Monday, May 9, 2011
U.S. Government Used COMMUNIST Torture Techniques Specifically Designed to Produce FALSE Confessions
As I noted in 2009:
I also pointed out:Senator Levin, in commenting on the Senate Armed Services Committee report on torture declassified today, drops the following bombshell:
With last week's release of the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) opinions, it is now widely known that Bush administration officials distorted Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape "SERE" training - a legitimate program used by the military to train our troops to resist abusive enemy interrogations - by authorizing abusive techniques from SERE for use in detainee interrogations. Those decisions conveyed the message that abusive treatment was appropriate for detainees in U.S. custody. They were also an affront to the values articulated by General Petraeus.
In SERE training, U.S. troops are briefly exposed, in a highly controlled setting, to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions. The techniques are based on tactics used by Chinese Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes. Techniques used in SERE training include stripping trainees of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, subjecting them to face and body slaps, depriving them of sleep, throwing them up against a wall, confining them in a small box, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. Until recently, the Navy SERE school also used waterboarding. The purpose of the SERE program is to provide U.S. troops who might be captured a taste of the treatment they might face so that they might have a better chance of surviving captivity and resisting abusive and coercive interrogations.
Senator Levin then documents that SERE techniques were deployed as part of an official policy on detainees, and that SERE instructors helped to implement the interrogation programs.
The senior Army SERE psychologist warned in 2002 against using SERE training techniques during interrogations in an email to personnel at Guantanamo Bay, because:
[T]he use of physical pressures brings with it a large number of potential negative side effects... When individuals are gradually exposed to increasing levels of discomfort, it is more common for them to resist harder... If individuals are put under enough discomfort, i.e. pain, they will eventually do whatever it takes to stop the pain. This will increase the amount of information they tell the interrogator, but it does not mean the information is accurate. In fact, it usually decreases the reliability of the information because the person will say whatever he believes will stop the pain... Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low. The likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the level of resistance in a detainee is very high... (p. 53).
McClatchy fills in some of the details:The Washington Post reported the same year:Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration...
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document...
When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued."Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .
A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.
"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."
"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."
Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.
In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage.
Writing about this today, Paul Krugman says:
Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.
Despite what you've seen on TV, torture is really only good at one thing: eliciting false confessions. Indeed, Bush-era torture techniques, we now know, were cold-bloodedly modeled after methods used by Chinese Communists to extract confessions from captured U.S. servicemen that they could then use for propaganda during the Korean War.I wrote last month:
So as shocking as the latest revelation in a new Senate Armed Services Committee report may be, it actually makes sense -- in a nauseating way. The White House started pushing the use of torture not when faced with a "ticking time bomb" scenario from terrorists, but when officials in 2002 were desperately casting about for ways to tie Iraq to the 9/11 attacks -- in order to strengthen their public case for invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 at all.
***
Gordon Trowbridge writes for the Detroit News: "Senior Bush administration officials pushed for the use of abusive interrogations of terrorism detainees in part to seek evidence to justify the invasion of Iraq, according to newly declassified information discovered in a congressional probe.
Indeed, it worked ... producing false confessions, and delaying by years our ability to obtain actionable intelligence:One of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
Truth Out reported yesterday:
Jessen's notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a "master" SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).
Kearns and his boss, Roger Aldrich, the head of the Air Force Intelligence's Special Survial Training Program (SSTP), based out of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, hired Jessen in May 1989. Kearns, who was head of operations at SSTP and trained thousands of service members, said Jessen was brought into the program due to an increase in the number of new SERE courses being taught and "the fact that it required psychological expertise on hand in a full-time basis."
Jessen, then the chief of Psychology Service at the US Air Force Survival School, immediately started to work directly with Kearns on "a new course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal individual resistance to terrorist exploitation."
The course, known as SV-91, was developed for the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) branch of the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, which acted as the Executive Agent Action Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jessen's notes formed the basis for one part of SV-91, "Psychological Aspects of Detention."
***
Kearns was one of only two officers within DoD qualified to teach all three SERE-related courses within SSTP on a worldwide basis, according to a copy of a 1989 letter written Aldrich, who nominated him officer of the year.
***
The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered - not just 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar," he said. "What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen's instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to 'reverse-engineer' a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press."
***
Jessen wrote that cooperation is the "end goal" of the detainer, who wants the detainee "to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)."
***
Kearns said, based on what he has read in declassified government documents and news reports about the role SERE played in the Bush administration's torture program, Jessen clearly "reverse-engineered" his lesson plan and used resistance methods to abuse "war on terror" detainees.
So we have the two main Air Force insiders concerning the genesis of the torture program confirming - with original notes - that the whole purpose of the torture program was to extract false confessions.
- One of the Main Sources for the 9/11 Commission Report was Tortured Until He Agreed to Sign a Confession that He Was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ
- 9/11 Mastermind: "During ... My Interrogation I Gave A Lot Of False Information In Order To Satisfy What I Believed The Interrogators Wished To Hear"
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remember all the kangaroo court "confessions" in the last 10 years
ReplyDelete"At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst".--Aristotle
ReplyDeleteAlthough I neither have first-hand experience nor research to support this notion, I strongly suspect that since time immemorial, certain forces of EVERY state have used tactics which clearly constituted torture (no matter how defined) and shocked the conscience, although many (for various reasons) have chosen not to do so openly.
ReplyDeleteHowever, that we live in a society capable of public introspection may be just good enough, for now, especially with other issues on our plate.
It’s what helps form the “collective conscience” that all societies need, but do not have.
I should point out some old news, but it bears repeating: the CIA began experimenting with techniques of interrogation, mind control, influence, performance enhancement and degradation, etc. (sometimes involving torture and generally brutal treatment) shortly after WWII in collaboration with Nazi scientists, but ramped up this project starting in the 1950s, "inspired" (as this washingtonsblog post points out) by techniques used on American prisoners during the Korean War (fearing a "mind control gap"). This program soon became MKULTRA, which involved the collaboration of psychologists, universities, medical institutes, etc. in Canada and England.
ReplyDeleteWhen they were investigated in the 1970s, the CIA claimed they found that almost none of this worked reliably or often enough to be useful, and so they claim to have shelved MKULTRA and all its projects. I suspect that "almost" may be the key word--it would be worth finding out if they discovered that if they had enough people to put through the grinding wheel, they'd produce a few desirable products, either for their original goals, and/or for other purposes discovered along the way. Speculating, this may be one of the reasons most of the documentation was destroyed in the 1970s--they may have wanted to minimize the chances that people would know that, in the CIA's estimation, MKULTRA got results (of whatever sort they found useful) often enough for CIA purposes. If the public had known this was the CIA's true conclusion, more people would have realized the CIA was probably putting the results of the experiments to use, or at least keeping the techniques in storage until some future date, and hence the public would have called for more scrutiny of the CIA earlier.
Some of the little surviving documentation on MKULTRA, and eyewitness testimony, also uses phrases like those used by Jessen, when he says the goal is for the detainee "to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)." As most people know, there was even a popular book and a film on some of the wilder extrapolations: "The Manchurian Candidate". The problem with that portrayal (in addition to being something of a red herring promoted by the CIA to draw attention away from MKULTRA's other projects), as with other portrayals for years after, was that even after the Korean War, they ominously portrayed other countries as possibly continuing to use these techniques against the US, when it was actually the US that began experimenting with these and more advanced methods, and possibly putting them into practice, on a scale beyond that used by the North Koreans and Chinese. The "war on terror" has produced a huge number of test subjects for fine-tuning the techniques further, far beyond the numbers the CIA could get its hands on for MKULTRA, so that the total number of "successes" may be greater.
(more)
More recently, mostly after 9/11 but to some degree before this too, the basic techniques the CIA first studied in MKULTRA, the simpler North Korean/Chinese methods of torture and physical and psychological abuse, were "re-purposed" (though under orders from Bush Jr., Cheney, etc.) for use on so-called enemy combatants, both by the CIA, and other branches of the military, in order to generate false intelligence, and maybe get a few useful pieces of information in the process. The CIA had long ago found these original methods were the simplest, easiest, cheapest to implement in the field, etc., rather than some of the elaborate methods they also experimented with (though some of those techniques were also probably found to have their uses). The CIA has had a lot of experience over the decades with what results are gotten when specific methods are used--a trove of techniques they didn't want to throw away--so that much of the torture and other uses of force they've engaged in, in the past decade or so, has been fairly formulaic, at least in their estimation, even when it seems to resemble mayhem. The only saving grace of the people who have actually performed these techniques in recent years, is that many of them point out that they still don't work nearly often enough to justify their use, and that they performed these acts because they were ordered to do so by the chain of command--they couldn't even rely on the military laws that dictate that people in the military are to obey only lawful orders, because Yoo, etc. worked with the Bush Jr. administration to make torture quasi-legal, and hence if they'd disobeyed, they would have been subject to the full weight of military prosecution.
ReplyDelete