[THS] Human Experimentation at the Heart of Bush Torture Program

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.truthout.org/human-experimentation-heart-bush-administrations-torture-program60199

Human Experimentation at the Heart of Bush Administration's Torture Program

Sunday 06 June 2010

by: Jason Leopold, t r u t h o u t | Report

photo
(Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

High-value detainees captured during the Bush administration's "war on terror," who
were subjected to brutal torture techniques, were used as "guinea pigs" to gauge
the effectiveness of various torture techniques, a practice that has raised troubling
comparisons to Nazi-era human experimentation. according to a disturbing new
report released by Physicians for Human Rights, an international doctors'
organization.

PHR, based in Massachusetts, called on President Barack Obama, Attorney General
Eric Holder and the US Congress to launch investigations into the role of physicians
and psychiatric experts in the monitoring and assessments of the brutal
interrogations.

"Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the
interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of [the] interrogations,
and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent
interrogations," said the 27-page report, entitled "Experiments in Torture: Human
Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation
Program." "Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation
by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of
medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in
some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."

The report is based on extensive research of previously declassified government
documents that shows the crucial role medical personnel played in establishing and
justifying the legality of the Bush administration's torture program. Many of the
details contained in the document has already been painstakingly documented by
Marcy Wheeler at her blog Emptywheel, and Truthout's own Jeffrey Kaye on his blog
Invictus and in articles published on this web site and at Firedoglake.

Written by medical and psychological experts, some of who have worked with victims
of torture, the report said the research and experimentation on detainees violate
medical professional standards, the Geneva Conventions on treatment of detainees,
and international law based on the Nuremberg principles that were embraced by the
civilized world after it was revealed that the Nazis engaged in medical atrocities on
prisoners during World War II.

“The essence of the ethical and legal protections for human subjects is that the
subjects, especially vulnerable populations such as prisoners, must be treated with
the dignity befitting human beings and not simply as experimental guinea pigs,” the
PHR report said.

Frank Donaghue, PHR's chief executive officer, said the report appears to
demonstrate that the CIA violated "all accepted legal and ethical standards put in
place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of
experimentation."

Waterboarding and Combined Techniques

For example, CIA medical personnel obtained experimental research data by
subjecting more than 25 detainees to individual and combined torture techniques,
including sleep deprivation and stress positioning, as a way of understanding
"whether one type of application over another would increase the subjects'
susceptibility to severe pain," the report said, adding that the information derived
from that research informed "subsequent [torture] practices."

The study of combined and individual torture tactics “appears to have been used
primarily to enable the Bush administration to assess the legality of the tactics, and to
inform medical monitoring policy and procedure for future application of the
techniques," the report said.

Drawing from the study of torture tactics, Steven Bradbury, then head of the Justice
Department's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), prepared a memo in 2005 that approved
combinations of torture tactics, including forced nudity, “wall-slamming,” stress
positions and repeated periods of sleep deprivation.

PHR's analysis on sleep deprivation concluded that "government lawyers used
observational data collected by health professionals from varying applications of sleep
deprivation to inform legal evaluations regarding the risk of inflicting certain levels of
harm on the detainee, and to shape policy that would guide further application of the
technique."

PHR also said the drowning method known as waterboarding was monitored in early
2002 by medical personnel who collected data about how detainees responded to the
torture technique. The data was then given to Bradbury, who cited it in advising CIA
interrogators how to administer the technique.

"According to the Bradbury memoranda, [CIA Office of Medical Services] teams,
based on their observation of detainee responses to waterboarding, replaced water in
the waterboarding procedure with saline solution ostensibly to reduce the detainees'
risk of contracting pneumonia and/or hyponatremia, a condition of low sodium levels
in the blood caused by free water intoxication, which can lead to brain edema and
herniation, coma, and death," the report said.

In Bradbury's memo urging revised techniques – what the PHR report termed
"Waterboarding 2.0" – the Bush lawyer wrote that "based on advice of medical
personnel, the CIA requires that saline solution be used instead of plain water to
reduce the possibility of hyponatremia 
 if the detainee drinks the water."

The Bush administration also used the medical studies to mitigate any blame that
might be placed on CIA interrogators or their superiors, by suggesting that doctors
were involved to protect the health of the detainees even if a side benefit was to
make the torture more effective, the report said.

Shielding Torturers

But the administration apparently anticipated accusations of human experimentation
by adding language in the 2006 Military Commissions Act. The PHR’s report noted
that the law amended the War Crimes Act, and made it retroactive to 1997, “to
delineate the specific violations of [the Geneva Conventions’] Common Article 3 that
would be punishable. Among those violations is ‘performing biological experiments.’

“The amended language prohibits: The act of a person who subjects, or conspires or
attempts to subject, one or more persons within his custody or physical control to
biological experiments without a legitimate medical or dental purpose and in so doing
endangers the body or health of such person or persons.”

According to the PHR report, "the new language of the WCA added two qualifications
that appear to have lowered the bar on biological experimentation on prisoners" by
creating a loophole regarding a “legitimate” purpose that does not necessarily match
up with the interests of the subject. The word “endangers” also would open the door
to some forms of human experimentation, the report said.

Do you value independent investigative reporting? Truthout's work is funded by
contributions from readers like you. Please click here to make a donation.

Calls for Accountability

PHR and other human rights groups plan to file a complaint Wednesday with the
Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Human Research Protections
(OHRP) demanding the agency launch a probe into the CIA’s Office of Medical
Services. Additionally, the group wants the Justice Department's ethics watchdog, the
Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), to launch a separate investigation.

The OPR recently concluded a four-year long investigation into the legal work former
OLC attorneys John Yoo, now a Berkeley law professor, and Jay Bybee, a federal
appeals court judge on the Ninth Circuit, did when drafting the August 2002 torture
memos and concluded both men violated professional standards when they issued
their legal opinions that allowed CIA officers to use brutal methods when
interrogating suspected terrorists, and recommended both men be referred to their
state bar associations to face possible disbarment.

The judgment was softened by career prosecutor David Margolis, who was put in
charge of the final recommendations, and who said he was "unpersuaded" by OPR's
"misconduct" conclusion, which faulted Yoo and Bybee for their approval of brutal
interrogation techniques that were used against terrorism suspects after the 9/11
attacks.

The CIA denied the PHR's allegations of wrongdoing. Spokesman Paul Gimigliano said
the agency, "as part of its past detention program, [did not] conduct human subject
research on any detainee or group of detainees."

Despite the latest revelations regarding the torture program and other war crimes,
President Obama still refuses to allow war-crimes investigations into the actions of
President George W. Bush and his subordinates, saying it is better to "look forward,
and not backwards."

However, Obama appears to have different standards for other countries. During an
interview with a reporter for an Indonesian television station, Obama was asked
whether he was satisfied with the way Indonesia dealt with its past human rights
abuses.

"We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed," said Obama,
who lived in Indonesia as a child and whose step-father was Indonesian. "We can't
go forward without looking backwards."

Stephen Soldz, a psychoanalyst and one of the author's of the PHR report, said "it is
important to realize that the logic used by the Obama administration to refuse an
investigation of torture claims - that the torture memos allowed the torturers to
believe their actions were legally sanctioned - does not apply to potential research on
detainees."

"As far as is publicly known, there exist no 'torture research' memos authorizing
ignoring laws and regulations prohibiting research on torture techniques," Soldz said.

Rev. Richard Killmer, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against
Torture, said PHR's findings "recalls some of humanity's darkest days - charges from
which no person of faith can afford to turn away."

"A Guinea Pig"

The PHR report's conclusions regarding sleep deprivation also buttresses previous
information that the Bush administration practiced its torture techniques on the first
“high-value detainee,” Abu Zubaydah, after he was captured in March 2002 and
confirm several recent investigative reports published by Truthout.

A former National Security official knowledgeable about the Bush administration's
torture program previously told Truthout that Zubaydah was "an experiment ... a
guinea pig" used so CIA contractors could obtain data regarding different
techniques.

The data was then shared with officials at the CIA and the Justice Department, who
used the information to draft the August 2002 torture memos regarding the preferred
interrogation methods and their frequency of use, setting parameters that
supposedly prevented the interrogators from crossing the line into torture.

In an interview with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Zubaydah said the
torture he was subjected to after his capture "felt like [his torturers] were
experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people."

Moreover, in her book "The Dark Side," New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote that
Zubaydah's interrogation sessions became more aggressive and experimental in April
2002, after the CIA sent in Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to the
agency, to take over the interrogations.

Mayer wrote that when Mitchell arrived he told Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who had first
interrogated Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques, that Zubaydah needed to
be treated “like a dog in a cage.”

Mitchell said Zubaydah was “like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a
caged dog, after a while he’s so diminished, he can’t resist.”

Soufan and the other FBI agent argued that Zubaydah was “not a dog, he was a
human being” to which Mitchell responded: “Science is science.”

The PHR report does not identify Zubaydah by name.

In March, Truthout reported, based on interviews with more than two dozen
intelligence and national security officials, that one of the main reasons Zubaydah's
torture sessions were videotaped was to gain insight into his "physical reaction" to the
techniques used against him.

For example, one current and three former CIA officials said some videotapes showed
Zubaydah being sleep deprived for more than two weeks. Contractors hired by the
CIA studied how he responded psychologically and physically to being kept awake for
that amount of time. By looking at videotapes, they concluded that after the 11th
consecutive day of being kept awake Zubaydah started to "severely break down." So,
the torture memo signed by Bybee concluded that 11 days of sleep deprivation was
legal and did not meet the definition of torture.

Those videotapes were destroyed and the issue is now the subject of a criminal
investigation lead by John Durham, a US attorney from Connecticut.

PHR's report said, "information collected by health professionals on the effects of
sleep deprivation on detainees was used to establish sleep deprivation policy" and
"guide further application of the technique."

The report determined that the human experimentation side of the program helped
create a framework to protect the torturers from war crimes and other charges.

"OLC lawyers argued that efforts to refine and improve the application of techniques
would provide a potential 'good faith' defense for interrogators against charges of
torture," the report said. "They argued that such a medical monitoring regime would
remove the element of intent to cause harm from the act, which is a necessary
requirement for a successful prosecution of a torture charge under US law, and that
a 'good faith belief need not be a reasonable belief; it need only be an honest belief.'
Thus, research on the detainees became a key part of the OLC legal strategy to
demonstrate the lack of intent to commit torture."

Nathaniel Raymond, director of PHR's Campaign Against Torture, said, "Justice
Department lawyers appear to have never assessed the lawfulness of the alleged
research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been
to their legal cover for torture."

Brent Mickum, Zubaydah's attorney, said PHR's report is evidence that there was an
"experimental element to the torture program and it was approved at the highest
levels of government."

"I have said literally for years that I believe my client was tortured before any of
these enhanced interrogation techniques were approved by the Justice Department,"
Mickum told Truthout. "And now we know that not only was my client subjected to
torture but he was part of an experiment. This is so ugly, so shameful, so unlawful. If
this revelation doesn't kick in an obligation on the part of the Department of Justice
to investigate war crimes than I don't know what does. The Obama administration
has essentially refused to do that. At some point, this president and his appointees
have to take seriously what their obligations are under the law."

Mickum said he is preparing to file a series of motions in federal court, calling on the
government to preserve evidence related to the CIA's research and experimentation.

"Research" Continues

Meanwhile, Obama's presence in the White House has not resulted in an
abandonment of the research side of the interrogation program.

Last March, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, who recently resigned,
disclosed that the Obama administration's High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group
(HIG), planned on conducting "scientific research" to determine "if there are better
ways to get information from people that are consistent with our values."

"It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area," Blair said during
testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. He did not provide additional
details as to what the "scientific research" entailed.