After the atrocities of the two world wars in the 20th century, most nations condemned torture and made it illegal. A recently released archive of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, created in 1943 to classify and identify Axis war crimes and to assist in the prosecution of war criminals,…
Nov. 2001: U.S. Department of Justice “legalizes” nonconsensual experiments Experimenting on prisoners of war is explicitly prohibited by the Nuremberg Code, the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law (18 USC section 1430). The Pentagon sought to lift these prohibitions on research involving prisoners. Lawyers in the Department of Justice (DOJ) Office…
CIA torture techniques in use since Sept. 11, 2001 – are euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”(EIT). They were touted as “science-based;” they are the product of decades of unethical experiments by American psychiatrists and psychologists who explored the psychological effects of extreme stress. A. CIA’s infamous mind control experiments: BLUEBIRD,…
After September 11, 2001, the C.I.A. ignored its own 1989 conclusions that torture is not an effective way to elicit intelligence information, and embarked on widespread use of torture globally, employing the euphemistic term, “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT). America’s post-9/11 torture techniques are an expansion of the mind control arsenal…
The primary argument that officials in the Bush administration made in defense of their authorization for the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (EIT) — otherwise recognized as torture — is that their use in interrogations of Al Qaeda suspects resulted in obtaining vital intelligence information that “saved American lives.” That…
The Office of Legal Counsel was established to serve as the “constitutional conscience” of the Justice Department: “OLC is, and views itself as, the frontline institution responsible for ensuring that the executive branch charged with executing the law is itself bound by law. The danger, of course, is that OLC…
In December 2001, a small group of professors and law enforcement and intelligence officers gathered outside Philadelphia at the home of a prominent psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, to brainstorm about Muslim extremism. Seligman is most famous for his work in the 1960s in which he was able to psychologically…
Al Qaeda were labelled “unlawful enemy combatants.” President Bush effectively denied prisoners in the War on Terror the legal protections and minimum standards for humane treatment under Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. He did so while stating that, as a matter of policy, the U.S. Armed Forces shall treat…
The CIA and the Department of Justice were the lead government agencies that authorized the use of torture techniques against prisoners in the War against Terror. The CIA contracted psychologists to devise and supervise tough innovative interrogation techniques whose use would have arguable “scientific and psychological” justification. James Mitchell and Bruce…
Feb. 2002: President Bush Executive Order authorizes JTF-170 GTMO Intelligence Corps. Guantanamo Bay Detention Center opens (Jan. 2002) and is almost immediately transformed into a “Battle Lab” – the term used to describe the intelligence operation by Commander MG Dunlavey and later MG Miller – where prisoners are subjected to…
Katherine Eban, in her extraordinary report Rorscharch and Awe in Vanity Fair (2007), unmasked the fabricated lie crediting torture as the key to successful interrogations. In fact, it was the F.B.I.’s humane treatment and rapport-building techniques that prompted of Abu Zubaydah to divulge actionable information. But this success story evaporated…
Abu Zubaydah was described as al-Qaeda’s coordinator of attacks who helped manage an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. He was detained at a “black site” in Thailand and first interrogated from March to June 2002, by two seasoned FBI agents, Ali Soufan and Steve Gaudin, who spoke English and…
