05/09/16 – Jeffrey Kaye – The Scott Horton Show

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Scott Horton Show.
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And introducing our friend Jeff Kaye.
He is a psychologist from San Francisco.
He has written a great deal on America's torture regime, continuing torture regime, mostly in the past for Firedog Lake but also for The Guardian and Alternet and all over the place.
This one is at muckrock.com, muckrock.com, a very important new article.
Pentagon declassifies talking points regarding controversial Army interrogation manual.
And I guess I warn y'all that we're about to get deep into torture memo land, but it's very important stuff and not too difficult to understand either, especially as described by Jeff.
So welcome back to the show, Jeff Kaye.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Thanks for inviting me.
Very happy to have you on here and happy to see you're suing him under that Freedom of Information Act.
Being friends with Jeff, I mean, being friends with Jason Leopold has its benefits.
Yeah.
I don't know when it comes to play.
It may, the agencies, it may not have its benefits.
Oh, yeah, it might work against you, but at least he knows how to help you cross all your T's and dot all your I's on the paperwork.
Everybody.
Yeah, just as long as they don't Google y'all's names together.
That's okay, though.
All right, so you got some talking points here.
Yeah.
I think you were, I don't know if it's properly called suing in the first place or only if you're appealing, but you asked under FOIA for much more than that, correct?
But this is what you got?
Oh, yes, yes.
In fact, I'm asking for, and they're not the only agency.
Of course, the Department of Defense, but I have something, you know, I have other FOIAs out on this subject, because, you know, in 2006, the United States government put into effect in September 2006 a brand new Army field manual that covers how the Army and other military units do interrogations.
Well, stop right there.
Why did they do that?
Well, they have periodically rewritten and adjusted their field manual on this subject over the years.
This wasn't the first time.
To bring it into line with, you know, who knows, modern practice, but actually as somebody who's looked at past Army field manuals going back some decades now, each field manual ate away at the guarantees about how prisoners should be treated humanely than the previous manual, one way or another.
Well, and wasn't it a reaction to the Detainee Treatment Act that you can only torture people to the degree that it says it's okay in the Army field manual, and then they rewrote the field manual to allow more torture than before?
Well, I think, yes, that definitely did happen.
But it turns out that the rewrite of the field manual was in place before the DTA, which was in 2005.
Oh, I didn't realize that.
Yeah, I didn't realize it either.
And I think I mentioned it in passing in one article someplace.
I haven't written, like, a specific thing about it, because I don't really have enough information, but it did come out.
There were references to earlier attempts to rewrite the manual.
But they, man, I could swear I at least remember them also saying after the passing of the Detainee Treatment Act that they were going to rewrite this thing.
It was really in reaction, but I guess there's a parallel effort going on anyway, or maybe I just don't remember 10 years ago well enough.
You know, it's funny what you're saying, because that was really on some level the point of my FOIA.
What I did is I FOIAed.
I wanted them to give me information about the discussions and the vetting of this field manual, in particular of this controversial annex or appendix labeled simply with the letter M, like in James Bond, letter M as in mother.
And, you know, it's very difficult, and it is shrouded in secrecy.
And the other agency I have a FOIA out to is the agency in the Army that does that rewriting, which is the intelligence component at Fort Huachuca in Arizona.
And it's been, you know, we'll see what comes from that FOIA.
But even in this FOIA where I asked for all these documents, I did get the talking points.
But that's not why, which is great.
It's very interesting, and I use it for the point of an article, but it's not what I asked for.
I asked for, you know, all the different considerations and review of the Army field manual procedures that led them to publish the manual as they did.
And they did not release that.
So, in fact, instead they said we're withholding 64 pages, which I didn't even, they didn't even bother to give me as blanked out pages, which I guess saved me ten cents a page.
But, you know, there's not being open and transparent, even though they claim they are, about what the procedures are.
We know more now about how the CIA created the enhanced interrogation techniques than we know about how the U.S. Army created its Army field manual techniques.
And this is important when you consider that the United Nations, which has a standing committee against torture, which monitors the use of torture around the world in adherence to its treaty, known as the Convention Against Torture, to which the United States and most nations around the world are signatories.
And just last year, the United Nations Committee Against Torture came up every so many years.
The country comes up for review by this U.N., official U.N. agency.
And that agency said, you know what, United States?
Your Army field manual uses, is involved in ill-treatment of prisoners, which sometimes amount to torture.
Well, you'd thought that would have made headlines in American newspapers, but, in fact, it did not.
At first I've heard of it.
Yeah, I know.
It's kind of amazing, right?
Because, you know, well, I have my own reasons for believing this is kind of partisan, but because the two political parties in this country agree on one thing.
They agree that, well, there are some people who want to see waterboarding come back, and there are other people who say they're anti-torture.
They agree on one thing.
The Army field manual is what we're going to use, we meaning the United States, in having a rule book for interrogation.
And neither Bernie Sanders nor Hillary Clinton is the two standard bearers who are running for president in the Democratic Party, for instance, which claims to be less for torture than the Republicans are, you know, who spat out about waterboarding, et cetera, and how much they love Guantanamo.
They have not said a word, either, about this condemnation by the United Nations of ill-treatment and procedures tantamount to torture in the Army field manual, even though they've been pointed out by human rights agencies here in the United States and journalists such as myself now for literally ten years.
Yeah.
Ten years.
I couldn't believe I'd look back.
The first thing I wrote on this was in September 2006.
And now, so, there's a lot more.
This article, obviously, you focus on what you've got here and specifically on the topic of what they call separation.
They have to have a different word for everything than normal humans use.
Solitary confinement is what we're talking about here.
In military custody, not CIA custody we're talking about, right?
Well, in part, you know, they do the same thing that the CIA did when they talked about sleep deprivation.
They take a technique, and it's like these little Russian dolls where you open it up and there's another doll inside, and you open it up and there's another doll inside.
Well, that's what their techniques are.
So they have a technique.
In fact, Appendix M of the Army field manual says, restricted technique, restricted, meaning you can only use it on certain kinds of prisoners.
And that technique is known as separation.
And people believe, you know, and the primary thing they talk about is, well, we're going to use, you know, solitary confinement to hold people for 30 days or possibly more.
In other words, we're separating them.
But it's led to tons of confusion.
One confusion is that, and in fact, the documents that were released to me, actually to DOD's credit, we're making clear that this is not separation, that separation is not equivalent to segregation.
So some people who have responded to this will say, well, of course the military needs to separate prisoners out if we're going to interrogate them.
We can't have them all in a big room together.
Or if we have bad guys, we can't have them talking to each other about how to escape or get their stories straight together, so we need to put them in different cells.
That's called segregation, and that's not what DOD is talking about when they talk about separation.
They're talking about, of course, as you mentioned, solitary confinement used as an interrogation technique, in other words, used to break down prisoners to make them want to talk.
And then as you're saying, combined with, and do we even have the full Appendix M here?
My recollection was that back then that it said, you know, temperature manipulation is okay, sleep deprivation is okay, and even some stress positions, if I recall correctly.
They have an interesting way of doing it.
Of course, they're hiding a torture program.
There was a dispute, and in some of my way back, your listeners can Google my name and Army Field Manual, and one of the first things that will come up is an article I did for Alternate back in, I think, early 2009, which laid out how they hid the torture program in the Army Field Manual, and also how it historically developed, because originally they wanted this appendix to be secret.
They did not want the public to know what they were doing.
But after all the controversy, certain members of the Senate, in particular John Warner, but I'm sure there were others in Congress, they thought this was kind of a bad idea and that it would only lead to trouble, it would only leak out and cause more controversy, and it should all just be public.
So they made it public, but in doing so, they controlled the spin on it, and they had their entities in the press spin how this would be reported, and they reported, of course, at the time as a great advance.
And they hid, literally by de-emphasizing many of the techniques and kind of torture by use of fine print.
So if you read Appendix N, they do have sleep deprivation as part of the separation technique, but they mention it only in passing as a clause in the middle of a sentence about how people should feel as if it's good, like, oh, it's a good thing, that we're going to make sure that you get at least four hours sleep a night for at least 30 days in a row, or more, and we could extend that if we need to.
In other words, that's sleep deprivation.
Or they have a big paragraph how we don't want sensory deprivation, nothing about this is sensory deprivation as we define it, they say, quote, unquote.
And then they have a part of the separation technique is we can put goggles and earmuffs on you and keep you that way for hours on end until you go psychotic, which, in fact, was something pointed out by the United Nations.
It was, in fact, using extreme sensory deprivation to disorient prisoners, which tends to derange their minds.
And then as far as the environmental manipulations, the way they did that, they said, well, we ban all environmental manipulations that are, quote, extreme, meaning we allow other manipulations of environment, of food, and with the stress positions, what they did is the previous Army Field Manual had a direct prohibition against stress positions, and they just took that prohibition out and just didn't say anything.
Amazing.
One way or another, they didn't ban it.
This really reminds me of the New York Times article about Ben Rhodes where he's a novelist and he's just really great at writing these narratives and spinning everything perfectly.
You've got to hand it to them.
They're really good with the new speak, with the syntax and hiding behind it.
But now, so are you telling me that Obama's been torturing people right out of their minds this whole time completely under the radar, unlike during the Bush regime and the CIA doing it?
Yes, that's right.
And, in fact, people who've been at Guantanamo, which now has been run under Obama's auspices for almost eight years now, when they talk about what it was like under Obama, will say it was terrible.
It continued to be terrible, right?
People who were released, Mawz and Begg, others, would talk about a regime of torture that still continued under Obama.
And I can tell you that other instances of cover-up occur within Guantanamo during Obama's regime, including the deaths of detainees.
I'm going to use the breaking news for you, Scott, but soon I will be publishing a story that shows that the NCIS and investigators from the Pentagon looking into the deaths of some Guantanamo detainees produced deliberately suppressed evidence at Guantanamo that could have led to other possibilities other than rulings of suicides.
And I'm talking about different deaths than the ones that Joe Hickman talked about in his book.
Wow.
Which is at Camp Delta, that's right.
But anyway, back to torture.
The reason that...
Well, I just wanted to chime in.
Bagram, too, right?
Not just Guantanamo, but there was a whole separate secret prison at Bagram that was there for a while, at least.
Yeah.
Well, at Bagram, of course, they were also using these kinds of techniques.
Significant isolation, sleep deprivation.
And by the way, the Army Field...
You have Appendix M, but then you have the Army Field Manual in its non-appendices form, which has the bulk of a group of a bunch of other interrogation techniques.
One of them is called FEAR UP.
In other words, to induce strong and manipulate you based on strong levels of fear that are induced in you.
And another technique is called EGO DOWN, in which we verbally abuse you and make you feel terrible about yourself in any way we can.
Perhaps sitting in your own shit would do that.
And then finally, there's a technique called FUTILITY, which the Army Field Manual specifically says is meant to induce a sense of hopelessness and helplessness in a prisoner.
And helplessness, by the way, is a key word here because James Mitchell, I'm sure you know that name, Mitchell and Jess and the whole CIA program, was based on creating states of helplessness, or what they called learned helplessness in prisoners.
So to see it pop up in the Army Field Manual should have been, for congressmen and congresswomen and the press, it should have been, you know, who has reported on the Mitchell CIA program, should have been, you know, set off alarm bells.
And yet, no one except myself, literally except myself, reports on this.
I shouldn't take that back.
People, even Newsweek magazine, Rupert Stone, who has a new article out, I just thought today on, you know, how torture scientifically doesn't produce information sometime back, did note that, you know, there were problems with appendix N and this was in Newsweek.
So it's just starting to bump into the… Yeah, he's a good guy, Stone.
…consciousness.
Yeah, yeah, he is.
But, you know, so has Obama tortured as many people as Bush?
I don't think so.
I think the torture was far more widespread in Iraq.
But what happened was, with all the revelations, the United States pulled back, you know, they closed, for the most part, so far as we know, the CIA black sites.
We don't know for a fact, but we know that they were allowed to have them maybe on a short-term basis.
But for the most part, they went back to something that, the way the United States used to operate for decades, which was by use of surrogates.
Whether it was host countries or via rendition, or just the use of domestic police and military intelligence forces in countries where we're intervening, like the Afghan police, right, or the Iraqi police, or rendition, which Obama did not end, by the way, and to which, by the way, no one to date.
Should you be interviewing Secretary Clinton, Scott, which I don't know that you will, but if you do, I would strongly ask you, request that you ask her, just what was her role in the ongoing use of rendition by the Obama administration?
Hey, that's a great question.
Yeah, my chances of getting her on the show, jeez, I never even thought to try it, but I guess I could.
Just ask that one question.
Not that she would ever answer it.
Well, yeah, not that I could get that far into the interview, because that wouldn't be first, Jeff, I'm afraid.
No, I know.
Yeah, she'd hang up on me before I got to the rendition question, probably.
All right, so now, in the article, you talk about how it's reaffirmed over and over again by the military officials themselves.
They're like, oh, yeah, no, this would definitely be illegal, what we're doing, if we were talking about the average schmuck wearing a uniform, prisoner of war.
But, and then all of a sudden, they turn into John Yoo, and they turn into Alberto Gonzalez, and they say, yeah, but these guys are outside the Geneva Convention, so we can do whatever we want with them.
What?
Really?
That's what they did.
That's what the Bush administration did.
And is that the Bradbury memo that you refer to, that they're hiding behind here?
Is that the law just doesn't apply?
Oh, yeah, no, this would be illegal.
But in this case, the law doesn't apply.
Well, actually, what DOD gave me, yeah, you could say that the Bradbury memo does talk about the need, can't be used on enemy prisoners of war.
People don't, you know, when listeners hear people talk about the Geneva Conventions, you know, the key word is conventions, plural.
There were a number of different treaties that were signed by countries like the United States.
The third Geneva Convention was the convention or the treaty that covered enemy prisoners of war and how they should be treated.
And of course, as the documents I received indicated, the Army Field Manual does not comply with these Geneva Conventions for the Appendix M in particular because it does allow the use of threats, insults, or exposes prisoners to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment, something that should not happen, right?
You know, they are held in a cell or a room or in close confinement.
They are interned in what essentially are penitentiaries, all things which should not be happening to these prisoners if they're enemy prisoners of war, even if that war is the war on terror.
In fact, the military makes clear that whatever these people are being subjected to, and the article goes into it, we've talked about sleep deprivation, environmental manipulations, significant solitary confinement requires ongoing medical monitoring.
Why would that be if these things weren't in fact medically dangerous to the prisoners?
And they are.
So, yeah, the Bush administration removed a subset of prisoners from the protections of humane treatment, and they called them, hence the contract, detainees.
They're not going to call them prisoners because if they called them prisoners, then they'd have to be subjected to prisoners of war.
And they did everything they could to make sure that these people didn't get decent, even tribunals to show whether or not they deserve to be prisoners or not, even according to the criteria laid down by Geneva.
I won't go into it, but that was the reason for a lot of legal decisions going back in the mid-2000s, the Hamdi decision, the Hamdan decision.
Even to this day, detainees never really got a procedure by which they could contest their standing as people without the rights of a Geneva-protected prisoner of war to this day, even under the Obama administration.
It's just awful.
As I'm laying it out to you, I don't know if I'm conveying just how terrible it was to take people, rip up international agreements about humane treatment of prisoners, and then take a group of prisoners who you could mistreat for various reasons, maybe for interrogation purposes, but also for purposes of trying to turn some of them to be double agents for you, also just to show that you're the big guy on the block and to make people show you that others fear the United States and fear its presence, and just sometimes plain old cruelty and statism go into this, and racism.
Yeah, no doubt about it.
And this is supposed to make them not want to mess with us because we're such tough hombres, as you kind of alluded to as one of the parts of this, when of course all it does is harden the resolve of our enemies, the exact same as it would do if it was them doing it to us.
Boy, I had to think real hard to figure that out, boy.
I know, it seems so obvious.
And you know what, maybe the more conspiratorial, everything I've laid out here is in paper, it's not conspiratorial.
I can document this is there.
The only conspiratorial aspect is why isn't the press covering this more?
But when I do have a conspiratorial part, it is kind of, well, who knows?
The war on terror is big business.
War is very, very good for American capitalism.
Some at the expense of the rest, anyway.
Yes, but creating enemies is good business for the United States military.
What if there were no enemies?
So what it does is it creates instability abroad, which then the United States seeks to fill the void.
Now we've got ISIS, the latest example, ISIL, ISIS, the new bad guys on the block such that the United States will even ally with al-Qaeda to fight ISIS.
It's just insane, keeping the Middle East, but also other parts of the world in a state of perpetual chaos.
It's not that crazy, Jeff.
I mean, I can see him just tweaking the algorithm a little bit.
You know what, we need him a little madder in this province, crank up the torture, even just the torture news.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah.
Why not?
Well, it's like, look at waterboarding.
By all intents and purposes, I can see, although certainly there were more people waterboarded than the United States claimed there were as it has come out in the past couple of years.
Nevertheless, the amount of people subjected formally to waterboarding really were not that many people, as horrific as even one person being waterboarded is.
But the idea of putting waterboarding out there has a kind of a thigh war aspect to it.
Psychological warfare is the use of propaganda to fulfill your purposes, psychological propaganda to manipulate people's emotions.
Although in that one, I think the purpose there is because water sounds soft and not as bad as beating the living hell out of somebody while they're tied up and can't do anything about it, which is a lot of what this torture is about.
Yeah, and that's a lot of what's been happening.
Jeremy Scahill pointed this out in an article some time ago, where under Obama, they have these rapid deployment forces within Guantanamo.
They're actually called ERFs.
My acronym memory is failing me is what that stood for.
Something rapid, or IRF is Immediate Reaction Force.
And they would go into cells.
This happened to, Moaz Ambeg talked about it.
And if they didn't like the way they were looking, they sent a group of armored men into this little cell that's maybe smaller than 100 square feet to beat the living daylights out of you and then drag you out.
And as I and Jason Leopold discovered through FOIA a few years ago also, or they would shoot you up with drugs to chemically, as they put it, chemically incapacitate you.
Yeah, and I interviewed Jason about that.
He did some really great work on that about the anti-malaria drugs that they didn't even need.
And they'd give them a huge dose of it, which amounted to basically like overdosing them on PCP or something and giving them a terrible bad trip, maybe less than for days and that kind of thing as side effects.
Well, they gave them so-called treatment doses, which were in fact, yes, massive doses compared to the prophylactic dose.
Because a lot of people say, well, I took that anti-malaria drug.
I took it when I went on, you know, and I was okay, although many people complained even of the protection dose.
You could call it a protection dose or whatever.
First of all, there's no malaria in Cuba.
But second of all, the dose they gave them were for people who already had malaria to kill the parasite within them.
And that level of dosage causes a lot of side effects.
And the idea was, you know, take prisoners and disorient them.
And the talking points that I got shows that one of the things they're trying to do, and this has been mentioned before, is they're trying to do something called prolonging the shock of capture.
The idea is that the most vulnerable moment of a prisoner, the best time to exert your influence over them, are in roughly the 48 hours after capture.
They always come.
They come in the middle of the night.
You know, they beat you.
They strip you.
You're in the power of these anonymous men with guns who shove you around.
And you're disoriented.
You're thrown out of your normal life.
You have no one there to help you, protect you, to speak to.
And at those moments, a person's defenses are very down.
And if you are, in fact, holding a secret, you might give it up.
Or if you don't know what to do and these guys say, we need you to go back to the mosque and be our eyes and ears there, you'll say okay.
Right?
And, you know, because it's called the shock of capture.
And what they talk about over and over, and it is talked about in the documents I recently got by FOIA, is they want to prolong that shock of capture, that state of disorientation, and keep you disoriented longer, the better to exploit you in whatever way or fashion they deem fit for themselves.
And they do that by use of drugs sometimes.
But more often they do that simply through use of psychological techniques, such as removing you from human contact, removing you from environmental contact, manipulating, making things very you just don't know what's going on, when you're going to sleep, when you're going to be allowed to sleep, how long you're going to be allowed to sleep.
For not just for a day or a week, but for weeks and even months on end.
Or in the case of Guantanamo, years on end.
And that's a kind of psychological torture.
This is what we're talking about.
I'm talking about Obama's administration does.
That, yeah, okay, sure, they're not waterboarding.
I believe that.
I don't believe Obama's been waterboarding anybody.
But you can break down an individual in many, many different ways.
And I'm a psychologist, as you said, and many of your listeners may be aware of how just living, let's say, in abusive households could break you down.
Well, that's an understanding on some level.
Just understanding that is an understanding of psychological effects of torture.
Now, if you take and extend that where someone has 100% total control over you 24 hours a day, and you put somebody in an abusive environment who has even more knowledge of psychological manipulation than maybe one's bad parents did or one's abusive spouse has, and then you begin to get a sense of how psychological torture works as it's used by the government.
All right.
Listen, I can't thank you enough for the great work that you do, Jeff, and your time that you share with us on the show here.
Sure.
Thank you so much, Scott.
It's really great stuff, as always.
Okay.
All right, y'all.
That is the great Jeffrey Kaye.
Find him here at muckrock.com, muckrock.com.
Pentagon declassifies talking points regarding controversial Army interrogation manual.
Really good stuff.
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