IG Report: Working Thread
Spencer and the Washington Independent have posted the documents.
There is significantly more in here.
One thing to note: IG was complaining about water dousing in 2004. And then they wrote the 2005 memos to include water dousing, done on Hassan Ghul, sometime in 2004. Interesting timing.
The report started because of illegal techniques used with al-Nashiri, among others. Yet Durham hasn’t found any reason to show that the torture tapes were destroyed because of that?
It says CTC with Office of Technical Services came up with the techniques. I suspect Jeff Kaye will have a lot to say about that combination.
Note, it doesn’t say that OGC (John Rizzo) was also working with DOD’s GC (Jim Haynes) to come up with the torture techniques, thereby hiding SERE’s involvement.
"OGC briefed DO officers" at interrogation sites on what was legal. Doesn’t say whether OGC briefed the contractors. But in any case, Rizzo bears some responsibility here, right?
Okay, this is significant.
With respect to two detainees at those sites, the use and frequency of one EIT, the waterboard, went beyond the projected use of the technique as originally described to DoJ. The Agency, on 29 July 2003, secured oral DoJ concurrence that certain deviations are not significant for the purposes of DoJ’s legal opinions.
Remember, this is two days after they got the oral okay in the first place (based on the JPRA document), and two days before DOJ wrote the memo. Yet the memo still used restrictions that they had just orally okayed the torturers to exceed.
This also suggests the techniques, as we suspected, preceded the authorization.
Page 7:
The DCI Guidelines … still leave substantial room for misinterpretation and do not cover all Agency detention and interrogation activities.
Also page 7:
Officers are concerned that public revelation of the CTC Program will seriously damage Agency officers’ personal reputations, as well as the reputation and effectiveness of the Agency itself.
No mention of international law or, more importantly, endangering Americans captured by others. That’s nice.
On page 11, they’ve kept two paragraphs describing the legal basis for the program redacted.
Page 12
OGC shared these "draft" papers [on techniques] with Agency officers responsible [for the interrogations?]
Page 13
…in late 2001, CIA had tasked an independent contractor psychologist, … to research and write a paper on Al-Qa’ida’s resistance to interrogation techniques.
Note this shifts the chronology SASC gives, suggesting CIA started it. It also doesn’t say who in CIA asked Mitchell and Jessen to develop the program.
Page 22: Rizzo got a follow-up document we haven’t seen yet, which basically says War Crimes are off the table. This is where they dismiss the 5th, 8th, and 14th Amendments.
Page 23:
In early 2003, CIA officials, at the urging of the General Counsel, continued to inform senior Administration officials and the leadership of the Congressional Oversight Committees of the then-current status of the CRC Program.
Close to an admission that the Fall 2002 briefing was not on the then-current status. Goes onto claim that GC says that "none of the participants expressed any concern about the techniques or the program" even though Jane Harman did, to then GC, Scott Muller, in writing.
Page 31 fn 36 suggests that they didn’t put the medical guidelines in writing bc "Seventh Floor" would need to approve the promulgation of any further former guidelines." This was, of course, right after the month of KSM’s worst torture.
Page 37:
OIG found 11 interrogation videotapes to be blank. Two others were blank except for one or two minutes of recording. Two others were broken and could not be reviewed. OIG compared the videotapes to [redacted] logs and cables and identified a 21-hour period of time, which included two waterboard sessions, that was not captured on the videotape.
Note, CIA is trying to withhold precisely those logs from ACLU. I wonder what else is in that 21-hour gap.
Page 44
According to the General Counsel, the Attorney General acknowledged he is fully aware of the repetitive use of the waterboard and that CIA is well within the scope of the DOJ opinion and the authority given to CIA by that opinion. The Attorney General was informed the waterboard had been used 119 on a single individual.
Cables indicate that Agency interrogators [redacted] applied the waterboard technique to Khalid Shaykh Muhammed 183 [redacted]
Well, I guess that’s one explanation for why they didn’t prosecute…
Page 71: These guys couldn’t even stage a mock execution credibly. What morans.
Page 83
According to a number of those interviewed for this Review, the Agency’s intelligence on Al-Qa’ida was limited prior to the initiation of the CTC Interrogation Program. The Agency lacked adequate linguists or subject matter experts and had very little hard knowledge of what particular Al-Qa’ida leaders–who later became detainees–knw. This lack of knowledge led analysts to speculate about what a detainee "should know," vice information the analyst could objectively demonstrate the detainee did know.
Page 84
According to a senior CTC officer, the interrogation team [redacted] considered Abu Zubaydah to be compliant and wanted to terminate EITs. [redacted] believed Abu Zubaydah continued to withhold information [redacted] at the time it generated substantial pressure from Headquarters to continue use of the EITs. According to this senior officer, the decision to resume use of the waterboard on Abu Zubaydah was made by senior officers of the DO [redacted] to assess Abu Zubaydah’s compliance and witnessed the final waterboard session, after which, they reported back to Headquarters that the EITs were no longer needed on Abu Zubaydah.
Page 87, on KSM (note the focus on Americans, some of them on totally bogus charges)
He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen whom Khalid Shaykh Muhammed planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks [redacted] Khalid Shaykh Muhammed’s information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.
Page 94
One officer expressed concern that one day, Agency officers will wind up on some "wanted list" to appear before the World Court for war crimes stemming from activities [redacted] Another said "Ten years from now we’re going to be sorry we’re doing this … [but] it has to be done." He expressed concern that the CTC Program will be exposed in the news media and cited particular concern about the possibility of being named in a leak.
Here we go!
That’s it!? 106 pages!? I think I can read Rove stuff until they have the whole thing posted.
Isn’t this at the 1 year anniversary, 2003?
“An interrogator is a person who completes a two-week interrogations training program, which is designed to train, qualify and certify a person to administer EITs.” — footnote on page 14 of 34, marked as page 6.
Gosh, people like Matthew Alexander spend an entire career building the expertise to build rapport in interrogations, and any hard-on from Blackwater can be “certified” in two weeks to drown somebody and otherwise destroy their mind. I wonder if they frame the certificates for them?
I would be willing to bet the sick bastards have home movies that they didn’t destroy.
P77
“Pressure points” should be better described as strangulation to the point of unconsciousness.
Negative. Strangulation refers to restriction of air passage. Carotid pressure points restrict blood flow to the brain. Two very different things physiologically.
Putting @4 and @5 together, one wonders how much time was spent learning the strangulation technique during the 2 week training period!
This is so disgusting!
Does putting out this evidence leave them open to the ICC or another case like the one that was brought in Spain against Rumsfeld?
Sorry if this was already asked and answered.
The US does not participate actively in the ICC nor does it recognize jurisdiction of the ICC over American officials. In short, no.
You’re right…but someday, someone who was involved in the creation of this system (and not just a peon) will take a trip somewhere into a jurisdiction that is willing to extradite them to Spain, or to the Hague. At any rate, I certainly live in the hope that this will happen.
The ICC covers all it’s citizens, so it’s a spider web.
ANYONE we tortured or kidnapped, who is a citizen of a signature country to the ICC, is subject to prosecution through that system by that member, as a requirement not an option.WE as a country cannot protect and shield criminals or would we want to.
Silly. You remember, in SERE school? Where they told us about the war crimes act and that anything we did that wasn’t legal wasn’t legal?, you remember when they said even an order from a superior didn’t mean we could violate the law? Remember when they told us about how crossing the line meant punishment because we signed all those statements about understanding torture and where the line is? Remember the generals coming and telling us the president and the guy from Texas both said it was “A-OK”.
The AG appears to have told the IG that “we need a way out of this”. Where is there an adult that can read the law to the AG and the IG? They act like this issue is a new one that has no precedent. Please Mr. President: Hire people that are literate for such jobs. It will make things so much easier. Instead your AG and IG will have to be told by a judge that they can’t read. Isn’t that going to be embarrassing again? and again, and again.
Rut roh. Mitchell and Jessen have some ’splainin’ to do. Here are images of the first part and second part of a footnote on pages 29 and 30 of the 34 page document. Seems these guys misrepresented themselves and waterboarding, with the conclusion of the footnote stating that the waterboard is not effective or medically safe as used.
Paging Jeff Kaye…
And remember that OLC opinions are only for members of the Exec branch & agencies – not private persons or entities. (Or for-profit “independetn” contractors).
Not to mention that the field level people could not have known about the classified opinions. But they could rely on what they were being told and ordered. You don’t suppose they might have an affirmative defense anywhere here do you??
I think this footnote was cited in Bradbury 2005 “techniques” with the exception that the term psychologist/interrogator was redacted. This unredaction confirms they are likely targets/scapegoats of the new probe.
Thanks, I’m not taking the time to go back to Marcy’s two earlier posts today to make sure what stands out to me is new, so I know I’m running the risk of focusing on something already known.
P122, the chronology.
There is something important redacted in December 2002 from the column “events in Washington” and in the final column, which appears to be adverse events reviewed by the OIG. I’d guess that whatever it is is the reason for the OIG review in the first place. There is a lot redacted with respect to al Nashiri, so it still remains unclear why he was only waterboarded 2 times.
I also note that I found no references to his interrogation tapes being reviewed versus AZ.
Could this have anything to do with it?
On Dec. 3, 2002 Bush boasted about Nashiri’s capture:
I misread your comment. I thought the redaction was connected to events in Washington during that month. Sorry. My mistake
I think you are right, that the redactions have to do with al-Nashiri, and maybe the 21 hours of deleted interrogation videotape that included 2 waterboarding sessions that Marcy notes above. We have both in the past noted the possibility that something went awry with al Nashiri’s waterboarding. I am wondering though if the deleted “events in Washington” of dec 2002 is the name of the person or unit who referred the program to the OIG.
Sorry to be so horridly uninformed – is al-Nashiri alive or dead or is that even known?
Alive and at GTMO, uncharged and in poor health.
Search his name above, EW has several posts on him, as do I at dKos.
Poor pathetic bastard, no matter what he may have done, no human deserves that. It sounds from those posts like they very nearly killed him. He’s not even charged w/anything, this is horrible, horrible. Thank you (I think) for the link directions. I’m glad this is coming out and I hate this is coming out, too. I hate it happened at all.
al-Niahiri is alive, at Gitmo and awaiting tribunal.
OT -Mohammed Jawad, age about 19, to go back from Gitmo (where he’s been for 7 years) to Afghanistan, as Admin obeys a court order. He will not be tried for anything.
One wishes that the Administration obeying a court order was not newsworthy.
“November 2002 DDO of CIA [redacted] learned of and had a team dispatched to investigate [location redacted]. January, 2003 DDO informs OIG of allegations that agency personnel used [torture] on al-Nashiri at another site.”
Furthermore CIA employees (not just the FBI investigators) were expressing concerns that covert activities at overseas sites constituted violations of detainee Human Rights and potential War Crimes.
I wonder if the Congressional Committees were informed about these issues????
Context: “Repeated US Policy Statements condemning torture and advocating humane treatment of political prisoners and detainees in the international community”.
I wonder if these events were briefed to the Congressional leadership? I doubt it.
If they weren’t doing anything wrong, how would it damage the patriot’s reputation to reveal that they were good to go with anally assaulting a kidnap victim, then disappearing them into hell?
@ p. 13 – well, we have Panetta saying that we knew close to nada about al-Qaeda and that’s why we needed the torture intel, while that p. 13 reference says that they knew enough about al-Qaeda to have private contractors write up a paper on how al-Qaeda’s resistance to interrogation techniques. And apparently to also konw that al-Qaeda resisted in ways unique to “al-Qaeda”
I liked the bit where after the General Counsel and DCI provide a “detailed briefing to selected NSC Principals” there’s no reference to who selected the Principals and why (this is what Powell has been hinting at) and that apparently while no one in congress could put anything in the record, the CIA Gen Counsel was allowed to generate a memorandum for the record. They have Ashcroft confirming that DOJ was on board with jacking up torture (”including multile applications of the waterboard”). So once again, one more top level lawyer sitting mum while Congress and America was lied to by Hayden and Kiriakou and others about the number of waterboardings. There was a duty to correct the record, Ashcroft did not do it despite his direct knowledge. The only one who did correct the record to my knowledge, ever, was Levin and on that topic – waterboarding. The number of lawyers who sat silent while knowing misrepresentations were made to the courts and congress, at times under oath, are pretty staggering. And protect them on their crappy advice and opinions all you want -there should be no protecting them on those kinds of failures and lapses and obstructions. But that’s an area where no investigation is even attempting to go.
Anyway, back to the language of the CIA GC’s memo for the record – even there he what he says is he “believes” that everyone in attendance “was aware of exactly what the CIA was doing with respect to detention and interrogation.”
Kind of the CIA version of “I Believe”
Makes you wonder if the “facts” given to Congress are as correct as the “facts” recited by Yoo and Bradbury. You know, the “facts” about Zubaydah being the No. 3 al-Qaeda guy. Also the “facts” that were given out about al-Libi and his position on the governing council of al-Qaeda.
I will say this, between all the leaks over the last few days, the Panetta crap, the new interrogation scheme, and Eric Holder’s “preliminary review” bullcrap, the government has certainly overflowed the capacity of the cable news media to focus on anything. They are not covering for shit.
They are not covering for shit.
This is what I was worried would happen all along – it’s what I put in my comment at EW’s post on the OPR report not being included. As a nation, we’ve become something different than we were, individuals here and there notwithstanding. DOJ and the Media have been central to that evolution into a people who support having a torture regime and an uneducated morass who believe that only bad buys were abused, that it wasn’t much worse than college hazing and that it saved lives. That’s become such a predominant theme, with DOJ constantly reiterating it and constantly asserting the patriotism of torture and the need to protect
our torturersthe country with the state secrets invocation, that none of this gets a reaction anymore. Hell, release the pictures of the child sodomy and it wouldn’t get a flinch. That’s what DOJ and MSM and CIA and Bush AND Obama have been willing to do to this country to make things convenient for themselves and their friends and colleagues.They willingly made us into this kind of a country. There’s a lot of sins you can get absolution for, but selling a whole nation to evil just so you don’t have to confront an ugly truth – I don’t think there’s absolution for that. And trickled out releases with a President still more focused on appeasing torturers than anything else isn’t going to change things.
Now we are really fucked for coverage.
Breaking News: Michael Jackson death ruled a homicide; criminal charges against doctor expected.
Who could have ever predicted …
*sigh*
Coverage of memos being released won’t do anything without a face for the torture brigade. The press here has done a really remarkable job of keeping pictures of KSM’s children off the airwaves; keeping pictures of the children we took to GITMO off until years later when they are bearded; keeping Maher Arar and Khalid el-Masri and their children off the airwaves. Making sure no one ever sees Dilawar’s mother. Making sure no one ever saw the throngs of women and children outside the US concentrated population camps weeping and trying to find out what had happened to their disappeared family members. Making sure no one sees the bodies of the children after our drone attacks. Making sure no one ever reports on the massive refugee camps and problems from the millions who were displaced by our invasions.
never a face
We can respond with words all we want, but without a face, the nation won’t change back. There were the wild eyed, bearded, “funny named” men to make the face of terrorism and to target wrath upon. There’s never been a face given to innocent victims of that wrath. You can’t “win” your case with no face for your victims, or with only something like KSM trotted out as the victim.
Look! Over there! Shiny object! Shiny object!
If it hadn’t been Jackson, I’m sure the MSM would have ginned up another excuse to not cover this. At this point there is no excuse for just how lousy TV news is. It is bad on purpose. TV news exists to sell us stuff. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to buy when I see a story about the collapse of our governmental institutions, but when it’s Michael Jackson, well then, it’s time to shop… albums, a single glove, Pepsi, you name it. The TV news people have done their corporate duty.
Sorry but I think your implication that this is really recent is untrue. Why exactly do you think the USA isn’t party to the ICC? The nation, though not to be fair the President, was quite happy for all these foreigners to prosecute one another, but prosecute the USA? Things would be so different at the moment if the USA had signed up to the ICC. John Yoo might even not have got away with his memos. NAW, that’s going too far.
By the way, I wouldn’t worry about the coverage. It will all be useful ammunition as Durham’s work proceeds, forcing him to go off down rabbit holes he is maybe not expected to go.
???????
What is the “this” you think I am implying?
“your implication that this is really recent is untrue”
I’ve made the point about the ICC on any number of occassions.
The nation, though not to be fair the President, was quite happy for all these foreigners to prosecute one another, but prosecute the USA?
Um, no, actually this is something that most Americans know absolutely nothing about and would in general think, if you hit them up in the street, that we were a part. The nation isn’t the Congress. And I said way before the torture memos came out that they would make no dent and that it was naive for the pro-prosecution crew to think that they would make a dent, so again, I’m lost on your “this” that you are saying I am implying.
What I will say is that a decade ago, having information about Bill Clinton putting together a torture regime to gin up a war would have gotten a treatment via DOJ and the MSM that is quite different than what has happened here the last decade (if that is the “this” you mean). During that time, the US public has had a very steady stream of propaganda and manipulation.
I do believe that such a widespread and systemic non-reaction by the American public to the revelations of the US govt, as a matter of US policy, engaged in torture programs involving children and rape etc. is something that is newish, in that, as I said, if it had come out during the Clinton administration the media and DOJ treatment would have helped shape a different public response.
If you think that the media and DOJ etc. don’t shape a response, fine, go with that, but I don’t buy it. I’ve seen too often the blank look with the, “if we were doing that it would have been on FOX” from the people who work hard, watch 24 and Fox, and don’t do any independent research. For that matter, I can offer up the way the US citizens responded to 9/11-Iraq and the huge numbers who truly thought – bc of the media’s handling and propaganda and manipulation – that Iraq was behind 9/11 as evidentiary of the fact that media and doj spin makes a difference. When it goes unchallenged for too long, it makes a very deep groove in the consciousness.
Actually I was going back way beyond Clinton and thinking primarily South America. Congress resisting the ICC was but a step along the way. I would however concur that the onset of such as Fox has created a very low information society. Funnily enough that nice Mr Murdoch does it here in the UK with old faashioned “newspapers” like the Sun.
If memory serves, Clinton signed on to the ICC. Senate never ratified. Bush 43, looking forward, backpedalled immediately.
The US is technically an “Observer” participant only by my recollection.
That was the point of the exercise.
Dang, items 101 through 143 fully redacted (I can’t get past page 68 now for some reason). So much for “disclosure”. What are they still hiding?
This is significant. From page 13:
From page 32:
That date is no coincidence. They got Ashcroft to retroactively bless the ‘extreme’ waterboarding…
This is fucking hilarious. The “one notable example” they note is the waterboardings. At least one of those was videotaped (and my guess is the others were as well, they just haven’t admitted it). So these are the “worst” in the group that Big Bull durham might, possibly, consider prosecuting. If he charges my client with this conduct you know what the first thing I file is? Yep, a motion to dismiss for prosecutorial misconduct for destroying evidence, to wit the tapes. And set up right, it is a drop dead winner.
Is the “prosecutorial misconduct” due to the destruction of the tapes or to filing the charges after the tapes have been destroyed? I don’t see that the prosecutors ever had posession of the tapes. Doesn’t that matter? Or are the prosecutors the public face of the government that allowed the tapes to be destroyed? Would the prosecutors face potential punishment for something that someone else did?
Has anybody seen a PDF version of the report? Got link?
You can download it from the scribd link above.
found this link at the WaPo. It’s the 159 page report
Yes, that’s a better link (has all the docs, I think, and is smaller and they have better bandwidth).
Thanks.
this might be some of the professionals pushing back against team b
Re.”psychologist/investigators” on pp. 13 (point 32): That was Bruce Jessen…he was asked to review the “al-Qaeda Capture Manual” [which really was something put together by Iranian Captives to deal with Savak, I believe). He was aided by Mitchell [both were AF JPRA/SERE psychologists]. Jessen devised his “reversed engineered” methods.
Interestingly, this document again refers to the use of psychologists at point 33.
Jessen and Mitchell ran programs that “debriefed” individuals who were detained, abused, or otherwise traumatically stressed (e.g. law enforcement personnel involved in shootings). They developed a theory that such traumas were actually temporary if those individuals were provided with a single short-term set of counselling and destressing sessions after being removed from the stress. Thus they were pushing a miracle cure for PTSD…if the subject was “treated” soon enough. Unfortunately, while it made them good money pushing this hypothesis, research soon showed that they were wrong. I suspect they pushed their bogus hypothesis as their “data” for there being no long-term psychological effects from their “tortures”.
So it seems that Jessen and Mitchell not only developed the system, based on their bogus psychological hypotheses (avoiding peer-review) , but were allowed to be the ones to review its efficacy…and to apply it to the victims.
But it gets worse.
Note, OTS solicited info from outside psychologists and academics, and also the JPRA crew.
What about the research of Charles “Andy” Morgan, III, MD, a CIA behavior specialist that studied SERE training pre-9/11?
They knew all about this way before Mitchell and Jessen were ever brought into it. And before 9/11. Before the EIT program, as instituted.
Did OTS read this material or know of it? You bet your bottom dollar they did!
I think Abu Zubaydeh has reported that some sort of device was placed on his fingertips while he was being water boarded, and removed and examined by someone in a white coat. I’m wondering if this was some sort of blood titer analytical device…similar to diabetic tests. Maybe these “psychologists” were collecting similar data. It wasn’t torture…it was some grand experiment! Their “primary purpose” wasn’t to cause pain and suffering…it was scientific knowledge and obtain critical information. Since their “intent” was not to create pain all is allowed.
Gosh…why didn’t Mengele and Eichmann use this defense?
The best analogy is to Hubertus Strughold, the German Nazi aviation medicine scientist at Dachau, who conducted terminal experiments “into the reactions of the human body to low pressure, cold, hypothermia and re-warming using prisoners – many of whom died unnecessarily.”
Strughold never was tried for his crimes, but was brought to the U.S. as part of Operation Paperclip. He ended up at the Air Force’s School of Aviation Medicine (SAM) at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. He helped bring other Nazi scientists over.
Oh, yes. The U.S. has a long history of covert crimes, and protection of war criminals.
Late to the party (Congrats, Mr. Emptywheel).
Somewhat off topic: I haven’t had any time to read any of today’s document dump, but your comment reminded me that, contrary to Operation Paperclip’s bestowing honors on Nazi doctors, the medical profession has begun some retroactive (proactive?) renaming of eponymous diseases previously known by the Nazi doctors who discovered them including Reiter’s syndrome, Wegener’s granulomatosis, and Hallervorden’s Hallervorden-Spatz disease.
see the March 2009 article at Irish Medical Times’ Diseases Should Not Bear Nazi Criminals’ Names http://www.imt.ie/opinion/2009….._nazi.html
And this comment at Chest (an authoritative medical journal for pulmonologists and not a scatalogical mens’ magazine)
This would likely have been a pulse-oximeter (”pulse-ox”) that measures heart-rate and oxygen takeup in the blood. They are used all the time, and if you’re ever in the hospital overnight for even the most minor reasons you will become familiar with the fingerclip. The use of this in waterboarding would be to indicate how much he is suffocating. Say, if the oxygen ratio in his blood went down below a certain percentage, or his pulse went higher than X beats per minute. Now those are some numbers that would shed light on the level of cruelty.
And Jeff, you also write in your linked article the following:
Looking at more psychological than physiological symptoms, one well-known 2001 study in the August 2001 edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry looked at dissociative symptoms, e.g., depersonalization, derealization, psychic or emotional numbing, general cognitive confusion (emphasis added):
The current study was designed to assess the nature and prevalence of dissociative symptoms in healthy humans experiencing acute, uncontrollable stress during U.S. Army survival training. METHOD: In study 1, 94 subjects completed the Clinician-Administered Dissociative States Scale after exposure to the stress of survival training. In study 2, 59 subjects completed the Brief Trauma Questionnaire before acute stress and the dissociative states scale before and after acute stress. A randomly selected group of subjects in study 2 completed a health problems questionnaire after acute stress. RESULTS: In study 1, 96% of subjects reported dissociative symptoms in response to acute stress. Total scores, as well as individual item scores, on the dissociation scale were significantly lower in Special Forces soldiers compared to general infantry troops. In study 2, 42% of subjects reported dissociative symptoms before stress and 96% reported them after acute stress.
96 percent! Well, these statistics are very different from those that appeared to say that less than 2% of SERE subjects had any significant psychological symptoms. It’s all in how you frame it in the research world, and apparently in the legal world as well.
———————————————————-
Producing dissociative states was desired in MKULTRA and other mind control programs. Dissociative Identity Disorder replaced the name, Multiple Personality Disorder in the DSM-III in 1980.
Creating alter personality states and programming those alters to do unspeakable things has been done by the CIA since the advent of Project Paperclip. Project Paperclip was a US program to bring Nazis to universities, hospitals, mental institutions, prisons NASA and the military to experiment with mind control. (They also worked on rockets and did “research” on children with radiation.)
The value in creating dissociative states – multiple personalities – is that these altered states can carry out unspeakable things and then be walled off from the consciousness of the person BY TORTURE.
Many false confessions have been created. Many awful things have been done by people whose personalities have altered by extreme stress. On a command, a person with DID can move from one state to another and have no memory of it.
Think of it. SERE training produced dissociative symptoms in 96 per cent of soldiers who went through it. Imagine if their training was NOT done by trusted personnel who would give them time to fully recover from those dissociated states.
From page 29:
A few takeaways here:
1. The Vaughn index (17 page PDF) submitted by the CIA to Judge Hellerstein purporting to show this communication shows none of these “cables, e-mail…” from HQTRS to FIELD from April 13, 2002 until May 28, 2002, and then only 1 single fookin’ cable from HQTRS until January 9, 2003! So where’s the fookin’ cables CIA? And why did you lie to Judge Hellerstein?
2. And this one throws me: “Agency management did not require those involved in interrogations…to comply with the guidance provided.”
3. And does this “Nor did the Agency maintain a comprehensive record of individuals who had been briefed on interrogation procedures…” mean the CIA has no record of who they briefed including Nancy Pelosi as she has claimed? I think it does.
Page 51 section 95. Anyone want to bet the contract interrogator threatened to crush KSM’s kid’s testicles?
Also:
As a guess, the claim goes like this:
Under the convention, torture may not be justified by exigent circumstances. “No exceptional circumstances, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability, or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” But cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment is not torture. Thus the Convention gives the green light (even though we must undertake to prevent it).
It’s pretty fucked up.
I think the dismissing the amendments logic might come from Alan Dershowitz 2002.
That would be absolutely absurd logic since the United States made the explicit statement that it would interpret the phrasing of the Convention on Torture as being identical to the terms ‘cruel and unusual” in the US Constitution, and “inhumane” under US Law. The Executive Branch was asked to clarify this before Senate Ratification.
And Yoo’s interpretation that the 5th Amendment only applies “to individuals upon whom criminal sanctions have already been applied.” Wouldn’t that essentially strip away every right the Amendment actually is supposed to protect. Under Yoo only convicted criminals could plead the 5th. Maybe he also holds that habeas corpus also applies only to the convicted, thus allowing people to be “disappeared”?
The Supreme’s (even Scalia and Thomas) have pretty much repudiated the legal logic of Yoo on these issues…he couldn’t even get the support of the Justice he formerly clerked for.
Cripes. I just scrolled to a random spot and I found something decidedly troubling.
Page 83, paragraph 205:
Then the next paragraph:
So. They didn’t know fuck-all what the detainees should know, so they just assumed that they knew everything, and therefore if they didn’t give up every last iota of information we thought they might know, they must be holding back and we must torture them some more.
I’m not sure what’s more astounding, the evil or the incompetence.
(BTW, I hope someone’s working on a more careful scanning of the document? All the tiltiness is making it necessary to retype everything; I’m sure I made a few embarrassing typos above.)
On the bit about threatening KSM’s children on page 51, there are three instances where a long word just before “interrogators” is redacted. The paragraph begins by stating that an experienced Agency interrogator is reporting the activity. The spacing for the word before “interrogators” sure looks like “Blackwater” would be perfect fit. Is this a CIA career person turning in Blackwater thugs?
Until they prove otherwise I assume Blackwater had the contract to provide the “2 week wonder” interrogators. It would be completely out of character for Eric Prince to leave that kind of money, and remember money was no object to the CIA according to employees of Jeppesen Dataplan, on the table.
Blackwater does not fit according to font and page dimensions.
I’m thinking it’s “Jessen-Mitchell Associates”….”Blackwater” is way too small.
The Windy has some of the other docs up here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/19050610/Appendices
From pages 34-35:
My guess is that the first and third redactions in the quoted sections are for the word “Contract” or “Contractor”.
I guess the CIA is unwilling as of yet to definitively admit that Contractors were running the show.
Footnote 6 An interrogator may debrief a detainee. A debreifer may not interroggate a detainee. It follows that an interrogator can tell people what the detainee has supposedly said to him under interrogation and it becomes true. That’s what in less unpleasant circumstances in the UK we used to call “verballing”.
Watch out for this line of reasoning, from one of the appendices (I don’t understand the numbering, but the page has “101-4″ scrawled on the lower-right; it’s page 26/33 in the Scribd upload):
So, we nabbed these guys that these other guys said were going to do this stuff. Therefore that stuff was most definitely going to happen, and we most definitely prevented it by making the arrests.
I’d bet good money that we’ll be seeing Cheney invoking precisely such circularities when he cites what he wanted declassified.
Just in case you need it. Here’s the link to the report also from the ACLU.
http://www.aclu.org/oigreport/
Aha! You can actually copy and paste from that one (and get something resembling English-language text). Thanks!
JT thomason has a great comment downstairs that should not go epu;
that’s the problem and we have all neglected it, that the fact that bush hired depraved lawyers to just make shit up and that protects them
there are some new legal opinions just released also.
http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/whatsnew.htm
Interesting. Withdrawl of a July 20, 2007 Bradbury opinion.
Looks like they’re cleaning out the outboxes in the OLC.
haha! yeah. It’s just a big document dump today.
Thanks. Some good stuff there.
As it appears there is no interest in a complete criminal investigation, I believe it yet remains possible for civil litigation using RICO to pursue accountability by Yoo, Bybee, Rumsfeld, et al.
Some folks may recall the civil RICO lawsuit back in the 80s on behalf of a reporter, which was undertaken in the effort to find and hold responsible parties in the Reagan administration believed to have been involved in orchestrating a bombing in Nicaragua which caused injury to the reporter. That particular suit ultimately failed due to mistaken beliefs by plaintiffs about identity of the actual bomber(s). But in the abstract, as a legal vehicle, it was a viable mechanism to gain some measure of accountability.
It seems like a large part of their argument for need of these techniques is this “resistance” as they describe KSH as “an accomplished resistor”. For me this is one area where the house of cards falls. They do not describe or define this “resistance program” and it seems to me that since this is used as the MO for the whole mess, someone might have asked them to define exactly what this “resistance” is exactly and how it is defined. Without a structured definition this MO for torture could have been completely based on the notion that: “We know they know something because we think they do. In fact, we have a ‘feeling’ that they are resisting.”
Also they completely undo the ticking time bomb scenario because it’s clear that they had to corroborate all information with other sources before they could rely upon it. Hello?? This technique works and often does not require torture, but it IS time consuming.
I have to go shower…ugh.
Semi-O/T derivative posting:
Not to draw anyone away from the important work, but I took the comment @5 into a diary at dKos. I think the fact that the IG is calling strangulation a “pressure point” belies the nature of this document:
CIA work product whitewash. We need new investigations, starting from scratch.
A shocking conclusion!!
Best be careful drat, else you are going to end up a member of the pricky cynics club…..
at least I’d have you and Mary to go drinking with. Porcupine convention.
Well, we’re good drinking company.
It was definitely a gentle wash. But remember, Dick had his shot at Helgerson before it was published.
Shot him afterwards too. Also neutered the office.
In the PDF links containing the appendixes (D and E in particular), there is an authority that remains blacked out. Strange.
For example:
“…each CIA officer participating in the questioning of individuals detained pursuant to [blacked out]” has been provided with a copy of the ‘Guidelines Interrogation Conducted Pursuant [blacked out]”, and
“These Guidelines address the conduct of interrogations of persons who are detained pursuant to the authorities set forth in [big hairy blacked out section]”
Maybe its just some weird CIA thing about disclosing authorities. But that would be a bit ironic, wouldn’t it?
No, I think it’s important. It says that thew hole torture program was based on some other authority that may have (and given some of the other redactions, presumes to have been claimed to have) made the OLC memos irrelevant. It’s still all that Article 2 bullshit.
And where is this document??
In the appendices of the IG Report.
Ah, so it is. Still doesn’t do much for me substance wise, but that does look to be the document.
My guess for the lack of cables in late 2002 and some of the missing transcripts and destruction of the tapes has to do with ginning up a war with Iraq…and that al-Qaeda got the numbnuts in the Bush Administration to expend a lot of cash, diplomatic goodwill, dead and wounded in Iraq. Basically, it’s a cover your ass move for having lead the country into a pre-emptive war on false pretenses…a war crime of the first order, preceding from a regime of torture and leading to hundreds of thousands of civilians displaced, killed, or maimed in Iraq and Afganistan. It’s a world that can best be described as broken.
Majid Khan is the brother of Mohammed Khan, who was at one point the cellmate of KSMs 7 and 9 year old sons. His father, Ali Khan, stated in a letter/affidavit that the boys had been, according to Mohammed Khan, tortured using food and water deprivation, and using insects on the boys’ legs. The boys have been disappeared since 2003, when the CIA acknowledged they had them. We don’t know whether the boys are even alive or dead.
Standing with you, as always, for justice and accountability,
For Dan,
Heather
Marcy,
It was an honour, privilege and pleasure to meet you at NN09.
Yes, unless it is the first step, which I am highly sceptical of, the torture investigation that Eric Holder has ordered will be a whitewash, and the CIA officers investigated/prosecuted will be scapegoats.
Standing with you, as always, for justice and accountability,
For Dan,
Heather
What does DO stand for?
“Directorate of Operations”
As in, agency-employed spies and covert operators.
Is there a citation for where/when the AG acknowledges this? This would be AG Ashcroft.
You mean in the IG Report, or in general?
In general. The GC asserts that the AG has explicitly made a broad interpretation of the DoJ opinion. I.e. AG has been officially asked for an opinion on the subject, and responded. Surely that documentation should be available from the GC. It’s redacted version might look like pp. 47-51 of the IG Report, but it should exist.
Helgerson has issued a statement:
http://voices.washingtonpost.c…..e_rel.html
It’s interesting watching the news sources reveal that we “threatened” children with death, without ever going for the follow up “however, KSM’s children are alive and well in …”
If this was a mafia case and the claim was that the mafia had custody of a “detainee’s” children and threatened to kill them, you’d think that at some point someone would ask “hey, what DID happen to those kids” Someone – maybe. MSM – notsomuch.
Hope this is not a dupe.
Ex-Gitmo inmates ask Supreme Court to declare them ‘persons’
BY STEPHEN C. WEBSTER Published: August 24, 2009 Updated 4 hours ago
“Attorneys for four prior Guantánamo Bay prisoners have filed a second petition with the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking a review of a lower court’s decision that foreign nationals held in the prison not “persons” and have no Constitutional rights.”
More.
Dems Urge Holder To Allow Torture Probe To Go Further
By Zachary Roth – August 24, 2009, 4:11PM
“Some top Democrats are expressing disappointment with Eric Holder’s announcement of a probe into Bush-era torture, and specifically with Holder’s apparent decision to ensure the probe doesn’t look at the Bush officials who authorized the policy.
“In just-released statements, Reps John Conyers and Jerry Nadler of the House Judiciary committee applaud the decision to probe torture, but add that “it would not be fair or just for frontline personnel to be held accountable while the policymakers and lawyers escape scrutiny after creating and approving conditions where such abuses were all but inevitable to occur.”
“Sen Russ Feingold agrees. His statement says, in full:”
More.
Eric Holder announces investigation based on Abu Ghraib model
MONDAY AUG. 24, 2009 15:25 EDT
Glenn Greenwald
“Attorney General Eric Holder today confirmed what has been suspected for many weeks: he has ordered what he calls “a preliminary review into whether federal laws were violated in connection with the interrogation of specific detainees at overseas locations.” Holder’s decision does not amount to the appointment of a Special Prosecutor, since a preliminary review is used, as he emphasized, “to gather information to determine whether there is sufficient predication to warrant a full investigation of a matter.” More important, the scope of the “review” is limited at the outset to those who failed to “act in good faith and within the scope of legal guidance” — meaning only those interrogators and other officials who exceeded the torture limits which John Yoo and Jay Bybee approved. Those who, with good faith, tortured within the limits of the OLC memos will “be protected from legal jeopardy” (the full Holder statement is here).”
More.
Much to say, and only half way through a detailed reading of the IG report (I skipped ahead and read the OMG guidelines at end, too)
Marcy, you’re right. The inclusion of OTS (Office of Technical Services) working with CTC is very important. It also speaks to a possible double narrative in the IG report. On one hand, CTC w/assistance of OTS proposes “certain more coercive physical techniques” for use on AZ. The other narrative has some unnamed person or dept at CIA going to the SERE psychologist (Mitchell) with the AQ manual proposal. Note, still, no indication why Mitchell and Jessen would turn that into a prospectus for torture. And why Mitchell? Why go to him of all people?
The OTS link is very significant. Formerly known as the Technical Services Division (TSD or TSS), it was the department for, among other things, running MKULTRA. Also making exploding cigars for Castro.
For the record, and to get the snooping going, the Director of TSD from 95-03 was Robert Wallace. Like Roger Aldrich, who I’ve written was a key link between Mitchell and the CIA boys, Wallace is another individual we haven’t heard about. Get used to it. There’s a lot we don’t know, and this report has some huge gaps… not least the 3pg redaction.
It was OTS analysis that was used by OGC in evaluating the legality of techniques. OMS complains they weren’t consulted early on. So… it was OTS, the blackest of the black holes at CIA from which the EITs emerged, verifying what I have said and thought for some time: this was a black op from the get-go, not just an interrogation program gone wild. We must approach this as one approached understanding of MKULTRA. It was deep, it was multi-national (links with the Brits and, most likely, Israelis, and others possibly, maybe Canada? — I’m not talking the renditions here).
Notice, too, the footnote #6 on interrogation v. debriefing. They admit the terms were sloppily interchanged early on, as were probably the functions. This gives greater weight to my finding on early use of SERE and Special Ops psychologists for debriefing of “targets of opportunity” pre-9/11.
BTW, among the document/news dump today is the recommendation by Obama’s Interrogation Task Force to keep rendition and use the abusive Army Field Manual (rewritten under Cambone’s supervision) as the centerpiece of interrogation, reserving a special interrogation unit for high-value prisoners, and of course, more “research” into interrogations. The pro-National Security psychologists of the Intelligence Science Board are licking their chops.
More to say later……
I left one sentence incomplete. The 3pg redaction to which I referred was in the section introduced re CTC’s 11/02 initiation of training courses on interrogation. Now, what would they want us not to know about their training courses. Maybe, who ran them? What exactly was taught?
Another, similarly long redaction follows almost immediately on the conditions of confinement for CIA prisoners.
this makes ’sorta’ sense to me, the redacted training details. anyone could make the argument (however lamely) that it gives this info over to our enemies.
but still, that info is critical for knowing what level of interrogation was built into the basic training and how much training included adherence to US laws and geneva conventions, etc. shame they’ll hide behind the national security curtain for that one.
Yep…if one really believes that the Torture Convention allows torture in exigent circumstances (like war) then they can never be used as a basis for War Crimes. In fact, in Yoo-vian logic, not only do the Torture Convention’s not work in war, or national emergencies (threats of revolution, rioting, a hurricane) but it seems to mandate its use.
.. (starvation that doesn’t cause death)
[provided it doesn’t cause deafness],
[presumably destinged scorpions or those that didn’t reach Yoovian levels of “harm”~ threat to life or permanent maiming- would be acceptable]
“.
ll of these would be legal in the United States…no Federal statute or law prevents their use…even on persons that are not under arrest.
ho boy. overwhelming, yet nothing new, if that makes any sense.
really outraged over p. 13 and the contractor psych stuff. i want the apa to release the names of all the members of their interrogation task force. i know the name of the chair who (a) forbade the taking of notes and (b) failed to disclose that majority of task force members were military. she’s licensed in MA and i would dearly love to file a complaint with our professional board.
any further suggestions from out there?
just curious, but is it not reasonable to consider that this narrow approach might actually serve to encourage congress to do its job in launching a full throttle investigation? given obama’s express disinclination to play emperor like bush did in cleaning up bush’s mess, and his further express preference to lead according to article 2 and not by decree, leaving the yeoman’s work to the congress (i.e., voice of the people), could this be interpreted as actually consistent?
just asking? i’m in truth getting pretty fed up but still want to ask these questions along the way. i do confess, tho, that i don’t like the results that come from a cleanup cowboy approach to this, or anything else, for that matter, preferring to see this played out openly in congressional hearings much more akin to the watergate hearings.
that was such an inspirational time. democracy in action. what we’re watching now is the open obstruction of our democratic process by the republicans, while obama appears to wish to retain a respectful demeanor to these thugs. not a patsy indeed.
I put up a diary discussing the KSM children.
This was under voluntary conditions, of short duration, unrepeated, by healthy and athletic young men, with helpful and encouraging comrades. Imagine its effect on a 40 year old, out of shape, beat-up, hungry, deaf, depressed man, with no friends in the room. I wonder if KSM or AZ set new records for the levels of the stress hormones?
Measuring the levels of stress hormones might be an “objective” or “scientific” or at least independent basis for the claim that KSM or others had techniques to resist torture. But I thought the basis for the hypothesis of waterboard resistance was that Chalabi had already told Cheney what they would know – is that right? That doesn’t seem right. Where does the hypothesis of waterboard resistance come from? Don’t tell me it came from the subjective impressions of those doing the waterboarding? Like, they say to themselves, this is really awful and he still isn’t spilling the beans? Surely the subjective opinions of the people doing the waterboarding cannot be scientifically valid…?
p. 30, footnote 33,
This is somewhat inconsistent with the 10 May 2005 memo. Your post “264 Hours of Sleep Deprivation” discusses related issues.
Bradbury’s July 20, 2007 memo has accepted 48 hours of sleep deprivation as allowable.
Hallucinations are relatively common after 48 hours of sleep deprivation, so any intelligence extracted from a detainee kept awake for more than 48 hours would be beyond questionable.
That should be 96 hours, not 48, in both paragraphs.