In a hearing Thursday to dismiss charges in the second war crimes trial at Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba, U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer, a licensed psychologist who had ordered the torture of a juvenile detainee, refused to testify under Section 831, Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Article 31 prohibits compulsory self-incrimination as a right under the Fifth Amendment. And the judge in the case ruled that a Pentagon official cannot participate in the trial by military tribunal of Mohammed Jawad, a detainee captured in Afghanistan and held in extrajudicial detention at Bagram Theater Internment Facility and at Gitmo for the past five and a half years.

The official, Air Force Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann, the legal adviser to the tribunals, had previously been barred from the trial of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's driver, who was convicted last month of "providing material support" to al Qaeda. In both instances, according to the Associated Press, the general was kept out of the trials because of his political interference. Hartmann was eager, testified former prosecutor Air Force Col. Morris Davis, to keep Jawad's case at the top of the queue because it would be a grabber for Americans. The Pakistani-born Jawad, who was 16 or 17 at the time of his capture, allegedly tossed a grenade at a U.S. convoy in December 2002.

The judge did not grant the motion to throw out the charges against Jawad. The motion was based on claims that Jawad had been tortured physically at Bagram, where his nose may have been broken, and by means of threats, linguistic and physical isolation, as well as sleep deprivation at Gitmo. Twice, Jawad was kept in extreme isolation for 30 days. Sleep deprivation and prolonged periods of isolation are widely recognized as torture by non-governmental organizations, human rights groups, governments, the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the U.S. State Department, and federal courts as well as state courts.

Although the Bush administration, in the person of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, had expressly said the Geneva Conventions did not apply in the case of the Gitmo detainees, a perspective later overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court, the approved torture techniques were to be used only when there was a good reason to believe that the detainee possessed "critical intelligence," clearly not the case for the young Jawad, who was not being held on terrorism charges. Rather, the accusation against him then, as now, was that, in effect, if he committed the act he was charged with, he had behaved like any soldier in a war zone. (Jawad has always denied throwing any grenades.)

The torture practices used against Jawad can cause physical deterioration, panic, rage, loss of appetite, lethargy, paranoia, hallucinations, self-mutilation, cognitive dysfunction, disorientation and mental breakdowns, any of which, alone or in combination, can spur the detainee to give interrogators more information than he might otherwise surrender. The techniques had a particularly severe effect on Jawad, who attempted suicide on Christmas Day, 2003.

It is especially egregious that these practices were carried out on a juvenile. But worst of all, according to a source familiar with the case who spoke with Daily Kos but asked not to be identified, the torture was ordered by Lieut. Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer, a PhD psychologist operating as part of Gitmo's Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT). BSCTs are not mental health providers. Their primary mission is to support military interrogations. Their role has been widely criticized by prominent psychologists and psychoanalysts such as Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner.

According to an unclassified but highly censored document that the anonymous source has read, when an interrogator came to Zierhoffer and said he thought the techniques being applied to Jawad should be temporarily halted because they were causing him to dissociate, to crack up without providing good information, she recommended that the torture continue. This was a clear violation of the Convention Against Torture, and a clear violation of Principle A of the American Psychological Association, the first sentence of which reads: Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm. At the time, Zierhoffer was still a member of the APA, which she joined in 1997. Her membership lapsed in 2005.

According to a story by Adam Zagorin and Michael Duffy in the June 12, 2005, issue of Time magazine, Inside the Interrogation of Prisoner 63, Army Major John Leso is named in the logs as the psychologist supervising Mohammed al-Qatani’s interrogation, who many believed to be the "20th hijacker." According to the interrogation logs, Qatani (Prisoner 63) almost died during his questioning. Charges of war crimes and terrorist acts against him were dismissed May 13 but he remains at Gitmo.

As recently as 2007, Major Leso was stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, which includes the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school (SERE) for Army Aviation, whose purpose is to train soldiers to resist torture. Government sources and reports show that SERE training was reverse-engineered as a means to break enemy soldiers. Leso is still a member of APA and could be disciplined by the organization if it so chose. Zierhoffer, having left the organization in 2005, cannot.

The significance of that date is that it was the year of the first disclosures, in The New York Times, about Red Cross reports of psychological torture involving psychologists. The APA consequently formed a task force called PENS (President’s Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security). Its report, subsequently discredited by ethicists inside and outside psychology as a whitewash, allowed psychologists to participate in interrogations if they were "legal," which was defined as being in compliance with Bush administration interpretations of what constitutes legal. Did Zierhoffer resign her membership because of the increased scrutiny?  

As reported here Tuesday in Torture Generates Turmoil at the APA, the organization has faced growing concern about its stance on torture, and particularly its unwillingness to say that psychologists should not participate in BSCTs when violation of international law is occurring or likely to occur.

Today, Leonard S. Rubenstein, president of Physicians for Human Rights, which operates the Campaign Against Torture, sent a letter to the president and vice president of the APA:

The emerging information is alarming because it shows not only the involvement of individual psychologists in abusive CIA and military interrogations, but an institutionalized program of psychological torture supervised by teams of CIA psychologists and the Pentagon’s Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT), staffed predominantly by psychologists.

To date, the APA has been muted about these revelations. It has twice passed resolutions reaffirming its opposition to torture and ill treatment but the Association has never explicitly condemned the operations and policies authorizing such abuses, nor concluded its ethics investigations of psychologists who have engaged in such conduct. ...

It is past time for the APA to explicitly and categorically reject the use of psychologists and psychology to perpetrate a widespread, command-ordered program of torture and abuse. General statements opposing torture fail to fully address the reality of what psychologists have done.

The letter asks APA to take six steps: acknowledge that psychologists were "deeply and structurally involved" in detainee torture and degrading treatment; condemn such behavior as unethical; demand that Congress set up an independent commission to investigate the role of military and intelligence psychologists in torture; appoint a blue-ribbon APA panel to review the role of psychologists in torture; initiate disciplinary measures against any APA member alleged to have participated in torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment; reform APA's ethical rules.

Said PHR CEO A. Frank Donaghue:

"The APA must hold psychologists who were involved in the abuse and torture of detainees in U.S. custody accountable. The APA should implement critical reforms to its ethics code.  On the top the list is ensuring that psychologists be required to adhere to the highest ethical standards, rather than be allowed to descend to the lowest interpretations of the law."

Each new revelation that emerges in the cases of the detainees that the Bush administration tried to turn into non-persons rekindles the rage of anyone who believes in civilized behavior and the rule of law. But none is more chilling than the knowledge that medical professionals and psychologists willingly participated in violating the most basic human rights, and that, in the latter case, their leading professional organization has yet to deliver clear and firm objections against that behavior.  

Osama bin Laden's personal driver and bodyguard, who made the magisterial sum of $200 per month, 34-year-old Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was held years without charges at Guantanamo Naval Base prison, has just been found guilty of lesser charges in the first of a series of planned "military commission" trials by the Bush Administration. Comprehensive news coverage of the Hamdan trial can be found at the Miami Herald.

Hamdan was found not guilty on two counts of conspiracy to foment terrorism in league with Al Qaeda. He was found guilty on five of eight charges of providing material support to terrorists. He has yet to be sentenced, and faces possible life imprisonment. In any case, the Bush Administration has already said that whatever the verdict or sentence, no "enemy combatant" will be released until the "war on terror" is over, i.e., until hell freezes over.

Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for "repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide" and urging future Foreign Service officers to be "guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed."

As I write it is late Tuesday afternoon.  The quote, from which my title is taken, comes from a column by Roger Cohen about which I wrote July 24, in I am so tempted to violate copyright  

Our traditional media has failed miserably in informing the American public about policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience and so such policies have endured.  Today I propose to remind myself, and those who choose to read this diary, of policies fundamentally at odds with our national conscience.  That is, they should be, because if they are not, if they are acceptable, then we are lost already and there is no point in our being here.

Last month, I examined the testimony from the Senate Armed Services Committee hearings on interrogations and torture. The hearings concentrated on the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, and its use of military psychologists hired by the CIA to "reverse-engineer" SERE program elements for use in coercive interrogations by the United States at Guantanamo Bay prison and elsewhere.

The timelines constructed out of this testimony and ancillary documentary evidence showed the Department of Defense turned to SERE for help in interrogating "enemy combatants" in July 2002. At least, that seems the case if you follow the summary given by SASC Committee Chair, Senator Carl Levin, adhered to in subsequent reports by every other journalist (but one).

The mendacious Bush Administration ha surpassed itself in terms of statements so absurd that they would lead ordinary people to believe they were listening to a comedy act. Today's monologue comes to us courtesy  of the "Justice" Department, when memos obtained by the ACLU via the Freedom of Information Act, revealed that DoJ policy allowed the torture of prisoners so long as it was done in "good faith."

Naturally, this begs the question as to what constitutes "bad faith" torture? My guess, since the all mighty government of the Great and Benevolent Bush can NEVER be wrong, is there is no such thing as bad faith torture because torture always works.

"Any of us could be the man who encounters his double." -- Friedrich Durrenmat (1)

Jane Mayer's new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (not due out in the bookstores until tomorrow), is already creating headlines and generating controversy. This article will examine the issues around U.S. torture practice, in light of new allegations in the book, and review an email conversation between myself and a prominent nationally-known psychologist whom Mayer says assisted in the planning of U.S. government torture.

Congress and the traditional media in the US have a magnificent blindspot where the worst CIA operations are concerned. Regarding George Bush's torture regime, his policy of cruelty, they've given us long periods of silence interspersed with blinkered or faux-naive commentary. So, sure, we've heard from them occasionally about the legal battles regarding Guantanamo prison, the erased videotapes, waterboarding, and somewhat more vaguely about "aggressive" interrogation techniques. But they've scarcely ever remarked about the broader context in which that's going on: Bush's worldwide spiderweb of secret prisons, of which Gitmo is just a small part; the purchase of masses of prisoners; the meagerness of evidence; the 'renditions'; the disregard of human rights; the absence of accountabililty.

Above all, we rarely hear anything from Congress or the media about how the Bush administration has instituted a systematic regimen to degrade the psychological state of terrorist suspects in order to instill pain, fear, emotional suffering, and childlike dependency. The government even has a name for the regimen of abuse, "exploitation", not that the public has been made aware of it however.

It's partly a testament to a network of bloggers, such as DK diarist Valtin, that truly salient information about the development of the Bush administration's policy of cruelty ever gets out beyond a small circle of human rights groups and lawyers for the prisoners. In what follows, I'll discuss some issues already raised in this recommended diary by Valtin.

Last week Scott Shane of the NYT highlighted evidence that the prisoner "management techniques" at Guantanamo were closely modeled on the abusive conditions imposed on American POWs during the Korean War. That could well be news to readers of the Times, which would be a scandal in itself. Certainly the June 17 Senate Armed Services Committee hearings and media coverage might have given the impression that the Bush administration's reverse-engineering of SERE techniques, for application at Gitmo and elsewhere, was uncovered only in 2008. In fact, however, it was clear at least 3 years ago that the abusive techniques were modeled on SERE training.

Neither is it a secret that the SERE program arose in the wake of the Korean War, as the military and CIA studied how North Korean and Chinese captors manipulated the minds of American POWs to extract confessions without leaving physical marks of torture. On the CIA side, that research led to the experimental MK-ULTRA program, the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual of 1963, and much clandestine training in torture (for example at the School of the Americas). On the Pentagon side, it led to the creation of the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program to give military personnel some experience in the kind of coercive system of "exploitation" they might face if captured by an authoritarian regime.

The Bush administration turned to the SERE experts on psychological coercion to generate a clean system for the cruel treatment of prisoners. It relies heavily on such things as prolonged isolation, sensory disruption, sleep deprivation, temperature extremes, humiliation, degradation, exploiting phobias, and intimidation as well as markless physical tortures to erode the prisoners' mental state and induce a child-like sense of dependency. It's all very unpleasant, and exceedingly clear - for any who wish to see what the Bush administration has been doing.

That's not to say Scott Shane's article doesn't contain important information. He draws attention (without crediting Valtin, who first pointed this out last month) to a Cold-War document used by the SERE instructors when they gave a class on "exploitation" at Guantanamo in 2002. It's a Chart of Coercion released by SASC in June (p. 51 of the PDF). The chart is nearly identical to one first published in Albert Biderman's 1957 Air Force study of communist interrogation techniques (PDF). That information came as a revelation, according to Shane.

[Senate Armed Services Committee] investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity...

Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that "every American would be shocked" by the origin of the training document.

So where exactly did SASC investigators suppose SERE got this system of "exploitation" from, the tooth fairy? The chart in question was attached to a description of "'physical pressures' training" done by SERE instructors for Guantanamo personnel in Dec. 2002 (p. 48 of SASC docs):

"Mr. Ross and I initiated training with an in-depth class on Biderman's Principles".

Indeed, the chart has a header: "Biderman's Chart of Coercion". How hard was it to Google that?

So I remain skeptical that the Congress did not know until last week that George Bush's policy of cruelty was modeled on the torture inflicted on American POWs during the Korean War.

Why does it matter? Here is Shane again:

Some [Biderman] methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret "alternative" interrogation methods.

This false reassurance forms the rotten core of the Bush administration's attempt at public rehabilitation. Even while they falsely continue to assert that it was the commanders at Gitmo who asked permission to use abusive techniques, Bush & Co. wants you to believe they've put a stop to them. Yet psychological degradation remains the foundation of the systematic "exploitation" of prisoners at Gitmo and elsewhere. What is the continued isolation of prisoners about, then, if not the degredation of their mental faculties? Congress has tried to limit the more egregious types of torture, but has done nothing to address the underlying, systematic principles of "exploitation".

And for what it is worth, as Valtin and I and many others have described, the techniques studied by Biderman were inherited rather than invented by totalitarian regimes. Biderman himself says so. 'Clean' torture has a long history in western democracies. It was particularly favored by European colonial forces who didn't wish to leave physical marks of torture on prisoners who might be brought into court.

...the style of torture American forces used in Iraq and Afghanistan derived from two venerable traditions of torture, French modern and Anglo-Saxon modern.

We're supposed to believe that the well-documented history of torture is unknown to members of Congress and their staffs who are investigating allegations of torture? That's a truly magnificent blind spot.

The histories people tell can be revealing. Sen. Levin produced for the SASC hearings a detailed history of how the Bush administration reverse-engineered SERE techniques. It concentrates on the period beginning in July 2002, when the head of the Air Force SERE program, Col. Daniel Baumgartner, was asked (via JPRA) to describe the SERE methods to the head of the DoD Office of General Counsel (OGC), Richard Shiffrin.

Levin's tale contradicts the Bush adminstration on key issues, particularly their ridiculous claim that the "exploitation" techniques were proposed by interrogators at Gitmo, without any prompting from Bush & Co. Not surprising that SASC found otherwise. Philippe Sands' book had already shown that the proposals were the handiwork of Bush's made-men, including Wm. Haynes, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Rizzo, and Michael Chertoff.

But Levin's story coheres to the Bush narrative overall in identifying the summer and fall of 2002 as the period in which "aggressive" techniques were formulated out of frustration with the lack of results from interrogations at Gitmo. By that stage, the Bushies famously had put into place an essential framework of legal advice that advocated for torture.

The problem with that story is that it falls afoul of facts. As Valtin pointed out, Col. Baumgartner let the cat out of the bag in his prepared remarks (PDF) to the SASC hearing.

My recollection of my first communication with OGC relative to techniques was with Mr. Richard Shiffrin in July 2002. However, during my two interviews with Committee staff members last year I was shown documents that indicated I had some communication with Mr. Shiffrin related to this matter in approximately December 2001. Although I do not specifically recall Mr. Shiffrin’s request to the JPRA for information in late 2001, my previous interviews with Committee staff members and review of documents connected with Mr. Shiffrin’s December 2001 request have confirmed to me the JPRA, at that time, provided Mr. Shiffrin information related to this Committee’s inquiry. From what I reviewed last year with Committee staff members, the information involved the exploitation process and historical information on captivity and lessons learned.

That puts matters in another light, doesn't it? The queries about SERE methods actually began in 2001, half a year before the July 2002 contacts that Levin's SASC history concentrates on. Thus, the Bush administration was looking into how to reverse-engineer SERE's "exploitation" techniques before most of the needed legal advice was in place to 'justify' using torture. The documents Baumgartner mentions weren't released by SASC, however, and if memory serves me nobody at the hearing wanted to talk about the 2001 contact(s) he referenced in his opening statement.

It looks to me like Baumgartner had been caught out by SASC staffers in presenting a very selective history of his involvement, and in his public testimony he sought to convince the Senators that his memory was faulty. They, however, very pointedly were not interested in exploring that most critical of issues.

For who knows how far an investigation would proceed if it began by exposing evidence that the Bush administration had violated the laws and conventions on torture and abuse before putting in place legal underpinnings declaring that stuff to be legal? That's the stuff of articles of impeachment.

I'd like to know when the Senate Armed Services Committee will release the documents showing that the top Pentagon lawyer was asking in December, 2001 for information about "exploiting" prisoners.

It's about time we stopped pretending along with Bush & Co. that this torture regimen began no earlier than late 2002 as a result of circumstances at and particular to Guantanamo. We know that is false.

The chief legal counsel at Guantanamo admitted in Oct. 2002 that sleep deprivation was already in use at Bagram air base. That is months before, we're told, the SERE system of coercion was introduced at Gitmo.

And long before they were dragged off to the newly opened prison at Guantanamo, many prisoners were treated to the full "exploitation process" at Bagram and elsewhere. The transport flights from Bagram to Gitmo, with their hoods and sensory deprivation and painful stress positions, were full bore Biderman coercion. In Dec. 2002 John Walker Lindh was abused in some similar ways. Furthermore just a "few weeks" after 9/11, German agents at Tulza air base (Bosnia) documented ongoing abuse of terrorist suspects by the US military. They refused to assist in such illegal interrogations.

As far as we know, none of the US officials who ordered or participated in abusing prisoners in late 2001 and early 2002 have ever been punished. That, too, ought to be a concern to Congress and the US media.

If only it weren't for that magnificent blind spot.

The unsavory details of torture techniques don't normally come up in polite conversations.  Many people don't want to think about the subject.   The average person devotes even less of their thoughts to the principles of resisting torture.  To clearly understand exactly why the current leaders of our nation are guilty of war crimes the subject needs to be discussed.  Only by examining torture from the perspective of the victim can the subject really be understood with full clarity.

Classified documents regarding torture have been released, with everything blacked out but "waterboarding."  An astute person does not need classified material to learn about torture.  The methods employed by the intelligence community today are not new.  United States citizens suffered from all of these methods in the past, at the hands of other governments.  It happened so regularly our military teaches courses in resistance techniques. The press may crave documents to point to as evidence, but they aren't necessary to learn the truth.  References do follow the diary though.

Caution:  Graphic and disturbing information after the flip.

Ex-CIA high official Victor Marchetti wrote:

"A 'limited hangout' is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering - some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

Scott Shane's New York Times article, China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo (7/2/08), details the use of Albert Biderman's "Chart of Coercion" by members of the the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program, or SERE, program to teach torture techniques to interrogators. The article is a fine example of how to conduct a limited hangout, or selected revelation, of intelligence-related material. Its headline and story is disingenuous or betrays ignorance.

The Armed Services Committee's hearings last week on interrogation and torture gave us a startling look into how torture was taught at the Naval Prison at Guantanamo Bay. Most articles have not bothered to look deeply into what was discussed in meetings between officials of the Navy's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, program and ranking officers and personnel at Guantanamo. This article will look in some detail at what actually occurred. (At the end, I will address an important correction and clarification to an earlier article on SERE.)

As Mark Benjamin writes in his "timeline to Bush government torture":

Something very odd occurred during the hearings last week of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on the use of torture against detainees. Something crucial was missed. But before we examine that, let's first examine how the so-called responsible U.S. press covered the revelations oozing out of Washington.

When the New York Times's Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane wrote their June 18 article on the testimony in the SASC hearings on torture of detainees at U.S. prison sites, they made a tremendous blunder in the very first paragraph. (At least I am going to grant it was a mistake, and not something more sinister.)

Lost in the shuffle yesterday was this news brief in the Portland Press Herald:

The Pentagon’s harsh interviewing tactics against detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba cribbed from the U.S. military’s resistance training programs were "inappropriate," Republican Sen. Susan Collins said on Tuesday.

The Senate Armed Services Committee revealed at a hearing on Tuesday that top Pentagon lawyers began compiling lists of interrogation methods used by the military’s elite Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape Schools in July 2002, much earlier than previously had been known.

"It seems that it was more logical for the (Pentagon) to go to the FBI for assistance than to try to figure out how the SERE techniques could be re-engineered for interrogation since that’s not at all what the purpose of the SERE techniques were," Collins said during the hearing.

I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that the Senate is just now getting around to investigating how SERE techniques were used on detainees held by our government at Git Mo and other places, since this was first reported in the media nearly three years ago.

More below the fold:

The Senate Armed Services Committee will be holding hearings into the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Tomorrow is part one, as Senator Levin's committee looks into the origins of U.S. aggressive interrogation techniques. A new article by AP makes clear that these techniques were approved at the highest levels, and that the resulting torture revelations were not due to the actions of a few "bad apples."

Also, on Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing entitled "From the Department of Justice to Guantanamo Bay", which is the second part of its inquiry into administration lawyers, like John Yoo, and their role in writing and approving torture and guidelines for abusive interrogation.

No it's not Bush's current program, although in the end it may turn out to be. With all the latest revelations about Bush's torture program, and the danger, as pointed out by Glenn Greenwald, of falling into scapegoating mode on an underling like John Yoo, I am reprinting a diary of mine from last summer. I don't reprint diaries often; I think this is the second time in something over two years. But the historical information herein is necessary to give context to the latest news.

*    *    *    *

Operation Phoenix Reborn: New Yorker Expose on CIA "Black Sites"

Jane Mayer at the New Yorker has written a riveting piece on the recent history of the CIA recent torture program, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.

"Alternative procedures." "Valuable tools in the war on terror." "Specialized interrogation procedures." "Safe and lawful techniques." "Good policies."

George W. Bush has more euphemisms for torture than his creepy Veep, Cheney, has expletives on supply.

On Saturday, in his weekly radio address, President Bush announced his veto of the Congressional Intelligence bill, which included a ban on CIA use of certain "enhanced" interrogation methods, like waterboarding. Bush defended the use of the so-called "alternative procedures" practiced by the CIA, as necessary for field intelligence officers interrogating "hardened terrorists." The play upon the fear of Americans of terrorist attack in the aftermath of the horrific 9/11 events turns upon well-understood traumatic mechanisms in the human psyche.

In an unusual departure for the Central Intelligence Agency policy, the CIA has apparently decided to publicly attack its critics, and comment thereby on its clandestine programs. What precipitated this public relations foray was a July 2007 article by Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair, who wrote an important piece detailing how military psychologists who worked for the Pentagon's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program (SERE) were hired by the CIA to conduct interrogations of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. (You can read my review of this article here.)

Ms. Eban also was interviewed by Amy Goodman at Democracy Now!, and further described how the CIA worked with the American Psychological Association in organizing meetings to "debate" the efficacy of coercive interrogations, the use of "truth serums" and the like, in interrogations. (Again, this is something I have also written on.)

[Author's Note for DKos readers: This is a long diary, but I recommend reading it fully. It shows how the long arm of the Bush Administration and the Pentagon reaches into non-governmental institutions and manipulates and controls them. It is scary, but it needs to be exposed. There is more to politics with a capital P than what happens in elections.

The issue is torture. The matter at hand concerns the military's need for behavioral "specialists" to monitor and direct prisoner abuse. The arena of the current dispute is the premier psychologist organization in the U.S., the American Psychological Association.]

While few may be aware of it, the battle to keep Bush's torture camps and "black sites" operational continues in listservs and little-known websites and state psychological association meeting rooms. The situation is heating up, fueled by charges of slander, corrupt practices, and accusations and denials -- all under the looming shadow of Senator Levin's pending Senate hearings on psychologists and torture, due this fall.

There are two plot lines, for those trying to understand what's happening:

The American Psychological Association (APA) has posted on their site the text of a new resolution passed August 19 on the question of psychologist participation in torture and cruel, unusual, inhumane or degrading practices (CUID) related to interrogation of "enemy combatants".

Written with an attorney's eye to nuances of definition and interpretation, it offers a condemnation of specific torture techniques, and suggests psychologists can refuse to work for interrogations or in settings that use such odious coercive techniques. But what it offers with one hand, it takes back with the other.

A close reading of the resolution shows that not much has changed since the last time APA took up this issue in 2006. I commented then that an abandonment of international laws and treaties in order to rely for definitions of CUID upon U.S. constitutional standards meant an evisceration of protections against involvement in coercive interrogations.