Rev. Richard Killmer, executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, said PHR's findings "recalls some of humanity's darkest days - charges from which no person of faith can afford to turn away."
"A Guinea Pig"
The PHR report's conclusions regarding sleep deprivation also buttresses previous information that the Bush administration practiced its torture techniques on the first "high-value detainee," Abu Zubaydah, after he was captured in March 2002 and confirm several recent investigative reports published by Truthout.
A former National Security official knowledgeable about the Bush administration's torture program previously told Truthout that Zubaydah was "an experiment ... a guinea pig" used so CIA contractors could obtain data regarding different techniques.
The data was then shared with officials at the CIA and the Justice Department, who used the information to draft the August 2002 torture memos regarding the preferred interrogation methods and their frequency of use, setting parameters that supposedly prevented the interrogators from crossing the line into torture.
In an interview with the International Committee of the Red Cross, Zubaydah said the torture he was subjected to after his capture "felt like [his torturers] were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people."
Moreover, in her book "The Dark Side," New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer wrote that Zubaydah's interrogation sessions became more aggressive and experimental in April 2002, after the CIA sent in Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to the agency, to take over the interrogations.
Mayer wrote that when Mitchell arrived he told Ali Soufan, an FBI agent who had first interrogated Zubaydah using rapport-building techniques, that Zubaydah needed to be treated "like a dog in a cage."
Mitchell said Zubaydah was "like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while he's so diminished, he can't resist."
Soufan and the other FBI agent argued that Zubaydah was "not a dog, he was a human being" to which Mitchell responded: "Science is science."
The PHR report does not identify Zubaydah by name.
In March, Truthout reported, based on interviews with more than two dozen intelligence and national security officials, that one of the main reasons Zubaydah's torture sessions were videotaped was to gain insight into his "physical reaction" to the techniques used against him.
For example, one current and three former CIA officials said some videotapes showed Zubaydah being sleep deprived for more than two weeks. Contractors hired by the CIA studied how he responded psychologically and physically to being kept awake for that amount of time. By looking at videotapes, they concluded that after the 11th consecutive day of being kept awake Zubaydah started to "severely break down." So, the torture memo signed by Bybee concluded that 11 days of sleep deprivation was legal and did not meet the definition of torture.
Those videotapes were destroyed and the issue is now the subject of a criminal investigation lead by John Durham, a USattorney from Connecticut.
PHR's report said, "information collected by health professionals on the effects of sleep deprivation on detainees was used to establish sleep deprivation policy" and "guide further application of the technique."
The report determined that the human experimentation side of the program helped create a framework to protect the torturers from war crimes and other charges.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
