Women’s Space

Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, soldiers carrying out orders to commit crimes against humanity

Thirteen or fourteen years ago now,I did some research and writing about coercion and mind control, in part in the effort to make sense of the battering I was taking at the hands of the Religious Right. As part of my research and self-education, I read Robert Jay Lifton’s classic, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, a book that grew out of Lifton’s research with former American prisoners of war who had been held by the Chinese in the 1950s during the Korean War. I also studied Biderman’s Chart of Coercion at the time, a chart detailing Chinese practices of coercion and torture and which accompanied Lifton’s original report of his work, published in 1957.  I  did some writing about these principles as they are applied in religious groups which was published in 1994 or 1995 on Re-Focus, an ex-cult-member website, also here.  One purpose — successfully accomplished — of the tortures and coercions described in Lifton’s and Biderman’s work was to elicit false confessions from American prisoners of war.

So imagine my horror when I learned this past July that the U.S. military had adopted the tactics of the Chinese as set forth in Biderman’s Chart of Coercion and was using them verbatim to to train interrogators at Gitmo!  The article I’ve linked from military.com even makes references to writings about Biderman’s work by ex-cult members on the internet! Tortures described included forcing prisoners to stand for extremely long periods in conditions of extreme cold, semi-starvation, “exploitation of wounds”, making sure surroundings were “filthy and infested”, and other horrific practices. As it turns out, the U.S. military changed only one thing before using the chart to train interrogators:  the TITLE of the document!

The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantanamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.”

The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from the 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members.

Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantanamo.

“It saddens me,” said Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo a “180-degree turn.”

180-degree turn is right.  The treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, the Bush Administrations “war on terror” prison, is and was a crime against humanity.

I blogged yesterday about President Obama’s orders, true to his word, to close Guantanámo Bay (”Gitmo”), and other CIA prisons in Europe.  In an interview a couple of weeks ago with George Stephanopoulus on ABC New This Week, now-President Obama said of his intentions to close Gitmo:

“I don’t want to be ambiguous about this. We are going to close Guantanamo and we are going to make sure that the procedures we set up are ones that abide by our Constitution. That is not only the right thing to do but it actually has to be part of our broader national security strategy because we will send a message to the world that we are serious about our values.”

When asked what he would do with the prisoners being  held, Obama wasn’t so clear:

“Part of the challenge that you have is that you have a bunch of folks that have been detained, many of whom may be very dangerous who have not been put on trial or have not gone through some adjudication. And some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it’s true. And so how to balance creating a process that adheres to rule of law, habeas corpus, basic principles of Anglo-American legal system, by doing it in a way that doesn’t result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up.”

When asked whether Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others would be prosecuted for crimes against humanity, Obama was also disturbingly unclear:

When pressed by Stephanopoulos as to whether he will instruct his Justice Department to investigate such accusations, Obama deferred to his nominated attorney general, Eric Holder.

“When it comes to my attorney general he is the people’s lawyer… His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he’s going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.”

So what’s it going to be?  Will we be closing Gitmo and CIA prisons to all of this fanfare and hooray,  hooray, only to, for example, outsource our torture and interrogation to other countries on the downlow?  Are Bush, Cheney and the rest going to walk now, despite engaging in ruthless,  horrific practices that as a civilized nation we ought never to have allowed?  Is it going to be all about cleaning up our image only in the eyes of the world, without actually changing our practices at all, so that, for example, the world won’t be too outraged and incensed if we continue to bomb Pakistan, also true to Obama’s intentions, as we did yesterday, killing at least 20 people?

Because that’s the sense I get reading what Obama has said– that he wants to clean up our reputation quick, hoping everyone forgets the atrocities of the Bush Administration, so we can continue to fight a Democratic Administration version of the “war on terror,” which seems to bear a striking resemblance to the one the Bush administration has been engaged in, to our national shame, for the last eight years.

Heart