11/06/13 – Jeffrey Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Scott Horton Show, scotthorton.org.
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Okay, our next guest is Jeffrey Kaye.
He writes at dissenter.firedoglake.com and he's a psychologist from San Francisco and actually treats torture victims, I have recently come to understand.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
I didn't realize before, I only just, it was actually in your Fire Dog Lake bio, it mentions there that you actually treat torture victims.
Maybe that's something we can talk about a little bit later in the show.
Do I have that right?
Yeah, I did.
I'm not currently doing that.
I used to work as a volunteer clinician for Survivors International Torture Treatment Center.
I did that for 10 years or so, but I'm not currently working with them, so.
Okay, well, I think we're probably going to get back to that maybe a little bit more, but let's start with the headlines here.
Have you had a chance to read this report by the Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers about the CIA's use of doctors in torturing their captives in the terror war?
Yes, I have.
I've been aware of the report since I first heard about it over a year ago, and I've been waiting with bated breath for it to come out because it was going to be, it promised to be, and in fact it turned out to be a comprehensive look at how doctors and psychologists and other health professionals were used by the CIA and also the Department of Defense, of course, in both constructing and running and operating their torture programs.
And they did this, and the report describes how they did this in minute detail.
And now, so does it start then with Justin and Mitchell and the Sear and all that stuff, or how's it go?
Well, Justin and Mitchell, you know, we're just, you know, are certainly discussed.
In fact, at the very end of the report is a, we reprinted the, a case, a legal document that was made in a filing against Mitchell in the state of Texas for malpractice or for, you know, to actually to be, have his license taken away.
He's a licensed psychologist for his involvement in the torture program, but that was thrown out of the state hearings, thrown out of the state board.
I wouldn't take that up.
And in fact, a big part of the report takes up how there has been no accountability at federal or state or local levels for people identified as operating involved in the torture program.
But to answer your question, the Mitchell and Justin really, although they've gotten the headlines are just one part of what in fact has been an extensive program of torture and CIA and DOD interrogation that has utilized doctors all along the road and not just an interrogation, but for instance, in the forced feeding of detainees, prisoners at Guantanamo, you know, just all over the board, doctors have been there monitoring and involved in abuse on detainees throughout the whole, you know, war on terror.
So it's not just Mitchell and Justin.
So in a sense that Mitchell and Justin are just two characters among many in this report doesn't focus on them particularly.
Yeah, they were just the guys who kind of, I guess the way I understood it was that the CIA went to them or they volunteered themselves as you know, we will help you design the program, not that they were the ones in charge of implementing all of it.
Yeah, it's my understanding that the CIA really went to them.
But you know, that story got dropped a long time ago.
There are a lot of things that have not been reported yet and still aren't known exactly how Bush's enhanced interrogation program, the one that used waterboarding, putting people in coffins and, you know, torturing them with insects, etc.really got started.
That still remains to be told.
Yeah, I mean, I know the sketch of what we don't know, in a sense, right?
Like some of this came from the Sear manual and reverse engineering the Sear stuff.
But quite a bit of it started before that.
And you had different levels of torture and different kind of programs of how to implement even the same tortures in different places like Afghanistan had some rules, Guantanamo others, and then different sets of rules sort of were imported from Afghanistan and Guantanamo to Iraq and applied in different ways by different forces.
And so yeah, it's certainly a mess.
A lot of people screaming in agony throughout all that jumbo mumbo jumbo.
Yeah, yes, I traced back in my writings and I published on this at Jason Leopold's The Public Record.
I'm not sure if it was posted at the Dissenter.
That, you know, behavioral scientists working for the US government were studying Sear kinds of survival school torture techniques all the way back in the 1950s as part of the MK Ultra program, and associated programs.
And they came up with a protocol, which in fact, a new report by the Institute on Medicine as a Profession and the Open Society Foundations Report, which is what we're talking about here, talks about how at the bottom of all this, the government's torture program tries to instill into prisoners something called dependency, debility and dread, the three Ds.
These three Ds are used to break down individuals by making them debilitated, in other words, weakened, dependent upon the totally dependent upon their captors psychologically as well.
And to do this also by instilling dread or great fear into them.
And if you think about all the different ways and all the different torture techniques you hear about, from isolation of prisoners to the use of the waterboard, all of those techniques are aimed one way or another at establishing that state of mind, that state of total mental breakdown, which is the three Ds.
And that was established in an article written by a president of the American Psychological Association, Harry Harlow, back in the 1950s, along with a couple of co-authors, who wrote about the three Ds, dependency, debility and dread.
And that research was done, as the article itself said, published in 1956, you know, by research at Air Force Survival School, you know, where they were looking at mock torture trials.
So this goes back a long, long time.
Well, Alfred McCoy, in his book, A Question of Torture, says that, you know, if at any point, they were taking North Korean communist techniques imported from China, imported from Russia, and applying them as seer, the training, how to survive torture, and then reverse engineering that into how to torture people, they're really all just copying the Nazis, because the Americans and the Soviets copied the Nazis' torture techniques.
And that was where the Soviet techniques originally came from, that the North Koreans were copying, that the Americans were copying from the North Koreans.
Well, you know, yes, the Nazis, but also isn't well known, also the Japanese.
Part of it is the no-touch torture, right?
Hey, look, judge, there's not a bruise on him.
All I did was just sensory deprivation until he had six personalities, none of which made any sense.
That was not, you know, that is the Americans' unique contribution, as McCoy himself has noted.
The research into, deep research into sensory deprivation and how it works, and how you can use it with other types of torture techniques, was solely an invention of the Americans.
Brain, brain, trusted at the very beginning by another president of the American Psychological Association, Donald Hebb, H-E-B-B, very famous psychologist, you know, who began, and then, but later, others took up this work.
And that kind of research, funded by the government, went on for about 25 years, quite intensely.
Now, I almost couldn't believe this, except it sounds so ridiculous, it's got to be true, that the Guardian writes here that medical professionals were, in effect, told their ethical mantra, first do no harm, did not apply, because they were not treating people who were ill.
So, this isn't part of your medical practice, doc, you're just helping us torture someone, now get to it!
Yes, right.
That was what one of the documents said, yeah, and in fact, apologists for this kind of work by medical professionals for the government, turning them into, you know, one of the people in the, one of the primary members of the task force called Agents of the Military, right, that's what the idea was.
And what they did is they gave lip service to legal standards of treatment of prisoners.
Of course, these legal standards were all rewritten by the Bush and Cheney people.
And then they said, well, we're going to follow these legal standards, and therefore, everything's cool.
But the report's main point is, the legal standards totally disregarded the ethical standards of the profession, going all the way back to the Hippocratic Oath, which says, of course, about, you know, one will not harm, first of all, anyone, anyone, that you come in contact as a holy oath that every medical professional takes.
And, of course, the government threw that out the window.
And, you know, it's still, that is primarily the center of how that is affected now is through something called the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams of the Department of Defense, and through the doctors who are working on the, at Guantanamo, and other bases like that, and particularly with the forced feeding of detainees, which totally goes against medical protocols and medical ethics.
But, you know, the government says it's legal, because they say they can say it.
Whatever they say is legal is because they say it.
Right.
Well, the problem is, really, is that people really believe that, especially in the case of the military, that, you know, after all, if you dress up in green, and you're fighting for your country, and your enemy is the Nazis or Osama Bin Laden or something, then they can give you a license to kill people.
I mean, hell, they legalized the occupation of Iraq and the causing of a civil war that killed at least multiple hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people.
If they can do that, and that didn't sin, as long as you're doing it under terms of government employment, then what's wrong with drowning someone half to death a few times, you know?
Right, absolutely.
You know, it's mind-boggling, the way in which they twisted, you know, the law and medical ethics that have been laid down for decades, if not centuries.
You know, and a lot of this, the report, if you read it, which can be found online, there's a link at the center, but you can go to the website of the Institute for Medical Medicine as a Profession, IMAP, I think it's just IMAP.com or .org, and actually download the report.
It's actually at IMAPNY.org.
Ah, okay.
IMAPNY, Institute on Medicine as a Profession.
It's called Medical, Military, and Ethics Experts.
Oh, no, that's just the press release.
I'm sorry.
The task force report is Ethics Abandoned, Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror.
Yes, yes.
And, you know, the report is some, you know, a couple hundred pages long or more, and it goes into great detail showing how a lot of this, of these changes were made by deft and never, you know, little reported or unreported changes in regulations, rules, little known documents, not ones that are secret, mind you.
They're there.
You could find them.
They're, you know, oftentimes these things are released, but people don't read them about, you know, procedures for medical professionals and Department of Defense code number five, blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever.
No one reads it.
Even in the military, they don't apparently read it.
But it gave them the, and then they lied, by the way, to, you know, when they would get caught out, they'd lie and say, oh, no, we're setting up ways in which people can report abuse.
You know, we definitely don't want this.
These are rogue elements, right, the bad apples at Abu Ghraib.
And, you know, they can report this up the chain of command, but then, you know, they never talked, actually gave the medical people in charge any procedures about how to really do that.
And nor would they define it, nor did they give any training to doctors and others.
Instead, they would fill them up with propaganda about these people being the worst of the worst.
And if you're, you know, in the military, you know, and it's drummed into you that you have to follow orders.
And so it's, you know, on the other side of the spectrum, the non-military, you had the American Psychological Association, one of the top medical professional associations, you know, telling their people, pretty much similar to the way CIA and DOD was, well, we don't torture, we don't want you to torture, we want you to report torture.
But we also think, this is a key aspect of this report, we also think that you can be involved in interrogations.
And a lot of this boils down to just how ethical is it or not for a medical professional to be involved in the interrogation of a national security or any kind of interrogation, really.
Here's the thing about waterboarding someone is you don't really cut them open and make them bleed.
It almost sounds even like it's not quite as bad as just punching a guy in the face a bunch of times and breaking his nose or something like that.
Sounds like it could be a lot more violent.
I mean, after all, a beating actually probably could be a lot more violent than waterboarding.
But the thing of it is, the way I read it anyway, was the waterboarding, the simulated drowning means drowning.
And that what they would do is they would have the doctor standing there with an O2 sensor on, say, Zubeda, who knew nothing's finger.
And they would get him to what they called the death spiral.
And then they would sit him up right when he was absolutely his blood was completely out of oxygen.
He is on his way to the gates of hell.
And then, boom, they wake him back up again and sit him up straight where he can puke and take a breath.
And maybe they zap him and resuscitate him that way and then do it again.
So really, what these doctors are doing is they're helping the CIA guys actually like flatliners or something, murder somebody, drown them to death, basically, over and over and over again.
A dunk in the water, a no brainer.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
You know, one of the implements they had is described in the CIA inspector general report was emergency equipment for tracheotomies.
So, you know, if you're going to have an interrogation, don't forget to bring, you know, your emergency scalpel so that you can cut open the person's throat because you just drowned them.
So because they were just about to die and you need to breathe, they need to breathe.
At which point you're treating them as a patient again, and you have to start taking care of them for a minute until you go back to torturing them.
Yeah, it truly harkens back to, you know, the kinds of things that supposedly America repudiated, you know, with the Nazis at Nuremberg.
Although, even that, as it turns out, everything, in fact, with Al McCoy, who once told me personally, the more you look into this, the darker it gets.
It turns out that even Nuremberg in many ways was a hoax upon America, because at the same time that the United States was prosecuting in a military tribunal, the Nazi doctors, they were giving amnesty to the Japanese doctors who were doing exactly the same thing.
Because they had gone even beyond the Nazis and conducted widespread experiments on biological warfare on human beings, and they wanted that data.
So they gave them all amnesty, covered it up, made sure they didn't go to trial.
And some of them went to work, you know, for the Americans later.
And then meanwhile, they shipped all the data off to Fort Detrick.
This is not something that I'm exposing here for the first time.
I mean, there's been some books written on this, but it's primarily been kept quite hush-hush.
I think I've heard a little of that somewhere, but I sure don't know anything about it.
I know, of course, about the Americans recruiting as many Nazis as they could to use against the Soviet Union and helping a lot more than that escape just for the fun of it, I guess.
Yeah, that was called Project Paperclip.
And there were some other associated projects they did.
They brought literally hundreds, if not thousands, of Nazis to the United States, many of whom went to go to work for NASA.
Yeah, and the CIA, too.
Reinhard Galen was the head of anti-Soviet intelligence there for a while, believe that or not.
Right, right.
And set up the German secret service, the West German secret service.
So yeah, all of this is pretty dark stuff.
And this report shows...
Well, never mind the fact of the nuking and the complete burning to the ground of all of Japan and the Americans finally, you know, pitching in with the British on their civilian terror bombing of the Germans, too.
I mean, the Americans admitted at the time that they knew they were war criminals and just, good thing we won.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And for those who follow those matters, certainly those who were on trial at the various war crimes trials brought that up in their defense.
They were unsuccessful because, of course, they were criminals anyway, but they were, you know, they did have a point, you know, and here we are.
And in fact, the failure to address these points one way or another is why we are where we are now, you know, still facing here in this country, you know, a crisis of mammoth proportions, because we're talking about the entire medical, you know, we're talking about a medical establishment in which hundreds of doctors and psychologists, they leave the military service and the spy service, and they go out into the civilian world, and they take with them their degraded ethics and their degraded way of treating patients.
And then later on, they're teaching others in graduate schools and medical schools, and they pass on this virus of nationalism over ethics.
And it's something that really is harmful to this country.
Well, just think about it.
If your doctor was a CIA torture doctor, you'd have no way of knowing.
You could be sending your wife or your kid to a CIA torture doctor.
That's right.
You could.
That's what Chalmers Johnson meant by you give up your empire, you live under it.
You turn yourselves into the instruments of torture, and you are.
In fact, I know a guy who his daughter, or I guess I know a guy who knows a guy whose daughter married a former Guantanamo guard, and it's not like he was running the place or anything, but just, you know what?
We sure do live in a society full of ex-Guantanamo guards, don't we?
And that's just what we're turning ourselves into, is a society full of ex-Guantanamo guards.
The longer we keep that thing open, the longer we keep acting like this.
That's why our cops act like they just got home from Iraq.
They did.
Yeah, right.
Yes, that's right.
That blowback from this is definitely coming into this country, and already has, obviously.
I did want to mention one other thing about this report, that the rest of the press, or most of them, I noticed the Rolling Stones account on the Ethics Abandoned report did mention this in passing, that one of the major findings, in fact, it was the number two finding and recommendation of the Ethics Abandoned Task Force report, and I wrote on this at the Dissenter, that people can go look that up, has to do with the Army Field Manual for interrogation.
Right.
In fact, I just had a debate about this, a little bit of one, with Colonel Wilkerson the other day, because we were talking about McCain, and I was saying that he shouldn't get credit for being anti-torture, because he sold us out on the Detainee Treatment Act, and he was saying, oh yeah, you mean the part where they exempted the CIA, because that's what Dick Cheney wanted, and I said, yeah, that, but also, he just said, go buy the Army Field Manual, and yes, let's go ahead and rewrite the Army Field Manual, so that Appendix M allows this, that, and the other abuse.
Not as bad as it was under the worst of the U regime, or whatever, but still, temperature manipulation, sleep deprivation, and we can see all this still going on to this day at Bagram, correct?
Yes, absolutely.
In fact, it's been a couple years now, but the Department of Defense confirmed to me when I queried their Public Affairs Office that Appendix M interrogations were ongoing, and this was in 2010 during the Obama, you know, so certainly under Obama, you know, and what is, you're right, the Appendix M includes methods like sleep deprivation, isolation, exploitation of fear, sensory deprivation, manipulation of the environment, manipulation of the diet, and it does all these things.
In fact, it makes sure only to a certain subsection of prisoners, so if the prisoner meets the Geneva requirements of being a prisoner of war, you can't use this section of the manual on them, but if not, then you can do that.
Now, what does that mean?
I guess all prisoners are not equal.
Some you can horribly torture, and others you have to apply Geneva techniques to, but that's just sick, and a lot of people, a lot of human rights organizations have spoken out about this, but President Obama continues to say that his Department of Defense and CAA using the Army Field Manual do not torture, and that's just a bold lie, and, you know, I've been too quiet, perhaps, myself in saying what really needs to be said.
If it is true, as this report says, and I will quote, the Army Field Manual and Human Intelligence Collector Operations, which binds both military and CIA interrogators, permits methods of interrogation that are recognized under international law as forms of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
Well, then that means Barack Obama is a torturer, just as George Bush was, and I'm sorry if people don't like that.
I'm sorry if it freaks them out, but that's just the truth.
He has pushed the Army Field Manual, and I believe this is because, you know, he does so because the CIA and the Department of Defense tell him to do that, because their main thing is to cover up torture, and they've done that by putting out a cover story that the Army Field Manual is non-abusive.
I got into it with Charlie Savage of the New York Times on Twitter the other day, because he put out a story saying that the Army Field Manual is non-abusive, and I said that he and the New York Times were pushing a lie, and he threatened to block me for my, quote, lying rant on Twitter about lies, and then he said something that wasn't true about Appendix M. It was only for separating detainees from each other for safety reasons, which is a total lie.
Yeah, I'm surprised to hear that from him, actually.
I generally respect his work, but that's way off, and anybody can just Google Bagram and Appendix M and know better than that in one instant.
Yeah, it's like, this is top secret.
It's shocking to me, too, and I, you know, I don't know, it's strange to me that people like Savage, but Savage, by no means, is alone.
You will not find, with the exception of maybe Marcy Wheeler and Jason Leopold, anybody out there in the blogging world, blogosphere, that, you know, that talks about this.
Yeah, other Scott Horton is good on this, but he's MIA right now.
Daphne Eviatar is typically pretty good, although I haven't heard from her in a while either.
That's true.
Oh, what's that?
All right, hey, listen, taxi's playing.
That means we got to go.
Thanks, Jeff.
I sure appreciate it.
Okay, thanks a lot, Scott.
Dissenter.
Firedoglake.com for Jeff K. Blue Ribbon Task Force says Army Field Manual on Interrogation Allows Torture Abuse.
See you tomorrow.
Thanks.
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