the APA should have no difficulty stating clearly and unequivocally that the use of isolation described in the Guantanamo SOP is unethical and that psychologists participating in that use are engaging in unethical behavior.

In considering the APA’s positions, we should remember that the Chief Psychologist of the Guantanamo Joint Intelligence Group [JIG] at Guantanamo at the time of this SOP, was none other than Colonel Larry James, who the APA chose to introduce their 2007 Resolution on the Council floor. The SOP makes clear that the JIG was the military unit that decided how long isolation was used on each detainee to “enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process.” The Rumsfeld memo makes clear that “medical and psychological supervision” were essential elements of this decision-making process. It is thus likely that the JIG’s Chief Psychologist was involved in determining exactly how much of this abuse a given detainee could tolerate. It hardly inspires confidence in the APA’s willingness to stand unequivocally against US torture and abuse that they selected this same Col. James to make the case for their carefully parsed and nuanced resolution. The APA has ignored extensive evidence from official documents and press reports raising questions about the activities undertaken by Col. James’ command during the time (January 2003 to Spring 2004) he was stationed there. The SOP provides additional evidence that Col. James’ command was engaged in routine abuse of detainees. Due to secrecy, we do not know exactly what activities Col. James was involved in. But, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, should the APA have someone who was in Guantanamo during this time represent its anti-torture positions? (For the record, Col. James denies that isolation was used for interrogation purposes and stated, in an email, that isolation was only used for medical purposes, to avoid spreading infection.)

In any case, it is time for the APA to stop word parsing and make clear, unequivocal statements about what in their view is and is not ethical. I, for one, feel that the use of isolation, as described in the Guantanamo SOP is well over the line into unethical territory. Does APA agree?

Beyond the APA and the role of psychologists, we need for Congress to take up the entire range of abusive interrogation techniques, especially including isolation and sensory deprivation. By focusing upon waterboarding as the litmus test abusive technique, the Congress, the press, and some human rights activists are ignoring the extent to which abuse is endemic in the US’ national security detentions. The CIA can continue its “enhanced techniques” without waterboarding; in fact reports say that they are already doing so. But to ban isolation and sensory deprivation would cut to the core of this country’s abusive treatment of detainees. Until the United States government takes this step, the U.S. will remain a torturing society.

Here’s the Letter:

November 1, 2007

The Honorable Senator Jay Rockefeller
531 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

The Honorable Senator Christopher Bond
274 Russell Senate Office Building.
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senators Rockefeller and Bond:

We are psychologists and other mental health professionals representing a broad array of individuals and organizations concerned with the role of psychologists in abusive interrogations that may violate national and international laws. We are concerned by the clear evidence from multiple sources, including public documents, that psychologists have played a central role in illegal United States torture tactics by the CIA. As teachers, clinicians, and/or psychological researchers we are asking Congress to prohibit abusive tactics and to insure that health providers, including psychologists, are not involved in roles that violate their ethical obligations as health professionals.

Evidence of the Central Role of Psychologists in Abusive Interrogations

Over the last several years, press reports and official documents have highlighted the disturbing roles of health professionals, especially psychologists, in the abusive interrogations that took place at Guantanamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the CIA’s so-called “black sites” under the administration’s “enhanced interrogations” program. We have learned from this record how the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape [SERE] program, designed to inoculate our troops from being coerced into false confessions if captured by a power that did not respect the Geneva Conventions, was reverse engineered to develop interrogation techniques to “break down” detainees held by the United States, so that they supposedly could no longer resist cooperating with interrogators.

We have learned that the “psychological techniques” of prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation and sensory overload, sleep deprivation, and cultural and sexual humiliation were at the core of this program, with techniques such as simulated drowning or waterboarding, threats with dogs, and threats of being buried alive or even threats to detainees’ family members being used in certain instances. These enhanced techniques, we have learned, are based on a fifty-year old paradigm of creating “debility, dread, and dependency” in detainees1. Additionally, according to evidence in the recent report Leave No Marks by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First, these techniques cause severe and prolonged mental and physical harm to detainees and subject those who use them to serious risk of criminality2.

We have learned that the former SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen of Mitchell Jessen and Associates (Offices: Spokane, Washington; Alexandria, Virginia) used these SERE-based techniques during interrogations at CIA detention centers in Thailand. We have learned from the Pentagon’s Office of the Inspector General [OIG] that active-duty SERE psychologists trained psychologists in the Guantanamo Behavioral Science Consultation Teams [BSCTs] and others in the use of these so-called “counter-resistance” techniques. We have learned from the OIG that SERE psychologists went to both Iraq and Afghanistan to train interrogators in the use of these counter-resistance techniques

We have further learned that these counter-resistance techniques were used extensively in Guantanamo in 2002-2004, with the participation of BSCT psychologists. We have also learned that BSCT psychologists at this time consulted not only on interrogations, narrowly defined, but on the often abusive conditions of detention under which detainees are kept. The public record is less clear on what has occurred since then, though, as recently as this past April, Amnesty International reported on the extensive use of prolonged isolation with many prisoners in Guantanamo.

This summer the President issued an Executive Order reauthorizing certain of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, which, by definition, are “enhanced” because they go beyond those techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual. [We know that certain techniques sanctioned in the Army Field Manual itself, such as isolation for prolonged periods and manipulation of fears of detainee, would be considered unethical according to international codes of ethics, at least for health professionals.] Thus, these techniques almost certainly fall into the legally proscribed categories of torture and/or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.

We fear that psychologists are still playing roles in the implementation of these abusive and illegal techniques. We know that during a July 22, 2007 appearance on Meet the Press, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell stated: “When I was in a situation where I had to sign off, as a member of the process, my name to this executive order, I sat down with those who had been trained to do it, the doctors who monitor it, understanding that no one is subjected to torture. They’re, they’re [sic] treated in a way that they have adequate diet, not exposed to heat or cold. They’re not abused in any way. But I did understand, when exposed to the techniques, how they work and why they work, all under medical supervision.” Now we do not know, given the paucity of publicly-available evidence about the CIA’s programs, whether psychologists have ever participated in this “medical supervision,” but we are concerned that psychologists may have been put in that position as the Surgeon General of the Army described the role of psychologists BSCTs as “safety officers.”3 As it is a further breach of medical ethics for a health professional to certify a detainee’s fitness for abusive interrogation, we feel that is essential for our profession, for this committee, and for the American people to know whether this has been the case.

In this same interview Director McConnell also stated: “I would not want a U.S. citizen to go through the process. But it is not torture, and there would be no permanent damage to that citizen.” As psychologists and as citizens, we know that any “process” that Director McConnell would not want a U.S. citizen to go through is a process that no one anywhere should be subjected to and certainly is a process that no American citizen should be administering to others. And we know from extensive clinical work and research studies on the consequences of abusive interrogations that these effects are often long-lasting, in contradiction of Director McConnell’s claim2. Thus, despite all suggestions to the contrary, these enhanced techniques appear in many cases to surpass the threshold for a legal definition as “torture” and almost certainly to pass that for “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.” As a result, those operatives, psychologists included, who participate in the use of these techniques are placed at serious risk of committing prosecutable criminal violations. The reputation of the United States on the international stage itself is also at risk. As a violator of international human rights laws, we limit our capacity and legitimacy to intervene when other nations practice torture.

As psychologists we are thoroughly aware that research, as well as the experience of professional interrogators, casts doubt upon the efficacy of these “harsh” techniques. Indeed, FBI investigators have repeatedly challenged the use of abusive SERE-based techniques at both military and CIA facilities. Additionally, on July 31, 2006, 20 former Army interrogators wrote the House Armed Services Committee opposing the use of these techniques as “counter-productive to the intelligence gathering mission.”

Concerns About Policies of the American Psychological Association on Interrogation Involvement

In addition to our dismay as citizens at these types of actions by our government, we are concerned as psychologists that psychologist involvement in abusive interrogations is in violation of established national and international norms of medical and psychological ethics4. In its Declaration of Tokyo Guidelines for Physicians Concerning Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in Relation to Detention and Imprisonment, the World Medical Association stated: “The physician shall not use nor allow to be used, as far as he or she can, medical knowledge or skills, or health information specific to individuals, to facilitate or otherwise aid any interrogation, legal or illegal.” Similarly, the American Medical Association, the American Nurses Association, and the American Psychiatric Association have taken clear unequivocal positions affirming the primacy of the health-promoting missions of their respective professions. These organizations have all emphasized the central tenet of the ethics of all health professions: the injunction to do no harm.

It is with distress, and indeed shame, that we psychologists note that the American Psychological Association [APA] alone among the national health professional associations has failed to take an unequivocal stand prohibiting participation of its members in potentially abusive interrogations. As was evident in its testimony to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the APA explicitly allows members to participate in the infliction of harm, as long as that harm does not exceed a certain threshold – causing “significant pain or distress” or of being “lasting”. This policy, sadly, echoes the word-parsing of the Bush Administration’s “torture memos” and other official policies and documents justifying the administration’s harsh interrogation strategies. Word-parsing may have a political rationale, but it is antithetical to professional ethics in that it indicates an intent to deceive or obscure. When this is the intent with regard to an issue as significant as torture, it brings into question the profession’s, and the nation’s, genuine commitment to human rights.

Like psychologists in any institutional setting, military or CIA psychologists, asked to participate in interrogations, need clear ethical guidance. These psychologists, in the heat of high-profile operations, cannot be expected to successfully parse words as to whether the pain or distress is sufficient to meet the APA’s standard for being “significant.” Nor can these psychologists be expected to predict whether a particular technique, used perhaps in combination with other techniques, will cause “lasting harm.” Thus, the APA policy leaves military and intelligence psychologists at risk of committing unethical and perhaps illegal actions and fails to protect members who are military and intelligence psychologists.

Ambiguities in the roles of psychologists also threaten the abilities of military and intelligence-agency psychologists to perform their primary health-promoting activities. To the extent that uncertainty exists around the roles of psychologists and whether or not psychologists’ primary responsibility is to promote health, the trust upon which all psychological and medical treatment depends will be severely damaged. As a result, potential patients may become reluctant to seek needed psychological care. At a time when many thousands of our soldiers are suffering severe psychological trauma, often requiring intensive psychological treatment, this loss of trust can hardly be risked.

We are also deeply concerned that the 2007 Resolution by APA Council makes it ethical practice for psychologists to participate in the violation of international human rights standards. In particular, the resolution allows psychologists to practice and support interrogations in sites that operate outside the protections offered by the Geneva Conventions and other international human rights instruments such as the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment [CAT]. As the illegal, indefinite detention of people at these sites itself constitutes a violation of international law and human rights standards, psychologists’ operational activities at these sites only legitimates these human rights violations.

Recommendations

We therefore ask Congress and this committee to take the following steps to clarify the status of psychologists in the military and intelligence agencies:

1. Conduct a thorough investigation of the role of psychologists, and of psychological knowledge and expertise, in the abusive interrogations carried out by this Administration. This investigation should clarify for the public the roles of SERE psychologists and SERE-based techniques in these interrogations. It should clarify the processes whereby SERE and other psychological knowledge and techniques were implemented at the CIA’s “black sites” and in military detention facilities at Guantanamo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. This investigation should clarify the degree to which psychologists helped turn these abusive techniques into standard operating procedures at these facilities. It should also clarify the extent to which psychologists and psychological knowledge and expertise are currently being utilized in support of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogations” program. Further, clarification is needed as to whether psychologists have ever participated in the “medical supervision” of interrogations at Guantanamo or of the “enhanced interrogations” that Director McConnell described.

2. Clarify that the infliction of harm of any degree is never an appropriate role for psychologists, their trainees and supervisees, or any other health professionals in national security contexts. Our military and intelligence colleagues need the warrant of Congressional mandate to identify and refrain from unethical participation in abusive or coercive interrogation practices.

3. Ban the use of enhanced interrogation techniques going beyond those authorized by the Army Field Manual, which itself needs revision, at any U.S. detention facility, whether run by the military, CIA, or any other government or private agency.

4. We would also like to add our voice to those urging Congress to act immediately to restore habeas corpus and other basic human rights, as defined in the Geneva Conventions, the UN CAT and other relevant international instruments, to all those sought or detained by the U.S. as “enemy combatants.” The CIA’s secret detention and rendition practices and CIA-run prisons are of particular concern. We urge Congress to take action speeding the closure of Guantánamo Bay, CIA-run prisons, and other secretive detention sites; Prisoners held at these sites should be transferred to sites in the U.S. that transparently observe due process & other international human rights standards & laws. Concomitantly, Congress should ban the practice of extraordinary rendition of detainees to countries documented by the State Department to use torture or other abusive interrogation techniques. Respect for human rights is a fundamental aspect of what makes us a civilized society.

We thank you for this opportunity to assist your vital efforts to rectify this sad chapter in our nation’s history.

Institutional Signers:

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Psychologists for Social Responsibility
The Center for Victims of Torture, Minneapolis, MN
Psychologists for an Ethical APA
Withhold APA Dues (www.withholdapadues.org)
Monterey Bay (CA) Psychological Association

Individual Signers:
[Affiliations for identification purposes only].

Stephen Soldz, Ph.D. Cert. Psya., Director, Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis & Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

Steven Reisner, Ph.D., Senior Faculty and Advisor, International Trauma Studies Program, an affiliate of the Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York & Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

Brad Olson, Northwestern University & Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

Jean Maria Arrigo, Ph.D., Former Member of the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS Task Force)

Mike Wessells, Columbia University & Former Member of the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS Task Force)

Anthony J. Marsella, Ph.D., President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, Washington, DC; Former vice president for academic affairs, University of Hawaii & Former Director of the World Health Organization Psychiatric Research Center, Honolulu

Jancis Long Ph.D., President-elect, Psychologists for Social Responsibility & University of California, Berkeley Extension

Morton Deutsch, E.L. Thorndike Professor Emeritus of Psychology &
Director Emeritus of the International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution (ICCCR)

Phil Zimbardo, Ph.D., Former President, American Psychological Association, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University, Director, CIPERT, Center for Interdisciplinary Policy, Education and Research on Terrorism

Mary Pipher, author of New York Times bestselling Reviving Ophelia

Jerome L. Singer, Ph.D., Professor-Emeritus of Psychology, Yale University

Tom Gutheil, M.D., Professor, Department of Psychiatry, BIDMC, Harvard Medical School

Ghislaine Boulanger, Ph.D., Steering Committee, WithholdAPAdues

Trudy Bond, Ph.D., Independent Practice

Nancy Hollander, Ph.D., Professor Emerita of History, California State University,

Arlene Lu Steinberg, Ph.D., President, Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility (APA Division 39 Section 9)

Herbert C. Kelman, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Emeritus, Harvard University

Ben Harris, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, University of New Hampshire & Past President, APA Division 26: Society for the History of Psychology

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Ph. D., Department of Psychology, Boston University

Gary R. Schoener, Executive Director, Walk-In Counseling Center, Minneapolis

Dan Aalbers, Central Michigan University

Elliot G. Mishler, Ph.D., Professor of Social Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School

Ruth Fallenbaum, Ph.D., Survivors International, San Francisco & The Wright Institute, Berkeley

Frank Summers, Ph.D., ABPP, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Northwestern University Medical School

Jeffrey S. Kaye, Ph.D., Clinician, Survivors International, San Francisco, CA

Meg Sandow, Psy.D., Licensed Psychologist, Santa Cruz, CA

Mark Kane, President, The West Michigan Family Therapy Institute

James C. Coyne, Ph.D., Director, Behavioral Oncology Program, Abramson Cancer Center & Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine

Jo Oppenheimer, The Counseling Center for Women – Israel & Women’s Therapy Center Institute – New York

David Sloan-Rossiter, Curriculum Chair, Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis & Boston Institute for Psychotherapy

Ibrahim Kira, Ph.D., ACCESS Community Health and Research Center &
Center for Cumulative Trauma Studies

Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis

Hermine Muskat, Ed.D., Licensed Psychologist, Back Bay Films, LLC., Boston

Victoria Steinitz, Associate Professor of Psychology (ret.), University of Massachusetts-Boston

Jennifer W. Kaupp, President, Monterey Bay Psychological Association

Robert L. Weiss, Ph.D., Professor emeritus of Psychology, University of Oregon

Elaine M. Heiby, Ph.D., Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Scot D. Evans, Ph.D., Wilfrid Laurier University, Psychologists Acting with Conscience Together

Edward S. Katkin, Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Psychiatry, State University of New York at Stony Brook & Past President, Society for Psychophysiological Research

Donnel B. Stern, Ph.D., William Alanson White Institute and New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

Irwin S. Rosenfarb, Ph.D., Professor, California School of Professional Psychology Alliant International University

Paul Kimmel, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center & Past President of APA Division 48 and of Psychologists for Social Responsibility

Rosa E. Garcia-Peltoniemi, Ph.D., L.P., Senior Consulting Clinician, The Center for Victims of Torture, Minneapolis, MN

Andrea Northwood, Ph.D., L.P., Director of Client Services, The Center for Victims of Torture
Michael Jackson, Chair, Department of Psychology, Earlham College

Works Cited

1. McCoy AW. A question of torture: CIA interrogation, from the Cold War to the war on terror. 1st ed. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Co., 2006.
2. Physicians for Human Rights, Human Rights First. Leave No Marks: Enhanced Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality. Physicians for Human Rights, 2007.
3. Lt. Gen. Kevin C. Kiley, Surgeon General of the Army Final Report: Assessment of Medical Operations for OEF, GTMO, and OIF. April 13, 2005
4. Miles SH. Oath betrayed: Torture, medical complicity, and the war on terror. 1st ed. New York: Random House, 2006.

Contact:

Stephen Soldz
ude.psgbnull@zdloss
617-935-4246