Features > February 14, 2007
Interrogations Behind Barbed Wire (cont’d)
The one professional group that has not banned the aiding of interrogation is the American Psychological Association (APA). A leaked interrogation log, reported by Time magazine two years ago, reveals that a psychologist was present during an interrogation where the prisoner was made to perform dog tricks and given intravenous fluids to force him to urinate on himself.
The ethical stance of the APA is meaningful because during a six-year period in the ’90s, the military granted some psychologists the same prescribing privileges as psychiatrists—a privilege long sought-after by the APA and one it continues to lobby the government to expand. The APA passed a resolution condemning torture last August, but pointed to the U.S. government’s reservations about the U.N. Convention Against Torture in their resolution. Those reservations claim that, “in order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.”
Decades of dubious tactics
Regardless of who is or isn’t responsible for drugging detainees, the information gained from doing so is not well regarded by intelligence professionals. But the Bush administration has a record of ignoring career intelligence officers. In a 2002 memo written to justify torture in overseas interrogations, former Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee argued that drugging should be included in the roster of techniques available to interrogators. And while that memo was repudiated, Guantánamo attorneys maintain that their clients are being drugged.
“Truth serums do not force the subject to tell the truth,” writes Kristin E. Heckman and Mark D. Happel of the MITRE Corporation, a military-funded research center, in “Educing Information,” a survey of interrogation research published by the National Defense Intelligence College in December. “[A]lthough a subject’s inhibitions have been lowered, there is no guarantee that any of the information elicited will be accurate,” they write. According to the report, the persistence of coercive strategies in interrogation is based on anecdotal knowledge and Cold War norms, not rigorous examination of effectiveness.
“Truth drugs” have long proven unreliable. The Korean War brought public hysteria about Chinese and Soviet brainwashing camps turning captured GIs into unwitting dupes. In response, in 1953 the CIA launched Project MKULTRA, a series of 149 experiments over two decades that used subjects—including prisoners—to test mind-control techniques, including hypnosis and then-new hallucinogens like LSD. The Senate’s Church Committee brought the abuses to light in the late ’70s, revealing that only a handful of thousands of subjects knew what was being done to them.
Not a single mind-control experiment succeeded. “The whole MKULTRA program was a giant dead-end,” says Alfred McCoy, a University of Wisconsin-Madison historian and author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror.
Far more influential as a model for getting prisoners to reveal sensitive information was the CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual, written in 1963 and declassified a decade ago. Along with a discussion of building rapport with interrogation subjects, it recommends coercive strategies: Deprive subjects of sensory stimuli, destabilize and disorient them, and use self-inflicted pain—for instance, having the captive stand at attention for great lengths of time. Such tactics are more likely to sap resistance than inflict pain.
Taking this advice, the military devised a training program to aid soldiers in resisting interrogation if they are captured. The nexus of the military’s “stress inoculation” training is the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) courses at the JFK Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The SERE training process has been reverse-engineered to exploit detainees.
As Jane Mayer reported in the New Yorker in 2005, many of the elements of the SERE curriculum surfaced in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, including insulting detainees’ religious texts, water-boarding prisoners, exploiting national flags, humiliating detainees sexually, and the essentials of sensory surfeit and denial: hooding, shackling, muffling, denying sleep, withholding food and clothes, and subjecting prisoners to loud, repetitive noise and temperature extremes.
Another element of the SERE program is biochemical. Psychologists and psychiatrists at Fort Bragg have studied the level of hormones present in stressful situations, particularly cortisol, which increases anxiety and alertness. The changes in cortisol levels recorded during the trainings have been among the largest ever documented, according to a 2000 report in Special Warfare, a publication of the JFK Special Warfare School.
“Stress inoculation occurs only when the stress intensity is at the optimal level,” the report’s authors wrote, “low enough so as not to overwhelm them … if the stress level is too high, stress sensitization will occur.”
The application of SERE’s cortisol findings to detainees could allow interrogators to find their “breaking” points, Brig. Gen. Stephen Xenakis, a psychiatrist who led the Southeast Regional Army Medical Command before retiring nine years ago, told In These Times. Using the measure of cortisol to find the hormonal point at which a detainee can no longer protect himself could help interrogators inflict the precise amount of stress that would make a detainee most vulnerable to questioning.
But while truth serums and SERE tactics—and their associated mental changes—both produce acquiescence, the efficacy of either is very much in doubt. Steven Kleinman, an Air Force senior intelligence officer, writes in “Educing Information” that compliance with interrogators has been confused with meaningful cooperation. Born of the desire to understand—and withstand—Soviet-era coercive interrogations, Kleinman writes, the emphasis of U.S. interrogators has focused on techniques to bring about submission, not the production of reliable information.
“Once torture starts, it begins very quickly to proliferate,” says McCoy, the historian. “The techniques become increasingly brutal. Whether it’s Algiers in 1957 or Afghanistan in 2002—in every instance we have, it proliferates out of control.”
That the tactics learned at SERE were being exported to the interrogation chambers of the “long war” became very apparent to Col. Morgan Banks, a SERE administrator and psychologist who advised on interrogations at Guantánamo and Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Consequently, he instituted a new rule for SERE graduates in 2004: Sign a pledge that SERE techniques will not be used on detainees in U.S. custody.
Such assurances come too late for Padilla, who becomes “visibly terrified” at the thought of watching his interrogation tapes and “appears to be incapacitated by Post Traumatic Stress Disorder,” according to psychiatric evaluations.
“It is clear that there are definite similarities, with some techniques being identical, between some of the tactics allegedly used on José Padilla and those adapted from the SERE program for use as interrogation methods at Guantánamo and elsewhere,” says Nathaniel Raymond, senior communications strategist for Physicians for Human Rights, which tracks detainee abuse.
In court filings, Padilla’s lawyers describe him as a “piece of furniture”—a man objectified and dehumanized by the U.S. government; a government that is relentlessly focused on extracting information, regardless of its utility or its veracity, from him and hundreds of others. At any cost.
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