Ongoing Torture
The Nation. (February2010) Anand Gopal writes on America’s secret Afghan prisons.
The Nation. (May 2010) Jeremy Schahill explains the Defense Intelligence Agency’s operation of the secret Black Jail at Bagram.
The Atlantic (May 2010) Mark Ambinder comments on the goings on inside the secret interrogation facility at Bagram, noting that defense officials say the US “does not invite the Red Cross to tour it because the US does not consider it to be a detention facility, classifying it instead as an intelligence-gathering facility.” In a separate post, Ambinder explains how Appendix M of the Army Field Manual is being used to allow the broad use of isolation and sleep deprivation.
Truthout (May 2009) Jeremy Scahill reports on continuing torture at Guantanamo Bay.
Tikkun (February 2010) Lynn Feinerman writes about the solitary confinement of Fahad Hashmi.
Accountability
The American Civil Liberties Union has an excellent website outlining which Bush Administration officials were involved in the decision to torture and what their involvement was.
Washington Post (April 2009) Mark Danner argues for an investigative commission.
Tikkun (May-June 2009) Lynn Feinerman calls for prosecution and care of victims/survivors.
Tortured Law, a 10-minute documentary by Alliance for Justice, examines the role lawyers played in authorizing torture and calls upon Attorney General Holder to conduct a full investigation of those who ordered, designed, and justified torture. Tortured Law is the recipient of a 2010 VSM Excellence Award.
Torture on Trial, a 30-minute documentary, features Mark Danner, Jane Mayer, and former interrogator Matthew Alexander, and other experts on the subject of torture.
Truth Out (April 2010) Jason Leopold states that in a sworn declaration obtained exclusively by Truthout, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell during George W. Bush's first term in office, said Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld knew the "vast majority" of prisoners captured in the so-called War on Terror were innocent and the administration refused to set them free once those facts were established because of the political repercussions that would have ensued.
The International Federation for Human Rights , along with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), has filed three cases against Donald Rumsfeld and others in Germany and France under universal jurisdiction laws for the torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, and in secret sites.
Harpers (April 2009) Scott Horton comments on the recommendation to prosecute in the Red Cross Report.
Accountability for Doctors and Psychologists
Leonard S. Rubenstein and Stephen N. Xenakis, in an op-ed published in the New York Times, note that
psychologists and at least one doctor designed or recommended coercive interrogation methods including sleep deprivation, stress positions, isolation and waterboarding. The military’s Behavioral Science Consultation Teams evaluated detainees, consulted their medical records to ascertain vulnerabilities, and advised interrogators when to push harder for intelligence information. Yet no agency—not the Pentagon, the CIA, state licensing boards, or professional medical societies—has initiated any action to investigate or discipline those individuals. The authors make the point that it is not too late to hold investigations and they should start now.
See the following sites also:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/aparesignation/index.html
http://ethicalapa.com/Ethics_Code_102.html
http://ethicalapa.com/Resources.html
http://www.ethicalapa.com/Links.html
(Go to the Advocacy page for more information.)
Psychologists’ Involvement in Torture
Psychologists' & Physicians' Involvement in Detainee Interrogations
This page, from psychologist Ken Pope's website, has many valuable links to files, resources, and information regarding interrogation, torture, and psychologists' and physicians' involvement in torture.
Democracy Now
Renowned journalist Amy Goodman has covered psychologists’ involvement in torture since 2005. The website of her award-winning radio program, Democracy Now! has a special section tracing the history and posting ongoing coverage of psychologists’ involvement in interrogations.
Salon.com journalist Mark Benjamin has a series of articles on psychologists’ involvement in torture:
"Torture teachers" -- June 29, 2006
"Psychological warfare" -- July 26, 2006
"Psychologists group still rocked by torture debate" -- August 4, 2006
"The CIA's torture teachers" -- June 21, 2007
"Will psychologists still abet torture?" -- August 21, 2007
Firedoglake (May 2010) Jeffrey Kaye writes that the APA has scrubbed clean the pages linking it to CIA torture workshops in 2003.
Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, a wonderfully written and researched book by Dr. Stephen Miles
University of Minnesota Human Rights Library has a website with links to government documents hard to find elsewhere, such memos from teams of behavioral consultants to the FBI and detainee death and interrogation indexes. The website has a wide range of documents available pertaining to the roles of Armed Forces Medical Personnel who worked in US Armed Forces prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay from 2001 to 2006.
Vanity Fair "Rorschach and Awe" (July 2007), by Katherine Eban, traces the migration of
SERE interrogation resistance techniques from the US military's training programs to their eventual application in the extra-legal and sometimes secret detention facilities abroad.
Also, see the following sites:
http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/2007/02/05/writings-on-psychologists-and-interrogations/
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2007/0701.levine.html
http://kspope.com/nuremberg.php
Torture
American Torture
This site, associated with the book of the same name by Michael Otterman, hosts bloggers (including Valtin) and news articles and also has some archived documents.
A Question of Torture : CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, by Alfred W. McCoy, takes a far-ranging look at the development of torture strategy in the US, much of it aided by psychologists, and addresses large questions about the efficacy of torture and the reasons for its use.
American Psychologist Researcher Jeffrey Burger conducted an experiment two years ago replicating the Stanley Milgram experiments. Burger, using an experiment very similar to Milgram’s, found that 70 percent of subjects would continue to administer the seemingly painful but fake shocks, even after hearing a subject’s cries for mercy.
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, is an important book by Phillip Zimbardo, creator of the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment. In this book Zimbardo analyzes the systematic infliction of violence that has characterized the US torture program. He outlines some of the dynamics that have made such brutality possible (depersonalization, dehumanization, group think, enemy image, etc.) and attributes responsibility to US officials at the highest levels.
Taxi to the Dark Side, a 2007 Academy Award-nominated documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney, focuses on the controversial death in custody of an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bigram Air Base. Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine the United State's policy on torture and interrogation in general, including the CIA's use of torture and its research into sensory deprivation.
Torturing Democracy is a documentary made by Washington Media and the National Security Archives. The website has a wealth of information and resources.
The Guantánamo Testimonials Project
This extensive collection of valuable data and testimony from many parties involved in detentions and interrogations at Guantánamo is compiled and maintained by The UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA). The CSHRA's director, UC Davis linguistics professor Almerindo Ojeda, also edited an excellent volume on psychological torture entitled The Trauma of Psychological Torture.
History Commons
This website, operated by the Center for Grassroots Oversight, has comprehensive listings and links to many things related to the US government’s use of torture, including government reports, court decisions, and documented torture techniques.
"Torture Memos"
Senate Armed Services Committee Report
International Committee of the Red Cross Report
2004 CIA Inspector General's Report
Truth, Torture, and the American Way, by Jennifer K. Harbury, examines the history of US involvement in torture. Harbury, a US attorney, lays out the United States government’s decades-long involvement in torture in Central America, from teaching torture techniques to funding and rewarding the Central American death squads that used them. A highlight of the book is the testimonies she gathered from people tortured in Central America who saw or heard US officials entering the torture chamber to supervise the torture, gather information from the interrogation, or pass questions to the torturers.
Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror, by Mark Danner, is about how the United States, when faced with incontrovertible evidence that its military and security forces were engaging in torture, moved or failed to move to confront that fact. The book, published in 2004, focuses on what led to the scandal at Abu Ghraib and examines the broader implications of the revelations of torture there.
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals,
by Jane Mayer, is a comprehensive examination of the development of US torture policy and its attendant costs.
