Psychologists shielded U.S. torture program, report finds

James Risen

WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s health professionals repeatedly criticized the agency’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation program, but their protests were rebuffed by prominent outside psychologists who lent credibility to the program, according to a sweeping new report. The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.

The report concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the interrogation policies of the Defense Department, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the C.I.A.’s interrogation program and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.

The association’s own ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public.”

Two former presidents of the psychological association were members of a C.I.A. advisory committee, the report found. One of them provided the agency with an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture, and later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program, it said.

The association’s ethics director, Stephen Behnke, coordinated the group’s public policy statements on interrogations with a top military psychologist, the report said, and then received a Pentagon contract to help train interrogators while he was still working at the association, without the knowledge of the association’s board. Behnke departed his post on July 8.

The report, which had not previously been made public, is the result of a seven-month investigation conducted by a team led by Chicago lawyer David Hoffman, at the request of the psychology association’s board.

The involvement of psychologists in the interrogation programs has been a source of contention within the profession for years. Another report, issued in April by several critics of the association, came to similar conclusions. But Mr. Hoffman’s report is by far the most detailed look yet into the crucial roles played by behavioral scientists, especially top officials at the A.P.A. and some of the most prominent figures in the profession, in the interrogation programs. It also shows that the collaboration was much more extensive than was previously known.

A report last December by the Senate Intelligence Committee detailed the brutality of some of the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods. The C.I.A. and the Pentagon both conducted harsh interrogations during the administration of President George W. Bush, although the C.I.A.’s program included more brutal tactics. Some of them, like the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding, are now widely regarded as torture. The agency’s interrogations were done at so-called “black site” prisons around the world where prisoners were held secretly for years.

The report found that while some prominent psychologists collaborated with C.I.A. officials in ways that aided the agency’s interrogation program, the A.P.A. and its staff members were more focused on working with the Pentagon, with which the association has long had strong ties. The report said that senior officials of the association had “colluded” with senior Defense Department officials to make certain that the association’s ethics rules did not hinder the ability of psychologists to remain involved with the Pentagon’s interrogation program.

The report’s most immediate impact will be felt at the association, where it has been presented to the board and its members’ council. The association has since renounced 2005 ethics guidelines that allowed psychologists to stay involved in the harsh interrogations, but several staff members who were named in the report have remained at the organization.

Dissent began building within the C.I.A. against the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques not long after the agency’s interrogation program began. In about late 2002, the head of the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, Terrence DeMay, started to complain about the involvement in the program of James Mitchell, a psychologist and instructor at the Air Force’s SERE (survival, evasion, rescue and escape) program, in which United States military personnel are subjected to simulated torture to gird them for possible capture.

In March, 2004, other insiders at the agency emailed the A.P.A. to say they had concerns that psychologists were assisting with interrogations in ways that contradicted the association’s ethics code. One of those who contacted the association was Charles Morgan, a C.I.A. contractor and psychiatrist who had studied military personnel who went through the SERE program’s simulated torture training, research that showed that the techniques used on them could not be used to collect accurate information.

The ethical concerns raised by Mr. Morgan and others inside the C.I.A. led to a confidential meeting in July 2004 at the A.P.A. of about 15 behavioral scientists who worked for national security agencies. This was followed by the creation of an association task force to study the ethics of psychologists’ involvement in interrogations. But association and government officials filled the task force with national security insiders, and it concluded in 2005 that it was fine for psychologists to remain involved, the report found.

“The evidence supports the conclusion that A.P.A. officials colluded with D.O.D. officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain A.P.A. ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key D.O.D. officials wanted,” the report says, adding, “A.P.A. chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping D.O.D., managing its P.R., and maximizing the growth of the profession.”

Nadine Kaslow, a former president of the beleaguered A.P.A. said psychologists should no longer aid the military at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere — effectively reversing more than a decade of institutional insistence that such participation was responsible and ethical. Kaslow said the A.P.A. would deliver the Hoffman report to the Senate armed-services and intelligence committees and the inspectors general of the Pentagon and the CIA. But she stopped short of committing to referring it to the FBI for potential criminal inquiry. She indicated that the A.P.A. recognized it had much work to do to restore public confidence.

– edited from The New York Times, July 10, 2015
PeaceMeal, July/August 2015

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


U.S. vague about alleged abuses of treaty against torture

=The international community watched closely as representatives from the United States government defended its compliance with the international Convention Against Torture (CAT) in front of the United Nations Committee against Torture in Geneva. The violations in question ranged from allegations of CIA rendition (sending prisoners to secret facilities) and the conditions at Guantanamo Bay prison to practices at domestic prisons and police brutality, as highlighted by events in Ferguson, Missouri.CAT signatories are required to submit reports on their adherence to the international treaty every four years. After reviewing these reports, the U.N. Committee Against Torture, a body of 10 independent experts, invites government officials from a country to expand on its report. The in-person review of U.S. practices, which took place on November 12 and 13, marked the first since President Obama took office in 2009.

The day before the review began, the committee took testimony ranging from experts on the death penalty and activists against torture to a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and the parents of Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson.

Mary McLeod, acting legal adviser for the State Department, said in introductory remarks that in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States regrettably had not lived up to its own values. As acknowledged by President Obama, the United States had crossed the line in the use of torture and was now taking steps to ensure adherence to its legal obligations.

President Obama issued an executive order banning the use of torture in 2009, shortly after taking office. The U.N. review investigated whether the Obama administration stuck to its promise to end the controversial Bush-era enhanced interrogation techniques and how well the administration has upheld the CAT’s terms since. The experts cited instances in which the U.S. violated the torture treaty abroad and asked for clarification “as to whether the U.S. considers all aspects of the convention to be applicable.”

Alessio Bruni, one of the U.N. committee’s experts, asked the U.S. representatives to elaborate on whether their government believes the prohibition on torture applies to its officials “abroad without geographic limitation.” But in answering the question, the U.S. reiterated its vague position. Representatives responded that the CIA no longer operates secret detention facilities and clarified that the U.S. understands the CAT obligations to apply only “where the U.S. acts as a governmental authority.” This answer left a key concern of the committee unresolved: whether the Obama administration has fully abandoned the Bush interpretation of the treaty to exclude the actions of U.S. officials abroad.

Bruni wondered how the U.S. was able to reconcile the force-feeding of Guantanamo prisoners with the terms of the treaty, and how it could claim it was not operating secret facilities when it fails to register detainees, calling registration “a first step to prevent torture since his or her identity and location are a sort of deterrent against any form of ill treatment, which needs secrecy to be carried out with total impunity.”

Representative for the U.S. Brigadier General Richard Gross said that force-feeding was only used as a last resort to address medical issues such as malnutrition and was evidence of the U.S. holding to its value of preserving life in a humane manner. He added that, according to the laws of armed conflict with groups like Al-Qaeda, the U.S. can legally hold detainees (without charge) until the end of hostilities.

Another U.S. representative told the committee that the U.S. does not have a unified policy regarding the registration of detainees, but “appropriate records” are kept and “comprehensive safeguards” are in place. The delegation made no mention of detainees of national security or intelligence agencies, such as the CIA — the committee’s prime concern.

Since the U.S. last reported to the committee in 2006, more evidence of violations have been reported by the media or alleged by human rights groups. But the U.S. has done little to demonstrate that it is holding accountable the top officials who gave the orders to torture. Groups like Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions say that the United States is shielding those responsible, which is in direct violation of its CAT obligations.

“It’s at the heart of everything,” Deborah Popowski, a clinical instructor at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and a member of Advocates for U.S. Torture Prosecutions, said in an interview with Newsweek. Referring to what she called the “legal framework the U.S. government built to shield itself from liability” (a mixture of legal opinions that distort laws governing torture and the use of the Military Commissions Act to retroactively redefine war crimes to impede prosecution), she said that by “choosing to immunize those responsible, [the U.S. government] legitimizes their actions and the legacy lives on, the precedent is set.”

Experts asked for evidence that the U.S. is investigating and prosecuting senior officials. Brigadier General Gross stated that the military is always required to investigate allegations of violations of the law and that there have been thousands of investigations into the mistreatment of detainees since 2001. He claimed that hundreds have been prosecuted for their misconduct — a number often repeated but never fully substantiated.

The committee also brought up the U.S. prison system and inquired as to how current practices can be justified in light of the country’s CAT obligations. Among the concerns were the use of solitary confinement, the treatment of minors and those with mental health disorders in particular, the lack of accountability for prison officials who have been accused of sexual abuse, and the sentencing of those who have committed nonviolent offenses to life without parole.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Attorney General David Bitkower said that solitary confinement is not imposed with the intention of inflicting psychological harm on inmates. U.S. representatives also touched upon minors in prison, saying that 7,400 juveniles were in adult prisons in 2011 and followed with the claim that sexual assault is higher in juvenile facilities than in adult prisons. The delegation also assured the committee that, if states do not adhere to federal standards regarding the sexual abuse of prisoners, they lose funding.

Jens Modvig, another expert serving on the committee, asked whether anything was being done to prevent police from using excessive force or if any steps were being taken to review the distribution of military equipment to local law enforcement, especially in light of the events that occurred over the summer in Ferguson, Missouri, and the prolonged gun violence in Chicago.

As the U.S. representatives skirted around these questions about police misconduct, they said little to ease the committee’s concerns regarding state and local law enforcement acquisition of military-grade weapons.

– edited from Newsweek, November 13, 2014
PeaceMeal Nov/December 2014

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


The cost of not ‘looking backwards’ at torture

Andrew_Rosenthal.jpg (2824 bytes)Andrew Rosenthal
The New York Times, March 6, 2014

In the last few days, Americans were treated to an appalling battle between the Central Intelligence Agency and its Congressional overseers over the Senate’s attempt to investigate the C.I.A.’s post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. The fight is over two still-secret documents — a 2009 C.I.A. inspector general’s report on those practices, and a four-year-long investigation by the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Some Democratic senators on the panel accused the C.I.A. of breaking into the computers of their committee’s staff members in an attempt to find out how they got access to that 2009 report. The head of the C.I.A., John Brennan, fumed about “spurious allegations,” in public, while behind the scenes, members of his staff claimed it was Senate workers who did the hacking.

If the entire thing left you baffled, I’m not surprised. The whole point of this exercise, as far as the Obama administration and its intelligence agencies are concerned, is to confuse the public and keep us in the dark.

It is the direct result of a cynical decision that was made five years ago by the newly inaugurated President Obama and his political advisers to paper over the C.I.A.’s adventures in torture, illegal detention and rendition (the kidnapping of foreign citizens who were shipped off to other countries to be tortured without worrying too much about international law or whether they had actually committed any crimes).

The White House decided at the time that it would neither lead nor order any formal investigation into those practices, even though Mr. Obama had railed against them as a candidate in the 2008 election. The new president explained that he would rather “look forward,” by which he meant to his own political agenda, than provide a full public accounting of his predecessor’s lawless behavior.

Administration lawyers continued to block all attempts at airing the Bush administration’s policies on detention and interrogation in court. Federal prosecutors whitewashed the destruction of 92 videotapes of C.I.A. interrogations. And a 2009 report on the interrogations by the inspector general of the Central Intelligence Agency was withheld not only from the public, but also from the very members of Congress whose job it is to supervise the intelligence agencies — the Senate committee.

The committee did not follow Mr. Obama’s lead, and had directed its staff to investigate and report on interrogation and detention policies after the 9/11 attacks. They did so over four years, amassing a 6,000-page report, using computers that were provided by the C.I.A. on a supposedly secure network in a supposedly secure room.

The report was finished last December, but has not been released because the C.I.A. disputed some of its conclusions. That’s not terribly surprising, since the report found fault with the C.I.A. for conducting illegal interrogations that it said did not produce much, if any, useful intelligence. It’s even less surprising when you consider that Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democratic member of the committee, revealed that the 2009 inspector general’s report came to some of the same conclusions as the Senate report.

Now, instead of having either of those documents brought before the public, we will have to endure a long battle between the Senate and the C.I.A. over who broke into whose computers first. The result will be more secrecy, less information, and, of course, no accountability.

– Peacemeal, March/April 2014

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


U.S. practiced torture after 9/11, review concludes

WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study by an 11-member panel was released by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group.

Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former members of Congress — a Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — sought to produce a stronger national consensus on the torture question.

The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary, and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.

Interrogation and abuse of prisoners at the C.I.A.’s secret prisons, the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba, and war-zone detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan have been described in considerable detail by the news media and in declassified documents, though the Constitution Project report adds many new details. Staff members, including the executive director, Neil A. Lewis, a former reporter for The New York Times, traveled to multiple detention sites and interviewed dozens of former American and foreign officials, as well as former detainees. It confirms a report by Human Rights Watch that one or more Libyan militants were waterboarded by the C.I.A., challenging the agency’s longtime assertion that only three Al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the near-drowning technique.

It includes a detailed account by Albert J. Shimkus Jr., then a Navy captain who ran a hospital for detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison, of his own disillusionment when he discovered what he considered to be the unethical mistreatment of prisoners.

The report’s main significance may be its attempt to assess what the government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing, and kept them awake for days on end.

The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules. All those memos were later withdrawn.

In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.

Like the still-secret Senate interrogation report, the Constitution Project study was initiated after President Obama decided in 2009 not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs, as proposed by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others. Mr. Obama said then that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” Aides have said he feared that his own policy agenda might get sidetracked in a battle over his predecessor’s actions.

Mr. Hutchinson, who served in the Bush administration as chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he “took convincing” on the torture issue. But after the panel’s nearly two years of research, he said he had no doubts about what the United States did.

“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.” Mr. Jones, a former ambassador to Mexico, said, “I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases. We lost our compass.”

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses. Advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds.

While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.

The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” the report says.

– edited from The New York Times, April 16, 2013
PeaceMeal, May/June 2013

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


Human rights court finds CIA tortured Khaled el-Masri

Amrit Singh.jpg (2618 bytes)Amrit Singh

The much-maligned European Court of Human Rights has shown itself at its very best: standing up for the rights of an individual who has been denied justice for almost nine years since he was abducted, secretly detained and tortured under the CIA’s rendition program. Khaled El-Masri, a German national, was seized by Macedonian security officers on December 31, 2003, at a border crossing, because he had been mistaken for an al-Qaida suspect. He was held incommunicado and abused in Macedonian custody for 23 days, after which he was handcuffed, blindfolded and driven to Skopje airport, where he was handed over to the CIA and severely beaten.

The CIA stripped, hooded, shackled and sodomized el-Masri with a suppository — in CIA parlance, subjected him to “capture shock” — as Macedonian officials stood by. The CIA drugged him and flew him to Kabul to be locked up in a secret prison known as the “Salt Pit”, where he was slammed into walls, kicked, beaten and subjected to other forms of abuse. Held there for four months, el-Masri was never charged, brought before a judge, or given access to his family or German government representatives.

The CIA ultimately realized that it had mistaken el-Masri for an al-Qaida suspect with a similar name. But it held on to him for weeks after that. It was not until May 24, 2004, that he was flown — blindfolded, earmuffed and chained to his seat — to Albania, where he was dumped on the side of a road without explanation.

In December 2005, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told a press conference, while then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stood by her side, that the United States had admitted it had made a mistake. But the U.S. government still refused to acknowledge its shameful conduct in el-Masri’s case and waged a successful campaign to prevent other governments from disclosing the truth.

El-Masri’s subsequent search for justice was repeatedly thwarted. The United States succeeded in getting his U.S. lawsuit dismissed on “state secrets” grounds without even responding to his allegations. In 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review that dismissal. The German government refused to disclose what it knew about el-Masri’s case and apparently caved in to U.S. pressure not to seek extradition of CIA officials involved in el-Masri’s rendition.

In December, the European Court of Human Rights delivered a measure of justice to el-Masri. It vindicated his account of his ill-treatment and unanimously found that Macedonia had violated his rights under the European Convention, including by transferring him to U.S. custody in the face of a risk of ill-treatment.

This is the first court to comprehensively and specifically find that the CIA’s rendition techniques amounted to torture. The decision stands in sharp contrast to the abject failure of U.S. courts to deliver justice to victims of U.S. torture and rendition.

Both the United States and Macedonia must now issue el-Masri a full public apology and appropriate compensation. Macedonia should also commit to an internationalized investigation capable of holding its officials accountable.

But Macedonia was not the only European country complicit in CIA renditions. A 2006 inquiry by Swiss Senator Dick Marty implicated 14 European governments, including the United Kingdom, in the CIA’s “spider web” of rendition operations. But with the exception of Italy, whose highest court recently upheld the convictions of U.S. and Italian officials for involvement in rendition, neither the U.K. nor other complicit countries — including Lithuania, Romania and Poland, which hosted secret CIA prisons — have conducted effective investigations capable of holding officials accountable for their participation in rendition.

The European court’s decision in the el-Masri case is a clarion call for accountability for the flagrantly criminal CIA rendition program. The time has come for European governments to stand up to the United States and break the conspiracy of silence, regardless of the diplomatic consequences. As former Human Rights Commissioner for the Council of Europe, Thomas Hammerberg, rightly said on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks: “The purported cost to transatlantic relations of pursuing such accountability cannot be compared to the damage inflicted on our European system of human rights protection by allowing ourselves to be kept in the dark.”

Amrit Singh is a senior legal officer at the National Security and Counterterrorism program of the Open Society Justice Initiative. A graduate of Cambridge University, Oxford University and the Yale Law School, she was counsel in ACLU v. Department of Defense, which resulted in the public disclosure of thousands of documents concerning the abuse of prisoners held by the U.S. overseas. Her father is the current Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh. This article is edited from The Guardian (U.K.), December 13, 2012, and was reprinted in PeaceMeal, Jan/February 2013.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


No penalty for torture

Editorial, The New York Times, September 4, 2012

Any remaining hope for imposing meaningful accountability for torture and other abuses committed against prisoners under President George W. Bush has ended, for all practical purposes. On August 30, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. announced that no one would be prosecuted for the brutal deaths of two prisoners held in C.I.A. custody.

One of the prisoners, a suspected militant named Gul Rahman, died in 2002 after being shackled to a concrete wall in near-freezing temperatures in a secret C.I.A. prison in Afghanistan. The other, Manadel al-Jamadi, died in C.I.A. custody in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where his corpse was photographed wrapped in plastic.

In his statement, Mr. Holder suggested that the decision not to bring prosecutions should not be seen as a moral exoneration but a sign that the record was not “sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction.”

The public deserves a more detailed explanation of why charges could not be brought. In these egregious cases, it appears as though the C.I.A. interrogators tortured prisoners to death, going beyond even the harsh techniques authorized by the infamous torture memos cooked up by Justice Department lawyers to try to justify the unjustifiable. Not pursuing criminal charges may remove an avenue of attack against the Obama administration by Republicans, who continue to defend the use of torture. But absent a more persuasive explanation, the implications for the rule of law are deeply troubling.

In June 2011, Mr. Holder said that about 100 cases of detainee treatment had been reviewed and none warranted further investigation. The decision not to bring charges on these last two cases puts into sharp and shameful focus the Obama administration’s overall record of trying to avoid legal scrutiny of Bush-era abuses.

Not only have those responsible escaped criminal liability, but the administration has succeeded in denying victims of the harsh methods any day in court, using exaggerated claims of secrecy and executive power to get federal judges, who should know better, to toss out claims for civil relief. The broad denial of justice to victims disgraces both the administration and the courts.

At the start of his administration, President Obama said he wanted to “look forward,” not back, on the actions of C.I.A. interrogators. In practice, the administration has chosen to look back selectively, eschewing prosecutions and civil relief for victims while pursuing criminal charges against a former C.I.A. officer, John Kiriakou, on charges he disclosed the identity of other C.I.A. officers who participated in the interrogations.

These are not old, musty issues that the nation has moved beyond and the public can afford to ignore. Just a few months ago, during the Republican primary campaign, Mitt Romney expressed support for the use of waterboarding as a counterterrorism method, and he even denied that it amounts to torture. In the absence of any sort of legal accountability, there is no assurance that this lawless practice would not happen again.

– PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2012

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


Torture needs accountability

Letter, The New York Times, September 7, 2012

To the Editor:

Re “No Penalty for Torture”

While it is deeply troubling that no criminal charges were filed against American personnel who committed torture, the need and opportunity for accountability remain.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is correct that broader questions persist. It is President Obama’s responsibility to ensure that they are answered.

How did this torture occur? How will torture be prevented from happening again?

Accountability requires that our government accept responsibility and transparently disclose what happened. The pending Senate Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A. interrogation program will provide some answers and should be released with the fewest redactions possible.

Yet, we already know that implementing this methodical torture regime was interdisciplinary and interdepartmental, including intelligence, military, legal and medical expertise.

A comprehensive, bipartisan, independent investigation must happen, both for our nation’s moral character and its security. Otherwise, waterboarding and torture methods erroneously referred to as “enhanced interrogation” techniques will be back, along with the disgrace and misinformation they yield.

Allen S. Keller & Parul Monga
New York, Sept. 5, 2012

The writers are, respectively, director and policy coordinator of the Bellevue/N.Y.U. Program for Survivors of Torture.

– PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2012

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


E.U. votes for CIA torture probe

The European Parliament, meeting in Strasbourg, France, endorsed (568 votes for, 34 against, 77 abstentions) a new report on accountability for European Union countries’ involvement in multiple human rights violations including torture. The report urges the countries to fulfill their legal obligation to investigate their role in the United States’ global CIA-led rendition and secret detention programs, which involved the torture and the enforced disappearance of alleged terrorism suspects.

The report focuses on the three European countries known or alleged to have hosted secret CIA detention sites: Poland, Romania and Lithuania. In Poland, a continuing investigation into a CIA secret prison has made limited progress, but the prosecutor has refused to keep either the parties or the public adequately informed.

Romania has flatly denied any involvement in the CIA programs, including credible allegations of a secret CIA prison there, and has refused to investigate further. And despite fresh information on rendition flights to and from Lithuania, the authorities in Vilnius still refuse to re-open a criminal investigation into two secret CIA sites set up there in 2002 and 2004.

Although flight data and information released in December 2011 also clearly implicate Denmark and Finland, both governments have refused to hold a human rights-compliant investigation. No EU country has yet met the legal obligation to hold a full and effective investigation into its role in the CIA programs.

– edited from Amnesty International press release, September 11, 2012
PeaceMeal, Sept/October 2012

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


Victims of torture, the perpetrators and the healers

There are more than 500,000 survivors of torture living in the United States. They are men, women and children who have endured unspeakable physical and psychological abuse. Many of them are afflicted with paralyzing fear, deep depression and severe anxiety. They suffer other long-term effects such as flashbacks, chronic pain and nightmares. Their voices are purposefully silenced by the perpetrators of torture.

The international treaty that makes torture a crime against humanity defines it as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession ...”

Obtaining the kind of information the George W. Bush admin-istration wanted in 2002 to sell its planned attack on Iraq is the reason it used torture on U.S. detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere. So-called “legal” memos written at the time by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and signed by Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee employed bizarre twisted reasoning and bureaucratic legalese to authorize the torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of human beings.

In April 2009, a comprehensive Senate Armed Services Committee report on treatment of U.S. detainees was released. Among its findings, Maj. Paul Burney, an Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations at Guantánamo Bay in the summer of 2002, told Army investigators: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.” As higher-ups in the administration got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove the desired connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.

In other words, the urgency for the use of torture was not the threat of another Al Qaeda attack on America being hyped by the Bush administration, but its own timetable for selling a war against Iraq. It wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections.

Among the agencies that work to heal the survivors of torture is The Center for Victims of Torture. An international nonprofit organization, CVT is headquartered in St. Paul, Minn., with offices in Washington D.C., Africa and the Middle East. CVT works around the world to provide direct care for those who have been tortured, trains partners around the world who can prevent and treat torture, and advocates for human rights and an end to torture. At their St. Paul (Minn.) Healing Center, each survivor works with a team of medical, mental health and social work professionals on the healing journey. CVT also partners with torture rehabilitation centers across the United States so that more survivors can receive the healing and care they need. See: www.cvt.org

– edited from The Center for Victims of Torture 2011 annual report and The New York Times
Peacemeal, May/June 2012

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


ricardo_sanchez.jpg (3586 bytes)Ricardo Sanchez calls for torture commission

Ricardo Sanchez, the retired Army lieutenant general who once led all coalition ground forces in Iraq, has done an “about face” and is calling for the creation of a truth commission to probe possible crimes involving torture of detainees in Iraq during the George W. Bush years. Revelations of detainee waterboarding and other torturous interrogation techniques that occurred on Sanchez’s watch at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison forced him to retire from the Army in 2006. Although an Army inspector general’s report cleared him of any wrongdoing, it found failures of oversight and execution at all levels. Sanchez says his former superiors dodged his repeated requests for guidelines that could have helped to avert the Abu Ghraib scandal.

In his own book, “Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story,” Sanchez condemned Bush’s rush to war as “a strategic blunder of historic proportions” that risked the lives of poorly trained and ill-equipped U.S. troops. But Sanchez, who prior to his retirement was the highest-ranking Latino to have served in the Army, has his own burden to bear. His year directing military operations in Iraq soon after the fall of Baghdad saw low-level enemy resistance erupt into full-blown insurgency and virtual civil war.

Before deciding to lambaste the White House’s prosecution of the war, Sanchez says he went through three years of “tremendous soul-searching.” He sought advice from several four-star officers, who, he says, supported his decision to come forward and even helped him shape his message. But after he first delivered that message in a speech to military journalists in October 2007, when he accused the Bush administration, Congress and the State Department of incompetence and of engaging in partisan politics at the risk of troop safety, “nobody wanted to get involved, because of potential fratricide across the board, and they began to very quickly walk away.”

Sanchez was working part-time as a paid military consultant, mentoring other generals in joint and interagency war-fighting operations, as well as senior noncommissioned officers assigned to top leadership positions. The Joint Forces Command stopped calling Sanchez after this speech, he says, and his mentoring contract was not renewed.

The lucrative consulting jobs that have come to many of his peers also have eluded Sanchez: not a single company doing business with the federal government has ever contacted him about fulltime employ- ment. Fellow flag officers he once considered friends have shunned him, he says, as “radioactive.” The only general to lend him a hand in retirement, according to Sanchez, has been Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and 2004 Democratic candidate for president.

“As a Christian, I must do what’s right regardless of what my personal consequences are, and that’s what I have embarked on,” Sanchez says. “It’s not just a duty for me as a believer. It’s also a duty to my subordinates and to all those young men and women who sacrificed their lives for this nation. And it’s just appalling to me that I have fellow general officers and superiors who’ve not had the courage to do that.”

Sanchez launched his call for a truth commission about the Iraq War in May 2009. “If we do not find out what happened,” he told a reporter at the event, “we are doomed to repeat it.”

After Sanchez came back from the war, his wife would sometimes wake up in the night and find him in front of his office computer, reading over the biographies of the 843 servicemen and servicewomen who died under his command. He knows that his name will forever be linked with Abu Ghraib, and when asked about it, he laments his failure to impose his own restrictive interrogation directives sooner. “We simply were not aggressive enough in implementing the controls,” he says.

Sanchez still wears his dog tags on a chain around his neck. When asked, he reaches inside his shirt and produces them, jangling. “I will always be a soldier,” he says, eyes misting. “I will go to my grave with these dog tags around my neck. It’s my whole life.”

– edited from an article by David Freed in The Atlantic, January/February 2011
Peacemeal, Jan/February 2011

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)


Italian court convicts 23 Americans in CIA rendition case

MILAN – An Italian court convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel on kidnapping charges on November 4 in a stern rebuke to the U.S. government's long-standing practice of covertly seizing terrorism suspects abroad without a warrant. The guilty verdicts are the first instance in which CIA operatives have faced a criminal trial for the controversial tactic of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects are abducted in one country and forcibly transported to another. The Americans were charged with snatching a Muslim cleric off the street here in 2003 and covertly flying him to Cairo, where he said he was subjected to electroshocks and other physical abuse.

In winning the guilty verdicts, Italian prosecutors said they were determined to enforce the law in spite of political pressure from Rome and Washington to drop the case. “This decision sends a clear message to all governments that even in the fight against terrorism you can’t forsake the basic rights of our democracies,” said the deputy Milan public prosecutor.

The victim, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, a radical Egyptian imam also known as Abu Omar, had been under the surveillance of Italian anti-terrorism police. Italian criminal investigators said they were steamed to learn later that the CIA, secretly aided by Italian military intelligence agents, had intervened without their knowledge and thwarted their effort to bring Nasr to trial.

The Americans were all tried in absentia but were represented throughout the trial by defense attorneys, most of them court-appointed. The defendants each received a five-year prison sentence, with the exception of Robert Seldon Lady, the CIA’s former chief in Milan, who was sentenced to eight years for leading the kidnapping operation.

In rendering the verdict, the judge in the case, Oscar Magi, acquitted three other Americans, including the former Rome station chief for the CIA, saying they were covered by diplomatic immunity. The prosecutor, Armando Spataro, said his office would seek to extradite the 23 Americans from the United States. But a formal decision rests with the Italian Justice Ministry, which so far has been reluctant to alienate Washington by asking for extradition. Although it is considered unlikely that any of the convicted Americans will spend time in an Italian prison cell, the trial has served as a public embarrassment for the CIA.

The U.S. State Department expressed disappointment over the judicial ruling but the CIA had no comment.

Most of the defendants, operating under assumed names, arrived in Italy a few weeks before the kidnapping and are now considered fugitives. The judge also convicted two Italian defendants, ruling they had acted as accomplices.

The defense offered by the attorneys of the convicted was that they were following orders of the Bush/Cheney White House. From Italy to Spain and Germany, court proceedings have taken place or are underway against Bush-era crimes.

– edited from The Washington Post, 4 November 2009
Peacemeal, Nov/December 2009

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)