How Paul Wolfowitz Authorized Human Experimentation at Guantánamo
http://www.andyworthington.co.uk/2010/10/24/how-paul-wolfowitz-authorized-human-experimentation-at-guantanamo/
24.10.10
Last week, Truthout published an important
article by Jason Leopold, Truthout’s Deputy
Managing Editor, and psychologist and blogger
Jeffrey Kaye, revealing, for the first time, a
secret memorandum dated March 25, 2002, approved
by deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz, which
authorized human experimentation on detainees in
the “War on Terror.” The release of the memo
followed some little-noticed maneuvering in
Congress in December 2001, when the requirement
of “informed consent” in any experimentation by
the Defense Department (introduced in 1972) was quietly dropped.
The article — which involved over a year of
research, as Leopold and Kaye persuaded former
officials to open up to them — not only adds to
Leopold’s important work and to Kaye’s formidable
track record as a chronicler of the development
of human experimentation in the Bush
administration’s “War on Terror” torture program
(which he has also revealed as part of an
obsession with human experimentation reaching
back to the 1950s), but also confirms the
existence of an important new front in the
struggle to raise awareness of the horrors of
torture, and the requirement that those who
authorized it be held accountable for their crimes.
Leopold and Kaye delivered a presentation about
their article the day after its publication, as
part of “Berkeley Says No to Torture” Week, and
their work on human experimentation added to a
compelling catalog of the many reasons why the
acceptance of torture must continue to be
opposed, which I developed during the week:
namely, that it is not only illegal, morally
corrosive, counterproductive and unnecessary, but
also that, at its heart, the Bush-era torture
program continued work in the field of human
experimentation that the US took over from the
Nazis, and also involved treasonous lies on the
part of senior officials, who pretended that the
program was designed to prevent future terrorist
attacks, when, from the very beginning (in late
November 2001, according to Col. Lawrence
Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s Chief of Staff), it was
actually being used to extract false confessions
about connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein that could be used in an attempt to
justify the illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
The article is cross-posted below (and I’ve added some additional links).
Wolfowitz Directive Gave Legal Cover to Detainee Experimentation Program
By Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye, Truthout, October 14, 2010
In 2002, as the Bush administration was turning
to torture and other brutal techniques for
interrogating “war on terror” detainees, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz loosened rules
against human experimentation, an apparent
recognition of legal problems regarding the novel
strategies for extracting and evaluating information from the prisoners.
Wolfowitz issued a little-known directive on
March 25, 2002, about a month after President
George W. Bush stripped the detainees of
traditional prisoner-of-war protections under the
Geneva Conventions [PDF]. Bush labeled them
“unlawful enemy combatants” and authorized the
CIA and the Department of Defense (DoD) to undertake brutal interrogations.
Despite its title — “Protection of Human Subjects
and Adherence to Ethical Standards in
DoD-Supported Research” (PDF) — the Wolfowitz
directive weakened protections that had been in
place for decades by limiting the safeguards to “prisoners of war.”
“We’re dealing with a special breed of person
here,” Wolfowitz said about the war on terror
detainees only four days before signing the new directive.
One former Pentagon official, who worked closely
with the DoD’s ex-general counsel William Haynes,
said the Wolfowitz directive provided legal cover
for a top-secret Special Access Program at the
Guantánamo Bay prison, which experimented on ways
to glean information from unwilling subjects and
to achieve “deception detection.”
“A dozen [high-value detainees] were subjected to
interrogation methods in order to evaluate their
reaction to those methods and the subsequent
levels of stress that would result,” said the official.
A July 16, 2004 Army Criminal Investigation
Division (CID) report obtained by Truthout shows
that between April and July 2003, a
“physiological warfare specialist” attached to
the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and
Escape (SERE) program was present at Guantánamo.
The CID report says the instructor was assigned
to a top-secret Special Access Program.
In his book The Terror Presidency, Jack
Goldsmith, the former head of the Justice
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, said
Wolfowitz was “put in charge of questions
regarding detainees” at Guantánamo. Goldsmith
also previously worked with Haynes at the Pentagon.
It has been known since 2009, when President
Barack Obama declassified some of the Bush
administration’s legal memoranda regarding the
interrogation program, that there were
experimental elements to the brutal treatment of
detainees, including the sequencing and duration
of the torture and other harsh tactics.
However, the Wolfowitz directive also suggests
that the Bush administration was concerned about
whether its actions might violate Geneva
Conventions rules that were put in place after
World War II when grisly Nazi human
experimentation was discovered. Those legal
restrictions were expanded in the 1970s after
revelations about the CIA testing drugs on
unsuspecting human subjects and conducting other mind-control experiments.
For its part, the DoD insists that it “has never
condoned nor authorized the use of human research
testing on any detainee in our custody,” according to spokeswoman Wendy Snyder.
However, from the start of the war on terror, the
Bush administration employed nontraditional
methods for designing interrogation protocols,
including the reverse engineering of training
given to American troops trapped behind enemy
lines, called the SERE techniques. For instance,
the controlled-drowning technique of
waterboarding was lifted from SERE manuals.
Shielding Rumsfeld
Retired US Air Force Capt. Michael Shawn Kearns,
a former SERE intelligence officer, said the
Wolfowitz directive appears to be a clear attempt
to shield then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
from the legal consequences of “any dubious
research practices associated with the interrogation program.”
Scott Horton, a human rights attorney and
constitutional expert, noted Wolfowitz’s specific
reference to “prisoners of war” as protected
under the directive, as opposed to referring more
generally to detainees or people under the government’s control:
“At the time that Wolfowitz was issuing this
directive, the Bush administration was taking the
adamant position that prisoners taken in the’ war
on terror’ were not ‘prisoners of war’ under the
Geneva Conventions and were not entitled to any
of the protections of the Geneva Conventions.
Indeed, it called those protections ‘privileges’
that were available only to ‘lawful combatants.’
So the statement [in the directive] that
‘prisoners of war’ cannot be subjects of human
experimentation … raises some concerns — why was
the more restrictive term ‘prisoners of war’ used
instead of ‘prisoners,’ for instance?”
The Wolfowitz directive also changed other rules
regarding waivers of informed consent. After the
scandals over the CIA’s MK-ULTRA program and the
Tuskegee experiments on African-Americans
suffering from syphilis, Congress passed
legislation known as the Common Rule to provide
protections to human research subjects.
The Common Rule “requires a review of proposed
research by an Institutional Review Board (IRB),
the informed consent of research subjects, and
institutional assurances of compliance with the regulations.”
Individuals who lack the capacity to provide
“informed consent” must have an IRB determine if
they would benefit from the proposed research. In
certain cases, that decision could also be made
by the subject’s “legal representative.”
However, according to the Wolfowitz directive,
waivers of informed consent could be granted by the heads of DoD divisions.
Professor Alexander M. Capron, who oversees human
rights and health law at the World Health
Organization, said the delegation of the power to
waive informed consent procedures to Pentagon
officials is “controversial both because it
involves a waiver of the normal requirements and
because the grounds for that waiver are so open-ended.”
The Wolfowitz directive also changes language
that had required DoD researchers to strictly
adhere to the Nuremberg Directives for Human
Experimentation and other precedents when conducting human subject research.
The Nuremberg Code, which was a response to the
Nazi atrocities, made “the voluntary consent of
the human subject … absolutely essential.”
However, the Wolfowitz directive softened a
requirement of strict compliance to this code,
instructing researchers simply to be “familiar” with its contents.
“Why are DoD-funded investigators just required
to be ‘familiar’ with the Nuremberg Code rather
than required to comply with them?” asked Stephen
Soldz, director of the Center for Research,
Evaluation and Program Development at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.
Soldz also wondered why “enforcement was moved
from the Army Surgeon General or someone else in
the medical chain of command to the Director of
Defense Research and Engineering” and why “this
directive changed at this time, as the ‘war on terror’ was getting going.”
Soldz is co-author of a report published in June
by the international doctors’ organization
Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which found
that high-value detainees who were subjected to
brutal torture techniques by the CIA were used as
“guinea pigs” to gauge the effectiveness of the
various “enhanced interrogation” methods. PHR
told Truthout it first examined the Wolfowitz
directive and changes Congress made to 10 USC
980, the law that governs how the Defense
Department spends federal funds on human
experimentation, in 2008 while preparing its
report, but did not cite either because the group
could not explain its significance.
Treating Soldiers
The original impetus for the changes seems to
have related more to the use of experimental
therapies on US soldiers facing potential
biological and other dangers in war zones.
The House Armed Services Committee proposed
amending 10 USC 980 prior to the 9/11 attacks.
But the Bush administration pressed for the
changes after 9/11 as the United States was
preparing to invade Afghanistan and new medical
products might be needed for soldiers on the
battlefield without their consent, said two
former officials from the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Yet, there were concerns about the changes even
among Bush administration officials. In a
September 24, 2001 memo to lawmakers, Bush’s
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said the
“administration is concerned with the provision
allowing research to be conducted on human
subjects without their informed consent in order
to advance the development of a medical product necessary to the armed forces.”
The OMB memo said the Bush administration
understood that the DoD had a “legitimate need”
for “waiver authority for emergency research,”
but “the provision as drafted may jeopardize
existing protections for human subjects in
research, and must be significantly narrowed.”
However, the broader language moved forward, as
did planning for the new war on terror interrogation procedures.
In December 2001, Pentagon general counsel Haynes
and other agency officials contacted the Joint
Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA), which runs SERE
schools for teaching US soldiers to resist
interrogation and torture if captured by an
outlaw regime. The officials wanted a list of
interrogation techniques that could be used for
detainee “exploitation,” according to a report
released last year by the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF).
These techniques, as they were later implemented
by the CIA and the Pentagon, were widely discussed as “experimental” in nature.
Back in Congress, the concerns from the OMB about
loose terminology were brushed aside and the law
was amended to give the DoD greater leeway
regarding experimentation on human subjects.
A paragraph to the law, which had not been
changed since it was first enacted in 1972, was
added authorizing the defense secretary to waive
“informed consent” for human subject research and
experimentation. It was included in the 2002
Defense Authorization Act passed by Congress in
December 2001. The Wolfowitz directive
implemented the legislative changes Congress made
to 10 USC 980 when it was issued three months later.
The changes to the “informed consent” section of
the law were in direct contradiction to
presidential and DoD memoranda issued in the
1990s that prohibited such waivers related to
classified research. A memo signed in 1999 by
Secretary of Defense William Cohen called for the
prohibitions on “informed consent” waivers to be
added to the Common Rule regulations covering DoD
research, but DoD never implemented it.
Congressional Assistance
As planning for the highly classified Special
Access Program began to take shape, most
officials in Congress appear to have averted
their eyes, with some even lending a hand.
The ex-DIA officials said the Pentagon briefed
top lawmakers on the Senate Defense
Appropriations Committee in November and December
2001, including the panel’s chairman Sen. Daniel
Inouye (D-Hawaii) and his chief of staff Patrick
DeLeon, about experimentation and research
involving detainee interrogations that centered on “deception detection.”
To get a Special Access Program like this off the
ground, the Pentagon needed DeLeon’s help, given
his long-standing ties to the American
Psychological Association (APA), where he served
as president in 2000, the sources said.
According to former APA official Bryant Welch, DeLeon’s role proved crucial.
“For significant periods of time DeLeon has
literally directed APA staff on federal policy
matters and has dominated the APA governance on
political matters,” Welch wrote. “For over
twenty-five years, relationships between the APA
and the Department of Defense (DOD) have been
strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by
DeLeon … When the military needed a mental health
professional to help implement its interrogation
procedures, and the other professions
subsequently refused to comply, the military had
a friend in Senator Inouye’s office, one that
could reap the political dividends of seeds sown by DeLeon over many years.”
John Bray, a spokesman for Inuoye, said in late
August he would look into questions posed by
Truthout about the Wolfowitz directive and the
meetings involving DeLeon and Inuoye. But Bray
never responded nor did he return follow-up phone
calls and emails. DeLeon did not return messages left with his assistant.
Legal Word Games
Meanwhile, in January 2002, President Bush was
receiving memos from then-Justice Department
attorneys Jay Bybee and John Yoo as well as from
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Bush’s White House
counsel Alberto Gonzales, advising Bush to deny
members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban
prisoner-of-war status under the Geneva Conventions.
Also, about a month before the Wolfowitz
directive was issued, the Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) asked Joint Forces Command if they
could get a “crash course” on interrogation for
the next interrogation team headed out to
Guantánamo, according to the Armed Services
Committee’s report. That request was sent to
Brig. Gen. Thomas Moore and was approved.
Bruce Jessen, the chief psychologist of the SERE
program, and Joseph Witsch, a JPRA instructor,
led the instructional seminar held in early March 2002.
The seminar included a discussion of al-Qaeda’s
presumed methods of resisting interrogation and
recommended specific methods interrogators should
use to defeat al-Qaeda’s resistance. According to
the Armed Services Committee report, the
presentation provided instructions on how
interrogations should be conducted and on how to
manage the “long term exploitation” of detainees.
There was a slide show, focusing on four primary
methods of treatment: “isolation and
degradation,” “sensory deprivation,”
“physiological pressures” and “psychological pressures.”
According to Jessen and Witsch’s instructor’s
guide, isolation was the “main building block of
the exploitation process,” giving the captor
“total control” over the prisoner’s “inputs.”
Examples were provided on how to implement
“degradation,” by taking away a prisoner’s
personal dignity. Methods of sensory deprivation
were also discussed as part of the training.
Jessen and Witsch denied that “physical
pressures,” which later found their way into the
CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program, were taught at the March meeting.
However, Jessen, along with Christopher Wirts,
chief of JPRA’s Operational Support Office, wrote
a memo for Southern Command’s Directorate of
Operations (J3), entitled “Prisoner Handling
Recommendations,” which urged Guantánamo
authorities to take punishment beyond “base line rules.”
So, by late March 2002, the pieces were in place
for a strategy of behavior modification designed
to break down the will of the detainees and
extract information from them. Still, to make the
procedures “legal,” some reinterpretations of
existing laws and regulation were needed.
For instance, attorneys Bybee and Yoo would
narrow the definition of “torture” to circumvent
laws prohibiting the brutal interrogation of detainees.
“Vulnerable” Individuals
In his directive, Wolfowitz also made subtle, but
significant, word changes. While retaining the
blanket prohibition against experimenting on
prisoners of war, Wolfowitz softened the language
for other types of prisoners, using a version of
rules about “vulnerable” classes of individuals
taken from regulations meant for civilian
research by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
This research and experimentation examined
physiological markers of stress, such as
cortisol, and involved psychologists under
contract to the CIA and the military who were
experts in the field, the ex-DIA officials said.
One study, called “The War Fighter’s Stress
Response,” was conducted between 2002 and 2003
and examined physiological measurements of mock
torture subjects drawn from the SERE program and
other high-stress military personnel, such as Special Forces Combat Divers.
Researchers measured cortisol and other hormone
levels via salivary swabbing and blood samples, a
process that also was reportedly done to war on terror detainees.
Three weeks after the Wolfowitz directive was
signed, SERE psychologist Jessen produced a Draft
Exploitation Plan for use at Guantánamo.
According to the Armed Services Committee’s
report, JPRA was offering its services for
“oversight, training, analysis, research, and
[tactics, techniques, and procedures]
development” to Joint Forces Command Deputy
Commander Lt. Gen. Robert Wagner. (Emphasis added.)
There were other indications that research was an
important component of JPRA services to the DoD
and CIA interrogation programs. When three JPRA
personnel were sent to a Special Mission Unit
associated with Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC) in August 2003 for what was believed to be
special training in interrogation, one of the
three was JPRA’s manager for research and development.
Three former top military officials interviewed
by the Armed Services Committee have described Guantánamo as a “battle lab.”
According to Col. Britt Mallow, the commander of
the Criminal Investigative Task Force (CITF), he
was uncomfortable when Guantánamo officials Maj.
Gen. Mike Dunleavy and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller
used the term “battle lab,” meaning “that
interrogations and other procedures there were to
some degree experimental, and their lessons would benefit DoD in other places.”
CITF’s deputy commander told the Senate
investigators, “there were many risks associated
with this concept … and the perception that
detainees were used for some ‘experimentation’ of
new unproven techniques had negative connotations.”
In May 2005, a former military officer who
attended a SERE training facility sent an email
to Middle East scholar Juan Cole stating that
“Gitmo must be being used as a ‘laboratory’ for
all these psychological techniques by the [counter-intelligence] guys.”
The Al-Qahtani Experiment
One of the high-value detainees imprisoned at
Guantánamo who appears to have been a victim of
human experimentation was Mohammed al-Qahtani,
who was captured in January 2002.
A sworn statement filed by Lt. Gen. Randall M.
Schmidt, al-Qahtani’s attorney, said Secretary
Rumsfeld was “personally involved” in the
interrogation of al-Qahtani and spoke “weekly”
with Major General Miller, commander at
Guantánamo, about the status of the
interrogations between late 2002 and early 2003.
The treatment of al-Qahtani was cataloged in an
84-page “torture log” (PDF) that was leaked in
2006. The torture log shows that, beginning in
November 2002 and continuing well into January
2003, al-Qahtani was subjected to sleep
deprivation, interrogated in 20-hour stretches,
poked with IVs and left to urinate on himself.
Gitanjali S. Gutierrez, an attorney with the
Center for Constitutional Rights who represents
al-Qahtani, had said in a sworn declaration that
her client was subjected to months of torture
based on verbal and written authorizations from Rumsfeld.
“At Guantánamo, Mr. al-Qahtani was subjected to a
regime of aggressive interrogation techniques,
known as the ‘First Special Interrogation Plan,’”
Gutierrez said. “These methods included, but were
not limited to, 48 days of severe sleep
deprivation and 20-hour interrogations, forced
nudity, sexual humiliation, religious
humiliation, physical force, prolonged stress
positions and prolonged sensory over-stimulation,
and threats with military dogs.”
In addition, the Senate Armed Services Committee
report said al-Qahtani’s treatment was viewed as
a potential model for other interrogations.
In his book Oath Betrayed, Dr. Steven Miles wrote
that the meticulously recorded logs of
al-Qahtani’s interrogation and torture focus “on
the emotions and interactions of the prisoner,
rather than on the questions that were asked and
the information that was obtained.”
The uncertainty surrounding these experimental
techniques resulted in the presence of medical
personnel on site, and frequent and consistent
medical checks of the detainee. The results of
the monitoring, which likely included vital signs
and other stress markers, would also become data
that could be analyzed to understand how the new
interrogation techniques worked.
In January 2004, the Director of Defense Research
and Engineering (DDR&E) initiated a DoD-wide
review of human subjects protection policies. A
Navy slide presentation at DoD Training Day on
November 14, 2006, hinted strongly at the serious
issues behind the entire review.
The Navy presentation framed the problem in the
light of the history of US governmental
“non-compliance” with human subjects research
protections, including “US Government Mind
Control Experiments — LSD, MK-ULTRA, MK-DELTA
(1950-1970s)”; a 90-day national “stand down” in
2003 for all human subject research and
development activities “ordered in response to
the death of subjects”; as well as use of “unqualified researchers.”
The Training Day presentation said the review
found the Navy “not in full compliance with
Federal policies on human subjects protection.”
Furthermore, DDR&E found the Navy had “no single
point of accountability for human subject protections.”
DoD refused to respond to questions regarding the
2004 review. Maj. Gen. Ronald Sega, who at the
time was the DDR&E, did not return calls for comment.
Ongoing Research
Meanwhile, the end of the Bush administration has
not resulted in a total abandonment of the
research regarding interrogation program.
Last February, 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.
As for the Wolfowitz directive, Pentagon
spokeswoman Snyder said it did not open the door
to human experimentation on war on terror detainees.
“There is no detainee policy, directive or
instruction — or exceptions to such — that would
permit performing human research testing on DoD
detainees,” Snyder said. “Moreover, none of the
numerous investigations into allegations of
misconduct by interrogators or the guard force
found any evidence of such activities.”
Snyder added that DoD is in the process of
updating the Wolfowitz directive and it will be
“completed for review next year.”
Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo
Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in
America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto
Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and
available from Amazon — click on the following
for the US and the UK) and of two other books:
Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The
Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles
in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed
(and I can also be found on Facebook and
Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo
prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details
about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law:
Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly
Nash and Andy Worthington, currently on tour in
the UK, and available on DVD here), and my
definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you
appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.
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"Capitalism is institutionalised bribery."
_________________
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"The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic
poison which alienates the possessor from the community" Carl Jung
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Please consider seriously the reason why these elite institutions are not discussed in the mainstream press despite the immense financial and political power they wield?
There are sick and evil occultists running the Western World. They are power mad lunatics like something from a kids cartoon with their fingers on the nuclear button! Armageddon is closer than you thought. Only God can save our souls from their clutches, at least that's my considered opinion - Tony
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