12/12/14 – Jeffrey Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Jeffrey Kay.
He's a psychologist who lives in the Bay Area and writes for FireDogLakeDissenter.
FireDogLake.com there with Kevin Gostula.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Jeff?
I'm fine.
How are you?
I'm doing real good.
Let me page down.
Let me see if I can find your whole bio somewhere on this page.
It has all this stuff about – I'll tell you what.
I'll just ask you.
Sure.
Could you tell us, please, about how you used to work with torture victims and this kind of thing, your experience with this topic in your professional life?
Sure, yeah.
I'm a psychologist.
I've been in practice now for 15 years, a little more.
And I used to work for a while with an organization, Survivors International in San Francisco.
It's a torture treatment center, and one of a number of them in this country, treating victims of torture from abroad, even who fled regimes, some of them supported by the United States, who come here to get political asylum, or for some reason or another have ended up here and are trying to recover from the terrible physical and emotional, psychological wounds that torture inflicts on a human being.
And today, I'm not actually working with survivors anymore.
I'm just in private practice in San Francisco, and I have been researching and writing for some years now on the topic of torture, U.S. torture in particular.
Right.
Yeah, it's very important that we have your point of view on this subject and have your journalism as a professional psychologist.
And speaking of that, you know what, before we get to the latest in the torture report and Mitchell and Jessen and all that, well, Mitchell and Jessen's part of this, I want to go back to your article from the 7th, APA, Independent Torture Review, led by attorney who worked with CIA's tenants.
So this is the APA, that's the American Psychological Association.
Why do they need an independent torture review?
What's going on there?
Well, a New York Times reporter, James Risen, came out with a book last month, Amy Price, in which he looks at the cost in terms of corruption and politically the cost of the war on terror and just how amped up it was and how it was used as a gravy train for all sorts of corruption and abuses of all sorts.
And one chapter in the book looks at how organized psychology, particularly the American Psychological Association, or top members of it, worked with the military and the CIA because the latter wanted to use psychologists for interrogations, many of which, as we later were to learn, in fact, was to teach them how to torture.
And they utilized techniques taken from a military training program called SEER, that is used to inoculate people against the stress of being tortured.
And, anyway, there's been a long controversy about this, and Risen revealed some new information in his book that showed, in fact, there was this collaboration, emails were passed back and forth, etc.
And the APA felt strung enough by this, and I also believe that they were worried enough about what might be in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA, that they kind of, what I see personally as a PR move, but others who oppose torture see as at least some kind of genuine attempt to get to the bottom of this.
And they constructed what they call an independent review.
They, on their own, went out and contracted with a Chicago attorney by the name of David Hoffman, who is not affiliated to the American Psychological Association, and independent.
And then they assigned three of their own top members from their board of directors to be the people who Hoffman answers to, and Hoffman right now is conducting such a review of whether or not the APA or its top members colluded with the military and the CIA in constructing Bush's so-called enhanced interrogation or torture program.
And what I wrote in my article was that, I just said, like anyone else, let's sit down and look who's involved in this review.
Let's research it, like any journalist should.
But unfortunately, none of the journalists have, including at First Look's The Intercept or Forbes Online or The New York Times, or anyone who's written about this review that the APA undertook, and discovered that the man leading it, David Hoffman, had, yes, many years ago, 20 years ago, worked in the offices of Senator David Boren, who was at that time the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
In other words, he was doing the same job that today Feinstein is doing, at least in terms of organizationally.
And at the same time, in that office, the staff director of the Senate Select Committee, the person who heads up the bureaucracy of that committee, was a man by the name, and you probably recognize it, or your listeners will, named George Tenet, who, of course, within a matter of years afterwards, became the leader of the CIA, the head of the CIA.
And there was another guy there who became Tenet's attorney by the name of Ken Levitt, who also was later to join the CIA.
And, you know, Hoffman was privy to, in that office, and admitted that he knew Tenet and Levitt and worked with them, including as a spokesman, anyway, for things that the Senate Committee was doing that were classified, and spoke out for Boren and the committee's support of Robert Gates to be head of the CIA, for instance.
I don't know all the things Hoffman did there, the point being, he knew, personally, George Tenet.
And he confirmed to me that after he left that job, and Hoffman has gone on to do a number of things.
He was an assistant U.S. attorney under Patrick Fitzgerald.
He was the inspector general of the city of Chicago.
He's been involved in numerous investigations as an attorney for clients.
And, you know, Hoffman, nevertheless, in the past ten years, has met with both Tenet and Levitt on several occasions, unspecified, because he won't tell me what they are.
He assures me and the world that he is unbiased.
But, you know, one has to ask, you know, if that's really true, and why wasn't this revealed earlier?
Because it is an important and salient fact that the head of the so-called independent review of whether the APA helped the CIA construct its torture program is, in fact, a man who knew and used to work with the head of the CIA that constructed the torture program.
That doesn't seem independent to me.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's been so long since anybody in Washington, D.C. has even heard the phrase conflict of interest.
You know, the appearance of impropriety just is beyond a shadow of anything that they've ever thought about in a decade.
You know, it's like, hey, I know, we'll have Henry Kissinger preside over the 9-11 commission, right?
Like, it's shameless because they don't even know it's shameful.
Yes, they don't.
You're right.
I guess that's true.
It's kind of hard to believe.
That's just how we do business, Jeff.
What are you talking about?
This is America.
It's a corrupt, fascist, tortured dictatorship.
You know that.
Well, I don't say it's fascist, but it may be a kind of a dictatorship at this point with the NSA.
But it's not a full-fledged dictatorship yet, but it's obviously getting there.
It's a participatory dictatorship.
Yes, right.
It's a new term, yes.
I just coined it.
Self-feeding is a new term.
Some of us get to participate, and that's what makes it a free society.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
By the way, I do want to add in that it's not just David Hoffman.
The review committee that's supposed to work with Hoffman, to whom he reports, have their own conflict of interest.
One of whom just stepped down, the CEO of the FDA, a man by the name of Norman Anderson, came under fire from a group of dissonant psychologists under the Rupert Coalition for an Ethical Psychology who pointed out that this guy may be—his office may be investigated as part of this.
What's he doing on this review committee?
And so he resigned.
But the other people have their own conflict of interest.
Some of them have received tens of thousands of dollars in award money from the FDA.
One of them has.
Another one has a relative who founded the division of the FDA.
I'm sorry.
We've got to hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Jeffrey Kaye.
Dissenter.
Firedoglake.com.
Hey, all.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Jeffrey Kaye.
He writes at dissenter.firedoglake.com.
He's a psychologist.
He, in the past, has worked with torture victims, and he's an expert on the torture beat from, you know, George W. Bush on and going back into history, too, as we're about to find out, in fact.
Let's, if you could, first of all, for this segment, Jeff, was there anything in this new torture report that you learned for the first time that really changed your understanding or helped to enhance your understanding of what went on here?
I mean, obviously, you've known about the salt pit for a long time and that kind of thing, but you must have learned some important things.
What do you think?
Well, yeah, there's a lot that's new I didn't know, so I don't know that I've learned anything that surprises me.
So we've learned that the CIA knew beforehand what they were doing with torture.
We've learned that the CIA did things that we hadn't heard about before that are just monstrous, like the so-called rectal dehydration or rehydration, i.e., you know, kind of forced NMF or, you know, kind of instrumental rape that they did on the prisoners.
We learned a lot of the horror things that I think people have read in a number of articles by now.
But, you know, the CIA has done so many brutal things, I can't say these things surprise me, although they sicken me.
One thing that surprised me a little, although in a way I predicted, and this was what my most recent article was, was that the CIA, that the impetus for bringing Mitchell and Besson into the interrogation picture and constructing the enhanced interrogation torture came from a not-too-well-known but very important entity within the CIA known as the Office of Technical Services, or OTS, and that this division had a lot to do with both setting up the torture and then vetting it legally, or so-called legally, to the office of John Yoo and other attorneys in the Office of Legal Counsel where they set up those notorious torture NMFs.
You know, the data that said, oh, these techniques are safe, came from the Office of Technical Services.
One thing I didn't know that's very important is that the Office of Technical Services was the entity where James Mitchell was actually working at the time he was brought into this, which raises a lot of questions, and what your viewers may not know is, so what's this Office of Technical Services, what's the big deal?
The Office of Technical Services, on one hand, is the agency that creates all the little spy gadgets, like in a James Bond movie, the people, you know, secret writing and poison pill capsules, and, you know, all types of spy paraphernalia, you know, and audio listening devices.
You know, they give the bug, oh, here's the transmitter of James Bond, you know, turn it on when you need to be found.
That comes from an office like the Office of Technical Services.
But the other thing they did that they're most famous for is they were the people who ran MK-ELSTRA, the CIA's decades-long mind-control program, you could call it, or torture research program, which used, you know, drugs, hypnosis, studied how to break people down psychologically and physically.
It had many different aspects to it.
It tried to create, at one point, secret, you know, mind-control staff, including the famous book by John Marks.
And that was the Office of Technical Services, and that's the same people who were involved in the origins of the current CIA torture program.
And it raises some questions as to what really this torture program was all about.
Well, you know, we saw in different cases, you know, in Abu Ghraib, they spent a lot of time just beating the hell out of these guys and that kind of thing on that level.
But you see the way they operated on Jose Padilla, for example, straight out of, you know, it didn't seem to have anything to do with the SEER training.
It seemed much more like, you know, old MK-ELSTRA stuff being done to him, psychotropic drugs and the sensory deprivation, which we find, I guess, is widespread all over the place here.
But that's a very important part of what they did to Jose Padilla.
And again, just really the whole O'Brien treatment from 1984 where, you know, you love me, you hate me, I'm your torturer, I'm your savior, you know, I'll kill you, I'm your father and all this crap and just drive them mad, you know?
Yes, exactly.
They wanted to break people down and foster dependence and to make them cooperative so they can exploit them.
Everything I just said is their own language.
And by exploit them, they mean to be able to, yes, sometimes get information from them, but the torture doesn't really provide information that you can rely upon.
So what they're really trying to do is they're trying to get them to exploit them for other reasons, and many times one of the main reasons they do is to turn them into informants, double agents, to use them for propaganda purposes, to put them on show trials like they want to do, you know, with the military commissions, you know, to use them in any way they can.
That's why they use the word exploit.
It's a very descriptive term, and it means to exploit them in any way they can think possible.
And that includes, exploit them, by the way, as some kind of experimental victim.
And in the other thing, and I haven't written about this yet, but it is in the Senate torture report on the CIA, there were discussions even within the CIA that what they were doing, if people knew about it, they could be prosecuted under the War Crimes Act for experimentation on prisoners, right?
Right.
For those of you listening, run and read page 13 of the Senate Armed Services Committee's report.
In fact, I mentioned Senate Armed Services.
You know what?
Bill Mahn just tweeted out an article by you and Jason Leopold from March of 2011 here at Truthout.org.
CIA psychologist notes reveal true purpose behind Bush's torture program, but it's about the experimentation as a particular violation of the war crimes statutes, experimentation and torture.
And they have where you and Leopold had the memos here.
Right.
But those notes were actually notes of Bruce Justin, who, along with Mitchell, worked at the CIA black sites, and was commissioned.
You know, Mitchell and Justin, together, were commissioned in late December of 2001 to write, supposedly, this countermeasures study on resistance to torture by Al-Qaeda for something called the Manchester Manual that was found by British intelligence.
Anyway, my point being that Mitchell and Justin, both under the picture of commission, again, by OTS, to work on these things.
So why is an agency that supposedly makes spy gadgets involved in getting Mitchell and Justin involved in the torture program?
I can't say I have a specific answer in my latest article.
I have a hypothesis, which is that, yeah, they are involved in technology, and that what they were doing was studying the physiological and psychological responses to torture, and so that they could make it more scientific, which I know sounds incredibly macabre, but that's what they do.
The idea is to, you know, and there were positions for human rights some years ago put out a report saying, hey, it looks to us like they're trying to fine-tune what torture is.
This is an experiment, and that this could be prosecuted.
And they tried to do it.
They didn't get anywhere.
But I think that there's a lot more that can be done along these lines.
This isn't crazy stuff, but even in the Senate report, there's an indication that the CIA itself was worried about just exact charges of exactly those kind, and we need to know why they were so worried.
Yeah, and it makes sense with what we know with what they did to Zabida and what they did, I guess, in Thailand mostly, and what they did to Katani down at Guantanamo Bay, where you literally had at least parts of the cabinet in there in the meeting, basically with an open phone line to Guantanamo, where they're choreographing the guy's torture step by step.
So make him do this, and now make him do this, and this kind of thing, where they're trying to figure out how much pain is equivalent to organ failure.
Just what can Dick Cheney argue is absolute necessary brutality to get the truth, but not really brutal.
After all, it's just a slap.
It's just sensory deprivation until their brain splits into a million pieces.
That's not torture.
Look, Judge, there's not a bruise on him.
All I did was drive the man out of his mind by locking him in a coffin for two weeks, but I didn't pull his fingernails out.
Exactly, and that is what they call psychological or so-called touchless torture, and the prisoners who have survived that in the CIA or Guantanamo, when they talk about it to the professor, to others, their attorneys, they will say, you know, the worst thing I ever experienced wasn't the beatings, right?
It was the psychological torture.
It was the sexual humiliation, the long isolation, which, by the way, is used in America's supermax prisons to break down prisoners within the United States as well, and is used currently in the Army Field Manual under the Appendix M Separation Technique, which is the United Nations Committee Against Torture recently told the United States that it had to drop that, to drop that and sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation used today by Obama in his military and CIA against prisoners not years ago, but today.
Yeah, now hold on a second, because that's a whole can of worms, but we're already over time.
So if you've got a minute, can I ask a follow-up about the Appendix M in the military?
Because this is, I mean, obviously, this is a whole broader subject than the very narrow focus of this CIA report, which excludes rendition, which excludes the military, you know, and all those things, and certainly excludes the Obama years, too.
Yeah, I mean, I totally agree, but I don't have, I mean, I have to be going, unfortunately, and we had the half hour here.
Oh, I see.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry, just because of my end.
I'm actually a working clinician still.
Oh, yeah, no problem.
Well, I'll tell you what we'll do.
I'll interview you, hopefully, sometime next week, and we can expand on that, because you're one of the very, very few, as you well know, who's focusing on mistreatment, abuse, torture, enhanced, whatever the hell you call it, against prisoners in, not just by, you know, Somalis working for America, but by actual American military and spies in the Obama years, too.
So I'd love to interview you about that next week as a follow-up, if possible, there, Jeff.
Sure, Scott, that sounds great.
Okay, well, thanks very much.
Talk to you again soon.
Appreciate it.
Okay, thanks.
Okay, take care.
All right, so that's Jeff Kaye.
He's at dissenter.firedoglake.com.
And the latest is SSCI report reveals CIA torture program originated in the same department as MKUltra.
The military-industrial complex.
The disastrous rise of misplaced power.
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