By William Fisher
Civil libertarians are condemning a call by two influential U.S. senators for the White House to block the impending release of photographs showing detainees being abused by U.S. military personnel at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and at other American detention facilities in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The plea to intervene to stop the expected May 28 release of the photos came in a letter to President Barack Obama from Senators Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham.
"The release of these old photographs of past behavior that has now been clearly prohibited will serve no public good, but will empower al-Qaeda propaganda operations, hurt our country's image, and endanger our men and women in uniform," the Senators wrote.
Release of the photos is expected in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
"We urge you in the strongest possible terms to fight the release of these old pictures of detainees in the war on terror, including appealing the decision of the Second Circuit in the ACLU lawsuit to the Supreme Court and pursuing all legal options to prevent the public disclosure of these pictures," the senators wrote.
Their letter said, “We know that many terrorists captured in Iraq have told American interrogators that one of the reasons they decided to join the violent jihadist war against America was what they saw on Al-Qaeda videos of abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.”
As a result of the ensuing actions by Congress, “America’s soldiers, sailors airmen and marines have made great progress in improving detention and interrogation procedures,” they wrote.
Senator Graham is a conservative Republican from South Carolina, a member of the Armed Services Committee, and a military lawyer in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. Lieberman was a lifelong Democrat until he lost his party’s primary contest in 2006, after which he ran and won as an Independent from Connecticut. He is chairman of the powerful Senate Homeland Security Committee. The two senators were among the most ardent supporters of the recent unsuccessful presidential campaign of Senator John McCain.
Civil libertarians were virtually unanimous in their opposition to withholding the photographs.
Gabor Rona, International Legal Director of Human Rights First, told IPS, ”Sen. Lieberman and Graham's claims might carry more weight had the US government been consistently honest about the mistreatment it authorized. But as long as the American people are kept in the dark about what crimes were committed in their name, they cannot intelligently exercise their democratic right and obligation to call for corrective measures.”
He added, “To elevate fear of al-Qaeda's reactions over faith in our democratic ideals and structures is unfortunate and counterproductive.”
Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS, “The more evidence that emerges to document the Bush policy of torture and abuse, the more likely that investigations and prosecutions will take place."
Professor Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School told IPS, “The release of these photos will further document torture, abuse and other war crimes inflicted by U.S. military personnel in Iraq, the orders for which go all the way up the military chain of command to the Commander in Chief President Bush, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, none of whom has yet been held accountable.”
He said, “Senators Lieberman and Graham are simply running interference for all three of them. Yet under the terms of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and the Convention against Torture, the Obama administration has an obligation to open an investigation and to prosecute them. Failure to do so is a war crime in its own right.”
"These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib," said attorney Amrit Singh of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the organization that originally brought the lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
"Their disclosure is critical for helping the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as for holding senior officials accountable for authorizing or permitting such abuse,” she said.
Lieutenant General Ricardo S. Sanchez, now retired, served as the V Corps commander of coalition forces in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004. When he retired in November 2006, he called his career a casualty of the Abu Ghraib scandal.
The disagreement over release of the photos reflects conflicting assessments of which is more dangerous and objectionable -- the release of the photographs or the abusive behavior that they depict. It also turns on unresolved questions concerning the scale of prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel, and the nature of the public accounting that can or should be required.
The original Abu Ghraib photos were first exposed to the public in a 2006 segment of the television program, “Sixty Minutes,” and shortly thereafter in an extensive article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker magazine.
The images showed Iraqi prisoners hooded, with electrodes attached to their bodies, being menaced by dogs, forced to walk with dog collars around their necks, and made to form pyramids of naked bodies. Existence of the images was first reported by a low-level U.S. Army soldier.
The military conducted more than a dozen investigations of the abusive practices, which then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attributed to the aberrations of “a few bad apples.” A number of low-level soldiers were convicted and sentenced to terms in military prisons, a few others were given official reprimands, and the brigadier general who was in charge of the prison was demoted to colonel.
The Defense Department investigations concluded that no one higher up in the military or civilian leadership of the Pentagon bore any responsibility for the abuses.
While the contents of the new photos have not been made public, it is known that members of Congress viewed them in a classified setting when the original Abu Ghraib images were released. Some have said publicly that the new photos paint an even grimmer picture of prisoner abuse, not only at Abu Ghraib but also at other U.S.-controlled prisons in the Middle East.
It is unclear whether the new crop of photos includes those taken by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. As an expert witness in the defense of an Abu Ghraib guard who was court-martialed, he had access to many of the images of abuse that were taken by the guards themselves. Zimbardo assembled some of these pictures into a short video. Many of the images are explicit and gruesome, depicting nudity, degradation, simulated sex acts, and guards posing with decaying corpses.
Zimbardo’s images may be viewed at http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/02/ted_zimbardo.
The original Abu Ghraib photos were broadcast around the world long before it became known that U.S. authorities, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), were using waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” at the Navy detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in Afghanistan, and at secret prisons in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Saturday, May 09, 2009
The Latest Political Third Rail: Terrorists in our Neighborhoods
By William Fisher
As lawmakers amped up the outcry against releasing Guantanamo “terrorists in our neighborhoods,” France agreed to accept a “cleared” Guantanamo prisoner and human rights groups continued to press for release of 17 Chinese Uigurs who the U.S. government has declared to be no threat to American national security.
The Democratic-led House Appropriations Committee last week passed a bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but stripped more than $50 million that President Barack Obama had requested for closing the prison and starting the relocation of its 240 prisoners.
Lawmakers of both parties demanded that the Obama Administration present a plan for closing Guantanamo and detailing what would be done with its inmates.
Republican lawmakers said the issue is an example of Obama's weakness on national security and accused the president of endangering Americans. They proposed legislation titled the "Keep Terrorists Out of America Act," which would bar moving Guantanamo prisoners to any U.S. facility unless approved by the receiving state's governor and legislature.
"Our constituents don't want these terrorists in their neighborhoods," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio.
Several Democrats have also joined Republicans in saying they do not want Guantanamo prisoners in their states or districts.
Administration officials have not said where the detainees would go, but they rejected the idea that Americans would face any risks from closing the prison by January.
"We are not going to put at risk the safety of the people of this country," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told a Congressional hearing.
Some observers said that, in the Congressional pushback against Guantanamo detainees, lawmakers appeared be conflating two separate groups of prisoners: Those who have been cleared for release because they do not pose a threat to U.S. national security, and others who will be detained in the U.S. to await trials in federal courts, or who can not be tried but are deemed too dangerous to release.
In the former category are 17 Chinese ethnic Uighurs who the U.S. says pose no security risk, but who have been detained without charge for over seven years at Guantánamo Bay. Their continued detention was found unlawful by a federal district court in January.
The court ordered the Uighurs released into the U.S. because they cannot be returned to China given the threat of torture there, and because no other country has agreed to accept them. But a U.S. Appeals Court reversed that decision when it held that federal courts have no jurisdiction over immigration law and thus are powerless to order the men released into the U.S. even if their continued detention is illegal.
The Uighurs’ lawyers, including the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group, has asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined the CCR’s plea.
Jennifer Chang Newell, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, said, “The Constitution requires that where a federal court has found a detainee's imprisonment to be illegal, the court must have the power to order his release – including release into the United States when necessary to end the unlawful detention. Permitting the government to hold these men indefinitely violates the Constitution and threatens to render habeas corpus a dead letter."
Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia.
In related developments, the government announced that two long-imprisoned GITMO detainees would soon be released.
As indicated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy during President Obama’s recent visit to Europe, France will take in one GITMO detainee -- an Algerian who has been held prisoner by the U. S. at Guantanamo since 2002. And the U.S. government agreed last week to release a Yemeni surgeon who reportedly treated al-Qaida wounded at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. That decision came as part of a new review ordered by President Obama to empty the Guantanamo prisons by January 2010.
The Algerian, Lakhdar Boumediene, 43, was arrested along with five other Algerians in 2001 in Bosnia, suspected in a bomb attack plot against the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. A U.S. federal judge ruled in November that the evidence against Boumediene was not credible and ordered him set free.
Boumediene is well known in legal circles because it was in his name that civil liberties attorneys argued at the U.S. Supreme Court the most recent case of prisoners’ right to seek their release through habeas corpus petitions. The court ruled in favor of the detainees in the case, Boumediene v. Bush.
The detainee the U.S. government has now agreed to release is Ayman Batarfi, 38, a Yemeni surgeon who reportedly treated al Qaida wounded at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. The government’s decision came as part of a case-by-case review ordered by President Barack Obama to empty the prison camps here by January 2010.
Batarfi had told a military review panel in 2005 that he was a humanitarian worker who found himself at the battle of Tora Bora in 2001 while Osama bin Laden was in the area, according to a Pentagon transcript. He said he did not respect the al Qaida leader, who he called "a coward."
Batarfi is the third detainee whose release has been ordered during the Obama administration. In addition to Boumediene and Batarfi, an Ethiopian-born British resident, Binyam Mohammed, was sent back to the U.K. a month into the Obama administration.
Along with five other GITMO detainees, Mohamed has filed lawsuits both in the U.S. and the U.K. In the U.S., he is suing a subsidiary of the Boeing company, Jeppesen Dataplan, for being complicit with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in facilitating his rendition and torture. While the government invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege” to keep the case out of court, a federal appeals court has ruled that the suit should proceed.
His U.K. lawsuit charges that British intelligence services cooperated with U.S. authorities in his rendition and torture. The suit has caused a diplomatic furor in Britain, where the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, intimated that evidence of British complicity had to be kept secret under threat from the U.S. to stop sharing intelligence with Britain if details were disclosed in court.
But the British High Court announced last week that it will reopen its judgment that details of the torture of the former Guantanamo Bay detainee must be kept secret.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, one of Mohamed’s attorneys, told us, “It is long past time that this evidence was made public. How can it be that two governments that purport to uphold the rule of law be working together to cover up crimes committed against Binyam Mohamed?”
In the Batarfi case, a major factor in the decision of the Justice Department was a federal judge’s finding that the government improperly withheld important psychiatric records of a government witness who was used in a "significant" number of Guantanamo cases.
The judge said the government had censored parts of the records, showing that the witness, a fellow detainee, was being treated for a serious psychological problem. That witness provided information in the government's case for detaining Batarfi.
There are nearly 100 Yemenis among the approximately 240 Guantánamo captives. Bush administration officials never succeeded in negotiating a repatriation agreement for those who had been earlier approved for release.
As lawmakers amped up the outcry against releasing Guantanamo “terrorists in our neighborhoods,” France agreed to accept a “cleared” Guantanamo prisoner and human rights groups continued to press for release of 17 Chinese Uigurs who the U.S. government has declared to be no threat to American national security.
The Democratic-led House Appropriations Committee last week passed a bill to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but stripped more than $50 million that President Barack Obama had requested for closing the prison and starting the relocation of its 240 prisoners.
Lawmakers of both parties demanded that the Obama Administration present a plan for closing Guantanamo and detailing what would be done with its inmates.
Republican lawmakers said the issue is an example of Obama's weakness on national security and accused the president of endangering Americans. They proposed legislation titled the "Keep Terrorists Out of America Act," which would bar moving Guantanamo prisoners to any U.S. facility unless approved by the receiving state's governor and legislature.
"Our constituents don't want these terrorists in their neighborhoods," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, a Republican from Ohio.
Several Democrats have also joined Republicans in saying they do not want Guantanamo prisoners in their states or districts.
Administration officials have not said where the detainees would go, but they rejected the idea that Americans would face any risks from closing the prison by January.
"We are not going to put at risk the safety of the people of this country," Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. told a Congressional hearing.
Some observers said that, in the Congressional pushback against Guantanamo detainees, lawmakers appeared be conflating two separate groups of prisoners: Those who have been cleared for release because they do not pose a threat to U.S. national security, and others who will be detained in the U.S. to await trials in federal courts, or who can not be tried but are deemed too dangerous to release.
In the former category are 17 Chinese ethnic Uighurs who the U.S. says pose no security risk, but who have been detained without charge for over seven years at Guantánamo Bay. Their continued detention was found unlawful by a federal district court in January.
The court ordered the Uighurs released into the U.S. because they cannot be returned to China given the threat of torture there, and because no other country has agreed to accept them. But a U.S. Appeals Court reversed that decision when it held that federal courts have no jurisdiction over immigration law and thus are powerless to order the men released into the U.S. even if their continued detention is illegal.
The Uighurs’ lawyers, including the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy group, has asked the Supreme Court to hear the case.
In a friend-of-the-court brief filed yesterday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) joined the CCR’s plea.
Jennifer Chang Newell, a staff attorney with the ACLU Immigrants' Rights Project, said, “The Constitution requires that where a federal court has found a detainee's imprisonment to be illegal, the court must have the power to order his release – including release into the United States when necessary to end the unlawful detention. Permitting the government to hold these men indefinitely violates the Constitution and threatens to render habeas corpus a dead letter."
Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group living in Eastern and Central Asia.
In related developments, the government announced that two long-imprisoned GITMO detainees would soon be released.
As indicated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy during President Obama’s recent visit to Europe, France will take in one GITMO detainee -- an Algerian who has been held prisoner by the U. S. at Guantanamo since 2002. And the U.S. government agreed last week to release a Yemeni surgeon who reportedly treated al-Qaida wounded at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. That decision came as part of a new review ordered by President Obama to empty the Guantanamo prisons by January 2010.
The Algerian, Lakhdar Boumediene, 43, was arrested along with five other Algerians in 2001 in Bosnia, suspected in a bomb attack plot against the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo. A U.S. federal judge ruled in November that the evidence against Boumediene was not credible and ordered him set free.
Boumediene is well known in legal circles because it was in his name that civil liberties attorneys argued at the U.S. Supreme Court the most recent case of prisoners’ right to seek their release through habeas corpus petitions. The court ruled in favor of the detainees in the case, Boumediene v. Bush.
The detainee the U.S. government has now agreed to release is Ayman Batarfi, 38, a Yemeni surgeon who reportedly treated al Qaida wounded at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. The government’s decision came as part of a case-by-case review ordered by President Barack Obama to empty the prison camps here by January 2010.
Batarfi had told a military review panel in 2005 that he was a humanitarian worker who found himself at the battle of Tora Bora in 2001 while Osama bin Laden was in the area, according to a Pentagon transcript. He said he did not respect the al Qaida leader, who he called "a coward."
Batarfi is the third detainee whose release has been ordered during the Obama administration. In addition to Boumediene and Batarfi, an Ethiopian-born British resident, Binyam Mohammed, was sent back to the U.K. a month into the Obama administration.
Along with five other GITMO detainees, Mohamed has filed lawsuits both in the U.S. and the U.K. In the U.S., he is suing a subsidiary of the Boeing company, Jeppesen Dataplan, for being complicit with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in facilitating his rendition and torture. While the government invoked the so-called “state secrets privilege” to keep the case out of court, a federal appeals court has ruled that the suit should proceed.
His U.K. lawsuit charges that British intelligence services cooperated with U.S. authorities in his rendition and torture. The suit has caused a diplomatic furor in Britain, where the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, intimated that evidence of British complicity had to be kept secret under threat from the U.S. to stop sharing intelligence with Britain if details were disclosed in court.
But the British High Court announced last week that it will reopen its judgment that details of the torture of the former Guantanamo Bay detainee must be kept secret.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal charity Reprieve, one of Mohamed’s attorneys, told us, “It is long past time that this evidence was made public. How can it be that two governments that purport to uphold the rule of law be working together to cover up crimes committed against Binyam Mohamed?”
In the Batarfi case, a major factor in the decision of the Justice Department was a federal judge’s finding that the government improperly withheld important psychiatric records of a government witness who was used in a "significant" number of Guantanamo cases.
The judge said the government had censored parts of the records, showing that the witness, a fellow detainee, was being treated for a serious psychological problem. That witness provided information in the government's case for detaining Batarfi.
There are nearly 100 Yemenis among the approximately 240 Guantánamo captives. Bush administration officials never succeeded in negotiating a repatriation agreement for those who had been earlier approved for release.
Thursday, May 07, 2009
Psychologists Complicit in Torture, Physicians’ Group Charges
By William Fisher
A leading human rights organization is charging that an American Psychological Association (APA) task force formed to advise the U.S. military on prisoner interrogations was “stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials” and “rushed to conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
In the wake of newly released internal APA documents indicating that the organization’s 2005 ethics task force on national security interrogations developed its policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The organization is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the APA and a probe by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
The director of PHR's Campaign Against Torture, Nathaniel Raymond told us, “The APA’s ethics task force on national security interrogations produced a report that was rushed, secret, and being driven to already-reached conclusions – conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
“The APA made ethics subservient to law by following guidelines set out by the Pentagon. Members of the task force had long-standing ties to the Pentagon, and the task force was stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials. There were clear conflicts of interest,” he said, adding, “The APA needs to explain how that happened. And the Pentagon’s Inspector General needs to look into how this was allowed to happen.”
The charges of APA conflicts of interest came after a series of task force emails were posted online by Salon.com and ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization.
PHR said the emails indicate that the APA's ethics task force developed its ethics policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines.
"These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct," said Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR Advisor for Psychological Ethics. "The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon," he said.
The task force found it to be "consistent with the APA Ethics Code" for psychologists to consult with interrogators in the interests of national security. While noting that psychologists do not participate in torture and have a responsibility to report it, and should be committed to the APA ethics code whenever they "encounter conflicts between ethics and law," the task force
decided that "if the conflict cannot be resolved ... psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law."
PHR has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of the APA's PENS policy governing psychologist involvement in interrogations, calling for a "bright line" prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations. Though the APA membership passed a 2008 referendum banning psychologists from facilities that violate US and international human rights law, PHR believes that the PENS policy must be immediately revoked.
Riesner said it was time to “put a psychologist's ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders."
The recently released Senate Armed Services Committee report detailing detainee abuse by the Department of Defense confirms that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised, and implemented the Bush Administration's torture program.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration's use of torture," said PHR’s Raymond.
"In the context of these revelations, the American public needs to know why a supposedly independent ethics policy was written by some of the very personnel allegedly implicated in detainee abuse," he said.
Stephen Soldz, a board member and spokesman for another advocacy group, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said, "These emails show that several of the military psychologists formulating APA ethics policy were giving themselves get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
He charged that their report concluded that it was ethical to follow military policy while the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos allowing torture were still in effect.".
The memoranda prepared by OLC lawyers provided the rationale for the Bush Administration’s assertion that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal.
PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the use of the SERE tactics by U.S. personnel, the dismantling of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and a full Congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. Government.
SERE, the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program” was developed to train American soldiers to cope with torture if captured by the enemy. Its developers warned officials as early as 2002 that “reverse-engineering” SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a recent Senate Armed Services Committee report revealed,
The report also noted that the same psychologists who helped develop the SERE program were complicit in the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.
Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a San-Francisco-based psychologist who has written extensively on the role played by medical professionals in prisoner treatment, told us, “APA's ties to the Pentagon are of long-standing, going back at least to the Cold War.”
He said, “Any inquiry should make the historical connection between the work of CIA and SERE psychologists and the role of coercive interrogation used in psychologically ‘breaking down’ a human being.”
He said that there is a long history of collaboration between psychologists and the military, which includes several former APA presidents. These men were the “institutional godfathers” for a later generation of psychologists who continue to be deeply involved in interrogation techniques, he said.
In an article accompanying ProPublica’s publication of the APA task force’s extensive email exchanges, Sheri Fink of ProPublica posed the question, “Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?”
The Senate report said that in 2002, a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command.
The board of the APA, the largest membership organization for psychologists, who are employed in great numbers by the Department of Defense, quickly adopted the task force's report as the organization's official policy.
But last year, members of the APA successfully petitioned for a vote on whether to ban psychologists from working in detention settings where international law or the U.S. Constitution are violated. The membership passed the proposal.
Some psychologists have filed complaints with the APA and state licensing boards against colleagues who were allegedly involved in abusive interrogations.
A leading human rights organization is charging that an American Psychological Association (APA) task force formed to advise the U.S. military on prisoner interrogations was “stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials” and “rushed to conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
In the wake of newly released internal APA documents indicating that the organization’s 2005 ethics task force on national security interrogations developed its policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The organization is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the APA and a probe by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
The director of PHR's Campaign Against Torture, Nathaniel Raymond told us, “The APA’s ethics task force on national security interrogations produced a report that was rushed, secret, and being driven to already-reached conclusions – conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
“The APA made ethics subservient to law by following guidelines set out by the Pentagon. Members of the task force had long-standing ties to the Pentagon, and the task force was stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials. There were clear conflicts of interest,” he said, adding, “The APA needs to explain how that happened. And the Pentagon’s Inspector General needs to look into how this was allowed to happen.”
The charges of APA conflicts of interest came after a series of task force emails were posted online by Salon.com and ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization.
PHR said the emails indicate that the APA's ethics task force developed its ethics policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines.
"These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct," said Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR Advisor for Psychological Ethics. "The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon," he said.
The task force found it to be "consistent with the APA Ethics Code" for psychologists to consult with interrogators in the interests of national security. While noting that psychologists do not participate in torture and have a responsibility to report it, and should be committed to the APA ethics code whenever they "encounter conflicts between ethics and law," the task force
decided that "if the conflict cannot be resolved ... psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law."
PHR has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of the APA's PENS policy governing psychologist involvement in interrogations, calling for a "bright line" prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations. Though the APA membership passed a 2008 referendum banning psychologists from facilities that violate US and international human rights law, PHR believes that the PENS policy must be immediately revoked.
Riesner said it was time to “put a psychologist's ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders."
The recently released Senate Armed Services Committee report detailing detainee abuse by the Department of Defense confirms that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised, and implemented the Bush Administration's torture program.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration's use of torture," said PHR’s Raymond.
"In the context of these revelations, the American public needs to know why a supposedly independent ethics policy was written by some of the very personnel allegedly implicated in detainee abuse," he said.
Stephen Soldz, a board member and spokesman for another advocacy group, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said, "These emails show that several of the military psychologists formulating APA ethics policy were giving themselves get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
He charged that their report concluded that it was ethical to follow military policy while the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos allowing torture were still in effect.".
The memoranda prepared by OLC lawyers provided the rationale for the Bush Administration’s assertion that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal.
PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the use of the SERE tactics by U.S. personnel, the dismantling of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and a full Congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. Government.
SERE, the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program” was developed to train American soldiers to cope with torture if captured by the enemy. Its developers warned officials as early as 2002 that “reverse-engineering” SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a recent Senate Armed Services Committee report revealed,
The report also noted that the same psychologists who helped develop the SERE program were complicit in the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.
Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a San-Francisco-based psychologist who has written extensively on the role played by medical professionals in prisoner treatment, told us, “APA's ties to the Pentagon are of long-standing, going back at least to the Cold War.”
He said, “Any inquiry should make the historical connection between the work of CIA and SERE psychologists and the role of coercive interrogation used in psychologically ‘breaking down’ a human being.”
He said that there is a long history of collaboration between psychologists and the military, which includes several former APA presidents. These men were the “institutional godfathers” for a later generation of psychologists who continue to be deeply involved in interrogation techniques, he said.
In an article accompanying ProPublica’s publication of the APA task force’s extensive email exchanges, Sheri Fink of ProPublica posed the question, “Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?”
The Senate report said that in 2002, a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command.
The board of the APA, the largest membership organization for psychologists, who are employed in great numbers by the Department of Defense, quickly adopted the task force's report as the organization's official policy.
But last year, members of the APA successfully petitioned for a vote on whether to ban psychologists from working in detention settings where international law or the U.S. Constitution are violated. The membership passed the proposal.
Some psychologists have filed complaints with the APA and state licensing boards against colleagues who were allegedly involved in abusive interrogations.
WATCHLIST HITS A MILLION PLUS
By William Fisher
Hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one million-strong terrorist watchlist, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The organization cited a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may contain a 35 percent error rate.
The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records.
The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.”
The audit confirmed estimates that the terror watchlist contains 1.1 million names as of December 2008, and that many of them are out of date.
OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist.
Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department oversees the FBI, told a Senate subcommittee this morning that he has not yet read the IG report, but has been told by the FBI that all of the concerns and problems raised in the report have been addressed.
“I am a bit skeptical about claims the FBI addressed all of the concerns and problems raised in the FBI Inspector General’s audit report on the terrorist watchlist,” Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project, told us.
“Are they saying that the FBI has reviewed 24,000 watchlist records to determine how many (likely a majority) need to be removed from the watchlist? Has the FBI completely streamlined a process for reviewing records so that people are removed from the watchlist within 10 days? The audit reports the average amount of time to remove an identity from the list is 60 days. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
The OIG report documents a widespread failure to scrub the lists by removing names after cases have been closed. For example, one subject stayed on the watchlist for almost five years after the case was resolved; two people on the list were dead. The FBI attempted to place one individual on the watchlist by reclassifying that person as an international terrorist after already having been cleared of wrongdoing by an FBI investigation.
It identified more than 50,000 records with no explanation of why they were on the list, making it impossible to remove them. It described the controls for placing many names on the list as “weak or nonexistent.”
The watchlist has existed since 2003, when then President George W. Bush issued a presidential directive mandating the development of a consolidated terrorist watchlist and required all federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies with terrorism information to share such information. The consolidated terrorist watchlist is known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
The Terrorist Screening Center, which also began operations in 2003 and is managed by the FBI, was established to serve as the U.S. government’s consolidation point for information about known or suspected international and domestic terrorists.
“This IG report reveals just what a comedy of errors the watchlist is,” said Chris Calabrese, attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. “But we did not need this report to know there is a problem with the effectiveness of any terrorist watchlist that includes over a million names. It certainly explains why Congressman John Lewis and Senator Edward Kennedy have problems when they try to fly.”
And Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape."
"Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon, " she urged, adding,
“This report strongly suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified as terrorists,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This is yet more confirmation of what we’ve been saying for years – that the watchlist is not only unfair for travelers, but it is also a waste of scarce resources. It is time for Congress to haul the watchlist policymakers up to Capitol Hill to answer some tough questions.”
The ACLU is recommending a series of controls on the watch lists. These include due process, a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based, tight criteria for adding names to the lists, and rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists.
The group also called on the president to issue an executive order requiring the lists to be reviewed and limited to only those for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. The review should be concluded within 3 months, the group said.
The OIG report also found that putting people on the watchlist was as problematic as getting them off. The Inspector General’s recommendations included establishing timeframe requirements for headquarters units to process watchlist nominations, modifications, and removals; reevaluation of watchlist records that are not sourced to a current terrorism case, and creation of a process to modify and remove known or suspected terrorists placed on the watchlist.
“We believe that the FBI’s failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security,” the OIG report said, adding that “FBI field offices’ frequent failure to modify watchlist records indicates a problem with training on and understanding of the importance of the watchlist process.”
Hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified because of the government’s wasteful and inefficient management of the nation’s one million-strong terrorist watchlist, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The organization cited a recent report by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General (OIG), which found that the part of the watchlist maintained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) may contain a 35 percent error rate.
The OIG audit also revealed that large portions of the list are governed by no formal processes for updating or removing records.
The ACLU says the audit “confirms that the nation’s watchlist system is massively broken.”
The audit confirmed estimates that the terror watchlist contains 1.1 million names as of December 2008, and that many of them are out of date.
OIG auditors reviewed 68,669 of those identities and found 24,000 out of date. In a closer inspection of the out of date records, the auditors found a majority of this sample did not belong on a watchlist.
Attorney General Eric Holder, whose Justice Department oversees the FBI, told a Senate subcommittee this morning that he has not yet read the IG report, but has been told by the FBI that all of the concerns and problems raised in the report have been addressed.
“I am a bit skeptical about claims the FBI addressed all of the concerns and problems raised in the FBI Inspector General’s audit report on the terrorist watchlist,” Chris Calabrese, an attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project, told us.
“Are they saying that the FBI has reviewed 24,000 watchlist records to determine how many (likely a majority) need to be removed from the watchlist? Has the FBI completely streamlined a process for reviewing records so that people are removed from the watchlist within 10 days? The audit reports the average amount of time to remove an identity from the list is 60 days. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
The OIG report documents a widespread failure to scrub the lists by removing names after cases have been closed. For example, one subject stayed on the watchlist for almost five years after the case was resolved; two people on the list were dead. The FBI attempted to place one individual on the watchlist by reclassifying that person as an international terrorist after already having been cleared of wrongdoing by an FBI investigation.
It identified more than 50,000 records with no explanation of why they were on the list, making it impossible to remove them. It described the controls for placing many names on the list as “weak or nonexistent.”
The watchlist has existed since 2003, when then President George W. Bush issued a presidential directive mandating the development of a consolidated terrorist watchlist and required all federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies with terrorism information to share such information. The consolidated terrorist watchlist is known as the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB).
The Terrorist Screening Center, which also began operations in 2003 and is managed by the FBI, was established to serve as the U.S. government’s consolidation point for information about known or suspected international and domestic terrorists.
“This IG report reveals just what a comedy of errors the watchlist is,” said Chris Calabrese, attorney with the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program. “But we did not need this report to know there is a problem with the effectiveness of any terrorist watchlist that includes over a million names. It certainly explains why Congressman John Lewis and Senator Edward Kennedy have problems when they try to fly.”
And Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, said "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other 'suspicious characters,' with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape."
"Congress needs to fix it, the Terrorist Screening Center needs to fix it, or the next president needs to fix it, but it has to be done soon, " she urged, adding,
“This report strongly suggests that hundreds of thousands of people are being wrongly identified as terrorists,” said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “This is yet more confirmation of what we’ve been saying for years – that the watchlist is not only unfair for travelers, but it is also a waste of scarce resources. It is time for Congress to haul the watchlist policymakers up to Capitol Hill to answer some tough questions.”
The ACLU is recommending a series of controls on the watch lists. These include due process, a right to access and challenge data upon which listing is based, tight criteria for adding names to the lists, and rigorous procedures for updating and cleansing names from the lists.
The group also called on the president to issue an executive order requiring the lists to be reviewed and limited to only those for whom there is credible evidence of terrorist ties or activities. The review should be concluded within 3 months, the group said.
The OIG report also found that putting people on the watchlist was as problematic as getting them off. The Inspector General’s recommendations included establishing timeframe requirements for headquarters units to process watchlist nominations, modifications, and removals; reevaluation of watchlist records that are not sourced to a current terrorism case, and creation of a process to modify and remove known or suspected terrorists placed on the watchlist.
“We believe that the FBI’s failure to consistently nominate subjects of international and domestic terrorism investigations to the terrorist watchlist could pose a risk to national security,” the OIG report said, adding that “FBI field offices’ frequent failure to modify watchlist records indicates a problem with training on and understanding of the importance of the watchlist process.”
Psychologists Complicit in Torture, Physicians’ Group Charges
By William Fisher
A leading human rights organization is charging that an American Psychological Association (APA) task force formed to advise the U.S. military on prisoner interrogations was “stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials” and “rushed to conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
In the wake of newly released internal APA documents indicating that the organization’s 2005 ethics task force on national security interrogations developed its policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The organization is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the APA and a probe by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
PHR Director Nathaniel Raymond told us, “The APA’s ethics task force on national security interrogations produced a report that was rushed, secret, and being driven to already-reached conclusions – conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
“The APA made ethics subservient to law by following guidelines set out by the Pentagon. Members of the task force had long-standing ties to the Pentagon, and the task force was stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials. There were clear conflicts of interest,” he said, adding, “The APA needs to explain how that happened. And the Pentagon’s Inspector General needs to look into how this was allowed to happen.”
The charges of APA conflicts of interest came after a series of task force emails were posted online by Salon.com and ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization.
PHR said the emails indicate that the APA's ethics task force developed its ethics policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines.
"These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct," said Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR Advisor for Psychological Ethics. "The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon," he said.
The task force found it to be "consistent with the APA Ethics Code" for psychologists to consult with interrogators in the interests of national security. While noting that psychologists do not participate in torture and have a responsibility to report it, and should be committed to the APA ethics code whenever they "encounter conflicts between ethics and law," the task force decided that "if the conflict cannot be resolved ... psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law."
PHR has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of the APA's PENS policy governing psychologist involvement in interrogations, calling for a "bright line" prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations. Though the APA membership passed a 2008 referendum banning psychologists from facilities that violate US and international human rights law, PHR believes that the PENS policy must be immediately revoked.
Riesner said it was time to “put a psychologist's ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders."
The recently released Senate Armed Services Committee report detailing detainee abuse by the Department of Defense confirms that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised, and implemented the Bush Administration's torture program.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration's use of torture," said PHR’s Raymond.
"In the context of these revelations, the American public needs to know why a supposedly independent ethics policy was written by some of the very personnel allegedly implicated in detainee abuse," he said.
Stephen Soldz, a board member and spokesman for another advocacy group, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said, "These emails show that several of the military psychologists formulating APA ethics policy were giving themselves get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
He charged that their report concluded that it was ethical to follow military policy while the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos allowing torture were still in effect.".
The memoranda prepared by OLC lawyers provided the rationale for the Bush Administration’s assertion that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal.
PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the use of the SERE tactics by U.S. personnel, the dismantling of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and a full Congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. Government.
SERE, the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program” was developed to train American soldiers to cope with torture if captured by the enemy. Its developers warned officials as early as 2002 that “reverse-engineering” SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a recent Senate Armed Services Committee report revealed,
The report also noted that the same psychologists who helped develop the SERE program were complicit in the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.
Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a San-Francisco-based psychologist who has written extensively on the role played by medical professionals in prisoner treatment, told us, “APA's ties to the Pentagon are of long-standing, going back at least to the Cold War.”
He said, “Any inquiry should make the historical connection between the work of CIA and SERE psychologists and the role of coercive interrogation used in psychologically ‘breaking down’ a human being.”
He said that there is a long history of collaboration between psychologists and the military, which includes several former APA presidents. These men were the “institutional godfathers” for a later generation of psychologists who continue to be deeply involved in interrogation techniques, he said.
In an article accompanying ProPublica’s publication of the APA task force’s extensive email exchanges, Sheri Fink of ProPublica posed the question, “Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?”
The Senate report said that in 2002, a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command.
The board of the APA, the largest membership organization for psychologists, who are employed in great numbers by the Department of Defense, quickly adopted the task force's report as the organization's official policy.
But last year, members of the APA successfully petitioned for a vote on whether to ban psychologists from working in detention settings where international law or the U.S. Constitution are violated. The membership passed the proposal.
Some psychologists have filed complaints with the APA and state licensing boards against colleagues who were allegedly involved in abusive interrogations.
A leading human rights organization is charging that an American Psychological Association (APA) task force formed to advise the U.S. military on prisoner interrogations was “stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials” and “rushed to conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
In the wake of newly released internal APA documents indicating that the organization’s 2005 ethics task force on national security interrogations developed its policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines governing psychologist participation in interrogations, said Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).
The organization is calling for an independent, outside investigation of the APA and a probe by the Defense Department’s Inspector General into whether any federal employees exerted influence over the APA's Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).
PHR Director Nathaniel Raymond told us, “The APA’s ethics task force on national security interrogations produced a report that was rushed, secret, and being driven to already-reached conclusions – conclusions that violated the Geneva Convention.”
“The APA made ethics subservient to law by following guidelines set out by the Pentagon. Members of the task force had long-standing ties to the Pentagon, and the task force was stacked with Defense Department and Bush Administration officials. There were clear conflicts of interest,” he said, adding, “The APA needs to explain how that happened. And the Pentagon’s Inspector General needs to look into how this was allowed to happen.”
The charges of APA conflicts of interest came after a series of task force emails were posted online by Salon.com and ProPublica, a not-for-profit investigative journalism organization.
PHR said the emails indicate that the APA's ethics task force developed its ethics policy to conform to Pentagon guidelines.
"These serious allegations require an independent investigation to determine whether APA leadership engaged in unethical conduct," said Steven Reisner, Ph.D., PHR Advisor for Psychological Ethics. "The American public deserves to know if there were inappropriate contacts or conflicts of interest between APA officials and the Pentagon," he said.
The task force found it to be "consistent with the APA Ethics Code" for psychologists to consult with interrogators in the interests of national security. While noting that psychologists do not participate in torture and have a responsibility to report it, and should be committed to the APA ethics code whenever they "encounter conflicts between ethics and law," the task force decided that "if the conflict cannot be resolved ... psychologists may adhere to the requirements of the law."
PHR has been a longstanding and outspoken critic of the APA's PENS policy governing psychologist involvement in interrogations, calling for a "bright line" prohibition against health professional participation in interrogations. Though the APA membership passed a 2008 referendum banning psychologists from facilities that violate US and international human rights law, PHR believes that the PENS policy must be immediately revoked.
Riesner said it was time to “put a psychologist's ethical obligations to human rights principles ahead of following orders."
The recently released Senate Armed Services Committee report detailing detainee abuse by the Department of Defense confirms that psychologists rationalized, designed, supervised, and implemented the Bush Administration's torture program.
"The Senate Armed Services Committee report confirms that psychologists were central to the Bush Administration's use of torture," said PHR’s Raymond.
"In the context of these revelations, the American public needs to know why a supposedly independent ethics policy was written by some of the very personnel allegedly implicated in detainee abuse," he said.
Stephen Soldz, a board member and spokesman for another advocacy group, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, said, "These emails show that several of the military psychologists formulating APA ethics policy were giving themselves get-out-of-jail-free cards.”
He charged that their report concluded that it was ethical to follow military policy while the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memos allowing torture were still in effect.".
The memoranda prepared by OLC lawyers provided the rationale for the Bush Administration’s assertion that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were legal.
PHR has repeatedly called for an end to the use of the SERE tactics by U.S. personnel, the dismantling of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) teams, and a full Congressional investigation of the use of psychological torture by the U.S. Government.
SERE, the military's “Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program” was developed to train American soldiers to cope with torture if captured by the enemy. Its developers warned officials as early as 2002 that “reverse-engineering” SERE techniques for use on detainees could be ineffective and dangerous, a recent Senate Armed Services Committee report revealed,
The report also noted that the same psychologists who helped develop the SERE program were complicit in the very interrogation policies and practices they warned against.
Dr. Jeffrey Kaye, a San-Francisco-based psychologist who has written extensively on the role played by medical professionals in prisoner treatment, told us, “APA's ties to the Pentagon are of long-standing, going back at least to the Cold War.”
He said, “Any inquiry should make the historical connection between the work of CIA and SERE psychologists and the role of coercive interrogation used in psychologically ‘breaking down’ a human being.”
He said that there is a long history of collaboration between psychologists and the military, which includes several former APA presidents. These men were the “institutional godfathers” for a later generation of psychologists who continue to be deeply involved in interrogation techniques, he said.
In an article accompanying ProPublica’s publication of the APA task force’s extensive email exchanges, Sheri Fink of ProPublica posed the question, “Is it possible for psychologists to uphold the ethical tenets of their profession while working within a system of interrogation that violates those tenets? Does it matter if they raised objections to the system of interrogation but cooperated with it anyway?”
The Senate report said that in 2002, a psychiatrist and a psychologist who worked at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prepared a list of harsh interrogation techniques that ended up influencing interrogation policy not only at Guantánamo, but also in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In the same memo, they warned that these methods were likely to result in inaccurate tips and could harm detainees. Those warnings disappeared as the memo moved up the chain of command.
The board of the APA, the largest membership organization for psychologists, who are employed in great numbers by the Department of Defense, quickly adopted the task force's report as the organization's official policy.
But last year, members of the APA successfully petitioned for a vote on whether to ban psychologists from working in detention settings where international law or the U.S. Constitution are violated. The membership passed the proposal.
Some psychologists have filed complaints with the APA and state licensing boards against colleagues who were allegedly involved in abusive interrogations.
Monday, May 04, 2009
Torture Detainees = Shoot Obama in Foot
By William Fisher
The Pentagon says there are up to 100 prisoners in Guantanamo who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. federal courts.
They cannot be tried because much of the evidence against them is based on hearsay, which judges would likely refuse to allow. Or because they were held illegally as “enemy combatants” while being stripped of any rights they may have had. Or because what we know about these people and their plans was learned through the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” (have you ever heard of a less descriptive euphemism?). Chances are most Federal judges would also find such “evidence” inadmissible.
Former Vice President Cheney tells us the government’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (including waterboarding) was NOT torture (didn’t the memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel tell us so?). He also claims these techniques yielded actionable intelligence that disrupted numerous terrorist plots to kill more Americans.
So far, we have not seen a shred of evidence to prove that claim. We have only the word of the former Veep. And, given the magnitude of the lies he and the rest of the Bushies have sold us over the past eight years, why on earth would any of us believe a single thing Cheney had to say?
The result of W’s presidential power-grab is that we are now faced with the prospect of being unable to prosecute accused terrorists in our Federal justice system, or of having to obtain plea deals that will greatly lighten the sentences meted out to these miscreants.
The al-Marri case illustrates the point. As noted in a Washington Post editorial this morning, “Nearly six years ago, President George W. Bush declared Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri an enemy combatant and had him swept out of federal court and into a U.S. Navy brig so he could be interrogated without the legal protections afforded by the criminal justice system. Bush said the Qatari national, arrested as a material witness in Illinois in December 2001, possessed critical intelligence that ‘would aid U.S. efforts to prevent attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States’."
The consequence of Bush’s action? Instead of being put on trial for providing material support for terrorism – and facing a 30-year prison sentence – Marri was allowed to plead guilty only to conspiracy to provide material support, which carries a 15-year sentence (and even less if he is given credit for the five years he spent in the Navy brig).
Why did the Justice Department have to accept this plea deal?
Because government lawyers were concerned about the release of classified evidence and the impact of possible testimony regarding Marri's mental state after prolonged solitary confinement.
Because he was interrogated using those famous “enhanced interrogation techniques” --defense lawyers said in court papers that interrogators threatened Marri, telling him he would be transferred to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, where he would be sodomized and forced to watch the rape of his wife.
And because Marri was allegedly recruited to come to the U.S. by no less a storied figure than Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, to organize a terrorist sleeper cell. KSM would have been a likely witness for Marri if the case were ever to find its way into a courtroom.
And speaking of KSM, it is also questionable that he will ever see the inside of a Federal courtroom. That’s not because anyone’s afraid that a jury would be sympathetic to him, but because of the headlines he would make by describing his own torture in U.S. custody. It’s likely that KSM and many other defendants would use the courts as platforms from which to expose yet more sensational details about their treatment.
So what to do with the hundred or so detainees at Guantanamo who the Pentagon says are too dangerous to release but who, like Marri and probably KSM, cannot be tried in civilian courts?
The Obama Administration was quick to declare the “enemy combatant” designation as illegal and to order an end to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be stuffed back in. The likely consequence is that most of the victims of these techniques will never be tried in civilian courts – even though our criminal justice system is demonstrably well-equipped to try them.
So what federal prosecutors are left with now is the grim reality of trying to reach plea deals with the accused, or freeing them, or trying them in settings where the rules of evidence are less stringent.
Less stringent? Read Military Commissions 2.0. -- some tweaked version of the totally failed system that produced exactly two convictions in eight years.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has acknowledged that a return the commissions remains an option. But most legal scholars and human rights advocates say there is no amount of tweaking that will repair this deeply flawed system.
And, as if this Obama Administration legal migraine wasn’t enough, it is also having to deal with the question of where to put these prisoners as they await trial?
Gates has already asked Congress for $50 million to build a new prison – a new GITMO.
But where? Virtually every voice in Congress is already belting out the NIMBY aria. You can bet that every member of Congress will be running, not walking, away from the opportunity to make an earmark out of this new construction project.
Mercifully, George W. Bush couldn’t run for reelection last November. But he still managed to shoot the Obama Administration – and all the rest of us -- in the foot.
The Pentagon says there are up to 100 prisoners in Guantanamo who are too dangerous to release but who cannot be tried in U.S. federal courts.
They cannot be tried because much of the evidence against them is based on hearsay, which judges would likely refuse to allow. Or because they were held illegally as “enemy combatants” while being stripped of any rights they may have had. Or because what we know about these people and their plans was learned through the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” (have you ever heard of a less descriptive euphemism?). Chances are most Federal judges would also find such “evidence” inadmissible.
Former Vice President Cheney tells us the government’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (including waterboarding) was NOT torture (didn’t the memos from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel tell us so?). He also claims these techniques yielded actionable intelligence that disrupted numerous terrorist plots to kill more Americans.
So far, we have not seen a shred of evidence to prove that claim. We have only the word of the former Veep. And, given the magnitude of the lies he and the rest of the Bushies have sold us over the past eight years, why on earth would any of us believe a single thing Cheney had to say?
The result of W’s presidential power-grab is that we are now faced with the prospect of being unable to prosecute accused terrorists in our Federal justice system, or of having to obtain plea deals that will greatly lighten the sentences meted out to these miscreants.
The al-Marri case illustrates the point. As noted in a Washington Post editorial this morning, “Nearly six years ago, President George W. Bush declared Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri an enemy combatant and had him swept out of federal court and into a U.S. Navy brig so he could be interrogated without the legal protections afforded by the criminal justice system. Bush said the Qatari national, arrested as a material witness in Illinois in December 2001, possessed critical intelligence that ‘would aid U.S. efforts to prevent attacks by al-Qaeda on the United States’."
The consequence of Bush’s action? Instead of being put on trial for providing material support for terrorism – and facing a 30-year prison sentence – Marri was allowed to plead guilty only to conspiracy to provide material support, which carries a 15-year sentence (and even less if he is given credit for the five years he spent in the Navy brig).
Why did the Justice Department have to accept this plea deal?
Because government lawyers were concerned about the release of classified evidence and the impact of possible testimony regarding Marri's mental state after prolonged solitary confinement.
Because he was interrogated using those famous “enhanced interrogation techniques” --defense lawyers said in court papers that interrogators threatened Marri, telling him he would be transferred to Saudi Arabia or Egypt, where he would be sodomized and forced to watch the rape of his wife.
And because Marri was allegedly recruited to come to the U.S. by no less a storied figure than Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, to organize a terrorist sleeper cell. KSM would have been a likely witness for Marri if the case were ever to find its way into a courtroom.
And speaking of KSM, it is also questionable that he will ever see the inside of a Federal courtroom. That’s not because anyone’s afraid that a jury would be sympathetic to him, but because of the headlines he would make by describing his own torture in U.S. custody. It’s likely that KSM and many other defendants would use the courts as platforms from which to expose yet more sensational details about their treatment.
So what to do with the hundred or so detainees at Guantanamo who the Pentagon says are too dangerous to release but who, like Marri and probably KSM, cannot be tried in civilian courts?
The Obama Administration was quick to declare the “enemy combatant” designation as illegal and to order an end to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” But the genie is out of the bottle and can’t be stuffed back in. The likely consequence is that most of the victims of these techniques will never be tried in civilian courts – even though our criminal justice system is demonstrably well-equipped to try them.
So what federal prosecutors are left with now is the grim reality of trying to reach plea deals with the accused, or freeing them, or trying them in settings where the rules of evidence are less stringent.
Less stringent? Read Military Commissions 2.0. -- some tweaked version of the totally failed system that produced exactly two convictions in eight years.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has acknowledged that a return the commissions remains an option. But most legal scholars and human rights advocates say there is no amount of tweaking that will repair this deeply flawed system.
And, as if this Obama Administration legal migraine wasn’t enough, it is also having to deal with the question of where to put these prisoners as they await trial?
Gates has already asked Congress for $50 million to build a new prison – a new GITMO.
But where? Virtually every voice in Congress is already belting out the NIMBY aria. You can bet that every member of Congress will be running, not walking, away from the opportunity to make an earmark out of this new construction project.
Mercifully, George W. Bush couldn’t run for reelection last November. But he still managed to shoot the Obama Administration – and all the rest of us -- in the foot.
BRITS TRY TO BLOCK RENDITION CASE
By William Fisher
British High Court judges are expected to rule this week on whether a document by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency can be publicly disclosed, thus opening the courthouse door to a lawsuit charging that the U.K. Government was complicit in facilitating the rendition of a British resident by the CIA, which tortured and secretly imprisoned him at Guantánamo Bay.
Lawyers acting for David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, last week made a last-ditch attempt to block the release of the CIA information, which reportedly shows what British authorities knew about the mistreatment of British resident Binyam Mohamed.
The information is a seven-paragraph summary of CIA documents, described earlier by Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones as containing nothing, which could "possibly be described as 'highly sensitive classified U.S. intelligence'".
In a ruling earlier this year, the High Court judges said: "Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials ... relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be."
However, David Mackie, a senior government lawyer, told the two judges that Miliband had been told by Obama administration officials that the disclosure of the seven paragraphs "could likely result in serious damage to U.K. and U.S. national security".
The claim was made despite Obama's recent decision to release detailed information about CIA interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.
Lawyers for Mohamed say Obama's action means it is highly unlikely that the president would object to the disclosure of the CIA summary.
This latest move in the long-running case in the High Court comes as a federal appeals court in the U.S. gave the legal green light to a case brought there by five men including Mohamed and another UK resident, Bisher al-Rawi, who say they were tortured under the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.
The five former Guantánamo Bay detainees are suing Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan for allegedly providing flights to secret prisons overseas, where the abuse is said to have happened.
In what may become a landmark decision, a federal appeals court recently ruled that the “state secrets privilege” – routinely used by the government to block lawsuits against its officials – can only be used to contest specific evidence, but not to dismiss an entire suit.
The ruling, which was hailed by human rights advocates, came in connection with a lawsuit against a company known as Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the government’s “extraordinary rendition” program during the administration of former President George W. Bush.
"This is a tremendous step forward," said Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the U.K.-based legal charity Reprieve, referring to the decision in the U.S. case.
"Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi (another plaintiff) and perhaps many others, are one step closer to making the CEOs of these companies stop and think before they commit criminal acts for profit," he told IPS.
Reprieve’s renditions investigator Clara Gutteridge said: "It is inconceivable that Jeppesen acted alone. People in the highest echelons of the U.S. – and in some cases the U.K. – governments have authorized illegal rendition flights and must also be held accountable."
The U.S. suit charges that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the rendition program by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to forcibly “disappear” the five men to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture. Jeppesen is a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing. The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
During the Bush administration, the government intervened when the case first came before a lower court in 2007, successfully asserting the "state secrets" privilege to have the case thrown out in February 2008. On appeal, the administration of President Barack Obama followed the same road as its predecessor. The appeals court has now reversed that decision.
But lawyers for the men who brought the case also sounded a note of caution. "This historic decision marks the beginning, not the end, of this litigation," Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Security Project, told IPS. Wizner argued the case for the plaintiffs.
"Our clients, who are among the hundreds of victims of torture under the Bush administration, have waited for years just to get a foot in the courthouse door. Now, at long last, they will have their day in court. Today's ruling demolishes once and for all the legal fiction, advanced by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration, that facts known throughout the world could be deemed 'secrets' in a court of law," he said.
In its ruling, the court wrote that "the Executive's national security prerogatives are not the only weighty constitutional values at stake,” adding that security depends on the "freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adhering to the separation of powers."
"According to the government's theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law," Judge Michael Hawkins wrote.
Allowing the government to shield its conduct from court review simply because classified information is involved "would ... perversely encourage the president to classify politically embarrassing information simply to place it beyond the reach of judicial process," Hawkins said.
"The extraordinary rendition program is well known throughout the world," said Steven Watt, a staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. "The only place it hasn't been discussed is where it most cries out for examination – in a U.S. court of law. Allowing this case to go forward is an important step toward reaffirming our commitment to domestic and international human rights law and restoring an America we can be proud of. Victims of extraordinary rendition deserve their day in court."
The U.S. Appeals Court ruling means that the government can assert the “state secrets” privilege for specific pieces of evidence, but not to end a case before it begins.
That means that the privilege is primarily an evidentiary privilege, a definition civil libertarians have long sought. The State Secrets Protection Act, now pending in Congress, would turn that definition into law.
The Obama Administration now has three options. It can do nothing, which will mean the case will finally go before a U.S. court. It can ask the entire Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case. Or it can appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
If the case goes to trial, the government can still argue that disclosing anything about Jeppesen's relationship with the United States government would jeopardize national security secrets. But now it can no longer simply “assert” that privilege; it will have to convince a judge by arguing the point in court.
During the administration of former President George W. Bush, the government asserted the “state secrets” claim with increasing regularity in an attempt to throw out lawsuits and justify withholding information from the public about the rendition program and also about illegal wiretapping, torture and other breaches of U.S. and international law.
British High Court judges are expected to rule this week on whether a document by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency can be publicly disclosed, thus opening the courthouse door to a lawsuit charging that the U.K. Government was complicit in facilitating the rendition of a British resident by the CIA, which tortured and secretly imprisoned him at Guantánamo Bay.
Lawyers acting for David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, last week made a last-ditch attempt to block the release of the CIA information, which reportedly shows what British authorities knew about the mistreatment of British resident Binyam Mohamed.
The information is a seven-paragraph summary of CIA documents, described earlier by Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones as containing nothing, which could "possibly be described as 'highly sensitive classified U.S. intelligence'".
In a ruling earlier this year, the High Court judges said: "Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials ... relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be."
However, David Mackie, a senior government lawyer, told the two judges that Miliband had been told by Obama administration officials that the disclosure of the seven paragraphs "could likely result in serious damage to U.K. and U.S. national security".
The claim was made despite Obama's recent decision to release detailed information about CIA interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.
Lawyers for Mohamed say Obama's action means it is highly unlikely that the president would object to the disclosure of the CIA summary.
This latest move in the long-running case in the High Court comes as a federal appeals court in the U.S. gave the legal green light to a case brought there by five men including Mohamed and another UK resident, Bisher al-Rawi, who say they were tortured under the CIA's extraordinary rendition program.
The five former Guantánamo Bay detainees are suing Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan for allegedly providing flights to secret prisons overseas, where the abuse is said to have happened.
In what may become a landmark decision, a federal appeals court recently ruled that the “state secrets privilege” – routinely used by the government to block lawsuits against its officials – can only be used to contest specific evidence, but not to dismiss an entire suit.
The ruling, which was hailed by human rights advocates, came in connection with a lawsuit against a company known as Jeppesen DataPlan for its role in the government’s “extraordinary rendition” program during the administration of former President George W. Bush.
"This is a tremendous step forward," said Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, director of the U.K.-based legal charity Reprieve, referring to the decision in the U.S. case.
"Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi (another plaintiff) and perhaps many others, are one step closer to making the CEOs of these companies stop and think before they commit criminal acts for profit," he told IPS.
Reprieve’s renditions investigator Clara Gutteridge said: "It is inconceivable that Jeppesen acted alone. People in the highest echelons of the U.S. – and in some cases the U.K. – governments have authorized illegal rendition flights and must also be held accountable."
The U.S. suit charges that Jeppesen knowingly participated in the rendition program by providing critical flight planning and logistical support services to aircraft and crews used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to forcibly “disappear” the five men to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas where they were interrogated under torture. Jeppesen is a subsidiary of aerospace giant Boeing. The lawsuit was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
During the Bush administration, the government intervened when the case first came before a lower court in 2007, successfully asserting the "state secrets" privilege to have the case thrown out in February 2008. On appeal, the administration of President Barack Obama followed the same road as its predecessor. The appeals court has now reversed that decision.
But lawyers for the men who brought the case also sounded a note of caution. "This historic decision marks the beginning, not the end, of this litigation," Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) National Security Project, told IPS. Wizner argued the case for the plaintiffs.
"Our clients, who are among the hundreds of victims of torture under the Bush administration, have waited for years just to get a foot in the courthouse door. Now, at long last, they will have their day in court. Today's ruling demolishes once and for all the legal fiction, advanced by the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration, that facts known throughout the world could be deemed 'secrets' in a court of law," he said.
In its ruling, the court wrote that "the Executive's national security prerogatives are not the only weighty constitutional values at stake,” adding that security depends on the "freedom from arbitrary and unlawful restraint and the personal liberty that is secured by adhering to the separation of powers."
"According to the government's theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law," Judge Michael Hawkins wrote.
Allowing the government to shield its conduct from court review simply because classified information is involved "would ... perversely encourage the president to classify politically embarrassing information simply to place it beyond the reach of judicial process," Hawkins said.
"The extraordinary rendition program is well known throughout the world," said Steven Watt, a staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program. "The only place it hasn't been discussed is where it most cries out for examination – in a U.S. court of law. Allowing this case to go forward is an important step toward reaffirming our commitment to domestic and international human rights law and restoring an America we can be proud of. Victims of extraordinary rendition deserve their day in court."
The U.S. Appeals Court ruling means that the government can assert the “state secrets” privilege for specific pieces of evidence, but not to end a case before it begins.
That means that the privilege is primarily an evidentiary privilege, a definition civil libertarians have long sought. The State Secrets Protection Act, now pending in Congress, would turn that definition into law.
The Obama Administration now has three options. It can do nothing, which will mean the case will finally go before a U.S. court. It can ask the entire Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear the case. Or it can appeal the case to the Supreme Court.
If the case goes to trial, the government can still argue that disclosing anything about Jeppesen's relationship with the United States government would jeopardize national security secrets. But now it can no longer simply “assert” that privilege; it will have to convince a judge by arguing the point in court.
During the administration of former President George W. Bush, the government asserted the “state secrets” claim with increasing regularity in an attempt to throw out lawsuits and justify withholding information from the public about the rendition program and also about illegal wiretapping, torture and other breaches of U.S. and international law.
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