From the testimony and interviews of the Abu Ghraib soldiers and those around them, esp. Errol Morris’ interviews with Sabrina Harman and others, a picture emerges for the method for disobeying an unlawful order under the UCMJ. The soldier who believes the order to be unlawful is supposed to submit the issue up the chain of command. That being done, the chain then advises as to whether or not the order is genuinely unlawful leaving the soldier to make the decision with advice. If that is also the system at the CIA, then agents who operated entirely within the guidelines of the Yoo/Bybee and Bradbury memoes will say that they contested the orders because they were aware that an unlawful order to torture must be disobeyed, and then they were informed that the orders had been looked at by experts in international and national law, and they were in fact lawful.

At which point, the CIA officer will plead that they did due diligence to find out whether they should disobey orders, and found out that what they were being asked to do was (surprisingly) within bounds. At which point they carried it out to the letter of the order, well aware that any transgression or enlargement of the methods might cross the line they had attempted not to cross.

Keep in mind that some of the techniques, used singly and in limited fashion, have actually been ruled in other courts to be CIDT not amounting to torture, and that there was a belief that CIDT done overseas “didn’t count” for various reasons (spec. that the amendments that the U.S. said implemented the prohibition were not applicable to someone without “significant U.S. presence”).

I actually believe that such a case needs to be prosecuted (which means going further with prosecutions than Eric Holder wants to go) so that flaws in the U.S. implementation of the CAT can be exposed, and so that the entire societal permission set that underlies having descended into torture can be exposed and eradicated. I don’t know if that will happen, however.

I’m grateful to Maddog for the link to that article, and after having read it, I think I see a pattern that addresses some of the extant breadcrumbs as well as what’s been bothering me about the “learned helplessness” model for interrogations. First , there is the grammar and syntax of the above quote. It would seem that a clear articulation of an applied scientifically-based program strategy would require that it be stated as: “interrogations require an application of fear and brutality comparable to that achieved by flying planes into buildings” (provided one believes such). Stated this way it is easier to then ask whether interrogations do require to be so, and why; it also lends itself to a further articulation of just how that is to be achieved. Scientists just don’t talk the way Dr. Mitchell did in that quote; this seemes more the jargon of a salesman, talking to customers (at what he percieves to be their level of comprehension). Second, I’ve come to think of bullies as people that want to hurt somebody and are looking for excuses to do so. So when I see someone citing a need to induce fear and apply brutality to accomplish some goal, my antennae react.

But most importantly, info in the Shane article indicates to me that a connection to Seligman and the learned helplessness theory is just name-dropping hyperbole. I suspect Mitchell invoked this highly regarded research as windowdressing in applying for a contract. If I’m right about this, there was no serious effort to apply Seligman’s theory to the intelligence-gathering effort; rather this was just sales talk to con those who might object and those who needed some intellectual cover for their mindless desire to get brutal. In this one cannot leave out the contextual pressure being applied by Mr. Addington, who was apparantly fond of asserting that “if another attack occurs, there will be blood on your hands, if you don’t act”. As Mary has pointed out, the information we have do not show a pattern of the application of such a theory. In fact one can make out a trend to exploring what might work, as if one were searching for a theory or, base of understanding for how to proceed, but instead of following where the data lead, always seeming to gravitate toward the application of brutality, as if motivated by some desperate belief in its efficacy. That is: if you hurt someone long enough, thoroughly enough, they’ll come to heel. The only connection I can see with “learned helplessness” is the belief that:”enough hurt makes people helpless, then you got’em”. Question is: what is it then that you got? I don’t think this was thought thru before being explored. FWIW.

One thing we do know, though, bc Yoo and Bradbury and Obama and Holder have now told us so – it’s not something that would cause more than fleeting and passing mental disturbance and definitely no long term issues.

And if we don’t know that, then what we don’t know should probably be a state secret too.

Dr. Mitchell suggested that interrogations required “a comparable level of fear and brutality to flying planes into buildings

Here’s a bit more, scattershot and epu’d, but fwiw.

The Jacoby declaration filed in Padilla’s ongoing detention-
http://www.pegc.us/archive/Pad…..030109.pdf

is worth a read imo.

On the torture memos front and how they interweave with something like the Padilla case and Luttig’s decisions there – I do think you have techniques for both learned escape and learned helpless being used, perhaps in competing and contradictory applications, but both there. Some detainees like Arar (who was being tortured in our Syrian proxy-prison and not by us directly) talked about how being in the continuing, uninterrupted isolation was in some ways worse than the torture sessions. Our detainees at black sites had even more extreme isolation. Nothing that a detainee could do ever made any adjustment in those aspects – except to the extent that you list the ability to talk with with an interrogator as the break, but that is something known by the detainee to only provide a temporary respite and that the return to isolation is inevitable and continuous.

As the black sites were stacking up years of isoaltion detention, the US courts (or at least the 4th circuits) were ruling that not just indefinite detention, but indefinite isolation with depraved treatment ongoing behind closed doors was appropriate under the US Constitution for American citizens taken first into the custody of the Dept of Justice in the US and then handed over for torture detention by the DOJ to the military. So you were getting a judicial blessing on military experimentation on US citizens taken without charge and held in isolation. This was under the argument made by Jacoby that disappearing a US citizen behind a military veil for hidden interrogation was a “trust building” process.

Back to the black sites torture memos, you also have what seems to be a learned escape model, where the memos acknowledge a set up that involves a thirty day period where an interrogator can go in to question a detainee and, unless that detainee provide a high threshold of cooperation involving giving up operational inforamtion about plans against the US, they will have “enhanced” interrogation. But that model isn’t dependent on the quality of the information, and is also set up so that if the detainee has nothing to provide, there is no realistic way for them to truly get to the “escape” point without a stream of lies.

Now lets add something that wasn’t in the memos, but was in a NYT article on one of the interrogators, “Deuce” Martinez.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06…..wanted=all

As described here, the interrogators and torturers had an artificial layer between them. The interrogator asked questions, decided if they were getting enough cooperation, if not, they signed off on the transfer to torture. The torture would not necessarily take place immediately, and after the torture it might be days before the detainee was again questioned.

In the Hollywood cliché of Fox’s “24,” a torturer shouts questions at a bound terrorist while inflicting excruciating pain. The C.I.A. program worked differently. A paramilitary team put on the pressure, using cold temperatures, sleeplessness, pain and fear to force a prisoner to talk. When the prisoner signaled assent, the tormenters stepped aside. After a break that could be a day or even longer, Mr. Martinez or another interrogator took up the questioning.

And they’d bring dates.

Now, in addition to the learned helplessness, learned escape, Jacoby strange version of “trust building” (that involved extreme isolation, maltreatment and possibly, but oddly, drugs such as pcp, which have been mentioned by other detainees as well and seems to have little to do with getting truthful, helpful info) there is another model that “they” (although more the military than the cis) have offered up is the “mosaic” theory – which is that all kinds of people, just by virtue of being in various areas and having geographic and tribal knowledge, etc. – can provide bits of interlocking info that can form a mosaic of operation intelligence. Under this model, it was ok to engage in interrogation and enhanced interrogation of non-combatants and non-enemies, bc they just didn’t know what they had to offer until you started squeezing.

Back to the analysis and use of the info (and I am skipping around a lot- sorry – just no time to do anything justice other than to mention it for you guys who do delve more into this to have) all these competing interests would also cause pressures on interrogators to get confirmation on the mosaic pieces of info they were obtaining – so the determination of credibility of info an determination of whether a black sites detainee was meetign the high threshold of info to be offered up would have a lot to do with whether he was corroborating and over time you have to think detainees would pick up on this. In a different, GITMO, setting, it appears very likely now that a detainee there was pushed to give some kind of “corroborating” info that Arar was al-Qaeda, and they falsely said that they saw him at al-Qaeda training camp in their questioning process.

Also, to the extent that any of what was in the original Yoo memo on the *necessary* elements that had to exist before the torture was legally approved made it to the interrogators, you know had a whole ‘nuther set of issues on the intel front. Either the interrogators got (preferrably corroborated) info that their detainees really WERE members of al-Qaeda who were high value operational al-Qaeda memos, or … what had been done to them was not covered by the Yoo memo. He specifically sets that out – that his memo is limited to torturing high value operational al-Qaeda (I think trying to set up a necessity defense although he doesn’t flesh that out)

SO I’ve mentioned a couple of time the cross corroboration (2/3 of which we now know was false, and perhaps all of it was false) of al-libi, al-Faruq and Zubaydah on the “high up al-Qaeda” front. Tell the interrogators who have already been torturing for a couple of months that what they need for the torture to be legal is for the victims to be high up al-Qaeda and voila.

The interrogators now have a lot of motivations separate from getting real intel as well. YOu have the need to hit the qualfication points in the AUg memo to make what you have done legal, you have the need of the knuckledraggers to prove how good they are to the other interrogators, you have the need of everyone to get something “actionable’ bc the torture mechanism is triggered whenever you fail to get that and because one of the legal justificiations for you to have been able to torture to start with was the fact that your torture victim did have the operational info to give – so if you didn’t get it, you fail on your own protection as well. Then you were supposed to be helping out on the mosaic front as well, and to top it all off, you had the problem of a detainee who might be talking later to others about what you have done, and what needs to happen there to make sure you are covered.

Credible intel as a primary or even significant motivator? You tell me.

But learned helplessness calls for the application of the punishers noncontingently, and no escape response is possible. You cited that the torture memos called for escape responses, in that cooperation produced relief from the agony. This is not a description of a learned helplessness paradigm. There is something dead wrong about this story. Things are not being described properly, and I cannot see how the LH model gets a motivated talker. What you get (if done competently) is a demoralized, uncaring, preferring to die to end his agony, possibly deranged individual, certainly somewhat detached from reality (think how you would be if subjected to Seligman’s uncontrollable shocks; survival extracts its costs). What could you expect from such an individual? Certainly not reliable intelligence. Which raises the technical question: then why do it that way, or say that’s what your doing? It would seem that those of a legal persuasion would want to know that too.