Dark Secrets at the Front
Give Me Liberty
Dark Secrets at the Front
Prisoners and interrogators are both brutalized in a war that changes who we are.
by Nat Hentoff
May 30th, 2007 11:27 AM
In February 2006, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that our wars against terrorism "could last for decades." Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, he said of the multiplying enemy: "Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs."
With a seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers in Iraq, the enemy certainly hasn't changed its way of life. However—as the world has witnessed—there's plenty of evidence that we've changed ours—namely, in America's professed values about how we treat our prisoners, euphemistically marginalized as "detainees."
Colin Powell, after his many years of military service, said that American forces using torture on prisoners has been an "innovation." And on May 7 of this year, General David Petraeus—now commanding our "surge" in Iraq, emphasized: "It's time to adhere to American values. We must not sink to the level of our enemies." That reminded me of John McCain admonishing the president and Cheney about brutalizing our prisoners: "We are Americans; our values are not those of the terrorists." McCain finally got a law passed barring "cruel and inhuman treatment" of prisoners, but he later voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that barred those we hold as terrorism suspects from going into our courts to speak of their "conditions of confinement"—including "coercive interrogations" permitted by the Military Commissions Act.
What caused the new alarm by General Petraeus about sinking to the level of the enemy is a startling official report from the Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army Medical Command. Dated November 17, 2006, the report—encompassing several years of research in the field, including repeated surveys—has found that:
" Less than half of other soldiers and Marines (in Iraq) believed that non- combatants should be treated with dignity and respect and well over a third believed that torture should be allowed to save the life of a fellow team member .
"About ten percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating an Iraqi non-combatant when it wasn't necessary . . . Less than half of the soldiers and Marines would report a team member for unethical behavior . . . Having a team member become a casualty or handling dead bodies and human remains were associated with increases in mistreatment of prisoners. High levels of anger [among the interrogators] and screening positive for mental health problems [including depression] were also associated with the mistreatment of Iraqi non-combatants."
This official report—and I'll be citing more of it—was described in a May 5 Washington Post report, but I have seen little of it elsewhere (while learning plenty about Paris Hilton going to prison). The disturbing official report was by the Surgeon General of the Multi-National Force–Iraq. Responding to it, a lesser official, Major General Gale Pollock, the acting Army surgeon general, told the Post: "They're not torturing the people."
This cruelty and torture by our forces—and the silence of fellow soldiers and Marines—are crimes under our own War Crimes Act. The responsibility for this goes to the top of the chain of command, but only a few "bad apples," mostly at Abu Ghraib, have been held accountable.
Wholly left out of the report of the Multi-National Force surgeon general, for example, is the deep complicity of military doctors in our overseas prisons. They enable the "coercive" interrogators to find the psychological vulnerabilities—the deepest fears—of the prisoners. An extraordinary investigative account of these doctors' war crimes has been published with far too little attention by Dr. Steven H. Miles, a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School; Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror.
I have followed Miles's work for years, and I interviewed him again recently for next week's column on the doctors who are complicit in torture. With regard to the ultimate complicity, Miles in his book speaks of the commanding role of Donald Rumsfeld setting a systemic policy of "coercive" interrogation of prisoners. (The ultimate responsibility, of course, lies in the Oval Office.) Miles writes:
"In 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld approved 'counterresistance' interrogation techniques including isolation, interrogation for twenty hours, deprivation of light and sound, and the use of loud sounds. He noted that some nations might view these methods as inhumane, intimidating or coercive, or as violating the Geneva Convention, but he asserted [with the advice of then counsel to the president Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department expert on presidential powers John Yoo] that the 'provisions [of the Geneva Convention] are not applicable to Guantánamo detainees.' "
Subsequently, there were a few alleged modifications for the Rumsfeld directive; but essentially, torture and other abuses have been the brutal norm in our treatment of these prisoners.
Adding to the severity of this treatment are the increased psychological problems of the interrogators and guards themselves. According to the surgeon general's report, "A quarter to a third of deployed soldiers in combat zones are currently experiencing moderate to severe combat stress. Others are experiencing depression and anxiety. About 45 percent of soldiers report low or very low unit morale."
Analyzing this report, The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks and Ann Scott Tyson note: "The study found that the more often soldiers are deployed, the longer they are deployed each time, and the less time they spend at home, the more likely they are to suffer from mental health problems such as combat trauma, anxiety, and depression. That result is particularly notable given that the Pentagon has sent soldiers and Marines to Iraq multiple times and recently extended the tours of thousands of soldiers to 15 months from 12 months."
Now that Democrats control Congress, where are the unsparing subpoena-powered investigations all the way up the chain of command on how the enemy has indeed changed who we are and what we stand for while we're told "the surge is working"?
http://tinyurl.com/2b6jby
Give Me Liberty
The Torture Doctors
These physicians have a strange way of preserving the American way of life
by Nat Hentoff
June 6th, 2007 11:12 AM
For all the press coverage of abuses, including torture, of our "detainees," most Americans are unaware of the partnership between military interrogators and military doctors and psychiatrists in "breaking" prisoners who refuse to provide information. A chilling account of this utter betrayal of medical ethics appeared in the July 2005 New England Journal of Medicine ("Doctors and Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay"), hardly a widely circulated publication.
It was preceded on July 1 by an op-ed column in The Washington Post, "The Stain of Torture," by Dr. Burton J. Lee II, former personal physician to President George H.W. Bush. Lee was horrified that "military medical personnel have played a role in the torture of prisoners."
I thought these modern versions of Émile Zola's "J'Accuse"—which famously denounced the French military in 1898 for its anti-Semitic persecution of Alfred Dreyfus—would be followed by Congressional investigations and fiery editorials, but the only substantial follow-up I've seen to this indictment of the Defense Department's torture doctors has been a book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror by Dr. Steven Miles, an expert on medical ethics and international human rights.
The book was published by Random House last year, but has largely disappeared from press and public attention. In his April 7 interview with Miles, Peter Rowe of the The San Diego Union-Tribune noted that "Amazon reported that 227,826 other volumes were outselling Oath Betrayed."
I am not surprised, therefore, to have seen no follow-up in the press or in Congress on Miles's documented proof that it was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who authorized the collaboration between interrogators and doctors preparing prisoners for torture.
In an April 2003 memorandum, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that "interrogations must always . . . take into account . . . a detainee's emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses . . . [and] manipulate [those] emotions and weaknesses."
This is how it works, as described in the New England Journal of Medicine. At Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, under Rumsfeld's policy, "approved the creation of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team" (BSCT, pronounced biscuit). Psychiatrists and psychologists on the team at Guantánamo "prepared psychological profiles [of the prisoners whose personal health information they had access to] for use by interrogators. They also sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators."
In another medical publication, American Journal of Bioethics, Miles added, "The BSCT doctors suggested . . . how to break the prisoners down. . . . [One] approach aimed at a prisoner's personal vulnerabilities, his worst fears, for example."
No detail was too insignificant for these specialists in cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment. A BSCT psychologist authorized the use of snarling dogs to "exploit individual phobias." And another psychologist, a chair of the BSCT team at Guantánamo and a major in rank, "suggested putting the prisoner in a swivel chair to prevent him from fixing his eyes on one spot and thereby avoiding the guards."
Moreover, Steven Miles reports in Oath Betrayed that "a civil lawsuit and an FBI memo describe four prisoners—three at Guantánamo and one apparently in Afghanistan—who were "denied a prosthetic limb [and] antibiotics for festering wounds . . . until they cooperated with interrogators."
Another detailed source of how the torture doctors operate is the soon-to-be-updated 2005 report, "Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces" from the Physicans for Human Rights (phrusa.org). (PFHR has offices in both Washington and Cambridge, Mass.)
A key indictment in this report on the legal responsibilities of health professionals cooperating with interrogators should lead to a Congressional investigation now that the Democrats are in power, but Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are clueless in these human-rights matters:
"Health personnel employed by the Department of Defense and other agencies in the 'war on terror' are bound by international law," reads the report. Also, "they should abide by ethical standards of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association [both of which have yet to be heard from concerning the discipline of torture doctors]. The Declaration of Tokyo, adopted by both bodies, prohibits participation by physicians in torture and all forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This includes providing knowledge to 'facilitate the practice of torture' [and other degrading treatment]. It also prohibits the physician's presence when any of these practices takes place."
Are none of the doctors in these prisons troubled by what they see, even if some are not directly involved? "There is evidence," says Physicians for Human Rights, "of failure on the part of health professionals to report abuse as well as evidence of complicity in acts of physical and psychological torture."
There are FBI agents with much higher ethical standards than these health professionals. A number of them, appalled at what they saw during Army interrogations while on assignment at Guantánamo, sent urgent e-mails to FBI Director Robert Mueller reporting these abuses, adding that some of the torturers pretended to be FBI agents. Mueller took no action until persistently prodded by Vermont Democratic Senator Pat Leahy; he then said he'd look into it. But as far as I know, no torturer cited by the FBI agents has been held accountable.
I asked Miles what actions have been taken against these health professionals who have abandoned medical ethics. "Only very minor reprisals," he said. "A medic who watched some abuse. A nurse who witnessed other abuses. But no one higher has been disciplined." A source at Physicians for Human Rights tells me: "It's been a complete whitewash."
Not only Army interrogators and doctors are committing these war crimes under our own War Crimes statute. Two years ago, The Washington Post's Dana Priest reported that in a CIA Rendition Group of kidnappers, "case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists . . . figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside. . . . "
The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that in ancient times, when a physician arrived, a patient was not sure whether the doctor had come to treat him or kill him. So much for advanced civilization. But why, I wonder, are American doctors who are not in our military prisons remaining silent?
http://tinyurl.com/2d9t5o
Dark Secrets at the Front
Prisoners and interrogators are both brutalized in a war that changes who we are.
by Nat Hentoff
May 30th, 2007 11:27 AM
In February 2006, then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that our wars against terrorism "could last for decades." Speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, he said of the multiplying enemy: "Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs."
With a seemingly endless supply of suicide bombers in Iraq, the enemy certainly hasn't changed its way of life. However—as the world has witnessed—there's plenty of evidence that we've changed ours—namely, in America's professed values about how we treat our prisoners, euphemistically marginalized as "detainees."
Colin Powell, after his many years of military service, said that American forces using torture on prisoners has been an "innovation." And on May 7 of this year, General David Petraeus—now commanding our "surge" in Iraq, emphasized: "It's time to adhere to American values. We must not sink to the level of our enemies." That reminded me of John McCain admonishing the president and Cheney about brutalizing our prisoners: "We are Americans; our values are not those of the terrorists." McCain finally got a law passed barring "cruel and inhuman treatment" of prisoners, but he later voted for the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that barred those we hold as terrorism suspects from going into our courts to speak of their "conditions of confinement"—including "coercive interrogations" permitted by the Military Commissions Act.
What caused the new alarm by General Petraeus about sinking to the level of the enemy is a startling official report from the Office of the Surgeon General, United States Army Medical Command. Dated November 17, 2006, the report—encompassing several years of research in the field, including repeated surveys—has found that:
" Less than half of other soldiers and Marines (in Iraq) believed that non- combatants should be treated with dignity and respect and well over a third believed that torture should be allowed to save the life of a fellow team member .
"About ten percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating an Iraqi non-combatant when it wasn't necessary . . . Less than half of the soldiers and Marines would report a team member for unethical behavior . . . Having a team member become a casualty or handling dead bodies and human remains were associated with increases in mistreatment of prisoners. High levels of anger [among the interrogators] and screening positive for mental health problems [including depression] were also associated with the mistreatment of Iraqi non-combatants."
This official report—and I'll be citing more of it—was described in a May 5 Washington Post report, but I have seen little of it elsewhere (while learning plenty about Paris Hilton going to prison). The disturbing official report was by the Surgeon General of the Multi-National Force–Iraq. Responding to it, a lesser official, Major General Gale Pollock, the acting Army surgeon general, told the Post: "They're not torturing the people."
This cruelty and torture by our forces—and the silence of fellow soldiers and Marines—are crimes under our own War Crimes Act. The responsibility for this goes to the top of the chain of command, but only a few "bad apples," mostly at Abu Ghraib, have been held accountable.
Wholly left out of the report of the Multi-National Force surgeon general, for example, is the deep complicity of military doctors in our overseas prisons. They enable the "coercive" interrogators to find the psychological vulnerabilities—the deepest fears—of the prisoners. An extraordinary investigative account of these doctors' war crimes has been published with far too little attention by Dr. Steven H. Miles, a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota Medical School; Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror.
I have followed Miles's work for years, and I interviewed him again recently for next week's column on the doctors who are complicit in torture. With regard to the ultimate complicity, Miles in his book speaks of the commanding role of Donald Rumsfeld setting a systemic policy of "coercive" interrogation of prisoners. (The ultimate responsibility, of course, lies in the Oval Office.) Miles writes:
"In 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld approved 'counterresistance' interrogation techniques including isolation, interrogation for twenty hours, deprivation of light and sound, and the use of loud sounds. He noted that some nations might view these methods as inhumane, intimidating or coercive, or as violating the Geneva Convention, but he asserted [with the advice of then counsel to the president Alberto Gonzales and Justice Department expert on presidential powers John Yoo] that the 'provisions [of the Geneva Convention] are not applicable to Guantánamo detainees.' "
Subsequently, there were a few alleged modifications for the Rumsfeld directive; but essentially, torture and other abuses have been the brutal norm in our treatment of these prisoners.
Adding to the severity of this treatment are the increased psychological problems of the interrogators and guards themselves. According to the surgeon general's report, "A quarter to a third of deployed soldiers in combat zones are currently experiencing moderate to severe combat stress. Others are experiencing depression and anxiety. About 45 percent of soldiers report low or very low unit morale."
Analyzing this report, The Washington Post's Thomas Ricks and Ann Scott Tyson note: "The study found that the more often soldiers are deployed, the longer they are deployed each time, and the less time they spend at home, the more likely they are to suffer from mental health problems such as combat trauma, anxiety, and depression. That result is particularly notable given that the Pentagon has sent soldiers and Marines to Iraq multiple times and recently extended the tours of thousands of soldiers to 15 months from 12 months."
Now that Democrats control Congress, where are the unsparing subpoena-powered investigations all the way up the chain of command on how the enemy has indeed changed who we are and what we stand for while we're told "the surge is working"?
http://tinyurl.com/2b6jby
Give Me Liberty
The Torture Doctors
These physicians have a strange way of preserving the American way of life
by Nat Hentoff
June 6th, 2007 11:12 AM
For all the press coverage of abuses, including torture, of our "detainees," most Americans are unaware of the partnership between military interrogators and military doctors and psychiatrists in "breaking" prisoners who refuse to provide information. A chilling account of this utter betrayal of medical ethics appeared in the July 2005 New England Journal of Medicine ("Doctors and Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay"), hardly a widely circulated publication.
It was preceded on July 1 by an op-ed column in The Washington Post, "The Stain of Torture," by Dr. Burton J. Lee II, former personal physician to President George H.W. Bush. Lee was horrified that "military medical personnel have played a role in the torture of prisoners."
I thought these modern versions of Émile Zola's "J'Accuse"—which famously denounced the French military in 1898 for its anti-Semitic persecution of Alfred Dreyfus—would be followed by Congressional investigations and fiery editorials, but the only substantial follow-up I've seen to this indictment of the Defense Department's torture doctors has been a book, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and the War on Terror by Dr. Steven Miles, an expert on medical ethics and international human rights.
The book was published by Random House last year, but has largely disappeared from press and public attention. In his April 7 interview with Miles, Peter Rowe of the The San Diego Union-Tribune noted that "Amazon reported that 227,826 other volumes were outselling Oath Betrayed."
I am not surprised, therefore, to have seen no follow-up in the press or in Congress on Miles's documented proof that it was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who authorized the collaboration between interrogators and doctors preparing prisoners for torture.
In an April 2003 memorandum, Donald Rumsfeld ordered that "interrogations must always . . . take into account . . . a detainee's emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses . . . [and] manipulate [those] emotions and weaknesses."
This is how it works, as described in the New England Journal of Medicine. At Guantánamo, Major General Geoffrey Miller, under Rumsfeld's policy, "approved the creation of a Behavioral Science Consultation Team" (BSCT, pronounced biscuit). Psychiatrists and psychologists on the team at Guantánamo "prepared psychological profiles [of the prisoners whose personal health information they had access to] for use by interrogators. They also sat in on some interrogations, observed others from behind one-way mirrors, and offered feedback to interrogators."
In another medical publication, American Journal of Bioethics, Miles added, "The BSCT doctors suggested . . . how to break the prisoners down. . . . [One] approach aimed at a prisoner's personal vulnerabilities, his worst fears, for example."
No detail was too insignificant for these specialists in cruel, degrading and inhuman treatment. A BSCT psychologist authorized the use of snarling dogs to "exploit individual phobias." And another psychologist, a chair of the BSCT team at Guantánamo and a major in rank, "suggested putting the prisoner in a swivel chair to prevent him from fixing his eyes on one spot and thereby avoiding the guards."
Moreover, Steven Miles reports in Oath Betrayed that "a civil lawsuit and an FBI memo describe four prisoners—three at Guantánamo and one apparently in Afghanistan—who were "denied a prosthetic limb [and] antibiotics for festering wounds . . . until they cooperated with interrogators."
Another detailed source of how the torture doctors operate is the soon-to-be-updated 2005 report, "Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by U.S. Forces" from the Physicans for Human Rights (phrusa.org). (PFHR has offices in both Washington and Cambridge, Mass.)
A key indictment in this report on the legal responsibilities of health professionals cooperating with interrogators should lead to a Congressional investigation now that the Democrats are in power, but Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are clueless in these human-rights matters:
"Health personnel employed by the Department of Defense and other agencies in the 'war on terror' are bound by international law," reads the report. Also, "they should abide by ethical standards of the World Medical Association and the American Medical Association [both of which have yet to be heard from concerning the discipline of torture doctors]. The Declaration of Tokyo, adopted by both bodies, prohibits participation by physicians in torture and all forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. This includes providing knowledge to 'facilitate the practice of torture' [and other degrading treatment]. It also prohibits the physician's presence when any of these practices takes place."
Are none of the doctors in these prisons troubled by what they see, even if some are not directly involved? "There is evidence," says Physicians for Human Rights, "of failure on the part of health professionals to report abuse as well as evidence of complicity in acts of physical and psychological torture."
There are FBI agents with much higher ethical standards than these health professionals. A number of them, appalled at what they saw during Army interrogations while on assignment at Guantánamo, sent urgent e-mails to FBI Director Robert Mueller reporting these abuses, adding that some of the torturers pretended to be FBI agents. Mueller took no action until persistently prodded by Vermont Democratic Senator Pat Leahy; he then said he'd look into it. But as far as I know, no torturer cited by the FBI agents has been held accountable.
I asked Miles what actions have been taken against these health professionals who have abandoned medical ethics. "Only very minor reprisals," he said. "A medic who watched some abuse. A nurse who witnessed other abuses. But no one higher has been disciplined." A source at Physicians for Human Rights tells me: "It's been a complete whitewash."
Not only Army interrogators and doctors are committing these war crimes under our own War Crimes statute. Two years ago, The Washington Post's Dana Priest reported that in a CIA Rendition Group of kidnappers, "case officers, paramilitaries, analysts and psychologists . . . figure out how to snatch someone off a city street, or a remote hillside. . . . "
The famed anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that in ancient times, when a physician arrived, a patient was not sure whether the doctor had come to treat him or kill him. So much for advanced civilization. But why, I wonder, are American doctors who are not in our military prisons remaining silent?
http://tinyurl.com/2d9t5o
bin66 - 9. Jun, 00:56
