American Torture

April 30, 2004... and now where are we?

2008-05-14T22:55:00.003-05:00

If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power.

The quote above is from U.S. psychology pioneer Carl Rogers. It is worth pondering his statement as we consider both recent developments in the fight against U.S. torture, and more general considerations about the role of psychologists, physicians, and other scientific and medical personnel in interrogations for Bush's "War on Terror."

I was reading the New York Times's article on the decision by the "Convening Authority" at Guantanamo to drop all charges "without prejudice" against purported sixth 9/11 Al Qaeda hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani, when my attention was drawn to an ad from the CIA trumpeting the announcement that they were seeking applicants for "National Clandestine Service Careers." A few clicks later, curious to see what they were offering for my own profession (not that I wish to apply), I found a number of positions open. Here's one that caught my eye:

Operational Psychologist
Work Schedule: Full Time
Salary: $82,961 – $127,442
Location: Washington, DC metropolitan area

Responsible for providing behavioral science consultancy to the Intelligence Community, the major activities involved in this role include psychological testing and behavioral assessment; customized training/consultation on topics related to cross-cultural personality assessment; and applied research.

"Applied research." "Cross-cultural personality assessment." Perhaps it was the sort of job that Major John Leso, psychologist at Guantanamo in late 2002-early 2003, had applied for, only to find himself present at the 54-day interrogation of Mr. al-Qahtani, otherwise known as Detainee 063. As Philippe Sands explains in his recent must-read article at Vanity Fair, "The Green Light", Mr. al-Qahtani had the unusual luck to have his interrogation log publicly leaked, detailing the torture -- which included 15 of 18 torture techniques, then under special approval of then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -- he underwent, in part under the participation of psychologist Leso.

No one knows for sure, as the "Convening Authority" is under no statutory obligation to explain herself, but it seems likely that al-Qahtani was dropped from Bush's projected show trials of other selected detainees, projected to begin sometime next year, because the evidence on him included large amounts of material produced through torture. There is no way the government can suppress this evidence by citing state secrecy, as the interrogation log is now public record, thanks to an anonymous leaker. Portions have already been published at Time Magazine. The full log is available at Center for Constitutional Rights.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon and the Bush Administration is preparing to try five other "high-profile" Guantanamo inmates at its dubious military commission hearings, as it seeks the death penalty for all five. One of the five is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the accused "mastermind" of the 9/11 attacks, who was admittedly waterboarded by CIA torturers during his interrogation. The videotape evidence of this was destroyed, leading to a brouhaha in the press and increased Congressional scrutiny.

Legal Experts Take on Bush/Cheney's Legal Team

Some of that Congressional interest was displayed at hearings on May 6 before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee, looking at Bush Administration lawyers and the development of Administration interrogation rules over the past six years. Much of this history is already available in Philippe Sands' article cited above. Mr. Sands, a professor at University College London, was one of three prominent legal authorities to testify at the hearings (transcript courtesy of AfterDowningStreet.org):

Mr Chairman, Honourable Members of the Committee, the story I uncovered is an unhappy one. It points to the early and direct involvement of those at the highest levels of government, often through their lawyers, the individuals on whom I largely focused. In June 2004, after the scandal of Abu Ghraib broke, and the August 1, 2002 Bybee Torture Memo became public, Mr Gonzalez and Mr Haynes appeared before the media to claim that the Bush Administration had not authorized such abuse. Contrary to the impression given by the Administration, repeated by Mr Haynes when he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2006, his involvement (and that of Secretary Rumsfeld) began well before that stated in the official version. Mr. Haynes had visited Guantanamo, together with Mr Gonzales and Mr Addington, discussed interrogations, and then recommended that the U.S. military abandon its tradition of restraint. My conclusion, on the basis of interviews and documents, is that this is a story not only of crime but also of cover-up, to protect the most senior members of the Administration from the consequences of the illegality that has stained America’s reputation.

Also speaking at the hearing was Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild, who has recently called for the firing of University of California law professor John Yoo, who is heavily implicated in giving legal cover for Bush's torture plans. Ms. Cohn spoke very precisely about the legal gyrations of Bush administration lawyers as they sought refuge from legal accountability for the deliberate breaking of torture laws both national and international. What follows is an edited version of her testimony:

What does torture have in common with genocide, slavery, and wars of aggression? They are all jus cogens. Jus cogens is Latin for "higher law" or "compelling law." This means that no country can ever pass a law that allows torture. There can be no immunity from criminal liability for violation of a jus cogens prohibition. [emphasis added]

The United States has always prohibited the use of torture in our Constitution, laws executive statements and judicial decisions....

The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, says, "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture."

Whether someone is a POW or not, he must always be treated humanely; there are no gaps in the Geneva Conventions. He must be protected against torture, mutilation, cruel treatment, and outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating and degrading treatment under, Common Article 3....

The US War Crimes Act, and 18 USC sections 818 and 3231, punish torture, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and inhuman, humiliating or degrading treatment.

The Torture Statute provides for life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies, for anyone who commits, attempts, or conspires to commit torture outside the United States....

In Filartiga v. Peña-Irala, the Second Circuit declared the prohibition against torture is universal, obligatory, specific and definable. Since then, every U.S. circuit court has reaffirmed that torture violates universal and customary international law. In the Paquete Habana, the Supreme Court held that customary international law is part of U.S. law....

Yet on February 7, 2002, President Bush, relying on memos by lawyers including John Yoo, announced that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to alleged Taliban and Al Qaeda members....

Lawyers in the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote memos at the request of high-ranking government officials in order to insulate them from future prosecution for subjecting detainees to torture....

The [United Nations] Torture Convention defines torture as the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering. The U.S. attached an "understanding" to its ratification of the Torture Convention, which added the requirement that the torturer "specifically" intend to inflict the severe physical or mental pain or suffering. This is a distinction without a difference for three reasons. First, under well-established principles of criminal law, a person specifically intends to cause a result when he either consciously desires that result or when he knows the result is practically certain to follow. Second, unlike a "reservation" to a treaty provision, an "understanding" cannot change an international legal obligation. Third, under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, an "understanding" that violates the object and purpose of a treaty is void. The claim that treatment of prisoners which would amount to torture under the Torture Convention does not constitute torture under the U.S. "understanding" violates the object and purpose of the Convention, which is to ensure that "no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment"....

Nevertheless, Yoo twisted the law and redefined torture much more narrowly than the definitions in the Convention Against Torture and the Torture Statute. Under Yoo's definition, the victim must experience intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result.

Attorney David Luban, a Georgetown law professor, and the third expert to speak at the committee hearing, zeroed in on White House legal counsels' terrible twisting of the meaning of pain and suffering under torture:

...as I mentioned earlier, [John Yoo] wrenches language from a Medicare statute to explain the legal definition of torture. The Medicare statute lists severe pain as a possible symptom of a medical emergency, and Mr. Yoo flips the statute and uses the language of medical emergency to define severe pain. This was so bizarre that the OLC itself disowned his definition a few months after it became public. It is highly unusual for one OLC opinion to disown an earlier one, and it shows just how far out of the mainstream Mr. Yoo had wandered. This goes beyond the ethical limits for a legal advisor. In fact, even in the courtroom there are limits to spinning the law: ethics rules forbid advocates from making frivolous legal arguments, or failing to disclose adverse legal authority. But it would be a mistake to focus only on Mr. Yoo. Mr. Levin’s replacement memo also takes liberties with the law. In particular, when the Levin Memo discusses the term “severe physical suffering” (which is part of the statutory definition of torture), it states that the suffering must “prolonged” to be severe – and that requirement simply isn’t in the statute at all. Under that definition, of course, waterboarding would not be torture because people break within seconds or minutes. This is a perfect example of a legalistic definition that looks inconspicuous but in reality narrows the definition of torture dramatically. Notice that the quicker a technique breaks the interrogation subject, the less prolonged his suffering will be – so the harsher the tactic, the less likely it is to qualify as “torture.”

I wonder if any CIA psychologist wannabes were watching the House committee testimony on C-Span. Perhaps they will have to sign a waiver releasing the Agency from liability if they are later found prosecutable for war crimes. One never knows.

Torture and Civil Society

Among those who are fighting to remove psychologists from government interrogations at Guantanamo and other "war on terror" prison sites (including CIA secret torture prisons), there is some recent hope that the tide is turning in the struggle against the ossified bureaucratic apparatus of the American Psychological Association. Steven Reisner got a plurality of votes in the first round of voting for APA president. Even more, a petition to essentially remove psychologists from operational roles at national security interrogations has gained over 800 signatures thus far.

About 950 signatures, or about 1% of the total APA membership, is needed to move the petition along to the next stage in the overly onerous process of delivering a vote on participation in interrogations to the overall APA membership. Along the way, supporters must survive vetting of the measure by both the APA president and the APA Council of Representatives. I believe the petition supporters are hoping that political pressures within and without the organization will help push it through. Meanwhile, APA leadership is planning to once again "discuss" the interrogations "issue" at its annual conference this August, hoping, no doubt, to talk their opponents into oblivion, or at least to a standstill, as they await marching orders from their bosses in Washington, DC and/or Langley.

We are too close and embroiled in the struggle against state-sponsored torture to get a complete perspective on just how compromised major portions of U.S. civil society has become. But things are not exactly looking promising at the moment. The quote from Dr. Rogers that opened this essay was written over forty years ago. A generation has come and gone, and the same problems remain. Note Rogers' emphasis: "If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science..." Scientists and attorneys, doctors and soldiers, if one is only concerned with advancing their profession, then professional parochialism is surely the prelude to societal dissolution.

Dr. Steven Miles, whose book Oath Betrayed documents the complicity of medical doctors and personnel in torture and abuse at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, among other prison sites, is fond of noting that over four years after the revelations of the sickening, criminal abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib was made public on April 30, 2004, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) "maintains continuous editorial silence on medical complicity with human rights abuses in US war on terror prisons." Meanwhile, the American Psychological Association maintains the fiction that psychologists are at Guantanamo, for example, in order to make interrogations "safe" for the detainees.

Slowly, achingly, you can feel the decent core of society straining to lift the crimes of torture and aggressive war off its bowed shoulders, like a modern Atlas struggling to raise the world up, while bureaucrats, military and intelligence hawks, crooked politicians, careerist attorneys, war profiteers, and oblivious medical and psychological personnel careen over themselves to pull it down. Will they succeed? And which "they" do you identify with?

Also posted at Invictus

Guantánamo: Torture victim Binyam Mohamed sues British government for evidence

2008-05-10T17:06:00.006-05:00

As published on the website of Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison.

On Tuesday, Binyam Mohamed, a 29-year old British resident in Guantánamo, sued the British government for refusing to produce evidence which, his lawyers contend, would demonstrate that he was tortured for 27 months by or on behalf of US forces in Morocco and Afghanistan, that any “evidence” against him was only obtained through torture, and that the British government and intelligence services knew about his torture and provided personal information about him -- unrelated to terrorism -- that was used by the Americans’ proxy torturers in Morocco.

They insist, moreover, that his case is an urgent priority, because he is about to be charged before a Military Commission in Guantánamo -- the much-criticized system of trials for “terror suspects” that was conceived by the US administration in November 2001 -- and they desperately need the exculpatory evidence in the possession of the British government to assist in his defence, and to prove his innocence.

Binyam’s torture

A refugee from Ethiopia, who arrived in the UK in 1994 and was later granted indefinite leave to remain, Binyam Mohamed was working as a cleaner in an Islamic Centre in west London in 2001, and attempting to recover from a drug problem, when he decided to travel to Afghanistan to see what the Taliban regime was like, and, he hoped, to steer clear of drugs because of the Taliban’s reputation as fierce opponents of drug use.

He came to the attention of both the American and British intelligence services in April 2002, when he was seized by the Pakistani authorities as he tried to board a flight to London. Although he had a valid airline ticket, his passport had been stolen, and, rather foolishly, he had borrowed a British friend’s passport instead.

In the heightened tension in Pakistan at the time -- just days after Abu Zubaydah, an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, was captured in Faisalabad -- Binyam was immediately regarded with enormous suspicion by the American agents who visited him in the Pakistan prison in which he was held.

Although he later reported to his lawyer -- Clive Stafford Smith of the legal action charity Reprieve, which represents 35 prisoners in Guantánamo -- that the British checked out his story, and confirmed that he was a “nobody,” the Americans were not convinced, and decided to send him to Morocco, where he could be interrogated by professional torturers who were not bothered about international treaties preventing the use of torture, and who were equally unconcerned about whether evidence of their activities would ever surface.

Speaking of his time in Morocco, where he was held for 18 months, Binyam told Stafford Smith that he was subjected to horrendous torture, which, included, but was not limited to having his penis cut with a razor on a regular basis. In spite of this, the regular beatings and other torture that he did not even want to talk about, Binyam said that his lowest moment of all came when his torturers produced evidence of his life in London, which could only have come from the British intelligence services, and he realized that he had been abandoned and betrayed by his adopted homeland.

After Morocco, Binyam was transferred to Afghanistan, where he endured further torture in the “Dark Prison,” a secret “black site” near Kabul, run by the CIA, which was a grim recreation of a medieval dungeon, but with the addition of non-stop music and noise, blasted into the pitch-dark cells at an ear-piercing volume.

Moved from here to the main US prison at Bagram airbase, where at least two prisoners were murdered by US forces, Binyam was finally put on a plane to Guantánamo in September 2004, two and a half years after his ordeal began.

In Guantánamo, he was put forward for a Military Commission in November 2005, and made one memorable appearance before the military court, when he held up a hand-written placard declaring that the Commissions were in fact “Con-Missions,” but in June 2006 the judge in his case was spared further embarrassment when the entire system was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Revived later that year by a barely sentient Congress, the trials have since struggled to establish their legitimacy, and have yet to proceed beyond arraignment and pre-trial proceedings, with the exception of the case of the Australian David Hicks, who accepted a plea bargain last March in order to return home to serve a desultory nine-month sentence.

In recent months, however, the administration, which boldly states that it intends to try between 60 and 80 of the remaining 273 prisoners, has stepped up the rate at which new prisoners are being charged. In an attempt to save Binyam from a second dose of the Commissions, his lawyers at Reprieve, together with solicitors from Leigh Day & Co., decided that the most constructive and innovative way to secure Binyam’s release was to put pressure on the British government.

The letter to the UK government

Armed with evidence from flight logs, which confirmed that CIA planes had flown from Pakistan to Morocco in July 2002, and from Morocco to Afghanistan in January 2004, as Binyam said they had, and with numerous accounts of British complicity in his interrogations, and knowledge of his rendition to torture, the lawyers submitted a list of requests to David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, at the end of March.

The extensive list of items requested included any evidence relating to UK knowledge of Binyam’s forthcoming rendition while he was held in Pakistan from April to July 2002, including “the identity of the US agents involved, so that they can be traced and interviewed or subpoenaed,” and any evidence relating to Binyam’s claim that representatives of the British intelligence services told him in Pakistan that they knew that he was a “nobody,” which, the lawyers stated, led them to “assume that the UK intelligence services and police have carried out investigations in to Mr. Mohamed’s activities whilst in the UK.” “We believe,” they added, “that such evidence will show that he does not represent a terrorist threat,” and that as such “it forms a necessary part of his defence.”

The lawyers also asked “to interview and take statements from the UK agents who (it is conceded) spoke to Mr. Mohamed whilst he was detained in Pakistan,” and who, Binyam stated, “informed him that he was going to be rendered to an Arab country for torture.” In December 2005, Jack Straw, who was the Foreign Secretary at the time, did indeed admit, in testimony to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, that UK Security Service officers visited Binyam while he was in Pakistani custody, and Binyam’s recollections of that encounter were noted by Clive Stafford Smith during a meeting at Guantánamo:

“They gave me a cup of tea with a lot of sugar in it. I initially only took one. ‘No, you need a lot more. Where you’re going, you need a lot of sugar.’ I didn’t know exactly what he meant by this, but I figured he meant some poor country in Arabia. One of them did tell me I was going to get tortured by the Arabs.”

As Binyam’s lawyers pointed out, “Such evidence will be central to the defence of Mr. Mohamed because any evidence obtained as a result of torture is inadmissible.”

The lawyers also requested “information about Mr. Mohamed’s life in the United Kingdom that could only have come from UK intelligence agencies or other government sources,” which, as Binyam pointed out, caused him particular distress in Morocco, when it was used by his torturers. According to Stafford Smith, this information included “personal details about his life in the UK, such as details of his education, the name of his kick-boxing trainer and his friendships in London, which he had never mentioned during interrogations, and that could only have originated from collusion in the process by the UK security or secret intelligence services.”

In addition, the lawyers requested any evidence about rendition flights that stopped on the British territory of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean (which is leased to the United States). After five years of denials, the British government finally admitted in February that two flights had indeed stopped at Diego Garcia, and Binyam’s lawyers requested information about these flights, pointing out that one of the flights had “subsequently stopped in Morocco at the time that Mr. Mohamed was there,” and that it was, therefore, “almost certainly (a) taking another prisoner to Morocco for torture; or (b) taking US personnel there who were involved in Mr. Mohamed’s interrogation process.”

The lawyers also requested any evidence relating to Binyam’s time in the “Dark Prison” in Kabul, where, they noted, “it seems highly probable that the UK government has details of the conditions that prevailed there,” because various British residents -- including Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, who returned to the UK from Guantánamo last year -- were also held there, and any evidence relating to Binyam’s time in Bagram, where other British prisoners were also held.

The lawyers’ final request was for access to Binyam’s medical records from Guantánamo. They noted that these were “relevant to the question of torture, and Mr. Mohamed’s current physical and mental condition,” and added that, although the Guantánamo authorities have given the UK government access to Binyam’s records, they have refused to provide them to Stafford Smith. “The UK should provide a copy now,” they wrote, “or provide whatever information or documents they have recording the contents of the medical records.”

The lawsuit

The lawsuit filed on Tuesday by Reprieve and Leigh Day & Co. was triggered when lawyers for the government responded to the letter described above by refusing to hand over any of the evidence requested by Binyam’s lawyers, claiming that “the UK is under no obligation under international law to assist foreign courts and tribunals in assuring that torture evidence is not admitted,” and adding, “it is HM Government’s position that … evidence held by the UK government that US and Moroccan authorities engaged in torture or rendition cannot be obtained” by Binyam’s lawyers.

The government lawyers proceeded to claim that Binyam’s lawyers did not “provide any evidence” to support their assertion that “such alleged information or assistance ‘was subsequently used in the torture of [Mr. Mohamed],’” to which Reprieve and Leigh Day responded by pointing out that Binyam’s allegation that UK sources provided information to his torturers in Morocco was “found credible” by the Intelligence and Security Committee (IRC), a committee established in the UK Intelligence Services Act 1994, and empowered to examine the expenditure, administration and policies of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Binyam’s lawyers pointed out that the government had ignored the conclusion of the IRC’s Rendition Report in 2007, when the committee had explicitly stated, “There is a reasonable probability that intelligence passed to the Americans was used in [Binyam Mohamed]’s subsequent [Moroccan] interrogation.”

They also cited the particular passage from Binyam’s statement to Clive Stafford Smith, in which he spoke about the interrogation in Morocco that contained information that could only have come from the British intelligence services:

“Today I was questioned about my links with Britain. The interrogator told me, ‘We have been working with the British, and we have photos of people given to us by MI5. Do you know these?’ I realized that the British were sending questions to the Moroccans. I was at first surprised that the Brits were siding with the Americans. I sought asylum in Britain rather than America because it’s known as the one country that has laws that it follows. To say that I was disappointed at this moment would be an understatement.”

It remains to be seen, of course, if this novel approach taken by Binyam’s lawyers will bear fruit, but it seems plausible, as it is hardly in the interests of the British government to run the risk of further embarrassing disclosures. The lawsuit may, therefore, put pressure on the politicians to step up their efforts to secure Binyam’s return to Britain -- to face charges in the UK, if any can be found that will stick to the “nobody” from west London -- rather than to allow him to be tried in a much-criticized system in Guantánamo that threatens to embarrass both the British and the American governments.

Psychologist "Swat Team" Serves Bush's Torture Gulag

2008-05-08T23:17:00.001-05:00

Dr. Alan E. Kazdin, current president of the American Psychological Association, in a new column in the APA Monitor, brags that APA lobbyists are a vertable "swat team" in support of government dollars for scientific research. Much of that money funds the work of psychologists "in support of homeland security after 9/11", "psychological research within the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense", and the "special relevance of psychological science on... counter-terrorism" research, among other items.

It is surely cosmic irony that places Dr. Kazdin's article in contrast to new revelations from the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. government documenting "the role of psychologists in military interrogations."

"The documents reveal that psychologists and medical personnel played a key role in sustaining prisoner abuse — a clear violation of their ethical and legal obligations," said Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU. "The documents only underscore the need for an independent investigation into responsibility for the systemic abuse of detainees held in U.S. custody abroad."

In 2006, the ACLU received a highly redacted version of the Church Report, which was commissioned by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a comprehensive review of military interrogation operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay based on 187 investigations into detainee abuse that had been closed as of September 30, 2004. The report did not analyze information relating to 130 abuse cases that remained open as of that date, and issues of senior official responsibility for detainee abuse were beyond its mandate. Written by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, the report skirts the question of command responsibility for detainee abuse, euphemistically labeling official failure to issue interrogation guidelines for Iraq and Afghanistan as a "missed opportunity."

The report states that "analogous to the BSCT in Guantanamo Bay, the Army has a number of psychologists in operational positions (in both Afghanistan and Iraq), mostly within Special Operations, where they provide direct support to military operations. They do not function as mental health providers, and one of their core missions is to support interrogations."

The documents also demonstrate the failure of medical personnel to report abuses upon those ostensibly under their care. Moreover, when it comes to the use of torture techniques, such as forced nakedness, stress positions, the use of dogs, and other illegal forms of "interrogation" or incarceration, there was a decided policy of ignoring even the flimsy legal justifications and prohibitions issuing from the Department of Defense:

"The unredacted sections of the report provide new evidence confirming the use of abusive interrogation techniques after they were no longer authorized. According to the report, "the use of some of the techniques... continued even until July 2004, despite the fact that many were retracted by the October 2003 memorandum, and some were subsequently prohibited by the May 2004 memorandum."

As psychologists are implicated in the worst sort of human rights abuses at Guantanamo and elsewhere, Dr. Kazin, who is the John M. Musser Professor of Psychology, Child Psychiatry, and Institute of Social and Policy Studies at Yale University, positively gushes over the "APA... dream team of experts that is nimble and can move into action as needed with Congress, funding agencies and other organizations."

Kazin's organization, the APA, took five years to make a detailed statement against torture techniques that were documented at U.S. prisons, including Guantanamo, although even then the APA mimicked Bush administration language in saying that only psychologists who "knowingly" inflicted harm are to be sanctioned. This makes judging the intent of a torturer supposedly a crucial question. This doctrine of "specific intent" was written into the infamous Bybee memo, and represents a get out of jail free card for those who torture. (See John Mikhail's excellent discussion of the implications of that little word, "knowingly," over at the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog.)

APA Springs into Action for... Defense Funding

Despite all protestations of good faith by APA, psychologists still staff the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams at Guantanamo, and other interrogation sites, including, presumably, secret "black site" prisons run by the CIA. Psychologists at these sites are under the military chain of command, not APA ethics codes and committees. These sites are known to be in violation of Geneva Conventions and other national and international laws and agreements concerning prisoners, including the holding of detainees in indefinite detention, hiding detainees from the Red Cross, subjecting detainees to abusive conditions of detention, transferring via secret rendition some detainees to foreign prisons to be tortured, and subjecting prisoners to secret courts where hearsay evidence and evidence supplied via tortured confession is allowed.

In his article, Dr. Kazin brags how when the National Science Foundation threatened to defund some pet projects, "within approximately 12 hours, an APA swat team mobilized an effort that drew on targeted individuals, other organizations, congressional staff, grass-roots support from many psychologists, and more." Two hundred phone calls and many emails later, the bills were saved. And yet, to this day, the APA cannot find the time to pass a resolution or make a statement calling for the closure of Guantanamo prison, where basic human rights are not allowed, and a policy of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, and a policy of indefinite detention remains in force. Show me where you put an organization's time and money, and I'll show you what that organization is really about. The APA is an obscentiy.

The newly unredacted Church report includes this statement about the role of psychologists, highlighting the use of psychologists throughout the different theaters in Bush's misnamed "war on terror":

Analogous to the BSCT in Guantanamo Bay, the Army has a number of psychologists in operational positions (in both Afghanistan and Iraq), mostly within Special Operations, where they provide direct support to military operations. They do not function as mental health providers, and one of their core missions is to support interrogations.

Supposedly, those working clinically with the disease and mental illness fostered by abusive treatment and conditions at U.S. prison sites do not share medical records with interrogators, but the report, while claiming that use of such information to "plan interrogations" doesn't take place, admits that such "sharing" has taken place:

According to the Director, Psychological Applications Directorate (US Army Special Operations Command), the only reason for sharing any medical information would be to ensure that detainees are treated in accordance with their medical requirements.

If you believe that, I've got a proverbial bridge to sell you. Meanwhile, the unredacted portions of the Church Report corroborate the findings of the Pentagon's own Office of the Inspector General report that exposed the existence of abusive techniques at Guantanamo, just at the time that APA honchos like Colonel Larry Banks (then Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at GTMO, Cuba) were in charge.

Alan Kazdin's article represents the mindset of the APA bureaucracy, which is dying to feed at the trough of "homeland security" and "counter-terrorism" millions drained from the public coffers to build up the power of the overtly militarist state that America has become. Show me where you put an organization's time and money, and I'll show you what that organization is really about. The APA is an obscenity.

Recently, APA dissident candidate for president, Dr. Steven Reisner, is campaigning on an overt call for an end to psychologist participation in military interrogations, such as at Guantanamo. While garnering a minority of votes, he still won a plurality in the first round of voting, demonstrating that rank-and-file psychologists are growing increasingly disgusted with the policy of their organization. A related group of APA dissidents are circulating a petition that "not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights."

When I left the APA earlier this year, I specifically cited the overall stance of that organization in relation to the national security state. While the complicity with torture and human rights abuses is bad enough, the promise of further integration into "counter-terrorism" and "homeland security" programs of the government is an ominous foreshadowing of what the APA intends to become. If those looking to change APA are unsuccessful, they must ponder what they are doing in an organization so steadfastly dedicated to serving those that torture, that are obsessed with national security at a time when the government of this country engages in illegal, genocidal wars abroad, and seems incapable of reforming its own increasingly militarist and anti-democratic policies and actions.

Also posted at Invictus

'Turbans and/or Burqas' as a 'Hood Device'

2008-04-28T19:39:00.005-05:00

In the same week the New York Times published portions of a DOJ letter explaining, yet again, how an interrogation technique must "shock the conscience" in order to constitute torture-- Wikileaks made available a previously unseen Pentagon detainee manual.

Detainee Operations in a Joint Environment, dated 3 May 2004, was produced to fill "a void identified in lessons learned from operations in Afghanistan, Cuba, and Iraq by providing the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) to be employed in planning for and executing the handling, transfer, transport, and release of detainees." Written in the wake of the April 2004 Abu Ghraib revelations, this document does repeatedly stress the importance of "providing firm, but humane treatment." But one section caught my eye: Field Expedient Restraints.

As noted by Valtin, currently legal field expedient "Separation" methods used by US military seek to elicit DDD-- debility, dependency and dread. This detainee ops manual adds one more technique to the DDD paradigm: exploiting a detainee's religious dress. According to page 97 the manual:

In some areas of the world, using the detainees’ own headgear as hood device is ideal, i.e. turbans and/or burqas.

This 2004 advice appears to run counter to the current, though limited, torture ban in place. While waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions are still legal in the eyes of the Department of Justice, last year's Executive Order 13440 did ostensibly ban a limited set of techniques "that any reasonable person, considering the circumstances, would deem the acts to be beyond the bounds of human decency". In addition to sexual humiliation, the Executive Order banned "acts intended to denigrate the religion, religious practices, or religious objects of the individual".

That said-- I wonder if Pentagon advice to use "turbans and/or burqas" as a "hood device" constitutes a violation of this 2007 ban? Has it been rescinded? According to the latest Pentagon interrogation field manual:

Although it is acceptable to use religion in all interrogation approaches, even to express doubts about a religion, an interrogator is not permitted to denigrate a religion’s symbols (for example, a Koran, prayer rug, icon, or religious statue) or violate a religion’s tenets, except where appropriate for health, safety, and security reasons. [page 8-8]

House Judiciary Committee Chair, John Conyers, should raise these questions on the committee's next hearing on May 6 into US "torture policy". Imagine using a devout Jew's yarmulka as a gag, or nun's hat as a blindfold? Surely that would rise "beyond the bounds of human decency".

The Insignificance and Insanity of Abu Zubaydah

2008-04-26T15:42:00.002-05:00

Abu Zubaydah, an alleged senior al-Qaeda operative, has been held without charge or trial as a “high-value detainee” for over six years, first in secret CIA custody, and then in Guantánamo, while battles have raged within the administration over his supposed significance. Drawing, in particular, on the story of former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi, Andy Worthington, author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, makes the case that Zubaydah’s importance has been wildly exaggerated.

A recent article in the Washington Post, Out of Guantánamo and Bitter Toward Bin Laden, which was based on an interview with former Guantánamo prisoner Khalid al-Hubayshi (released in 2006), was noteworthy as much for what it did not reveal as for what it did.

In the article, Faiza Saleh Ambah began by explaining how “A calling to defend fellow Muslims and a bit of aimlessness took Khalid al-Hubayshi to a separatists' training camp in the southern Philippines and to the mountains of Afghanistan, where he interviewed for a job with Osama bin Laden.”

Part of this story was previously known from al-Hubayshi’s long years in Guantánamo, as Detainee 155, when he admitted to his Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) in 2004 that he had trained in the Philippines and had also trained at the Khaldan camp in Afghanistan in 1997. He also said that he moved to Afghanistan in 2001, joining a “private small camp” outside Jalalabad, which was subsequently closed down by the Taliban. Throughout, he presented himself -- with some eloquence -- as a freedom fighter who focused on particular struggles that various Muslims around the world had with non-Muslim oppressors (the model that was largely superseded by bin Laden's declaration of global jihad in 1998).

It was for this reason, he said, that he trained at Khaldan, which was not associated with either the Taliban or al-Qaeda at the time, and it was also for this reason that he returned to Afghanistan in 2001, and joined the camp near Jalalabad. He insisted, “I wasn't a member of al-Qaeda or on the front lines with the Taliban because I don't believe in what they are doing. I believe what the Taliban did in Afghanistan was ethnic war [and] al-Qaeda is a terrorist organization.”

He also explained, “I think Osama bin Laden is wrong. He just wants to be famous. He doesn't care how he does it, killing people, killing Muslims, or destroying countries. I think he got what he wanted -- to be famous. I don't need to meet him. I don't understand the politics. People look at the vision of Osama bin Laden and believe America is their enemy. They don't understand what is going on or what happened in Afghanistan in 1980 [when the Soviet invasion began].”

This opinion of bin Laden, it transpired from al-Hubayshi’s interview with Faiza Saleh Ambah, was true, but rather lacking in context. In the interview he admitted that, although he had certainly become disillusioned with the inter-ethnic fighting in Afghanistan -- “I was not there … to help Afghans fighting Afghans for political gain,” he said, adding, “If I was going to die, I wanted to die fighting for something meaningful” -- his return to Afghanistan in May 2001, and what he subsequently did there, was both more complicated and more compromised than he had admitted at his tribunal.

He explained that, while attempting to return home in 1999, he had been arrested and imprisoned by the Pakistanis, who confiscated his passport, and that he had then returned to his job at a utilities company in Saudi Arabia on a false passport. His return to Afghanistan in 2001 came about when he discovered that he was wanted for questioning by the Saudi authorities, and it was at the camp near Jalalabad, where he became “adept at making remote-controlled explosive devices triggered by cellphones and light switches,” that he attracted the attention of al-Qaeda.

Introduced to Osama bin Laden, he said that he refused to join al-Qaeda because bin Laden’s fight “had changed from defending Muslims to attacking the United States. I wasn't convinced of his ideology. And I wanted to be independent, not just another minion in this big group.” After returning to his independent life, he was drawn once more into bin Laden’s orbit after 9/11, when, after fleeing Afghan persecution, he and others were invited to the Tora Bora mountains, for what, it seems, was touted as a glorious showdown with the Americans.

“Bin Laden was convinced the Americans would come down and fight,” al-Hubayshi said. “We spent five weeks like that, manning our positions in case the Americans landed.” He added, however, that as the airstrikes moved closer, and as the Americans’ Afghan allies advanced on their positions, bin Laden abandoned the fight and fled. “There was no dignity in what he made us do,” he told Faiza Saleh Ambah, adding that he was “sorry that Muslims carried out the Sept. 11 attacks because they targeted civilians.” “That was wrong,” he explained. “Jihad is fighting soldier to soldier.”

While this entire report fills in some rather large gaps in al-Hubayshi’s testimony in Guantánamo -- and also provides some apposite insight into his opinion of bin Laden -- what was missing from Faiza Saleh Ambah’s interview was any mention whatsoever of another allegedly pivotal figure in al-Qaeda: Abu Zubaydah, the Palestinian-born facilitator of the Khaldan camp, and one of 14 “high-value detainees” transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006.

In the interview, the only mention of Khaldan was that al-Hubayshi “learned to fire anti-aircraft missiles, anti-aircraft machine guns, anti-tank weapons and rocket-propelled grenades and became an expert in explosives,” whereas his comments in Guantánamo about his relationship with Abu Zubaydah struck me as enormously significant while I was researching The Guantánamo Files, and remain so to this day, as they cast important light on a fierce debate within the US administration, which has raged since shortly after Zubaydah was captured in the Pakistani city of Faisalabad in March 2002.

Contrary to claims made by the administration and the CIA -- which, as described in Time magazine shortly after his capture, indicated that he was “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit” -- the story that emerged in Ron Suskind’s 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine, was that Zubaydah was nothing like the pivotal figure that the CIA had supposed him to be, and had actually turned out to be mentally ill.

Investigating his diary, analysts found entries in the voices of three people -- a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego -- which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said.” Dan Coleman, the FBI's senior expert on al-Qaeda, explained to one of his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.” According to Suskind, the officials also confirmed that Zubaydah appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations, and was, instead, a minor logistician.

And yet, as Suskind also reports, so misplaced was the CIA’s belief in Zubaydah’s importance that when they subjected him to waterboarding and other forms of torture, and he “confessed” to all manner of supposed plots -- against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty -- “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each target ... The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

Last December, when there was a brief uproar over the destruction by the CIA of videotapes showing the “enhanced interrogations” of Zubaydah and another “high-value detainee”, Abdul Rahim al-Nashiri, Dan Coleman spoke out once more about Zubaydah, telling the Washington Post that the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” by the CIA cast doubt on the credibility of Zubaydah’s confessions. “I don't have confidence in anything he says,” Coleman explained, “because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted. He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much.”

Coleman also revisited the rift that developed between the FBI and the CIA when CIA operatives began holding him naked in his cell, “subjecting him to extreme cold and bombarding him with loud rock music,” explaining that FBI operatives who witnessed this said, “You've got to be kidding me. This guy's a Muslim. That's not going to win his confidence. Are you trying to get information out of him or just belittle him?”

Reiterating his skepticism about Zubaydah’s supposed importance, Coleman said that he “was a ‘safehouse keeper’ with mental problems who claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” that his diaries were “full of flowery and philosophical meanderings, and made little mention of terrorism or al-Qaeda,” and that he and others at the FBI had concluded, by looking at other evidence, including a serious head injury that Zubaydah had suffered years earlier, that he had severe mental problems. “They all knew he was crazy, and they knew he was always on the damn phone,” Coleman explained, referring to other al-Qaeda operatives, adding, “You think they're going to tell him anything?”

Largely unnoticed, although featured in my book, are two more analyses of Zubaydah’s role that reinforce the opinions expressed by Dan Coleman and Ron Suskind: those of Khalid al-Hubayshi, and of Zubaydah himself, during his CSRT in Guantánamo last spring.

Al-Hubayshi explained that, far from being a mastermind, Abu Zubaydah was responsible for “receiving people and financing the camp,” that he once bought him travel tickets, and that he was the man he went to when he needed a replacement passport. He also suggested that Zubaydah did not have a long-standing relationship with bin Laden. When asked, “When you were with Abu Zubaydah, did you ever see Osama bin Laden?” he replied, “In 1998, Abu Zubaydah and Osama bin Laden didn't like each other,” adding, “In 2001, I think the relationship was okay,” and explaining that bin Laden put pressure on Zubaydah to close Khaldan, essentially because he wanted to run more camps himself.

The echoes with Zubaydah’s own account are uncanny. In his CSRT, Zubaydah said that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I'm not his partner and I'm not a member of al-Qaeda.” He also said that his interrogators promised to return his diary to him -- the one that contained the evidence of his split personality -- and explained that their refusal to do so affected him emotionally and triggered seizures.

Speaking of his status as a “high-value detainee,” he said that his only role was to operate a guest house used by those who were training at Khaldan, and confirmed al-Hubayshi's analysis of his relationship with bin Laden, saying, “Bin Laden wanted al-Qaeda to have control of Khaldan, but we refused since we had different ideas.” He explained that he opposed attacks on civilian targets, which brought him into conflict with bin Laden, and although he admitted that he had been an enemy of the US since childhood, because of its support for Israel, pointed out that his enmity was towards the government and the military, and not the American people.

I await the development of Abu Zubaydah’s story with interest. Just a month ago, his lawyers, Brent Mickum and Joe Margulies, followed Coleman and Suskind’s lead by filing an unlawful detention suit arguing that their client is insane, and I’m fascinated to know what they -- and others who are wondering why, if Zubaydah was so important, he was not charged in February in connection with the 9/11 attacks along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five others -- will make of the testimony of Khalid al-Hubayshi, who, as Faiza Saleh Ambah reported, is now a world away from his previous life as a would-be soldier and US prisoner, happily married and working at the utilities company from which he twice escaped to pursue his dreams of jihad.

The Torture Election: Fighting for the Soul of the American Psychological Association

2008-04-25T17:44:00.000-05:00

Originally posted at AlterNet

In a surprising turn of events, New York psychologist Steven Reisner won over 30% of the votes in the mail balloting for nominations for the presidency of the American Psychological Association (APA), as announced at the beginning of April. This represented more votes than any other candidate running.

Dr. Reisner, a psychoanalyst, is a Senior Faculty member and Supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, an Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University, and a consultant to the United Nations on stress and trauma. As a key leader of Psychologists for an Ethical Psychology, he is also a leading critic of APA's position on torture and interrogations.

A number of APA members see Reisner's showing as a great victory for critics of APA's position of allowing psychologists to participate in Bush's "war on terror" interrogations. Reisner received 1,765 votes, four hundred more than Robert E. McGrath, the next most popular candidate. The impressive numbers are testimony to two years of anti-torture activism within APA, involving scores of dedicated professionals. The electoral results guarantee that Dr. Reisner will be on the ballot for APA president next October.

All told, however, the vast majority of votes still went to candidates who have very different positions on interrogations. Moreover, there are signs that some APA office holders and loyalists are hostile to Reisner's candidacy. One inside source says that a top member of the California Psychological Association -- a state affiliate of APA -- called it "despicable" that Reisner was running for APA president, after all he's done to "disrupt" that organization.

The APA ostensibly takes a hard line against torture. But it refuses to forbid its membership from working at Pentagon or CIA prison sites that deny its prisoners basic human rights, like habeas corpus, and with documented histories of abuse and torture. Amy Goodman, in a recent column, summarized the battle within APA to turn the organization away from collaboration with governmental interrogators. The story of this collaboration, and how psychologists came to be key members of the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs, popularly called "biscuits") at Guantánamo and elsewhere, has been told in great detail by myself, psychologist Stephen Soldz, and writers Katherine Eban, Jane Mayer, Arthur Levine, and Mark Benjamin, among others. The narrative is as dense or as simple as one wishes to make it, and depends how deeply one looks into the history of U.S. torture.

The APA's shifting position on interrogations is rooted in a long commitment to serve the national security apparatus of the United States. That commitment has been reflected in the current APA election, where Dr. Reisner appears as the first true candidate of change on this issue.

The Candidates: The Psychopharmacology Doctor

While Reisner received the plurality of votes in the first round of APA balloting, second place went to Robert E. McGrath at 1,340 votes. (Only 3-4% of APA members seem to have cast nominating ballots in this election.) McGrath runs a postdoctoral program in psychopharmacology at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and was president of APA's Division 55, the American Society for the Advancement of Pharmacotherapy. (APA is a federated organization, divided into 53 professional divisions; each division, along with representatives to the state and provincial psychological associations, is represented on APA's Council of Representatives.)

McGrath has said little on the record regarding APA's interrogation policy, though he did write a letter to the house APA organ, the Monitor, last September on "psychologists' military roles":

In response to recent claims that psychologists have been involved in torture and abusive interrogations, some psychologists are now calling for a complete ban on any involvement in military interrogations. I am troubled by these claims, but I am also troubled by two questions concerning this proposed solution: By extension, shouldn't psychologists withdraw from all coercive interrogations, including those by law enforcement agencies? Don't further restrictions in the diversity of individuals involved in such interrogations increase the potential for abuse even further?

One wonders how objective Dr. McGrath is on this issue, given Division 55 is largely devoted to teaching psychologists psychopharmacology and lobbying for prescription rights for psychologists. The practice, which has been fought tooth and nail by the psychiatric establishment, has found its greatest support in the military, which established a Psychopharmacology Demonstration Project in 1989 to train military psychologists to prescribe. (In an article on psychologists and torture in Vanity Fair last year, Katherine Eban looked at the possibility of a "quid pro quo" between APA and the military, in which APA would give "its stamp of approval to military interrogations" in agreement for the Pentagon allowing "psychologists -- who, unlike psychiatrists, are not medical doctors -- to prescribe medication, dramatically increasing their income.")

McGrath's opposition to pulling psychologists out of Guantánamo and other military/CIA interrogation centers is manifest. Reading his letter, psychologist Martha Davis, a visiting scholar at John Jay School of Criminal Justice, was struck by how APA's position has totally changed the way psychologists view their professional role when it comes to interrogations. "The APA has so successfully finessed this business," Davis wrote on a listserve of APA critics, "that most people hearing about the interrogations and psychology controversy, including psychologists, think that psychologists 'do' or supervise interrogations of criminal suspects in the US. THEY DO NOT … There is no mention of interrogation work in the ethics code. You won't find panels on doing interrogations in forensic psychology conference programs. Psychologists do not have the authority to 'do' interrogations or to supervise them in the US."

The Military Nominee?

The author of Jews in Blue: The Jewish American Experience in Law Enforcement, and consultant "for the police and law enforcement community since 1983," Jack Kitaeff, Ph.D, JD, was a military psychologist (as a Major) in the late 1970s to early 1980s. Both his psychological internship and postdoctoral residency were in military settings. Currently, he is Secretary-Treasurer-Elect for the Police and Public Safety Section of Div. 18 (Psychologists in Public Service).

While Dr. Kitaeff does not appear to have made a public statement on the current controversy on APA and interrogations, he did speak about his work and his views of himself as a "patriot" in an interview in 2006 at FrontPage Magazine, a well-known right-wing neo-conservative outlet run by David Horowitz's Freedom Center. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to guess where Kitaeff, who received 1,128 votes and third place in APA voting, probably stands on psychologist staffing of military interrogations.

The Insiders

Rounding out the final five nominees are Ronald H. Rozensky, PhD and Carol E. Goodheart, EdD, who received 1,057 and 134 votes, respectively. Goodheart was a last-minute write-in candidate; last year she came in second in the nomination balloting, behind eventual presidential winner, James Bray. Reisner, who also ran, failed to make the top five in 2007. Reportedly, Goodheart wasn't going to run in 2008, but she appears to have changed her mind. According to one APA insider, many on APA Council see her as a major competitor to Dr. Reisner in the upcoming election.

Goodheart is, as Steven Reisner once labeled her, an "APA stalwart." A psychotherapist in private practice, and a clinical supervisor in the psychology training program at Rutgers, she has served on the APA Board of Directors, and most recently was APA Treasurer. Currenly, she's working with APA President-elect Bray on his 2009 Presidential Task Force on the Future of Psychology Practice. Is part of that future staffing the BSCTs for the military at Guantánamo and elsewhere?

When psychologists mobilizing to withhold their dues from APA in protest against APA's interrogation policy queried Dr. Goodheart about her position, she replied:

I know that some psychologists in good conscience and good faith want APA also to prohibit psychologists from any participation whatsoever in military interrogations. There is serious debate within APA about the appropriate role for psychologists and I do not know if we will ever be able to reach total agreement. I, along with the majority of the Council of Representatives, voted against a moratorium, after listening carefully and considering all views seriously. As my own act of personal conscience, in the hope that we will be able to influence policy and practices related to interrogations, I believe that we must support psychology's promotion of ethical interrogations to prevent violence, safeguard detainees' welfare, and facilitate communications with them. We must stay engaged and work with the people, both military and non-military, who are working with great dedication to prevent torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and punishment.

In other words, as one prominent member of APAs Division of Psychoanalysis put it:

She feels that to exclude psychologists from morally problematic places may leave prisoners even more vulnerable, and she argues that defining psychologists' presence as unethical would jeopardize ethical professionals who have been in this situation.

This makes Goodheart's stance on psychologists and interrogation a mirror image of APA's official position: psychologists make interrogations safer for detainees. Yet overwhelming evidence implicates psychologists in both the construction and implementation of a torture paradigm that emphasizes sensory deprivation and overstimulation, sleep deprivation, inculcation of debility, psychological regression, and dependency. Furthermore, psychologists have been specifically singled out as the agents responsible for reverse-engineering the military's torture resistance program, SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), in order to teach military interrogators coercive forms of interrogation. This was documented, no less, by the Department of Defense's Office of the Inspector General in a report on detainee abuse, declassified last year.

The news hasn't gotten through to a final candidate, Ronald H. Rozensky, Ph.D. Dr. Rozensky has a resume a mile long. Former Chair of APA's Board of Professional Affairs, President of the Illinois Psychological Association, award-winning Outstanding International Psychologist, and co-author of Psychological Assessment in Medical Settings, Rozensky is a major lobbyist for governmental money for psychologists, supporting especially research in neuroscience, functional MRI and space programs. Concerned, like the APA honcho he is, in expanding the role of psychologists in particular societal institutions, he is worried that the controversy over military interrogations will spill over to domestic correctional settings, considered by APA a "proliferating" source of psychologist jobs. According to Dr. Rozensky:

...current discussions about psychologists' roles in interrogation in the military have implications within organized psychology for those psychologists working within the correctional system. It is key that our field recognize the important role that psychologists in the correctional system play in assuring ethical treatment of individuals remanded to the system and that information obtained from those individuals is factual and useful.

Whither APA?

Steven Reisner's candidacy for president represents a significant challenge to the status quo of APA governance. While all the other candidates for APA president support the continued presence of psychologists as an integral part of Defense Department and CIA interrogations, Reisner says no:

When leaders of other health professions reject all participation in detainee abuse, and our leaders justify participation, I am ashamed of our profession....

My candidacy calls for a clear departure from the complicity of psychologists in state-sponsored abuses of human rights, whether these take place at Guantánamo, CIA black sites, or domestic supermax prisons.

I have been told that psychologists might fear for their jobs if we hold to a principled stance on detainees' basic human rights. I fear for our nation and our profession if we don't.

Whether Steven Reisner's candidacy for APA president represents the high-water mark for opposition to the pro-military APA bureaucracy, or the beginning of a real sea change within the civil institutions of U.S. society regarding complicity in torture and other criminal, unethical practices of the government, remains to be seen. If Reisner is able to carry the presidential vote, he will still have to contend with a ruling apparatus that remains committed to cementing its ties with the Department of Defense and the CIA.

But these are challenges that lie in the future. Right now, Dr. Reisner and his supporters are riding a wave of optimism that things can change. His electoral showing demonstrates that, within APA, critics of torture and interrogations are making a real impact. In the big picture, the future of APA is likely tied to how these same issues play out in the larger society, especially the U.S. presidential race. For now, however, Reisner's supporters can give themselves a hearty congratulations, even as a longer, larger, higher hill to climb lies before them.

[Much thanks to AlterNet editor Liliana Segura for editorial help on this article.]

Support Call for Investigations on Drugging Detainees

2008-04-23T15:47:00.002-05:00

Following a pivotal article by Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly a few weeks back, today's Washington Post published an important article today, "Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned." The story, by Post staff writer Joby Warrick, notes U.S. denials in using drug injections for coercive purposes during interrogations.

Adel al-Nusairi, a Saudi national imprisoned for years at Guanatanmo, and now released without charges, has a different memory:

"I'd fall asleep" after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

"I was completely gone," he remembered. "I said, 'Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I will.'"

U.S. authorities at the Department of Defense and the CIA say the stories of prisoners being forced to take drugs and make confessions are lies, or perhaps mistaken interpretations of various medical procedures. The Post article, which mentions the March 2003 John Yoo memo to the Department of Defense that gave legal cover to abusive interrogation methods, including the use of drugs on detainees, fails to mention that the CIA and military studied the use of drugs in interrogations for decades. Still, the Post article makes clear that drugs have been alleged to have been used on U.S.-held detainees for purposes of forcing confessions, as chemical restraint, and to forcibly psychologically condition detainees for interrogation.

Medical ethicists and experts in international law say such accounts raise serious questions. While the Geneva Conventions do not specifically refer to drugs, they ban any use of force or coercion in interrogating prisoners of war, said Barbara Olshansky, a law professor at Stanford University and the author of a book on military tribunals. "If you're talking about interrogations, you're talking about very specific prohibitions that mean you cannot use any force, at all, to interrogate someone," Olshansky said. "The law is beyond clear."

Physicians for Human Rights has called for both Congressional and Department of Justice investigations on the forcible drugging of detainees. This may be a good time, too, to support the ACLU's call for the release of a Justice Department Office of Inspector General report on a long-running investigation of the FBI's role in the unlawful interrogations of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. It's believed that "FBI agents stationed at Guantánamo Bay expressed concern after witnessing military interrogators' use of brutal interrogation techniques." Did these techniques include the forcible drugging of detainees?

Investigations Needed, Though Much Information in Public Domain

Investigations are urgently needed to get the full picture of what exactly the government has been up to, as the full extent of the manifold use of torture by the United States government has not been fully documented. Such investigations are also sorely needed to change the political dialogue in this country, and to hold accountable government officials who have broken domestic and international law on torture and the treatment of prisoners.

If the press would do their job and report the known research and give the proper context on this subject, then the work of the investigators would be much easier. (Jeff Klein's work, noted at the beginning of this article, is a notable exception. Other exceptions are Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair, Jane Meyer at The New Yorker, Scott Horton at Harper's, and Mark Benjamin at Salon.com.) The use of drugs in interrogations is not a new subject by any means. The government has researched this, including mixing drugs with other forms of coercive interrogation practice, such as sensory deprivation.

A Course in Narcosis, Part I

Online, I suggest the interested reader -- or Congressional or DOJ investigator -- begin with the CIA's own discussion of the matter in the declassified KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual. Here's some relevant quotes from the CIA on "narcosis" (if this website link is having problems, as it did when I went to reference it, use this cached link instead, or this alternate site, or the photocopy online of the manual itself). Bold emphasis in the following is mine. Remember, this "course" in narcosis was researched with U.S. taxpayer dollars. The CIA drew upon the work of the infamous MKULTRA program of the CIA.

Just as the threat of pain may more effectively induce compliance than its infliction, so an interrogatee's mistaken belief that he has been drugged may make him a more useful interrogation subject than he would be under narcosis....

In the interrogation situation, moreover, the effectiveness of a placebo may be enhanced because of its ability to placate the conscience. The subject's primary source of resistance to confession or divulgence may be pride, patriotism, personal loyalty to superiors, or fear of retribution if he is returned to their hands. Under such circumstances his natural desire to escape from stress by complying with the interrogator's wishes may become decisive if he is provided an acceptable rationalization for compliance. "I was drugged" is one of the best excuses.

Drugs are no more the answer to the interrogator's prayer than the polygraph, hypnosis, or other aids. Studies and reports "dealing with the validity of material extracted from reluctant informants... indicate that there is no drug which can force every informant to report all the information he has. Not only may the inveterate criminal psychopath lie under the influence of drugs which have been tested, but the relatively normal and well-adjusted individual may also successfully disguise factual data"....

Nevertheless, drugs can be effective in overcoming resistance not dissolved by other techniques. As has already been noted, the so-called silent drug (a pharmacologically potent substance given to a person unaware of its administration) can make possible the induction of hypnotic trance in a previously unwilling subject....

Particularly important is the reference to matching the drug to the personality of the interrogatee. The effect of most drugs depends more upon the personality of the subject than upon the physical characteristics of the drugs themselves. If the approval of Headquarters has been obtained and if a doctor is at hand for administration, one of the most important of the interrogator's functions is providing the doctor with a full and accurate description of the psychological make-up of the interrogatee, to facilitate the best possible choice of a drug.

Persons burdened with feelings of shame or guilt are likely to unburden themselves when drugged, especially if these feelings have been reinforced by the interrogator. And like the placebo, the drug provides an excellent rationalization of helplessness for the interrogatee who wants to yield but has hitherto been unable to violate his own values or loyalties.

Like other coercive media, drugs may affect the content of what an interrogatee divulges. Gottschalk notes that certain drugs "may give rise to psychotic manifestations such as hallucinations, illusions, delusions, or disorientation", so that "the verbal material obtained cannot always be considered valid." (7) For this reason drugs (and the other aids discussed in this section) should not be used persistently to facilitate the interrogative debriefing that follows capitulation. Their function is to cause capitulation, to aid in the shift from resistance to cooperation. Once this shift has been accomplished, coercive techniques should be abandoned both for moral reasons and because they are unnecessary and even counter-productive.

This discussion does not include a list of drugs that have been employed for interrogation purposes or a discussion of their properties because these are medical considerations within the province of a doctor rather than an interogator [sic].

A Course in Narcosis, Part II

If we go back and look at the Washington Post article printed today, we see that the reaction of the detainees who were (allegedly) drugged is replete with traumatic feelings. One wonders if the giving of injections rather than pills was psychologically designed to create greater fear in the prisoners.

The CIA's reference to Gottschalk is to Louis A. Gottschalk. At the time (early 60s), Gottschalk was Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Research Coordinator in the Department of Psychiatry at Cincinnati General Hospital. His essay, "The Use of Drugs in Interrogation" was published in the 1961 book, The Manipulation of Human Behavior. (Online via Questia, for some time this book could be read for free over the net at 4shared.com, but that link is gone now. The Questia read will cost you about $8.00 -- worth it in my opinion, though enterprising web surfers may find it elsewhere for less or free, for all I know.)

In Gottschalk's piece, he looks at such aspects of drug use in interrogation as the use of placebo administration; the effects of individual differences in personality and cerebral functions on drug reaction; the effects of physiological conditions, secondary to manipulation of biological rhythms, nutritional states, isolation and fatigue; and the efficacy of drugs in "uncovering information." Regarding the latter, Gottschalk wrote:

For certain personality types, some drugs lower conscious ego control, thereby facilitating recall of repressed material and increasing the difficulty of withholding available information....

... clinical experience and experimental studies indicate that, although a person's resistance to communicating consciously withheld information can be broken down with drugs, and particularly sodium amytal, the interrogator can have no easy assurance as to the accuracy and validity of the information he obtains.... An interrogator would have to evaluate many other factors... to decide how to interpret the outcome of an interview with a drugged informant.

Besides sodium amytal, Gottschalk and other government researchers (from the military, CIA, contracted or unwittingly funded) studied numerous pharmacological agents, including barbiturate sedatives and calmatives (amobarbital, secobarbital), non-barbiturate sedatives (Placidyl, Quiactin), stimulants (ritalin, benzadrine, and methamphetamine, the latter said to be "useful in the interrogation of the psychopath"), autonomic reactors and beta blockers, antimalarial drugs, heavy metals, hormones (ACTH, cortisone, thyroid), and classic hallucinogens like mescaline, LSD and PCP. Marijuana was also an early target of drug experiments on truth telling. Psychoactive medications have (or are?) been studied as well (thorazine, compazine, etc.).

Thorazine was also used heavily by Dr. Ewen Cameron, the famous Montreal psychiatrist, whose attempt to totally control the human mind via a technique called "psychic driving" destroyed many people's lives in the 1950s and 1960s. Cameron used drug-induced coma, multiple electroshock, and drugs like thorazine and LSD in an effort to totally control human beings, from their memory (which he sought to wipe out) and their behavior. The research was funded, in part, by the CIA. The story has been told in all its horrendous detail a number of times, most recently by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine, and by researcher Gordon Thomas in his new book, Secrets and Lies.

Summary

While the Washington Post article demonstrates some movement among the official elite who run this country to address the latest revelations on torture, perhaps even to promote some kind of reform inside the Pentagon and CIA, it's also possible that official denials are all we are going to hear.

It's important that the calls from organizations like Physicians for Human Rights for hearings and investigations be supported by phone calls, letters, emails, and donations. The Yoo memo and other issues related to torture are supposed to be examined at a meeting of the House Judiciary Committee on May 9. Why not bring up the issue of involuntary drugging as part of that hearing? In any case, a full investigation is needed of U.S. torture. In my opinion, the government cannot be trusted to run this investigation. But, lacking any other authoritative forum, a Congressional investigation may be the best we can hope for at this point.

On this topic, with a special emphasis on the possible role of psychologists and other health professionals in these interrogation abuses, see Stephen Soldz's article, "Involuntary drugging of US detainees, a crisis for the health professions".

Cross-posted at Invictus.

The Torture Planners: "Why are we talking about this in the White House?"

2008-04-10T15:13:00.001-05:00

In a very interesting follow-up to the unfolding story on the 2003 John Yoo memorandum that justified the use of torture, ABC news is reporting how the CIA came to the White House after the spring 2002 capture of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah in Pakistan and asked for permission to use more "aggressive" interrogation techniques. Citing anonymous sources, ABC says that beginning with the Zubaydah case, "the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency." These discussions evidently included the use of waterboarding, as the CIA has admitted using this torture technique on Zubaydah.

The "Principals" -- high-level Bush administration officials -- present included National Security Adviser Condolezza Rice, who chaired the meetings, "Vice President Cheney... Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft."

While Ashcroft is said to have signed off on the legality of the interrogations, he got squeamish about how it was being approved. Perhaps he was afraid of future legal and political consequences. Perhaps he remembered how the secrets of the Wannsee Conference were ultimately leaked. Per the ABC story (also reported over at Reuters):

Lawyers in the Justice Department had written a classified memo, which was extensively reviewed, that gave formal legal authority to government interrogators to use the "enhanced" questioning tactics on suspected terrorist prisoners. The August 2002 memo, signed by then head of the Office of Legal Counsel Jay Bybee, was referred to as the so-called "Golden Shield" for CIA agents, who worried they would be held liable if the harsh interrogations became public.....

But even after the "Golden Shield" was in place, briefings and meetings in the White House to discuss individual interrogations continued, sources said. Tenet, seeking to protect his agents, regularly sought confirmation from the NSC principals that specific interrogation plans were legal....

Highly placed sources said CIA directors Tenet and later Porter Goss along with agency lawyers briefed senior advisers, including Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld and Powell, about detainees in CIA custody overseas....

Then-Attorney General Ashcroft was troubled by the discussions. He agreed with the general policy decision to allow aggressive tactics and had repeatedly advised that they were legal. But he argued that senior White House advisers should not be involved in the grim details of interrogations, sources said.

According to a top official, Ashcroft asked aloud after one meeting: "Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly."

Despite Ashcroft's qualms -- mainly concerned with his political neck, not the safety of prisoners -- the Principals "approved interrogations... pushing the limits of international law and even the Justice Department's own legal approval." Condi Rice was said to be particularly forceful in giving the CIA power to torture (with Powell echoing Ashcroft's wimpy protests).

As the blogger buhdydharma in an article today, the new revelations "clearly point to a high level, willful conspiracy to commit torture." Beyond the question of conspiracy, serious violations of a number of laws that prohibit torture and inhumane treatment have also been broken. Courtesy of Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First own examination of criminal laws governing laws on torture, let's review what Ashcroft, Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Tenet, and possibly others, may find themselves vulnerable with aggressive prosecution (for footnotes, please refer to original via link):

The recent amendments to the War Crimes Act establish as war crimes “grave breaches” of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions,10 including “torture” and “cruel or inhuman treatment.”11 “Torture” is characterized, in pertinent part, as “an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”12 The separate war crime of “cruel or inhuman treatment,” is defined as “an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical or mental pain or suffering.”13

For the crime of torture under the WCA14 and the Torture Act,15 severe mental pain or suffering is defined as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from” several specified actions, including “the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering” and “the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mindaltering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.”16

For the WCA crime of “cruel or inhuman treatment,” serious mental pain or suffering is defined as “the serious and non-transitory mental harm (which need not be prolonged) caused by or resulting from” the same specified actions.17

The Detainee Treatment Act requires that “no person in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment (CIDT).”18 The DTA defines CIDT as conduct prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

Since the "CIA’s reported “enhanced” interrogation techniques cause the types of physical and mental anguish that are criminalized under the WCA and other laws," it's clear that top administration officials have committed war crimes.

But what are the governmental officials, including elected members of the legislature, going to do about it? Certainly we can expect nothing from Mukasey's Justice Department, which has all but signed off even on waterboarding, and refuses to rule out evidence obtained by same. Rep. Conyers has asked John Woo to appear at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee next month. Meanwhile, the story barely reaches the significance of the front pages in the U.S. press.

This is not surprising, as the Executive Branch of the U.S. government has gotten away with the criminal execution of an illegal, pre-emptive war in Iraq, even when the evidence for this was placed in the public domain for all to see (going back at least to the publication of the Downing Street memos). Reportedly, the congressional offices of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats receive emails and faxes demanding action, up to and including the initiation of impeachment hearings in the House. All to no avail.

The poet William Blake wrote over two hundred years ago:

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

We know that this is more than enough to put the criminal leadership of the Bush administration away in prison for many years. Therefore, enough!!

Give us our bill of indictment. Give us our impartial jury to examine the evidence. Give us justice. Failing this, I shudder to think what monstrous conclusion is being prepared for us in the bowels of history.

National Lawyers Guild: Fire Yoo & Try for War Crimes

2008-04-09T17:07:00.001-05:00

The National Lawyers Guild has issued a press release calling for University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school to fire Professor John Yoo. The NLG calls for the rescission of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 provisions that allow immunity and the prosecution of Yoo as a war criminal. Meanwhile, yesterday, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) threatened to subpoena John Yoo to testify about the memo at a May 6 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.

The declassification and release of Yoo's memorandum to William Haynes, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, written in March 2003, has caused a firestorm in the press. Yoo's memo is the smoking gun for those looking for evidence of how the Bush Administration flouted basic human rights law, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the U.S. War Crimes Act to initiate a campaign of torture against detainees swept up in the aggressive U.S. military and covert campaigns that followed 9/11.

The NLG nicely summarizes much of what is outrageous about Yoo's memo. But as an excellent article in the current Vanity Fair, Philippe Sands' "The Green Light," explains, the torture began before Yoo's memo was even written.

Starting in late 2002 a detainee bearing the number 063 was tortured over a period of more than seven weeks....

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration—by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees—lawyers—who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.

Yoo's memo sought to give the legal justification to the worst kind of physical and psychological torture. The NLG memo and the press have not fully plumbed the significance of what doors were opened by Bush and his co-conspirators. Jeff Stein, at Congressional Quarterly, tied the Yoo memo to an increase of drug use on detainees. The use of drugs -- from marijuana to LSD to PCP to sodium amytal -- in interrogations was a hallmark of the CIA's MKULTRA research program in the 1950s-1960s.

There can be little doubt now that the government has used drugs on terrorist suspects that are designed to weaken their resistance to interrogation. All that’s missing is the syringes and videotapes.

Another window opened on the practice last week with the declassification of John Yoo’s instantly infamous 2003 memo approving harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects.

Yoo advised top Bush administration officials that interrogators could employ mind-altering drugs if they did not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.”

Yoo had first rationalized the use of drugs in a 2002 memo for top Bush administration officials....

“The new Yoo memo, along with other White House legal memoranda, shows clearly that the policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs was being laid,” says Stephen Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror".... “The use of these drugs was anticipated and discussed in the memos of January and February 2002 by DoD, DoJ, and White House counsel using the same language and rationale. The executive branch memos laid a comprehensive and reiterated policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs.”

Stein also cites the CIA/Rand Corp./American Psychological Workshop in 2003 that looked at use of "pharmacological agents" on interrogation subjects as part of an attack on prisoner attempts at deception. The full story on this "workshop", which also included work on sensory overload mechanisms to "overwhelm the senses" of detainees, was first broken by me last year.

The heat is on the administration on torture yet again. But I warn all my readers that NONE of the crimes of the Bush Administration have yet met any legal consequences. The relevant governing bodies seem to have no stomach for actually prosecuting any top war criminals, much less taking Bush, Cheney, and their mob on politically. The news media of record, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., bluster about the outrages, but have yet to call for any prosecution or impeachment. It seems likely that little of consequence will come from the latest expose over Yoo's 2003 memo. One can't help but feel that in America the government can declare they will pull the fingernails out of your children, and there still will be no action taken.

Is it fear? Is it laziness? What is it?

The following is the text of the NLG release, signed by Marjorie Cohn, NLG President, and Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director. I've added bold emphases for editorial effect.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 9, 2008

Contact: Marjorie Cohn, NLG President, marjorie@tjsl.edu; 619-374-6923
Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director, director@nlg.org; 212-679-5100, x11

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CALLS ON BOALT HALL TO DISMISS LAW PROFESSOR JOHN YOO, WHOSE TORTURE MEMOS LED TO COMMISSION OF WAR CRIMES

New York. In a memorandum written the same month George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Boalt Hall law professor John Yoo said the Department of Justice would construe US criminal laws not to apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. According to Yoo, the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of the war.

The federal maiming statute, for example, makes it a crime for someone "with the intent to torture, maim, or disfigure" to "cut, bite, or slit the nose, ear or lip, or cut out or disable the tongue, or put out or destroy an eye, or cut off or disable a limb or any member of another person." It further prohibits individuals from "throwing or pouring upon another person any scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance" with like intent.

Yoo also narrowed the definition of torture so the victim must experience intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will likely result; Yoo's definition contravenes the definition in the Convention Against Torture, a treaty the US has ratified which is thus part of the US law under the Constitution's Supremacy Clause. Yoo said self-defense or necessity could be used as a defense to war crimes prosecutions for torture, notwithstanding the Torture Convention's absolute prohibition against torture in all circumstances, even in wartime. This memo and another Yoo wrote with Jay Bybee in August 2002 provided the basis for the Administration's torture of prisoners.

"John Yoo's complicity in establishing the policy that led to the torture of prisoners constitutes a war crime under the US War Crimes Act," said National Lawyers Guild President Marjorie Cohn.

Congress should repeal the provision of the Military Commissions Act that would give Yoo immunity from prosecution for torture committed from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005. John Yoo should be disbarred and he should not be retained as a professor of law at one of the country's premier law schools. John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal.

The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.

Also posted at Invictus