08/06/14 – Jeff Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our next guest on the show is Jeff Kay.
He's a psychologist in private practice in San Francisco.
For 10 years, for more than 10 years, he worked professionally with torture victims and asylum applicants.
I guess oftentimes they're the same people there.
And he has his own blog called Invictus, but you can also find him at truthoutalternet and firedoglake, dissenter.firedoglake.
And his latest piece is Obama admits he banned only some of the CIA's torture techniques.
Welcome back to the show, Jeff.
How are you doing?
Hi, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And so before we get right into this article and the president's recent statement and what all that means and all that, can you first of all just catch us up a little bit on the news for people who haven't been keeping up with this story?
There's so much going on, but there's been obviously the recent developments in the case of the Senate torture report and their relationship with the CIA and all of that that led to the president's statements.
Could you catch us up here real quick?
Sure.
Yeah.
There's been a ton of politics going on between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA, and of course the Obama administration or President Obama himself, because after the revelation that videotapes of torture by the CIA had been destroyed by the CIA, the Senate Committee initiated an investigation of the CIA torture program, interrogation, rendition, and interrogation program, and amassed 6,000 pages of report apparently documenting things that are far worse than we've even heard thus far.
This is according to Senator Dianne Feinstein, the head of the committee.
But it turned out, then there were later revelations that the CIA, kind of back and forth between the CIA and the committee, the CIA claimed that the committee was trying to essentially hack into their stuff.
They were able to access something called the Panetta Report within the CIA that was looking at the CIA abuse, and they claimed that this was spying done by Senate staffers.
The Senate themselves said, no, you're hacking into congressional computers.
This is outrageous.
It was sent to the Department of Justice, who kicked the football down the field.
And just the other day, despite the fact he said that the CIA had done nothing wrong, John Brennan, the director of the CIA, in a long time, national security advisor, intelligence advisor to President Obama, admitted that the CIA had done improper, quote-unquote, investigations of the Senate panel.
So all of this is kicking around, and of course, the press is up in arms about this.
And meanwhile, there is an executive summary of this report that the Senate committee okayed for release, and it went to be looked at by the executive branch, by the CIA, so they could supposedly censor out portions that were too sensitive, or people's names, whatever.
And now the latest dispute is that the Senate has over, big surprise, over-redacted, over-classified sections of this summary that's put out for, that's supposed to be released to the public.
As a result, Senator Feinstein says, you know what, I'm just not going to release even the executive summary at all.
I'm going to send it back.
You do a better job, redact, censor less of this.
And of course, the headlines just keep rolling.
But what it also does is it forms a narrative about how the U.S. engaged in torture, what U.S. torture is, what's going to be revealed, that, and underneath this narrative, a lot of the truth about what's really going on is being buried, and that was the purpose of my report.
Well, yeah.
I mean, on one hand, it is being brought back up and sustained in the news cycle.
So there is a silver lining to it, but you're right.
The focus is not on the actual inhumanity of what was done.
We are going to focus on that, but...
One example, Scott, just very brief, is that, you know, the fight right now, it's all framed as whether or not this executive summary will be released.
Right.
I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of the Overton window, which is if you don't like, we're going to reframe the discussion and make the discussion all about this, and then when you get your little victory, everyone will think, wow, we won, when in fact you lost because the battle was lost in the reframing of the argument itself.
Right.
So, in this case, it's still the same thing.
The Senate did, apparently, a really good job of investigation.
They have a 6,000-page report.
Einstein announced they are not going to release, in fact, not going to release the 6,000-page report.
That's the news story.
The Senate is refusing to release their investigation of the CIA torture program.
Instead, they were going to release a watered-down executive summary, which is now furthermore going to be watered down by the CIA itself, and the fight now is over how much watered down it will be.
Right.
Will it be the watered-down Senate version, or will it be the watered-down CIA version?
If the Senate wins, everyone will go, wow, wow, we really got openness, when in fact...
We're still talking about a summary, after all, and levels of redaction.
I get it.
Summaries are never...
They always leave out the...
You know what, though, Jeff?
Yeah.
I learned as a kid from my dad about Watergate that it's not the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you.
I understand now why that is.
It's because the crime is never the CIA kidnapping and torturing congressmen.
It's always some third party that's actually suffering, but the cover-up is an affront to the other branch.
In this case, the CIA went so far.
It's funny, because I do want to get to the inhumanity of the actual tortures and all.
It's so important to explain why and how this is so criminal that there should be something done about it and all that, but at the same time, this is the kind of thing that could, if we had a constitutional republic, this would be the end of this administration, for the CIA going so far as to spy on the Senate Intelligence Committee, no matter what their excuse is.
I mean, that ought to be absolutely earth-shattering.
It's only because the subject matter is torturing people to death that makes it sound like it's just some kind of bureaucratic thing, but that is just absolutely huge, the CIA acting like they are the boss of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
That's because the CIA's ultimate boss, the one who can fire at will the director of the CIA, is President Barack Obama, who is a Democrat, and the Democrats, even in Congress, as intense as they are, are not going to make the, you know, if President Obama were Richard Nixon, there would be articles of impeachment, written by Democrats, against Obama.
He got on TV, so yes, Obama came onto television and said, yeah, Brennan said he did something wrong, yeah, our people tortured some folks, but, you know, we're going to sweep it all under the rug now.
And I stand by my CIA director, who hacked into the, you know, congressional computers and tried to derail a torture in a Senate investigation.
Right, and lied to everybody's face about it, too.
Yeah, and then lied to everybody's face, but I stand by this man.
I mean, even Nixon, frankly, was not, could not be, was not so overt in his defense of the people.
Even Spiro Agnew had to resign.
Right.
Right.
Now, well, so as long as we're talking about this, what do we know about what Obama knew about the CIA spying on the Senate like this?
Anything?
That, I can't, you know, I don't know.
What he knew about that, uh...
What did the President know, and when did he know it?
Right, that would be subject for some kind of Senate investigation, but I personally am not as interested in that, and it could go that way.
I could, you could, I could certainly foresee, and the Republicans themselves may want to push this, except the reason, you hit on the other main reason.
If they go into this, it means that they have to open up a can of worms around torture, and they don't want to do that.
They're trying to control the torture story, not open it up bigger.
Right.
And, um...
Well, and by the way, I think this is a good time for me to mention that yesterday, Phil Giroldi, former CIA officer on the show, said he's speculating now, but he thinks that maybe there's something really bad in there that we really don't know about yet, because Panetta reports, so what?
Why, or why would they go this far?
He thinks there's something new that we are yet to find out in that report somewhere.
Something big.
Something worse than people being tortured to death, you know?
Well, yeah, well, that people, that many, that more people were tortured to death, possibly, that in fact the MKUltra program never really ended, which is what I particularly believe.
It seems like it was used on Jose Padilla, right?
The sensory deprivation and all that?
Well, I think it's being, yeah, it's being used on, I think it's part of what's being done at Guantanamo.
All right.
Well, we're going to pick this up on the other side of this break, MKUltra and the inhumanity of the Bush and Obama administrations' tortures of their captives over the last 14 years here.
Be right back.
Oh, I should say again, Jeff K. at dissenter.firedoglake.com.
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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Jeff K. from dissenter.firedoglake.com.
He's a psychologist who spent more than a decade working with torture victims.
And he's been writing for a great many years here about America's torture regime, which continues.
As Jeff, your article here details, the president admitted on August the 1st, I guess, before we get to that, though, please finish up what you were saying there before the break about MKUltra.
Can you remind people what is MKUltra and what is it that you think remains of that legacy as policy in America today?
Well, MKUltra is just one of the best known of a number of different United States government mind control and programs that were aimed in part about forming forms of interrogation, but also population control.
Other really dark, crazy, conspiracy sounding stuff that anybody who might write anyone off like myself who talked about, except that it's all documented, or at least it's very much documented.
The United States government destroyed many, many records about these programs, but what's left shows us that it was a multi-million dollar program that touched many different parts of American civil society, including hospitals, universities, certainly it was included in military participation.
And it had, one of the things it did that's most popularly known for was the experiments on LSD and the use of, using drugs like LSD, you mentioned Jose Padilla who made that same charge to control people, to break them down, to make them, or if nothing else, just to make them psychotic and discredit them in the eyes of other people, all sorts of things like this.
And at Guantanamo, the only reason I said that is, you know, there's certainly evidence that the CIA had a black site there.
The other Scott Horton has written about that at Harper's and, you know, Jason Leopold and myself have written about the strange use of the drug mefloquine, which a very prestigious medical group based at Columbia University came out earlier this year and also called for an investigation to the use of that drug on all the Guantanamo detainees.
And there are many, many other instances I could go into.
But I do want to talk about what Obama said, because it's very important and it was, you know, it was a moment when underneath all the sound and fury surrounding the CIA report, a piece of what's underneath all this emerged for a moment when Obama admitted, and what he said, quote, is that after I took office, one of the first things I did was to ban some of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of the CIA report.
I'm sorry for laughing, but isn't that just amazing?
The president of the United States, that he would just kind of say it that way, so thoughtlessly just let that slip that way?
You know, I'm a psychotherapist and I know very well that when people are under pressure, the truth slips out.
Interrogators know that, too.
And this is an instance of that.
And what I do in my article at the Dissenter that was out the other day was to show, because I've been working exactly on documenting this, and I'm not alone in this, by the way.
But unfortunately, even those who have worked on this issue, such as the Constitution Project, who wrote about the use of torture in the Army Field Manual and put out a huge report on it last year, got a lot of press coverage, or groups like Physicians for Human Rights or Amnesty International or Center for Constitutional Studies, not studies, Constitutional Rights, all of them and others have written about how the Army Field Manual, which President Obama made the gold standard for interrogation practices by both the CIA and the Department of Defense when he came into office in January 2009, which is what he's speaking about in that quote, in fact allows all sorts of different torture techniques, including the use of isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, drugs, I mean, manipulation of diet, manipulation of the environment, use of fear, use of something called futility to break down people psychologically so they feel helpless.
These are torture techniques.
They're not waterboarding, but they're forms of psychological torture techniques that were well-studied, and in fact, was the result of the CIA's MKUltra program, which was formalized in a torture manual which the Baltimore Sun got in the late 1990s and revealed called the QBARC manual, which showed exactly how they used these same techniques to break people down.
And you know, sleep deprivation, that's not just psychological.
I mean, that is a physical assault as bad as beating somebody, really.
Yes, yes.
In fact, it's good to point out that the distinction between physical and psychological forms of torture is a very blurry one, and sleep deprivation is a good example, so frankly is isolation, because putting a person in a sensory-deprived environment actually has negative effects on the nervous system and the brain itself.
It can be measured.
Well, you know, the thing about this, too, Jeff, is, you know, I've been covering this all along since even still during the Bush years.
It was all as above board as a torture program could be, that if you're going to pass the Detainee Treatment Act, Cheney insisted first you take the CIA out of it, and secondly, if you're going to bind the military to the Army Field Manual, then we are going to rewrite Appendix M of the Army Field Manual to allow as much of this stuff as we think we can possibly get away with, and that's exactly what they did.
And so I guess, you know, it's not like they reveal the details of how they apply this stuff to their victims at Bagram all these years on a regular basis or anything, but it's almost like the way they lied us into war with Iraq, where they announced, we're about to lie you into war with Iraq for the next year and a half.
Get ready.
Here it comes.
And then they did.
It's the same thing here.
Oh, yeah, we got Appendix M. It's our go ahead and keep torturing free card, you know, and get out of jail free card.
And they announced that even before Obama took office.
And then he, from the very beginning, on the very first day, he made it clear in his statement that he was going to continue applying Appendix M.
Yes.
As you just said.
And the whole Army Field Manual, Appendix M is the worst part, but does include, you know, for instance, the allowance of use of drugs is a major part.
It is in the main text of the Army Field Manual, not Appendix M. The use of fear and phobias to manipulate detainees is in the main part of the Army Field Manual.
And did they rewrite the whole thing, or did they rewrite...
They rewrote the entire thing.
Oh, okay.
And in doing so, they did things such as they removed... the old Army Field Manual had a prohibition against sleep deprivation.
Guess what?
That disappeared from the main text of the new Army Field Manual.
The old Army Field Manual had a prohibition against the use of stress positions.
This is making people kind of crouch or be in some bizarre position and have to stay that way for hours on end.
And you mentioned in your article, too, and I'm sorry we're so short on time, but it's really important, Jeff, that you mention SCAHILL's work on Somalia and their so-called national security agency that they have there and the prison that they keep, in cooperation with CIA and JSOC.
And I hate to give any credit to Eli Lake, but he reported another prison just like that up in Puntland, too.
So that's a whole new huge thing there.
Yes, exactly.
But these things, you remember them, but the mainstream coverage that's going on right now doesn't remind the reader of that.
So it becomes isolated as if it's all about this issue.
And over and over, what the press does is it cuts out the history.
And so it makes it all sound like what's happening now is just about an argument over some redactions and a report, when it's really about a decades-long use of torture by the U.S. government.
Right.
And of tens of thousands of people, not three or four people were waterboarded, but tens of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis were treated without any kind of benefit of the so-called laws of war for years there.
Yes.
That's what people got to remember.
All right.
I'm sorry we're out of time.
Thanks so much.
Okay.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Jeff Kaye, everybody.
Dissenter.
FireDogLake.com.
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