By
Lisa
Hajjar
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(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)
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Reframing
the CIA’s interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical
ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.
Human
experimentation was a core feature of the CIA’s torture program. The
experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly
evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s executive summary of its
investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to
obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the
identities of perpetrators.
At
the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by
the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and
detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the
agency’s secret “black sites.”
In
its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the
duo: “We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict
had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into
the uncharted territory of the program.”
Mitchell and Jessen’s qualifications
did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda
or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force
experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as
well as a curiosity about whether theories of “learned helplessness” derived
from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.
To
implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or personally engaged in
techniques intended to produce “debility, disorientation and dread.” Their
“theory” had a particular means-ends relationship that is not well understood,
as Mitchell testily explained in an interview on Vice News: “The point of the
bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop.” In other words,
“enhanced interrogation techniques” (the Bush administration’s euphemism for
torture) do not themselves produce useful information; rather, they produce the
condition of total submission that will facilitate extraction of actionable
intelligence.
Mitchell,
like former CIA Director Michael Hayden and others who have defended the
torture program, argues that a fundamental error in the Senate report is the
elision of means
(waterboarding, “rectal rehydration,” weeks or months of nakedness in total
darkness and isolation, and other techniques intended to break prisoners) and ends—manufactured
compliance, which, the defenders claim, enabled the collection of abundant
intelligence that kept Americans safe. (That claim is amply and authoritatively
contradicted in the report.)
As
Americans from the Beltway to the heartland debate—again—the legality and
efficacy of “enhanced interrogation,” we are reminded that “torture” has lost
its stigma as morally reprehensible and criminal behavior. That was evident in
the 2012 GOP presidential primary, when more than half of the candidates vowed
to bring back waterboarding, and it is on full display now. On Meet the Press, for
example, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who functionally topped the
national security decision-making hierarchy during the Bush years, announced
that he “would do it again in a minute.”
No
one has been held accountable for torture, beyond a handful of prosecutions of
low-level troops and contractors. Indeed, impunity has been virtually
guaranteed as a result of various Faustian bargains, which include “golden
shield” legal memos written by government lawyers for the CIA; ex post facto
immunity for war crimes that Congress inserted in the 2006 Military Commissions
Act; classification and secrecy that still shrouds the torture program, as is
apparent in the Senate report’s redactions; and the “look forward, not
backward” position that President Obama has maintained through every wave of
public revelations since 2009. An American majority, it seems, has come to
accept the legacy of torture.
Human
experimentation, in contrast, has not been politically refashioned into a
legitimate or justifiable enterprise. Therefore, it would behoove us to
appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers of black-site torments
were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and CIA to experiment
on human beings. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light
on questions of accountability and impunity.
The
“war on terror” is not the CIA’s first venture into human experimentation. At
the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of
human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United
States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking
rapidity of American POWs’ breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist
captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research.
In 1953, the CIA
established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis,
electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in
psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models,
including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and
humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied “science” in the Cold War.
During
the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined
psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and
extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled “Kubark
Counterintelligence Interrogation” to guide agents in the art of extracting
information from “resistant” sources by combining techniques to produce
“debility, disorientation and dread.”
Like the communists, the CIA largely
eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target
the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the
desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into
the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the
Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled “Human Resource Exploitation Manual,”
was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin
America and Southeast Asia during the global “war on communism.”
In
the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations
into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both manuals became public in
1997 as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Baltimore Sun.
That would have seemed like a “never again” moment.
But
here we are again. This brings us back to Mitchell and Jessen. Because of their
experience as trainers in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape
(SERE) program, after 9/11 they were contacted by high-ranking Pentagon officials
and, later, by lawyers who wanted to know whether some of those SERE techniques
could be reverse-engineered to get terrorism suspects to talk.
The
road from abstract hypotheticals (can SERE be reverse-engineered?) to the
authorized use of waterboarding and confinement boxes runs straight into the
terrain of human experimentation. On April 15, 2002, Mitchell and Jessen
arrived at a black site in Thailand to supervise the interrogation of Abu
Zubaydah, the first “high-value detainee” captured by the CIA.
By July,
Mitchell proposed more coercive techniques to CIA headquarters, and many of
these were approved in late July. From then until the program was dry-docked in
2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical
torments, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is
the textbook definition of human experimentation.
My
point is not to minimize the illegality of torture or the legal imperatives to
pursue accountability for perpetrators. Rather, because the concept of torture
has been so muddled and disputed, I suggest that accountability would be more
publicly palatable if we reframed the CIA’s program as one of human
experimentation.
If we did so, it would be more difficult to laud or excuse
perpetrators as “patriots” who “acted in good faith.” Although torture has
become a Rorschach test among political elites playing to public opinion on the
Sunday morning talk shows, human experimentation has no such community of
advocates and apologists.
Source:
http://www.thenation.com
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