USA MILITARY OPERATIONS FROM WOUNDED KNEE TO IRAQ

May 13, 2009

"When any modern state tortures even a few victims, the stigma compromises its majesty and corrupts its integrity. Its officials must spin an ever more complex web of lies that, in the end, weakens the bonds of trust and the rule of law that are the sine qua non of a democracy. And, beyond its borders, allies and enemies turn away in collective revulsion." - Prof. Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture (2006).

Truth and justice are essential components of democracy and the rule of law. We cannot move forward unless we honestly examine our past. Accuracy is vital to every decision we make, be it impeachment, prosecution or a restoration of our nation's honor and integrity.

This is the first in a four-part series of articles which will strive to correct misperceptions arising from the erroneous blending of military and CIA torture. This task has become especially relevant now that the Justice Department's the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the very section which had issued the torture memos, tasked by former Attorney General Michael Mukasey with investigating itself, has now released a recommendation that none of the authors of the torture memos be prosecuted. This recommendation stands in stark contrast to our nation's post-World War II decision to prosecute German judges for war crimes at Nuremberg.

Part I addresses the relatively public involvement of the U.S. military and private contractors at Guantanamo, Afghanistan and Iraq. It will dispel the notion that the Bush White House sought out independent legal opinions from the OLC before deciding to torture.

Part II will discuss the CIA's dark beginnings, including its recruitment of former Nazis, its devotion to covert "psychological operations" as a founding principle, the experiments on unwitting subjects that were part of a maniacal quest to crack the code of human consciousness, and the scientific studies that led to KUBARK, the CIA's torture manual.

Part III provides a vital historical account of CIA torture applied by surrogates in developing nations as a component of empire, an account that belies the suggestion made by the The New York Times that CIA torture first arose as an aftermath of 9/11.

Part IV will address the CIA's involvement in extraordinary rendition and an ultra-secret system of "black-sites" into which "ghost detainees" would disappear. It will show how the techniques used on "ghost detainees" are the culmination of a half-century of CIA research and practices...

Military Torture

The 263-page Senate Armed Services Committee Report [PDF] (the "Levin Report"), whose release was inexplicably delayed from its Nov. 20, 2008 completion to April 22, 2009, tracks the military's involvement* in torture. It reveals that in December 2001, more than a month prior to the issuance of a Feb. 7, 2002 Presidential memorandum, erroneously** declaring that the Geneva Convention's proscriptions on torture did not apply to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees, the DoD's Office of General Counsel "solicited information on detainee "exploitation" from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), the "agency that oversees military Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training," whose techniques are [emphasis added] "based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions."

In the SERE program U.S. military personnel, under careful medical controls, are taught to resist unlawful interrogation practices (aka torture). SERE techniques include forced nudity, stress positions, hooding, sleep disruption, loud music and flashing lights, exposure to extreme temperatures, face and body slaps and, in the Navy's SERE school, waterboarding.

The Levin Report discusses how SERE techniques were "reverse engineered" for use at Guantanamo, by the U.S.. This was approved at the highest levels of the Bush/Cheney cabal,*** despite multiple legal memoranda from all branches of the armed forces challenging its legality and despite a July 2002 JAPRA memo which noted that aside from its "myriad legal, ethical, or moral implications," torture produces unreliable intelligence. The Levin report reflects modification of the SERE techniques to exploit fear, such as the use of vicious dogs. Levin includes an historical account of how these modified and reverse engineered SERE techniques migrated from Guantanamo to Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Levin report contains neither an in-depth analysis of the CIA history and application of torture nor the CIA's role in extraordinary rendition and methods that were exclusive to "ghost detainees." Levin does not address the role of private contractors, like CACI International Inc. and Titan Corp. (now L-3 Services), named in lawsuits brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights ("CCR"), Al Shimari v. CACI and Saleh v. Titan. The CCR alleges the companies engaged in torture while providing interrogation and translation services at Abu Ghraib.
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**In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006) the Supreme Court rejected the Administration's position. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which mandates that all detainees "in all circumstances be treated humanely" and which proscribes "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment" applies to al Qaeda and the Taliban.

***Rumsfeld, who signed a Dec. 2002 memo authorizing torture at Guantanamo, displayed a despicable cowardice by asserting the emerging Abu Ghraib torture photos were the work of "a few bad apples." Today, as low level former MPs languish in military prisons because of their role in carrying out those policies he specifically approved, Rumsfeld walks about, a free and wealthy man.

Legal Fig-Leaves

President Obama's initial rush to shield CIA torturers on the basis of their supposed reliance on the quasi-legal memos overlooked a critical issue, now partially resolved by a newly released summary [PDF] sent by Sen. John D. Rockefeller, IV to Attorney General Eric Holder for a declassification review. It reveals that Abu Zubayda was "badly injured in the firefight that brought him into custody" in March 2002; that he was initially interrogated by FBI agents while receiving medical care; that contacts in which the CIA sought NSC approval for application of its torture techniques began in April 2002 and that the National Security Advisor authorized application of CIA torture techniques, "subject to a determination of legality by" the OLC.*

The Levin Report reflects that the torture memos were issued by the OLC's Jay Bybee only "after consultation with senior Administration attorneys, including then White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and then-Counsel to the Vice President David Addington."

This seemingly innocuous notation says a great deal. As revealed by Jane Mayer's July 3, 2006 New Yorker article, "The Hidden Power," the former Vice President and his chief legal counsel (who later became Cheney's chief of staff), David Addington were the driving force behind the Bush regime's unprecedented claims of dictatorial executive powers.

Addington, a man described by Lawrence Wilkerson, Secretary of State Colin Powell's former assistant, as "utterly ruthless," began his government career as assistant CIA general counsel where he aided William Casey's resistance to Congressional oversight. He served as a staff attorney on the U.S. House/Senate select committee investigating the Iran/Contra scandal, assisting Congressman Richard Cheney in preparation of the Iran-Contra Minority Report. Although the scandal produced 17 felony convictions, the Minority Report, Mayer observes, made the "outlandish" claim it was "Congress --- not the President --- [which] had overstepped its authority, by encroaching on the President's foreign-policy powers."

According to Mayer, Addington dominated the agenda. She quoted an administration source: "'If you're not sufficiently ideological, he would cut the ground out from under you.'" Former Pentagon lawyer Richard Schriffrin described a tense multi-agency White House meeting in which Addington would simply dismiss them. "He didn't recognize the wisdom of the other lawyers. He was always right...He knew the answers...If you favored international law, you were in danger of being called 'soft on terrorism.'" Mayer said a number of "talented top lawyers who challenged Addington...left the Administration under stressful circumstances."

As we observed previously in "Prosecute or Perish," Addington was well aware that innocents were being held at Guantanamo. He didn't care.

Addington, Bybee and DoD General Counsel William J. Haynes were included amongst the six Bush administration attorneys who were targeted by Spanish prosecutors in the war crimes complaint they filed with Judge Baltasar Garzón. The Levin Report reveals that Haynes quashed a review by "then-Captain (now Rear Admiral) Jane Dalton, Legal Counsel to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff" which "discussed the military services' concerns" about application of reverse engineered, SERE techniques to detainees.

The evidence is compelling. The President and Vice President wanted torture. They had no intention to leave little matters like international and federal laws forbidding torture to stand in the way. The notion that they relied on legal opinions from an independent OLC is a farce. Any doubts about that were conclusively resolved when the White House sought to collect and destroy all copies of a dissenting legal memo from former State Department attorney Philip Zelikow.
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Premature Exculpation

In his haste to evade his obligation to faithfully execute the law with respect to those who supposedly relied upon the OLC legal opinions, President Obama not only ignored the long history of CIA torture that will be addressed in subsequent articles, but the significant issue of whether, in terms of the Bush regime's so-called "war on terror," the CIA was already engaged in torture and sought the OLC opinions as a retroactive justification for crimes already committed.

Where the Aug. 2002 Bybee torture memo suggests that the CIA was seeking OLC approval "before" it tortured Abu Zubaydah, there is reliable evidence that Abu Zubaydah was subjected to torture long before Bybee conjured his now infamous memos.

Abu Zubaydah initially cooperated with FBI agents, one of whom tended to his wounds. But the CIA, which would later destroy some 92 interrogation tapes, insisted on taking over the interrogation. After Zubaydah was transferred to a CIA black site, the two FBI agents complained about "brutal tactics." They were told the tactics had been approved "at the highest level."

It is likely that Zubaydah was not the first Bush-era victim of CIA torture. In 2001 John Walker Lindh, "The American Taliban," was captured by the Northern Alliance and taken to a courtyard inside a Northern Alliance fort where he was "brutally" questioned by two CIA agents. This sparked a riot that resulted in the death of the CIA's Michael Spann. Recaptured, Lindh was transferred to Bagram Airbase, by which time he was "dehydrated, starving, and suffering from a festering bullet wound in his leg." He was then "duct-taped to a gurney, blindfolded with tape, and left in a dark, sealed, unheated metal shipping container....His leg was left untreated for days. Allegedly tortured...he was repeatedly threatened with death and...when he asked for a lawyer," Lindh was told "nobody knows you're here." He "cracked and signed a confession." D. Lindorf & B. Olashansky, The Case for Impeachment (2006)

Lindorf & Olshansky reveal that, after his return to the US, Lindh's family hired attorney James Brosnahan, who moved to suppress the confession, seeking to call as witnesses both soldiers from Bagram and Guantanamo detainees. Faced with possible revelations of CIA torture, Michael Chertoff, then the head of the Justice Department's criminal division, offered a plea arrangement in which the government would drop the terrorism, attempted murder and conspiracy to kill Americans charges if Lindh would plead guilty to the charges of providing assistance to a banned country and carrying a weapon. Chertoff's offer required that Lindh "sign a letter saying he had 'never been mistreated.'"** Lindh accepted
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**I mentioned in an earlier post that the day after my father was waterboarded during WWII, and forced to sign a false confession that he was a British agent, the Japanese Kempetai, unsatisfied by his wobbly signature, gave him the choice of again signing or undergoing another round of waterboarding. I neglected to mention that, at that time, my father was given a second document that stated he'd signed the first of his own "free will." What is it about people who torture that makes them insist the victim sign off on the lie that their victim had "never been mistreated"?

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Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California State Bar since 1977 and has practiced in the fields of civil litigation and workers' compensation at both the trial and appellate levels. He graduated cum laude from Southwestern University School of Law where he served as a student director of the clinical studies department and authored the Law Review Article, Executive Privilege: Myths & Realities. He received an MA in political science at Cal State University Northridge and a BA in political science from UCLA. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).

May 13, 2009

Guest Blogged by Ernest A. Canning
- Part II of a Four-Part Special Series (Part I is here.)

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." -Voltaire

I don't want to give the wrong impression. All nations possess a legitimate need to gather intelligence. There have been large numbers of extraordinarily dedicated CIA employees, like Ray McGovern and Valerie Plame Wilson, who have sought to protect this nation from harm. But there is the dark side of the agency, a covert branch which has engaged in deception, intrigue, torture and assassinations, all designed to destabilize democratic governments in order to advance and consolidate the power and influence of a US-based, multi-national corporate empire.

In Part I of this four-part series, I described how the George W. Bush administration did not wait for legal "permission" from its Department of Justice before embarking on its plan to use torture as means of forcing confessions and other information from detainees. In "Prosecute or Perish" I stressed that the current torture scandal is the product of a half-century of CIA torture; that by failing to prosecute those who tortured in our name in the same manner that we prosecuted the Japanese officers who waterboarded my father during World War II, we not only will expose our nation to the charge of hypocrisy but will endanger the very survival of our constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

As I noted in Part I, we cannot move forward unless we honestly examine our past --- which, in this instance, mandates a careful look at the origins of the CIA...

Dark Beginnings

In a sense, it may be said that the CIA was a stepchild of Nazi Germany. As noted by Joseph Trento in Prelude to Terror (2006), its founder, Allen Dulles, had done business with the Nazis before World War II. Dulles served in the O.S.S. in Bern, Switzerland. From 1945 to 1947, preceding the creation of the CIA, Dulles ran his own private and entirely illegal intelligence service in which he "began a massive ex-Nazi recruitment* campaign, using a State Department refugee office as a front." The recruitment campaign, Prof. Alfred McCoy observed, in A Question of Torture (2006), entailed more than the use of war criminals as spies. It included German scientists "who had directed Nazi experiments into human physiology and psychology" and whose early research would lay the ground work for CIA torture techniques...

The National Security Act of 1947 created the CIA to be an instrument of the newly formed National Security Council (NSC). Five months after that formation, notes McCoy, the NSC promulgated a top secret authorization for the CIA to conduct propaganda programs that would be "supplemented by covert psychological operations."

During his Feb. 16, 2007 interview on Democracy Now, McCoy explained:

In A Question of Torture, McCoy reveals that in 1950 the CIA's "Project Bluebird" began testing LSD on unwitting American soldiers. From 1953 to 1963, MKUltra, a covert operation under the control of Richard Helms, not only injected North Korean prisoners with LSD but "spiked drinks at a New York City party house, paid prostitutes to slip LSD to their customers..., pumped hallucinogens into children at summer camp, attempted behavior modification on inmates...and collected powerful toxins from Amazon tribes." The project was terminated when the CIA's inspector general, having discovered it during a routine audit, determined MKUltra jeopardized "the rights and interests of all Americans."

In The Shock Doctrine (2007), Naomi Klein provides an extended discussion of the CIA-funded electroshock experiments carried out by Dr. Ewen Cameron of McGill University as "a means to blast his patients back to their infancy...;" a tool designed to make the mind a "blank slate" on which to write a new reality.

Klein quotes from Cameron's 1962 scientific paper:

Obviously, its memory destroying features makes electroshock a counter-productive tool in the gathering of actionable intelligence. But that finding wouldn't keep the CIA from continuing to search for a way to unlock the key to forced self-incrimination...

KUBARK: The CIA's 1963 Torture Manual

Neither the drug nor the electroshock experiments satisfied the agency's maniacal quest to crack the code of human consciousness without loss of the victim's ability to pass on useful intelligence. Perceived success came by way of academic studies that combined the relatively simple techniques of sensory deprivation with the KGB's use of self-inflicted pain. This combination produced the how-to-torture manual, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation-July 1963. ("KUBARK" was an early cryptonym for the CIA itself.)

The KUBARK manual, which begins by stating that it is "intended as a guide for interrogation of resistant sources" notes, under the subheading, "Deprivation of Sensory Stimuli," that "the chief effect of arrest and detention, and particularly solitary confinement, is to deprive the subject of many or most of the sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations to which he has grown accustomed."

In addition to a McGill University study on sensory deprivation in which student volunteers sitting in a cubicle with goggles, gloves, headphones, and earmuffs began to hallucinate within 48 hours, KUBARK references a study at the National Institute of Mental Health in which two subjects were outfitted in "black out masks, which enclosed the whole head but allowed breathing and nothing else." The subjects were immersed up to their necks in tanks of slow flowing water, each for a period of less than three hours. It cites a sensory deprivation experiment involving 17 paid volunteers who lay flat on their backs inside a tank type respirator with their arms and legs inside "comfortable but rigid cylinders to inhibit movement and tactile contact." The only sound was the dull, repetitive humming of the respirator motor. Only 6 of the 17 paid volunteers completed the 36 hour test. "The results confirmed...that (1) the deprivation of sensory stimuli induces stress; (2) the stress becomes unbearable for most subjects; (3) the subject has a growing need for physical and social stimuli, and (4) some subjects progressively lose touch with reality...."

These studies formed the basis for the first basic component of the CIA torture paradigm, sensory deprivation --- also described by McCoy as "sensory disorientation."

Pay close attention to the 1963 KUBARK torture instructions, for, in the final segment of this series, you will see them reproduced in the Feb. 14, 2007 report [PDF] from the International Committee of the Red Cross ("ICRC") regarding the treatment of 14 high-value "ghost detainees" who were ordered transferred to Guantanamo by the Bush Administration.

KUBARK says coercion is used to induce a child-like "regression" that will lead the victim to look at the interrogator as a father figure. Control must be exerted, starting with the timing and manner of arrest to insure surprise and maximum discomfort. The detainee's clothes are immediately stripped "because familiar clothing reinforces identity." Arrest and detention are designed "to deprive the subject of ...the signs, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations to which he has grown accustomed....Results produced only after weeks or months of ordinary imprisonment...can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light...which is sound proofed, in which odors are eliminated...."

The KUBARK manual explains the preference for self-inflicted pain. "Persons of considerable moral or intellectual stature often find in pain inflicted by others a belief that they are in the hands of inferiors, and their resolve not to submit is strengthened." Where such pain is intense, it will likely produce "false confessions."

But "whereas pain inflicted on a person from outside himself may actually focus or intensify his will to resist, his resistance is likelier to be sapped by pain which he seems to inflict upon himself....When the individual is told to stand at attention for long periods, an intervening factor is introduced. The immediate source of pain is not the interrogator but the victim himself." Per KUBARK, psychological factors --- such as fear engendered by threats to torture --- are more effective than pain induced directly by torture.

It would be a mistake to dismiss the brutal impact of this relatively simple method. As we noted previously in "Fixing the Facts and Legal Opinions Around the Torture Policy", citing A Question of Torture, a 1956 CIA-commissioned, Cornell University study of KGB torture techniques revealed that the simple act of standing in place for eighteen to twenty-four hours produces "'excruciating pain' as ankles double in size, skin becomes 'tense and intensely painful,' blisters erupt oozing 'watery serum,' heart rates soar, kidneys shut down, and delusions deepen." This too should be kept in mind when, in the fourth and final article, we turn to the ICRC's description of the disorientation caused by application of the twin techniques of sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain to the 14 high-value "ghost-detainees" whose testimony is documented in the ICRC's report.

But the tactics used, and exposed in the ICRC's report were not new to the post-9/11 period, as many have misreported. The techniques were true and tested, and had found their way into covert U.S. foreign policy long before "everything changed" in September of 2001, as we'll discuss in the next chapter of this series...

Here is a short, graphic video demonstrating three of the CIA's torture techniques --- sensory deprivation (hooding) combined with self-inflicted pain (forced stress position) and waterboarding --- three techniques approved for use by the Bush Administration....

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Trento's CIA connections allege that Dulles recruited George H.W. Bush as a CIA business asset in 1956 after George H.W. moved to Houston and established Zapata-Offshore; that this led to the former President's involvement with anti-Castro Cubans in which the CIA used Zapata-Offshore oil rigs as training areas in advance of the Bay of Pigs invasion. A pair of Nation magazine articles authored by Joseph McBride in July and August 1988 link George Bush of the CIA to a Nov. 29, 1963 J. Edgar Hoover memo relating to the Kennedy assassination and to a curious denial by then Vice President Bush that he had any connections to the CIA prior to being appointed its Director by President Ford in 1975.

The top secret code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was "Operation Zapata." The two repainted naval vessels used in the invasion were given the names "Houston" and "Barbara."

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Ernest A. Canning has been an active member of the California State Bar since 1977 and has practiced in the fields of civil litigation and workers' compensation at both the trial and appellate levels. He graduated cum laude from Southwestern University School of Law where he served as a student director of the clinical studies department and authored the Law Review Article, Executive Privilege: Myths & Realities. He received an MA in political science at Cal State University Northridge and a BA in political science from UCLA. He is also a Vietnam vet (4th Infantry, Central Highlands 1968).