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IN MAY 2013, the Washington Post’s Greg Miller reported that the head of the CIA’s clandestine service was being shifted out of that position as a result of “a management shake-up” by then-Director John Brennan. As Miller documented, this official — whom the paper did not name because she was a covert agent at the time — was centrally involved in the worst abuses of the CIA’s Bush-era torture regime.

As Miller put it, she was “directly involved in its controversial interrogation program” and had an “extensive role” in torturing detainees. Even more troubling, she “had run a secret prison in Thailand” — part of the CIA’s network of “black sites” — “where two detainees were subjected to waterboarding and other harsh techniques.” The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture also detailed the central role she played in the particularly gruesome torture of detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated multiple court orders as well as the demands of the 9/11 commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. A special prosecutor and grand jury investigated those actions but ultimately chose not to prosecute.

The name of that CIA official whose torture activities the Post described is Gina Haspel. Today, as BuzzFeed’s Jason Leopold noted, CIA Director Mike Pompeo announced that Haspel was selected by Trump to be deputy director of the CIA.

This should not come as much of a surprise given that Pompeo himself has said he is open to resurrecting Bush-era torture techniques (indeed, Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, was forced to withdraw from the running in late 2008 because of his support for some of those tactics only to be confirmed in 2013). That’s part of why it was so controversial that 14 Democrats — including their Senate leader Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Tim Kaine — voted to confirm Pompeo.

That Haspel was the actual subject of the 2013 Post story was an open secret. As Leopold said after I named her on Twitter as the subject of that story: “All of us who covered CIA knew. She was undercover and agency asked us not to print her name.” Gina Haspel is now slated to become the second-most powerful official at the CIA despite — or because of — the central, aggressive, sustained role she played in many of the most grotesque and shameful abuses of the war on terror.

Top photo: An interrogation room at Camp Delta in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for detainees from the U.S. war in Afghanistan, April 7, 2004.

Glenn Greenwald
February 2 2017, 9:50 p.m.
Find this story at 2 February 2017

Copyright https://theintercept.com/

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Exclusive: Information from terror suspects about 2010 plot was used in a ‘Jack Bauer real-time operation’

The former head of MI6 has revealed that torture “does produce intelligence”

The former head of MI6 has said torturing suspected terrorists produces “useful information”, as The Independent on Sunday reveals that “real-time” intelligence understood to have been obtained by torture in Saudi Arabia helped to thwart a terrorist bombing on British soil.

In his first interview since stepping down from Secret Intelligence Service in January, Sir John Sawers told the BBC yesterday that torture “does produce intelligence” and security services “set aside the use of torture… because it is against the values” of British society, not because it doesn’t work in the short term. Sir John defended the security services against accusations they had played a role in the radicalising of British Muslims, including Mohammed Emwazi, who it is claimed is the extremist responsible for the murder of hostages in Syria.

The IoS can reveal details of a dramatic “Jack Bauer real-time operation” to foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two airliners in 2010. According to a well-place intelligence source, the discovery of a printer cartridge bomb on a UPS cargo aircraft at East Midlands airport was possible only because two British government officials in Saudi Arabia were in “immediate communication” with a team reportedly using torture to interrogate an al-Qaeda operative as part of “ticking bomb scenario” operation.

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Sir John Sawers has advised increasing defence spending to counter the security threat posed by Russian aggression (AFP/Getty)
The terror plot was to use cartridge bombs to bring down two aircraft over the eastern United States. However, British authorities intercepted the first device at the cargo airport hub after what they described as a “tip-off” from Saudi Arabia. A second device was intercepted aboard a freight plane in Dubai; both aircraft had started their trips in Yemen.

The IoS understands there was a frantic search prompted by “two or three” calls to Saudi Arabia after the tip-off, with security services battling to find the device. French security sources revealed the device was within 17 minutes of detonating when bomb disposal teams disarmed it.

One intelligence source said: “The people in London went back on the phone two or three times to where the interrogation was taking place in Riyadh to find out specifically where the bomb was hidden. There were two Britons there, in immediate communication with where the interrogation was taking place, and as soon as anything happened, they were in touch with the UK. It was all done in real time.”

There is growing frustration on the part of some UK security officials at Britain’s lack of candour about aspects of intelligence work. “There is a lack of understanding in that most people, if they knew about a ticking bomb scenario, would say torture was defensible, yet we insist on saying ‘we never do it’. Yet we are very happy beneficiaries of it,” one official said.

CIA torture report: The 10 most harrowing stories
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The human rights group Cage said the use of torture by MI5 and MI6 allegedly played a role in radicalising young British Muslims, including Michael Adebolajo, convicted of murdering soldier Lee Rigby in London in 2013. In the interview, Sir John said blaming the security services for radicalisation was “specious” and offered a vigorous defence of the methods used by MI5 and MI6. He said torture had been used for “thousands of years in order to extract useful information”.

He said: “The whole problem about torture and maltreatment is sadly is that it does produce intelligence. And that’s why in a civilised society like ours we have to set aside certain methods, even though they might be effective in the short term. In the longer term they are very counterproductive; they are undermining the values of our society.”

Shami Chakrabarti, the director of campaign group Liberty, said: “That is a low ebb, even for a senior spook in this country. After 9/11, I could have predicted internment without charge or trial. I could predict more invasions of privacy and blanket surveillance, but the one thing I could never have predicted is in 2015 we would be having to talk about torture in the UK.”

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Floral tributes to Fusilier Lee Rigby at the spot where he was killed (Getty)
According to a source close to the East Midlands bomb operation, the British officials “would have made sure they were not actually in the room” where the torture was allegedly taking place, but there was “no way” the intelligence that thwarted the bombing “wasn’t procured under duress”. “It is a fair inference to say he was being tortured. He wasn’t volunteering the information, that’s for sure,” the source said. “Of course we use intelligence from torture. We take it from wherever we can get it, but we are never, ever going to say ‘we don’t want that’. Or ask too many questions about where it has come from. It is the difference between intelligence and evidence.”

Earlier this month, in what aides confirmed as a reference to the plot, Prime Minister David Cameron alluded to a “piece of information” from Saudi Arabia that “saved potentially hundreds of lives”.

While in office Sir John described torture as “illegal and abhorrent”, but in 2010 said the security services faced “real, constant operational dilemmas” to avoid using information which has been gathered by torture. Two year later, he admitted British agents went “close to the line” when questioning alleged terrorists.

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Shami Chakrabarti is shocked that in 2015 “we would be having to talk about torture in the UK.” (Teri Pengilley)
However, senior Tories said the case raised serious issues. Dominic Grieve, the Conservative former attorney general, said: “History shows us that torture can work but that it also often results in completely misleading information. It’s utterly unlawful, totally repugnant, and contrary to our national practices.”

Andrew Tyrie MP, chair of the Parliamentary all-party group on rendition, said: “Allegations of British complicity in rendition, torture and kidnap just keep coming. The case for an independent judge-led inquiry into them has been overwhelming for years.”

There are growing calls backing Mr Tyrie’s long-held argument that the next chair of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) be elected by MPs and not the Prime Minister.

Social media and terrorist threats

Facebook, Twitter and other technology firms have been savaged by a former spy chief for refusing to “fulfil their responsibilities” by protecting people from terrorists.

Sir John Sawers, the former head of MI6, told Radio 4’s Today programme that the leaks by Edward Snowden had “driven a wedge” between the security services and social media companies which had hampered counter-terrorism efforts.

His comments were echoed by the shadow Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, who said social media firms “can’t just stand back and ignore” evidence of their users engaging in extremist activity.

Sir John said: “Before the Snowden leaks took place, there was a good working relationship between technology companies and the intelligence agencies that kept us all safe. That has now gone down to the absolute legal minimum.

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Edward Snowden’s revelations sparked outrage about the scope of government snooping (AP)
We cannot just leave the security of society to the intelligence agencies. Technology companies have to find a way whereby they can fulfil their responsibilities and play their part.

“They need to have mechanisms whereby they can identify this dangerous activity, and they are sitting on a mine of data which they use extensively for commercial purposes, but which they are not allowing to be used for purposes of public good like national security.”

Ms Cooper told The IoS: “At the moment, some of the online social media organisations will do more around child abuse than on counter-terror or terrorist threats. I don’t think people can just stand back and ignore it.”

Jamie Merrill, James Hanning, Mark Leftly, Nick Clark @Jamie_Merrill Sunday 1 March 2015

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After Adam Goldman exposed the identity of Jihadi John, ISIL’s executioner, as Mohammed Emwazi, it set off an interesting response in Britain.

CagePrisoners — the advocacy organization for detainees — revealed details of how MI5 had tried to recruit Emwazi and, when he refused, had repeatedly harassed him and his family and prevented him from working a job in Kuwait (where he was born).

While that certainly doesn’t excuse beheadings, it does raise questions about how the intelligence services track those it has identified as potential recruits and/or threats.

And seemingly in response to those questions, the former head of MI6 has come forward to say that torture has worked in a ticking time bomb scenario — that of the toner cartridge plot in 2010.

In his first interview since stepping down from Secret Intelligence Service in January, Sir John Sawers

…defended the security services against accusations they had played a role in the radicalising of British Muslims, including Mohammed Emwazi, who it is claimed is the extremist responsible for the murder of hostages in Syria.

The IoS can reveal details of a dramatic “Jack Bauer real-time operation” to foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two airliners in 2010. According to a well-place intelligence source, the discovery of a printer cartridge bomb on a UPS cargo aircraft at East Midlands airport was possible only because two British government officials in Saudi Arabia were in “immediate communication” with a team reportedly using torture to interrogate an al-Qaeda operative as part of “ticking bomb scenario” operation.

The terror plot was to use cartridge bombs to bring down two aircraft over the eastern United States. However, British authorities intercepted the first device at the cargo airport hub after what they described as a “tip-off” from Saudi Arabia. A second device was intercepted aboard a freight plane in Dubai; both aircraft had started their trips in Yemen.

The IoS understands there was a frantic search prompted by “two or three” calls to Saudi Arabia after the tip-off, with security services battling to find the device. French security sources revealed the device was within 17 minutes of detonating when bomb disposal teams disarmed it.

One intelligence source said: “The people in London went back on the phone two or three times to where the interrogation was taking place in Riyadh to find out specifically where the bomb was hidden. There were two Britons there, in immediate communication with where the interrogation was taking place, and as soon as anything happened, they were in touch with the UK. It was all done in real time.”

At the time, multiple sources on the Saudi peninsula revealed that authorities learned of this plot — and therefore learned about the bombs — from an apparent double agent(and former Gitmo detainee), Jabir al-Fayfi, who had left AQAP and alerted the Saudis to the plot. If so, it would mean what was learned from torture (if this account can be trusted) was the precise location of the explosives in planes that boxes that had already been isolated.

that may mean this “success” prevented nothing more than an explosion in a controlled situation, because it had already been tipped by a double agent who presumably didn’t need to be tortured to share the information he had been sent in to obtain.

The toner cartridge story significantly resembles the UndieBomb 2.0 plot, which was not only tipped by a double agent, but propagated by it …in that case, the double agent came not via Gitmo and Saudi “deradicalization,” but via MI5, via a recruitment effort very like what MI5 used with Emwazi.

Indeed, it is not unreasonable to imagine that Emwazi knew that double agent

the treatment of a range of people implicated in Yemeni and/or Somali networks (MI5 accused Emwazi of wanting to travel to the latter) derives from the growing awareness among networks who have tried to be recruited who else might have been recruited.

Which might be one reason to tie all this in with “successful torture” — partly a distraction, partly an attempt to defer attention from a network that is growing out of control

2015-03-01 / N/A / www.emptywheel.net

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© 2016 INFOSOURCES

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British authorities intercepted bomb at East Midlands airport after ‘tip off’ Plastic explosives discovered on cargo planes travelling to the US
Intelligence from Saudi Arabia ‘came after torture of al-Qaeda operative’
Ex-spy chief says torture ‘does produce useful information’

Information obtained using torture was used to help foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two planes, it has been claimed.

British authorities intercepted a bomb at East Midlands Airport after being ‘tipped off’ by Saudi Arabian security forces, reportedly following the interrogation by torture of an al-Qaeda operative.

The claim comes as former MI5 head Sir John Sawers said torture does produce ‘useful information’ and can be ‘effective in the short term.’

Intelligence obtained via torture was reportedly used in a ‘Jack Bauer real-time operation’ to foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two planes and intercept a bomb at East Midlands Airport (pictured)
+5
Intelligence obtained via torture was reportedly used in a ‘Jack Bauer real-time operation’ to foil an al-Qaeda plot to bring down two planes and intercept a bomb at East Midlands Airport (pictured)

A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is the package found at East Midlands Airport
A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is the package found at East Midlands Airport

A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010.

It is believed the bombs were designed to go off mid-air and bring the huge planes down over the US.

After what was described as a ‘tip-off’ from Saudi Arabian security forces, the planes were stopped at East Midlands Airport in Leicestershire and the United Arab Emirates and the bombs uncovered.

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A group called Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) later took responsibility for the plot.

Now it has been claimed the discovery at East Midlands Airport was only possible because British officials in Saudi Arabia were in communication with a team believed to have been using torture on a member of terror group al-Qaeda.

‘The people in London went back on the phone two or three times to where the interrogation was taking place in Riyadh to find out specifically where the bomb was hidden. There were two Britons there, in immediate communication with where the interrogation was taking place, and as soon as it happened, they were in touch with the UK. It was all done in real time,’ an intelligence source told Jamie Merrill, James Hanning, Mark Leftly and Nick Clark at The Independent On Sunday.

A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is a packaged being launched onto a police helicopter at East Midlands Airport
A major security alert was launched after plastic explosives concealed inside inkjet printer cartridges were discovered on two cargo planes travelling from Yemen to the US in October 2010. Pictured is a packaged being launched onto a police helicopter at East Midlands Airport

It is claimed the discovery at East Midlands Airport was only possible because British officials in Saudi Arabia were in communication with a team believed to have been using torture on a member of al-Qaeda
It is claimed the discovery at East Midlands Airport was only possible because British officials in Saudi Arabia were in communication with a team believed to have been using torture on a member of al-Qaeda

A source close to the operation said there was ‘no way’ that the information which led to the plot being exposed ‘wasn’t procured under duress’, but that the British officials would have ensured they were not present.

He added: ‘Of course we use intelligence from torture. We take it from wherever we can get it, but we are never, ever going to say “we don’t want that”. Or ask too many questions about where it has come from. It is the difference between intelligence and evidence.’

Last month, following the death of King Abdullah, Prime Minister David Cameron defended Britain’s ties with Saudi Arabia – despite the country’s record on human rights.

He also said that a piece of counter-terrorism intelligence supplied by the Arab state had ‘saved potentially hundreds of lives’ in the UK, which aides have confirmed was a reference to the bomb plot.

He added: ‘Now, you can be Prime Minister and say exactly what you think about every regime in the world and make great headlines, and give great speeches.

Former MI5 head Sir John Sawers said yesterday that torture does produce ‘useful information’ and can be ‘effective in the short term’
Former MI5 head Sir John Sawers said yesterday that torture does produce ‘useful information’ and can be ‘effective in the short term’

‘But I think my first job is to try and keep this country safe from terrorism and if that means you have to build strong relationships sometimes with regimes you don’t always agree with, that I think is part of the job and that is the way I do it. And that is the best way I can explain it.’

Former spy chief Sir John, who was head of MI6 from 2009 to 2014, yesterday hit back at claims that security services played a role in the radicalisation of British jihadist Mohammed Emwazi.

Asim Qureshi, research director of Cage, claims Emwazi, who was nicknamed Jihadi John, was interrogated by MI5 and subjected to security agency harassment before becoming a militant.

But Sir John said arguments that harassment drove Emwazi to join IS were ‘very specious’.

‘The idea that somehow being spoken to by a member of MI5 is a radicalising act, I think this is very false and very transparent,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

Sir John also told presenter Mishal Husain: ‘Torture had been used for “thousands of years in order to extract useful information.

‘If you decide in 2015 that it doesn’t work at all then that would be to misunderstand the problem.’

He added: ‘The whole problem about torture and maltreatment is sadly is that it does produce intelligence. And that’s why in a civilised society like ours we have to set aside certain methods, even though they might be effective in the short term. In the longer term they are very counterproductive; they are undermining the values of our society.’

By LUCY CROSSLEY FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 14:28 GMT, 1 March 2015 | UPDATED: 14:32 GMT, 2 March 2015

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© Associated Newspapers Ltd

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The use of torture is “wrong and never justified”, the former head of the security service MI5 has insisted.
Eliza Manningham-Buller said it should be “utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives”.
Giving the second of her BBC Radio Reith lectures, she acknowledged recent disclosures about alleged British intelligence operations in Libya would “raise widespread concerns”.
“No-one could justify what went on under Gaddafi’s regime,” she added.
Baroness Manningham-Buller’s lectures examine the issues of terrorism and security on the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
She said that the use of torture had not made the world a safer place, adding that the use of water-boarding by the United States was a “profound mistake” and as a result America lost its “moral authority”.
Allegations have recently emerged that the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) was involved in the rendition of Libyan terror suspects, following the discovery of papers suggesting close ties between MI6, the CIA and the Gaddafi regime.
Find out more

The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures will be broadcast on Tuesday 13 September 2011 at 09:00 BST on BBC Radio 4.
Listen via the Radio 4 website
Download the Reith Lectures podcast
Explore the Reith Lectures archive
Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was director-general of the security service MI5 between 2002 and 2007, stated that she “would like to say more” on the recent allegations.
However, her position made it difficult to do so as she anticipates being called to give evidence to the Gibson Inquiry which will investigate the subject.
Sir Peter Gibson is chair of the ongoing detainee inquiry, which was set up last year by Prime Minister David Cameron to investigate the alleged involvement in torture by UK security agencies.
A statement issued by the inquiry said it would also be considering the new allegations of UK involvement in rendition to Libya. Some of the inquiry will be held in secret to protect intelligence sources and methods.
Following the lecture, which was held in Leeds City Museum, Lady Manningham-Buller answered questions posed by members of the audience.
The Conservative MP, David Davis, asked the former MI5 head if she thought Britain’s resistance to the use of telephone intercept evidence in court had hindered the conviction rate of terrorists in the UK.
Baroness Manningham-Buller replied that MI5 had first suggested the use of intercept evidence in 1988, and she would “still like to see that happen” – but successive British governments have found the idea “procedurally difficult”.
The second of Eliza Manningham-Buller’s Reith Lectures, which is entitled Security, will be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday, 13 September.

8 September 2011

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A new report disclosed by James Risen of the New York Times on Friday tells in greater detail than ever before the story of how members of the American Psychological Association colluded with the CIA when it came to the application of brutal interrogation techniques.
The report describes how repeated expressions of concern from within the CIA itself that psychologists had no place in the abusive treatment of detainees were brushed asided by leaders of what was supposed to be a highly ethical professional association. Psychologists with close ties to the CIA, in some cases even involving financial relationships, cited national security as the reason to ignore their fundamental oaths to do no harm.
As one example, when the CIA asked Melvin Gravitz, a long-time APA governance member and former CIA contractor, to weigh in on whether or not it was ethical for psychologists to participate in torturous interrogations in early 2003, he concluded that it was fine because ethics need to be “flexible” in the face of national security.
The report details Gravitz’s response, in a February 13, 2003 e-mail titled “Ethical Considerations in the Utilization of Psychologists in the Interrogation Process.”
Recently, some questions have been raised regarding the ethical implications of psychologists applying their skills by assisting in the interrogation process of certain persons who have been detained in the currently ongoing world-wide war against terrorism. . . .
The following comments are based upon a review of the principles of the Ethical Code as they may be relevant to certain psychological services rendered by Agency staff psychologists and contractors, all of whom are required by regulation to be licensed.622 In the interrogation of detainees, such services may include (1) acting as a consultant to officers who design and conduct interrogations, (2) acting as observers but not actually participating in the interrogations, and (3) participating in the interrogation process themselves.
The authors of the report write that “Gravitz identified a number of ethical standards that might be relevant to psychologists’ involvement in interrogations, including conflicts between ethics and law (Standard 1.02), conflicts between ethics and organizational demands (Standard 1.03), management of alleged or possible ethical violations, boundaries of competence, providing services in emergencies (Standard 2.02), bases for professional judgments (Standard 2.04),624 and cooperation with other professionals.”
Nevertheless, Gravitz concluded:
While the APA Ethics Code focuses primarily on concern for the individual (i.e., client or patient), it also recognizes that the psychologist has an obligation to the group of individuals, such as the Nation. The Ethics Code is in its essence a set of aspirations and guidelines, and these must be flexibly applied to the circumstances at hand.
The complaint Gravitz was asked to address was raised by the head of the CIA’s Office of Medical Services, Terrence DeMay, in late 2002, very early in the “enhanced interrogation program.”
DeMay was not the only naysayer. Multiple CIA officers questioned the morality of involving psychologists in the interrogations over the course of several years.
CIA psychologist Kirk Hubbard sent an inquiry in March 2004 to the APA Ethics Office, writing in an e-mail to the office’s director that his staff had “been discussing a problem that is experienced by both psychiatrists and psychologists alike…both specialties are being asked to provided consultation to law enforcement, the military, and other organizations that have a role in national security,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, some of what they are asked to do runs counter to [their] code of ethics.”
Andy Morgan, the CIA psychiatrist who first raised the issue with Hubbard, told the authors of the report that he was worried mental health professionals were being misled about their roles in interrogations. He said psychologists he knew working in Guantanamo Bay were “placed in roles that were different from what they had been told before deployment,” according to the report. He told the report’s authors he was worried psychologists might start becoming interrogators themselves.
Morgan’s concerns were dismissed by APA members who insisted that “the code” of ethics does not extend to matters of national security.
When CIA psychologist Kirk Kennedy also raised concerns that psychologists were involved in abusive tactics without scientific evidence of their effectiveness, his complaint was “received poorly,” according to a footnote in the report, and he decided to transfer out of the operational assessment division.
The new report was commissioned by the APA’s board, and was the result of an investigation led by David Hoffman, a lawyer with the firm Sidley Austin.
CIA torture techniques, which it called “enhanced interrogation,” included waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other egregious practices, most extensively detailed in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s December 2014 “torture report.” The APA shielded the program, and enjoyed a “harmonious working relationship” that brought them money and media attention, according to the new report.
“The military and CIA’s insensitivity to professional medical and psychological ethics continues to this day,” says Katherine Hawkins, national security fellow at OpenTheGovernment.org told The Intercept. “If the medical and psychological community wants to make real amends for clinicians’ role in the torture program, they should put serious pressure on the U.S. government to change this.”
Jenna McLaughlin
July 14 2015, 3:13 p.m.
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American Psychological Association framed the departures of its chief executive officer, deputy CEO and communications chief as ‘retirements’ and resignations
The torture scandal consuming the US’s premiere professional association of psychologists has cost three senior officials their jobs, part of a reckoning that reformers hope will lead to criminal prosecutions.
US torture doctors could face charges after report alleges post-9/11 ‘collusion’
As the American Psychological Association copes with the damage reaped by an independent investigation that found it complicit in US torture, the group announced on Tuesday that its chief executive officer, its deputy CEO and its communications chief are no longer with the APA.
All three were implicated in the 542-page report issued this month by former federal prosecutor David Hoffman, who concluded that APA leaders “colluded” with the US department of defense and aided the CIA in loosening professional ethics and other guidelines to permit psychologist participation in torture.
Despite rumors of the three oustings circulating for over a week, the APA framed the departures of longtime executive officials Norman Anderson and Michael Honaker as “retirements”. Rhea Farberman, who served as APA’s communications director for 22 years, “resigned”, the APA said in a statement.
While CEO Anderson’s retirement was scheduled before the Hoffman report was released, the APA stated: “Dr Anderson felt that moving up his retirement date to the end of 2015 would allow the association to take another step in the important process of organizational healing, and to facilitate APA’s continuing focus on its broader mission.”
Psychologist accused of enabling US torture backed by former FBI chief
Read more
Anderson, Honaker and Farberman join Stephen Behnke, the APA’s former ethics chief also implicated in torture, in the first wave of APA departures as the organization seeks to rebuild its credibility. Behnke has issued a combative statement threatening unspecified legal action.
“This is a major step toward reforming the APA and the profession,” said Stephen Soldz, a longtime APA critic on torture affiliated with Physicians for Human Rights.
“I hope it is only the beginning of change. The selection of the right CEO will be crucial.”
Soldz is part of a group pushing for the APA to refer the Hoffman report to the FBI and justice department for potential criminal inquiries. Thus far, the APA has committed to providing the report to the Senate committees overseeing the military and CIA, and a call to end all psychologist participation in US interrogation and detention operations is slated for APA consideration at a major conference next month.
Thus far, there is no indication from the justice department that it intends to revisit the politically fraught question of legal accountability for torture, which ended in 2012 without prosecutions. The defense department, which still assigns psychologists to Guantanamo Bay, has yet to comment; and the White House has stayed out of the fray.
Hoffman’s report identifies Behnke, a defense department contractor, as a chief culprit in maneuvering the APA toward loosening its opposition to torture while denying doing any such thing; and the departed APA officials as complicit.
Behnke undertook “extensive efforts to manipulate” the APA’s council of representatives “in an effort to undermine attempts to keep psychologists from being involved in national security interrogations”, Hoffman found. Other “APA officials involved with Behnke in these efforts included “Anderson, Honaker [and] Farberman”.
Nevertheless, Farberman insisted to the press that the APA had taken a consistent position against torture.
After the Guardian reported that the APA had declined to take action against a psychologist who participated in a brutal Guantanamo interpretation, Farberman told the Guardian: “A thorough review of these public materials and our standing policies will clearly demonstrate that APA will not tolerate psychologist participation in torture.”
It is unclear if the three officials are the APA’s last to leave. Barry Anton, the APA’s current president, is also listed in the “Key Players” section, as Anton is said to have “participated in the selection” of members of a critical task force on psychologist involvement in torture that was stacked with US defense department officials.
The APA will meet in Toronto beginning on 6 August for its annual convention, which former president Nadine Koslow told the Guardian she expected to be consumed with the issue of what reforms the organization must adopt in the wake of the Hoffman report.
Tuesday 14 July 2015 17.43 BST Last modified on Tuesday 14 July 2015 18.51 BST
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Robert Jay Lifton, the prominent psychiatrist famous for his study of the doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, speaks out on the role of the American Psychological Association in aiding government-sanctioned torture under President George W. Bush. A new report alleges the APA, the world’s largest group of psychologists, secretly coordinated with government officials to align its ethics policy with the operational needs of the CIA’s torture program. “What the APA did was a scandal within a scandal,” Lifton says. “[This] is something we have to confront as a nation.”
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: New details have emerged on how the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, aided government-sanctioned torture under President George W. Bush. A group of dissident psychologists have just published a 60-page report alleging the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Pentagon to change the APA ethics policy to align it with the operational needs of the CIA’s torture program. The report also reveals a behavioral science researcher working for President Bush secretly drafted language that the APA inserted into its ethics policy on interrogations.
AMY GOODMAN: Much of the report is based on hundreds of newly released internal APA emails from 2003 to 2006 that show top officials were in direct communication with the CIA. In 2004, for example, the APA secretly took part in a meeting with officials from the CIA and other intelligence agencies to discuss ethics and national security.
Still with us, Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, leading American psychiatrist who has spoken out against the APA’s practices. So, the American Psychological Association has about 150,000 members, the largest association in the world. That’s the APA. The little APA is the American Psychiatric Association, which I assume you’re a part of. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, your thoughts on what the APA did?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: What the APA did—and I read that report—is what I call a scandal within a scandal. That is, I have been much concerned with the behavior of professionals and their ethics, not just in terms of how they conduct their everyday profession—that’s important enough—but their relationship to the world ethically. I became interested in this in working with veterans of the Vietnam War. And in that war, military psychiatrists would be in a position, when examining a soldier who was brought to them with anxiety and a sense of outrage at what was going on—would be in the position of helping that soldier to be strong enough to return to duty, which meant daily atrocities. And I asked myself, how did a psychiatrist find himself in that situation? And it had to do with a military structure of medicine and with the psychiatrist entering into what I called an atrocity-producing situation. In my work with Nazi doctors, it was even, of course, much more extreme, probably the most extreme example of any profession of any country engaging in extremely immoral behavior, engaging directly in killing, because Nazi physicians were in charge of the killing in Auschwitz. And that’s what I studied in that research. But, you know—
AMY GOODMAN: What’s interesting, both Nermeen and I saw you speak last night on a very different issue, on the Armenian genocide, and you talked about the significance of Dr. Josef Mengele dying without acknowledging what he did.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Yes, when Mengele, who was a notorious fanatical Nazi, quite unusual in that way among doctors, was found to be dead in a lake in Argentina, survivors of Auschwitz were upset that there wasn’t the opportunity to bring him to the dock so that he could confront his crimes. It wasn’t so much a desire for revenge as it was for justice. So I mentioned that survivors of holocaust or genocide, or survivors in general, are what can be called collectors of justice. They need a sense of justice for their own healing.
But now, here we have American psychologists. There were psychiatrists involved early also in the enhanced interrogation, which spilled over into torture in American use. Fortunately, American Psychiatric Association had slightly more enlightened leadership, and we had the advantage of doctors’ Hippocratic Oath, which is “do no harm,” and there could be developed a resolution prohibiting any physician, any psychiatrist, from being in the interrogation room. The American Psychological Association took an opposite tendency. It’s one thing—and there were a couple of psychologists, who are well known, who helped create the torture and the whole psychological regimen for the torture, crudely and very unscientifically, but with the claim of psychological science. It’s still another level when the professional organization supports torture by meeting with the administration and those people who were looking for some legitimation coming from a professional group for torture. And that’s what the American Psychological Association did.
And that’s all too reminiscent of what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung. I’m not saying they’re Nazis. We’re not Nazis. We’re still a sufficiently open society to confront this, criticize it and do something about it. But with the Nazis, there was this process of Gleichschaltung, meaning reordering or re-gearing all professional organizations, not destroying them, but breaking them down and reconstructing them to serve the Nazi project. That’s the kind of thing we must and can confront and avoid here.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, last December, psychologist James Mitchell, who was contracted by the CIA while still a member of the American Psychological Association to design its interrogation program, appeared on Fox News to talk about his role in the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. He was interviewed by Megyn Kelly.
MEGYN KELLY: So you—were you the one actually conducting the techniques on Abu Zubaydah, or were you in more of a sort of background role?
JAMES MITCHELL: It depends on when you’re talking about. Initially, I was in a background role. Then, after we shut down and the enhanced interrogations were approved, I was in an administration role.
MEGYN KELLY: OK, so did you personally waterboard him?
JAMES MITCHELL: Yes.
MEGYN KELLY: We’re going to get to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a minute, but sticking with Abu Zubaydah for now, were all of the methods that were cited in the Senate report employed, like nudity, standing sleep deprivation, the attention grab, the insult slap? Were those all used?
JAMES MITCHELL: The ones you mentioned were used.
MEGYN KELLY: The facial grab, the abdominal slap, the kneeling stress position, walling?
JAMES MITCHELL: Walling was used. The others—if they showed up on the list, they were used. We didn’t typically use a lot of those stress positions. We didn’t use any stress positions with Abu Zubaydah, because he had an injury.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: That was psychologist James Mitchell speaking on Fox News last December. He was the psychologist who was asked by the CIA to design its interrogation program. Could you talk about that, Dr. Lifton? And in particular, in the context of what you called earlier an atrocity-producing situation, what enabled this to occur?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Professionals are as prone to being socialized to the norm of a group, including being socialized to evil, as are any other groups in American society. What that means is that psychologists, in this case—and there are others from other professions—internalize what is considered to be acceptable and appropriate for them in carrying out their profession. So, torture exists. There is the nod from the administration: Go ahead with torture. And psychologists then adapt to that and, in this case, become not just participants in torture, but the creators of the methods of torture.
That’s a shocking clip because it shows him kind of slightly reluctantly admitting that they do all those things. Of course, it’s denied that they’re torture, and that’s absurd. They’re out-and-out torture. But the fact that they’ll come on a network program and describe it as something legitimate is another level of scandal. After all, torture has been conducted, you know, from the time of the beginning of history. It’s always been seen, and especially in recent centuries, as something evil. You can judge a society as to whether it engages in torture. You condemn a society that engages in torture.
In our case, looking at the sequence, one can praise the Obama administration for ending that torture, but one must criticize the Obama administration for blocking any examination or confrontation of our role in torture. You showed an interesting clip about the city of Chicago confronting and at least recognizing that the police had engaged in torture of certain suspects. Well, that doesn’t undo what they did, but it’s a step toward some kind of ethical advance. And for the United States to have engaged in torture on such a widespread dimension, to have legitimated it among professionals like psychologists, for psychologists and others to have created and participated in it, is something that we have to confront, as a nation, to move ahead in something like an ethical way.
AMY GOODMAN: And when you talk about confronting, what exactly do you mean? You’ve just given a psychological, sociological explanation, understanding. For example, James Mitchell, or Mitchell and Jessen, the company of two psychologists that Pentagon funneled money into, not to mention other psychologists who didn’t even work for them, working at Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, but should they be brought up on charges?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: Of course they should. There are many situations that I can probe psychologically, or psychohistorically, as we say, but have to be approached politically for some kind of resolution, and this is an example of that. A proper confrontation of what we did would mean a real investigation that didn’t stop as we got to the top. Yes, of course, the order for torture being acceptable and advised comes from above, comes from the highest sources in the administration. That has to be uncovered by an investigation, and there has to be a legal context. Whether or not everybody who participated in torture is in some way condemned and put to jail, I don’t know. But at minimum, there must be a confrontation and revelation of what was done, who did it, what the consequences were and how to prevent it in the future.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of this comment by CIA psychologist—former CIA psychologist Kirk Hubbard, who served as the CIA’s chief of operations of the Operational Assessment Division before he joined Mitchell Jessen and Associates? In 2012, Hubbard told the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, quote, “Detainees are not patients nor are they being ‘treated’ by the psychologists. Therefore the ethical guidelines for clinicians do not apply, in my opinion. Psychologists can play many different roles and should not be forced into a narrow doctor-patient role.” Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, your response?
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: What you’ve heard, what you just recited, is a rationalization for torture and for destructive behavior on the part of professionals. All professions require some sort of ethical code, as I said before, not just in everyday practice, but in what they do in society. And to weasel out of any such ethical requirement because one is dealing not with patients, but with prisoners—and, of course, that administration didn’t even give them prisoner rights, according to Geneva Conventions—to do that is simply a rationalization for destructive or even evil behavior.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a leading American psychiatrist, author of many books, including Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. We’ll be back with him, talking about a number of issues, including another of his books, Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions—Prosecutors, Judges, Jurors, Wardens, and the American Public in Conflict. Stay with us.
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WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency’s health professionals repeatedly criticized the agency’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation program, but their protests were rebuffed by prominent outside psychologists who lent credibility to the program, according to a new report.
The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.
The report, completed this month, concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the C.I.A.’s interrogation program and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.
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DOCUMENT
Psychologists and ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation
A 542-page report concludes that prominent psychologists worked closely with the C.I.A. to blunt dissent inside the agency over an interrogation program that is now known to have included torture. It also finds that officials at the American Psychological Association colluded with the Pentagon to make sure the association’s ethics policies did not hinder the ability of psychologists to be involved in the interrogation program.
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The association’s ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public,” the report said.
Two former presidents of the psychological association were on a C.I.A. advisory committee, the report found. One of them gave the agency an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture, and later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program, it said.
The association’s ethics director, Stephen Behnke, coordinated the group’s public policy statements on interrogations with a top military psychologist, the report said, and then received a Pentagon contract to help train interrogators while he was working at the association, without the knowledge of the association’s board. Mr. Behnke did not respond to a request for comment.
The report, which was obtained by The New York Times and has not previously been made public, is the result of a seven-month investigation by a team led by David Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer with the firm Sidley Austin at the request of the psychology association’s board.
After the Hoffman report was made public on Friday, the American Psychological Association issued an apology.
“The actions, policies and lack of independence from government influence described in the Hoffman report represented a failure to live up to our core values,” Nadine Kaslow, a former president of the organization, said in a statement. “We profoundly regret and apologize for the behavior and the consequences that ensued.”
The association said it was considering proposals to prohibit psychologists from participating in interrogations and to modify its ethics policies, among other changes.
The involvement of psychologists in the interrogation programs has been a source of contention within the profession for years. Another report, issued in April by several critics of the association, came to similar conclusions. But Mr. Hoffman’s report is by far the most detailed look yet into the crucial roles played by behavioral scientists, especially top officials at the American Psychological Association and some of the most prominent figures in the profession, in the interrogation programs. It also shows that the collaboration was much more extensive than was previously known.
A report last December by the Senate Intelligence Committee detailed the brutality of some of the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods, but by focusing on the role of psychologists, Mr. Hoffman’s report provides new details, and can be seen as a companion to the Senate report.
The C.I.A. and the Pentagon both conducted harsh interrogations during the administration of President George W. Bush, although the C.I.A.’s program included more brutal tactics. Some of them, like the simulated drowning technique called waterboarding, are now widely regarded as torture. The agency’s interrogations were done at so-called black site prisons around the world where prisoners were held secretly for years.
The report found that while some prominent psychologists collaborated with C.I.A. officials in ways that aided the agency’s interrogation program, the American Psychological Association and its staff members focused more on working with the Pentagon, with which the association has long had strong ties.
Indeed, the report said that senior officials of the association had “colluded” with senior Defense Department officials to make certain that the association’s ethics rules did not hinder the ability of psychologists to remain involved with the interrogation program.
The report’s most immediate impact will be felt at the association, where it has been presented to the board and its members’ council. The board met last week to discuss the report and is expected to act on its findings soon. The association has since renounced 2005 ethics guidelines that allowed psychologists to stay involved in the harsh interrogations, but several staff members who were named in the report have remained at the organization.
A C.I.A. spokesman said that agency officials had not seen it and so could not comment.
Dissent began building within the C.I.A. against the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques not long after its interrogation program began.
In about late 2002, the head of the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services, Terrence DeMay, started to complain about the involvement in the program of James Mitchell, a psychologist and instructor at the Air Force’s SERE (survival, evasion, rescue and escape) program, in which United States military personnel are subjected to simulated torture to gird them for possible capture. Mr. Mitchell had also served as a consultant to the C.I.A. advisory committee that included two former presidents of the psychological association.
One unidentified witness was quoted in the Hoffman report as saying that doctors and psychologists in the C.I.A.’s Office of Medical Services “were not on board with what was going on regarding interrogations, and felt that they were being cut out of the discussion.” One leading C.I.A. psychologist told investigators that Mr. DeMay “was berating Jim Mitchell about being involved in the interrogation program,” and that Mr. DeMay’s objections “related to the involvement of psychologists as professionals adept at human behavior and manipulation.”
Mr. DeMay’s complaints “led to a substantial dispute within the C.I.A.,” according to the report, and prompted the head of the agency’s counterterrorism center to seek an opinion from a prominent outside psychologist on whether it was ethical for psychologists to continue to participate in the C.I.A.’s interrogations.
The C.I.A. chose Mel Gravitz, a prominent psychologist who was also a member of the agency’s advisory committee. In early 2003, Mr. Gravitz wrote an opinion that persuaded the chief of the agency’s counterterrorism center that Mr. Mitchell could continue to participate in and support interrogations, according to the Hoffman report.
Mr. Gravitz’s opinion, which the Hoffman report quotes, noted that “the psychologist has an obligation to (a) group of individuals, such as the nation,” and that the ethics code “must be flexible [sic] applied to the circumstances at hand.”
But ethical concerns persisted at the C.I.A. In March 2004, other agency insiders emailed the psychological association to say they were worried that psychologists were assisting with interrogations in ways that contradicted the association’s ethics code.
One of those who contacted the association was Charles Morgan, a C.I.A. contractor and psychiatrist who had studied military personnel who went through the SERE program’s simulated torture training, research that showed that the techniques used on them could not be used to collect accurate information.
Another, oddly, was Kirk Hubbard, a C.I.A. psychologist who was chairman of the agency advisory committee that included two former association presidents and on which Mr. Mitchell was a consultant. Mr. Hubbard told the Hoffman investigators that he did not have concerns about the participation of psychologists in the interrogation program, but emailed the association because he had been asked to pass on the concerns of other behavioral scientists inside the agency.
The ethical concerns raised by Mr. Morgan and others inside the C.I.A. led to a confidential meeting in July 2004 at the psychological association of about 15 behavioral scientists who worked for national security agencies. This was followed by the creation of an association task force to study the ethics of psychologists’ involvement in interrogations.
But association and government officials filled the task force with national security insiders, and it concluded in 2005 that it was fine for psychologists to remain involved, the report found.
The report provides new details about how Mr. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, another SERE trainer who would later go into business with Mr. Mitchell, gained entree to the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center, which hired them to create and run the interrogation program. After Mr. Mitchell worked as a consultant to the C.I.A. advisory committee, Mr. Hubbard introduced Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen to Jim Cotsana, the chief of special missions in the C.I.A.’s counterterrorism center.
Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen were later hired as contractors for the counterterrorism center, where they helped create the interrogation program by adapting the simulated torture techniques from the SERE program, using them against detainees.
Separately, Joseph Matarazzo, a former president of the psychological association who was a member of the C.I.A. advisory committee, was asked by Mr. Hubbard to provide an opinion about whether sleep deprivation constituted torture. Mr. Matarazzo concluded that it was not torture, according to the report.
Later, Mr. Matarazzo became a 1 percent owner of a unit of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the contracting company Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Jessen created to handle their work with the C.I.A.’s interrogation program. Mr. Matarazzo was also listed as a partner of the company in a 2008 annual report, according to the Hoffman report.
Mr. Matarazzo said he had not read the report and could not comment.
Mr. Hubbard, after he retired from the C.I.A., also did some work for Mitchell Jessen and Associates.
The report reaches unsparing conclusions about the close relationship between some association officials and officials at the Pentagon.
“The evidence supports the conclusion that A.P.A. officials colluded with D.O.D. officials to, at the least, adopt and maintain A.P.A. ethics policies that were not more restrictive than the guidelines that key D.O.D. officials wanted,” the report says, adding, “A.P.A. chose its ethics policy based on its goals of helping D.O.D., managing its P.R., and maximizing the growth of the profession.”
By JAMES RISENJULY 10, 2015
Find this story at 10 July 2015
© 2015 The New York Times Company

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New details have emerged on how the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, aided government-sanctioned torture under President George W. Bush. A group of dissident psychologists have just published a 60-page report alleging the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Pentagon to change the APA ethics policy to align it with the operational needs of the CIA’s torture program. Much of the report, “All the President’s Psychologists: The American Psychological Association’s Secret Complicity with the White House and US Intelligence Community in Support of the CIA’s ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program,” is based on hundreds of newly released internal APA emails from 2003 to 2006 that show top officials were in direct communication with the CIA. The report also reveals Susan Brandon, a behavioral science researcher working for President Bush, secretly drafted language that the APA inserted into its ethics policy on interrogations. We are joined by two of the report’s co-authors: Dr. Steven Reisner, a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and member of the APA Council of Representatives, and Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: New details have emerged on how the American Psychological Association, the world’s largest group of psychologists, aided government-sanctioned torture under President George W. Bush. A group of dissident psychologists have just published a 60-page report alleging the APA secretly coordinated with officials from the CIA, White House and the Pentagon to change the APA ethics policy to align it with the operational needs of the CIA’s torture program. The report also reveals a behavioral science researcher working for President Bush secretly drafted language that the APA inserted into its ethics policy on interrogations.
Much of the report is based on hundreds of newly released internal APA emails from 2003 to 2006 that show top officials were in direct communication with the CIA. In 2004, for example, the APA secretly took part in a meeting with officials from the CIA and other intelligence agencies to discuss ethics and national security. In one email, the APA stated that the aim of the meeting was, quote, “to take a forward looking, positive approach, in which we convey a sensitivity to and appreciation of the important work mental health professionals are doing in the national security arena, and in a supportive way offer our assistance in helping them navigate through thorny ethical dilemmas,” unquote.
One attendee was Kirk Hubbard, then the chief of operations for the CIA Operational Assessment Division. He would later leave the CIA to work for the private firm set up by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the psychologists who were hired as private contractors to set up the CIA interrogation program including the waterboarding of prisoners. In one 2003 email, Hubbard wrote to a top APA official, quote, “You won’t get any feedback from [Dr. James] Mitchell or Jessen. They are doing special things to special people in special places, and generally are not available,” unquote. While the APA has attempted to distance itself from Mitchell and Jessen, the newly disclosed emails show the men attended a 2003 invite-only conference called “The Science of Deception,” sponsored by the APA, the CIA and RAND Corporation, to discuss so-called enhanced interrogations.
We’re joined now by two of the co-authors of the new report, “All the President’s Psychologists: The American Psychological Association’s Secret Complicity with the White House and US Intelligence Community in Support of the CIA’s ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program.” Steven Reisner is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. He’s a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and adviser on psychology and ethics for Physicians for Human Rights. He’s currently a member of the APA Council of Representatives. Nathaniel Raymond is director of the Signal Program on Human Security and Technology at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
We did invite a representative from the APA to join us, as well, but they declined. Last year, the APA commissioned an outside attorney named David Hoffman to conduct a third-party, independent review of the allegations about the APA and the Bush administration torture program. Rhea Farberman, the APA’s executive director for Public and Member Communications, told Democracy Now! the APA won’t respond to the allegations in the “All the President’s Psychologists” report until Hoffman’s review is completed.
Steven Reisner and Nathaniel Raymond, welcome back to Democracy Now! OK, Nathaniel Raymond, why don’t you lay out the core findings in your 60-page report?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: There are four core findings. The first is that the American Psychological Association allowed, as you mentioned, Dr. Susan Brandon, it appears, who, three weeks before the APA engaged in its ethics process in 2005 on psychological ethics and national security, had been president Bush’s behavioral science adviser—she wrote what appears to be research language in the PENS report, the Psychological Ethics and National Security policy of the APA. That language, we now know because of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report, directly aligns with the legal memos authorizing the enhanced interrogation program, and provided an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card that aligned with the then-classified legal get-of-jail-free card.
Secondly, we see clear deception by the APA, including some outright lies, including the assertion for many years that James Mitchell, the CIA torture psychologist you mentioned, had not been an APA member. We now know he was an APA member from 2001 to 2006. And the APA has also contended, according to Dr. Stephen Behnke, the ethics director, that they had had no contact on interrogations and interrogation techniques with Mitchell and Jessen. We now know that they discussed sensory overload and the use of psychopharmacological agents with Mitchell and Jessen in 2003.
The last two critical findings, Amy, are that the APA, as we see throughout the emails, expressed no concern about clear evidence of abuse that at that point, between 2004 in 2005, was public knowledge. And lastly, what we see in this report is a clear coordination that directly mirrors the timeline inside the Bush administration when Office of Medical Services personnel inside the CIA were raising concerns about human subjects research as part of the program. The APA, whether they knew it or not, allowed the administration to write a policy that basically helped put down that rebellion inside CIA.
AMY GOODMAN: How?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: By allowing psychologists to play a critical monitoring and research role, that was at the heart of the newly—then newly authorized Bradbury Office of Legal Counsel memo. If psychologists couldn’t ethically play this role, if the APA had not engaged in this policy, it is highly likely that the interrogation program itself would have disintegrated.
AMY GOODMAN: You ran, Steven Reisner, for president of the American Psychological Association. Your main platform was speaking out against torture and APA’s involvement with the Bush administration. You didn’t win. Talk about what this means for the American Psychological Association.
STEVEN REISNER: Well, I think the issue is what this means for the entire profession of psychologists and the fact that we are represented by the American Psychological Association, because I think that what we’re finding is that psychologists are feeling betrayed by our association. What has happened is that the ethics code that we are all trained in, that we align ourselves with and that gives us our identity as health professionals dedicated to the public good, that ethics code and ethics policy was twisted to align—not only to align with what the government needed it to do, but in the service of torture. It is a betrayal of what I think we all are expecting from and try to identify with from our association. So, what has to happen right now is that we’ve got to—the membership, the council, any concerned American has to insist that we reclaim our association, put it back on an ethical track, and find a way to expose this, be accountable for it, be transparent about it and make significant change so that we can restore trust.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to go into detail on what the APA knew and when they knew it with Dr. Steven Reisner and Nathaniel Raymond, co-authors of the new report, “All the President’s Psychologists,” in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking about a new report that has just come out on the American Psychological Association’s involvement with the Bush administration’s so-called enhanced interrogation program. In 2005, Stephen Behnke, the director of ethics at the American Psychological Association, then and now, appeared on Democracy Now!
STEPHEN BEHNKE: I don’t have firsthand knowledge of what went on at Guantánamo. I know that the APA very much wants the facts, and that when APA has the facts, we will act on those facts.
AMY GOODMAN: Stephen Behnke appeared on the show in a debate with Michael Wilks, chair of the medical ethics committee at the British Medical Association. Dr. Behnke went on to defend the APA’s actions.
STEPHEN BEHNKE: In all fairness, the American Psychological Association is very clear that under no circumstances is it in any manner permissible for a psychologist to engage in, to support, to facilitate, to direct or to advise torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. The American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association issued a joint statement against torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment in 1985. In 1986, the American Psychological Association issued another resolution against torture. So, to even suggest that that would in any manner be permissible is completely out of bounds.
MICHAEL WILKS: Might I ask a direct question, because I’m really interested to know? Could I ask why the APA’s presidential report then specifically recommends that psychologists should be involved in research into interrogation techniques?
STEPHEN BEHNKE: Well, as I have—as I have said, psychologists have been working together with law enforcement for many years domestically in information gathering and interrogation processes. We believe that as experts in human behavior, psychologists have valuable contributions to make to those activities.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Dr. Stephen Behnke on Democracy Now! in 2005. Our guests now are Dr. Steven Reisner, a member of the American Psychological Association, and Nathaniel Raymond. They both co-authored the new report, “All the President’s Psychologists.” Nathaniel Raymond, can you respond to what Dr. Behnke said?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Well, what we now know, by reading the American Psychological Association’s emails, is that Dr. Behnke’s assertion in 2005 of “bring us the facts, and we will respond” directly contradicts his own words to the Operational Assessment Division of the Central Intelligence Agency in 2004, where he basically says, “We are not going to investigate,” in the context of the secret meeting they had, almost to the—basically, to the day that the White House was reauthorizing the enhanced interrogation program—”We’re not going to investigate any claims of abuse or any charges made at that meeting.” That directly contradicts what he said on Democracy Now!
Second is his continued assertion that somehow the American Psychiatric Association, which endorsed in 2006 a clear ban on participation in all interrogations, direct participation by psychiatrists, is analogous to the APA position, is entirely specious. The fact of the matter is, is the American Psychological Association position in that PENS report, that we now know was the direct result of coordination with the intelligence community and, in some cases, elements of that community writing language in the report, critical research language, is—it is entirely different to look at the APA position and the American Psychological Association position for one reason. The American Psychological Association based its policy on U.S. definitions of torture at that time, which we now know from the declassified Office of Legal Counsel memos had an entirely different view of what constituted, quote, “torture” and what constituted cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. So, saying that those positions are the same is just not the facts.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what changed.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: What changed is—there was two periods of change. The first is immediately after 9/11. We have evidence in the public record that the American Psychological Association changed a large portion of its ethics code related to research, and basically it wrote out international and domestic protections on consent for human subjects research. We know, by different names, some of those protections, such as the Nuremberg Code and the Common Rule. They allowed for the revocation of consent when consistent with a lawful order or regulation.
That then combined with the second set of changes, which is the 2005 PENS report. The Psychological Ethics and National Security Task Force report then not only allows, but exhorts psychologists to have a research role in not only interrogations, but—this is the key sentence, Amy—in determining what constitutes cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment. Now, last time I checked, psychologists were not lawyers. This is outside the professional competency of psychologists to make a legal determination based on research. The question is, why were they being asked to do that, in language that we now know from the emails appears to have been written by a White House—former White House official? The fact of the matter is, that’s exactly what the Bradbury memos, that were then protecting the Bush administration from potential torture charges, required. And that’s exactly the concern that was being raised by the Office of the Inspector General internally at CIA, we now know from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. So that one sentence about research into what constitutes cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment positioned psychologists to be the legal heat shield for the president of the United States.
AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Reisner?
STEVEN REISNER: Well, we listened to Dr. Behnke say that the APA is opposed to torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment at the very moment when they are writing into our ethics code a policy that permits psychologists’ very presence at those sites, researching, overseeing and monitoring, that the psychologists being there is what makes it fall outside the definition of torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment concocted by the Justice Department in order to legally allow the torture. So what we have is a working together between the psychologists, the American Psychological Association, the CIA and the White House to create a cover story that says that torture is not torture, that it’s not legally torture under these rules. And while Dr. Behnke is claiming that psychologists don’t torture, psychologists are in fact torturing, and the APA seems to know it, according to these emails and according to what was in the press. But so what he’s doing is he’s parsing the facts and funneling it through a bent and distorted APA ethics code that has been changed simply to allow that program to continue.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to read another one of the newly disclosed emails. This is from Dr. Geoff Mumford, director of science policy at the APA, to CIA psychologist Dr. Kirk Hubbard, who was then chief of operations for the CIA Operational Assessment Division. Dr. Mumford writes, quote, “I thought you and many of those copied here would be interested to know that APA grabbed the bull by the horns and released this [Psychological Ethics and National Security] Task Force Report today.” The PENS Task Force. “I also wanted to semi-publicly acknowledge your personal contribution … in getting this effort off the ground over a year ago. Your views were well represented by very carefully selected Task Force members,” unquote.
In another email from 2005, the APA’s Dr. Geoff Mumford admitted former White House adviser Susan Brandon, who was then at the National Institute of Mental Health, helped craft language for the PENS report. Mumford wrote, quote, “Susan serving as an Observer (note she has returned to NIMH, at least temporarily) helped craft some language related to research and I hope we can take advantage of the reorganization of the National Intelligence Program, with its new emphasis on human intelligence, to find a welcoming home for more psychological science.”
OK, Nathaniel Raymond, talk about who Mumford is. Talk about also the significance of the Susan they are referring to, Susan Brandon, and her position today.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Well, Geoff Mumford, then and now, was executive director and is executive director of science policy at the American Psychological Association. And while he is one of the most prominent officials in these emails, I want to make clear he’s not the only one. We also see Rhea Farberman, the spokeswoman who denied any coordination between the APA and the Bush administration in James Risen’s New York Times story. We see Steve Behnke. And we also see—and this is new to our report—that the deputy CEO, Michael Honaker, deputy CEO of APA, was also CCed on one of the emails about the secret 2004 meeting.
Dr. Brandon, then, was, as you described, at NIMH. She served in a variety of roles.
AMY GOODMAN: National Institute of Mental Health.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yeah, National Institutes of Mental Health. And she served in a variety of roles in the Department of Defense and elsewhere. But she also had been, during the time of the planning of the 2003 conference that Mitchell and Jessen attended, an APA employee, previously. Now she is the chief scientist of the High-Value Interrogation Group of the FBI. And in that role, she is basically the senior interrogation research scientist in the U.S. government. And thus, the High-Value Interrogation Group, which advises the National Security Council at the White House, is the leading interrogation group in the intelligence community. What we’ve seen in the—
AMY GOODMAN: She’s head of it now. She’s heading it now.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: She’s head of it right now. And I think that’s something that’s been missed in the coverage so far, is that this is not just about what happened five years ago. It is about a currently serving Obama administration official. And I want to say that Mark Fallon, the former assistant deputy director of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, came out—
AMY GOODMAN: NCIS.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: NCIS—came out a few days ago calling for an independent prosecutor in these matters, including the issues raised in our report. He is serving as chair of an advisory group to the High-Value Interrogation Group. So I want to make a point here that we have master interrogators, people who are affiliated with the current interrogation group, who are raising real concerns about the allegations in our report and are saying this isn’t old news. This has direct implications for accountability on these matters, involving, in this case, a current administration official.
AMY GOODMAN: In 2007, psychologist Jean Maria Arrigo stood on the dais before a standing-room-only crowd at the annual American Psychological Association meeting in California. This came two years after she participated in an APA panel known as the PENS Task Force, that we’ve referred to today, that concluded psychologists working in interrogations play a, quote, “valuable and ethical role.” Dr. Arrigo criticized the findings and makeup of the panel she was on.
JEAN MARIA ARRIGO: Six of the 10 members were highly placed in the Department of Defense, as contractors and military officers. For example, one was the commander of all military psychologists. Their positions on two key items of controversy in the PENS report were predetermined by their DOD employment, in spite of the apparent ambivalence of some. These key items were: (a) the permissive definition of torture in U.S. law versus the strict definition in international law, and, second, participation of military psychologists in interrogation settings versus nonparticipation. Those are the two principal issues. And because of their employment, they have to decide the way they do.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Dr. Jean Arrigo. Talk about the significance of what she was saying. Democracy Now! was there covering these meetings as the APA even tried to cut down public access to the public parts of the meeting. But, Dr. Steve Reisner, she served on the PENS committee.
STEVEN REISNER: That’s right. She served, believing that it was a committee that—of interested and knowledgeable psychologists to actually review ethics policy and national security. What she found was that the task force seemed to have a predetermined agenda, that the members of the task force were involved in the very commands that were implicated in the abuse, and that the majority of the conclusions seemed to have already been drawn before they began. It was a guided operation.
AMY GOODMAN: She attempted to take notes during the meeting, is that right?
STEVEN REISNER: That’s right, and she was asked not to, which is totally bizarre for a meeting that is trying to generate a new policy. She was taking notes. She was participating as if it was a regular meeting. It turned out that the meeting was a meeting of, as the emails reveal, carefully selected members. And that email was to Kirk Hubbard. The members were carefully selected in order, it seems, to guarantee what the CIA and the White House needed from that meeting. And that’s what Jean Maria realized and what she’s talking about in that—on that panel.
AMY GOODMAN: She talked about having a meeting for a few hours and then being handed the resolution of the committee—
STEVEN REISNER: That’s right.
AMY GOODMAN: —before she had even weighed in.
STEVEN REISNER: That’s right. The drafts came fast and furious. This meeting lasted two-and-a-half days. And then the very final draft, where they added the piece on research, that came between the end of the meeting and, I would—and just, you know, 12, 24 hours later. The final rewritten version was sent to the members for them to just give their OK. It was whirlwind. They were told that this had to go to the Pentagon, it had to go to the White House. It was hurried, and there was very little room for critique.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Nathaniel Raymond, who do we now know wrote these drafts?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Well, we know from the PENS listserv and from Jean Maria Arrigo herself and others that Dr. Stephen Behnke was responsible for being the keeper of the draft and, during lunch breaks and in the evenings, wrote the language in the report.
But that’s not the whole story. From what we see in the emails, as you mentioned, Dr. Brandon’s avowed role by Dr. Mumford in the research piece raises the broader question of: Who were the observers in the room, and how did they get there? What we see from the PENS listserv, the listserv of this task force that Jean Maria Arrigo has helped the world to see, that listserv shows that Dr. Gerald Koocher and Dr. Barry Anton, who is the current president right now of the APA, was responsible for approving the observers in the room. We now know that one of those observers was a senior administration official who had never— and still now never—been publicly acknowledged by the APA as having been in the room. So it’s not just who was writing the report, who was Dr. Behnke; it was who put those other people secretly in the room. And we now know it was Drs. Anton and Koocher, according to the listserv.
AMY GOODMAN: Why were psychologists so important to this whole process? I mean, what was happening with the psychiatrists of the United States? What was happening with other physicians?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: This is where it can get complicated sometimes, and I want to try to express this as clearly as possible. In the enhanced interrogation program, you had two roles for health professionals, and these roles were conjoined. Role one was actually designing and implementing the tactics. And that’s what James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen did. The second role is this monitoring and indemnification role, to say that we have not crossed this threshold of severe and long-lasting harm. Now, that role changes throughout the program. It begins with Yoo-Bybee making sure that a line hasn’t been crossed. But by the time we get to—
AMY GOODMAN: Bybee now being a federal judge. Explain his role.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yeah, he was assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. And John Yoo worked for him in that office, and he was responsible for primarily crafting the first torture memo.
AMY GOODMAN: Now at the University of California, Berkeley, law school.
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes, at Boalt Hall. And now we move forward in time. And so, what we can see in these emails is that at the time the APA was really working hard—its engine was going overdrive on these issues between 2004 and 2005—in direct contact with the CIA, you have another process going on, which is the creation of that new legal authorization that we now know George Tenet asked for upon his resignation. And that’s what we call the Bradbury memo. In that memo, there is a significantly changed role for this second group of health professionals, putting Mitchell and Jessen aside: the monitors, the researchers. And it moves from them determining whether you crossed the line to determining the line. And to determine the line, that required research. And so, we see in the Bradbury memos very clearly, as we documented in the Physicians for Human Rights report, “Experiments in Torture,” in 2010, is that they were having to look at the effect of the tactics to the whole detainee population over years and determine what the line was, because there was no clinical literature on torture.
AMY GOODMAN: Last December, psychologist James Mitchell, who was contracted by the CIA to design its interrogation program, appeared on Fox News to talk about his role in the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah. He was interviewed by Megyn Kelly.
JAMES MITCHELL: Zubaydah shut down. And they asked me to come back to the campus. And it was clear to me, when I was at the campus listening to what people were saying, that there was so much pressure about trying to head off this second wave that was coming, that they were going to use some kind of physical coercion. And so, I have been—spent a lot of time in the Air Force SERE school, and I see what happens when people sort of make stuff up on the fly. And in the course of the conversations, I said, “If you’re going to use physical coercion—not that you should use physical coercion, but if you’re going to use physical coercion—then you should use physical coercion that has been demonstrated over 50 years not to produce the kinds of injuries we would like to avoid.
MEGYN KELLY: OK. So you—were you the one actually conducting the techniques on Abu Zubaydah, or were you in more of a sort of background role?
JAMES MITCHELL: It depends on when you’re talking about. Initially, I was in a background role. Then, after we shut down and the enhanced interrogations were approved, I was in an administration role.
MEGYN KELLY: OK, so did you personally waterboard him?
JAMES MITCHELL: Yes.
MEGYN KELLY: We’re going to get to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a minute, but sticking with Abu Zubaydah for now, were all of the methods that were cited in the Senate report employed, like nudity, standing sleep deprivation, the attention grab, the insult slap? Were those all used?
JAMES MITCHELL: The ones you mentioned were used.
MEGYN KELLY: The facial grab, the abdominal slap, the kneeling stress position, walling?
JAMES MITCHELL: Walling was used. The others—if they showed up on the list, they were used. We didn’t typically use a lot of those stress positions. We didn’t use any stress positions with Abu Zubaydah, because he had an injury.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s psychologist James Mitchell, who was in the APA from 2001 to 2006, admitting on Fox News that he waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, the prisoner. Dr. Steve Reisner, we are wrapping up right now. Your response to Mitchell?
STEVEN REISNER: Well, this was—this is chilling to listen to the description of a psychologist dedicated to the public good and individual well-being talking about destroying a prisoner’s mind and body. And it was chilling to the medical professionals in the CIA, who were pushing back. It was chilling to the inspector general, who was pushing back. The program was shut down. And just at that moment when the program was shut down, the Office of Legal Counsel, the White House, some members of the CIA and the American Psychological Association appear to have all worked together to revive that program and to find the rationale for psychologists to be able to help that program continue.
AMY GOODMAN: So what are you looking for now? What is the next step that’s taking place right now with the American Psychological Association, Nathaniel?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Well, as we heard from Senator Feinstein when James Risen’s article came out last week, there’s clear congressional interest in what happens next. And she said in her statement that she is looking forward to the results of the Hoffman investigation, the independent review of alleged collusion between—
AMY GOODMAN: Now, is this independent? He has been hired by the American Psychological Association?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Yes, it is called by the APA the independent review. Dr. Reisner and I and our co-authors have met extensively with David Hoffman, and obviously the proof will be in the pudding when the report is released. But right now, the next step—
AMY GOODMAN: Did the APA say they will release the report?
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: Well, this is a big issue, Amy, is the APA has said that the board will review it and, after it reviews it, will release it. And as we’ve been calling for, they need to release it to the public right now. When you have Senator Feinstein saying she wants to see this report, there cannot be a half-step before it goes to the public. The key issue now is to put pressure on the American Psychological Association to release the report to the public as soon as it is completed.
AMY GOODMAN: Your response to what Kirk Hubbard said, the former CIA psychologist, who in a 2012 interview with the Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment said that “Detainees are not patients, nor are they being ‘treated’ by the psychologists. Therefore the ethical guidelines for clinicians do not apply, in my opinion. Psychologists can play many different roles and should not be forced into a narrow doctor-patient role.”
NATHANIEL RAYMOND: The Declaration of Helsinki and the Declaration of Tokyo, the Nuremberg Code, U.S. law, the Geneva Conventions are not based on whether someone’s a patient. It’s based on whether someone’s a human being. And the fact of the matter is that those codes were mangled and, in some cases, written out of what the APA did. So the issue is not about doctor-patient relationship here. It is about war crimes and about crimes against humanity, which are not contingent on someone being your patient.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you both for being with us. Nathaniel Raymond and Dr. Steven Reisner are co-authors of the new report, “All the President’s Psychologists.” We will link to it at democracynow.org. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.
TUESDAY, MAY 5, 2015
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Newly disclosed emails reveal American Psychological Association coordinated with officials in CIA and White House to help ethically justify detainee program
The leading American professional group for psychologists secretly worked with the Bush administration to help justify the post-9/11 US detainee torture program, according to a watchdog analysis released on Thursday.
The report, written by six leading health professionals and human rights activists, is the first to examine the alleged complicity of the American Psychological Association (APA) in the “enhanced interrogation” program.
Based on an analysis of more than 600 newly disclosed emails, the report found that the APA coordinated with Bush-era government officials – namely in the CIA, White House and Department of Defense – to help ethically justify the interrogation policy in 2004 and 2005, when the program came under increased scrutiny for prisoner abuse by US military personnel at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
A series of clandestine meetings with US officials led to the creation of “an APA ethics policy in national security interrogations which comported with then-classified legal guidance authorizing the CIA torture program,” the report’s authors found.
The APA is the largest organization representing psychologists in the US, with more than 122,500 members. That mental health professionals – let alone members of the APA itself – played any role in the justification or enhancement of the interrogation program undoubtedly lent the program an air of legitimacy, if even behind closed doors.
In secret opinions, the US Department of Justice argued that the torture program did not constitute torture and was therefore legal, since they were being monitored by medical professionals.
A spokeswoman for the APA denied that the group had coordinated its actions with the government, in a statement to the New York Times. There “has never been any coordination between the APA and the Bush administration on how APA responded to the controversies about the role of psychologists in the interrogations program”, Rhea Farberman said.
The US paid torture doctors millions. Why is it last in the world in punishing them?
Dr Steven Miles
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However, the report details a meeting in July 2004 – as images from Abu Ghraib stirred international outrage – at which the APA invited psychologists “directly involved in the CIA’s ‘enhanced’ interrogation program” to meet with the APA’s ethics office regarding the organization’s ethics policies. The meeting came on the heels of a secret order – signed one month prior by then-CIA director George Tenet – suspending the agency’s use of torture techniques, which also requested a detailed policy review.
A second meeting took place in 2005, when the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (Pens), according to the emails, ensured that the “legal safeguards built into the ‘torture memos’ issued by the DOJ’s office of legal counsel were codified in APA ethics policy”.
Following the Pens meeting, the report says the APA passed “extraordinary policy recommendations”, in which the association reaffirmed that its members could be involved in the interrogation program, without violating APA ethical codes.
Additionally, the APA permitted research on “individuals involved in interrogation processes” without their consent; according to the report’s authors, such a policy turned against decades of medical ethics prohibitions.
“The analysis presented in this report raises serious concerns about the APA Board’s knowledge of, involvement in and responsibility for allowing the US government to unduly influence and change APA policy on interrogations,” the report concludes. “The resulting policy facilitated the continuation of the Bush administration torture program.”
Although the Bush-era torture program has since been shuttered, a partially declassified report released by the Senate intelligence committee in December concluded that torture does not work. Detainees subjected to so-called enhanced techniques, it found, produced no intelligence or “fabricated information, resulting in faulty intelligence”.
Donna McKay, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), an organization with which all of the report’s authors have been affiliated at some point, said in a statement issued on Thursday: “This calculated undermining of professional ethics is unprecedented in the history of US medical practice and shows how the CIA torture program corrupted other institutions in our society.”
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PHR has previously called on the APA to clarify its ties to the CIA torture program and its architects, namely the two CIA contract psychologists Dr James Mitchell and Dr Bruce Jessen. “In the meantime,” the statement said, “there is sufficient evidence of wrongdoing to warrant a Department of Justice investigation.”
In their own report, issued last December, PHR called for a federal commission to investigate the full extent of health professionals’ alleged participation in CIA torture, accusing them of “[betraying] the most fundamental duty of the healing professions” and suggesting that some psychologists may have committed war crimes.
The new report found that the APA concealed its numerous contacts with Mitchell and Jessen, and had failed to disclose Mitchell’s past APA membership when it released its 2007 statement in response to public revelation of Mitchell’s role in enhanced interrogations.
Perhaps most damning, the watchdogs reported that in examining the trove of 638 new emails, they found no evidence that any APA staff member “expressed concern over mounting reports of psychologist involvement in detainee abuse during four years of direct email communications with senior members of the US intelligence community.”
Last November, the APA announced an independent investigation into its alleged collusion with the CIA. The findings are expected this summer.
Raya Jalabi in New York
Thursday 30 April 2015 18.23 BST Last modified on Thursday 30 April 2015 18.38 BST
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Diego Garcia has been mythologized by American pop culture. Its true story is stranger (and bleaker) than fiction
“24’s” phony history exposed: The dark history of a CIA “black site”
This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.
First, they tried to shoot the dogs. Next, they tried to poison them with strychnine. When both failed as efficient killing methods, British government agents and U.S. Navy personnel used raw meat to lure the pets into a sealed shed. Locking them inside, they gassed the howling animals with exhaust piped in from U.S. military vehicles. Then, setting coconut husks ablaze, they burned the dogs’ carcasses as their owners were left to watch and ponder their own fate.
The truth about the U.S. military base on the British-controlled Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia is often hard to believe. It would be easy enough to confuse the real story with fictional accounts of the island found in the Transformers movies, on the television series 24, and in Internet conspiracy theories about the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.
While the grim saga of Diego Garcia frequently reads like fiction, it has proven all too real for the people involved. It’s the story of a U.S. military base built on a series of real-life fictions told by U.S. and British officials over more than half a century. The central fiction is that the U.S. built its base on an “uninhabited” island. That was “true” only because the indigenous people were secretly exiled from the Chagos Archipelago when the base was built. Although their ancestors had lived there since the time of the American Revolution, Anglo-American officials decided, as one wrote, to “maintain the fiction that the inhabitants of Chagos [were] not a permanent or semi-permanent population,” but just “transient contract workers.” The same official summed up the situation bluntly: “We are able to make up the rules as we go along.”
And so they did: between 1968 and 1973, American officials conspired with their British colleagues to remove the Chagossians, carefully hiding their expulsion from Congress, Parliament, the U.N., and the media. During the deportations, British agents and members of a U.S. Navy construction battalion rounded up and killed all those pet dogs. Their owners were then deported to the western Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and the Seychelles, 1,200 miles from their homeland, where they received no resettlement assistance. More than 40 years after their expulsion, Chagossians generally remain the poorest of the poor in their adopted lands, struggling to survive in places that outsiders know as exotic tourist destinations.
During the same period, Diego Garcia became a multi-billion-dollar Navy and Air Force base and a central node in U.S. military efforts to control the Greater Middle East and its oil and natural gas supplies. The base, which few Americans are aware of, is more important strategically and more secretive than the U.S. naval base-cum-prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Unlike Guantánamo, no journalist has gotten more than a glimpse of Diego Garcia in more than 30 years. And yet, it has played a key role in waging the Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and the current bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
Following years of reports that the base was a secret CIA “black site” for holding terrorist suspects and years of denials by U.S. and British officials, leaders on both sides of the Atlantic finally fessed up in 2008. “Contrary to earlier explicit assurances,” said Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs David Miliband, Diego Garcia had indeed played at least some role in the CIA’s secret “rendition” program.
Last year, British officials claimed that flight log records, which might have shed light on those rendition operations, were “incomplete due to water damage” thanks to “extremely heavy weather in June 2014.” A week later, they suddenly reversed themselves, saying that the “previously wet paper records have been dried out.” Two months later, they insisted the logs had not dried out at all and were “damaged to the point of no longer being useful.” Except that the British government’s own weather data indicates that June 2014 was an unusually dry month on Diego Garcia. A legal rights advocate said British officials “could hardly be less credible if they simply said ‘the dog ate my homework.’”
And these are just a few of the fictions underlying the base that occupies the Chagossians’ former home and that the U.S. military has nicknamed the “Footprint of Freedom.” After more than four decades of exile, however, with a Chagossian movement to return to their homeland growing, the fictions of Diego Garcia may finally be crumbling.
No “Tarzans”
The story of Diego Garcia begins in the late eighteenth century. At that time, enslaved peoples from Africa, brought to work on Franco-Mauritian coconut plantations, became the first settlers in the Chagos Archipelago. Following emancipation and the arrival of indentured laborers from India, a diverse mixture of peoples created a new society with its own language, Chagos Kreol. They called themselves the Ilois — the Islanders.
While still a plantation society, the archipelago, by then under British colonial control, provided a secure life featuring universal employment and numerous social benefits on islands described by many as idyllic. “That beautiful atoll of Diego Garcia, right in the middle of the ocean,” is how Stuart Barber described it in the late 1950s. A civilian working for the U.S. Navy, Barber would become the architect of one of the most powerful U.S. military bases overseas.
Amid Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, Barber and other officials were concerned that there was almost no U.S. military presence in and around the Indian Ocean. Barber noted that Diego Garcia’s isolation — halfway between Africa and Indonesia and 1,000 miles south of India — ensured that it would be safe from attack, yet was still within striking distance of territory from southern Africa and the Middle East to South and Southeast Asia.
Guided by Barber’s idea, the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson convinced the British government to detach the Chagos Archipelago from colonial Mauritius and create a new colony, which they called the British Indian Ocean Territory. Its sole purpose would be to house U.S. military facilities.
During secret negotiations with their British counterparts, Pentagon and State Department officials insisted that Chagos come under their “exclusive control (without local inhabitants),” embedding an expulsion order in a polite-looking parenthetical phrase. U.S. officials wanted the islands “swept” and “sanitized.” British officials appeared happy to oblige, removing a people one official called “Tarzans” and, in a racist reference toRobinson Crusoe, “Man Fridays.”
“Absolutely Must Go”
This plan was confirmed with an “exchange of notes” signed on December 30, 1966, by U.S. and British officials, as one of the State Department negotiators told me, “under the cover of darkness.” The notes effectively constituted a treaty but required no Congressional or Parliamentary approval, meaning that both governments could keep their plans hidden.
According to the agreement, the United States would gain use of the new colony “without charge.” This was another fiction. In confidential minutes, the United States agreed to secretly wipe out a $14 million British military debt, circumventing the need to ask Congress for funding. In exchange, the British agreed to take the “administrative measures” necessary for “resettling the inhabitants.”
Those measures meant that, after 1967, any Chagossians who left home for medical treatment or a routine vacation in Mauritius were barred from returning. Soon, British officials began restricting the flow of food and medical supplies to Chagos. As conditions deteriorated, more islanders began leaving. By 1970, the U.S. Navy had secured funding for what officials told Congress would be an “austere communications station.” They were, however, already planning to ask for additional funds to expand the facility into a much larger base. As the Navy’s Office of Communications and Cryptology explained, “The communications requirements cited as justification are fiction.” By the 1980s, Diego Garcia would become a billion-dollar garrison.
In briefing papers delivered to Congress, the Navy described Chagos’s population as “negligible,” with the islands “for all practical purposes… uninhabited.” In fact, there were around 1,000 people on Diego Garcia in the 1960s and 500 to 1,000 more on other islands in the archipelago. With Congressional funds secured, the Navy’s highest-ranking admiral, Elmo Zumwalt, summed up the Chagossians’ fate in a 1971 memo of exactly three words: “Absolutely must go.”
The authorities soon ordered the remaining Chagossians — generally allowed no more than a single box of belongings and a sleeping mat — onto overcrowded cargo ships destined for Mauritius and the Seychelles. By 1973, the last Chagossians were gone.
“Abject Poverty”
At their destinations, most of the Chagossians were literally left on the docks, homeless, jobless, and with little money. In 1975, two years after the last removals, a Washington Post reporter found them living in “abject poverty.”
Aurélie Lisette Talate was one of the last to go. “I came to Mauritius with six children and my mother,” she told me. “We got our house… but the house didn’t have a door, didn’t have running water, didn’t have electricity. And then my children and I began to suffer. All my children started getting sick.”
Within two months, two of her children were dead. The second was buried in an unmarked grave because she lacked money for a proper burial. Aurélie experienced fainting spells herself and couldn’t eat. “We were living like animals. Land? We had none… Work? We had none. Our children weren’t going to school.”
Today, most Chagossians, who now number more than 5,000, remain impoverished. In their language, their lives are ones of lamizer (impoverished misery) and sagren (profound sorrow and heartbreak over being exiled from their native lands). Many of the islanders attribute sickness and even death tosagren. “I had something that had been affecting me for a long time, since we were uprooted,” was the way Aurélie explained it to me. “This sagren, this shock, it was this same problem that killed my child. We weren’t living free like we did in our natal land.”
Struggling for Justice
From the moment they were deported, the Chagossians demanded to be returned or at least properly resettled. After years of protest, including five hunger strikes led by women like Aurélie Talate, some in Mauritius received the most modest of compensation from the British government: small concrete houses, tiny plots of land, and about $6,000 per adult. Many used the money to pay off large debts they had accrued. For most, conditions improved only marginally. Those living in the Seychelles received nothing.
The Chagossian struggle was reinvigorated in 1997 with the launching of alawsuit against the British government. In November 2000, the British High Court ruled the removal illegal. In 2001 and 2002, most Chagossians joined new lawsuits in both American and British courts demanding the right to return and proper compensation for their removal and for resettling their islands. The U.S. suit was ultimately dismissed on the grounds that the judiciary can’t, in most circumstances, overrule the executive branch on matters of military and foreign policy. In Britain, the Chagossians were more successful. In 2002, they secured the right to full U.K. citizenship. Over 1,000 Chagossians have since moved to Britain in search of better lives. Twice more, British courts ruled in the people’s favor, with judges calling the government’s behavior “repugnant” and an “abuse of power.”
On the government’s final appeal, however, Britain’s then highest court, the Law Lords in the House of Lords, upheld the exile in a 3-2 decision. The Chagossians appealed to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn the ruling.
A Green Fiction
Before the European Court could rule, the British government announced the creation of the world’s largest Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Chagos Archipelago. The date of the announcement, April Fool’s Day 2010, should have been a clue that there was more than environmentalism behind the move. The MPA banned commercial fishing and limited other human activity in the archipelago, endangering the viability of any resettlement efforts.
And then came WikiLeaks. In December 2010, it released a State Departmentcable from the U.S. Embassy in London quoting a senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office official saying that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos Archipelago were a marine reserve.” U.S. officials agreed. According to the Embassy, Political Counselor Richard Mills wrote, “Establishing a marine reserve might, indeed… be the most effective long-term way to prevent any of the Chagos Islands’ former inhabitants or their descendants from resettling.”
Not surprisingly, the main State Department concern was whether the MPA would affect base operations. “We are concerned,” the London Embassy noted, that some “would come to see the existence of a marine reserve as inherently inconsistent with the military use of Diego Garcia.” British officials assured the Americans there would be “no constraints on military operations.”
Although the European Court of Human Rights ultimately ruled against the Chagossians in 2013, this March, a U.N. tribunal found that the British government had violated international law in creating the Marine Protected Area. Next week, Chagossians will challenge the MPA and their expulsion before the British Supreme Court (now Britain’s highest) armed with the U.N. ruling and revelations that the government won its House of Lords decision with the help of a fiction-filled resettlement study.
Meanwhile, the European Parliament has passed a resolution calling for the Chagossians’ return, the African Union has condemned their deportation as unlawful, three Nobel laureates have spoken out on their behalf, and dozens of members of the British Parliament have joined a group supporting their struggle. In January, a British government “feasibility study” found no significant legal barriers to resettling the islands and outlined several possible resettlement plans, beginning with Diego Garcia. (Notably, Chagossians are not calling for the removal of the U.S. military base. Their opinions about it are diverse and complicated. At least some would prefer jobs on the base to lives of poverty and unemployment in exile.)
Of course, no study was needed to know that resettlement on Diego Garcia and in the rest of the archipelago is feasible. The base, which has hosted thousands of military and civilian personnel for more than 40 years, has demonstrated that well enough. In fact, Stuart Barber, its architect, came to the same conclusion in the years before his death. After he learned of the Chagossians’ fate, he wrote a series of impassioned letters to Human Rights Watch and the British Embassy in Washington, among others, imploring them to help the Chagossians return home. In a letter to Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, he said bluntly that the expulsion “wasn’t necessary militarily.”
In a 1991 letter to the Washington Post, Barber suggested that it was time “to redress the inexcusably inhuman wrongs inflicted by the British at our insistence.” He added, “Substantial additional compensation for 18-25 past years of misery for all evictees is certainly in order. Even if that were to cost $100,000 per family, we would be talking of a maximum of $40-50 million, modest compared with our base investment there.”
Almost a quarter-century later, nothing has yet been done. In 2016, the initial 50-year agreement for Diego Garcia will expire. While it is subject to an automatic 20-year renewal, it provides for a two-year renegotiation period, which commenced in late 2014. With momentum building in support of the Chagossians, they are optimistic that the two governments will finally correct this historic injustice. That U.S. officials allowed the British feasibility study to consider resettlement plans for Diego Garcia is a hopeful sign that Anglo-American policy may finally be shifting to right a great wrong in the Indian Ocean.
Unfortunately, Aurélie Talate will never see the day when her people go home. Like others among the rapidly dwindling number of Chagossians born in the archipelago, Aurélie died in 2012 at age 70, succumbing to the heartbreak that is sagren.
DAVID VINE, TOMDISPATCH.COM
TUESDAY, JUN 16, 2015 10:45 AM +0200
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The UK Foreign Office (FCO) has further delayed publication of flight records for Diego Garcia, following disclosures by a senior Bush administration official that interrogations took place at a CIA black site on the British island.
FCO officials are “still assessing the suitability of the full flight records for publication”, nine months after they were first requested from the government by human rights NGO Reprieve.
Campaigners believe that the logs — written records of all flights landing on and leaving the atoll — could provide crucial, previously undisclosed details of flights involved in the intelligence agency’s post-9/11 rendition and torture program.
‘It is now over seven years since the UK government was forced to admit that CIA torture flights were allowed to use the British territory of Diego Garcia, yet we still seem no closer to the publication of flight records which could provide crucial evidence of what went on.’
However, the UK government has so far declined to publish the logs, and has dismissed the new claims made by a former senior Bush administration official — published by VICE News — that the CIA did in fact detain prisoners on Diego Garcia, despite years of assurances from British ministers to the contrary.
“We have responded publicly in recent years to previous claims,” wrote Hugo Swire, the FCO minister of state, in a letter to Reprieve. “However, Colonel Wilkerson has not presented any new evidence to support his allegation that detainees were held on Diego Garcia.”
Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, told VICE News in January that the island was home to “a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time.” His information came from four well-placed CIA and intelligence sources, he said.
Related: Exclusive: CIA interrogations took place on British territory of Diego Garcia, Senior Bush administration official says. Read more here
Swire said that the British government “seeks regular reassurance from the US government” on renditions, in the letter dated March 3.
“All previous assurances on transfer of detainees provided by the US government since 2008 remain valid and correct,” Swire wrote.
“Whilst I am not able to make public the details of diplomatic correspondence, I can confirm that the most recent assurances were received this month.”
Swire did not explain whether the FCO contacted the US in direct response to Wilkerson’s disclosures, but did say that the most recent assurances were made “after Colonel Wilkerson’s claims were made.”
Donald Campbell of Reprieve said the publication of the flight logs was necessary to reassure the public that Britain is not involved in a cover-up of torture evidence.
“It is now over seven years since the UK government was forced to admit that CIA torture flights were allowed to use the British territory of Diego Garcia,” he said, “yet we still seem no closer to the publication of flight records which could provide crucial evidence of what went on.
“Last summer, after the records reportedly suffered ‘accidental’ water damage, ministers promised that they were ‘assessing their suitability for publication.’ Eight months later, they say they are still ‘assessing.’ It is hard to see how such a long delay could be justified.”
It is far from the first time that Diego Garcia’s role in the CIA’s post-9/11 rendition and torture program has been disputed.
The tiny atoll in the Indian Ocean, which has been leased to the US for use as a military base since 1966, has been the subject of CIA torture program claims and counter-claims stretching back more than a decade. The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee torture report in December confirmed that the CIA did operate a post-9/11 global rendition and torture program, with secret prisons all over the world — but the heavily redacted document did not reveal whether Diego Garcia was a part of the CIA’s international network of black sites.
The UK’s changing position on Diego Garcia’s unpublished flight records
The British government says it has received repeated assurances from the US that no CIA rendition flights landed on Diego Garcia — bar two rendition planes which stopped briefly to refuel in 2002.
The government has been slow to release flight logs for the atoll, however, and the position of the Foreign Office in relation to the records has shifted as pressure for them to be released has grown.
February 21 2008: The UK admits that two rendition flights stopped over on Diego Garcia to refuel.
David Miliband, then the foreign secretary, tells parliament he is “very sorry indeed” to report that contrary to earlier assurances, two rendition flights carrying a single detainee each did, in fact, land on Diego Garcia.
July 2008: … but the UK claims that records on these two flights — and for the whole of 2002 — are no longer held.
Miliband tells the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) that records “are unfortunately no longer held for the period when the two cases of rendition occurred [2002],” because they are generally only held for up to five years.
June 26 2014: NGO Reprieve asks the foreign secretary whether flight records from 2002 onwards are held…
Reprieve writes to William Hague, who has by then taken over as foreign secretary, asking: “Can you confirm whether the government holds monthly statistics of flights through D[iego] G[arcia] from January 2002 onwards; daily logs from October 2002 onwards; and general aviation reports from January 2004 onwards? And can you confirm that all planes and flights recorded in all these logs and statistics have been investigated, and discounted as being possible rendition flights?”
July 8 2014: …and the Foreign Office says they are held, but 2002 flight records are incomplete due to ‘water damage.’
Mark Simmonds, a Foreign Office minister, tells members of parliament (MPs) that “though there are some limited records from 2002, I understand they are incomplete due to water damage.”
July 14 2014: … but then the foreign secretary says he believes that there’s actually a complete set of flight logs for 2002.
Hague replies to Reprieve’s letter saying that actually only a small number of flight records have been irretrievably damaged: “I am satisfied that for the period you are asking about, we have a complete set of information about types of aircraft, passenger and crew numbers landing and departing Diego Garcia.”
July 15 2014: The Foreign Office confirms that the water damaged 2002 flight records have not been lost after all — because they’ve “dried out.”
Foreign Office Minister Mark Simmonds tells MPs that water-damaged records have “dried out”: “Since my answer of 8 July, BIOT [British Indian Ocean Territory] immigration officials have conducted a fuller inspection, and previously wet paper records have been dried out. They report that no flight records have been lost as a result of the water damage.”
He says that “a small number of immigration arrival cards from 2004” have been damaged, however.
August 19 2014: The Foreign Office says that not all flight records from 2002 onwards are complete, but they should be able to get a full set anyway.
Responding to a letter from Reprieve asking for clarification on which flight records are damaged, Philip Hammond, now foreign secretary, writes: “The Administration of the British Indian Ocean Territory holds several different types of record about flights entering the territory, though not all of these are complete for the period you are referring to. By combining different types of records, we are confident we can establish what types of aircraft landed on a particular day, and passenger and crew numbers on these aircraft, for the period since 2002.”
September 4 2014: It turns out the heavy weather that damaged the records wasn’t so heavy after all…
VICE News obtains the government’s own records which show that the so-called “extremely heavy weather” in June 2002 amounted to 3.25 inches of rainfall — considerably less than the average for that month.
“I don’t think it’s very helpful for us to have a discussion about how much rain is a lot of rain,” a FCO spokesperson told VICE.
By Ben Bryant
April 8, 2015 | 1:15 pm
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Lawrence Wilkerson is the latest of a number of US officials to say British territory was used in CIA rendition programme
The UK government is facing renewed pressure to make a full disclosure of its involvement in the CIA’s post-9/11 kidnap and torture programme after another leading Bush-era US official said suspects were held and interrogated on the British territory of Diego Garcia.
Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to Colin Powell at the US state department, said the Indian Ocean atoll was used by the CIA as “a transit site where people were temporarily housed, let us say, and interrogated from time to time”.
In an interview with Vice News, Wilkerson said three US intelligence sources had informed him that the CIA used Diego Garcia for what he described as “nefarious activities”, with prisoners being held for weeks at a time.
“What I heard was more along the lines of using it as a transit location when perhaps other places were full or other places were deemed too dangerous or insecure, or unavailable at the moment,” said Wilkerson, who served under Powell from 2002 to 2005.
“So you might have a case where you simply go in and use a facility at Diego Garcia for a month or two weeks or whatever and you do your nefarious activities there.”
Donald Campbell, spokesman for the legal rights group Reprieve, said: “We already know Diego Garcia was used for CIA renditions, yet over a decade on the British government has yet to own up to the full part the island played in the CIA’s torture programme.
“Ministers have consistently claimed that no CIA detainees were held on the island, but Col Wilkerson’s account suggests that either they are lying or they have been lied to. It is high time the British government came clean over the part UK territory played in the CIA’s shameful torture programme.”
Diego Garcia’s population was removed during the late 1960s and early 70s and forced to settle on the Seychelles and Mauritius. Since then the atoll has been leased by the UK to the US for use as a military base.
Wilkerson is the latest of a number of well-placed officials who have said that after 9/11 the atoll was also used in the CIA rendition programme.
Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star American general, has twice spoken publicly about the use of Diego Garcia to detain suspects.
Manfred Nowak, a former United Nations special rapporteur on torture, has said he has heard from reliable sources that the US held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean.
Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who led a Council of Europe investigation into the CIA’s use of European territory and air space, said he received confirmation of the use of the atoll. He later said he received the assistance of some CIA officers during his investigation.
There also is a wealth of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Diego Garcia was used in the so-called rendition programme.
There have been reports that an al-Qaida terrorist known as Hambali, who was suspected of involvement in the 2002 Bali bombing in which 202 people died, was taken to Diego Garcia to be interrogated following his capture in August 2003. A report in Time magazine quoted a regional intelligence official as saying he was being interrogated there two months after his detention.
An American detention facility of some sort is known to exist on Diego Garcia. In 1984 a review by the US government’s general accounting office of construction work on the atoll reported that a detention facility had been completed the previous December.
According to answers given to parliamentary questions, British military officials – who are nominally in command of the atoll – re-designated another building as a prison three months after the September 11 attacks.
In the past, Tony Blair, as prime minister, and Jack Straw, as foreign secretary, both denied the use of the atoll during the rendition programme, but these denials were contradicted by David Miliband, one of Straw’s successors, who told parliament in February 2008 that information had “just come to light” to show that two rendition flights stopped there to refuel.
That statement was made after human rights organisations obtained flight data showing that two aircraft closely involved in the CIA’s rendition programme had flown into and out of Diego Garcia.
A number of sources in the US have said there were a number of references to the CIA’s use of Diego Garcia in the report on the agency’s use of torture that was published last month by the US Senate intelligence committee.
Since then the UK Foreign Office has evaded a series of media inquiries about Diego Garcia and about the report, and has instead responded with a stock response.
Asked about Wilkerson’s comments, a spokesperson issued the same statement: “The US government has assured us that apart from the two cases in 2002 there have been no other instances in which US intelligence flights landed in the UK, our overseas territories, or the crown dependencies with a detainee on board since 11 September 2001.”
The Foreign Office has also performed a number of twists and turns when asked questions about the fate of flight and immigration records relating to Diego Garcia.
Last July the Foreign Office minister Mark Simmonds told Andrew Tyrie, the Tory MP who has been investigating the UK’s involvement in the rendition programme for almost a decade, that daily records were “incomplete” due to water damage.
The following day, however, a Foreign Office official was photographed in Whitehall carrying a batch of emails that showed that Scotland Yard detectives had taken possession of “monthly log showing flight details” and “daily records [obscured] month of alleged rendition”.
A few days later, Simmonds told MPs that “previously wet paper records have been dried out”, and that “no flight records have been lost as a result of the water damage”.
Two months after that, the Foreign Office told the Commons foreign affairs committee that a number of immigration records relating to civilians landing on Diego Garcia “have been damaged to the point of no longer being useful”.
Ian Cobain
Friday 30 January 2015 17.11 GMT Last modified on Saturday 31 January 2015 00.08 GMT
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Yonas Fikre, who attends a mosque where at least nine of its members have been barred from flying, says the US no-fly list is being used to intimidate American Muslims into spying on behalf of US authorities
When Yonas Fikre stepped off a luxury private jet at Portland airport last month, the only passenger on a $200,000 flight from Sweden, he braced for the worst.
Would the FBI be waiting? That would mean more interrogation, maybe arrest. But he told himself that whatever happened it could hardly be as bad as the months of torture he endured in a foreign jail before years of exile in Scandinavia.
A US immigration officer boarded the plane and asked for his passport. Fikre handed over the flimsy travel document that was valid for a single flight to the US. The officer said all was in order. He was free to go.
“I don’t think they knew who I was. I think they thought I was just some rich guy who’d come on a private jet. A rapper or someone,” said Fikre.
The 36-year-old Eritrean-born American was finally back in Portland at the end of a five-year odyssey that began with a simple business trip but landed him in an Arab prison where he alleges he was tortured at the behest of US anti-terrorism officials because he refused to become an informant at his mosque in Oregon.
Fikre is suing the FBI, two of its agents and other American officials for allegedly putting him on the US’s no-fly list – a roster of suspected terrorists barred from taking commercial flights – to pressure him to collaborate. When that failed, the lawsuit said, the FBI had him arrested, interrogated and tortured for 106 days in the United Arab Emirates.
As shocking as the claims are, they are not the first to emanate from worshippers at Fikre’s mosque in Portland, where at least nine members have been barred from flying by the US authorities.
“The no-fly list gives the FBI an extrajudicial tool to coerce Muslims to become informants,” said Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer who represents other clients on the list. “There’s definitely a cluster of cases like this at the FBI’s Portland office.”
They include Jamal Tarhuni, a 58 year-old Portland businessman who travelled to Libya with a Christian charity, Medical Teams International, in 2012. He was blocked from flying back to the US and interrogated by an FBI agent who pressed him to sign a document waving his constitutional rights.
“The no-fly list is being used to intimidate and coerce people – not for protection, but instead for aggression,” said Tarhuni after getting back to Portland a month later. He was removed from the no-fly list in February after a federal lawsuit.
Detained, then put on the no-fly list
Another member of the mosque, Michael Migliore, chose to emigrate to live with his mother in Italy because he was placed on a no-fly list after refusing to answer FBI questions without a lawyer or become an informant. He had to take a train to New York and a ship to England. In the UK, he was detained under anti-terrorism legislation. Migliore said his British lawyer told him it was at the behest of US officials.
“We have a name for it: proxy detention,” said Abbas, Migliore’s lawyer. “It’s something the FBI does regularly. It’s not uncommon for American Muslims to travel outside the US and find they can’t fly back and then they get approached by law enforcement to answer questions at the behest of the Americans.”
I refused to answer questions. That’s when the beating started
Fikre’s problems began not long after he travelled to Khartoum to set up an electronics import business. He still had relatives in Sudan after his family fled there when he was a child to escape conflict in Eritrea. Fikre’s family arrived to California as refugees when he was 13 and he moved to Portland in 2006 where he worked for a mobile phone company.
Not long after he arrived in Khartoum in June 2010, Fikre went to the US embassy to seek advice from its commercial section. A couple of days later he was invited back to what he was told would be a briefing for US citizens on the security situation. Instead he found himself in a small room with two men.
“They pulled out their badges. They mentioned their names and said they were from the FBI Portland field office,” he said.
The agents were David Noordeloos and Jason Dundas, both attached to the Joint Terrorism Task Force at the FBI office in Portland. Fikre was immediately suspicious because of the agents’ duplicity in luring him to the embassy.
“They said, we just want to ask you a few questions. Right away I invoked my right to have a lawyer. Then they became threatening,” he said.
Fikre said it swiftly became clear the agents wanted information about his mosque in Portland, Masjed As-Saber.
The mosque is the largest in Oregon and drew the FBI’s attention not long after 9/11. In 2002, four years before Fikre arrived in Portland, seven members of its congregation were charged for attempting to travel to Afghanistan to join the Taliban. Six received prison sentences. A seventh was killed in Afghanistan.
In late 2010, a Somali American, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, was arrested and later convicted for plotting to blow up the lighting of downtown Portland’s Christmas tree amid allegations of FBI entrapment. He occasionally prayed at the As-Saber mosque.
Fikre has acknowledged meeting Mohamud but said he was no more than a passing acquaintance and that he had left for Sudan months before the plot was even hatched or the FBI became involved.
When Fikre hesitated to answer the agents’ questions, he was told he had been placed on the US “no-fly list”.
“I asked them, why am I on a no-fly list after I leave the country? I said to them, you did this in order to coerce me to work with you guys,” he said. “They said there’s a case in Portland and they wanted me to help them. I asked, what is this case about? They said, we can’t talk about it. You have to agree you’ll work with us and if you agree, we’ll tell you.”
Fikre said he would answer questions about the mosque but he was not going to work as an informant.
“Eventually I was answering questions because you know how it feels to be in a room with two of the major agencies and you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “They wanted to know about fundraising. Were there any people that made me feel uncomfortable? What do they talk about during Friday sermons?”
‘The choice is yours to make’
The FBI’s account of the interrogation is summarised in a declassified document written a week later and marked “secret”. It is heavily redacted but Fikre’s claim that he was lured to the embassy under false pretences appears to be confirmed by a line which says that after being escorted to an interview room, “Fikre was informed of the true identity of the agents”.
Yonas Fikre Facebook Twitter Pinterest
Yonas Fikre. Photograph: Dan Lamont
The document shows part of the questioning focussed on financial transactions including his attempt to open a bank account in Dubai, which Fikre said he needed to do business in the region.
“Fikre was asked if he knew anyone related to international terrorism. Fikre denied any knowledge of anyone attempting to train or go to train for terrorist acts against the US or its interests,” the FBI document said. “Fikre agreed to assist and stated that he honestly does not know of anyone attempting to leave the US to attend terrorism related training.”
Fikre agreed to return for further questioning the next day.
“I said OK because I wanted to get out of there,” he said. “The next day I called David Noordeloos and told him, I’m wasting your time and you’re wasting my time. I don’t plan to work for you guys. He got very angry and he said, you mean to tell me you don’t want to work for us?”
About two weeks later, Fikre received an email from Noordeloos.
“While we hope to get your side of issues we keep hearing about, the choice is yours to make. The time to help yourself is now,” it said.
That was the last he heard from the agents. Fikre conclude Khartoum wasn’t the best place to do business and decided to try his hand in the United Arab Emirates but first went to visit relatives in Sweden. He worried that the no-fly list might create difficulties.
“If I was a threat, you would think the US would tell them. If some British guy was coming to this country and he was a threat, the US would be very pissed off if the British knew and didn’t make them aware of it. But nothing happened in Sweden. I came to Sweden normally,” he said.
That only confirmed Fikre’s belief he was on the no-fly list as a means to pressure him not because he was a terrorist threat.
Weeks later he moved to the UAE where he established himself trading in electronics with financial help from his family in California. Months went by. Then in June 2011 he was arrested by the local police.
“I didn’t know what was happening until I was taken away and the next day, that’s when I knew that it was questions related to Portland, Oregon,” he said. “At first I kept on saying, I’m an American. I need my lawyer, I need my embassy. They said to me, the American government don’t care about you. Then they started asking, tell us the story about what’s going on in Portland. The same questions the FBI were asking in Sudan about As-Saber I was being asked in the UAE.”
Fikre swiftly concluded the US had a hand in his arrest.
“Without a doubt this was instigated by the FBI. Why would the UAE ask me questions about this particular mosque in Portland?” he said.
So began months of interrogation.
“I refused to answer questions. That’s when the beating started,” he said. “They started with punches, slaps. They got tired of that so they brought water hose. There’s the hard ones, the black ones, and there’s the soft ones. The soft kind they would use for strangling. When I refused to answer, they put that thing on my neck. They had me lay down and beat me on the soles of my feet. They beat me on the back constantly.
You want to believe it’s not true, that some employee made a mistake
“If they weren’t beating you, they made you stand for eight hours with your hands raised. The beating was much better than the standing.”
The torture continued even when he was alone in his cell at night.
“I was sleeping on tiles, very cold tiles. They put on this AC so it was very cold. The body can’t take this cold on top of the beating,” he said. “That’s when I decided to answer their questions.”
‘You want to believe it’s not true’
After eight weeks of demanding to see someone from the US embassy, he was told he was being taken to meet American diplomat but warned not to say anything about his torture or it would delay his release, which was promised within days.
Fikre found himself sitting in front of woman who only identified herself as Marwa.
“I look all fragile, pale. I’ve lost a lot of weight. I’m drained. I wanted to tell her the situation but I felt like I was so close to my freedom, just two days, three days, and I was getting my ass beaten, and if I tell her it’ll set me back,” he said.
Fikre asked why it took so long for the US to find him, a citizen held by the security services of a close ally. He said Marwa told him they had been looking hard. Later he learned he was being held just blocks from the US embassy.
The State Department has confirmed that a US diplomat visited Fikre while he was being held in the UAE on “unspecified charges”. It said he “showed no signs of having been mistreated and was in good spirits”.
Fikre was not released and the questioning resumed. But an incident gave him hope. An interrogator beating Fikre with a hose caught him on the funny bone in his knee. He collapsed in agony. The man appeared alarmed he had done lasting damage.
“I thought to myself, why would you care? You were strangling me just a few days ago. Then I realised they didn’t want to leave me with any visible injuries. That’s when I had hope that I would get out of there,” he said.
Fikre said he was given a lie detector test but instead of more questions about Portland he was asked if he was a member of al-Qaida or soliciting funds for it. He denied it strenuously. He said it was clear from the response of his interrogators that he passed the test.
Through it all Fikre could not shake the sense that someone in the US had outsourced his interrogation to a place with few legal constraints.
“Toward the end of his interrogation [Fikre] inquired of his interrogator whether the FBI had requested that he be detained and interrogated,” the lawsuit said. “This time, instead of being beaten, the interrogator stated that indeed the FBI had made such a request and that the American and Emerati authorities work closely on a number of such matters.”
The FBI in Portland said it is unable to comment directly on the allegations because they are the subject of pending litigation. But an FBI spokesperson, Beth Anne Steele, said in a statement that the agency works within the law.
“A fundamental FBI core value is the belief that every person has the right to live, work and worship in this country without fear. As such, FBI agents take an oath to uphold the US constitution and to protect the rights of every American citizen under the Constitution, no matter where in the world an agent may working. This holds true every day in every situation,” she said.
After 106 days of imprisonment, the UAE released Fikre without charge.
The no-fly list prevented Fikre from flying back to the US so he opted to go to Sweden where he applied for political asylum. His application was rejected in January because he was unable to prove the US had a hand in his imprisonment although the Swedes accepted that he had been tortured.
In February, Fikre was finally formally notified by the US government he was on the no-fly list because he “may be a threat to civil aviation or national security”. Sweden paid for a private jet to fly him to Portland five years after he left.
Fikre has not been charged with any terrorism related crimes or even questioned as a potential threat on his return to the US. He remains on the no-fly list.
“It’s hard to comprehend that the government does something like this. You want to believe it’s not true, that some employee made a mistake,” he said. “I could be angry but anger doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t answer the question of why I was there. You can’t have this anger build up against your own government, your own country, your own people. I’m an American. I want to try to move on.”
Chris McGreal in Portland, Oregon
Monday 16 March 2015 11.38 GMT Last modified on Wednesday 18 March 2015 21.00 GMT
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