Abdul Aziz Naji

This story was originally published on Truthout.

The UK action charity Reprieve, whose attorneys represent over a dozen prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, reports that former Guantánamo prisoner, Algerian citizen Abdul Aziz Naji, has been sentenced to three years in prison in Algeria. Reprieve says the charges were “of past membership in an extremist group overseas – a charge derived from the unsubstantiated accusations the US administration made against him in 2002.”

News reports state that prosecutors initially had asked for a ten-year prison sentence, and a 5,000 euro fine (over $6,000 US dollars).

The Reprieve press release states, “During his trial held in Algiers on Monday 16 January, the prosecutor presented no evidence of Mr Naji’s guilt – rather, the judge simply questioned him and produced a guilty verdict. His lawyer, Hassiba Boumerdassi, filed an appeal of his sentence and will request that he be released on bail pending retrial.”

When Naji was first forcibly returned to Algeria in 2010 – the first Guantánamo detainee removed to a country where he refused to go, for fear of returning there – he was, according to the Jurist, held initially “under a [Algerian] statute that allows for the detention of terror suspects for up to 12 days.” The charges under which he was held were never clarified at the time, but presumably were similar or the same for which he was recently sentenced.

Naji was subsequently released in July 2010 under judicial supervision, with the proviso he report to police authorities weekly. At the time, a statement by Algiers prosecutors, reported by Reuters Africa, bragged that Naji’s case had been “dealt with in the most complete transparency and in respect for the law, whether in terms of procedure or the length of his detention.”

Naji had been forcibly deported from Guantánamo to Algeria with the full knowledge and approval of Congress, which, at that time, had demanded 15 days advance notice of any Guantánamo transfer. Naji had previously stated he feared any return to Algeria, where he anticipated either repression by the government or by Islamic extremists. His forcible return, the first such non-voluntary expulsion of any Guantánamo prisoner, violated the principle of non-refoulement or non-return of prisoners to states where they have reason to expect torture or other mistreatment. The principle is part of the United Nations Convention Against Torture treaty, to which the US is a signatory.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, relies on diplomatic “assurances” by host countries that they will not maltreat returning prisoners. But a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch described the problems with such “assurances”: “Governments that engage in torture routinely deny it and refuse to investigate allegations of torture. A government that is already violating its international obligation not to torture cannot be trusted to abide by a further ‘assurance’ that it will not torture.”

In the case of Algeria, the 2010 State Department report on human rights in that country notes that, while torture is formally illegal in Algeria, there have been numerous charges of torture by state police. Furthermore, the Algerian government obstructs oversight on such matters by non-governmental and UN agencies. The report describes abuse of prisoners in order to obtain confessions. While some government agents have been tried and convicted for such abuse, the State Department reports notes, dryly, that in regards to abuse by state officials, “impunity remains a problem.” Even more, local Algerian human rights attorneys have said that prisoner abuse occurs “most often against those arrested on ‘security grounds.’”

In regards to prison and detention conditions, the report states, “Prison conditions generally did not meet international standards, and the government did not permit visits to military, high-security, or standard prison facilities or to detention centers by independent human rights observers.”

Revelations About Drugging of Detainees, Torture for False Confessions

Since his release, Naji has been vocal about the treatment he endured in US custody. in a July 28, 2010, interview with the Algerian paper El Khabar, only days after his forcible transfer, Naji told the world about maltreatment at the hands of the Americans. He charged Guantánamo authorities with using torture to make detainees confess to terror charges.

“They force detainees to take some medicines for three months to drive them crazy, loosing memory and committing suicide,” he said, adding, “I still remember how a Yemeni prisoner killed himself for he couldn’t resist to torture and sexual abuse practiced by the prison caretakers.” Two of the six purported Guantánamo suicides were Yemeni, Ali Abdullah Ahmed (also known as Salah al-Aslami) and Mohammed Salih al-Hanashi, but it is not clear to which prisoner Naji is referring.

Charges of drugging prisoners have been widespread, but have been difficult to verify. (See this April 2008 report by Joby Warrick at The Washington Post.) A Pentgon inspector general investigation on such drugging was completed in 2009, Titled “Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees,” the report remains classified. A Freedom of Information Act request by this author for the report is now 16 months old. Last September, a Senate Armed Forces Committee spokesperson told Truthout the Office of Inspector General’s investigation did not substantiate allegations of drugging of prisoners for the “purposes of interrogation.”

The involuntary use of drugs on prisoners would violate a number of domestic and international laws, as well as basic ethical codes of the medical professions. Yet, under the guidelines of the current “Army Field Manual” (AFM), whose protocols govern all interrogations past and present at Guantánamo, only drugs that cause permanent, lasting harm are not allowable for interrogation use. The provision from an earlier version of the AFM that forbid use of drugs that could create a “chemically induced psychosis” was dropped from the manual in September 2006, or even earlier.

Naji also told El Khabar “about how some detainees had been promised to be granted political asylum opportunity in exchange of a ‘spying role’ within the detention camp. He added that once released, they are maintained as spies serving for the US, under the cover of political refugees.”

The use of spies recruited by the Americans from among Muslim detainees and suspects has been reported in numerous instances. Abdurahman Khadr, the brother of Guantánamo prisoner, Omar Khadr, was an admitted “asset” for the CIA, who once described how he was sent to Guantánamo as a fake prisoner to spy.

More recently, the Tarek Mehanna case raised a good deal of controversy with charges from Mehanna and supporters that he was targeted by the FBI because the 29-year-old Sudbury, Massachusetts, man repeatedly refused to become an informant.

The “Case” Against Abdul Aziz Naji

No public report has indicated to what “extremist group” Naji is accused of belonging. In the May 2008 Joint Task Force-Guantánamo Detainee Assessment leaked by WikiLeaks last year, US intelligence maintained that Naji had belonged to the Pakistani-based group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. It also accused him of being “an identified al-Qaida courier.” The bulk of the accusations against him were levied by torture victim Abu Zubaydah, who supposedly said he had recruited Naji to be part of his “Martyrs Brigade.” Another torture victim, and one who the US relied upon to place Naji in Afghanistan, was Abd al-Rahim Abdul Razzak Janko, who was arrested by the Americans even though he had been tortured by the Taliban.

Abu Zubaydah was infamously tortured by the CIA, including being waterboarded 83 times, held in stress positions, had his head banged against a wall, suffered sleep deprivation and isolation. Mr. Zubaydah was flown from one CIA black site prison to another in the four or so years he was held in CIA captivity. Under later Department of Defense detention, it is not known exactly what ill treatment he may have endured, though it is known he is held in solitary confinement, and like the other Guantánamo detainees, is subject to interrogations under the current AFM. The manual has a special appendix known by the letter M that describes special interrogation techniques that cannot be used on regular prisoners of war. All told, AFM techniques used on Mr. Zubaydah could include, besides solitary confinement, modified forms of sleep deprivation, modified sensory deprivation or overload, stress positions, use of drugs and interrogation approaches meant to generate fear and humiliation.

Mr. Janko, who was released from Guantánamo in 2009, had provided supposedly incriminating information about approximately 20 other detainees, coerced from him via torture. After arrest and torture by the Taliban in 2000 for alleged sexual and espionage crimes, Mr. Janko was arrested by the US after 9/11 and was tortured from his first days while incarcerated at Kandahar Air Base. While the Taliban had used electric shock, stress positions, beatings on the soles of his feet (falaka) and water torture, to get Mr. Janko to falsely confess to sexual crimes and being an American and Israeli spy, the US relied upon sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault, attack by dogs and forced exercise to make him admit he was a terrorist. The US even used a Taliban videotape of Mr. Janko’s “confession” and tried (unsuccessfully, ultimately) to pass it off as the martyrdom video of an al-Qaeda suicide bomber.

Mr. Janko’s mental state deteriorated seriously, and he spent years in Guantánamo’s psychiatric ward, given antidepressant, antiseizure and antipsychotic medications. He subsequently filed suit against the US government for the torture, and is said to live under an assumed name in Belgium.

Both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim Abdul Razzak Janko were two of the primary sources used to build the case against Naji. The other Algerian arrested with Naji, Musafa Hamilil, was released from Guantánamo without charges in July 2008 and returned to Algeria at that time. Once in Algeria, Mr.Hamlili was charged with “counterfeiting and affiliation to a militant group that is active abroad.” He was acquitted of those charges in February 2010.

But Naji was not so lucky. According to the Reprieve story, Naji is suffering “serious health complications” in regards to his leg, which was amputated after he stepped on a landmine in 2001, while doing charity work in Kashmir. The US accused him of being a landmine expert, but Naji told his Combatant Status Review Hearing that he had nothing to do with mines or the planting of mines, and admitted to some details because of serious beatings. “I had a difficult time when I was first transferred to Cuba … I was tortured and made to tell things against myself,” Naji told the Guantánamo military hearing. “The interrogators forced me to say these things, because I was scared to be punished.”

His family is reportedly concerned about the deterioration of Naji’s health while imprisoned at El Harache prison in Algiers. His attorney, Hassiba Boumerdassi, reports his condition is “worsening by the day.” Reprieve charges that Naji has been denied adequate health care.

Katie Taylor, a “Life After Guantánamo” caseworker for Reprieve stated, “It is outrageous that Mr Naji is being punished again for the same discredited accusations that the US used to hold him in Guantánamo for eight years without charge or trial – this time in his own country. Algerian authorities must restore his right to a fair trial and overturn his conviction on faulty charges for which the prosecutor did not even bother to introduce evidence.”

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

Still image taken from the Amnesty International film Stuff Of Life, a film about waterboarding, the practice of torturing prisoners by partially drowning them

It could have been big news, if U.S. torture weren’t so anathema to the press corps, such that reporting upon it is considered either a fruitless and unprofitable enterprise, or among most of those who do venture into such waters, the sine qua non for such reportage must be ignorance and/or cover-up for much of what the U.S. military and intelligence agencies do.

Consider that during the recent Senate debate over the Defense Authorization Bill — the one that passed provisions on indefinite detention that drew cries of outrage from a number of law professors, and stoked fear among government opponents — Senator Dianne Feinstein, while speaking against provisions of the bill that would subject U.S. citizens to indefinite detention also made some serious points concerning the torture-interrogation amendment offered by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire). (See PDF link of her remarks – h/t Marcy Wheeler.)

Feinstein announced that the much-heralded, and much forgotten review of CIA torture undertaken by the Senate Intelligence Committee, first reported by Jason Leopold back in April 2010, is wrapping up its investigation. But her comments went unregarded and unreported, as patience for such things as fighting torture is not the strong suit of American political discourse, nor is much expected anymore from a Congress that has so clearly lost its bearings.

But, nevertheless, the announcement is not without interest, as Feinstein told her colleagues:

As chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, I can say that we are nearing the completion [of] a comprehensive review of the CIA’s former interrogation and detention program, and I can assure the Senate and the Nation that coercive and abusive treatment of detainees in U.S. custody was far more systematic and widespread than we thought.

Moreover, the abuse stemmed not from the isolated acts of a few bad apples but from fact that the line was blurred between what is permissible and impermissible conduct, putting U.S. personnel in an untenable position with their superiors and the law.

That is why Congress and the executive branch subsequently acted to provide our intelligence and military professionals with the clarity and guidance they need to effectively carry out their missions. And that is where the Army Field Manual comes in.

It is not surprising to hear the torture was worse than already known. After all, the purpose of secrecy and the cult of classification, so assiduously courted by the current Administration, is to hide crimes. So one can only hope the Intelligence Committee will, when the review is truly and finally complete (and let’s hope it’s not another 18 months), that its findings will be released publicly. In fact, in a decent world, it would be demanded.

Lies that facilitate torture – Case-in-point: the Army Field Manual

One reason for the lulled non-murmur over torture is the outrageous lie that Obama, after coming into office, “ended torture.” He enshrined the Army Field Manual as the supposedly humane alternative to the Bush torture regime of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Feinstein, who certainly knows better, is an exemplary model for such myth-making — “myth” because the Army Field Manual actually uses torture of various sorts, and even though about half-a-dozen human rights and legal organizations, and a number of prominent government interrogators have said so (see this Nov. 2010 letter signed by 14 well-known interrogators to then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) — as her following comments on the Army Field Manual (AFM) demonstrate.

Here, Sen. Feinstein is polemicizing against the Ayotte amendment, which was ignominiously dismissed via a parliamentary maneuver, along with a few dozen other amendments, after an ostentatious Senate “colloquy” on the matter by Senators Ayotte and Lieberman (with Lindsay Graham chiming in at the very end). The amendment awaits its resurrection, seeking passage attached like an obligate parasite to another bill some months down the line. (The authorization bill is currently “in conference,” as a final version is worked out that reconciles both House and Senate versions. It is not unknown for provisions to be slipped in under such circumstances, and I wouldn’t count out yet Ayotte/Lieberman/Graham’s attempt to insert a new secret annex to the AFM, not until, like the undead, a stake is driven through its heart.)

Feinstein:

However, Senator Ayotte’s amendment would require the executive branch to adopt a classified interrogation annex to the Army Field Manual, a concept that even the Bush administration rejected outright in 2006.

Senator Ayotte argued that the United States needs secret and undisclosed interrogation measures to successfully interrogate terrorists and gain actionable intelligence. However, our intelligence, military, and law enforcement professionals, who actually interrogate terrorists as part of their jobs, universally disagree. They believe that with the Army Field Manual as it currently is written, they have the tools needed to obtain actionable intelligence from U.S. detainees.

As an example, in 2009, after an extensive review, the intelligence community unanimously asserted that it had all the guidance and tools it needed to conduct effective interrogations. The Special Task Force on Interrogations–which included representatives from the CIA, Defense Department, the Office of the Director of Intelligence, and others–concluded that “no additional or different guidance was necessary.”

Since 2009, the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group has briefed the Select Committee on Intelligence numerous times. The group has repeatedly assured the committee that they have all authority they need to effectively gain actionable intelligence. As a consummate consumer of the intelligence products they produce, I agree.

Unfortunately, Sen. Feinstein is oddly correct. Between standard interrogation methods and CIA-derived interrogation techniques meant to break down a prisoner psychologically, they do really have all they “need.”

Feinstein never mentions the years-long protests about certain provisions of the AFM, many of them gathered in the document’s Appendix M, that have been found tantamount to torture — the use of drugs (so long as they don’t “induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage,” the harsh manipulation of fears and phobias, the elimination of wording from the previous version of the AFM that would ban stress positions, the use of isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation techniques. All of these are mingled in with a number of other basic interrogation techniques, but that doesn’t diminish the cruel irony of Feinstein’s IC-based assurance that that government interrogators “had all the guidance and tools it needed to conduct effective interrogations.” Guidance and tools, indeed.

Perhaps she could have quoted the letter to Gates, signed by Ali Soufan, Steven Kleinman, Jack Cloonan, Robert Baer, Mark Fallon, Malcolm Nance and others, which noted “the use of potentially abusive questioning tactics” in the Army Field Manual. Of course, these government interrogators softened their language (“potentially”?) and couched their opposition in terms of what hurts the national interest, versus what is wrong or illegal.

But when it comes to protecting the massive military-intelligence complex, such awkward facts as the use of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners, as well as outright torture enshrined in the Army Field Manual are not worthy of note. Even the many human rights groups who opposed the Ayotte amendment all buried any past critique of the AFM or its Appendix M in their polemics against Ayotte’s “classified annex” proposal. This is not the way to win a battle!

Honoring “our values”?

Feinstein concluded:

We cannot have it both ways. Either we make clear to the world that the United States will honor our values and treat prisoners humanely or we let the world believe that we have secret interrogation methods to terrorize and torture our prisoners.

But what about interrogation methods that are not secret, Sen. Feinstein?

I don’t seriously expect her to respond. Instead I ask readers, what kind of a country is it that has torture written into its public documents, and no one raises a fuss (or practically no one)?

The failure to take on the AFM and its Appendix M abuses in a serious fashion has led in a straight line to the political pornography of watching torture debated in Congress and among Presidential candidates, as well as a surge of political effort being made in some circles to make sure all such abuse is hidden forever behind a veil of classification. This failure is directly the responsibility of the human rights groups, who have not made it clear to their constituencies and the public at large how serious the problem currently is. While most of them are on the record of opposing the abuses described above, they repeatedly have pulled their punches for political reasons (as during the recent debate on the Ayotte amendment), and as a result, they must take the hard criticism when it comes, until, or unless they turn this around.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

[Herman] Cain said, “I don’t see it as torture. I see it as an enhanced interrogation technique,” which is what the Bush administration used to call its policy of torture and abuse. [Michelle] Bachman declared, “If I were president, I would be willing to use waterboarding. I think it was very effective. It gained information for our country.” And after the debate, Mitt Romney’s aides told CNN that he does not think waterboarding is torture.

Cohn notes at the end of her article, “Unfortunately, during his hearing to be confirmed as CIA director, David Petraeus told Congress there might be occasions in which we must return to “enhanced interrogation” to get information. Alarmingly, that comment signaled that the Obama administration may return to the use of torture and abuse.” Petraeus was confirmed as the new CIA director last August on a 94-0 vote of the U.S. Senate.

Evidence of Torture in the Obama Administration

Despite President Obama’s own comments criticizing Cain and Bachman’s statements, Cohn points out that Obama’s own nominated candidate for CIA director is willing to support waterboarding and the other torture techniques designated “enhanced interrogation” during the Bush/Cheney regime. But there’s no “unfortunately” about it. The Obama administration does support torture, but it does so in the old-fashioned U.S. way, through official and/or plausible denial.

But anyone who looks at what the U.S. does, rather than what it says, will know that the torture never ended. Waterboarding may or may not have been ceased, but in the U.S. official Army Field Manual on interrogation, numerous commentators have found clear evidence of the use of torture, including use of debilitating isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, manipulation of phobias, use of drugs, and other “techniques.” Some of these techniques, such as use of isolation and sleep deprivation are limited to supposed “illegal” combatants, such as those captured in the “war on terror,” as discussed in the AFM’s Appendix M (PDF).

The use of controlled suffocation, such as in the water torture used in the video below, was documented to be endemic across the field of Defense Department operations in a series of articles published at Truthout.org recently. Also published at Truthout was an analysis of the possible use of “dryboarding”, another suffocation torture technique that may have been used by U.S. interrogators and implicated in the deaths of three prisoners at Guantanamo in 2006.

“Dryboarding”

The “dryboarding” hypothesis was developed by Almerindo Ojeda at the University of California at Davis’s Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas. Ojeda is also principal investigator for the Center’s Guantánamo Testimonials Project. He discovered that Ali Saleh Al-Marri, a purported Al Qaeda “sleeper” agent, who was held for years in solitary confinement at the Navy Brig in Charleston, North Carolina, like fellow domestic internee and U.S. citizen Jose Padilla, had been tortured by having a sock shoved stuffed in his mouth and then having his lips taped shut with duct tape. Al-Marri almost suffocated.

Ojeda noted that all of the dead supposed suicides at Guantanamo had socks stuffed in their mouths or down their throats.

Scott Horton, who wrote an award-winning article on the Guantanamo “suicides,” noted in a recent review of Ojeda’s work that socks were not allowed for prisoners at Guantanamo. He added:

The “dryboarding” disclosures do not resolve the questions about the Guantánamo deaths, but they give rise to important new questions about interrogation practices that may also have been used at Guantánamo. They also further justify the call for a thorough and independent investigation of the three deaths and underscore the severe credibility issues with the government’s claims about “suicides.”

The investigation of the Guantanamo “suicides” by Horton and Seton Hall University School of Law, Center for Policy and Research (PDF) was the subject of a slur campaign in the media last May, with Horton’s article in particular attacked by former Bush Administration officials. Then, strangely, Adweek writer Alex Koppelman and his former Salon.com collaborator Mark Benjamin, jumped in to defend Guantanamo Defense Department authorities’ version of events.

Links to the Torturers

The following video was posted at both LiveLeak.com and You Tube, and provides “a glimpse of what went on during interrogations of [Afghan] insurgents by Jonathan Idema,” who worked in conjunction with NATO forces in Afghanistan “counterterror” operations.

Idema is a controversial figure. He was arrested by Afghan authorities in July 2004 in Kabul, where according to a New York Times report, he had been holding eight men prisoner. Some of these men “said they were kicked and beaten, had scalding water poured on them, and had their heads repeatedly dunked in a bucket of water.” Idema was pardoned by Afghan President Karzai in March 2007. He had claimed all along that he was working at the behest of U.S. authorities. The U.S. denied this, though admittedly he did work with international forces on counterterrorism operations.

In a well-documented examination of his career at Wikipedia, Idema’s connections with U.S. Special Forces is dissected. Idema’s various disgraces and problems with the military never kept him from working at various times with U.S. Special Forces, and interestingly, he has been connected to private contracting firms associated with the “war on terror,” including Star America Aviation Company, Ltd. (SAAC).

One of the latter company’s executives is retired Major General Jack Holbein, a former leading commander at U.S. Special Forces Command. SAAC is linked to a shell company, Isabeau Dakota, Inc., that listed Idema’s father as president and sole officer, in that both are registered as corporations by the same individual, William L. London, who appears to be an attorney in Sanford, North Carolina. There is some evidence, given the connections noted in his Wikipedia entry, that Idema served as an off-the-record asset or operative of U.S. Special Forces.

Major General Holbein was listed in the 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) report on detainee abuse (large PDF) as one of the recipients of the Defense Department’s interrogation-torture proposal developed by James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen at Joint Personnel Services Agency (JPRA). Holbein was then Chief of Staff at U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), and JPRA was under command authority of JFCOM at that time. The implication of the SASC report is that Holbein and others helped send the torture proposal up the chain of command.

JFCOM was disbanded last August, “the first time a Defense Department combatant command has been dissolved” one news account explained. According to the article, by Hugh Lessig at The Daily Press:

The military is keeping the core mission of JFCOM: training the military to operate and fight together. But instead of maintaining a separate four-star command and all the overhead it entails, personnel will report directly to the Joint Staff.

The former JFCOM functions remaining in Hampton Roads include those related to joint training, developing new concepts and doctrine, experimentation and what the military calls “lessons learned.”

A Tale of Two Videos

The video below is from As Sahab, a supposedly Al Qaeda linked media outlet, though reposted at LiveLink, and apparently was discovered in the raid on Idema’s Afghanistan headquarters in Kabul in 2004. (Other As Sahab videos of torture have been aired by ABC news, and posted at You Tube.) Whether or not Idema was working directly for the Americans or not, the video provides a sickeningly vivid display of the kind of water torture during interrogation that has been documented previously as used by U.S. forces. (See here and here.)

The refusal by either the Obama administration or the U.S. Congress to hold torturers accountable, or to eliminate the torture embedded in the Army Field Manual, means that the torture program continues. It may be more hidden, but it operates nevertheless continuously. While the U.S. puts out propaganda about its “humane” treatment of detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere (see this story by Jason Leopold on the latest video issued in the U.S. propaganda effort), the real truth is hidden as much as possible.

The cozening of torturers, and the successful continuation in one form of the U.S. torture program has found its domestic analogue in the vicious state repression being unleashed upon the reform-minded protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Indeed, the attacks on peaceful protesters demonstrates as much as the history of the torture program that the U.S. government is not an entity to be bargained with, and that new political forms must arise to challenge the social and political status quo. Their first demand must be an end to state violence against peaceful protest.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

This story was written by Almerindo Ojeda and originally published on Truthout.

On June 10, 2006, three Guantánamo prisoners were found dead in their cells. Two days later, a Department of Defense (DoD) news release described these deaths as suicides. The news release quoted Camp Commander Harry Harris, who described these suicides as acts of asymmetric warfare meant to advance al-Qaeda’s cause in the war on terror.

The news release was categorical with regards to the self-inflicted nature of the deaths. And the camp commander was equally certain of their hostile intent. Yet the news release was curiously guarded about the manner of these deaths – the three “appear” to have hanged themselves with nooses made of bed sheets and clothing, it said.

The deaths of these three individuals was the subject of an investigation by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). The much-awaited report of this investigation concluded that these deaths were indeed self-inflicted. Yet, a close reading of the heavily redacted material released by the NCIS raises more than a few questions, both for this researcher and for others, regarding the exact circumstances of these deaths. To wit:

• Why did the prisoners have their hands tied when they were found hanging in their cells? (NCIS185, NCIS950, NCIS1012, NCIS958, AUTO693-1)
• Is it possible to tie one’s own hands?
• Why were the prisoners gagged with cloth? They were already going to kill themselves by silent suffocation through hanging; why suffocate themselves silently twice? (NCIS966, NCIS975, NCIS1073f, NCIS1079, NCIS1091)
• Why did all three prisoners have masks – or mask-like contraptions – on their faces as they hanged? (AUTO693-1, NCIS950, NCIS990f)
• Is it physically possible to hang yourself bound, masked and gagged?
• Why was there a bloody T-shirt around the neck of one of the prisoners found hanging in his cell? (NCIS1113)
• Rigor mortis had begun to set in on the prisoners when they were discovered. Consequently, they had to have been hanging for two hours before they were discovered. According to Standard Operating Procedures, each of the prisoners had to be visually inspected every ten minutes. That means six inspections per prisoner per hour, or 36 inspections overall. How could the guards have missed the hangings in 36 visual inspections? (NCIS1025, NCIS1070, NCIS1078f, AUTO693-8, AUTO588-7)
• Why were the neck organs (the larynx, the hyoid bone and the thyroid cartillage) removed from one of the corpses? According to subsequent autopsies done privately, these would be essential in establishing whether or not hanging was the cause of death (AUT693-5)
• Why is there a page missing from a log book begun on the day the deaths were discovered and recording the entries and exits to the cell block where the suicides took place? (NCIS1354)

Incidentally, the information that the dead prisoners were gagged with rags came out before the NCIS report was even begun. This information was provided by Col. Michael Bumgarner, one of the Guantánamo commanders. Speaking to The Charlotte Observer, Col. Bumgarner said that the prisoners who had hanged themselves, “each had a ball of cloth in their mouth either for choking or muffling their voices.”

The deceased were known officially as Ali Abdullah Ahmed (ISN 693), Mana Shaman Allabardi al Tabi (ISN 588), and Yasser Talal al Zahrani (ISN 93). Their lifeless bodies were found hanging in cells A5, A12 and A8, respectively, of Alpha Block, Camp 1, Camp Delta (NCIS938).

The Testimonies of Several Guards And One Commander

In January 2010, Scott Horton published an explosive article in Harper’s Magazine. In it, he told about Staff Sgt. Joseph Hickman, who was guarding the entrance to Camp Delta on the night of the deaths. Early that night, Sergeant Hickman saw a white van pick up three prisoners from the Camp and drive them to a secretive facility within the Guantánamo Naval Base. Then, about an hour before the bodies were found hanging in their cells, the van returned and backed up to the entrance of the clinic as if to unload something. Hickman went to the clinic and a medical corpsman informed him that three dead prisoners had been delivered to the clinic. The corpsman furthermore told him that they had died because they had rags stuffed down their throats, and that one of them was severely bruised.

Spc. Tony Davila, also serving at Guantánamo at the time, was likewise told, according to Harper’s, that the prisoners had died as the result of having rags stuffed down their throats.

The article in Harper’s Magazine adds two critical questions to the nine raised thus far:

• Who were the three prisoners taken to the secret facility on the evening of the deaths?
• What happened to them there?

In addition to this information, two Guantanamo guards other than the ones mentioned thus far told Horton that no prisoners were taken from the regular cell blocks to the clinic that night. Several guards also confirmed to him that Bumgarner had acknowledged the gagging early on. Indeed, according to Harper’s, the colonel called a meeting of personnel on the morning of the deaths; at that meeting, he is said to have told those in attendance that, “you all know three prisoners in the Alpha Block at Camp 1 committed suicide during the night by swallowing rags, causing them to choke to death.” (The Guantánamo Suicides, §5)

“He also told them,” Horton continued, “that the media would report something different. It would report that the three prisoners had committed suicide by hanging themselves in their cells. It was important, he said, that servicemen make no comments or suggestions that in any way undermined the official report. He reminded the soldiers and sailors that their phone and email communications were being monitored.”

The Dryboarding Of Ali Al-Marri

Ali Saleh al-Marri is a citizen of Qatar who entered the United States lawfully in September 2011. Ostensibly, he had come with his wife and five children to pursue graduate studies at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois – the same institution from which he had earned a bachelors degree in 1991. On December 12, 2001, Mr. al-Marri was arrested by the FBI as an alleged material witness of the terrorist attacks of September 11 (Complaint, §§14-15).

Mr. al-Marri was initially detained at the Peoria County Jail. From there, he was transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, and then back to the Peoria County Jail in May 2003. By then, Mr. al-Marri had been detained without charge for 17 months, most of which he had spent in solitary confinement (Complaint, §§15-16, 21).

On June 23, 2003, then-president George W. Bush designated Mr. al-Marri an enemy combatant and had him transferred to the US Naval consolidated brig in Charleston, South Carolina, the same prison that once housed alleged dirty-bomber Jose Padilla, former Guantánamo prisoner Yasser Hamdi and former Guantánamo Chaplain James Yee. Mr. al-Marri remained at the brig until February 2009. By then, he had been held for more than seven years – all without charge; all in virtual isolation (Complaint, §§25-26).

In 2008, President Obama transferred Mr. al-Marri’s case to the federal court system, where he pleaded guilty of supporting al-Qaeda and was sentenced to 15 years. He is now held at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He received a reduced sentence for time served and the harsh conditions of his confinement and is due to be released in January 2015 (Federal Bureau of Prisons web site).

This December, Mr. al-Marri will have spent ten years in custody. Of these years, the most brutal were the first year and a half he spent at the Naval consolidated brig, from June 2003 to October 2004. There he was held incommunicado – meaning that he was denied any contact with the outside world, including his family, his lawyers and even the International Committee of the Red Cross. His only human contact then was with government officials during interrogation sessions, or with guards when they delivered trays of food through a slot in his cell door, escorted him to shower or took him to a concrete cage for “recreation” (Memorandum, p. 4).

During this period, Mr. al-Marri was held in a 6-by-9-foot cell, denied basic necessities, including adequate clothing, recreation, and hygiene items such as a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and toilet paper. Sometimes the water to his cell was cut off for up to 20 days. If Mr. al-Marri needed water to drink or to wash himself, he had to ring a buzzer. Brig staff would often fail to respond for several hours. Brig staff also interfered with Mr. al-Marri’s practice of his religion. A devout Muslim, he was denied water to purify himself, a prayer rug, and a kofi to cover his head during prayer. When he used his shirt as a substitute, he was punished by having his shirt removed. He was prohibited from knowing the time of day and the direction to Mecca, thus preventing him from properly fulfilling the Muslim requirement of praying five times a day. The only religious item he was permitted was a Koran – but it was sometimes taken away and desecrated (Memorandum, pp. 5-6).

While held incommunicado, Mr. al-Marri was subjected to a brutal interrogation regime which included stress positions, prolonged exposures to cold temperatures, extreme sensory deprivation, and threats of violence or death to himself or to others. Interrogators, for example, told Mr. al-Marri that they would send him to Egypt or to Saudi Arabia to be tortured, sodomized and forced to watch as his wife was raped in front of him. They also threatened to make him disappear so that no one would know where he was (Memorandum, pp. 4-5).

But of all the interrogation techniques that Mr. al-Marri endured, there is one that is, potentially, of great importance for an accurate interpretation of the deaths at Guantánamo in 2006. Yet, it would have gone unnoticed were it not for a recent article by Tony Bartelme in Charleston’s Post and Courier.

Indeed, on one occasion, interrogators decided to stuff Mr. al-Marri’s mouth with cloth and cover his mouth with heavy duct tape – a technique of controlled suffocation that Mr. al-Marri’s lawyer, Andrew Savage, has called dryboarding. Dryboarding is not just a criminal practice; it is a potentially lethal procedure. As he was being dryboarded, Mr. al-Marri tried to relieve the pain caused by the duct tape by loosening the tape with his lips. He succeeded. Taking note of this, the interrogators taped his mouth again, but this time more tightly. At this point, Mr. al-Marri began to choke to death. Panicking, the interrogators acted quickly and removed the tape, thus managing, narrowly, to keep Mr. al-Marri alive (Memorandum, p. 5).

This account of the events is apparently undisputed. Ms. Joanna Baltes, who appeared on behalf of the government in the sentencing of Mr. al-Marri, seems to have acknowledged that this incident took place. She also recognized that this procedure was inconsistent with the Army Field Manual (Sentencing, pp. 259, 261). There are no signs, however, that anyone has been held accountable for carrying it out.

Video recordings of this incident exist, but have been repeatedly denied to Mr. al-Marri’s legal team on grounds of national security (Sentencing, p. 261; Andrew Savage, personal communication).

Suicide or Dryboarding?

The dryboarding of Mr. al-Marri raises an unavoidable question: Did the three individuals found hanging in Guantánamo die from dryboarding rather than by hanging? If so, they would be cases not of multiple suicide, but rather of torture leading to multiple loss of life.

Whether the Guantánamo prisoners died from hanging or from dryboarding is something for a thorough, independent and transparent inquiry to determine – the NCIS investigation was none of these. If it had been thorough, it would have disposed of all the questions we raised above; if it had been independent, it would not have been carried out by the Navy, which runs the Guantanamo Naval Base; and if it had been transparent, it would not have censored more than half of its report.

Be that as it may, it is clear that dryboarding can dispose, singlehandedly, of all the questions we have raised thus far – especially the questions regarding the need for gagging with cloth and for using masks or mask-like contraptions. They would be nothing short of essential to the task at hand.

The dryboarding hypothesis would also explain the binding of the hands, the fact that no hanging was observed after 36 visual inspections, the removal of the organs of the neck, and the missing pages in the log book – the latter being attempts at destroying evidence of a crime. It would also void the need for dubious appeals to self-binding and hobbled hangings. Similarly, it would identify the prisoners taken from Camp Delta and reveal their fate.

And the violent conditions necessitated by dryboarding could account for the bruising and bloodied T-shirt. Even the guarded description of the manner of death in the early news release would make sense under a dryboarding scenario.

But there is more. Two of the documents in the NCIS report affirm that the rags in the mouths of the deceased were socks. One of these socks was described as white athletic; the other as white nylon (NCIS1073f, NCIS1091). Interestingly, the cloth used in the dryboarding of Mr. al-Marri was also a sock (Andrew Savage, personal communication).

In light of the unanswered questions, one thing remains clear: there is a need for a thorough, independent and transparent investigation into the June 10, 2006, deaths at Guantánamo and, more broadly, for a thorough, independent and transparent inquiry into all the practices and policies of detention enacted since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

To view in full the documents cited in this report, click here.

Almerindo E. Ojeda is the founding director of the University of California at Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas and the principal investigator for its flagship Guantánamo Testimonials Project. He can be reached electronically at humanrights@ucdavis.edu. The author wishes to thank Andrew Savage, Heather Hill, Candace Gorman, James Yee, Terry Mustafa Holdbrooks and Brandon Neely for help with this article, the contents of which are the sole responsibility of the author.

Former CIA Operative Glenn Carle. Photo: Lance Page/Truthout

Reporting by Jason Leopold. Originally published on Truthout.

Rob Richer, the No. 2 ranking official in the CIA’s clandestine service, paid a visit to Glenn Carle‘s office in December 2002 and presented the veteran CIA operative with an urgent proposal.

“I want you to go on a temporary assignment,” Carle recalls Richer telling him. “It’s important for the agency, it’s important for the country and it’s important for you. Will you do it?”

Richer, who resigned from the CIA in 2005 and went to work for the mercenary outfit Blackwater, told Carle that agency operatives had just rendered a “high-value target,” an Afghan in his mid-forties named Haji Pacha Wazir, who was purported to be Osama bin Laden’s personal banker as well as financier for a number of suspected terrorists. Wazir was being held at a CIA black site prison in Morocco, and the agency needed a clandestine officer who spoke French to take over the interrogation of the detainee.

Carle, formerly the deputy national intelligence officer for transitional threats, who had no prior interrogation experience, agreed, and within 72 hours, he boarded a CIA-chartered jet bound for Morocco.

The Interrogator

Carle recounts what unfolded next in his riveting book, “The Interrogator: An Education,” which stands as a damning indictment of the CIA’s torture and rendition program and the Bush administration’s approach to the so-called Global War on Terror.

Carle refers to Wazir in his book as CAPTUS. The CIA, which did not respond to requests for comment for this report, would not allow Carle to print Wazir ‘s name in his book, nor was he permitted to disclose the locations of the two black site prisons where Wazir was imprisoned and tortured.

A report published in Harper’s in July first disclosed that CAPTUS is Wazir and the location of the CIA black site prisons where he was held.

During an on-camera interview with Truthout in Washington, DC, Carle said he originally believed the agency had captured a “significant Al-Qaeda leader” who had been a concern to US intelligence agencies “for a long time.”

“The assessment that was made of [Wazir] was quite compelling and I accepted it,” Carle said. “I knew my colleagues to be hard-working and careful and that they reviewed their assessments regularly and the assessment was that [Wazir] was one of the top players in Al-Qaeda.”

Although Carle was told by a top agency official that he should do “whatever it takes to get this man to talk,” which he said he understood meant using torture to “break this fellow’s will” and obtain intelligence, Carle said he “would not do it [because] it was wrong.”

Instead, Carle said he interrogated Wazir using standard rapport-building techniques and “psychological manipulation” that led the detainee to believe Carle was his “friend.”

Carle concluded not long after he began interrogating Wazir that the agency had “kidnapped” the “wrong guy” and Wazir, who ran an informal money-transfer business known as a Hawala, was not a “committed jihadist” or Bin Laden’s personal banker.

Wazir was “more like a train conductor who sells a criminal a ticket,” Carle writes in “The Interrogator.” “Slowly, progressively, first in dismay, then in anger, I had realized that on the CAPTUS case the Agency, the government, all of us, had been victims of delusion.”

Wazir’s life had been “destroyed” based on what Carle characterized as an “error.”

But the CIA’s position did not change. The agency believed Wazir was withholding intelligence due to the fact that he could not answer specific questions. So in an attempt to convince him to reveal information about Al-Qaeda, agency operatives kidnapped his older brother, Haji Ghaljai, in December 2002 and held him captive for six months at the same black site prison.

Carle documented his conclusions about Wazir, and called for his immediate release, in top-secret cables he prepared that were supposed to be sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. However, Carle said when he later inquired about his cables he discovered they “were never transmitted so they never formally existed.”

The US government eventually moved Wazir from Morocco to the infamous Salt Pit prison in Afghanistan, which Carle refers to as “Hotel California,” and then transferred him to the Bagram prison facility.

Psychological Torture

Carle described in great detail the conditions in which Wazir and other detainees were held at the black site prisons.

“It was instantaneously, completely black,” Carle said about the black site prisons. “Not dark, black. A darkness where literally I could not see my hand…Totally black. And there was loud incessant noise or a series of other sounds. Babies wailing, sounds that would appear to be someone being hit or car crashes or wheels screeching. The goal is to play upon the senses so as to disorient the prisoner.”

Carle said he believed the psychological methods used to disorient detainees rose to the level of torture. He said that if “things got out of hand” during an interrogation a CIA psychologist would step in. Carle said, however, he “never saw any of the physical techniques being administered [to Wazir]” while he was present.

“Whenever anything came up to make that possible I wouldn’t allow it,” Carle said. “I stopped it. So I wasn’t aware of that happening. But I don’t know what happened to him after I left” the black site prison.

Habeas Denial

Blogger Marcy Wheeler reported that in September 2006 Wazir filed a habeas petition and “his suit was ultimately consolidated with the three Bagram detainees whose DC Circuit habeas denial remains the relevant decision denying Bagram detainees habeas.”

“But Wazir’s petition was denied in spite of the fact that a former Bagram detainee revealed that Wazir had been told some time in June or July 2008 there was no evidence against him,” Wheeler wrote.

Tina Foster, a constitutional attorney who represented Wazir in his habeas petition against the US government, told Harper’s, “the Justice Department maintained that Pacha Wazir was legally detainable on unspecified grounds, but that the determination had been properly made by those with knowledge of his case.”

“Had the conclusions reached by [Carle in cable assessments he sent about Wazir] not been destroyed, and instead acknowledged and disclosed by the government to the court, it would likely have tipped the scales of justice in his case and possibly also in other cases,” Foster said.

Wazir was not freed until February 2010, eight years after his capture.

Heavily Redacted

The CIA’s Publications Review Board, “under the guise of ‘protecting sources and methods,’ imposed numerous redactions and elliptical phrases on my manuscript,” Carle writes in “The Interrogator,” which was published following a year-long battle with the agency. “These have eliminated or softened harsh facts about what our government has done in pursuit of terrorists, rounded edges of wrongdoing, and obscured the corruption of our institutions and of our system of government caused by the rendition, detention, and coercive interrogation of terrorists or terrorist suspects.”

Still, Carle footnoted the redactions and summarized, in general terms, what the agency had censored. For example, in response to a redacted paragraph on page 134, Carle added this footnote:

The deleted passage concerns my assessment of why Headquarters would persit in its conceptual and operational errors in [Wazir's] case. The passage is acidic. This is the only reason I can see why it would be redacted, for it reveals no source or method–other than contemptible institutional incompetence.

Carle told Truthout that since his book was published in June, he has been the subject of a “whispering campaign,” where “unnamed anonymous representatives and supporters of [torture] and defenders of them will speak to significant members of the media and say, ‘You shouldn’t take a chance on [reporting] his story because you don’t want to damage your access to useful sources.”

“That’s had some effect on my ability to get this story out,” Carle said, without citing the media outlets that were allegedly contacted. “The effort clearly has been, and I have heard this from multiple sources, to keep me from having access to the major media networks and newspapers and magazines. It has worked. I have not been able to share my story on a major network.”

Prosecutions Would “Divide Us”

Yet Carle, who retired from the CIA in 2007, refuses to endorse an investigation and/or prosecution of key Bush administration and CIA officials who he said they were responsible for violating numerous laws in the name of national security, claiming it would “divide” the country.

“It’s not to protect the guilty,” Carle told Truthout about the reasons he does not support accountability. “I think a trial or series of trials would divide us, polarize us and become a he said, she said, ‘I attempted to protect the nation’ – and I am sure everyone sincerely intended to do that – and ‘You’re just for political reasons coming after me.’ I think that would be counterproductive.”

“The country is already ‘divided,’” Truthout retorted, “even without a full-scale investigation or prosecution. You’re well aware of the partisan bickering currently taking place in Washington, DC. How would a criminal probe further polarize the country?”

“Well, we are divided in a more distressing way than at any time since the the Vietnam War,” Carle said. “But Vietnam was over an issue not over a political philosophy. By taking steps that fuel the divisions we don’t end them. My objective is to make the feeling more broad among the American public that [torture is] un-American and unacceptable and doesn’t work. I think that comes not by going after the designers of them, but by taking steps that make the average American think, ‘well, yeah these methods don’t work and are incompatible with what it means to be an American citizen. So, I think strengthening the feeling that the measures are wrong is more important than having three or four people pay a penalty for this.”

“I Did My Best”

Another CIA officer took over Wazir’s case in 2003 and Carle returned to the United States. He said he did not inquire about what happened to the detainee until he reluctantly typed his name into Google in December 2010.

“I was an undercover CIA operations officer for most of my career,” Carle said. “I was known to foreign services around the world as a CIA officer. It would be unwise for me to associate my name with an operation. I never asked [about Wazir] and I never looked. I learned only last year, nine months after [Wazir] had been freed, that in fact he had been freed. I knew nothing about it.”

Ultimately, Carle said, “I did my best and I think in this case I made the right decisions and acted honorably, although I was unable to accomplish much of what I tried.”

A new proposed “casebook” on psychologist ethics in national security settings, written by the Ethics Committee of the American Psychological Association (APA), tells psychologists that when assessing whether an interrogation technique is abusive or not, they should consider, among other factors, whether there are “data to support that the technique is effective in gathering accurate information.” This determination, which places the needs of the military or intelligence gathering entity above that of the person the psychologist is examining, demonstrates how blatantly unethical it is for psychologists to participate in these interrogations.

While it’s shocking that APA would call upon psychologists to weigh an interrogation technique’s “effectiveness” with other ethical standards, it’s even crazier when one considers it took them six years to write this up, having been originally tasked with writing an “ethics casebook” for interrogations back in 2005.

The vignettes that would compose the “casebook” were apparently posted (PDF) by APA for public comments last June, but APA failed to notify their membership, or really anyone. The earliest comment posted was on August 18. In a comment posted by Nina Thomas, a psychologist who was one of the few non-military, non-intelligence-linked members on the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) panel hastily assembled to formulate APA policy on psychologists and interrogations, Thomas decried the lack of notification of the membership.

“A barely three month period for responses does not seem adequate when we have not previously known anything about the progress on this work,” Thomas wrote. She also indicated that progress on the casebook’s development had not been regularly reported to APA’s Council of Representatives. (The mandate to produce such a “casebook” goes back to 2005.) Thomas had other criticisms as well, writing, “It is my hope and aim that the Ethics Committee will seriously rethink its charge and return to Council with a request for a revised mandate.”

The petition resolution affirmed by the membership of APA [in 2008] makes perfectly clear that psychologists are prohibited from working in settings in which people are held outside of or in violation of either international law or the U.S. Constitution. The only exceptions to this prohibition are in cases in which a psychologist is working directly for the person being detained, for an independent third party working to protect human rights or providing treatment to military personnel. These major and ultimately most important points do not have sufficient presence in this casebook as currently devised.

Over and over the APA “casebook” advises members to seek “consultation” about any difficult ethical situation, while advising psychologists to rely on a host of human rights documents, APA resolutions, and the APA ethics code to “guide” them. But psychologists shouldn’t even be in these torture settings to begin with!

The petition resolution referenced by Thomas was a member-initiated petition that was passed in a referendum vote in 2008 by a membership unhappy with APA’s policy on interrogations, and implemented by APA’s Council in 2009. The resolution states that “psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation 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.”

But APA has adamantly refused to set up a process that would actually determine when such a detention setting is in violation of the law, even while sententiously expressing “grave concern” over reports of torture and abuse at U.S. military and CIA interrogation and detention centers. According to one “casebook” instruction, “the psychologist … would need to determine whether the site is a lawful or unlawful detention setting.” If APA can’t or won’t make such a determination, how can they expect an individual psychologist to do this, and feel they will be backed up by their organization for doing so?

APA has refused to follow the policy of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association in instructing their membership not to participate in interrogations. Indeed, it was the contention of the 2005 APA PENS panel that “it is consistent with the APA Ethics Code for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes, as psychologists have a long-standing tradition of doing in other law enforcement contexts.”

Nothing in the new “casebook” is really any different than the position APA derived in the 2005 PENS report (PDF). The psychologist is supposed to walk an ethical tightrope while serving as “consultant” to interrogations, admonished to report torture or other cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment (as defined by law), and to engage in research beneficial to national security aims. All the while, APA’s seemingly benign admonishments cover a policy of support to detention and interrogation policies that amount to torture, using various legalistic loopholes built into a 2002 rewrite of the Ethics Code to allow the unethical use of psychologist expertise to brain-trust the torture.

APA concludes that psychologists should report torture to the “appropriate authorities.” Furthermore, “If the psychologist was not satisfied with the result of reporting such concerns, the psychologist would consider other reporting avenues such as the judge advocate and/or the inspector general.” It all sounds good, until you realize that such reporting rarely goes anywhere, and it beggars all knowledge of social psychology to believe that one individual will buck an entire system and put their careers on the line to protest. This is even more true when one considers that previous investigations of detainee torture have either minimized or covered up significant aspects of the torture.

The one case that APA often cites where a psychologist protested torture concerns NCIS psychologist Michael Gelles, who protested the torture protocol for Mohamed Al Qahtani. Two salient points are connected with that case. One is that it didn’t stop the torture, both of Al Qahtani, nor the spread of the torture program throughout the Department of Defense. Two, Gelles was not just protesting a torture protocol, he was proposing a different program of psychological torture based primarily on the application of extreme isolation of the prisoner, who was reportedly already manifesting psychotic behavior.

Another example of the impotency of the policy of protest concerns the CIA torture of Abu Zubaydah. Planned by two former SERE psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the “enhanced interrogation techniques” applied to Zubaydah, which included stress positions, placing him into a closed box with insects, waterboarding, sleep deprivation and more, led then chief operational psychologist for the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center, R. Scott Shumate to leave the interrogation “in disgust, leaving before the most dire tactics had commenced,” according to a 2007 article by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair.

There is no evidence that Shumate protested the torture up the chain of command. Indeed, the torture continued, and was extended to others. Shumate, whatever he did, was rewarded by being put on the APA PENS panel.

APA cannot help but confuse the “casebook” instructions by mixing use of the ethics code as a guideline with advice laid down by DoD in the Army Field Manual for interrogations: “‘If the proposed approach technique were used by the enemy against one of your fellow soldiers, would you believe the soldier had been abused?’…. if the answer to this question is yes, ‘the contemplated action should not be conducted.’” The problem is, as has been amply documented, it is the military and/or CIA psychologists who are proposing the “techniques” to begin with, or following orders from those higher in the chain of command (see here, and here, and here, for instance).

Psychologists Speak Out

Dan Aalbers, one of the authors of the APA petition resolution told The Dissenter, “I didn’t understand until fairly recently how few obligations remain in the APA’s ethics code: if you use these quite useful pdfs [comparing the 1992 and 2002 ethical codes] and search for words and phrases that denote obligation — ‘must’ ‘should’, ‘do not’ and ‘obligation’ itself — you will quickly find that most of these phrases appear in the 1992 revision of the ethics code and, more often than not, the 2002 code saddles psychologists with no obligation greater than due consideration. Psychologists ‘must’ consider the consequences their actions — but they are not prevented from doing much…. The 2002 ethics code should be thrown out and the 1992 code — with its strictures on informed consent, on clarification of role, and obligations to avoid multiple relationships — reinstated.”

One good example of what Aalbers is talking about is Section 3.04 of the Ethics Code, to which the “casebook” authors often refer. It states, “Psychologists take reasonable steps to avoid harming their clients/patients…” Not “Do Not Harm,” but the taking of “reasonable steps.” Indeed, until the membership and some of the human rights community raised a hullaballoo, and even then only after eight years of stalling, did APA change its code last year regarding ethical conflicts with organizational authorities. Before this change, since 2002 the APA has instructed its membership that resolution of such conflicts could be resolved by simply following the authority in question (like the military) and not the ethical standard, should they be in conflict. Critics called this the Nuremberg Defense, referencing many a Nazi’s defense against war crimes with the refrain that he was “only following orders.”

Another psychologist who has been active in opposing APA’s policies on interrogation, former president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility Stephen Soldz, also told The Dissenter that he was worried about aspects of the Ethics Code that relate to research. “Remember,” Soldz said, “that [Ethics Codes] 8.05 ['Dispensing with Informed Consent'] and 8.07 ['Deception in Research'] still remain. 8.05 removes the requirement for informed consent for institutional research. And 8.07 raises the bar for psychological distress to rule out research deception, using language similar to the Convention Against Torture’s definition of psychological torture. Meanwhile, the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group currently has former APA fellow Susan Brandon as Research Director. The HIG may have conducted and is apparently intending to conduct research on detainees. There are persistent rumors that research on detainees occurred as recent as last year (I’m not saying it ended, just have no current sources) in both Iraq and Afghanistan. While we don’t know the nature of this research, there are some indications in the press that raise alarm.

“All this is simply to say that the interrogation issue is not a matter of the Bush administration and the past. Rather, it is still alive. And we should remember that research may have played a larger role in the need for psychologists than many of us originally realized.”

Martha Davis, a forensic psychologist who has just completed a documentary about psychologists, interrogations and torture, “Doctors of the Dark Side,” in a statement to The Dissenter cautioned that no fine tuning of the “casebook” would make things better (for the record, I was interviewed by Davis as part of the documentary):

I worry that IF the Ethics Committee were ever to do the right thing, extend the deadline, open the discussion up, and somehow put together another, much better Casebook that incorporated these suggestions and other good ones, then in effect, the casebook process would reinforce and “legitimize” the practice of having psychologists directly involved in interrogations. Every significant health and human rights organization has condemn this practice except the APA. The simple versions of “no direct involvement in interrogations” adopted by the AMA and ApA are understandable to everyone and the only way to guarantee that doctors “keep in their lane” etc., etc. We know so much more now than we did in 2005 — so much of it ominous and disturbing. The practice is spreading beyond “national security” interrogations to US law enforcement settings. BSCT psychologists violate at least 10 parts of the APA Ethics Code (and that’s without torture), and the role is incompatible with the new Specialty Guidelines of Forensic Psychology.

Len Rubenstein, Senior Scholar, Center for Human Rights and Public Health, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, wrote an op-ed at Huffington Post last week, indicating he believed that a recent rewrite by APA of its forensic psychology guidelines should apply to psychologists and interrogations. Rubenstein, calling the PENS ethical guidelines ”ethically untenable, little more than a shabby rationalization for severe ethical violations,” noted that APA’s new Specialty Guidelines for Forensic Psychologists call for complete transparency with the client, and eschews use of deception, both the opposite of military/CIA practice.

The guidelines also render intolerable the conflict of interest at the heart of the psychologists’ role — at once to advance intelligence gathering and to act as a “safety officer.” The conflict, moreover, is likely to be resolved in favor of pressing for information, since the psychologists involved are classified as combatants, not clinicians (though they must be licensed to practice), and assigned to an intelligence chain of command. Whereas PENS sought to fudge the conflict by urging a “delicate balance of ethical considerations” the Specialty Guidelines insist on adherence to core obligations of integrity and fairness and avoidance of involvement in roles with conflicts of interest.

But according to forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, “These guidelines are not enforceable. And, like all such professional guidelines, they will be subject to diverse interpretations.”

And it is in such a forest of conflicting interpretations, vague instructions, unenforceable prohibitions against torture, and the like, that APA hides complicity in the U.S. torture program, having determined that “national security psychology” is the wave of the future. The lack of accountability for psychologist collaboration with torture is the background for the entire discussion. It is more incumbent than ever that psychologists and other mental health professionals speak out against this amalgam of psychological science and practice with the art of coercive interrogation and persuasion, of the marriage of psychology with torture.

Originally published at Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

Former United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speaking at CPAC 2011 in Washington, DC. Rumsfeld has recently denied knowledge of any waterboarding by US military personnel taking place at Guantanamo Bay. Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr

This report was written by Jeffrey Kaye and originally published on Truthout.

In the controversy over whether torture, especially waterboarding, was used to gather information leading to the capture of Osama bin Laden, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Fox News’ Sean Hannity recently that “no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the US military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period.”

In his memoir, “Known and Unknown,” Rumsfeld maintained, “To my knowledge, no US military personnel involved in interrogations waterboarded any detainees,not at  Guantanamo or anywhere else in the world.” But as we shall see, Rumsfeld was either lying outright, or artfully twisting the truth.

Others have insisted as well that the military never waterboarded anyone. Law and national security writer Benjamin Wittes wrote in The New Republic last year that “the military, unlike the CIA, never waterboarded anybody.” Harper’s columnist Scott Horton also noted last year, “There is no documentation yet of waterboarding at Gitmo, but the case book is far from closed on that score, too.”

Yet, though not widely reported and scattered among various articles and reports on detainee treatment by the military, including first-person accounts, there are a number of stories of forced water choking or drowning, both at Guantanamo and other US military sites.

In little-known testimony in May 2008 before Congress, former Guantanamo detainee Murat Kurnaz testified he endured a form of simulated drowning. In his testimony before a subcommittee of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Kurnaz said that under US military captivity at Khadahar, Afghanistan, prior to his transfer to Guantanamo, his head was “dunked under water to simulate drowning.”

Asked by Republican Congressman Rohrabacher if he hadn’t then been waterboarded, Kurnaz responded, “No, it’s not waterboarding. It’s called ‘water treatment.’ There was a bucket of water.”

ROHRABACHER: Was a cloth put over your face and you were put on a board?

KURNAZ: There was a bucket of water. And they stick my head in it and at the same time, punch me into my stomach.

Rohrabacher reportedly commented, “The CIA is claiming that only three people have been waterboarded. And this may be a loophole that they’re suggesting that’s not ‘waterboarding.’”

According to a report on Kurnaz’s testimony at the time by The Christian Science Monitor, Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon replied to the torture charges: “The abuses Mr. Kurnaz alleges are not only unsubstantiated and implausible, they are simply outlandish.”

Whether implausible or not, waterboarding was one of a number of “counter-resistance techniques” requested for use at Guantanamo by Maj. Gen. Mike Dunleavy, commander of Task Force 170. In an October 2002 memo from Dunleavy’s intelligence chief requesting use of a number of techniques, including sensory deprivation, isolation, stress positions, forced nudity and death threats, there was also a proposal for “Use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of suffocation.”

In a follow-up memo approving most, but not all of the requested techniques, Department of Defense (DoD) general counsel William J. Haynes II said of the “wet towel” and other so-called “aggressive” “Category III” techniques, “While all Category III techniques may be legally available, we believe that, as a matter of policy, a blanket approval of Category III techniques is not warranted at this time.” (Emphasis added.)

Water Torture at Guantanamo

Evidence regarding waterboarding or other forms of water torture by suffocation or choking at Guantanamo has been reported, but this article is the first collection of the various reports in one place.

Last April, a report by two doctors who were allowed to examine “medical records and relevant case files … of nine individuals for evidence of torture and ill treatment,” found at least one case of “near asphyxiation from water (i.e., hose forced into the detainee’s mouth)” and another case where a detainee’s head was forced into a toilet.

The report, by doctors Vincent Iacopino and Stephen N. Xenakis, was published at PLoS Medicine. Dr. Xenakis is also a retired brigadier general in the Army, who has worked as a medical consultant on a number of Guantanamo legal cases.

Additionally, accusations of military waterboarding turned up in a Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General (IG) report on “FBI Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations” that was released at almost the same time as Kurnaz’s testimony (May 2008). The IG noted that the chief of the FBI’s Military Liaison and Detainee Unit at Guantanamo told DoD Assistant Attorney General Dave Nahmias, “one of the planned or actual techniques used on [purported 9/11 would-be hijacker, Mohammed] Al Qahtani was simulated drowning.”

In fact, the military admits the use of pouring water over al Qahtani’s head, as is discussed below.

At another point in the report, the IG describes one FBI agent who “once heard a discussion at GTMO when someone mentioned using water as an interrogation tool and someone else in the group said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen that.’” According to the IG report, no FBI agent actually reported seeing waterboarding or water torture him or herself.

Whether or not waterboarding was observed by FBI agents at Guantanamo, we know from the minutes of a “Counter-resistance Strategy meeting” at Guantanamo on October 22, 2002, that waterboarding (called the “wet towel” technique) was discussed (see Tab 7 at link). The meeting included legal officials from the CIA, DIA, the Guantanamo intelligence chief, as well as members of the Guantanamo Behavioral Science Consulting Team (BSCT).

At one point, Lt. Col. Diane Beaver, the Staff Judge Advocate at Guantanamo asked whether SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) employed “the ‘wet towel’ technique.” Jonathan Fredman, then chief counsel to the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, replied:

“If a well-trained individual is used to perform [sic] this technique it can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating, but your body will not cease to function. It is very effective to identify phobias and use them (ie, insects, snakes, claustrophobia). The level of resistance is directly related to person’s experience.”

At this point, a BSCT psychiatrist noted, “Whether or not significant stress occurs lies in the eye of the beholder. The burden of proof is the big issue.” Fredman replied, “These techniques need involvement from interrogators, psych, medical, legal, etc.”

Fredman continued “The CIA makes the call internally on most of the types of techniques found in the BSCT paper and this discussion.” In a reference to the approvals for waterboarding and other techniques given the CIA by Office of Legal Counsel memos a few months before, he added, “Significantly harsh techniques are approved through the DOJ.” There was no indication in the minutes from the meeting that waterboarding was not allowed for Defense Department use.

Waterboarding of Mohammed al Qahtani

Mohammed al Qahtani was a Saudi Arabian citizen brought to Guantanamo in early 2002. Ostensibly believed to be a part of the 9/11 plot, when interrogators became frustrated at their inability to get information out of him, or force his compliance, they turned to methods of interrogation that the Guantanamo Convening Authority Susan Crawford would later herself conclude amounted to torture.

By November 2002, al Qahtani had become the “first subject of a Special Interrogation Plan,” which relied heavily on the military’s SERE torture school techniques, including isolation, stress positions, sexual humiliation and apparently, a form of waterboarding. SERE was created to provide US military personnel with training to resist torture.

Even years before Crawford’s admission, DoD’s Schmidt-Furlow report, looking at early allegations of detainee abuse, concluded that “the creative, aggressive and persistent interrogation of the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan [al Qahtani] resulted in the cumulative effect being degrading and abusive treatment.” No one has ever been charged for such crimes committed against this or any other Guantanamo detainee.

The Schmidt-Furlow report details the use of water torture on al Qahtani, an aspect of his torture that has been little reported:

On seventeen occasions, between 13 Dec 02 and 14 Jan 03, interrogators, during interrogations, poured water over the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan head….

There is evidence that the subject of the first Special Interrogation Plan regularly had water poured on his head. The interrogation logs indicate that this was done as a control measure only.

Time Magazine published al Qahtani’s interrogation logs  in 2005. The use of water to drench al Qahtani’s head does not appear to be a “control measure” when it is discussed in the logs themselves.

On December 23, 2002, a log selection describes how interrogators hung pictures of swimsuit models around al Qahtani’s neck. Then the lead interrogator “pulled pictures of swimsuit models off detainee and told him the test of his ability to answer questions would begin. Detainee refused to answer and finally stated that he would after [the] lead [interrogator] poured water over detainees [sic] head and was told he would be subjected to this treatment day after day. Detainee was told to think about his decision to answer questions.”

The day before, when al Qahtani had refused to look at “fitness photos,” saying it was against his religion, interrogators had “poured a 24 oz bottle of water over detainee’s head.” The log notes dryly, “Detainee then began to look at photos.”

In their investigation of detainee abuse, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) noted in a 2008 report that the Navy limited waterboard demonstrations to two pints (32 oz.) of water. A January 13, 2003, memo, described in the SASC report, underreported how much water was poured over Qahtani, saying that “up to eight ounces of water” was poured over Qahtani’s head as a “method of asserting control” when Khatani exhibited ”undesired behavior.”

The SASC report also said that the interrogation plan for another Guantanamo detainee, Mohamadou Walid Slahi, included the practice of pouring water over Slahi’s head to “enforce control” and “keep [him] awake.”

Three More Guantanamo Detainees Report Suffocation by Drowning

Besides Kurnaz and al Qahtani, at least three other detainees have reported being tortured at Guantanamo by application of water meant to cause suffocation, choking or the sensation of drowning.

A 2009 article by Jeremy Scahill outlined the torture and abuse endured by former Guantanamo detainee and British resident Omar Deghayes. Scahill mentions two incidents where the Immediate Reaction Force (IRF, sometimes called the Emergency Reaction Force, or ERF) used forms of water torture on Deghayes. In one case, the detainee was shackled, his head put into a toilet. The IRF team “pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.”

The IRF or ERF team also came into Deghayes cell on another occasion and conducted a simulated or partial drowning.

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. [Deghayes] was totally shackled and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present and they would join in.

According to Scahill, the IRF team conducted this form of waterboarding three times on Deghayes. Note that the presence of medical staff is consistent with the use of medical personnel under CIA descriptions of how they conducted waterboarding.

Another example of water torture involving Guantanamo guards appears in a document related to the case of Djamel Ameziane, an Algerian Berber who has been held at Guantanamo for over eight years, despite the fact he never received military or terrorist training, nor fought against the US. According to 2008 legal filing for Ameziane by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR):

In another violent incident, guards entered his cell and forced him to the floor, kneeing him in the back and ribs and slamming his head against the floor, turning it left and right. The bashing dislocated Mr. Ameziane’s jaw, from which he still suffers. In the same episode, guards sprayed cayenne pepper all over his body and then hosed him down with water to accentuate the effect of the pepper spray and make his skin burn. They then held his head back and placed a water hose between his nose and mouth, running it for several minutes over his face and suffocating him, an operation they repeated several times. Mr. Ameziane writes, “I had the impression that my head was sinking in water. I still have psychological injuries, up to this day. Simply thinking of it gives me the chills.” [Emphasis added.]

In March 2008, six Guantanamo detainees filed suit against Bosnia and Herzegovina in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for failure “for many years to take any steps to negotiate and secure the men’s release from Guantanamo.” One of the men, Mustafa Ait Idr, who had been rendered to Guantanamo and “taken from his pregnant wife in violation of a Bosnian court order to free him,” also reported use of water torture in a manner remarkably similar to that of Ameziane.

A CCR report on “Torture, Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba” said that on one occasion prison guards demanded to search Idr’s cell. Idr cooperated, but they came in, sprayed him in the face with a chemical irritant and put him into restraints.

According to the CCR report, “Guards then slammed him head first into the cell floor, lowered him, face-first into the toilet and flushed the toilet – submerging his head. He was then carried outside and thrown onto the crushed stones that surround the cells. While he was down on the ground, his assailants stuffed a hose in his mouth and forced water down his throat.” As a result, Idr’s face was paralyzed for several months.

Other threats to use waterboarding on DoD prisoners, or to rendition detainees for water torture, are also on record. According to journalist Robert Windrem in a 2009 story at The Daily Beast, then Vice President Dick Cheney requested the waterboarding of Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi, the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat. According to the article, the official in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials at the time, Charles Duelfer, declined the request.

According to the SASC detainee report, the lead agency for SERE, Joint Forces Personnel Agency, constructed a CONOP (Concept of Operations) plan for use at a Special Mission Unit Task Force interrogation center in Iraq. The CONOP recommended use of the “water board.” Military legal figures reportedly objected to that and other techniques, but it is not known whether Special Forces in Iraq used waterboarding or other water torture techniques and the SASC report does not enlighten us on that point.

In another case, former Italian resident and Guantanamo detainee, Tunisian-born Saleh Sassi, reported that in late 2002, Tunisian agents came to Guantanamo and interrogated him. They “left no doubt about what awaited ex-Guantanamo inmates back in Tunisia: ‘water torture in the barrel’ and other horrors.” Sassi was released and sent to Albania in 2010.

Finally, the DOJ IG report on FBI interrogations referenced earlier describes how an Abu Ghraib prisoner, Saleh Muklef Saleh, was restrained and had cold water poured over him on more than one occasion. One time, according to Saleh’s own testimony, “They gave me one or two bottles of water and they asked me to drink it while I was hungry and they forced me to drink it and I did and I felt vomiting, then they ordered me to drink again and they were looking at me and laughing” (pp. 279-280).

Back in 2008, during the Congressional meeting where Murat Kurnaz testified to the use of water torture upon him, Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee commented, “It seems that we have a new definition … If you were wedded to the language of waterboarding, now we have new language called ‘water treatment,’ which may bear on being torture as well.”

To date, there has been no investigation that specifically has looked at the use of types of water torture, including waterboarding or water treatment, on detainees. The military’s current Army Field Manual on interrogation forbids the use of “waterboarding.” It is the only “prohibited action” term that is described with quotation marks around it.

A Human Rights Watch report issued on July 12 called for President Barack Obama “to order a criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse authorized by former President George W. Bush and other senior officials.”

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

In particular, HRW singled out “four key leaders” in the torture program. Besides former President George W. Bush, the report indicts former Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. But others remain possible targets of investigation and prosecution. According to the report:

Such an investigation should also include examination of the roles played by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft, as well as the lawyers who crafted the legal “justifications” for torture, including Alberto Gonzales (counsel to the president and later attorney general), Jay Bybee (head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC)), John Rizzo (acting CIA general counsel), David Addington (counsel to the vice president), William J. Haynes II (Department of Defense general counsel), and John Yoo (deputy assistant attorney general in the OLC).

But the key passage in the HRW report concerns the backing for international prosecutions, under the principle in international law of “universal jurisdiction,” which was used back in 1998 by Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón to indict former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for genocide and murder.

Unless and until the US government pursues credible criminal investigations of the role of senior officials in the mistreatment of detainees since September 11, 2001, exercise universal jurisdiction or other forms of jurisdiction as provided under international and domestic law to prosecute US officials alleged to be involved in criminal offenses against detainees in violation of international law. [emphasis added]

Indeed, in an important section of the report, HRW details the failures and successes of pursuing such international prosecutions in the face of U.S. prosecutors’ failure to act and investigate or indict high administration officials for war crimes. This is even more important when one considers that the Obama administration has clearly stated its intention to not investigate or prosecute such crimes, going after a handful of lower-level interrogators for crimes not covered by the Bush administration’s so-called “legal” approvals for torture provided by the infamous Yoo/Bybee/Levin/Bradbury memos issued by the Office of Legal Counsel.

Nor has Congress shown even a smidgen of appetite for pursuing further accountability: not one Congressman or Senator has stepped forward as yet to endorse HRW’s new call. Instead, they demonstrated their obsequiousness by approving Obama’s nomination of General David Petraeus as new CIA director 94-0, despite the fact that Petraeus has been implicated in the organization of counter-terror death squads in Iraq, and was in charge of training Iraqi security forces who repeatedly were documented as engaging in widespread torture. It was during Petraeus’s tenure as chief of such training for the coalition forces, that the U.S. implemented the notorious Fragmentary Order (FRAGO) 242, which commanded U.S. forces not to intervene in cases of Iraqi governmental torture should they come across such it (which they often did). No one during Petraeus’s testimony in his nomination hearings even questioned him about this.

Why this report now?

I asked Andrea Prasow, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch, why this report was issued now, noting that some on the left had already questioned the timing of HRW’s action.

“Because it really needed to be done,” Prasow explained. She noted the recent admissions by former President Bush and Vice President Cheney that they had approved waterboarding. Furthermore, “following the killing of [Osama] Bin Laden, we saw the immediate response by some that torture and the enhanced interrogation techniques led to the capture of Bin Laden. And it became a part of normal debate about torture. It shows how fragile is the current commitment not to torture.”

Prasow also noted the recent closure of the Durham investigation, which resulted in the decision to criminally investigate the deaths of two detainees in CIA custody, while 99 other cases referred to his office were closed. I asked her whether she felt, as I do, that the announcement of the two investigations were meant to forestall attempts by European (especially Spanish) prosecutors to pursue “universal jurisdiction” prosecutions of U.S. officials for torture.

“I don’t see how there’s a defensible justification that the investigations Durham announced can do that,” Prasow said. “It’s pretty clear that there should be an investigation into the deaths of these detainees,” she added, “but it’s so clear the investigation is very limited. The scope of the investigation is the most important part. Even if Durham had investigated the 100 or so cases that exceeded the legal authorities, it wouldn’t be sufficient. What about the people who wrote the legal memos? Who told them to write the memos?” she said, emphasizing the fact that Durham’s investigation was limited by Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder to only CIA crimes, and only those that supposedly exceeded the criteria for “enhanced interrogation” laid out in a number of administration legal memos. The torture, Prasow noted, was “throughout the military” as well, including “hundreds or thousands” tortured at sites in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

Prasow noted that the Obama administration has made it policy to block attempts by torture victims to get compensation for torture, asserting a policy of protecting “state secrets” to shut down court cases. “But there are other ways of providing redress,” she said, adding that “providing redress is part of international laws.” The HRW report itself states, “Consistent with its obligations under the Convention against Torture, the US government should ensure that victims of torture obtain redress, which may include providing victims with compensation where warranted outside of the judicial context.”

The new HRW report comes on the heels of a controversy roiling around a proposed United Kingdom governmental inquiry into torture. A number of British human rights and legal agencies have said they would boycott the UK proceedings as a “whitewash.” As Andy Worthington put it the other day:

As a result of pandering to the Americans’ wishes, the terms of reference are “so restrictive,” as the Guardian described it, that JUSTICE, the UK section of the International Commission of Jurists, warned that the inquiry “was likely to fail to comply with UK and international laws governing investigations into torture.” Eric Metcalfe, JUSTICE’s director of human rights policy, said that the rules “mean that the inquiry is unlikely to get to the truth behind the allegations and, even if it does, we may never know for sure. However diligent and committed Sir Peter [Gibson] and his team may be, the government has given itself the final word on what can be made public.”

Andrea Prasow echoed Metcalfe’s fears, saying HRW had “some concerns about how much information [in the UK inquiry] was going to be kept secret. I think transparency, making it as public as possible, is most important.”

The fight for transparency also makes HRW’s call for prosecutions of high government officials, along with “an independent, nonpartisan commission, along the lines of the 9-11 Commission, [that] should be established to examine the actions of the executive branch, the CIA, the military, and Congress, with regard to Bush administration policies and practices that led to detainee abuse,” very timely. In a column the other day at Secrecy News — Pentagon Tightens Grip on Unclassified Information — Steven Aftergood reported on a Department of Defense proposed new rule regarding classification. While the Obama administration is supposedly on record for greater governmental transparency, the new rule imposes “new safeguard requirements on ‘prior designations indicating controlled access and dissemination (e.g., For Official Use Only, Sensitive But Unclassified, Limited Distribution, Proprietary, Originator Controlled, Law Enforcement Sensitive).’”

According to Aftergood, “By ‘grandfathering’ those old, obsolete markings in a new regulation for defense contractors, the DoD rule would effectively reactivate them and qualify them for continued protection under the new Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) regime, thereby defeating the new policy.” Even worse (if possible), “the proposed rule says that any unclassified information that has not been specifically approved for public release must be safeguarded. It establishes secrecy, not openness, as the presumptive status and default mode for most unclassified information.”

Much of what we know about the Bush-era torture program is due to the work of the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights, who have used the Freedom of Information Act to gather hundreds of documents, if not thousands, that document the paper trail surrounding the crimes of the Bush administration. Reporters and investigators like Jane Mayer, Philippe Sands, Alfred McCoy, and Jason Leopold have also contributed much to our understanding of what occurred during the Bush years. The work of investigators going back years demonstrates that U.S. research into and propagation of torture around the world goes back decades.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has also produced an impressive, if still partially redacted, investigation (large PDF) into detainee abuse by the Department of Defense. Their report, for instance, concluded regarding torture at Guantanamo that “Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of interrogation techniques at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.”

When one puts together the accelerated emphasis on “state secrets”; the Obama political program of “not looking back” in regards to U.S. war crimes (while supposedly pursuing accountability for torture and war crimes committed by other countries); the political passivity, if not cowardice of Congress; the fact that Obama “has not been transparent on the rendition issue, not even saying what its policy is,” according to Andrea Prasow; and finally the lies and propaganda spewed forth by the former Administration’s key figures and their proxies, one can only agree with HRW that enough is enough. The time for investigations and prosecutions into torture and rendition is now.

And if they won’t listen in Washington, D.C., perhaps they will in Madrid. Or some other intrepid prosecutor in — who knows? — Brazil or Argentina or Chile will pay back America, as a matter of poetic but also real justice for the crimes endured by their societies when the U.S. helped organize torture and terror in their countries only a generation ago. There were no U.S. investigations into actions of government figures then, and now we are faced with another set of atrocities produced by our own government. If we do not act now, what will our children face?

Originally published at Firedoglake.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor at the UK Guardian reported earlier this week that the widely heralded 2010 announcement of a British government official inquiry into UK torture is facing a boycott by British human rights and attorney groups. The reason is undue secrecy.

[British Prime Minister] Cameron also made clear that the sort of material that has so far been made public with the limited disclosure in the Guantánamo cases would be kept firmly under wraps during the inquiry. “Let’s be frank, it is not possible to have a full public inquiry into something that is meant to be secret,” he said. “So any intelligence material provided to the inquiry panel will not be made public and nor will intelligence officers be asked to give evidence in public.”

This from the UK Guardian… July 14, 2010.

The handwriting was on the wall for some time on this sham inquiry, but the British human rights and lawyer groups kept fighting to make something real out of it. I can understand the impulse to do this, but really the inquiry’s true intentions were telegraphed when Sir Peter Gibson was made its chair, as I noted when the news first broke.

The investigation is being conducted by a panel of three, whose head is the intelligence-connected Sir Peter Gibson, who is Intelligence Services Commissioner, responsible for monitoring secret bugging operations by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ (Britain’s version of the NSA). Many questions have been raised by the appointment of Gibson, and it is startling to think that British human rights groups will accede to the appointment, given Gibson’s likely bias, not to mention his track record in other “judge-led” investigations.

The legal human rights charity group Reprieve describes three fatal flaws embedded within the official rules recently published for the inquiry:

First, the definition of evidence that will remain classified forever is hopelessly overbroad. Set out in Annex A [of the Detainee's Inquiry Protocol - PDF], this effectively includes anything that would in any way breach an “understanding” between the UK and its allies – in other words, anything the Americans would find embarrassing will not be made public…. Given that the essence of British complicity involves working with the US on torture and rendition, the exception to publicity swallows the rule.

Second, there is no meaningful, independent (preferably judicial) review of what should be kept secret… Unlike other inquiries where victims have made serious allegations of torture, the victims will not have meaningful legal representation. Their advisers will be denied access to any documents or hearings deemed secret by the inquiry.

Third, the Inquiry is left toothless due to a lack of powers to compel the attendance of witnesses or the provision of evidence or information from any party or organisation.

Truly, the UK government’s so-called inquiry is being set up as Reprieve director Clive Stafford-Smith called it, “a whitewash.” According to the Guardian article Shami Chakrabarti, director of the British group Liberty, states the inquiry is “a sham.” “When is an inquiry not an inquiry?” Chakrabarti asked. “When it’s a secret internal review.”

Hiding Murder in the Rendition Program

Illustration: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t

While the U.S. Department of Justice is finally considering two cases of murder of detainees by the CIA, in general, the Obama administration has an official policy of “not looking back” and non-accountability when it comes to crimes of torture. But it seems likely there are more crimes waiting to be revealed.

Last July, around the time the UK torture inquiry was first proposed, I broke the story that the revelations of UK cooperation with U.S. rendition policies included possible “rendition to killing.”

Like much of what I report, the revelation was not consistent with the accepted narrative of what the U.S. media is allowed to report, so it was also ignored by the supposed alternative blogosphere, who mainly grubs after the crumbs that are begrudgingly reported by Associated Press, the New York Times, the Washington Post, or second-tier establishment-organs-cum-alternative-press like Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, or Salon.com. The mainstream press reports what government officials tell them, while the “alternative” press and bloggers report what academic and governmental dissidents say. Rarely is any real investigative work done.

But this revelation was based on hard documentation, as reported in my July 14, 2010 article.

A series of documents released on July 14 in the UK Binyam Mohamed civil case, Al Rawi and Others v Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Others, have produced a series of explosive revelations, reported in Britain and as yet unknown here in the U.S….

Now, one of the most incendiary revelations in the documents concerns instructions given to MI6 Special Intelligence Service (SIS) over detention operations. According to Chapter 32 of MI6′s general procedural manual, “Detainees and Detention Operations”, “the following sensitivities arise” (PDF – bold emphasis added):

a. the geographical destination of the target. Where will she or he be held? Under whose jurisdiction? Is it clear that detention, rather than killing, is the objective of the operation?

b. what treatment regime(s) for the detainees can be expected?

c. what is the legal basis for the detention?

d. what is the role of any liaison partner who might be involved?

The “objective” of “killing” points to the existence of extrajudicial murders carried out by the intelligence services. It’s not clear if the killings are by UK or liaison — including United States — forces. “Liaison partners” refers to instances of operational cooperation with non-UK intelligence agencies.

I have since discovered that BBC reported the same revelations about “killing” on July 15, so at least it was reported in the British press, where it made some stir, the BBC labeling as “stark” the paragraph on about “killing” as “the objective of the operation.” Still, no U.S. news outlet picked up on this.

This is not the first time that unheralded killings of detainees has appeared in an otherwise unnoticed document. Last December I reported on a discussion of Guantanamo health protocols at a February 19, 2002 meeting of the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board, where officials were told that a “number of the detainees have died of the wounds that they arrived with.”

This is not as impossible or incredible as it may sound. We know that Guantanamo, like other DoD and CIA sites had their share of “ghost prisoners,” i.e., prisoners whose existence was never reported to the International Red Cross or anyone else. Some of these disappeared forever. We don’t know how many. (Maybe a real torture inquiry would shed some light on this.) Indeed, Manadel al-Jamadi, the subject of one of John Durham’s recently announced criminal investigations, was such a ghost prisoner. And he, too, ended up dead, murdered.

Nor are such renditions and ghost prisoners a recent phenomenon. Consider the case of a Bulgarian political activist Dmitrov (aka “Kelly”) who was rendered to U.S. Fort Clayton in Panama in the early 1950s, where, according to declassified CIA documents, he became a victim of the CIA’s Project Artichoke mind control program. The full story was reported by H.P. Albarelli and myself in a Truthout article last year.

The United States, Great Britain and their partners in torture and rendition believe they are above the law, and that they can game the system forever. Perhaps they are right, and we have lost the battle before it was ever really engaged. I refuse to believe this is so. I can’t believe that I am alone in wanting justice, and seeking a radical change in the configuration of forces that control this planet, which are currently organized in the name of power and oppression, for the benefit of an economic elite, and not around justice, social and economic equality, and a rational, humane world order based on cooperation and mutual respect for all nations and all individuals.

We desperately need a real, international inquiry into the crimes of torture, rendition, and aggressive war. But there is no political force currently operative that has the power and influence to make this happen, as the pending collapse of the UK torture inquiry enterprise demonstrates. And that is truly the dilemma of our times.

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist living in Northern California who writes regularly on torture and other subjects for The Public Record, Truthout and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

This picture of Abu Zubaydah was included in his classified Guantanamo Detainee Assessment Brief released last month by WikiLeaks.

This report was written by Jason Leopold and originally published at Truthout.org. Click here to listen to Jason Leopold discuss this investigative story on The Peter B. Collins show.

Shortly after he was captured in March 2002 at a safe house in Faisalabad, Pakistan, following an early morning raid jointly conducted by the CIA, FBI, Pakistani police and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Abu Zubaydah woke up at a black site prison in Thailand and discovered that his left eye had been surgically removed.

Zubaydah, who is wearing an eye patch in a photograph included in his Guantanamo threat assessment file released by WikiLeaks last month, apparently never consented to the medical procedure and to this day has no idea why it was done, according to one of Zubaydah’s attorneys.

“I can tell you that Abu Zubaydah has no explanation for the loss of his eye,” said Brent Mickum, who has represented Zubaydah since 2007. “He continually wants me to make inquiries to try and determine the circumstances for which he lost his eye, but no one has been forthcoming.”

This is Abu Zubaydah’s passport photo, taken sometime in 1998 it is believed, which appears to show a shadow or scar over his left eye, possibly the result of an earlier shrapnel wound.

Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee captured in the “war on terror” whom the Bush administration had falsely claimed helped plan the 9/11 attacks and was the “No. 3″ person in al-Qaeda, was shot in the leg, groin and stomach with an AK-47 during the March 28, 2002, raid. He allegedly attempted to evade capture by trying to jump from the rooftop of his safe house to the roof of a neighboring house. But the wounds he sustained did not include injuries to his eyes, face or head, according to intelligence officials and photographs of Zubaydah taken as he lay unconscious in a pool of blood, teetering on the brink of death, following the raid.

This is a photo of Abu Zubaydah taken after he allegedly tried to evade capture in Pakistan on March 28, 2002. Zubaydah was shot in the leg, groin and stomach and was near death.

Retired CIA officer John Kiriakou, who was the head of counterterrorism operations in Pakistan and led the team involved in Zubaydah’s capture, told Truthout recently that Zubaydah “had both eyes” when the suspected terrorist was escorted from a Pakistani hospital to a Gulf Stream jet a day or so after the raid where a trauma surgeon from Johns Hopkins University the CIA tapped to perform surgery on the suspected terrorist was waiting.

So, what happened?

A US counterterrorism official, responding to a query from Truthout, said, “Zubaydah had a preexisting eye condition when he was captured” and “American medical personnel treated the condition, [but] he ultimately lost the eye.”

The revelation stands as the first piece of new medical information related to Zubaydah’s case to surface in years.

But Mickum doesn’t believe the government is being truthful.

“It is patently false to state Zubaydah lost his eye due to a preexisting condition and that is belied by the evidence that I have from [Zubaydah], which I can’t discuss due to the government’s protective order,” said Mickum. “My client had two good eyes before he was seized. I’m aware of no information from my client, the government or any other source that he had a ‘preexisting eye condition.’”

The counterterrorism official, who was speaking on behalf of the US government, did not respond to follow-up questions about what Zubaydah’s pre-existing condition was, when the surgery to remove his eye took place, who performed it and where it was done, whether officials at the CIA (who had custody of Zubaydah) signed off on the procedure, whether measures were taken to try and save Zubaydah’s eye and whether the CIA or any other intelligence official told Zubaydah why his eye was being removed.

Evisceration or Enucleation?

Dr. Jonathan Macy, who runs the Macy Eye Center in Los Angeles and is an associate clinical professor of ophthalmology at UCLA and the University of Southern California, said the “indications for removal of an eye include trauma, infection, pain, tumor and sympathetic ophthalmia,” where a piercing injury to one eye results in inflammation of the uninjured eye.

“If the eye is removed primarily at the time of trauma, the indication is a blind eye that cannot be put back together,” Macy said. “An alternative scenario would involve primary repair of the ruptured globe and the subsequent development of infection or pain in a blind eye.”

Macy added that “removal of eyes is done with either evisceration or enucleation.”

“Evisceration is usually the preferred procedure,” Macy said. “With evisceration, the contents of the globe are removed, but the outer wall, or sclera of the eye in retained. A silicone ball implant is inserted within the sclera to create volume. The volume within the orbit allows proper fitting of a prosthesis. When the whole globe must be removed, that is an enucleation.”

But Macy said it is unknown which procedure Zubaydah underwent because the counterterrorism official would only say that “he ultimately lost the eye.”

A 1998 passport picture of Zubaydah, which for years was the only photograph available, shows him wearing a pair of glasses and what appears to be a shadow or scar over his left eye, possibly the result of a shrapnel wound he suffered a decade prior to his capture.

Macy said in that photograph Zubaydah’s “left orbit may have already contained a prosthesis,” but Macy did not take a position as to whether that was the case.

“When one eye is normal and the other eye has a prosthesis, they rarely appear symmetrical,” he said. Zubaydah’s “eyes look slightly different from one another, but not to any marked degree.”

Macy also viewed the photograph of Zubaydah lying unconscious that was taken immediately following the raid and said Zubaydah’s eyes appears to be “fine.”

“I do not see any see any cuts or big lacerations and no cuts around the face or nose,” Macy said.

Regarding the counterterrorism official’s account about Zubaydah’s pre-existing eye condition and the circumstances that led to his left eye being removed, Macy said the scenario is conceivable.

“If the eye had suffered significant direct trauma, there are usually signs of injury to the surrounding skin,” Macy said. “The photos don’t show collateral damage. Therefore, the official explanation is very plausible.”

“Rather than perforation causing infection, an infection of the cornea may lead to perforation of the globe,” Macy added. “In this case, as there is a claim of a preexisting condition, [Zubaydah] may have suffered a previous corneal ulcer that thinned and weakened the globe. He may have had a bacterial infection or herpes of the cornea. This is almost always a unilateral process. Such infections may be severe enough to perforate the eye, rendering it blind. The offending agent must be removed, leading to evisceration or enucleation.”

Zubaydah’s medical records would likely explain the pre-existing eye condition, but those files are classified. The government has refused to share Zubaydah’s medical files with his legal team, all of whom have top secret clearance, because it contends that doing so would amount to a violation of the detainee’s privacy rights, an assertion that Mickum said is “so ludicrous that it is not even laughable at this stage.”

Mickum said Zubaydah now wears a prosthetic eye, but it sometimes irritates him so he takes it out and instead wears the eye patch.

Shrapnel Wound

The only known pre-existing condition that may have affected Zubaydah’s eye was the shrapnel wound to his head he suffered from a mortar attack while “on the front lines” in Afghanistan fighting Soviet forces a decade prior to his capture, according to the government’s classified Detainee Assessment Brief released by WikiLeaks.

That file says Zubaydah “stated he had to relearn fundamentals such as walking, talking and writing; as such, he was therefore considered worthless to al-Qaida.”

Last year, the government finally admitted in court documents that Zubaydah’s diaries seized during the raid of the safe house “indicate that he suffered cognitive impairment from a shrapnel injury for a number of years.”

But when former Justice Department attorney John Yoo prepared one of the August 2002 torture memos, authorizing the CIA to subject Zubaydah to ten brutal torture techniques, which included waterboarding and repeatedly slamming him into a wall, Yoo wrote: “Zubaydah does not have any pre-existing mental conditions or problems that would make him likely to suffer prolonged mental harm from your proposed interrogation methods.”

“Through reading his diaries and interviewing him, you [CIA] have found no history of mood disturbance or other psychiatric pathology … ‘thought disorder’ … enduring mood or mental health problems,” Yoo wrote.

One of the interrogation memos Yoo drafted for the Department of Defense (DoD) that was used by military personnel and contractors conducting interrogations at Guantanamo and other prison facilities operated by the DoD stated that “gouging” a prisoner’s eyes out was arguably legal under the president’s executive powers unless “specific intent” to harm the prisoner could be proven.

“Infected Eye”

Details about Zubaydah’s eye appear to have first surfaced in a 2008 FBI inspector general’s report that contained details of his interrogation conducted by CIA contractors, which former FBI special agent Ali Soufan, identified in the report by the pseudonym “Thomas,” said amounted to “borderline torture.”

In the report, the then-FBI Inspector General Glenn Fine said Soufan’s colleague, FBI special agent Steve Gaudin, identified by the pseudonym “Gibson,” disclosed to his fiancé in 2002 or 2003 that he accompanied Soufan to the black site prison in Thailand to “interview a notorious terrorist.”

Soufan had interrogated Zubaydah at the CIA’s black site prison in Thailand in April 2002, before CIA contractors took over, and had tended to his wounds.

Gaudin’s fiancé at the time, identified in the report as “Morehead,” “stated the terrorist was missing an eye. [Gaudin] told [the FBI during an interview into the matter] that Zubaydah had an infected eye, sometimes wore an eye patch and eventually got a glass eye,” which seems to indicate that Zubaydah’s eye may have already been removed by the time both agents arrived at the black site in April 2002.

Truthout tried to reach Gaudin’s ex-fiancé to determine if Gaudin disclosed additional information to her about Zubaydah’s eye and his medical condition in general, but she did not return emails or voice mail messages left on her cell phone.

Daniel Freedman, who works as director of strategy for policy and analysis at Soufan’s consulting firm, The Soufan Group, said Soufan confirmed that Zubaydah had a “preexisting eye condition.”

“I checked with [Soufan] and the [counterterrorism official's] account is correct,” Freedman told Truthout in an email.

Neither Freedman nor Soufan elaborated.

Kiriakou, who wrote a book about his tenure at the CIA and the capture of Zubaydah, said, “I now recall that when [Zubaydah] first opened his eyes, his left eye was cloudy, like it had a significant cataracts film over it.”

“Zubaydah spent most of the time with his eyes closed and I just forgot about it,” said Kiriakou, who was surprised to learn Zubaydah’s eye had been removed. “It looked like a really bad cataract. I was with him about 48 hours when the plane came. I do not recall the Pakistani doctors paying any attention at all to his eye. They were so focused on his wounds that they didn’t pay any attention to anything else.”

Zubaydah Blames Interrogators

Zubaydah seems to be under the impression that he lost his eye as a result of abusive treatment.

During his Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing, Zubaydah said the interrogators subjected him to “months of suffering and torture, physically and mentally, they did not care about my injuries that they inflicted to my eye, to my stomach, to my bladder and my left thigh and my reproductive organs.”

The counterterrorism official also said that any suggestion that Zubaydah “lost the eye while being captured or as a result of interrogation would be flat wrong.”

But other detainees’ claimed there were attempts to gouge out their eyes.

In a recent interview with The Guardian UK, Omar Deghayes said a Guantanamo guard “pushed his fingers inside my eyes” and blinded him in his right eye.

“I didn’t realise what was going on until the guy had pushed his fingers inside my eyes and I could feel the coldness of his fingers,” Deghayes told The Guardian UK, explaining that the incident took place when he protested a policy that called for detainees to walk around without pants. “Then I realised he was trying to gouge out my eyes.”

Shaaker Aamer, the last British detainee who remains imprisoned at Guantanamo, told his attorney he also experienced similar treatment. Aamer said naval military police brutally tortured him for two and a half hours on June 9, 2006, “gouged his eyes” and “held his eyes open and shined a maglite in them for minutes on end, generating intense heat,” during a brutal two-and-a-half hour beating on June 9, 2006, after he refused to provide his captors with a retina scan and fingerprints.

Mickum said the loss of Zubaydah’s eye and the government’s rationale that it was the result of a “preexisting eye condition” only raises additional questions about Zubaydah’s treatment.

“The only way to rule out that anything nefarious took place is to look at Zubaydah’s medical records,” Mickum said. “Until that occurs, the jury is way out and the government is not entitled to any credibility. They’ve lied consistently starting with the fact that they said Zubaydah was never tortured. The only inference one can draw is that he lost his eye as a result of mistreatment by the government and that he received poor medical treatment in the aftermath of his injury.”