01/14/14 – Jeff Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest on the show today is Jeff Kay.
He writes at dissenter.firedoglake.com, dissenter.firedoglake.com.
He's a psychologist active in the anti-torture movement.
He works clinically with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco.
His latest piece is called How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual That Still Includes Torture.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
Fine, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Sure.
All right.
So take us back, I guess, to the afternoon of September 11th.
Cheney and Addington decide that the Commander-in-Chief Clause is the only part of the Constitution that's operable at that point, and that the President can torture whoever he wants.
But then Bush ended that practice after Abu Ghraib and related scandals in 2005, right?
Right.
Yes.
Well, yeah, absolutely.
After the Abu Ghraib, well, they knew about Abu Ghraib, but it really wasn't until it went public, which it finally did on that famous 60 Minutes show, and subsequently in the U.S. public saw the pictures of the torture, that they really began scrambling in the Pentagon.
And it became a big scandal to try and find a way to hide the torture.
And in fact, there were tons of investigations that the military did after Abu Ghraib, most of which, in fact, all of which covered up more or less, you know, responsibility for the torture.
And then, you know, the lawyers got going.
And one of the things they did, and of course, this is concurrent with scandals that were leaking out about CIA torture, of course, too, that was happening in those days.
People may forget the torture memos that we know so much about now.
They were classified.
No one knew what was in them.
And stories were leaking out nevertheless.
But by 2005, they had already, I've discovered, were making moves along the time that the Congress was putting together the Detainee Treatment Act, which was supposed to address torture, but in fact, was finding yet another route in which they could use, as Cheney called it, the dark side against these prisoners.
And one of the ways they were going to do it was to hide the torture within the Army Field Manual itself, and then sell it to the public as a reform, as a brand new and better way to interrogate that wouldn't involve torture.
And of course, that would work great as long as nobody actually read the Army Field Manual and saw what was in it.
Well, I mean, it seemed pretty absurd at the time, the way, you know, of course, with John McCain posing as Mr. Anti-Torture because he was tortured and spilled his entire guts and told them everything he knew.
Anyway, so he was, you know, grandstanding and all of that and taking the good guy position versus Dick Cheney.
But then, like you're saying, first they made the exception for the torture or for the CIA there.
It was supposed to cover, the Detainee Treatment Act was supposed to cover the CIA and the military.
So then McCain takes the CIA out of it and then they add this thing that says, and you know, correct me if I'm, you know, remembering the chronology here, but it seems like then they tacked on, well, oh, I know what we'll do.
We'll just, we'll have the law say that they can only do what's allowed in the field manual, but then we'll rewrite the field manual so that they can do whatever they want again.
Where, you know, it's just like the Three Stooges on TV.
There was nothing, you know, subtle or sophisticated about it or anything.
It's the most ham-handed way of keeping torture legal I've ever heard of anyway.
Yeah, absolutely.
In fact, at the time I was, they had done such a good job that I, at the time, remember reading about it and thought that in 2006 when the new manual came out that they had pulled the wool over McCain's eyes.
But in fact, McCain knew about the rewrite and the, at that time, what they intended to have, which was a classified section of the field manual that would discuss, you know, interrogation techniques, in other words, torture, that would be used on the detainees, on so-called, you know, unprivileged combatants, you know, enemy combatants that weren't POWs.
Sometimes when, one reason, another way they get away with this, by the way, is it gets so legalistic that the public just turns off.
You know, they hear people like me saying, well, there's the definition of this and they're not exactly a POW, so the treatment is different.
Geneva I, Geneva II, Geneva III and IV, and people just go, their brains just glaze over, you know.
So that's, you know, another way that they get away with this.
But what, you know, think of it as torture by fine print, really, is that we're going to put out this abstruse document, it'll be public if anyone wants to look it up, but in the fine print of this document, in fact, they stuck the worst techniques all the way towards the end of the document in an appendix labeled M, as in Mary.
So I don't know what, how many letters that is in the alphabet, what is that, about the 13th letter?
So after the 13th appendix to this other long document, finally you get this thing, and even in that appendix they lie about what it is.
Oh, this is just a, one other technique we have, one other thing we want to mention here.
We're going to call it separation.
Yeah, we can, you know, we're, and you know, it starts out by saying we're for the Geneva Conventions, we're for humane treatment of prisoners, all this stuff, you got to get all this approval, and yeah, just to use this, you got to have doctors on site, which should have been a tip-off.
Why do doctors have to be on site for an interrogation?
But no, anyway, separation is the name of the technique, and still a lot of people say, oh yeah, that's all this is, they're separating people so that they don't, you know, collaborate with other people to cause prison uprisings, or you know, they can share their stories and so they can lie to the interrogators.
But again, you'd have to read the actual text to see what they're talking about, and as it turned out, there wasn't just one technique, it was a number of different techniques that were lumped together and called separation, and they included, yes, the isolation of the prisoner, but not like the segregation that you do prisoners who are captured for security purposes, but it was definitely meant to help break down the prisoner.
Sleep deprivation, and by the way, these things could be extended indefinitely, and in forms of sensory deprivation, elimination of all light, or elimination of all sound.
In fact, if you remember those iconic pictures of the detainees who, in those orange jumpsuits at Camp X-Ray, in the very first days of Guantanamo, who have, whose eyes are covered and they've got, you know, big earphones, there's no sound, ear cancellation, noise cancellation, things over their ears, that's what they were using on them to disorient, because sensory deprivation of that sort, particularly in an aggressive environment, can cause psychosis, and it certainly disorients and breaks the person down.
So there are all sorts of incredibly insane stuff has gone on, but it's all been sold to the public, which is what my latest article in the Dissenter shows, by the press, of which you are an exemplar on the other end of the bad press, you know, showing to sell the fact that, you know, the new army, you know, we learned our lesson from Abu Ghraib, now we're humane.
Obama comes along, says, I've ended torture, but of course he never did end torture.
So it all just is kind of insane.
Well, you know, even the claim that, you know, he issued an executive order saying, I've ordered an end to it, was still different than, I've ordered the government to recognize the fact that torture is a crime in America, it already has been outlawed by the Congress, and by bills, you know, passed by Congress and signed by the president.
And all I'm doing is ordering the government to go back to following that instead of not.
He already was claiming his own authority to really decide whether people should be tortured or not.
And he's decided, nice guy that he is, that at least for now, he's claiming that no more torture.
But, you know, again, just like under the Bush team, it's all in the semantics.
And in fact, just like under the Bush guys, when it was, you know, not even under Appendix M, but just ad hoc under their definitions, they even, you can read, and depending on the context, you could sort of at least understand where they're coming from, where they're saying that stress positions and sleep deprivation and temperature manipulation that, you know, that doesn't quite seem like, you know, the rack or pulling their fingernails out or anything like that.
But then I guess even Connolly's or Rice and some of these others wondered aloud whether the combination of all of these things together might really be, might really amount to torture, even if you don't think that, you know, a marathon questioning session is torture or sleep deprivation or temperature, you know, manipulation.
If you combine all of those things together, you could do it in a way that, you know, to turn it into a real nightmare for someone that it would certainly, you know, could amount to torture if you combine them all together, right?
And that's the same kind of things we're talking about is this isn't the worst stuff that the CIA and the military did to people, but it's still beyond what was ever considered legal before September 11th anyway, right?
Well, yes and no.
Some of the things they do, well, legal, was still seen as legal.
Even the earlier versions of the Army Field Manual allowed for the use of some techniques known as fear up, which of course is to instill great fear into a prisoner, and emotion down.
These are just terms or ego down that come from the Army Field Manual themselves.
They are the names of certain techniques to break a person down by verbally abusing them, to scare a person and make them very frightened about what might happen to them by the technique fear up.
To use isolation, certainly people, you know, solitary confinement has been used, as we know, in the supermax prisons here in the United States itself for decades now.
And the effects, the deleterious effects of that on prisoners is very well known and documented.
And in fact, a number of prisoners who have survived all this and torture victims have stated over and over that the physical torture that they received at the hands of torturers, the Egyptian, actually Australian citizen, Mahmoud Habib, who wrote a book about his experiences at Guantanamo, said, you know, here's a man who had been literally, you know, up to his, you know, near drowned, who had been, you know, electroshock torture by, you know, when under rendition, he'd been under Egyptian torture, you know, you know, and he said the worst thing that happened to him was when he was put into isolation and subjected to these psychological, so-called touchless torture techniques, which are the sleep deprivation and the isolation and the sensory deprivation.
Because these are, here's the thing, there really is, I'm a psychologist, I know people out there, I know you've said this, and lots of times their distinctions are made between physical torture and so-called psychological torture.
Well, yes, isolation, but really it's all physical torture.
Psychological torture is just an attack upon the nervous system itself.
All right, now we've got to hold it right there and take this break, Jeff, I'm afraid to say.
But we'll be right back, everybody, with Jeff Kaye, dissenter.firedoglake.com, how the press, the Pentagon, even human rights groups sold us Appendix M. We'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show, talking with Jeff Kaye, anti-torture activist, psychologist by trade, where he treats torture victims.
So he knows certainly of what he speaks, and also he's great on the history and the legalities about all this stuff, too.
He writes it dissenter.firedoglake.com.
And now, Jeff, we were talking before the break about how no-touch torture, look, judge, not a bruise on them, could actually be just as bad or even worse than the drown-you-to-death kind.
Right, right.
Before I say anything about that, I just want to correct one thing on your intro to me, is I have worked with Survivors International, but I currently am not.
I don't want people to think I'm touting an association I don't currently have.
Oh, okay.
I guess your bio at FireDogLake needs a change in tense there.
Oh my gosh, yeah.
Okay, I'll get on that right away.
So yeah, what I was saying is very important, is that the reason that people get PTSD and suffer from psychological torture is because it is so damaging.
Why is it damaging?
Because it affects the nervous system.
Everyone knows, a simple way to understand this is, you know, perhaps you want to learn how to play the guitar.
So you start learning to play the guitar.
At first it's very awkward and try to form the chords or to do a certain pick of the strings, but you practice it and it gets better.
The reason it does is because your nervous system, the neurons in your nervous system, get, you know, make new connections and stronger connections.
It literally grows new things in your, new connections in your nervous system, and you've changed your nervous system and now you can easily play that song.
Well, you know, when you deprive, either overload or deprive the nervous system of stimuli and sensations, you also do things to that nervous system.
It's bizarre, but you can change, you know, they did experiments.
For instance, these were horrific, listeners, I'm sorry, but they were really done by researchers where they took kittens after birth and puppies and they put blindfolds on them.
And for a certain period of time, then they would take them off after a month or two after they were born.
But guess what?
They never did learn to see because they needed the stimuli to, was necessary as part of brain growth.
And when they didn't get it during a crucial period early in development, they never were able to see.
They were functionally blind for their entire lives.
And that's the power of what you can do to the nervous system.
And the evil scientists, and I really do think of them as evil, and psychologists who worked for decades for the CIA and the military, and not just in this country, similar things were being done once upon a time in the USSR, et cetera, and other countries.
They studied this and came up with a kind of psychological torture that they perfected.
And the CIA itself discussed in their own, now declassified interrogation manual known on the internet as the QBARC, Counter-Intelligence Interrogation Manual was released by FOIA about 15 years ago.
And in there, the CIA discusses, very graphically, their theory of torture and coercion.
They use the word coercion, they don't use torture, but that's what they mean.
And how you use it in interrogations.
And in fact, if you follow the disputes around torture in this country, they very much mirrored disputes within the intelligence community itself about different kinds of torture that you should use.
Believe it or not, there are differences among torturers.
There are some who feel that there's nothing like a good old waterboarding, that Dick Cheney kind of guy.
And then, and by the way, there were guys, there was a big dispute, and I wrote on this at FireDogLake some few years back now, about the dispute among the SEER organization, which was the Survival, Evasion, Escape, anyway, program that the military uses to train people to withstand torture.
I'm sure you remember, Scott, and your listeners, that it was reverse-engineered to be used for the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Program and other kinds of torture which took place in the U.S. military by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen and their CIA handlers.
But what I was mentioning was that in SEER, yeah, there was a dispute over waterboarding, and they banned waterboarding, even as a training, even practiced waterboarding, supposedly to teach people how to withstand it because it was so damaging to the individuals.
But the Navy SEER people, they kept it, and they kept it going for years after the other parts of the military had abandoned it because it was too harmful.
And there were back and forth memos and discussions and arguments within the military over this.
So you see, even some of what we are viewing for the interested readers of newspapers and journals and blogs and documents released by the government is, in fact, a dispute within the government itself.
And then, of course, there are those who don't want torture at all, and so it can get quite confusing to the person just listening to it.
But what bothers me the most, and I'm so glad you asked me to be on your show, Scott, is just how much this entire subject has become almost banished from public discourse.
And the lies and the shallow reporting that goes on out there about how Obama stopped torture and the U.S. doesn't torture, it's just not true.
And something, you know, I congratulate you.
The press has to take steps to tell the public what's really going on in their name.
All right, so talk to us about the Bagram prison, because at least it was the case, right, that there were two prisons there, the Bagram prison and then the wink-wink, elbow-nudge, over-the-hill, real Bagram prison, where maybe Appendix M was enforced there.
Right, well, Appendix M is the doctrine of, and the other Army Field Manual techniques, wherever there is a military, you know, U.S. military has control of prisoners.
I have to admit, I don't, you know, the U.S. government's made it very difficult to know what's happening in Bagram, and I just haven't done enough of my own research to know.
So, for instance, you know, supposedly in Iraq they were not supposed to use Appendix M because these were real prisoners of war, but we do know that, in fact, Iraq prisoners were tortured, they were, in some cases, renditioned out for torture, and we know, of course, from Abu Ghraib what really went on a good deal of the time.
So, no matter what they're saying is happening in Afghanistan, we don't really know.
This is an active theater of war.
It's very difficult to get information about what's happening, particularly at Bagram today, which has become a dispute between the Afghan government of Karzai and the U.S. over, as they supposedly begin the turnover of prisons and other aspects of the war to the Afghanis, the Afghan government, not the Taliban.
Yeah, well, yeah, Karzai wants to let everybody out, and there's a big fight about that.
All right, but so now let me ask you this.
There's a very important article by Jeremy Scahill.
Of course, you wrote a whole book about it, too, but there's an article at TheNation.com, which anyone can find, called Blowback in Somalia.
Oh, no, that isn't it.
It's the companion article, The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia, and it's about a prison, a dungeon, really, beneath Mogadishu, which is run by the quote-unquote wink-wink, elbow-nudge government of Somalia, backed by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command there, and I wonder whether, what are the legalities?
I don't know.
I guess that's probably not an Appendix M issue, but what are the legalities?
What executive orders?
What OLC memos make that okay?
Because certainly, at least the way Scahill describes it, it's not even plausible deniability.
The Somalis there are running it on behalf of the Americans.
Yeah, the CIA, and in fact, the CIA will tell you, well, there is an executive order.
I mean, there may be a presidential finding, right, that is directing them in this particular operation, but in general, the executive order that covers them was the one that established the CIA way back in 1947, which says that the CIA shall do from time to time whatever the president tells it to do, essentially, and you're absolutely right to point out, and it was a great article in Investigation by Jeremy Scahill, but what it really represents is a return of the United States to its standard SOP, which is we will train and we will help staff at the executive levels, and when necessary, you know, intervene to, you know, for our client states and police and other militaries, we'll do most of the torture, right?
So this is what they did in Latin America.
Back to the school of the Americas model, I guess.
Or even prior to that, Operation Phoenix, you know, which killed, which the CIA admitted that they assassinated, they tortured and assassinated over 20,000 people, and the Vietnamese say it goes up to about 50,000, you know, in these provincial reconnaissance, in these provincial units, which were run ostensibly by the Vietnamese themselves, with CIA overlords stationed at each of them and heavily involved.
So that's what they, like, until 9-11, when Dick Cheney says, okay, we'll get our hands more dirty, what was really happening is not that the U.S. wasn't doing torture, but that they were trying to, you know, they farmed it out, they did the training, you know, they kept, they didn't get their hands as dirty with the blood on their hands, so to speak, exactly.
But by, after 9-11, they decided to go into the business for themselves and cut out the middleman.
But the scandals have, to a certain extent, undone that, but not entirely.
We can see that what they did is they, they left a huge portion, the so-called more scientific portion of their torture program intact.
They buried it in the Army Field Manual.
They told the country that they weren't doing it.
Obama said, I've rescinded all of the memos, Bush, John Yu, and Brad, Stephen Bradbury, but they didn't.
There was one that, if you look at their executive order, again, in the fine print, supposedly abolishing torture in the CIA, OLC memos, they didn't do that.
What they said is, we will get rid of them to the degree that it isn't consistent with our policy, and I'm giving it to the Department of Justice to investigate.
And in fact, they left one of the memos intact.
What memo?
The one that OK'd Appendix M. That was Jeff Kaye from dissenter.firedoglake.com, psychologist and anti-torture activist.
And the article, again, is how the press, the Pentagon, and even human rights groups sold us an Army Field Manual that still includes torture at dissenter.firedoglake.com.
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