Steven Reisner talking:
The Bush administration’s Justice Department created a legal rationale for torture that required the presence of psychologists and medical professionals. And so, on one hand, for legal cover, there had to be psychologists present. On the other hand—and even more horrifying for members of my profession—the torture regime itself was created at the CIA by these two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, and in the Department of Defense psychologists were involved in creating the torture program and in overseeing it from the beginning to the end.
these two psychologists were sought out by the CIA because the CIA had been—had found this manual, which they called a resistance manual, an al-Qaeda resistance manual. And in it, the al-Qaeda operatives are taught how to handle their imprisonment to not give up too much information. So someone had the idea that our own resistance trainers, psychologists, might have something to say about that manual. This seems to have been an opportunity for Mitchell and Jessen. They were resistance trainers who had been part of a program to basically torture our own soldiers to try to teach them to resist. So, the two of them got the manual, they wrote about it, and they claimed that they had special expertise, because of their resistance training, to break the resistance of al-Qaeda members.
they created this torture program and justified it. They did the assessment of the prisoners, they did the torture itself, and then they did the evaluation of how well the torture worked. The level of conflict of interest and their self-promotion is horrendous. And it started a kind of virus of putting psychologists in these roles of overseeing and directing enhanced interrogations. And what happened very early on is that the professional—the American Psychological Association decided that it was going to do its part by bringing researchers together with operatives to make those interrogations more effective, on the one hand, and to find a way to permit psychologists to be present, according to—by changing its ethical policy, on the other hand.
Alfred McCoy talking:
they were the latest in a long history of American and Canadian psychologists helping the CIA design its interrogation protocols. This is an extraordinarily long history that goes back to 1951, when the CIA, in alliance with British and Canadian psychologists, set out to crack the code of human consciousness. And they worked with a very famous Canadian psychologist named Donald O. Hebb. And he conducted a series of experiments from 1951 to ’54 that discovered the basic concept of sensory deprivation or sensory disorientation, which, when you read the Senate report, that is the core of the CIA’s tactics.
These were originally developed for offensive uses, for us to break down captured Soviet spies. Then, in 1955, some 30 pilots returned as prisoners of war from North Korea, and they had been tortured. They gave statements, some of them, on Radio Beijing, alleging falsely that the United States had engaged in germ warfare. One of the pilots, a Marine Corps aviator, was put on trial. He was court-martialed. And at the end of this very sad saga, President Eisenhower ordered that all American military personnel at risk of capture by the enemy should be conditioned to resist torture. And this was the origin in the U.S. Air Force of the survival, evasion, escape, resistance doctrine, OK, which was using these psychological torture techniques, flipping them and using them defensively to train our personnel to resist enemy interrogation.
During the long years of the Cold War, the CIA propagated the offensive techniques among our allies worldwide. We trained SAVAK in Iran. We ran the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. We trained Latin American militaries in the doctrine of torture. And as the Cold War wound up in the 1980s, the CIA did a review, repudiated the doctrine, developed a policy of not using coercive techniques. The Defense Department recalled the training manuals from Latin American militaries, under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. These manuals were destroyed, and it was all over.
Now, when 9/11 struck, the only place where these techniques resided within the bowels of the U.S. bureaucracy was in the SERE doctrine. And so, it’s quite logical that the CIA turned to two former U.S. Air Force SERE trainers and got them to, again, reverse-engineer the defensive doctrine into an offensive doctrine, using these psychological torture techniques against al-Qaeda and terrorist suspects.
KUBARK was the distillation of the CIA’s decade of research into these psychological torture techniques. All that work, that first of all developed sensory deprivation or sensory disorientation, and then parallel work done by two researchers at Cornell University Medical School—they found that the KGB’s most effective torture technique was not brutal beating, but self-inflicted pain. And these two basic doctrines of sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain were encoded in something called the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual in 1963. KUBARK was then the CIA’s cryptonym for itself. So, the real title of the manual was the CIA’s Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual. And that manual and those techniques were propagated worldwide for the next 30 years among U.S. allies in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, Iran, and particularly South Vietnam.
Steven Reisner talking:
what has now been revealed about this critical PENS meeting. Speaking of secrecy around this meeting, Jean Maria Arrigo talked about, in the meeting, her natural tendency was to begin taking notes. She was invited to be on this panel. And another member of the panel turned to her and said, “You will put your notes down now.”
It’s probably the only task force in APA history where the members were forbidden from taking notes. So, Jean Maria was a part of this task force because she’s an oral historian in military and national security intelligence. But she suspected, rather quickly, that the task force had been brought together for some purpose that wasn’t communicated to all the members, but had only been understood by the military-connected members. But she was sworn to secrecy. And she kept that secrecy pretty much until she had a conversation with myself and a few other of us who were questioning the task force. And I mentioned to her that I had just learned that the head of the APA Practice Directorate, Russ Newman, was married to a BSCT in Guantánamo.
A BSCT is a behavioral science consultant. The BSCTs at Guantánamo oversaw the interrogations. That was the part of the role, the essential role, that psychologists played in this whole process. And I had mentioned that because General Kiley was a guest at that convention, and he had mentioned that to a group of us. And Jean Maria kind of turned white, and she said, “One of the secrets that I was asked to keep was that Russ Newman was a guiding force at that task force. And we didn’t know that his wife was a BSCT at Guantánamo.” So she said that now that this is revealed, “that I was basically duped. I’m going to reveal all that took place at that meeting, because I think that that meeting had some—that it was a duplicitous meeting, that the APA was colluding with the CIA and the Pentagon.” It turns out that she was very prescient, because Jim Risen’s book gives us the smoking gun to validate what Jean Maria suspected at the time.
The American Psychological Association has deep, long-standing connections with the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies. In fact, the Department of Defense was the first government agency to really recognize the important roles that psychologists play. A huge number of psychologists work for the Department of Defense at the VAs and in the military itself, so—but also, some very key members of the American Psychological Association governance have always had ties to military contracts. There are members of the governance who run an organization called HumRRO, which is a—which has itself tens of millions of dollars of Pentagon contracts to supply psychological expertise to the Pentagon. So there’s all kinds of unfortunate overlap and conflicts of interest that seem to press the APA to support military policy uncritically and sometimes, perhaps, behind the scenes.
Alfred McCoy talking:
The psychologists are critical, but they’re critical because psychological torture is, in effect, enshrined within U.S. law. When the United States finally ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, we did so subject to certain qualifications, known in diplomatic parlance as “reservations.” And basically, the four reservations that we introduced modified our approval, our ratification of that convention, everything in it except: We redefined the U.N. definition of what torture was—extreme pain—and we called it “prolonged mental harm,” that for an act to rise to the level of torture, it had to become, in U.S. parlance, in those reservations, prolonged mental harm.
Now, those three words are critical. First of all, “mental.” That meant that the United States was effectively splitting the U.N. convention down the middle. The convention barred both physical and psychological torture. We were saying, “We accept the ban on physical torture, but we’re exempting the ban on psychological torture. And we are qualifying that ban because in order for an act to rise to the level of torture, of psychological torture, it has to inflict prolonged mental harm upon the victim.”
Now, what is “prolonged”? How long is “prolonged”? That’s not defined. It’s a huge loophole. And what constitutes “harm”? That’s another huge loophole. And that, of course, opened the door for that notorious memo by the Office of Legal Counsel, its leader then Jay Bybee, to say that for something to rise to the level of harm, the pain must be sufficient or equivalent to organ failure. In other words, torture, psychological torture up to but not including death, is legally acceptable in U.S. law.
Those words in the reservations have been replicated verbatim in the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, the Military Commissions Act 2006, verbatim. Those paragraphs recur in U.S. law, and it’s that which creates the opening for psychologists like Mitchell and Jessen to participate in these programs. And that, in effect, means that these acts, which are outrageous and which we now consider to be torture, are in fact—can be, if you will—can be exempted from the rubric of law. So, it’s a problem that the United States has been so reliant on psychological torture for so long that it’s become embedded not only in bureaucracy, in professional practice, like the military psychologists that work for the Defense Department, but also in U.S. law. It’s deeply embedded in our society.
going back to the start of this whole process, right, the United States responded to the idea that the Soviets had cracked the code of human consciousness, that they had somehow had the capacity to produce, to borrow the parlance, a Manchurian candidate—they could program an assassin. So, we reacted to this by using psychologists to develop our own offensive doctrine of psychological torture. And again, the CIA disseminated this among our allies worldwide for 30 years throughout the Cold War. This became encoded within the U.S. military through the SERE training.
And then, when that was all over and it was time for serious structural reforms, those reforms took place. The CIA abjured torture in 1989, said they wouldn’t do it anymore. They said it was completely counterproductive. The Defense Department recalled the manuals. The manuals were actually published in the U.S. press in 1997. It seemed to be all over—except that the inclination, the reliance, the belief and the faith in the efficacy of psychological torture was at this point so deeply embedded in the U.S. national security bureaucracy that our reflex, upon ratification of the U.N. convention—which, by the way, took us an extraordinarily long time, took us six or seven years after the rest of the world had ratified that convention—by the time we did it, we did it in a way that protected, that reserved our right to engage in these psychological torture practices.
And indeed, since then, we’ve conducted ourselves in activities that are a clear violation of the U.N. convention. So, in other words, the reflex to torture, the sense of empowerment, the idea that we can defy international law, defy our own law for reasons of national security, that arises from this long and troubled history of our relationship to psychological torture.
Dick Cheney has been a forceful advocate for the enhanced interrogation techniques. He’s been unapologetic. He’s been vociferous. He’s given dozens of interviews over the years. In effect, Dick Cheney is the leading voice for those in the intelligence community that are determined to win impunity for their violations of law and international conventions.
And we’re now—as a result of the Senate report, we’re now in what I call the fifth and final stage of a decade-long struggle over the torture issue, a decade-long struggle for impunity. And the United States, just like other nations that have emerged from these sad practices at the end of the Cold War, has been going really through a five-stage process of impunity.
When the Abu Ghraib photographs were released back in April 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blamed it on the so-called “bad apples.” That’s the first reflex—blame the bad apples. Then Dick Cheney and others, right away, began saying that it was an imperative for national security: We had to do it for reasons of safety. That’s the second stage in impunity. Then, when President Obama came into office in April 2009, he visited CIA headquarters, and he brought us to the third stage of impunity by saying that the past was indeed unfortunate, but it was time to move forward together. In other words, national unity means we can’t investigate this troubled past.
Then we hit stage four, which is essentially exoneration for the perpetrators and the powerful that ordered them to commit these acts. That occurred, ironically, after the death of Osama bin Laden in May of 2011, when an a cappella chorus of Republican neoconservatives arose on the media and said that these enhanced interrogation techniques led us to Osama bin Laden, they kept us safe. To use to Dick Cheney’s words, they saved thousands of lives, tens of thousands of lives. At that point, the U.S. Justice Department terminated its investigation of nearly a hundred CIA excesses that were potentially crimes, and the perpetrators had won exoneration.
Now what they’re fighting for is not just exoneration, they want vindication before the bar of history. And that’s critical on a couple of levels. First of all, policy level, if they achieve that, if they win the fight and say that these techniques were, first of all, not torture, and, second of all, they kept us safe, they will then, first of all, be exempt from civil litigation by the victims, second of all, to possibly U.S. criminal investigations, to international arrests should they travel abroad. More importantly, in terms of policy, that means that this doctrine will remain in the presidential toolkit so that a future president can set aside President Obama’s restrictions on these methods and torture again.
And so, that’s why this is a desperate and very serious battle over impunity. And that’s why the Senate committee’s report is so important, because up to this point the perpetrators and their powerful were winning the debate. Now, in fact, the debate has shifted its tone, and it’s looking to me like it’s a much more neutral, much more positive outcome.
Steven Reisner talking:
what makes this different is that the Risen book exposed the collusion, apparent collusion, between the APA and the CIA and perhaps the DOD. An independent investigator has been hired to take a look at all documents at the APA, to look at all of the questions that we dissidents at the APA have raised, and will do a full and thorough independent investigation. And I agree with Dr. McCoy that we have to enshrine into law that torture has to be made illegal, but we also have to close that one place that has permitted torture, which has to do with health professionals and doctors and psychologists. And I’m hoping the results of this investigation will force, will press the APA to, once and for all, prohibit psychologists from being involved in any coercive interrogations from here on in.
— source democracynow.org
Dr. Steven Reisner, founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and psychological ethics adviser to Physicians for Human Rights.
Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror and Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation.