Mental health professionals 'may have committed war crimes', report says

As reported in the Guardian

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Health professionals who assisted in the CIA’s torture programme of terror suspects “betrayed the most fundamental duty of the healing professions” and may have committed war crimes, according to a hard-hitting report released on Tuesday.

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) called for a federal commission to investigate the full extent of health professionals’ participation in CIA torture following last week’s release of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) report on the agency’s detention and interrogation programme.

“Under the auspices of the Bush administration, the CIA systematically tortured suspected terrorist detainees, in at least one instance to the point of death. This torture program heavily relied on the participation and active engagement of health professionals to commit, conceal, and attempt to justify these crimes,” PHR concludes.

The report comes days after Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, defended the practices disclosed in the report including “rectal feeding” – arguing the practice was done for medical reasons. Former CIA director Michael Hayden has also claimed that the practice was carried out on medical grounds.

According to PHR, rectal hydration is almost never practiced in medicine because there are more effective methods, and it is never considered as a first option for rehydration or nutritional support. PHR notes that the report indicates that rectal hydration was used to “control and/or punish the detainees ... Insertion of any object into the rectum of an individual without his consent constitutes a form of sexual assault.”

“Rather than reject such brutal practices, medical officers appear to have modified them to increase pain: ‘we used the largest Ewal [sic] tube we had,’ stated one officer in a February 2004 email,” writes PHR.

Dr Vincent Iacopino, PHR’s senior medical advisor and an author of the analysis, said Cheney was “either terribly misinformed or propagating a lie. Any reasonable person knows feeding does not take place rectally.”

The report sets out eight areas where doctors, psychologists and physician assistants may have violated “medical and psychological ethics, domestic and international law, and federal research guidelines”:

• Designing, directing and profiting from the torture program;
• Intentionally inflicting harm on detainees;
• Enabling US department of justice lawyers to create a fiction of “safe, legal and effective” interrogation practices;
• Engaging in torture research that could potentially violate the Nuremberg Code, brought in after World War II to ban “experiments” like those practiced by the Nazis, and could constitute a crime against humanity;
• Monitoring torture and calibrating the level of pain;
• Evaluating and treating detainees for the purposes of torture;
• Conditioning medical care on cooperation with interrogators;
• Failing to document physical and/or psychological evidence of torture.

The report is especially damning of the work of psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. The SSCI described how the pair – given the pseudonyms “Grayson Swigert” (Mitchell) and “Hammond Dunbar” (Jessen) in the report– designed the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EITs) used to interrogate suspects.

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Meet the Psychologists Who Helped the CIA Torture People

As Seen in New York Magazine

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The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 500-page executive summary of its report on the CIA’s torture program offers some horrifying details about U.S. treatment of detainees captured in the post-9/11 years. It also highlights and adds some details about the important role two psychologists had in both developing the “enhanced interrogation” program and carrying it out.

Within the report, the duo in question are referred to with the pseudonyms "Grayson Swigert" and "Hammond Dunbar." But both the New York Times and NBC News have identified them as Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two psychologists who have been previously singled out for their roles in developing and legitimizing the torture program.

Both men came from an Air Force background, where they worked on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program in which military personnel are trained to resist enemy questioning by enduring oftentimes brutal mock interrogations. Beyond that, though, they seemed otherwise poorly suited for the task of interrogating al-Qaeda detainees. “Neither psychologist had any experience as an interrogator,” the report notes, “nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qa'ida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.” Despite their lack of experience in these key areas, Mitchell and Jessen “carried out inherently governmental functions, such as acting as liaison between the CIA and foreign intelligence services, assessing the effectiveness of the interrogation program, and participating in the interrogation of detainees in held in foreign government custody.”

So how did these two men come to play such an outsized role in developing and enacting the CIA’s torture program? Much of the story is captured in a 2009 Times article by Scott Shane. Shane writes that Mitchell, who after retirement “had started a training company called Knowledge Works” to supplement his income, realized that the post-9/11 military would provide business opportunities for those with his kind of experience and started networking with his contacts to seek them out.

[...]

“In 2005,” the Senate report states, “the psychologists formed a company specifically for the purpose of conducting their work with the CIA. Shortly thereafter, the CIA outsourced virtually all aspects of the program.” And while the company’s contract was terminated in 2009 amid a growing national outcry over government-sanctioned torture, by then Mitchell and Jessen’s years-long relationship with the CIA had already proven extremely profitable.

The CIA paid two ex-military psychologists $81 million to help design and run torture the program

Of course, the Psychologist who made so much money from the program has been speaking out, defending the torture program.

Is This Guy Crazy?