Scientists '...upset,' and 'consternated' that Bush officials misused their work to justify torture.

[ProSense]

Scientists 'disappointed, upset,' and 'consternated' that Bush officials misused their work to justify torture.

In the past week, at least three scientists have come out and objected to their work on sleep deprivation being used by the CIA and Justice Department to justify torture. In one of his 2005 memos, the OLC's Steven Bradbury said that sleep deprivation causes "at most only relatively moderate decreases in pain tolerance." But one of the scholars, Dr. Bernd Kundermann from the University of Marburg, pointed out that that he was "working with healthy volunteers and didn't deprive them of sleep for more than one day without allowing them to recover." Similarly, from Dr. S. Hakki Onen from the Hôpital Gériatrique A. Charial:

"(The study subjects) were distracted from sleeplessness by playing different games, or watching soccer matches. They could eat, drink, read, and move about as they wished. (From) the American documents we learn that sleep deprivation spanned from 70 to 120 hours -- and set maximum limits of 180 hours for the hardest resisters, which is over a full week without sleep," Onen said. "In other words, they discuss starting the sleep deprivation process at nearly double the maximum we set for ethical reasons."

Onen compared the CIA's use of his study results to the overdosing of medication. "In a manner, it's like giving a drug to a patient: if you administer it in small doses for therapeutic reasons, it helps them. If you give it in huge volumes, it becomes toxic -- and can even kill them," he said.

As Onen notes, the Justice Department determined that "the maximum allowable period of sleep deprivation allowed under the CIA interrogation program was 264 hours, though no detainee was actually deprived of sleep for more than 180 hours, or seven and a half days."

[ProSense]

1. Maybe they can testify during a trial. n/t

[ProSense]

2. Exploring the Bush Torture Regime’s SERE Origins

Exploring the Bush Torture Regime’s SERE Origins

Spencer Ackerman has an excellent article on the findings of a Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry into interrogation policy, exploring the torture system’s origins in the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency’s SERE torture resistance training. Note that those who applied these methods were specifically warned that they were illegal and unlikely to work:

By September 2002, Pentagon officials and Guantanamo interrogators had grown “frustrated” with their inability to collect as much useful intelligence from interrogations as they had expected from Guantanamo detainees, according to the report. A JPRA-sponsored training session for interrogators that month introduced the concept of exploiting “phobias” and playing off cultural sensitivities of Arabs and Muslims. JPRA instructor Joseph Witsch warned a superior, “We are out of our sphere when we begin to profess the proper ways to exploit these detainees,” but the training continued. Witsch later acknowledged to a Pentagon working group on interrogations, “The physical and psychological pressures we apply in training violate national and international laws. … I hope someone is explaining this to all these folks asking for our techniques and methodology!”

Several Pentagon officials were asking for precisely that. A “Behavioral Science Consultation Team” established at Guantanamo and in frequent contact with SERE advisers counseled a Guantanamo working group on whether the interrogators had “authorization to use interrogation approaches that had not been taught to interrogators” at the U.S. Army’s intelligence center and were not contained in its Field Manual on interrogations. One SERE adviser told the BSCT, “Bottom line: the likelihood that the use of physical pressures will increase the delivery of accurate information from a detainee is very low.” Yet the working group approved a decision — over some BSCT and SERE reservations — to recommend the use of expanded techniques on a high-value detainee named Mohammed al-Qatani that were “influenced by SERE,” according to the report.

As Cato Vice President Gene Healy says “Imagine if, shortly after 9/11, someone had told you that the US government would adopt an interrogation policy based on Chinese Communist techniques designed to elicit false confessions. You’d have thought that person was pretty cynical.” But that’s what they did. Really. SERE training is designed to help stiffen soldiers’ resistance to the sort of torture the North Vietnamese used to “break” John McCain and force him to “confess” to all manner of crimes. It specifically arises out of the experience of American detainees in the Korean War to imitate tactics applied by Communist regimes for the purpose of deriving false confessions. And why shouldn’t it? That’s what torture is good for.

Rumsfeld: Architect of torture (and more on the new Senate report on torture)