Jane Mayer, The Experiment: The military trains people to withstand interrogation. Are those methods being misused at Guantánamo? The New Yorker, 11 July 2005. “From the beginning…the Guantánamo Bay prison camp was conceived by the Bush Administration as a place that could operate outside the system of national and international laws that normally govern the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. Soon after September 11th, the Administration argued that the Guantánamo site, which America had been leasing from the Cuban government since 1903, was not bound by the Geneva Conventions. Moreover, the Administration claimed that terrorist suspects detained at the site were not ordinary criminals or prisoners of war; rather, they would be classified under a new rubric, “unlawful combatants.” This new class of suspects would be tried not in U.S. courts but in military tribunals, the Administration announced. ”
[A] number of critics, including human-rights officials, detainees’ lawyers, and others with knowledge of the inner workings of the detention center, believe that the problems at Guantánamo are the result of a… systematic effort. The strange accounts of torment that have steadily emerged, these critics say, are connected to decades of research by American scientists into the psychological nature of warfare and captivity. The research, which began during the Cold War, developed new currency after September 11th, when the Bush Administration declared a global war on terror and began trying to extract intelligence from radical Islamists, many of whom have been trained not to reveal anything about their activities. Since 2001, the critics say, medical and scientific personnel have played a role, largely hidden, in helping to design and monitor interrogations that are intended to exploit the physical and mental vulnerabilities of detainees. According to a former interrogator at Guantánamo who was interviewed at length by a lawyer, behavioral scientists control the most minute details of interrogations, to the point of decreeing, in the case of one detainee, that he would be given seven squares of toilet paper per day.
“It is both illegal and deeply unethical to use techniques that profoundly disrupt someone’s personality,” Leonard S. Rubenstein, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights, an advocacy group that has been critical of the Bush Administration, says. “But that’s precisely what interrogators are doing, in order to try to get people to talk.”…
Concrete evidence of the medical and psychological mistreatment of detainees is all but impossible to obtain, in part because the Justice Department, in contravention of all national and international norms, has repeatedly blocked attempts by lawyers to get copies of detainees’ medical records. “Prisoners, even terrorists, have the right to their medical records, according to federal laws, common laws, the American Medical Association, and court trials,” Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, says….
Last month, a report in the Times said that doctors at Guantánamo had provided interrogators with information from some detainees’ medical records. In one case, interrogators were told that a detainee had a profound fear of the dark, and ways were suggested to exploit this phobia, in order to break down the detainee’s resistance to questioning. Also last month, an article in The New England Journal of Medicine revealed that a military policy statement instructed caregivers at Guantánamo to offer clinical information to interrogation teams on request. And last year a confidential report by the International Committee of the Red Cross, parts of which were leaked to the Washington Post, charged that doctors consulted detainee medical records to help interrogators, in a “flagrant violation of medical ethics.”…
The role of physicians, who take the Hippocratic oath to “do no harm,” is ethically complicated in wartime. Doctors are often described as having “dual loyalties,” to patients and to country. But at the Nuremberg trials, after the Second World War, revulsion at Nazi atrocities led to the establishment of rules barring medical mistreatment, even for reasons of national security. A section of the 1950 Geneva Convention, for example, states that “no prisoner of war may be subjected to physical mutilation or to medical or scientific experiments of any kind which are not justified by the medical, dental or hospital treatment of the prisoner concerned.” In 1962, the U.S. passed the first law requiring doctors to obtain “informed consent” from patients. And in 1975 the World Medical Association, or W.M.A., issued the Declaration of Tokyo, which barred medical personnel from participation in either torture or abuse, even as monitors. The American Medical Association is a member of the W.M.A., which means that U.S. doctors must follow its ethical standards.
In June [2005], the Pentagon released a new set of formal ethical guidelines, titled “Medical Program Principles and Procedures for the Protection and Treatment of Detainees in the Custody of the Armed Forces of the United States.” The document, which was issued by Dr. William Winkenwerder, Jr., the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs, stresses the importance of upholding “the humane treatment of detainees.” It states that “health-care personnel charged with the medical care of detainees” cannot participate in interrogations. In this phrase is embedded a troubling loophole, however: scientific and medical personnel who are not directly responsible for a patient’s care may take part in interrogations. Leonard Rubenstein, of Physicians for Human Rights, argues that “the Administration has basically given a green light for medical personnel to participate in abuse.”…
Winkenwerder did acknowledge, however, that a number of medical and scientific personnel working at Guantánamo—including psychologists and psychiatrists—are not providing care for detainees. Rather, these “non-treating” professionals have been using their skills to “assist the interrogators,” as he put it.
People working in this advisory capacity are members of what are called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, or BSCTS. (In military jargon, the teams are known as “Biscuits.”) In past wars, the U.S. military has used health-care consultants for therapeutic purposes, to evaluate the combat readiness of soldiers with psychological or physiological problems, and to provide soldiers with counselling and psychotropic drugs. But Major General Geoffrey D. Miller—who commanded the Guantánamo Bay detention center between November, 2002, and March, 2004, and who was then sent by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to manage Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq—established a new role for health-care advisers. “These teams, comprised of operational behavioral psychologists and psychiatrists, are essential in developing integrated interrogation strategies and assessing interrogation intelligence production,” Miller explained in an internal report in September, 2003….
[There is] a Pentagon-funded program known as SERE, which stands for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape.” SERE was created by the Air Force, at the end of the Korean War, to teach pilots and other personnel considered at high risk of being captured by enemy forces how to withstand and resist extreme forms of abuse. After the Vietnam War, the program was expanded to the Army and the Navy. Most details of the program’s curriculum are classified….
The theory behind the SERE program is that soldiers who are exposed to nightmarish treatment during training will be better equipped to deal with such terrors should they face them in the real world. Accordingly, the program is a storehouse of knowledge about coercive methods of interrogation. One way to stimulate acute anxiety, SERE scientists have learned, is to create an environment of radical uncertainty: trainees are hooded; their sleep patterns are disrupted; they are starved for extended periods; they are stripped of their clothes; they are exposed to extreme temperatures; and they are subjected to harsh interrogations by officials impersonating enemy captors….
According to the SERE [affiliated scientist] and two other sources familiar with the program, after September 11th several psychologists versed in SERE techniques began advising interrogators at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere. Some of these psychologists essentially “tried to reverse-engineer” the SERE program, as the affiliate put it. “They took good knowledge and used it in a bad way,” another of the sources said. Interrogators and BSCT members at Guantánamo adopted coercive techniques similar to those employed in the SERE program. Ideas intended to help Americans resist abuse spread to Americans who used them to perpetrate abuse. Jonathan Moreno, a bioethicist at the University of Virginia, is a scholar of state-sponsored experiments on humans. He says, “If you know how to help people who are stressed, then you also know how to stress people, in order to get them to talk.”…
In May, an e-mail written by a graduate of the SERE program was posted on Informed Comment, the blog of Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, who is critical of the Bush Administration. The e-mail, which was anonymous, asserted, “Gitmo must be being used as a ‘laboratory’ for all these psychological manipulation techniques.”…
The graduate’s claim that waterboarding took place at the Navy’s SERE school was confirmed by the SERE [affiliated scientist]. Waterboarding is intended to simulate drowning and asphyxiation….
Another SERE technique that has apparently surfaced at Guantánamo is the use of “noise stress.” The SERE affiliate told me that trainees often think that the interrogation portion of the program will be the most gruelling, but in fact for many trainees the worst moment is when they are made to listen to taped loops of cacophonous sounds. One of the most stress-inducing tapes is a recording of babies crying inconsolably….
Critics also allege that the SERE program has become a testing ground for interrogation techniques involving sexual embarrassment and humiliation. (Detainees at Guantánamo have complained of such methods, and the scandal at Abu Ghraib last year revealed that guards there photographed prisoners naked and in sexually humiliating poses.)…
It is not yet possible to pinpoint when ideas from the SERE program began to influence interrogations of terrorist suspects. But, as early as March, 2002, James Mitchell, a psychologist formerly affiliated with SERE, appeared inside an interrogation room where the C.I.A. was holding a “high-value” Al Qaeda suspect. (The interrogation took place at an undisclosed location.) Mitchell worked for years as a SERE administrator….
According to a counter-terrorism expert familiar with the interrogation of the Al Qaeda suspect, Mitchell announced that the suspect needed to be subjected to rougher methods. The man should be treated like the dogs in a classic behavioral-psychology experiment, he said, referring to studies performed in the nineteen-sixties by Martin Seligman and other graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania. The dogs were placed in harnesses and given electric shocks that they could not avoid; they were then released into pens and shocked again, but this time they were given a chance to escape the punishment. Most of them, Seligman observed, passively accepted the shocks. They had lapsed into a condition that he called “learned helplessness.” The suspect’s resistance, Mitchell was apparently saying, could be overcome by inducing a similar sense of futility. (Seligman, now a psychology professor at Penn, has spoken at a SERE school about his dog research.)…
Mitchell’s position was opposed by the counter-terrorism expert, who had not spent time at a SERE school. He reminded Mitchell that he was dealing with human beings, not dogs. According to the expert, Mitchell replied that the experiments were good science. The expert recalled making the argument that the U.S. should not “do things that our enemies do, like using torture.” When asked about this incident, Mitchell confirmed that he admired Seligman’s research. He declined to comment on any interrogations that he might have taken part in, though he added, “I don’t have anything to hide.”…
According to Elena Nightingale, a pediatrician and the co-editor of a 1985 anthology of essays about doctors and torture, “The Breaking of Bodies and Minds,” medical experts are often called on to assist with torture, because “people trust and confide in them, which is useful to torturers, and because they have the know-how to keep a person under torture alive, so that more information can be extracted.” Dr. Darryl Matthews, a psychiatrist whom the Army brought in as a consultant after many suicide attempts at Guantánamo, and who has since become a critic of conditions at the prison camp, told me, “As psychiatrists, we know how to hurt people better than others. We can figure out what buttons to push. Like a surgeon with a scalpel, we have techniques and we know what the pressure points are.”
Leonard Rubenstein, of Physicians for Human Rights, described the role of psychologists and medical personnel in the Qahtani interrogation as “conduct that’s been considered forbidden for thirty years.” Psychologists, he said, are subject to the same standards as medical doctors. “Of course they can’t participate in coercive interrogations!” he said. “It’s clear as day. You can’t advise, you can’t develop plans, you can’t review interrogations, you can’t sign off on them, and you can’t even be present in the room.”…
Soon after the establishment of the Guantánamo camp, the F.B.I. sent several of its top counter-terrorism agents to the prison to interview detainees. By the fall of 2002, these agents believed that they were making progress with detainees, including Qahtani, by slowly establishing a dynamic of friendly rapport. According to several sources at the F.B.I., when General Miller assumed his administrative role at Guantánamo he became impatient with the F.B.I. interrogations, and insisted that harsher methods be used. The agents said that even if other interrogators managed to break the detainees through force the intelligence would be unreliable, and it would be impossible to prosecute the cases in any U.S. court. These clashes are now under investigation by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, who is trying to determine if laws were broken during interrogations at Guantánamo and elsewhere….
In [a] former interrogator’s view, fewer than a quarter of the detainees had any intelligence value. More important, he said that most of the coercive methods used on the detainees at Guantánamo were counterproductive. As he explained to the lawyer, “If you don’t have a terrorist now, you will by the time he leaves.”