Ooh, look, actual reporting from the Washington Post. How refreshing.
In April 2002, as the terrorism suspect known as Abu Zubaida lay in a Bangkok hospital bed, top U.S. counterterrorism officials gathered at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., for a series of meetings on an urgent problem: how to get him to talk.
Put him in a cell filled with cadavers, was one suggestion, according to a former U.S. official with knowledge of the brainstorming sessions. Surround him with naked women, was another. Jolt him with electric shocks to the teeth, was a third.
One man’s certitude lanced through the debate, according to a participant in one of the meetings. James E. Mitchell, a retired clinical psychologist for the Air Force, had studied al-Qaeda resistance techniques.
“The thing that will make him talk,” the participant recalled Mitchell saying, “is fear.”
I don’t know how they forgot the old ‘lop off one digit at a time’ trick. One of the lessons I hope that we somehow manage to learn from this mess is that one of the greatest dangers from a massive terrorist attack is in the aftermath…in how we react to it and what he allow to happen to our common humanity and national values.
After 9/11, our government failed that test, as did our poorly-led citizenry. We may find ourselves facing a similar test in the future. We need to learn these lessons now, so we didn’t repeat these mistakes again.
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Dr. Bruce Jessen, a senior military psychologist with offices in Spokane, had a key role in expanding the controversial use of torture against enemy combatants, according to a report released Thursday by U.S. Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain, ranking members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The torture policy – approved at the highest levels of the Bush administration over objections of many military officials – allowed the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) where Jessen worked to operate “outside its charter” teaching coercive techniques used at Guantanamo and other detainee facilities, the committee’s executive summary says.
JPRA efforts in support of “offensive” interrogation operations “went beyond the agency’s knowledge and expertise (and) contributed to detainee abuse,” the report says.
Many details of the complete report are still classified and are undergoing a publication review.
In a series of stories last summer, The Spokesman-Review reported that Jessen and his partner, James E. Mitchell, principals in Mitchell Jessen & Associates in the American Legion Building in Spokane, were subjects of the congressional inquiry
Joint Personnel Recovery Agency’s “White Bluff” facility
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Inquiry into the treatment of detainees in US custody (note that it is a pdf file). What will jump out is both how some psychologists (the aforementioned Mitchell and Jessen come up) were instrumental in creating the conditions under which torture could occur, and also that the American Psychological Association had, post 9-11, made some changes to its ethical code that essentially allow its members to use a Nuremburg defense.
1910 Fruitgum Company. Or the Lemon Pipers’ “Jelly Jungle” on an endless tape loop.
“One of the greatest dangers from a massive terrorist attack is in the aftermath…in how we react to it and what he allow to happen to our common humanity and national values.“
You mean like setting up death squads to go around the world and kill people you feel threatened by – as long as Congress is in the loop, of course?
I remember feeling very uncertain and concerned about how to respond to 911. On the one year anniversary I sat up all night dwelling on it. I cried for my kids
While I wasn’t certain what to do, I knew the Bush administration’s approach lacked imagination and forethought and worse would stifle, suppress and ridicule as weak anything that looking imaginative or thoughtful.
I foresaw a massive dumbing down of our culture, diplomacy and collective conversation.
I also foresaw a massive shift in conservative principles away from constitutional and fiscal principles to America first, xenophobic, ends justifies all means principles.
America actually needs the Right as part of the conversation, just not the lunatic Right