Originally published at Truthout

High-value detainees captured during the Bush administration's "war on terror," who were subjected to brutal torture techniques, were used as "guinea pigs" to gauge the effectiveness of various torture techniques, a practice that has raised troubling comparisons to Nazi-era human experimentation. according to a disturbing new report released by Physicians for Human Rights, an international doctors' organization.

PHR, based in Massachusetts, called on President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the US Congress to launch investigations into the role of physicians and psychiatric experts in the monitoring and assessments of the brutal interrogations.

"Health professionals working for and on behalf of the CIA monitored the interrogations of detainees, collected and analyzed the results of [the] interrogations, and sought to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations," said the 27-page report, entitled "Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the 'Enhanced' Interrogation Program." "Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity."

The report is based on extensive research of previously declassified government documents that shows the crucial role medical personnel played in establishing and justifying the legality of the Bush administration's torture program. Many of the details contained in the document has already been painstakingly documented by Marcy Wheeler at her blog Emptywheel, and Truthout's own Jeffrey Kaye on his blog Invictus and in articles published on this web site and at Firedoglake.

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The normalization of torture continued apace yesterday as the criminal President Bush said in a speech in Grand Rapids, MI that if he had it all to do over again he would still order the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. That’s right this unindicted war criminal still thinks that ordering this crime, which produced no actionable intelligence was not only the legal thing to do but the right thing.

Lest we let time wash away our memories KSM was waterboarded 183 times in the course of one month. That is an average of five times a day that they tortured this man and exactly nothing came of it. Sure we got some BS that banks and malls might be attacked, but there were not operations to do that, just the desire on the part of the tortured to say anything, everything to make it stop.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

Below is a fictionalized first person account I wrote a couple of years ago, to give everyone a glimpse into what waterboarding is like. I am re-posting it. Warning – To those who have been tortured, this account can be triggering, please read only if you are sure you will not be thrown back to that time.

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The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has launched an investigation into Abu Zubaydah, the "high-value" detainee captured in March 2002 that the Bush administration wrongly claimed was one of the planners of 9/11 and a top al-Qaeda operative, according to several Capitol Hill sources.

The investigation of Zubaydah, who was tortured at a secret black site prison in Thailand, will be conducted alongside the committee's ongoing probe of the Bush administration's interrogation and detention policies. Zubdaydah has been detained at Guantanamo since 2006.

The panel will scrutinize thousands of pages of highly classified documents related to Zubaydah's detention and torture to determine, among other things, whether the "enhanced interrogation techniques" he was subjected to was accurately reflected in CIA cable traffic sent back to Langley, whether he ever provided actionable intelligence to his torturers, and how the CIA and other government agencies came to rely on flawed intelligence that led the Bush administration to classify him as the No. 3 person in al-Qaeda and its first high-value detainee, Hill sources said.

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Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once declared that individuals captured by the US military in the aftermath of 9/11 and shipped off to the Guantanamo Bay prison facility represented the "worst of the worst."

During a radio interview in June 2005, Rumsfeld said the detainees at Guantanamo, "all of whom were captured on a battlefield," are "terrorists, trainers, bomb makers, recruiters, financiers, [Osama Bin Laden's] body guards, would-be suicide bombers, probably the 20th hijacker, 9/11 hijacker."

Click here to listen to Truthout's Jason Leopold discuss this story on The Peter B. Collins show (mp3).

But Rumsfeld knowingly lied, according to a former top Bush administration official.

And so did then Vice President Dick Cheney when he said, also in 2002 and in dozens of public statements thereafter, that Guantanamo prisoners "are the worst of a very bad lot" and "dangerous" and "devoted to killing millions of Americans, innocent Americans, if they can, and they are perfectly prepared to die in the effort."

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Attorneys defending Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo prisoner designated as the first "high-value" detainee by the Bush administration, have finally gained access to three volumes of diaries he wrote while he was in the custody of the CIA and brutally tortured by agency interrogators and contractors at a secret "black site" prison.

The diaries, identified as volumes 7, 8 and 9, were written between 2002 and 2006 and total a little more than 300 pages. They were turned over to defense attorneys by the government late last year after a lengthy legal battle, and are believed to contain detailed descriptions of the torture techniques to which Zubaydah was subjected.

The diaries are crucial to the defense, said one of Zubaydah's attorneys, Brent Mickum, because they will reveal locations of where Zubaydah was detained and identify people with whom he spoke, contradicting previous government assertions that Zubaydah was connected to and involved in the planning of terrorist plots against the United States. Zubaydah began keeping a diary in 1992 after he suffered a severe head injury while fighting communist insurgents in Afghanistan. The injury left "significantly impaired both his long- and short-term memory," states a January 14, 2009, court motion filed by Mickum.

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In recent weeks, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has been on a public relations campaign defending the efficacy of waterboarding, going so far as to say that the torture technique sanctioned by the Bush administration is not only safe, but is in line with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

On Tuesday, in an interview with "Fox News," John Yoo, the former Justice Department attorney who was the principal author of legal memoranda that cleared the way for CIA interrogators to waterboard "war on terror" detainees and subject them to other brutal torture techniques, asserted that waterboarding was harmless.

Please click this link to listen to an interview with Jeffrey Kaye on the Peter B. Collins show.

In his defense of the practice, Yoo cited the thousands of US servicemen who have undergone SERE training and said, "we don't think it amounts to torture because we would not be doing it to our own soldiers otherwise."

However, a previously unreleased internal Department of Defense (DoD) memo, summarizing a review of the Navy SERE program in late February - early March 2007, reveals  that there was fierce criticism within the DoD of the Navy SERE school in North Island, San Diego, for being the only SERE facility to still use waterboarding in its training program.

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Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s on-going campaign for torture accountability. The purpose of this series is to keep the issue of accountability under the law for torture alive. To do this every Monday the Dog writes a letter to one of the decision to makers who could move the issue of torture accountability forward. You get involved by sending your own letter, you can use the one the Dog writes, just pasted over your signature, or you can write your own. The point is to have some notice given that not everyone has forgotten about the issue of torture war crimes in the glare of HCR and the new season of American Idol.

Originally posted at Squarestate.net

This week we are going to write to the Attorney General, as he is the single person that can really get the ball rolling with full-scale investigations. There will be copies to the President, the Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader of the Senate, Judiciary Chairs Leahy and Conyers and ranking Judiciary Committee Member Rep. Jerry Nadler.

This week’s letter:

Dear Attorney General Holder;

I write you this week to ask a simple question; doesn’t it make you angry that you are being made a patsy by war criminals?

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During his 36-minute speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway Thursday, President Barack Obama explained to an audience of 1,000 how the United States has a "moral and strategic interest" in abiding by a code of conduct when waging war - even one that pits the US against a "vicious adversary that abides by no rules."

"That is what makes us different from those whom we fight," Obama said. "That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard."

To many human rights advocates, however , Obama’s high-minded declaration rang hollow in light of fresh reports that his administration continues to operate secret prisons in Afghanistan where detainees have allegedly been tortured and where the International Committee for the Red Cross has been denied access to the prisoners.

Obama has substituted words for action on issues surrounding torture since his first days in office nearly one year ago. Last June, on the 25th anniversary of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Obama said the US government "must stand against torture wherever it takes place" and that his administration "is committed to taking concrete actions against torture and to address the needs of its victims."

But it’s clear that his pledge does not apply to torture committed by Bush administration officials.

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We watched Christopher Hitchens and Erich "Mancow" Muller spend a few seconds on a waterboard and emerge convinced that waterboarding is torture. While I welcome their conversions, their stunts really did not teach us anything new. Though the initial panic of having water come at them was suffering enough, they both quit before the real effects of waterboarding kicked in: they have no idea what would come if the torture did not stop when they cried "uncle."

Torture is the systematic use of trauma to provoke a change in consciousness: the only goal of torture is to drive a person to unbearable madness. The purpose of the torture -- interrogation, extortion -- immaterial. Mancow and Hitchens spent a short time on the waterboard and saw that rabbithole in the distance. They bailed before any of the real terror kicked in...

But what if ending the torture at will was not an option? What if they would have undergone waterboarding as Bybee prescribed?

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from Sheri Fink, ProPublica
May 28, 2009 8:27 am EDT (view source)

A version of this story was published on Salon.

Evidence is emerging that medical personnel monitored the medical effects of the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the al-Qaida operative who was, according to government reports, subjected to the near-drowning at least 83 times in August 2002.

The new information comes from descriptions of cables, classified as top secret and relating to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, that were transmitted from a Central Intelligence Agency field station to the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters nearly every day between Aug. 1 and Aug. 18 that year.

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