{"id":943,"date":"2007-08-05T15:32:07","date_gmt":"2007-08-05T15:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/psychologists-and-cia-torture\/943\/"},"modified":"2007-08-05T15:32:07","modified_gmt":"2007-08-05T15:32:07","slug":"psychologists-and-cia-torture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/psychologists-and-cia-torture\/","title":{"rendered":"Psychologists and CIA torture"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Stephen Soldz<\/a><\/p>\n

Last month Vanity Fair<\/em> online published Katherine Eban\u2019s account<\/font><\/a> of the psychologist-designed torture of Abu Zubaydah, designed and conducted by CIA consultants Mitchell and Jessen, former Suvival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) psychologists. This week, the New Yorker<\/em> publishes a companion piece by Jane Mayer on the CIA torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [The Black Sites<\/font><\/a>]. In the course of a long piece, the article sheds more light on the role of psychologists in US torture.<\/p>\n

Here are a few excerpts on the role of psychologists:<\/p>\n

The C.I.A. program\u2019s first important detainee was Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda operative, who was captured by Pakistani forces in March of 2002. Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as \u201ca \u2018Clockwork Orange\u2019 kind of approach.\u201d The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE\u2013an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape\u2013was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.\u2019s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. \u201cThey were very arrogant, and pro-torture,\u201d a European official knowledgeable about the program said. \u201cThey sought to render the detainees vulnerable\u2013to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, \u201cClearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can\u2019t just say, \u2018We want to do what Egypt\u2019s doing.\u2019 When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, \u2018We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.\u2019 \u201d He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. \u201cBehavioral scientists said, \u2018Don\u2019t even think about this!\u2019 They thought officers could be prosecuted.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, the SERE experts\u2019 theories were apparently put into practice with Zubaydah\u2019s interrogation. Zubaydah told the Red Cross that he was not only waterboarded, as has been previously reported; he was also kept for a prolonged period in a cage, known as a \u201cdog box,\u201d which was so small that he could not stand. According to an eyewitness, one psychologist advising on the treatment of Zubaydah, James Mitchell, argued that he needed to be reduced to a state of \u201clearned helplessness.\u201d (Mitchell disputes this characterization.)<\/p>\n

Steve Kleinman, a reserve Air Force colonel and an experienced interrogator who has known Mitchell professionally for years, said that \u201clearned helplessness was his whole paradigm.\u201d Mitchell, he said, \u201cdraws a diagram showing what he says is the whole cycle. It starts with isolation. Then they eliminate the prisoners\u2019 ability to forecast the future\u2013when their next meal is, when they can go to the bathroom. It creates dread and dependency. It was the K.G.B. model. But the K.G.B. used it to get people who had turned against the state to confess falsely. The K.G.B. wasn\u2019t after intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the C.I.A. captured and interrogated other Al Qaeda figures, it established a protocol of psychological coercion. The program tied together many strands of the agency\u2019s secret history of Cold War-era experiments in behavioral science. (In June, the C.I.A. declassified long-held secret documents known as the Family Jewels, which shed light on C.I.A. drug experiments on rats and monkeys, and on the infamous case of Frank R. Olson, an agency employee who leaped to his death from a hotel window in 1953, nine days after he was unwittingly drugged with LSD.) The C.I.A.\u2019s most useful research focussed on the surprisingly powerful effects of psychological manipulations, such as extreme sensory deprivation. According to Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, who has written a history of the C.I.A.\u2019s experiments in coercing subjects, the agency learned that \u201cif subjects are confined without light, odors, sound, or any fixed references of time and place, very deep breakdowns can be provoked.\u201d<\/p>\n

Agency scientists found that in just a few hours some subjects suspended in water tanks\u2013or confined in isolated rooms wearing blacked-out goggles and earmuffs\u2013regressed to semi-psychotic states. Moreover, McCoy said, detainees become so desperate for human interaction that \u201cthey bond with the interrogator like a father, or like a drowning man having a lifesaver thrown at him. If you deprive people of all their senses, they\u2019ll turn to you like their daddy.\u201d McCoy added that \u201cafter the Cold War we put away those tools. There was bipartisan reform. We backed away from those dark days. Then, under the pressure of the war on terror, they didn\u2019t just bring back the old psychological techniques\u2013they perfected them.\u201d<\/p>\n

The C.I.A.\u2019s interrogation program is remarkable for its mechanistic aura. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the most sophisticated, refined programs of torture ever,\u201d an outside expert familiar with the protocol said. \u201cAt every stage, there was a rigid attention to detail. Procedure was adhered to almost to the letter. There was top-down quality control, and such a set routine that you get to the point where you know what each detainee is going to say, because you\u2019ve heard it before. It was almost automated. People were utterly dehumanized. People fell apart. It was the intentional and systematic infliction of great suffering masquerading as a legal process. It is just chilling.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Katherine Eban\u2019s Vanity Fair<\/font><\/a><\/em> articlerevealed the existence of a December 10, 2002 document \u2013 SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure \u2013 establishing certain of these SERE-derived torture techniques as standard Operating procedure for US abuse at Guantanamo. Mayer reveals a bit more of the contents of this chilling document which shows the degree to which torture became routinized and bureaucratically organized in American gulags:<\/p>\n

\n

A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing \u201cSERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,\u201d outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. \u201cIn addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.\u201d The document advises interrogators to \u201ctear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.\u201d The memo also advocates the \u201cShoulder Slap,\u201d \u201cStomach Slap,\u201d \u201cHooding,\u201d \u201cManhandling,\u201d \u201cWalling,\u201d and a variety of \u201cStress Positions,\u201d including one called \u201cWorship the Gods.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Mayer also reveals the important role of doctors in US torture:<\/p>\n

In the process of being transported, C.I.A. detainees such as Mohammed were screened by medical experts, who checked their vital signs, took blood samples, and marked a chart with a diagram of a human body, noting scars, wounds, and other imperfections. As the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry put it, \u201cIt\u2019s like when you hire a motor vehicle, circling where the scratches are on the rearview mirror. Each detainee was continually assessed, physically and psychologically.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Mayer also makes clear that we are talking about \u201ctorture\u201d here, not any supposed \u201ctorture-lite\u201d:<\/p>\n

Ramzi Kassem, who teaches at Yale Law School, said that a Yemeni client of his, Sanad al-Kazimi, who is now in Guant\u00c3\u00a1namo, alleged that he had received similar treatment in the Dark Prison, the facility near Kabul. Kazimi claimed to have been suspended by his arms for long periods, causing his legs to swell painfully. \u201cIt\u2019s so traumatic, he can barely speak of it,\u201d Kassem said. \u201cHe breaks down in tears.\u201d Kazimi also claimed that, while hanging, he was beaten with electric cables.<\/p>\n

According to sources familiar with interrogation techniques, the hanging position is designed, in part, to prevent detainees from being able to sleep. The former C.I.A. officer, who is knowledgeable about the interrogation program, explained that \u201csleep deprivation works. Your electrolyte balance changes. You lose all balance and ability to think rationally. Stuff comes out.\u201d Sleep deprivation has been recognized as an effective form of coercion since the Middle Ages, when it was called tormentum insomniae<\/em>. It was also recognized for decades in the United States as an illegal form of torture. An American Bar Association report, published in 1930, which was cited in a later U.S. Supreme Court decision, said, \u201cIt has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under President Bush\u2019s new executive order, C.I.A. detainees must receive the \u201cbasic necessities of life, including adequate food and water, shelter from the elements, necessary clothing, protection from extremes of heat and cold, and essential medical care.\u201d Sleep, according to the order, is not among the basic necessities.<\/p>\n

In addition to keeping a prisoner awake, the simple act of remaining upright can over time cause significant pain. McCoy, the historian, noted that \u201clongtime standing\u201d was a common K.G.B. interrogation technique. In his 2006 book, \u201cA Question of Torture,\u201d he writes that the Soviets found that making a victim stand for eighteen to twenty-four hours can produce \u201cexcruciating pain, as ankles double in size, skin becomes tense and intensely painful, blisters erupt oozing watery serum, heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And:<\/p>\n

Among the few C.I.A. officials who knew the details of the detention and interrogation program, there was a tense debate about where to draw the line in terms of treatment. John Brennan, Tenet\u2019s former chief of staff, said, \u201cIt all comes down to individual moral barometers.\u201d Waterboarding, in particular, troubled many officials, from both a moral and a legal perspective. Until 2002, when Bush Administration lawyers asserted that waterboarding was a permissible interrogation technique for \u201cenemy combatants,\u201d it was classified as a form of torture, and treated as a serious criminal offense. American soldiers were court-martialled for waterboarding captives as recently as the Vietnam War.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But the psychological disorientation was paramount:<\/p>\n

\n

Some detainees held by the C.I.A. claimed that their cells were bombarded with deafening sound twenty-fours hours a day for weeks, and even months. One detainee, Binyam Mohamed, who is now in Guant\u00c3\u00a1namo, told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, that speakers blared music into his cell while he was handcuffed. Detainees recalled the sound as ranging from ghoulish laughter, \u201clike the soundtrack from a horror film,\u201d to ear-splitting rap anthems. Stafford Smith said that his client found the psychological torture more intolerable than the physical abuse that he said he had been previously subjected to in Morocco, where, he said, local intelligence agents had sliced him with a razor blade. \u201cThe C.I.A. worked people day and night for months,\u201d Stafford Smith quoted Binyam Mohamed as saying. \u201cPlenty lost their minds. I could hear people knocking their heads against the walls and doors, screaming their heads off.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Some US interrogators with SERE training claim that this treatment can\u2019t be torture because its nothing more than is done to US troops during SERE training. They can\u2019t seem to distinguish a couple of days of abuse under known limited conditions from the never-ending tortures inflicted upon real detainees:<\/p>\n

\n

One of these former [CIA] officers defends the C.I.A.\u2019s program by noting that \u201cthere was absolutely nothing done to K.S.M. that wasn\u2019t done to the interrogators themselves\u201d\u2013a reference to SERE-like training. Yet the Red Cross report emphasizes that it was the simultaneous use of several techniques for extended periods that made the treatment \u201cespecially abusive.\u201d Senator Carl Levin, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, who has been a prominent critic of the Administration\u2019s embrace of harsh interrogation techniques, said that, particularly with sensory deprivation, \u201cthere\u2019s a point where it\u2019s torture. You can put someone in a refrigerator and it\u2019s torture. Everything is a matter of degree.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As Mayer makes clear, the US torture regime became more systematic, more routinized, more bureaucratic over time. Eventually Mohammed was moved to the US\u2019s state-of-the-art secret torture facility in Poland:<\/p>\n

But, according to well-informed sources, it was a far more high-tech facility than the prisons in Afghanistan. The cells had hydraulic doors and air-conditioning. Multiple cameras in each cell provided video surveillance of the detainees. In some ways, the circumstances were better: the detainees were given bottled water. Without confirming the existence of any black sites, Robert Grenier, the former C.I.A. counterterrorism chief, said, \u201cThe agency\u2019s techniques became less aggressive as they learned the art of interrogation,\u201d which, he added, \u201cis<\/em> an art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mohammed was kept in a prolonged state of sensory deprivation, during which every point of reference was erased. The Council on Europe\u2019s report describes a four-month isolation regime as typical. The prisoners had no exposure to natural light, making it impossible for them to tell if it was night or day. They interacted only with masked, silent guards. (A detainee held at what was most likely an Eastern European black site, Mohammed al-Asad, told me that white noise was piped in constantly, although during electrical outages he could hear people crying.) According to a source familiar with the Red Cross report, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he was shackled and kept naked, except for a pair of goggles and earmuffs. (Some prisoners were kept naked for as long as forty days.) He had no idea where he was, although, at one point, he apparently glimpsed Polish writing on a water bottle.<\/p>\n

In the C.I.A.\u2019s program, meals were delivered sporadically, to insure that the prisoners remained temporally disoriented. The food was largely tasteless, and barely enough to live on. Mohammed, who upon his capture in Rawalpindi was photographed looking flabby and unkempt, was now described as being slim. Experts on the C.I.A. program say that the administering of food is part of its psychological arsenal. Sometimes portions were smaller than the day before, for no apparent reason. \u201cIt was all part of the conditioning,\u201d the person involved in the Council of Europe inquiry said. \u201cIt\u2019s all calibrated to develop dependency.\u201d<\/p>\n

The inquiry source said that most of the Poland detainees were waterboarded, including Mohammed. According to the sources familiar with the Red Cross report, Mohammed claimed to have been waterboarded five times. Two former C.I.A. officers who are friends with one of Mohammed\u2019s interrogators called this bravado, insisting that he was waterboarded only once. According to one of the officers, Mohammed needed only to be shown the drowning equipment again before he \u201cbroke.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWaterboarding works,\u201d the former officer said. \u201cDrowning is a baseline fear. So is falling. People dream about it. It\u2019s human nature. Suffocation is a very scary thing. When you\u2019re waterboarded, you\u2019re inverted, so it exacerbates the fear. It\u2019s not painful, but it scares the shit out of you.\u201d (The former officer was waterboarded himself in a training course.) Mohammed, he claimed, \u201cdidn\u2019t resist. He sang right away. He cracked real quick.\u201d He said, \u201cA lot of them want to talk. Their egos are unimaginable. K.S.M. was just a little doughboy. He couldn\u2019t stand toe to toe and fight it out.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article also shows the moral complexity of America\u2019s torture regime as a former CIA official insists the program is \u201csafe\u201d for the detainees but speaks of the psychological damage to the interrogators\u201d:<\/p>\n

The former officer said that the C.I.A. kept a doctor standing by during interrogations. He insisted that the method was safe and effective, but said that it could cause lasting psychic damage to the interrogators. During interrogations, the former agency official said, officers worked in teams, watching each other behind two-way mirrors. Even with this group support, the friend said, Mohammed\u2019s interrogator \u201chas horrible nightmares.\u201d He went on, \u201cWhen you cross over that line of darkness, it\u2019s hard to come back. You lose your soul. You can do your best to justify it, but it\u2019s well outside the norm. You can\u2019t go to that dark a place without it changing you.\u201d He said of his friend, \u201cHe\u2019s a good guy. It really haunts him. You are inflicting something really evil and horrible on somebody.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This article again raises the issue of the centrality of psychology to America\u2019s torture regime. It was the supposed knowledge, expertise, credentials, and legitimacy of psychologists that was important to the CIA torture-planners.The psychological profession will be stained by this association, and by its silence while these abuses occurred in our name. Not untill the profession fully investigates and condemns these abuses will the stain begin to be lifted. No simple \u201cbanning\u201d of specific torture techniques by the American Psychological Association (APA) can possibly be an adequate reply to these horrors. The profession must loudly and collectively cry \u201cShame!\u201d and \u201cNever again!\u201d<\/p>\n

Further, the critical collaboration and silence of the APA leadership during this profound moral crisis cannot go unchallenged. In the interests of maintaining their ties to the military and the CIA, these leaders were more than willing to turn a blind eye to the torture being designed and conducted by our psychological colleagues. They never uttered a peep of concern for these abuses, but, rather, parsed words to try and evade responsibility. In the final accounting for US torture, the APA leadership will certainly bear a measure of the responsibility.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Stephen Soldz Last month Vanity Fair online published Katherine Eban\u2019s account of the psychologist-designed torture of Abu Zubaydah, designed and conducted by CIA consultants Mitchell and Jessen, former Suvival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) psychologists. This week, the New Yorker publishes a companion piece by Jane Mayer on the CIA torture of Khalid Sheikh […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[32],"class_list":{"0":"post-943","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-latest-news","7":"tag-cia"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}