Sometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The APA’s decision is important — and not just symbolically. Today we have a president who has promised to bring back torture and “load up” Guantánamo “with some bad dudes.” When healing professionals refuse to work there, they are standing up for human rights and against torture.

It wasn’t always so. In the early days of Guantánamo, military psychologists contributed to detainee interrogations there. It was for Guantánamo that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved multiple torture methods, including among others excruciating stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced nudity. Military psychologists advised on which techniques would take advantage of the weaknesses of individual detainees. And it was two psychologists, one an APA member, who designed the CIA’s whole “enhanced interrogation program.”

Here’s a disclaimer of sorts: ever since I witnessed the effects of U.S. torture policy firsthand in Central America in the 1980s, I’ve had a deep personal interest in American torture practices. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, I wrote two books focused on the subject, the latest being American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes.

For a year and a half, I also served on a special ethics commission established by the APA after ugly revelations came out about how that organization’s officials had, in the Bush years, maneuvered to allow its members to collude with the U.S. government in settings where torture was used. In fact, an independent review it commissioned in 2015 concluded that “some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies.” Indeed, those leaders colluded “with important DoD officials to have [the] APA issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain [the] DoD in any greater fashion than existing DoD interrogation guidelines.”

In the wake of that independent review, the APA’s Council of Representatives voted that same year to keep psychologists out of national security interrogation settings.

It’s modestly encouraging that this August two-thirds of its governing body voted against a resolution that would have returned psychologists to sites like Gitmo.

What makes the new vote less than completely satisfying, however, is this: the 2015 vote establishing that policy was 157-to-1. This year, a third of the council was ready to send psychologists back to Guantánamo. Like much of the rest of Donald Trump’s United States, the APA seems to be in the process of backsliding on torture.

The details of the parliamentary wrangling at the August meeting are undoubtedly of little interest to outsiders. The actual motion under consideration was important, however, because it would have rescinded part of the organization’s historic 2015 decision, prohibiting its members from providing psychological treatment, as it put it,

“at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, ‘black sites,’ vessels in international waters, or sites where detainees are interrogated under foreign jurisdiction unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights or providing treatment to military personnel.”

Proponents of the new motion argued that keeping psychologists out of places like Guantánamo deprives detainees of much needed psychological treatment. If the association really cared about detainees, they claimed, it would not deny them the treatment they need.

Opponents argued that allowing psychologists to work at Guantánamo gives ethical cover to an illegal detention site where detainees are still being tortured with painful forced feedings, solitary confinement, and the hopelessness induced by indefinite detention without charges. It’s worth noting that the military still refuses to allow the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture to speak privately with detainees at Gitmo. In addition, at such a detention and interrogation site, any psychologist who was a member of, or employed by, the U.S. military would face an inevitable conflict of interest between the desires of his or her employers and the needs of detainee clients.

The 2015 resolution also prevented APA members from participating in national security interrogations, declaring that they

“shall not conduct, supervise, be in the presence of, or otherwise assist any national security interrogations for any military or intelligence entities, including private contractors working on their behalf, nor advise on conditions of confinement insofar as these might facilitate such an interrogation.”

Military psychologists within the APA were not happy in 2015 about being shut out of national security interrogations and they’d still like to see psychologists back in the interrogation business. This time around, they strategically chose to focus their rhetoric on treatment rather than interrogation. However, the long-term goals are clear. Indeed, in response to a request from those military psychologists, the APA’s Committee on Legal Issues recommended to the board of directors “broadening” the resolution “to allow psychologists to be involved in the practice and policy of humane interrogation.” The board declined — this time, anyway.

Here’s the problem with “humane interrogation”: no one ever admits to using inhumane methods. Unfortunately, there’s a recent and sordid history of U.S. officials claiming that torture is actually humane — albeit “enhanced” — interrogation. In the George W. Bush administration, John Woo and Jay Bybee, who worked in the Justice Department’s Office ofLegal Counsel, were among those who wrote memos justifying torture. As Bybee explained in an August 2002 memo to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “real” physicaltorture must involve pain similar to that experienced during “serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” And the effects of psychological interrogation must last “months or even years” to constitute mental torture — obviously an impossible standard to meet, since no one knows for sure what will happen in the future. In that way, they essentially redefined any form of cruelty, including waterboarding, in any of the CIA’s black sites then scattered around the world or at Guantánamo, as anything but torture.

As it happened, even as defined by the Bush administration, much of what was done in those years would have qualified as torture. Certainly, isolating people, depriving them of sleep, bombarding them with heat, cold, light, and endless loud noise, beating them, and providing them with no hope of eventual release were not exactly acts conducive to long-term mental health. In fact, in 2016 the New York Times interviewed several freed Guantánamo detainees, who reported that the effects of their abuse had indeed lasted “months or even years.”

A Bit of History

The role of American psychologists in designing torture programs goes back at least to the 1950s, as historian Alfred McCoy documented so graphically in his book A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror. At that time, research psychologists at elite universities in the U.S. and Canada experimented on unwitting subjects — including mental patients — in an effort to develop techniques to produce a condition of compliancy in future prisoners, a condition that the CIA called “DDD” (for debility, dependency, and dread).

Much of this research culminated in that Agency’s now-infamous 1963 KUBARK manual on interrogation, which the United States used to train the police and military forces of client states. That manual would be resurrected in 1983 and used in the CIA’s training of the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua’s civil war. Many of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that became so familiar to us in the George W. Bush years — sensory bombardment, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, sexual humiliation — were first laid out in that manual. But the CIA evidently misplaced it somewhere in their voluminous files because, after 9/11, instead of hauling it out yet again, they paid $80 million to two psychologists to reinvent the torture wheel. Those two, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, repackaged DDD as “learned helplessness” (borrowing a concept developed by another psychologist, Martin Seligman).

Seligman’s role in developing the CIA torture program has been in dispute ever since. At most, he seems to have willingly discussed his theories with CIA personnel. In December 2001, he met at his home with both JamesMitchell and Kirk Hubbard, who was then the chief of research and analysis in the CIA’s Operational Division, among others. In 2002, at the invitation of CIA personnel, he lectured on learned helplessness at the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school where U.S. military are trained to resist torture. Seligman claims he had no idea how his work was being used until “years later,” when he read a New Yorker article byJane Mayer (perhaps this one) about CIA torture practices in the post-9/11 era. “If I had known about the methods employed,” says Seligman, “I would not have discussed learned helplessness with” Agency officials.

Mitchell and Jessen, however, had no such compunctions. They cheerfully designed an interrogation program for the CIA that included such “enhanced techniques” as slamming detainees against walls and locking them in tiny boxes. As no one is likely to forget, they also retrieved waterboarding from history. This practice had bluntly been called “the water torture” in Medieval Europe and American soldiers were using it in the Philippines, where it was referred to ironically as “the water cure,” as the twentieth century began. To waterboard is essentially to drown a prisoner to the point of unconsciousness, a “technique” the CIA used 83 times on one man (who didn’t even turn out to be an al-Qaeda leader). The whole program was implemented at CIA black sites in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, and Romania, among other places.

For part of this time, Mitchell was a member of the APA and so presumably subject to its code of ethics, which, theoretically at least, prohibited involvement in interrogations involving torture. When concerned APA members tried to bring an ethics claim against him to the group (whose only real sanction would have been to publicly expel him), they got nowhere. Eventually, Mitchell quietly resigned from the association.

Meanwhile, military psychologists were also working on interrogation matters for the Department of Defense. At Guantánamo, they participated in behavioral science control teams (BSCTs, pronounced “biscuits”). Despite the homey-sounding name, those BSCTs were anything but benign. Staffed by psychologists and psychiatrists, the teams, according to a 2005 New England Journal of Medicine op-ed by knowledgeable insiders, “prepared psychological profiles for use by interrogators; they also sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators.”

Guantánamo’s BSCTs, the Journal piece continues, favored an approach to behavioral control taught at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center, which “builds on the premise that acute, uncontrollable stress erodes established behavior (e.g., resistance to questioning), creating opportunities to reshape behavior.” This was to be achieved by introducing “stressors tailored to the psychological and cultural vulnerabilities of individual detainees (e.g., phobias, personality features, and religious beliefs).”

But where did the BSCTs get their information about the vulnerabilities of those individual detainees? The International Committee of the Red Cross discovered that it came from their medical records at the detention center, which, according to generalmedical ethics and the Geneva Conventions, are supposed to be kept confidential.

Those APA members who continue to argue for bringing military psychologists back to Guantánamo insist that it’s possible to keep a firewall between their work as clinicians and the role of interrogator. But how realistic is this, especially within an organization like the military, where obedience and hierarchical loyalty are key values? As the New England Journal of Medicine concludes,

“[The] proximity of health professionals to interrogation settings, even when they act as caregivers, carries risk. It may invite interrogators to be more aggressive, because they imagine that these professionals will set needed limits. The logic of caregiver involvement as a safeguard also risks pulling health professionals in ever more deeply. Once caregivers share information with interrogators, why should they refrain from giving advice about how to best use the data? Won’t such advice better protect detainees, while furthering the intelligence-gathering mission? And if so, why not oversee isolation and sleep deprivation or monitor beatings to make sure nothing terrible happens?”

Who Cares What the American Psychological Association Does?

When it comes to torture, why should the internal politics of one professional association with relatively little power matter? The answer is: because what happens there offers a vivid illustration of how organizations (or even entire nations) can be deformed once torture gains an institutional home.

And as in the APA, in the United States, too, the fight over torture has not ended. On the first day of his presidency, Barack Obama issued two executive orders. One de-authorized the use of those “enhanced interrogation techniques,” and closed the CIA’s black sites. The other was meant to shut Guantánamo as well (but the fervent opposition of most congressional Republicans ultimately prevented this).

Obama also argued that nothing would be “gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” He couldn’t have been more mistaken. Had America’s elected officials spent their time and energy that way, those in George W. Bush’s administration who authorized widespread acts of torture and those who committed them might have been held legally responsible — which is exactly what the U.N. Convention Against Torture (of which the U.S. is a signatory) requires. As a nation, minimally we would have gotten a much fuller accounting of the many cruel and illegal acts committed in our names by top officials, intelligence agencies, and the military after September 11, 2001.

And had all of that happened, we might not be backsliding on torture the way we are. It’s just possible that this country might not have elected a man who campaigned on the promise that he would bring back “waterboarding and a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding” and who, on entering the Oval Office, signed an executive order keeping Guantánamo open.

In addition, the Senate would probably not have approved Gina Haspel who oversaw a CIA black site in Thailand (where acts of torture did take place) to run the Agency. She might have been prosecuted, not promoted to CIA director. And perhaps the president wouldn’t have nominated a Supreme Court justice, Brett Kavanaugh, who worked as staff secretary in the George W. Bush White House and was involved in detainee policy. The Washington Post reports that he attended more than one meeting on the treatment of detainees, suggested that they weren’t entitled to legal counsel and strategized about how to keep the Supreme Court from granting them habeas corpus rights. Now, President Trump, citing “executive privilege,” is even withholding 100,000 pages of records from Kavanaugh’s service in the Bush White House — and who knows what they might contain on the subject.

How Did They Do It?

What happened at the APA convention recently also matters because it illustrates the power of organized ethical action. Association members who were determined to keep psychologists out of the torture business formed the APA Watch: Alliance for an Ethical APA. They consulted thoughtfully with each other and allies (including Veterans for Peace), developed and distributed materials aimed at persuading APA members in general, and made personal phone calls to most of the 170 members of the association’s governing Council of Representatives. They combined the wisdom and values of their profession — including the all-important Hippocratic injunction not to harm one’s patients — with energetic, organized action.

It’s an encouraging example for the rest of us, as we enter this crucial election cycle. When we’re smart, committed, and organized, the good guys can win.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands.

Copyright 2018 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com
——

Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now! “The Kavanaugh Cover-up? Role in Torture & Domestic Spying Policy Remains Unknown As Papers Withheld”

I told this story back in 2005 but it is a good story, has held up, and bears repeating now that President Trump is again promoting torture as “effective.” Torture is a good way to get people to tell you what they think you want to hear so that you will stop torturing them. That is, torture may occasionally turn up some good information if it is applied to someone not very clever or not very committed. But it is an excellent way to be trolled by a seasoned operative, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Before the Iraq War, the US government had captured a handful of important al-Qaeda figures and applied torture to them.

One of these was Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, a Libyan terrorist whose real name was Ali Abdul Hamid al-Fakheri. Under torture, he “confessed” that that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was training al-Qaeda operatives in the use of chemical weapons.

The Defense Intelligence Agency and other high-level intelligence operatives dismissed this information as unreliable.

It should be noted that no money traces showed al-Qaeda funds coming from Iraq. No captured al-Qaeda fighters had been trained in Iraq. There was no intelligence that in any way corroborated al-Libi’s story. And, it was directly contradicted by two of his superiors.

The information from KSM and Abu Zubaydah circulated widely among intelligence officials.

I still remember Fox Cable News almost nightly in late 2002 droning on about a chemical weapons facility at Salman Pak in Iraq where, its anchors alleged, Saddam was training al-Qaeda agents. It was, like most of the stories told about Iraq in that period, fake news.

There was also a phony story, retailed by Secretary of State Colin Powell and other members of the administration, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian extremist who had spent time in Afghanistan, had ties to Saddam Hussein once he relocated to Iraq in 2002. But later on the US army released a document from the Baath Party secret police showing that an APB was put out on al-Zarqawi immediately on his entering Iraq, and local police were ordered to shake down the Jordanian expatriates in Iraq to find out where he was and arrest him immediately, since he was dangerous and had ties to “the Saudi terrorist Usama Bin Laden.”

Top al-Qaeda operative and 9/11 mastermind and
Khalid Shaykh Muhammad and al-Qaeda travel agent and marginal personality Abu Zubayda, according to the 9/11 Commission report, revealed to interrogators that Usamah Bin Laden had prohibited al-Qaeda operatives from cooperating with the secular Arab nationalist, Saddam Hussein.

This crucial information was withheld from Congress and from the American people by the Bush/Cheney administration in the run-up to the Iraq War.

(Although KSM was captured only shortly before the war, surely the connection to Saddam was the first thing they asked him about. His answer was not shared with us, to say the least.)

‘ The report on Zubaydah’s debriefing was circulated among US intelligence officers, but his statements were not included in public discussions by Administration officials about the evidence of al-Qaeda ties. “I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the Administration was talking about all of these other reports and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted,” one official said. ‘

This was a community of intelligence. Those with the clearances saw those confessions. The lower-level analysts were amazed when they saw Bush and Cheney and Rice on television hyping al-Libi’s torture-induced “revelations.” . . . “They were only putting out what they wanted” . . ..

It is impossible that Bush, Cheney and Rice saw the intel from al-Libi but not from Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad. The only way to explain these comments is that they suppressed the latter in order to emphasize the former. This tactic was deeply dishonest.

So in September of 2002, as “the new product” was being “rolled out” in the psychopathic words of Bush adviser Andy Card, this is what we heard:

Thursday, September 26, 2002 Posted: 1:28 PM EDT (1728 GMT)
WASHINGTON (CNN) — President Bush’s national security adviser Wednesday said Saddam Hussein has sheltered al Qaeda terrorists in Baghdad and helped train some in chemical weapons development — information she said has been gleaned from captives in the ongoing war on terrorism.

The comments by Condoleezza Rice were the strongest and most specific to date on the White House’s accusations linking al Qaeda and Iraq.

The accusations followed those made by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who earlier in the day said the United States has evidence linking Iraq and al Qaeda, but they did not elaborate.”

This lie by omission was repeated over and over again by Bush and his cronies:

“Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.”
– Bush in January 2003 State of the Union address.

“Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training.”
– Bush in February 2003.

Al-Fakheri / Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi had a last laugh on the people of the United States. Yes, they captured and tortured him. But he misdirected them toward his enemy, the secularist Baath government of Iraq and arranged for the Americans to overthrow it.

Al-Zarqawi’s branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq, thus freed from Baath surveillance, went from strength to strength, morphed into Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) and by 2014 took over 40% of Iraqi territory.

So beware of the information you get from torture. Your victim may be setting you up. And the psychopaths in the White House will be perfectly happy to run with the fake news gained from torture and use it to bamboozle the public for their own nefarious purposes.

There can be no doubt that the swearing in of Donald Trump on January 20 will usher in a new era for the United States. But the president-elect’s open support for torture and waterboarding could mean his inauguration also marks a return to what President Barack Obama has called a “dark and painful chapter” in US history.

Trump and his team have not hesitated in their support for waterboarding. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump said:

I would bring back waterboarding, and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. We’re like a bunch of babies, but we’re going to stay within the laws. But you know what we’re going to do? We’re going to have those laws broadened. They say, what do you think about waterboarding? I said I like it a lot. I don’t think it’s tough enough. You have to fight fire with fire.

The dark and painful chapter

Waterboarding, as described by NPR, “involves choking the victim by filling their throat with a steady stream of water – a sort of ‘slow-motion drowning’.” It is best known for being used by the CIA during the Bush administration’s “war on terror”. To use the technique, the Bush administration argued for a very restrictive legal definition of torture.

A series of memos from 2001 and 2002 show the Bush administration effectively made waterboarding legal by changing the definition of torture. On August 3 2002, CIA Headquarters first informed one of their “black sites” that they had approval to begin waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques”. Black sites were secret overseas prisons maintained by the agency in countries as diverse as Poland, Egypt and Thailand.

Over the next few years, waterboarding was used hundreds of times on what the CIA called “high-value detainees”.

In July 2007, under pressure from a series of torture and mistreatment scandals involving detainees, President Bush issued an executive order that CIA detainees would be covered by the Geneva Conventions. President Obama subsequently issued an executive order revoking all of the Bush administration orders relating to the interrogation of detainees and prohibiting waterboarding.

Under pressure

As far as we know, Trump’s position on torture has not changed. In an interview with The New York Times, he said his defence secretary nominee, General James M Mattis, surprised him by coming out against torture.

Still, Trump explained, “I’m not saying it changed my mind. Look, we have people that are chopping off heads and drowning people in steel cages and we’re not allowed to waterboard.”

Of course, just because a president supports a policy does not mean he will be able to implement it. President Obama’s multiple attempts to close down Guantanamo Bay are a good example of how support for a policy and its successful execution can diverge.

Individual presidents are subject to many competing political pressures that both help and hinder them in realising their agendas. Understanding these political pressures is vital if we want to know whether Trump’s desire to reintroduce torture is likely to materialise.

Pressure from the American public

The opinion of the American public is central to Trump’s ability to institute waterboarding. He has said he takes the public mood about torture seriously. In his conversation with General Mattis, he said, “If it’s so important to the American people, I would go for it. I would be guided by that.”

But the American people do not, in general, disagree with their president-elect. The US public generally supports torture in the context of the terrorism and security.

In December 2016, an ICRC poll showed that 46% of Americans believed torture could be used on an enemy combatant, with 30% believing the opposite. In a March 2016 poll, 63% of Americans claimed that torture is often or sometimes justified, and only 15% claimed that it is never justified.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, Americans have consistently supported the use of torture. This has been part of a longer-term trend starting in the Bush presidency where, perhaps counter-intuitively, the support for torture began making gains after the scandals of Abu Ghraib and the revelations of torture at CIA black sites in 2005 and 2006.

If Donald Trump wishes to reinstate waterboarding, there is evidence to suggest that he could command at least a plurality, if not a majority, of support among the American people for his policies. From the perspective of electoral politics, there would be little preventing him from implementing such a policy and, indeed, he is likely to find support from large sections of the American public.

Pressures within the US government

If he tried to reinstate Bush-era policies, Trump would face both support and opposition from within the US government.

Institutional opposition from some sectors of government to the use of waterboarding has a long history. During the Bush administration, the US military and state department were opposed to removing the Geneva Convention rights from Taliban prisoners that would protect them from torture, though Bush eventually decided to ignore these recommendations.

This time around, the mere possibility that Trump would allow waterboarding led ex-CIA director Michael Hayden to declare that the CIA’s position would be: “If you want somebody waterboarded, bring your own damn bucket.”

The current CIA director, John Brennan, asserted that he would not comply with orders to waterboard prisoners as long as he was the head of the CIA. But Trump’s current pick for CIA director, Mike Pompeo, previously denounced Obama’s decision to close CIA black sites, where torture took place, and rein in government interrogators. Top generals in the US military have also come out against a return to waterboarding.

Members of Congress have spoken out on both sides. Some Republican senators, such as John McCain, have spoken openly against it. In November 2016, he said, “I don’t give a damn what the president wants to do … we will not waterboard. We will not torture people.”

Other Republicans, such as Tom Cotton, have argued that waterboarding isn’t torture.

The US government is seemingly split on the issue, so Trump can certainly expect political and legal resistance. This is particularly the case since it will be more difficult to rely on secrecy in the same way that the Bush administration did.

Trump’s open support of the practice will almost certainly lead torture opponents to be more vigilant in uncovering potential misdeeds.

Pressure from abroad

In addition to pressure from within his own executive and government, Trump might face pressure from international leaders. We can see these effects if we look back to the Bush administration. Many countries were openly opposed to Bush’s use of torture, and this opposition strengthened between 2001 and 2008.

The cooperation that the United States did achieve with countries that hosted black sites, such as Poland, Lithuania, Romania, and Thailand, required both the transfer of large sums of money and consistent diplomatic effort to maintain highly unstable cooperative relationships – even when the programme was secret. Once it was revealed in 2006, it became almost impossible for the CIA to maintain existing partners or find new ones.

Assuming that international conditions are relatively similar, there is little to suggest that Trump’s waterboarding policy would find much international support among traditional American allies.

This is particularly the case since, unlike George Bush, Trump openly uses the word “torture”, which is unambiguously in violation of the laws of armed conflict and international human rights law.

Trump will almost certainly need to consider the diplomatic fallout of open waterboarding policy, particularly with respect to intelligence-sharing and joint military activities. In both of these areas, American allies are likely to be highly resistant to finding themselves involved in cooperation that involves the use of torture.

Counting the costs

In Trump, we have a president-in-waiting who openly advocates for torture, supported by the American public.

Though he will face opposition from within the US government and legal system, if there are more successful terrorist attacks on American soil, the pre-existing public support for torture, combined with the momentum for the president to “do something”, might be difficult to overcome.

Reversing the support for torture among the American public is almost certainly going to be a long-term process. Until then, there is an important role for US allies to be clear about their disapproval, to make the international diplomatic costs of using torture clear.

Foreign leaders must stand up and add their voices to the domestic opponents of torture to make Trump think twice before instituting waterboarding. Statements such as that made by Angela Merkel, who stressed close cooperation based on “the dignity of each and every person”, need to be reinforced by other leaders.

With the public and some domestic lawmakers onside, president-elect Trump must be made fully aware that any attempt to reinstate torture will carry a great international cost.

Vincent Charles Keating, Assistant Professor at the Center for War Studies, University of Southern Denmark

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

——-

Related video added by Juan Cole:

AP: “McCain Questions Homeland Nominee on Torture”

The US president-elect Donald Trump has on several occasions insisted that torture is a good idea and that procedures such as water-boarding are not “tough enough” when dealing with terrorist groups like Islamic State.

The view is clearly morally and ethically questionable. But if we put that aside, does he have a point? If we need to get information out of someone who is plotting to kill lots of innocent people, is it a necessary evil? Well, there’s some psychological research on the subject that can help us answer this question.

Torture can be defined in many ways but it is always intentional and concerns inflicting psychological and/or physical pain to gain information, a confession or simply to punish. There must exist an asymmetrical relationship of power – a dependence and vulnerability where victims realise that they are at the mercy of their tormentors.

Torture has a long history, and despite being prohibited worldwide (in 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations inserted the prohibition against torture in the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights), the use of torture appears to be increasing worldwide. The reason for this is unclear, but the current threat from international terrorism is severe or high in many countries. So, when dealing with those who threaten our security and who appear committed to withholding information, the pressure to get results is significant.

The most commonly cited reason for justifying torture is the hypothetical “ticking time bomb” scenario. Here, a terrorist knows where a bomb is concealed, and when it will go off. If the bomb goes off, then thousands of people will be killed and injured. So torture in such a circumstance is argued as appropriate because the ends justify the means. On the face of it this is a compelling argument. Indeed, even those who are against torture might be persuaded to waver.

Fact and fiction

But we have to ask ourselves a series of questions. For starters, if our terrorist does know the information we are seeking (the individual may not), will torturing that person really make him or her talk? Finding out is not as simple as it may sound. For obvious reasons, observing torture being carried out and testing whether it works is not legally possible – in the real world or in the laboratory. Rightly, there are ethical codes of conduct that prohibit psychologists’ involvement in torture. The evidence that torture works appears to be anecdotal. Recently, a classified CIA report, which cited eight real cases of torture as evidence that the technique had thwarted plots and led to the capture of terrorists, was branded inaccurate and speculative by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

But the effects of pain, stress, and coercive behaviour on our ability to think and make decisions are well known. In fact, the published science is very clear – extreme stress and pain (physical and psychological) can bring about false memories, reduce our ability to remember information and seriously affect our decision-making and memory performance in general. Recent research has found stressful interrogations and isolation brought about false memories in upwards of 80% of trained military personnel.

In fact, criminal justice research on false confessions provides irrefutable evidence that even less coercive techniques than torture have brought about verifiable false confessions – and continue to do so. The Reid technique, a method of questioning suspects to try to assess their credibility, is one such example. The technique, banned in some countries, is accusatory, psychologically manipulative, assumes guilt and prevents denials. Yet we know that the more aggressive the interrogation method the higher the probability of eliciting false confessions. Recent, and historical examples of miscarriages of justice as a result of aggressive, manipulative interrogation methods are easy to find.

Psychologists and governments have been working together for a number of years to develop science-based, non-coercive interrogation methods for persuading detainees to reveal information. One example is the US High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, which develops new interrogation techniques and supports scientific testing of existing ones. The UK government also supports similar research.

Alternatives to torture

I am one one of many researchers who develops non-coercive, science-based intelligence interviewing methods. But what are they and how do you go about it?

A starting point is that we always have to accept that, even if a person knows the information we are seeking, we may never be able to “make” him or her reveal it. Even if we torture, some information may be offered, but it might be false, simply to stop the suffering.

Much of our knowledge comes from laboratory experiments and research in the criminal justice system, where the stakes are high, but not necessarily as high as for terrorists. We do know that aggressive behaviour does not help, but effective rapport building, and the way in which questions are presented and framed can bring about cooperation and persuasion.

A non-judgemental mindset on the part of the interrogator, and the use of psychologically-based methods such as framing questions to manage the mental distress that typically comes about when we try and change a person’s attitude also helps bring about cooperation. Other effective techniques are managing the context and displaying empathetic behaviour associated with understanding the information holder’s perspective. In this way, we can maximise the chances that information might be revealed.

Framing involves presenting questions differently in an attempt to get a desired answer. For example, I can ask “was anyone else was there with you?”, or I could say, “who else was there with you?”. An even better option would be “I appreciate this is very difficult for you, but I need to know who was there with you. Others who have fully explained what has happened, and who was there, have agreed with me that this was the right thing to do. Would you agree?”

Indeed, all things considered, the available science simply does not support the argument that torture is effective. What’s more, new research shows it isn’t just a case of avoiding being nasty – actually being fair and nice may be a far superior way of getting information out of people.

Psychological research has impacted on real world practice in the past. The PEACE investigative interviewing model – an acronym that spells out the stages to follow in an information gathering interview – was introduced in the early 1990s and was driven by research investigating miscarriages of justice. It is now used in a number of countries.

Changing hearts and minds is challenging. But, if we start by considering interrogations more like a game of chess against a very able opponent, rather than a fight, governments and policymakers might begin to understand the importance of brains over brawn.

Coral Dando, Professor of Psychology, University of Westminster

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit Politics: “McCain Will Not Allow Trump To Use Waterboarding”

Trump’s picks for important security positions look intent on rolling back civil liberties.

While there are many questions about what U.S. President-elect Donald Trump will change once he officially takes office on Jan. 20, one of the biggest questions, and indeed concerns, is what a Trump administration will bring in terms of surveillance, privacy and interrogation.

Trump’s appointments for key security positions may very well push for increased government powers that could override citizen privacy and civil liberties.

Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo is set to become the head of the CIA and is known for defending harsh interrogation methods such as waterboarding. Pompeo has also been a vocal supporter of keeping the Guantanamo Bay open, arguing the U.S. prison in Cuba is “critical to national security.”

Pompeo said that inmates in the prison are treated well by staff and said that the prison has “been a goldmine of intelligence about radical Islamic terrorism.” Trump’s national security advisor, Mike Flynn, has said that the “fear of Muslims is rational,” and is believed to have used so-called “enhanced interrogation” practices to squeeze information out of prisoners.

Pompeo has continually pushed for more intelligence surveillance under the justification that the U.S. currently is under a high risk of a terrorist attack. “We ought not to take that tool away from our intelligence community while the threats are as great as they are today,” Pompeo told McClatchy in January. He also told the Washington Post that same month that “legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.”

After leaked information by former NSA employee Edward Snowden in 2013, contradicted claims by authorities that the data of U.S. citizens was not being collected by intelligence agencies, Pompeo labeled Snowden a “traitor,” arguing that he should be extradited from Russia to the U.S. and following due process, “I think the proper outcome would be that he would be given a death sentence,” he told C-Span.

Trump in 2013 also hinted at execution for Snowden, calling him a “terrible guy who has really set our country back.”

Ultra-conservative attorney general pick, Jeff Sessions, as well as being criticized for past racist incidents, seems to share Pompeo’s sentiments and has opposed banning the cruel treatment of prisoners. Both Session and Pompeo want to repeal laws that prevent the FBI and the NSA from collecting “metadata” of citizens, such as collecting phone numbers and financial information of citizens not under investigation.

Sessions also supported increasing the amount of data the FBI can obtain without the need for a search warrant. Additionally, sessions pushed for laws that require organizations such as Google and Facebook, to give government investigators information such as IP addresses and browsing histories in their investigations.

Even before Trump takes office, “Rule 41” has been touted as a major change that will give the FBI increasing powers to carry out surveillance an even hacking across computer networks.

The law allows the FBI to spy on an unlimited amount of computers suspected to be involved in criminal activities, through the use of only one search warrant from a federal. It is set to be enacted on December 1, unless Congress decides to stop it.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Wochit Politics “What To Know About Trump’s Pick For CIA Director”

After the CIA inspector general admitted it destroyed a 6,700 page report on torture, the famed whistleblower said the CIA does not destroy by “accident.”

Edward Snowden commented this week on the CIA inspector general office’s “mistaken” destruction of its only copy of a top secret torture report: ““When the CIA destroys something, it’s never a mistake,” he quipped.

The 6,700 page report detailed controversial “enhanced” interrogation methods deployed by the CIA at overseas prison sites, including waterboarding and sleep deprivation. The report’s demise was never reported to the public, and only came to light after Yahoo News began an investigation.

Another copy of the report exists on an untouched computer disk in a locked vault at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virgina.

Snowden tweeted: “I worked @CIA. I wrote the Emergency Destruction Plan for Geneva. When CIA destroys something, it’s never a mistake.”

The full report is still classified and it is possible that it will never be published. A 500-page summary was published in 2014 by Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and made available to the public.

Snowden continues to seek asylum in Russia after being charged under the Espionage Act for leaking classified details of mass surveillance by the U.S. government in 2013.

Via TeleSur

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Majority Report with Sam Seder: “Oops!!! CIA, Like, Totally Accidentally Destroys Torture Report ”

Intro: Rebecca Gordon catches the nightmarish quality of those [Bush] years, now largely buried, in the grim case of a single mistreated human being. It should make Americans shudder. She has also just published a new book, American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes, that couldn’t be more relevant.  It’s a must-read for a country conveniently without a memory. Tom Engelhardt | –

The allegations against the man were serious indeed.

* Donald Rumsfeld said he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person” in al-Qaeda.

* The Central Intelligence Agency informed Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee that he “served as Usama Bin Laden’s senior lieutenant. In that capacity, he has managed a network of training camps… He also acted as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of external contacts and foreign communications.”

* CIA Director Michael Hayden would tell the press in 2008 that 25% of all the information his agency had gathered about al-Qaeda from human sources “originated” with one other detainee and him.

* George W. Bush would use his case to justify the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation program,” claiming that “he had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” and that “he helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan” so they would not be captured by U.S. military forces.

None of it was true.

And even if it had been true, what the CIA did to Abu Zubaydah — with the knowledge and approval of the highest government officials — is a prime example of the kind of still-unpunished crimes that officials like Dick Cheney, George Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld committed in the so-called Global War on Terror.

So who was this infamous figure, and where is he now? His name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, but he is better known by his Arabic nickname, Abu Zubaydah. And as far as we know, he is still in solitary detention in Guantánamo.

A Saudi national, in the 1980s Zubaydah helped run the Khaldan camp, a mujahedeen training facility set up in Afghanistan with CIA help during the Soviet occupation of that country. In other words, Zubaydah was then an American ally in the fight against the Soviets, one of President Ronald Reagan’s “freedom fighters.”  (But then again, so in effect was Osama bin Laden.)

Zubaydah’s later fate in the hands of the CIA was of a far grimmer nature.  He had the dubious luck to be the subject of a number of CIA “firsts”: the first post-9/11 prisoner to be waterboarded; the first to be experimented on by psychologists working as CIA contractors; one of the first of the Agency’s “ghost prisoners” (detainees hidden from the world, including the International Committee of the Red Cross which, under the Geneva Conventions, must be allowed access to every prisoner of war); and one of the first prisoners to be cited in a memo written by Jay Bybee for the Bush administration on what the CIA could “legally” do to a detainee without supposedly violating U.S. federal laws against torture.

Zubaydah’s story is — or at least should be — the iconic tale of the illegal extremes to which the Bush administration and the CIA went in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. And yet former officials, from CIA head Michael Hayden to Vice President Dick Cheney to George W. Bush himself, have presented it as a glowing example of the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” to extract desperately needed information from the “evildoers” of that time.

Zubaydah was an early experiment in post-9/11 CIA practices and here’s the remarkable thing (though it has yet to become part of the mainstream media accounts of his case): it was all a big lie. Zubaydah wasn’t involved with al-Qaeda; he was the ringleader of nothing; he never took part in planning for the 9/11 attacks. He was brutally mistreated and, in another kind of world, would be exhibit one in the war crimes trials of America’s top leaders and its major intelligence agency.

Yet notorious as he once was, he’s been forgotten by all but his lawyers and a few tenacious reporters.  He shouldn’t have been.  He was the test case for the kind of torture that Donald Trump now wants the U.S. government to bring back, presumably because it “worked” so well the first time. With Republican presidential hopefuls promising future war crimes, it’s worth reconsidering his case and thinking about how to prevent it from happening again. After all, it’s only because no one has been held to account for the years of Bush administration torture practices that Trump and others feel free to promise even more and “yuger” war crimes in the future.

Experiments in Torture

In August 2002, a group of FBI agents, CIA agents, and Pakistani forces captured Zubaydah (along with about 50 other men) in Faisalabad, Pakistan. In the process, he was severely injured — shot in the thigh, testicle, and stomach. He might well have died, had the CIA not flown in an American surgeon to patch him up. The Agency’s interest in his health was, however, anything but humanitarian. Its officials wanted to interrogate him and, even after he had recovered sufficiently to be questioned, his captors occasionally withheld pain medication as a means of torture.

When he “lost” his left eye under mysterious circumstances while in CIA custody, the agency’s concern again was not for his health. The December 2014 torture report produced by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (despite CIA opposition that included hacking into the committee’s computers) described the situation this way: with his left eye gone, “[i]n October 2002, DETENTION SITE GREEN [now known to be Thailand] recommended that the vision in his right eye be tested, noting that ‘[w]e have a lot riding upon his ability to see, read, and write.’ DETENTION SITE GREEN stressed that ‘this request is driven by our intelligence needs [not] humanitarian concern for AZ.’”

The CIA then set to work interrogating Zubaydah with the help of two contractors, the psychologists Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell. Zubaydah would be the first human subject on whom those two, who were former instructors at the Air Force’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) training center, could test their theories about using torture to induce what they called “learned helplessness,” meant to reduce a suspect’s resistance to interrogation. Their price? Only $81 million.

CIA records show that, using a plan drawn up by Jessen and Mitchell, Abu Zubaydah’s interrogators would waterboard him an almost unimaginable 83 times in the course of a single month; that is, they would strap him to a wooden board, place a cloth over his entire face, and gradually pour water through the cloth until he began to drown. At one point during this endlessly repeated ordeal, the Senate committee reported that Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.”

Each of those 83 uses of what was called “the watering cycle” consisted of four steps:

“1) demands for information interspersed with the application of the water just short of blocking his airway 2) escalation of the amount of water applied until it blocked his airway and he started to have involuntary spasms 3) raising the water-board to clear subject’s airway 4) lowering of the water-board and return to demands for information.”

The CIA videotaped Zubaydah undergoing each of these “cycles,” only to destroy those tapes in 2005 when news of their existence surfaced and the embarrassment (and possible future culpability) of the Agency seemed increasingly to be at stake. CIA Director Michael Hayden would later assure CNN that the tapes had been destroyed only because “they no longer had ‘intelligence value’ and they posed a security risk.” Whose “security” was at risk if the tapes became public? Most likely, that of the Agency’s operatives and contractors who were breaking multiple national and international laws against torture, along with the high CIA and Bush administration officials who had directly approved their actions.

In addition to the waterboarding, the Senate torture report indicates that Zubaydah endured excruciating stress positions (which cause terrible pain without leaving a mark); sleep deprivation (for up to 180 hours, which generally induces hallucinations or psychosis); unrelenting exposure to loud noises (another psychosis-inducer); “walling” (the Agency’s term for repeatedly slamming the shoulder blades into a “flexible, false wall,” though Zubaydah told the International Committee of the Red Cross that when this was first done to him, “he was slammed directly against a hard concrete wall”); and confinement for hours in a box so cramped that he could not stand up inside it. All of these methods of torture had been given explicit approval in a memo written to the CIA’s head lawyer, John Rizzo, by Jay Bybee, who was then serving in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. In that memo Bybee approved the use of 10 different “techniques” on Zubaydah.

It seems likely that, while the CIA was torturing Zubaydah at Jessen’s and Mitchell’s direction for whatever information he might have, it was also using him to test the “effectiveness” of waterboarding as a torture technique. If so, the agency and its contractors violated not only international law, but the U.S. War Crimes Act, which expressly forbids experimenting on prisoners.

What might lead us to think that Zubaydah’s treatment was, in part, an experiment? In a May 30, 2005, memo sent to Rizzo, Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, discussed the CIA’s record keeping. There was, Bradbury commented, method to the CIA’s brutality. “Careful records are kept of each interrogation,” he wrote. This procedure, he continued, “allows for ongoing evaluation of the efficacy of each technique and its potential for any unintended or inappropriate results.” In other words, with the support of the Bush Justice Department, the CIA was keeping careful records of an experimental procedure designed to evaluate how well waterboarding worked. 

This was Abu Zubaydah’s impression as well. “I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques,” Zubaydah would later tell the International Committee of the Red Cross, “so no rules applied. It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

In addition to the videotaping, the CIA’s Office of Medical Services required a meticulous written record of every waterboarding session.  The details to be recorded were spelled out clearly:

“In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented: how long each application (and the entire procedure) lasted, how much water was used in the process (realizing that much splashes off), how exactly the water was applied, if a seal was achieved, if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled, how long was the break between applications, and how the subject looked between each treatment.”

Again, these were clearly meant to be the records of an experimental procedure, focusing as they did on how much water was effective; whether a “seal” was achieved (so no air could enter the victim’s lungs); whether the naso- or oropharynx (that is, the nose and throat) were so full of water the victim could not breathe; and just how much the “subject” vomited up. 

It was with Zubaydah that the CIA also began its post-9/11 practice of hiding detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross by transferring them to its “black sites,” the secret prisons it was setting up in countries with complacent or complicit regimes around the world. Such unacknowledged detainees came to be known as “ghost prisoners,” because they had no official existence. As the Senate torture report noted, “In part to avoid declaring Abu Zubaydah to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which would be required if he were detained at a U.S. military base, the CIA decided to seek authorization to clandestinely detain Abu Zubaydah at a facility in Country _______ [now known to have been Thailand].”

Tortured and Circular Reasoning

As British investigative journalist Andy Worthington reported in 2009, the Bush administration used Abu Zubaydah’s “interrogation” results to help justify the greatest crime of that administration, the unprovoked, illegal invasion of Iraq. Officials leaked to the media that he had confessed to knowing about a secret agreement involving Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (who later led al-Qaeda in Iraq), and Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein to work together “to destabilize the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq.” Of course, it was all lies. Zubaydah couldn’t have known about such an arrangement, first because it was, as Worthington says, “absurd,” and second, because Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda at all.

In fact, the evidence that Zubaydah had anything to do with al-Qaeda was beyond circumstantial — it was entirely circular. The administration’s reasoning went something like this: Zubaydah, a “senior al-Qaeda lieutenant,” ran the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan; therefore, Khaldan was an al-Qaeda camp; if Khaldan was an al Qaeda camp, then Zubaydah must have been a senior al Qaeda official.

They then used their “enhanced techniques” to drag what they wanted to hear out of a man whose life bore no relation to the tortured lies he evidently finally told his captors. Not surprisingly, no aspect of the administration’s formula proved accurate.  It was true that, for several years, the Bush administration routinely referred to Khaldan as an al-Qaeda training camp, but the CIA was well aware that this wasn’t so.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, for instance, made this crystal clear, quoting an August 16, 2006, CIA Intelligence Assessment, “Countering Misconceptions About Training Camps in Afghanistan, 1990-2001” this way:

“Khaldan Not Affiliated With Al-Qa’ida. A common misperception in outside articles is that Khaldan camp was run by al-Qa’ida. Pre-11 September 2001 reporting miscast Abu Zubaydah as a ‘senior al-Qa’ida lieutenant,’ which led to the inference that the Khaldan camp he was administering was tied to Usama bin Laden.”

Not only was Zubaydah not a senior al-Qaeda lieutenant, he had, according to the report, been turned down for membership in al-Qaeda as early as 1993 and the CIA knew it by at least 2006, if not far sooner. Nevertheless, the month after it privately clarified the nature of the Khaldan camp and Zubaydah’s lack of al-Qaeda connections, President Bush used the story of Zubaydah’s capture and interrogation in a speech to the nation justifying the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program. He then claimed that Zubaydah had “helped smuggle Al Qaida leaders out of Afghanistan.”

In the same speech, Bush told the nation, “Our intelligence community believes [Zubaydah] had run a terrorist camp in Afghanistan where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained” (a reference presumably to Khaldan). Perhaps the CIA should have been looking instead at some of the people who actually trained the hijackers — the operators of flight schools in the United States, where, according to a September 23, 2001 Washington Post story, the FBI already knew “terrorists” were learning to fly 747s.

In June 2007, the Bush administration doubled down on its claim that Zubaydah was involved with 9/11. At a hearing before the congressional Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, State Department Legal Adviser John Bellinger, discussing why the Guantánamo prison needed to remain open, explained that it “serves a very important purpose, to hold and detain individuals who are extremely dangerous… [like] Abu Zubaydah, people who have been planners of 9/11.”

Charges Withdrawn

In September 2009, the U.S. government quietly withdrew its many allegations against Abu Zubaydah. His attorneys had filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf; that is, a petition to excercise the constitutional right of anyone in government custody to know on what charges they are being held. In that context, they were asking the government to supply certain documents to help substantiate their claim that his continued detention in Guantánamo was illegal. The new Obama administration replied with a 109-page brief filed in the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, which is legally designated to hear the habeas cases of Guantánamo detainees.

The bulk of that brief came down to a government argument that was curious indeed, given the years of bragging about Zubaydah’s central role in al-Qaeda’s activities.  It claimed that there was no reason to turn over any “exculpatory” documents demonstrating that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, or that he had no involvement in 9/11 or any other terrorist activity — because the government was no longer claiming that any of those things were true.

The government’s lawyers went on to claim, bizarrely enough, that the Bush administration had never “contended that [Zubaydah] had any personal involvement in planning or executing… the attacks of September 11, 2001.” They added that “the Government also has not contended in this proceeding that, at the time of his capture, [Zubaydah] had knowledge of any specific impending terrorist operations” — an especially curious claim, since the prevention of such future attacks was how the CIA justified its torture of Zubaydah in the first place. Far from believing that he was “if not the number two, very close to the number two person in” al-Qaeda, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had once claimed, “the Government has not contended in this proceeding that [Zubaydah] was a member of al-Qaida or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaida.”

And so, the case against the man who was waterboarded 83 times and contributed supposedly crucial information to the CIA on al-Qaeda plotting was oh-so-quietly withdrawn without either fuss or media attention.  Exhibit one was now exhibit none.

Seven years after the initial filing of Zubaydah’s habeas petition, the DC District Court has yet to rule on it. Given the court’s average 751-day turnaround time on such petitions, this is an extraordinary length of time. Here, justice delayed is truly justice denied.

Perhaps we should not be surprised, however. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, CIA headquarters assured those who were interrogating Zubaydah that he would “never be placed in a situation where he has any significant contact with others and/or has the opportunity to be released.” In fact, “all major players are in concurrence,” stated the agency, that he “should remain incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” And so far, that’s exactly what’s happened.

The capture, torture, and propaganda use of Abu Zubaydah is the perfect example of the U.S. government’s unique combination of willful law-breaking, ass-covering memo-writing, and what some Salvadorans I once worked with called “strategic incompetence.” The fact that no one — not George Bush or Dick Cheney, not Jessen or Mitchell, nor multiple directors of the CIA — has been held accountable means that, unless we are very lucky, we will see more of the same in the future.

Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the Philosophy department at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes (Hot Books, April 2016). Her previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt’s latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2016 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Vice News from last year: ” Ex-CIA Officer John Kiriakou: “The Government Turned Me Into a Dissident”

In the wake of the Belgium terrorist attacks, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has double-downed on his position in favor of torture.

In a recent telephone interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Trump argued “we have to change our law on the waterboarding thing,” that he would “go further” than waterboarding and that the primary suspect in last year’s terrorist attack in Paris would “talk faster with the torture.”

Trump concludes that our respect for the rule of law places us at an unfair advantage in our shared struggle against violent extremism.

“We have to change our laws and we have to be able to fight at least on almost equal basis. We have laws that we have to obey in terms of torture. They have no laws whatsoever that they have to obey,” Trump explained during his CNN interview.

In fact, international human rights law – which emerged in WWII’s aftermath – prohibits torture absolutely even in a national emergency, like in France or even Egypt (where a state of emergency has lasted over two decades).

Since 9/11, there’s been wide ranging debate around torture particularly in the context of counter-terrorism techniques. Some, like Trump, have argued that torture is necessary to get evidence that helps protect us from criminals who would do us harm.

But, does torture actually work?

Several years ago, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, responsible for overseeing our federal intelligence community, began investigating the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” – like waterboarding – as a counter-terrorism strategy.

After evidence emerged that the CIA destroyed recordings of post 9/11 detainee interrogations, the bipartisan group looked at the CIA’s use of torture on detainees from 2001 to 2006. Its findings, completed in 2012, were publicly released in 2014.

Significantly, the Committee concluded in its 6,000 page report that the CIA’s techniques were ineffective. Specifically, the Committee found that torture:

* Resulted in false information and faulty intelligence

* Did not facilitate detainee cooperation

* Did not thwart terrorist plots

Regarding waterboarding, as championed by Trump, the committee’s report described how it “induc[ed] convulsions and vomiting,” with one detainee becoming “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth,’ while another suffered a “series of near drownings.”

In other words, while it resulted in physical harm it didn’t give us accurate information.

CIA agents threatened detainees that they would be leaving in a “coffin-shaped box,” and that they could never go to court because “we can never let the world know what I have done to you.”

Again, according to the Senate Committee, these threats gave us no reliable intelligence.

So, what actually works?

The Committee found CIA agents obtained the most accurate information when they confronted detainees with intelligence they had already secured.

Trump sets up a moral equation between us and terrorists to argue for torture. But, by doing so, we give up our international standing and credibility as global leaders on human rights.

And, that’s no way to make America great again.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

The Young Turks: “Trump And Cruz Call For More Torture And Bombs After Brussels”

GOP presidential candidates are endorsing torture, again.

For anyone who cares deeply about being informed, watching Republican presidential debates can feel like a form of torture. But the program becomes more terrifying altogether when their ignorance is hitched to an endorsement of actual torture.

At the latest GOP debate in New Hampshire, Donald Trump heartily endorsed waterboarding and other forms of torture, which he promised to reinstitute in national security interrogations if he wins the election. “I would bring back waterboarding, and I would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding,” Trump vowed.

Trump’s position was condemned immediately by Republican Senator John McCain, who knows a thing or two about torture. McCain, who was brutally beaten as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, accused his fellow Republicans of “sacrificing our respect for human dignity” with their “loose talk” about instituting human rights abuses.

Fibonacci Blue / Flickr

McCain reminded Trump — and Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Carly Fiorina, who also seem to be enamored of torture — that the torture techniques employed by the Bush administration after 9/11 were unreliable. They produced no actionable intelligence, disrupted no terrorist attacks, and saved no American lives.

These conclusions were documented by investigators for the Senate Intelligence Committee, who examined raw CIA documents. In other words, they came directly from the horse’s mouth.

But torture isn’t just bad policy. It’s against the law.

First, the federal Torture Act stipulates that if an American soldier, CIA officer, or anybody else acting on behalf of the government waterboards a prisoner, he risks up to 20 years imprisonment. The McCain-Feinstein Amendment Congress passed last year reiterated the ban on torture, including waterboarding.

Second, our country is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Waterboarding a prisoner is against international law and could subject the torturer — or the person ordering or approving the torture — to international sanctions, including prosecution in international courts.

In the early part of the last decade, torture fans in the George W. Bush Justice Department — most infamously in a legal opinion by attorneys John Yoo and Jay Bybee — twisted the law itself into contortions to argue that certain forms of torture were permissible. Al-Qaeda, they said, was a “non-state actor,” not a country. As such, its members should receive none of the protections of international law.

That argument was specious on its face. Absolutely nothing in U.S. law says that there are two sets of rules — one for countries and one for terrorist groups. The law is the law, whether we like it or not — including international conventions adopted by the United States.

What Trump and his cronies are advocating is illegal, immoral, and unconstitutional. In fact, it’s an impeachable offense. No president can order anybody to commit torture. Anyone who does should be hauled before a judge.

Personally, I have trouble taking any candidate who knows so little about the law and the Constitution seriously. But deep down, I almost want one of them to win, just so Congress, the Supreme Court, and the American people can make an example of him or her.

Maybe that’s what it will take to finally put this torture issue to rest.