ABC Outs Spokane Torture Psychologists

45 comments on this post so far. Add yours!

• 

  Fork on May 02 at 3:54 a.m.

  OK, I’m a bad person.
  I’m glad that 9/11 ringleader got waterboarded. I’m glad they got info out of him that saved who knows how many lives in California.

  Sorry. I don’t feel good about it, but, well, screw him. I hope they did worse.

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  BethB on May 02 at 7:35 a.m.

  In response to Fork: the thing is, if you scratch even a little below the surface, you learn that the torture isn’t what got us valuable information - it was traditional investigative bonding techniques that got the info, and then they waterboarded the guy and were sent on wild goose chases. Keep in mind, the torture techniques were designed by countries like North Korea and the former Soviet Union to obtain propaganda statements, not intelligence leads.

  In response to DFO’s question: Well, I’ve been a bit obsessed. I’ve been writing about it on my blog. It makes me sad that Spokane has anything to do with this chapter in our nation’s history. Did you know that these two Spokane-based psychologists - whose opinions form the basis of the legal memos signed by Yoo and Bybee saying that waterboarding, “walling,” etc. was not torture - had never conducted an interrogation before? All they’d done is monitor our military’s SERE program, where we were teaching our guys what to expect if captured by a ne’er-do-well nation that would torture them for propaganda statements. So here we are, compromising our values as a nation under the guise of “necessity,” and the men leading the charge had no idea of what they were doing in the first place.

  One interesting fact: Mitchell and Jessen moved out of the Spokane building (108 North Washington) over a week ago, but I think the ABC footage shows Jessen entering the back of that building. If he doesn’t have offices there anymore, why is he there still?

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  sue on May 02 at 7:43 a.m.

  The question of to torture or not to torture seems a fairly simple one to me. Do we want our military treated in the same way if they’re captured? We agree to certain conditions that must be met, and we protect our own servicepeople. Add to the list of why not to torture: unreliability of information and degradation of our image. Primarily, it’s self preservation.

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  hmoffsuite on May 02 at 8:34 a.m.

  sue >> “Do we want our military treated in the same way if they’re captured?”

  I would like to know why you think that our people would be treated kinder by the enemy if we demonstrate we are really nice people, with regard to the torture matter. You think the bad guys will actually follow the ‘rules’? I happen to think that is a very naive, frankly.

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  JBelle on May 02 at 8:42 a.m.

  Interesting. Isn’t Bruce Jessen a Mormon?

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  BethB on May 02 at 8:45 a.m.

  Which is why, hmoff, we train our guys about what to expect from propaganda-hungry enemies who won’t play by the rules. But we can’t even get to fair play if we don’t uphold it. So I think Sue is saying, how can we stand on the high ground, and how can we expect others to follow that high-ground lead, when we choose quicksand as our terra firma?

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  nic on May 02 at 8:51 a.m.

  “why you think that our people would be treated kinder by the enemy if we demonstrate we are really nice people”

  All we accomplish with torture is prove that we do it too. It fosters a “they did it to us first so we’ll make ‘em pay” attitude - and that was one of the prime motivations behind the majority of terrorist attacks against the US. So why do you think that the enemy won’t retaliate for us torturing them? I happen to think that is a very naive, frankly.

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  hmoffsuite on May 02 at 9:25 a.m.

  nic. You are right. The last thing we should do is make the terrorists unhappy with us. For cripes sake, they have already announced their intentions of destroying all of us. Does it get any worse than that? If you don’t think that we already stand on a higher moral ground, perhaps you don’t understand the ‘enemy’ very well. Ask the family of Nick Berg, maybe they could explain it to you.

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  Sisyphus on May 02 at 9:32 a.m.

  hmoff that was the entire rationale inducing all the adherents to sign on to the Geneva Convention. That treaty when signed and ratified became the “law of the land” according to the constitution. In breaking that treaty we signal to the other signators that we are above our own law. In other words we undermine our relationship with other countries, our moral status in the world, and our own Constitution when we thumb our nose at it. No country, not just the terrorists, feels honor bound to it and thus all our soldiers are subject to the consequences. Hard to keep a coalition of the willing under these circumstances.

  But what really gets me is realted to Beth’s comment. These methods were derived from the SERE program, which was a training program to help our service people withstand torture techniques like those used by the Chinese in Korea to obtain FALSE INFORMATION FOR PROPAGANDA PURPOSES. Did the abject fallacy of that revelation get overlooked or otherwise fail somewhere in the legal memos utilized to justify torture? What they’re finding is that the information sought in the 183 times they tortured suspects wasn’t actionable intelligence, (really that would have to be discovered almost immediately to be actionable since the opposing side would assume that any knowledge he possessed would be compromised) instead they were seeking confessions to justify their own bogus excuses for invading Iraq, like that al Qaeda operated in Iraq.

  One of the main selling points of the torture policy to the base was the punishment component of torture. But that makes it even more odious given that enemy combatants were denied any sort of process of determining their particular transgressions for years and then when convened it was horribly one sided kangaroo courts further denigrating American prestige, not in the eyes of the terrorists, it only hardened their resolve in the justness of their cause, but in the rest of the world for marching away from civilization. Its been discovered that many of these so called ‘enemy combatants’ were guys in the wrong place at the wrong time. This policy has also led to the scapegoating of many service men and women when the orders they were following led to death. The policy is an embarrassment and most certainly against out best interests.

• 

  Phaedrus on May 02 at 10:13 a.m.

  George W Bush ceded America’s moral high ground and used fear to justify it to the American public. We should all be ashamed.

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  spokelooneh on May 02 at 11:23 a.m.

  They’re both Mormon, JBelle, and so is Jay Bybee who wrote one of the infamous torture memos. Bybee’s now a judge on the 9th Circuit. He’ll likely be forced to resign. More on the Mormon connection later.

  “Col. Kleinman says Mitchell and Jessen were way out their league advocating and creating an interrogation model.

  “What they failed to understand was they were stepping out of their area of expertise,” he says. “There was nobody, apparently, at the decision-making level that had enough expertise and experience in the area of interrogation to quickly see the disconnect between the SERE model, a resistance model, and an actual interrogation for intelligence purposes.” ”

  Well the FBI interrogators of Abu Zubaydah , one of whom has come out now and written on this matter, confronted either Mitchell or Jessen directly when he and the CIA goons wanted to torture Zubaydah. The FBI agent informed the deputy Director of the FBI on what was going on, and with the FBI Director’s concurrence, the FBI interrogators were withdrawn. The FBI interrogator said the CIA contractor argued with him, that “science” was on the side of the Mormon torturer.

  I must say, not a lot of new information in this ABC report that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere, tho good on ABC for pointing out that their original 2007 story was wrong, i.e. they were duped.

• 

  zelda on May 02 at 11:26 a.m.

  Didn’t Karen Dorn Steele out these guys more than a year ago in a series of S-R articles?

  The Bush Administration, as they had done throughout their eight years in office, created their own definition of torture.

  Under Bush and Cheney, there was no objective reality.

• 

  spokelooneh on May 02 at 11:30 a.m.

  Fork on May 02 at 3:54 a.m.

  OK, I’m a bad person.
  I’m glad that 9/11 ringleader got waterboarded. I’m glad they got info out of him that saved who knows how many lives in California.

  Sorry. I don’t feel good about it, but, well, screw him. I hope they did worse.”

  Well if you’re a bad person, it’s mostly because you have your facts WRONG.

  The plot against the Library Tower in Los Angeles was foiled in 2002.

  KSM wasn’t even caught until 2003. So torturing him had nothing to do with stopping the plot in Los Angeles. No lives were saved in California by torturing KSM.

  You’d think people would pay attention.

• 

  spokelooneh on May 02 at 12:09 p.m.

  Sis is right about the consequences of the indiscriminate torture that we did, and that’s according to practically every expert in the field, including many US Generals and Admirals.

  The leap you haven’t made yet, but I did some time ago, was that it’s precisely those bad consequences they wanted to happen. They (Cheney and the proponents of torture) weren’t looking for actionable intel. They deliberately wanted to enrage and rile up and create bad guys to attack our forces on the ground. A peaceful Iraq is not a profitable one, nor when you’re running for re-election, the War President needs to have a festering war going on to make people afraid, and not change horses in mid-war.

  It’s the same reason they double-crossed the Iraqi Military, first telling to lay down their arms, they’d be treated well, and kept on the payroll. Well, they fired and betrayed them all, and let them dissolve into the population WITH their weapons and knowledge of all the weapons caches, which we huge, and which we never secured. These former Iraqi military were pissed off that the US betrayed them, and willing to fight against the Americans and recruit others to so as well.

  GWB said “Bring ‘em on” and boy howdy, they did, just exactly what Cheney Bush wanted, Planned Chaos.

  Every military expert, all the military’s planning documents, envisioned invading Iraq with overwhelming military superiority, 500,000 troops etc. And not to just defeat Saddam’s rag tag military,they knew that would be fairly easy, but to secure the peace in the occupation. This was OFFICIAL military policy and strategy. Cheney Bush ignored that, deliberately. Then went in light knowing it would cause the chaos predicted by the military experts if you didn’t go in heavy.

  It’s a variation of the old militarizing (selling) to both sides, only this time one side was US, our side paid the price for the criminally treasonous behavior of the Cheney-Bush gang.

  Once you find out that all the supposed mistakes that were made went against standard military policies, against the advice of the experts, you realize they didn’t just screw up. They did it on purpose, because it enriched their fortunes, the fortunes of their favorite entities, the military industrial complex, the oil companies, the Saudis, and the “security” business, as well as supporting their political goals, primary one being staying in power.

• 

  hmoffsuite on May 02 at 12:20 p.m.

  spoke >> “They deliberately wanted to enrage and rile up and create bad guys to attack our forces on the ground. A peaceful Iraq is not a profitable one”

  That is a terribly irresponsible statement. Dreaming up this stuff isn’t going to make it so. Where, might I ask, did something that reckless come from? Air America?

• 

  BethB on May 02 at 12:34 p.m.

  I agree with Sisyphus, that the motivation behind the torture in August 2002 (or thereabouts) was to get a prisoner to validate the theory that there was a connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. It certainly was not to quash any imminent threat - as I understand it, Zubaydah had been in custody for months by the time they started to torture him, and so would not have any fresh information.

• 

  spokelooneh on May 02 at 12:34 p.m.

  On the Mormon connection:

  “…
  What’s going on here? How did four members of the LDS faith come to find themselves at the forefront of the unfolding war on terror, literally writing the rules as they went along? More importantly, how did they convince themselves, in each case, that the most extreme path was the right one? Why didn’t their common religious background provide an ethical barrier against the use of illegal interrogation tactics? I can only speculate, but I have some ideas. One possible answer (or at least, one source of insight) may come from understanding how many Mormons get into government service in the first place.

  It is common knowledge that LDS church members are prized recruits for the CIA and FBI.
  …
  It may also partly explain why Flanigan failed to use his position to rein in Addington and Cheney as the torture program took shape. As for the ghoulish Mitchell and Jessen…I have no idea. Good luck with that “final judgment” thing, fellas. I personally think you’re screwed.
  …”

  The author is an ex-Mormon, however he has great respect for most of the LDS church’s teachings, and the positive social values imparted by church. The author has a keen insight into that value system, and how it plays out in the rest of society.

  “I was raised Mormon and served a mission in Japan. I learned everything I know about honesty, service and loving thy neighbor as thyself in LDS Sunday School.
  …”
  http://leftwingcentrist.blogspot.com/2009/04/mormon-church-members-involved-in-bush.html

• 

  spokelooneh on May 02 at 12:42 p.m.

  “hmoffsuite on May 02 at 12:20 p.m.

  spoke >> “They deliberately wanted to enrage and rile up and create bad guys to attack our forces on the ground. A peaceful Iraq is not a profitable one”

  That is a terribly irresponsible statement. Dreaming up this stuff isn’t going to make it so. Where, might I ask, did something that reckless come from? Air America?”

  Nope, it’s my own conclusion that I came to after years of studying what was happening, in depth. As it went along, and as it is playing out now.

  I could not reconcile the numerous supposed “mistakes” made by the administration, when such decisions that were made were exactly contrary to what established military policy, planning, and analysis said was the proper course of action. One or two times, sure, that’s a mistake. When they ignored the military experts and official policy time after time after time, is when I realized it was on purpose.

• 

  Arch_Druid on May 02 at 12:47 p.m.

  I’d like to remind Hmoffsuite that the GW administration made all sorts of “vague but credible” claims about terrorist events that were going to happen in the U.S. It came from the Ashcroft Justice Dept. It occurred for many months after 9/11/2001. But, IN EACH INSTANCE of those claims being made, NOTHING CAME OF THEM! How did they come by these “vague but credible” claims of terrorist acts that obviously did not occur? Torture? After going to great lengths to keep the public very afraid so that for propaganda purposes GW kept us “very safe from terrorism…” But in fact terrorism continued unabated through out the world. I actually find it very interesting that Hmoffsuite would ignore some of what is public fact in order to adhere to the presumed benefits of GW’s torture policies. We do not know that torture deterred in one iota ANY terrorist plots that were successful or ANY terrorist plots that ultimately weren’t. But we can say with certainty that our torturing our enemies would have encouraged terrorist recruitments. Which means that those torture policies only backfired.

• 

  OrangeTV on May 02 at 2:34 p.m.

  Spokane just can’t seem to get a break. The Gypsy curse lives!

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  JamesBond on May 03 at 8:29 a.m.

  I see nothing wrong with waterboarding terrorists.

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  BlueinIdaho on May 04 at 9:07 a.m.

  My father (who was a diehard republican) taught me that America was an honest, proud nation that abhorred cowardice and stood as a role model for other nations. Torture is the cowards’ way of attempting to obtain information. A torturer can never be proud because their actions are the dirty secret of an otherwise honest and brave nation.

  And Christianity? All those Americans who claim that America is a Christian nation while supporting the torture of one of God’s children should not be surprised when their “come to Jesus meeting” isn’t quite what they’d planned.

  Lastly, “terrorism” is in the eye of the beholder. Invading a country (without just cause), destroying its infrastucture, annihilating its people and subjecting its children to hell on Earth in some people’s minds IS TERRORISM. Ready for a spot or two of water?

• 

  toadman on May 04 at 9:24 a.m.

  ” What do you think of this local connection to the international torture story?”

  It makes me ashamed to say I’m from Spokane.

  No matter how much vengeance and retribution we feel we deserve, or how much “good” information we get from people we torture…or do things to that some people define as “torture”…every time we do it, we destroy a part of who we are, and indeed, what we can become.

  We are lessened in stature world wide, and internally, by the actions of a few. Our pride as a nation is sullied, by the past. Stopping torture at all costs (yes, even at the cost of our OWN citizens safety and lives) is the best, most honorable thing, we can do right now, as a nation, and as a people.

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