By Lisa Hajjar
16 December 2014
(AP Photo / Maya Alleruzzo, File)
H uman experimentation was a central feature of program CIA torture. The experimental nature of the interrogation techniques and detention is clearly evident in the executive summary of the Intelligence Committee of the US Senate investigation report, despite newsrooms (insisted by the CIA) to hide the location of these laboratories cruel sciences and the identity of the authors.
At the head of this project human experimentation were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed protocols interrogation and detention they and others applied to people imprisoned in secret agency "black sites".
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: "We believe that his experience was so unique that had been abandoned would not have sought out when it became clear that the CIA would head into the unknown territory of the program . "Mitchell and Jessen ratings the experience did not include interrogation, specialized knowledge about al Qaeda or cultural or linguistic knowledge relevant. What they had was the experience of the Air Force in the study of the effects of torture of prisoners of war and a curiosity about whether the theories of "learned helplessness" derived from experiments in dogs could work on human enemies .
To implement these theories, Mitchell and Jessen supervised or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce "weakness, disorientation and fear." His "theory" had a particular means and ends relationship is not well understood, as Mitchell explained angrily in an interview Vice News: "the point of the bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop" in other words, "enhanced interrogation techniques" (a euphemism for the Bush administration torture) do not themselves produce useful information; Rather, they produce the condition of total submission to facilitate the extraction of actionable intelligence.
Mitchell, as former CIA Director Michael Hayden and others who have defended the torture program, argues that a fundamental error in the Senate report is the elision of media (waterboarding "rectal rehydration," weeks or months nudity total darkness and isolation, and other techniques to break prisoners) and ends the -Manufactured compliance, which, advocates say, allowed the rich collection of intelligence that keeps Americans safe. (This statement is broad and contradicted the report authority.)
As Americans from the Beltway to the debate heart, again, the legality and effectiveness of "enhanced interrogation , " we are reminded that "torture" has lost its stigma as a morally reprehensible and criminal behavior. That was evident in the GOP presidential primary of 2012, when more than half of the candidates promised to bring back the submarine, and now is on full display. On Meet the Press , for example, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who headed the national security functional hierarchy of decision-making during the Bush years, announced that "would do it again in a minute."
No one has been held accountable for torture, beyond a handful of trials of low-level soldiers and contractors. In fact, impunity has been virtually guaranteed as a result of several Faustian bargains, including "golden shield" memoranda written by government lawyers for the CIA; post immunity for war crimes that Congress inserted into the Military Commissions Act of 2006; classification and secrecy that still surrounds the torture program, as can be seen in the newsrooms of the report of the Senate; and the position of "looking forward, not backward," President Obama has maintained through each wave of public disclosures since 2009. A majority of America, apparently, has come to accept the legacy of torture.
human experimentation, however, not politically it has been renovated and transformed into a legitimate or justifiable business. Therefore, it would behoove us to appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers black site torture were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and the CIA to experiment with humans. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light on issues of accountability and impunity.
The "war on terrorism" is not the first foray of the CIA in human experimentation.At the dawn of the Cold War, scientists and physicians with Nazi German history of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American war prisoners breakdowns and indoctrination by his communist captors, the CIA began investing in research into mind control. In 1953, the CIA established MK-ULTRA program, the first phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program was developed in experiments of psychological torture that elements of Soviet and Chinese models were adapted, including standing for a long time, prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied "science" in the Cold War.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined with psychological torture brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA was a manual titled "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation" to guide employed in the art of extracting information from "resistant" sources by combining techniques to produce "weakness, disorientation and fear." As Communists tactics CIA largely avoided direct the body violently in favor of those that target the mind systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired compliance state. The model of the Phoenix program was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas,
In the mid-1980s, the CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations on US - backed atrocities in Central America. Both manuals were made public in 1997 as a result of the Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Baltimore Sun . That would have seemed like a moment "never again".
However, we are here again. This brings us back to Mitchell and Jessen.Because of their experience as instructors in the program of military Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE), after 9/11 were contacted by senior officials at the Pentagon and later by lawyers who wanted to know whether some SERE these techniques could be reverse-engineered to get terror suspects to talk.
The path of abstract hypothetical (SERE can be reverse engineered?) For the authorized use of waterboarding confinement boxes and runs directly in the field of human experimentation. On April 15, 2002, Mitchell and Jessen came to a black spot in Thailand to oversee the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first "high value detainee" captured by the CIA. By July, more coercive Mitchell proposed to the headquarters of the CIA techniques, and many of these were approved in late July. From then until the program it is dry docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torture, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.
My point is not to minimize the illegality of torture or legal imperatives to pursue the responsibility of the authors. On the contrary, because the concept of torture has been so confused and disputed, I suggest that responsibility would be more acceptable if publicly Reframed CIA program as one of human experimentation.If we did so, it would be harder to praise or excuse authors as "patriots" who "acted in good faith." Although torture has become a Rorschach test among political elites playing public opinion Sunday morning programs, human experimentation has no such community advocates and apologists
