Senate releases CIA torture report

[Albert Doyle]

Hoekstra shows that the Republicans feel confident that all they have to do is speak aggressively with a tone of indignation and keep lying. Hoekstra "We have rule of law in America".

Hayden thinks the poor CIA are betrayed victims and it is unprecedented. (As in they usually get away with it)

We have a Republican problem in this country.


David, the whole idea in the first place is the loss of confidence in government. The people who always benefit in that situation are those same lying power abusers.

[David Guyatt]

Hoekstra shows that the Republicans feel confident that all they have to do is speak aggressively with a tone of indignation and keep lying. Hoekstra "We have rule of law in America".

Hayden thinks the poor CIA are betrayed victims and it is unprecedented. (As in they usually get away with it)

We have a Republican problem in this country.


David, the whole idea in the first place is the loss of confidence in government. The people who always benefit in that situation are those same lying power abusers.

As I keep saying Albert, there is not the rule of law in the US, it is, rather, the law of rule.

[Peter Lemkin]

America is out of control and beyond the pale....
Those that ordered the torture should be dragged to court, tried and convicted!
Those that twisted the laws and justified torture [when it has always been illegal] should be dragged to court, tried and convicted!
Those who are in positions of elected power who make excuses for torture should be impeached - and that includes at least one [likely more] Supreme, who said it was OK under certain circumstances - it is not OK [illegal!] under all circumstances - by both Domestic law and International Treaty the USA has signed - which even trumps Domestic laws.
...and torture is just one of hundreds of egregious actions and polices - against the law, morality, the People, Justice, fairness, reasonableness, humanity, dignity, civility, life and principles of treating others as you would want to be treated - not to mention innocent until proven guilty and even then not mistreated or killed. The wrong people have their hands on all the levers of power and are looking/working to get even more.....

Sick Nation ::prison::

[Anthony Thorne]

Commentary from the Xymphora blog, coloured by that blog's typically quite-strident anti-Israeli perspective, but with some interesting observations nonetheless.

..........

"U.S. Tortured and Killed Innocent People for the Specific Purpose of Producing False Propaganda"

It is instructive that all the analysis from the United States, from both the 'right' and the 'left'. is that torture is employed for the purposes of eliciting otherwise unavailable information that saves American lives from 'terrorism'. The 'right' accepts this uncritically; the 'left' either points out - correctly - that torture produces unreliable information, or alleges that it is not worth the moral decay to the country (not to mention the cost to the American reputation). Both share the assumption that there is information - facts - available from certain individuals that could save American lives.

Of course, this is utter nonsense. The Global War On Terror is the creation of World Jewry specifically intended to increase Islamophobia in order to continue American protection for the supremacist Jewish project of building a Zionist empire across the Middle East. Considering the degree of provocation caused by American violence it is remarkable that there is almost no real terrorism, at least coming from Muslims. Almost all acts described as 'terrorism' are either:

1. false flags; or
   
2. self-defensive actions against violent - and legitimate - American or allied military or intelligence targets.
   

The CIA isn't stupid. Psychopathic, yes, but not stupid. The leaders of the CIA know that there are no facts available that would help fighting the Global War On Terror. On the contrary, the facts are not only useless, but positively dangerous, for the propaganda war that the American government is engaged in.

The entire premise of torture is that pressure can be applied to human beings to force them to give up their secrets, accurate information that could save American lives. This is largely based on entertainment provided by, yes, 'Hollywood;' (i.e., the propaganda arm of World Jewry), with the ticking time bomb that can only be found through pressure imposed on a captured 'terrorist' being the classic example. Of course, the reality is that the poor victims of torture are in extremis, and will do anything to resolve their situation. If only they could figure out what to say that would satisfy the CIA torturers.

The trick of excellent torturing is to convey to the torture victim what parts of the propaganda background would end the torture. It is a trick the thug torturers have never really mastered. The tragedy is that neither the CIA torturers, nor their victims, are aware that the torture is not a fact-finding enterprise. It is a propaganda-creation exercise. Thus the answers that any victim is liable to give - various facts known to the victim, or at least things made up out of necessity on the false hope that any kind of fact might please the torturer - won't work. Since the entire premise of the Global War On Terror is based on lies - the main lie being that the danger to Americans is from Islam and not from World Jewry - facts can never please the torturer.

Consider how the CIA acted, against how we would expect it to act if it were really engaged in a critical fact-finding exercise. Instead of picking up people who might actually be real terrorists, it rounded up victims holus-bolus, based on mistakes in identity and, in many cases, no attempt to confirm identity at all. There has never been any effort made to attempt to confirm if many of these victims had any hope of producing facts connected to terrorism (this is also the case for the victims at Guantanamo Bay)[B]. Once captured and tortured, at least some victims were killed, out of what appears to be mere carelessness and sloppiness. [B]If these people had real, valuable information, the last thing a real torture operation would want is for the victims to die. Even the high-value victims, people with verifiable connections to radical groups, [B]were handled in the most incompetent way possible, driving them insane, and thus useless as conveyors of information, before any accurate information was obtained.

The CIA behaved exactly as you might expect it to behave if it didn't really want the facts, and just wanted an operation intended to produce propaganda. The basis of all the lies told by the CIA and American politicians and bureaucrats is to misrepresent the basis and purpose of the Global War On Terror.

Of course, the American 'left' can't mention any of this, as the truth is career-ending 'anti-Semitism'. That is why nothing will change.

.....
[/B][/B][/B]Tweet (Sam Husseini; his posting on the issue):

"Key torture report finding buried in footnote 857: torture helped produce bogus case for Powell on Iraq war"

Landay at McClatchy, 2009 (without the specifics, but with clear understanding that the torture was intended to produce lies to be used for propaganda): "Report: Abusive tactics used to seek Iraq-al Qaida link"

We could even go further back to the Executive Intelligence Review News Service, 2005: "DIA Proof Of Cheney's Lies Released" (based on the CIA's President's Daily Briefing of September 21, 2001, before Ibn Shaykh al-Libi had been captured and interrogated by the Americans, and before his rendition to Egypt, where torture created his testimony of an Iraq-al Qaeda connection). This means that the intelligence community knew the stories they were creating using torture were lies.

The newest revelation, separate from the Torture Report, is that Levin has details from the classified March 2003 - just before the American attack on Iraq started - CIA cable warning that the allegation that Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague was false. Ironically, it appears that Brennan has released this in order to attempt to protect the CIA's reputation by emphasizing that Bush/Cheney/Powell had been given due warning from the CIA that the propaganda basis for the American attack on Iraq was a lie. Levin:

"There is a second recent revelation about how the "Prague meeting" progressed from unsubstantiated report to justification for war. It comes from Jiri Ruzek, who headed the Czech counterintelligence service on and after 9/11. Mr. Ruzek published a memoir earlier this year, which we have had translated from Czech. It recounts the days after the terror attack, including how his nation's intelligence services first reported a single-source rumor of a Prague meeting between Atta and al-Ani, how CIA officials under pressure from CIA headquarters in turn pressured him to substantiate the rumor, and how U.S. officials pressured the Czech government when Czech intelligence officials failed to produce the confirmation that the Bush administration sought.

Mr. Ruzek writes, "It was becoming more and more clear that we had not met expectations and did not provide the right' intelligence output." Mr. Ruzek goes on: "The Americans showed me that anything can be violated, including the rules that they themselves taught us. Without any regard to us, they used our intelligence information for propaganda press leaks. They wanted to mine certainty from unconfirmed suspicion and use it as an excuse for military action. We were supposed to play the role of useful idiot thanks to whose initiative a war would be started."

That's chilling. We have a senior intelligence official of a friendly nation describing the pressure that he and other Czech officials were under to give the Bush administration material it could use to justify a war."

The Atta Prague meeting is the creation of Douglas Feith, who created the lie in the face of specific CIA information to the contrary, and passed it on through Libby to Cheney and Powell (of course, the suppressed 'Able Danger' material informs us that 'Atta' was working for the US government throughout, as one of those false flag recruiters/military trainers in the mold of Ali Mohamed, a role much beloved by the Pentagon, so the CIA or Pentagon knew where 'Atta' was at all times, including not being in Prague at the relevant time; my emphasis in red and green):

"Cheney's public statements before and after the war about the risks posed by Iraq have closely tracked the briefing Feith's office presented to the vice president's then-chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. That includes the briefing's depiction of an alleged 2001 meeting in Prague between an Iraqi intelligence official and one of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers as one of eight "Known Iraq-Al Qaida Contacts."
The defense report states that at the time, "the intelligence community disagreed with the briefing's assessment that the alleged meeting constituted a 'known contact' " -- a circumstance that the report said was known to Feith's office. But his office had bluntly concluded in a July 2002 critique of a CIA report on Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda that the CIA's interpretation of the facts it cited "ought to be ignored."

The briefing to Libby was also presented with slight variations to then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and then-deputy national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley. It was prepared in part by someone whom the defense report described as a "junior Naval Reservist" intelligence analyst detailed to Feith's office from the DIA. The person is not named in the report, but Edelman wrote that she was requested by Feith's office."

I wonder if the DIA connection means it was the DIA, and not the CIA, that was directing the various torturers in what specific story they wanted from the torture. You also have to wonder if she was part of an Israeli conspiracy with Feith. It is not clear that the Prague meeting came out of a guided torture session, or whether she and Feith just made it up.

And more background:

1. "Lie by Lie: A Timeline of How We Got Into Iraq"
   
2. "Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations"
   
3. "Humanitarian Aid Worker: Torture Only Stopped When I Pretended I Was In Al Qaeda"
   
4. "U.S. Officials Guilty of War Crimes for Using 9/11 As a False Justification for the Iraq War"
   
5. "The Media Is Focusing On the WRONG Senate Torture Report"
   

[Albert Doyle]

...and if they tortured to produce false confessions in order to justify the War On Terror that means the likelihood that they did a false flag killing of 3000 Americans is much more probable. The feathers on one side of the vulture usually match those on the other.

[Lauren Johnson]

...and if they tortured to produce false confessions in order to justify the War On Terror that means the likelihood that they did a false flag killing of 3000 Americans is much more probable. The feathers on one side of the vulture usually match those on the other.

Bingo.

[David Guyatt]

From VoltaireNet:

The Congressional report on torture confirms that Al Qaeda was not involved in the attacks of September 11

by Thierry Meyssan

Publicly released excerpts of the report of the Senate Committee on the CIA's secret torture program reveal a vast criminal organization. Thierry Meyssan has read for you the 525 pages of this document. He found evidence of what he has been saying for years.

VOLTAIRE NETWORK | DAMASCUS (SYRIA) | 15 DECEMBER 2014 FRANÇAIS ESPAÑOL ITALIANO PORTUGUÊS فارسى TÜRKÇE РУССКИЙ DEUTSCH

Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, on December 9, 2014, released an extract of her classified report on the secret program of torture by the CIA. [1]

Presentation of the report

The declassified portion corresponds to only one-twelfth of the initial report.The report itself does not address the vast removal and sequestration system that the US Navy had put in place during the terms of President George W. Bush; a program that has led to worldwide kidnapping and sequestration of more than 80 000 people aboard 17 flat-bottomed boats stationed in international waters (these ships are: USS Bataan, USS Peleliu, USS Ashland, USNS Stockham, USNS Watson, USNS Watkins, USNS Sister, USNS Charlton, USNS Pomeroy, USNS Red Cloud, USNS Soderman, USNS Dahl MV PFC William B Baugh, Alex Bonnyman MV, MV Franklin J Phillips, MV Huage Louis J Jr, James Anderson Jr. MV). It is content to study 119 cases of human guinea pigs subjected to psychological experiments in Guantánamo and fifty secret prisons from 2002 to late 2009, a year after the election of Barack Obama.The extracts of the report do not indicate the criteria by which these human guinea pigs were chosen. They merely state that each prisoner denounced the following, while indicating that the confessions were not coerced but learned. In other words, the CIA sought to justify its choices by making denunciations post.In the initial report, the names of agents and contractors of the CIA involved have been replaced by pseudonyms. In addition, the declassified extracts were widely censored, mainly to clear the names of foreign accomplices of the CIA.

The content of the report

I read the entire 525 pages of excerpts from the public report. However, I am far from having drawn all the information because much research is needed to interpret the redacted passages.Conditioning sessions were performed in fifty secret prisons under the responsibility of "Alec Station", the unit of the CIA responsible for following Osama bin Laden. Infrastructure, staff and transport were the responsibility of the "Group of surrender and detention" of the CIA. The sessions were designed and built under the supervision of two contracting psychologists who formed a firm in 2005. The conditioning techniques employed were authorized at the highest level, without specifying that these tortures were intended to condition and not to extract information.Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Justice John Ashcroft, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and CIA Director George Tenet attended meetings on this subject at the White House. They attended simulations at the White House and watched recordings of some sessions; records that were subsequently illegally destroyed. These meetings were obviously designed to "wet" these personalities, but it is not possible to determine which of them knew for what these techniques had been used.However, in June 2007, Condoleezza Rice was personally briefed by the CIA contractor who supervised the experiments. The National Security Advisor authorized the continuation of the experiments, but diminished the number of authorized tortures.The publicly available excerpts of the report contain a detailed analysis of how the CIA lied to the other branches of the Bush administration, the media and Congress.James Mitchell and Bruce Jensen, supervisors of the CIA conditioning program. Mitchell was appointed Mormon bishop in 2012, but he was forced to resign when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints learned about his activities.

The experiments of Professor Martin Seligman

The public extract from the report confirms that the CIA conducted experiments based on the work of Professor Martin Seligman (theory of "learned helplessness"). They were not intended to obtain a confession or information, but to inculcate a narrative or behavior in the subjects.Most of the quotes that the press has extracted from the report are confusing. Indeed, the CIA speaks of "conditioning methods" under the name of "non-standard means of interrogation"). Out of context, we can assume that the term "interrogation" means the search for information while it actually denotes conditioning sessions undergone by the subjects.All the names of the torturers were censored in the declassified extracts. However, we recognize Bruce Jessen under the pseudonym "Grayson Swigert" and James Mitchell as that of "Hammond Dunbar." From April 12, 2002, the two men oversaw the program. They were physically present in secret prisons. In 2005, they organized themselves into a commercial company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates (referred to as "Company Y" in the report). From 2005 to 2010, their firm was paid $ 81 million. Subsequently, they were used by the Army to conduct a behavioral program on 1.1 million US soldiers.In May of 2003, a senior CIA officer informed the Inspector General of the Agency that the work of Professor Seligman was based on torture practiced by North Vietnam to obtain "confessions for propaganda purposes". The officer put the conditioning program into question. His information was not followed up on. Moreover, he made a small mistake by citing North Vietnam; Seligman's research was based, like the North Vietnamese practices, on Korean work.

How torturers protected themselves

According to the Senate Committee, the CIA's torture program was ordered by President George W. Bush, September 17, 2001, six days after the attacks. He had intended only to give extraordinary means to investigate the attacks of 11 September 2001. However, this program was immediately developed in breach of some President's instructions. Therefore, from the attacks, the CIA, unbeknownst to the White House, sought to manufacture fraudulent evidence falsely attesting to the guilt of al-Qaeda.President George Bush and parliamentarians were deceived by the CIA who
got authorizations to practice certain forms of torture by masking their true purpose and
misrepresented inculcated confessions as if they had been extracted under torture.When , on September 6, 2006, President Bush admitted to the existence of the secret torture program of the CIA, he defended the practice, arguing that it had yielded information that saved lives. It was based on the false reports of the CIA and he was unaware that it manufactured evidence instead of searching for it. From that point, the Atlanticist media descended into barbarism and debated the merits of torture by presenting it as a necessary evil.The torturers ensured legal cover for themselves by asking for permission to practice from the Department of Justice. But it took no action on the legality of the methods used (isolation, confinement in a small box, staged funeral, use of insects, etc.) and not on the program as a whole. Most lawyers allowed only particular postures ignoring their psychological consequences when combined. All authorizations were collected in August of 2002.CIA officials who authorized these experiments have indicated in writing that the human guinea pigs were to be incinerated if they succumbed during conditioning or they should stay locked up for life if they survived.

"Confessions" fabricated

Let's be clear: the Senate Committee does not say that the confessions of CIA detainees are legally incorrect because they were obtained under torture, it states that the CIA did not question the detainees, but it conditioned them to confess to acts of which they knew nothing. The Commission states that the CIA agents did not even look to see what the detainees had confessed during previous interrogations with the authorities who arrested them. In other words not only has the CIA not investigated whether al Qaeda was involved in the attacks or not, but its action had no other purpose than to generate false evidence attesting to the involvement of al-Qaeda in the attacks of September 11.The Senate Committee did not discuss whether the confessions of the human guinea pigs were extorted or inculcated, but after explaining that supervisors were conditioning experts and not interrogators, the Committee explains at length the fact that none of these "confessions" has allowed us to anticipate anything. It demonstrates that the CIA lied by claiming that they had helped prevent further attacks. The Commission does not write that information on al-Qaeda in these confessions is fabricated, but notes that it all was verifiably false. In doing so, the Commission explicitly refutes the arguments that were used to justify torture and implicitly cancels the testimonies which were used to link al-Qaeda to the attacks of Sept. 11.This report confirms, officially, several items of information we presented to our readers and that contradict and invalidate the work of Atlanticist think tanks, universities and the media since September 11, both in regard to the 2001 attacks themselves and with regard to al-Qaeda.Following the publication of excerpts from this report, it appears that all the evidence cited in the report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the September 11 attacks connecting these to al-Qaeda is false. There no longer exists to date a shred of evidence for attributing the attacks to Al Qaeda: There is no evidence that the 19 people accused of being airline pirates could have been found that day in one of the four planes, and none of the former members of Al Qaeda's testimonials confessing to the attacks is genuine [2].Martin Seligman, the designer of the CIA conditioning program.

The report confirms what we revealed in 2009

In October 2009, I published a study on this subject in the Russian magazine Odnako [3]. I argued that Guantanamo was not an interrogation center, but a conditioning centre. Also I was putting personally calling Professor Seligman to task. A year later, the article having been translated into English,US psychologists led a campaign to ask Martin Seligman for an explanation. In response, he denied his role as a torturer and launched legal proceedings against myself and the Voltaire Network in both France and Lebanon where I lived. Ultimately, Professor Seligman instructed his lawyers to stop the procedures after we published one of his letters followed by an explanatory text. [4] Martin Seligman sued all those who treated this subject, such as Bryant Weich of the Huffington Post [5].John O. Brennan was deputy director of the CIA (2001-05) and, as such, director of the National Anti-Terrorist Centre. He was the main architect of the secret program for fabricating confessions under torture. In 2009, he became adviser to President Barack Obams on Homeland Security issues. He was appointed CIA director in 2013.

And now

Senator Diane Feinstein bravely managed to publish part of her report, despite the opposition of the current CIA director, John Brennan, formerly in charge of controlling the torture program.President Barack Obama announced that he would not pursue any of the perpetrators of these crimes, while defenders of human rights are fighting to have the perpetrators brought to justice. It's the least we can do.However, the real issues are elsewhere: Why did the CIA committed such crimes? Why did it fabricate confessions to link al-Qaeda artificially to the attacks of September 11? And therefore, al-Qaeda being unrelated to the attacks of Sept. 11, who has the CIA therefore sought to protect?Finally, the CIA program involved only 119 human guinea pigs, what do we know about the 80,000 secret prisoners of the US Navy?

[Tracy Riddle]

This report has only brought out all the usual liars, rushing to the barricades, to overwhelm us with the same bullshit we heard 10-12 years ago. "We were all gonna die! They had suitcase nukes! We had to protect the country!"

Of course, fear trumps reason almost every time. Which is why polls show most Americans support this crap (of course, they were conditioned to accept it in movies and TV shows).

[Peter Lemkin]

AMY GOODMAN: Colonel Larry James, at that meeting, who is now dean at Wayne State in Detroit [sic], of the U.S. Army, chief psychologist at Guantánamo and a member of the APA governing board, said at the meeting, defending military psychologists, said they help make interrogations safe, ethical and legal, and cited instances where psychologists allegedly intervened to stop abuse. He said, "If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die." But then Dr. Laurie Wagner got up, a Dallas psychologist and the past president of the APA Division of Psychoanalysis, "Why are people dying, if the U.S. military is in charge?" Let me put that question to Professor Al McCoy. This whole debate within the APA and the role of psychologists, as you see it?
ALFRED McCOY: Yeah, Amy, we can put this in a wider context. The psychologists are critical, but they're critical because psychological torture is, in effect, enshrined within U.S. law. When the United States finally ratified the U.N. Convention Against Torture in 1994, we did so subject to certain qualifications, known in diplomatic parlance as "reservations." And basically, the four reservations that we introduced modified our approval, our ratification of that convention, everything in it except: We redefined the U.N. definition of what torture wasextreme painand we called it "prolonged mental harm," that for an act to rise to the level of torture, it had to become, in U.S. parlance, in those reservations, prolonged mental harm.
Now, those three words are critical. First of all, "mental." That meant that the United States was effectively splitting the U.N. convention down the middle. The convention barred both physical and psychological torture. We were saying, "We accept the ban on physical torture, but we're exempting the ban on psychological torture. And we are qualifying that ban because in order for an act to rise to the level of torture, of psychological torture, it has to inflict prolonged mental harm upon the victim."
Now, what is "prolonged"? How long is "prolonged"? That's not defined. It's a huge loophole. And what constitutes "harm"? That's another huge loophole. And that, of course, opened the door for that notorious memo by the Office of Legal Counsel, its leader then Jay Bybee, to say that for something to rise to the level of harm, the pain must be sufficient or equivalent to organ failure. In other words, torture, psychological torture up to but not including death, is legally acceptable in U.S. law.
Those words in the reservations have been replicated verbatim in the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996, the Military Commissions Act 2006, verbatim. Those paragraphs recur in U.S. law, and it's that which creates the opening for psychologists like Mitchell and Jessen to participate in these programs. And that, in effect, means that these acts, which are outrageous and which we now consider to be torture, are in factcan be, if you willcan be exempted from the rubric of law. So, it's a problem that the United States has been so reliant on psychological torture for so long that it's become embedded not only in bureaucracy, in professional practice, like the military psychologists that work for the Defense Department, but also in U.S. law. It's deeply embedded in our society.
AMY GOODMAN: I just wanted to make a slight correction. I was talking about Dr. Larry James. He's at Wright State in Dayton, Ohio. Aaron?
AARON MATÉ: Well, yeah, just back to this history, Professor McCoy, that you're talking about, this raises an important point. A common narrative is that it's the Bush administration that imposed torture, but you're saying that this has been enshrined in policy for a long time.
ALFRED McCOY: Yes. I mean, again, going back to the start of this whole process, right, the United States responded to the idea that the Soviets had cracked the code of human consciousness, that they had somehow had the capacity to produce, to borrow the parlance, a Manchurian candidatethey could program an assassin. So, we reacted to this by using psychologists to develop our own offensive doctrine of psychological torture. And again, the CIA disseminated this among our allies worldwide for 30 years throughout the Cold War. This became encoded within the U.S. military through the SERE training.
And then, when that was all over and it was time for serious structural reforms, those reforms took place. The CIA abjured torture in 1989, said they wouldn't do it anymore. They said it was completely counterproductive. The Defense Department recalled the manuals. The manuals were actually published in the U.S. press in 1997. It seemed to be all overexcept that the inclination, the reliance, the belief and the faith in the efficacy of psychological torture was at this point so deeply embedded in the U.S. national security bureaucracy that our reflex, upon ratification of the U.N. conventionwhich, by the way, took us an extraordinarily long time, took us six or seven years after the rest of the world had ratified that conventionby the time we did it, we did it in a way that protected, that reserved our right to engage in these psychological torture practices.
And indeed, since then, we've conducted ourselves in activities that are a clear violation of the U.N. convention. So, in other words, the reflex to torture, the sense of empowerment, the idea that we can defy international law, defy our own law for reasons of national security, that arises from this long and troubled history of our relationship to psychological torture.
AMY GOODMAN: On Sunday, former Vice President Dick Cheney said he would do it all again. Cheney was speaking on NBC's Meet the Press.

DICK CHENEY: With respect to trying to define that as torture, I come back to the proposition torture was what the al-Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation. ... It worked. It worked now. For 13 years we've avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States. We did capture bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys of al-Qaeda who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I'd do it again in a minute.

AMY GOODMAN: That is Vice President Dick Cheney. Now, the Senate Intelligence Committee report that came out last week, at least the summarythe full thousands of pages has notdetailed the list of torture methods they used on prisoners, including waterboarding; sexual threats with broomsticks; medically unnecessary rectal feeding; people who had died as a result, for example, of being kept in the cold; people being kept up for something like 180 hours; buzzing power drills put against their heads; dunked repeatedly in tanks of ice water; at least 26 innocent people subjected to torture, including one who froze to death. Your response, Professor McCoy, to Vice President Cheney saying he'd do it again?
ALFRED McCOY: Dick Cheney has been a forceful advocate for the enhanced interrogation techniques. He's been unapologetic. He's been vociferous. He's given dozens of interviews over the years. In effect, Dick Cheney is the leading voice for those in the intelligence community that are determined to win impunity for their violations of law and international conventions.
And we're nowas a result of the Senate report, we're now in what I call the fifth and final stage of a decade-long struggle over the torture issue, a decade-long struggle for impunity. And the United States, just like other nations that have emerged from these sad practices at the end of the Cold War, has been going really through a five-stage process of impunity.
When the Abu Ghraib photographs were released back in April 2004, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld blamed it on the so-called "bad apples." That's the first reflexblame the bad apples. Then Dick Cheney and others, right away, began saying that it was an imperative for national security: We had to do it for reasons of safety. That's the second stage in impunity. Then, when President Obama came into office in April 2009, he visited CIA headquarters, and he brought us to the third stage of impunity by saying that the past was indeed unfortunate, but it was time to move forward together. In other words, national unity means we can't investigate this troubled past.
Then we hit stage four, which is essentially exoneration for the perpetrators and the powerful that ordered them to commit these acts. That occurred, ironically, after the death of Osama bin Laden in May of 2011, when an a cappella chorus of Republican neoconservatives arose on the media and said that these enhanced interrogation techniques led us to Osama bin Laden, they kept us safe. To use to Dick Cheney's words, they saved thousands of lives, tens of thousands of lives. At that point, the U.S. Justice Department terminated its investigation of nearly a hundred CIA excesses that were potentially crimes, and the perpetrators had won exoneration.
Now what they're fighting for is not just exoneration, they want vindication before the bar of history. And that's critical on a couple of levels. First of all, policy level, if they achieve that, if they win the fight and say that these techniques were, first of all, not torture, and, second of all, they kept us safe, they will then, first of all, be exempt from civil litigation by the victims, second of all, to possibly U.S. criminal investigations, to international arrests should they travel abroad. More importantly, in terms of policy, that means that this doctrine will remain in the presidential toolkit so that a future president can set aside President Obama's restrictions on these methods and torture again.
And so, that's why this is a desperate and very serious battle over impunity. And that's why the Senate committee's report is so important, because up to this point the perpetrators and their powerful were winning the debate. Now, in fact, the debate has shifted its tone, and it's looking to me like it's a much more neutral, much more positive outcome.
AMY GOODMAN: And in the 30 seconds we have left, Steven Reisner, in the APA, an investigation is being done within the APA. What will make it different from the PENS committee years ago, that was made up, majority, of the people who were involved with the interrogations?
STEVEN REISNER: Well, what makes this different is that the Risen book exposed the collusion, apparent collusion, between the APA and the CIA and perhaps the DOD. An independent investigator has been hired to take a look at all documents at the APA, to look at all of the questions that we dissidents at the APA have raised, and will do a full and thorough independent investigation. And I agree with Dr. McCoy that we have to enshrine into law that torture has to be made illegal, but we also have to close that one place that has permitted torture, which has to do with health professionals and doctors and psychologists. And I'm hoping the results of this investigation will force, will press the APA to, once and for all, prohibit psychologists from being involved in any coercive interrogations from here on in.

[Peter Lemkin]

AARON MATÉ: A retired Air Force psychologist identified as the "architect" of the CIA's torture program has confirmed for the first time he personally waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. James Mitchell told Vice News, quote, "Yes, I waterboarded KSM. I was part of a larger team that waterboarded a small number of detainees." Mitchell also reportedly waterboarded Abu Zubaydah at a secret CIA black site in Thailand. Mitchell was hired to help create the interrogation program along with his partner, Bruce Jessen, another psychologist. The Senate report says Mitchell and Jessen were paid $81 million to help design the CIA's torture methods, including some of the most abusive tactics. The pair had no prior experience in interrogation.
AMY GOODMAN: Defending his role last week, James Mitchell said the abuse of prisoners is preferable to the Obama administration's ongoing drone war that claims civilian lives. He was speaking to Vice News.

JAMES MITCHELL: To me, it seems completely insensible that slapping KSM is bad, but sending a Hellfire missile into a family's picnic and killing all the children and, you know, killing Granny and killing everyone is OK, for a lot of reasons. One of the reasons is: What about that collateral loss of life? And the other is, is that if you kill them, you can't question them.

AARON MATÉ: As Mitchell defends his part in the torture program, the American Psychological Association has launched a review to determine whether its leadership played a role. The APA's probe was prompted by revelations in the new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War, by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist James Risen. The book reveals how after the Abu Ghraib torture scandal the APA formed a task force that enabled the continued role of psychologists in the torture program. One APA official wrote an email expressing gratitude to an intelligence official for influencing the decision, saying, quote, "Your views were well represented by the very carefully selected task force members."
AMY GOODMAN: There has been a deep division within the American Psychological Association's policy on interrogations for years. Unlike the American Medical Association and the smaller APA, the American Psychiatric Association, the APA, the American Psychological Association, which is the largest association of psychologists in the world, never prohibited its members from being involved in interrogations.
We're joined right now by two guests. We're going first to Steven Reisner, founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and psychological ethics adviser to Physicians for Human Rights. His latest piece for Slate is called "CIA on the Couch: Why there would have been no torture without the psychologists."
Well, Steven Reisner, it's great to have you back on Democracy Now! You also, years ago, ran for president of the APA, and your major plank was to stop involvement with torture. Your campaign, along with many hundreds of psychologists within the APA, has been going on for years. You now say that the torture could not have gone on without your colleagues, the psychologists?
STEVEN REISNER: Unfortunately, yes, that is true. The Bush administration's Justice Department created a legal rationale for torture that required the presence of psychologists and medical professionals. And so, on one hand, for legal cover, there had to be psychologists present. On the other handand even more horrifying for members of my professionthe torture regime itself was created at the CIA by these two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, and in the Department of Defense psychologists were involved in creating the torture program and in overseeing it from the beginning to the end.
AARON MATÉ: Talk about the role of Mitchell and Jessen, these two contractors paid $81 million to come up with these tactics that were usedbasically created the program.
STEVEN REISNER: Well, these two psychologists were sought out by the CIA because the CIA had beenhad found this manual, which they called a resistance manual, an al-Qaeda resistance manual. And in it, the al-Qaeda operatives are taught how to handle their imprisonment to not give up too much information. So someone had the idea that our own resistance trainers, psychologists, might have something to say about that manual. This seems to have been an opportunity for Mitchell and Jessen. They were resistance trainers who had been part of a program to basically torture our own soldiers to try to teach them to resist. So, the two of them got the manual, they wrote about it, and they claimed that they had special expertise, because of their resistance training, to break the resistance of al-Qaeda members.
AMY GOODMAN: And talk about how significant they were and the response by the American Psychological Association to what they were doing. It wasn't also just the two of them. They started the program. They got tens of millions of dollars for it.
STEVEN REISNER: Well, they created this torture program and justified it. They did the assessment of the prisoners, they did the torture itself, and then they did the evaluation of how well the torture worked. The level of conflict of interest and their self-promotion is horrendous. And it started a kind of virus of putting psychologists in these roles of overseeing and directing enhanced interrogations. And what happened very early on is that the professionalthe American Psychological Association decided that it was going to do its part by bringing researchers together with operatives to make those interrogations more effective, on the one hand, and to find a way to permit psychologists to be present, according toby changing its ethical policy, on the other hand.
AMY GOODMAN: Let's go to Vice News, go back to the Vice News interview with one of the two psychologists who helped create the CIA's program. James Mitchell was asked if the so-called EITs, enhanced interrogation techniques, were designed to get actionable intelligence. This was what he said.

JAMES MITCHELL: It was to facilitate getting actionable intelligence by making a bad cop, that was bad enough that the person would engage with a good cop. I would be stunned if they found any kind of evidence to suggest that EITs, as they were being applied, yielded actionable intelligence.

AARON MATÉ: That's James Mitchell, architect of the tactics used in the CIA torture program, speaking to Vice News. We're going to be joined now by Alfred McCoy, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He's the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror and Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation. Professor McCoy, can you talk about the role of Mitchell and Jessen in this torture program?
ALFRED McCOY: Well, they were the latest in a long history of American and Canadian psychologists helping the CIA design its interrogation protocols. This is an extraordinarily long history that goes back to 1951, when the CIA, in alliance with British and Canadian psychologists, set out to crack the code of human consciousness. And they worked with a very famous Canadian psychologist named Donald O. Hebb. And he conducted a series of experiments from 1951 to '54 that discovered the basic concept of sensory deprivation or sensory disorientation, which, when you read the Senate report, that is the core of the CIA's tactics.
These were originally developed for offensive uses, for us to break down captured Soviet spies. Then, in 1955, some 30 pilots returned as prisoners of war from North Korea, and they had been tortured. They gave statements, some of them, on Radio Beijing, alleging falsely that the United States had engaged in germ warfare. One of the pilots, a Marine Corps aviator, was put on trial. He was court-martialed. And at the end of this very sad saga, President Eisenhower ordered that all American military personnel at risk of capture by the enemy should be conditioned to resist torture. And this was the origin in the U.S. Air Force of the survival, evasion, escape, resistance doctrine, OK, which was using these psychological torture techniques, flipping them and using them defensively to train our personnel to resist enemy interrogation.
During the long years of the Cold War, the CIA propagated the offensive techniques among our allies worldwide. We trained SAVAK in Iran. We ran the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam. We trained Latin American militaries in the doctrine of torture. And as the Cold War wound up in the 1980s, the CIA did a review, repudiated the doctrine, developed a policy of not using coercive techniques. The Defense Department recalled the training manuals from Latin American militaries, under Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. These manuals were destroyed, and it was all over.
Now, when 9/11 struck, the only place where these techniques resided within the bowels of the U.S. bureaucracy was in the SERE doctrine. And so, it's quite logical that the CIA turned to two former U.S. Air Force SERE trainers and got them to, again, reverse-engineer the defensive doctrine into an offensive doctrine, using these psychological torture techniques against al-Qaeda and terrorist suspects.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us what KUBARK is?
ALFRED McCOY: Sure. KUBARK was the distillation of the CIA's decade of research into these psychological torture techniques. All that work, that first of all developed sensory deprivation or sensory disorientation, and then parallel work done by two researchers at Cornell University Medical Schoolthey found that the KGB's most effective torture technique was not brutal beating, but self-inflicted pain. And these two basic doctrines of sensory disorientation and self-inflicted pain were encoded in something called the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual in 1963. KUBARK was then the CIA's cryptonym for itself. So, the real title of the manual was the CIA's Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual. And that manual and those techniques were propagated worldwide for the next 30 years among U.S. allies in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, Iran, and particularly South Vietnam.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to break and then come back to this discussion. In our last segment, we're going to be talking with former Senator Mike Gravel. He's calling on Colorado outgoing Senator Mark Udall to read into the Congressional Record the full Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA's involvement with torture. But before we do that, we've got lots to cover with Professor Alfred McCoy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Steven Reisner. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: Our guests are Professor Al McCoy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Steven Reisner, who formerly ran for president of the American Psychological Association. He's a founding member of the Coalition for Ethical Psychology. I want to turn to a part of a [ 2007 ] Democracy Now! broadcast from San Francisco on a vote by the American Psychological Association's Council of Representatives to reject a proposal to ban psychologists from participating in interrogations at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. This meeting in San Francisco at this time was incredibly contentious. Many APA members wanted to reject the resolution, even though it was about to be approved. Democracy Now! was filming. One by one, these psychologists took to the stage to voice their outrage.

DAN AALBERS: My name is Dan Aalbers, and I am just another psychologist who thinks that the moral issue of our time has landed at our doorstep. ... We have made an enormous mistake, and I think it's not only did we do the wrong thing morally, we did not act in our best interests. We are now standing against the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the British Psychological Society, numerous human rights organizations, the U.N., the Council of Europe. And this detention and interrogation policy is going to go down. And once it does go down, we will find that we have secured the best cabin on the Titanic. Thank you.

NANCY WECKER: Hi, my name is Nancy Wecker. I'm in private practice in San Francisco. I just want to propose a conflict that we have. It's like we're embedded in the military, you know, like the journalists who are embedded in the war. That's our problem.

AMY GOODMAN: Not long after the town hall meeting had begun, the APA's public affairs officer approached Democracy Now! and told us to stop filming. She said we could only tape 10 minutes and that we had passed our time limit. I got on the microphone and told the people gathered at the meeting what was happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Excuse me, just [inaudible] a point of procedure. We're told that reporters are only allowed to record for 10 minutes, and Pamela Willenz of the APA said that she will call security on us now, because we're going to be recording for more than 10 minutes. So I was wondering if there could be any sense of the meeting, or a rationale, since this is a town hall meeting, for not being allowed to record for more than 10 minutes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We want to vote.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 1: Can we vote to allow recording at the town hall meeting? Can we all vote to allow recording?

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yes.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 1: Can we vote to allow recording?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 2: We want the press to witness this.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN 1: Can everyone who approves of allowing the reporters to record please raise your hand?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: OK, folks, the recording will continue through the session.

AMY GOODMAN: And with that, we continued taping the town hall meeting. APA members were outspoken about their concerns. Retired Bay Area psychologist Carter Mehl criticized the APA leadership for not bringing the issue of interrogations to the forefront.

DR. CARTER MEHL: Why are we being secretive? I understand why the CIA needs to be secretive. We are a public organization. And I would like someone from APA leadership to explain their rationale, why they thought a town meeting like this should be cut off, that the press should be excluded after 10 minutes. I would really like to know. I'm trying to understand. That is my problem, is what is the leadership coming from? Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: This was a meeting of the American Psychological Association. It was in 2007. Now, before this kind of speak-out, at the formal meeting, psychologist Jean Maria Arrigo stood on the dais before this standing-room crowd at the annual APA meeting. This came two years after she participated in an APA panel known as the PENS Task Force that concluded psychologists working in interrogations play a, quote, "valuable and ethical role." Arrigo criticized the findings and make-up of the panel.

JEAN MARIA ARRIGO: Six of the 10 members were highly placed in the Department of Defense, as contractors and military officers. For example, one was the commander of all military psychologists. Their positions on two key items of controversy in the PENS report were predetermined by their DOD employment, in spite of the apparent ambivalence of some. These key items were: (a) the permissive definition of torture in U.S. law versus the strict definition in international law, and, second, participation of military psychologists in interrogation settings versus nonparticipation. Those are the two principal issues. And because of their employment, they have to decide the way they do.

AMY GOODMAN: That was the psychologist Jean Maria Arrigo. She was part of this PENS Task Forceand PENS stands for Psychological Ethics and National Securitythe original whistleblower on this report that's on this committee, that's now being cited with James Risen reporting on the emails that came out around this. Steven Reisner, if you could talk more about her role and what has now been revealed about this critical PENS meeting. Speaking of secrecy around this meeting, Jean Maria Arrigo talked about, in the meeting, her natural tendency was to begin taking notes. She was invited to be on this panel. And another member of the panel turned to her and said, "You will put your notes down now."
STEVEN REISNER: Right. It's probably the only task force in APA history where the members were forbidden from taking notes. So, Jean Maria was a part of this task force because she's an oral historian in military and national security intelligence. But she suspected, rather quickly, that the task force had been brought together for some purpose that wasn't communicated to all the members, but had only been understood by the military-connected members. But she was sworn to secrecy. And she kept that secrecy pretty much until she had a conversation with myself and a few other of us who were questioning the task force. And I mentioned to her that I had just learned that the head of the APA Practice Directorate, Russ Newman, was married to a BSCT in Guantánamo and that that was not
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what "BSCT" is.
STEVEN REISNER: A BSCT is a behavioral science consultant. The BSCTs at Guantánamo oversaw the interrogations. That was the part of the role, the essential role, that psychologists played in this whole process. And I had mentioned that because General Kiley was a guest at that convention, and he had mentioned that to a group of us. And Jean Maria kind of turned white, and she said, "One of the secrets that I was asked to keep was that Russ Newman was a guiding force at that task force. And we didn't know that his wife was a BSCT at Guantánamo." So she said that now that this is revealed, "that I was basically duped. I'm going to reveal all that took place at that meeting, because I think that that meeting had somethat it was a duplicitous meeting, that the APA was colluding with the CIA and the Pentagon." It turns out that she was very prescient, because Jim Risen's book gives us the smoking gun to validate what Jean Maria suspected at the time.
AARON MATÉ: So the APA is now probing this, probing this task force that worked with the CIA. Why do you think they would have done this in the first place?
STEVEN REISNER: Would have done which? Probe or agree?
AARON MATÉ: Why they would have colluded with the CIA to enable the program?
STEVEN REISNER: Well, we've all been wondering about that. The American Psychological Association has deep, long-standing connections with the Department of Defense and the intelligence agencies. In fact, the Department of Defense was the first government agency to really recognize the important roles that psychologists play. A huge number of psychologists work for the Department of Defense at the VAs and in the military itself, sobut also, some very key members of the American Psychological Association governance have always had ties to military contracts. There are members of the governance who run an organization called HumRRO, which is awhich has itself tens of millions of dollars of Pentagon contracts to supply psychological expertise to the Pentagon. So there's all kinds of unfortunate overlap and conflicts of interest that seem to press the APA to support military policy uncritically and sometimes, perhaps, behind the scenes.