Chicago Tribune - ‎Justice department memos: Experts dispute claim that harsh interrogation tactics had no lasting effect

Chicago Tribune - ‎Justice department memos: Experts dispute claim that harsh interrogation tactics had no lasting effect
Memo claimed that harsh interrogations were largely benign
By Sarah Gantz and Ben Meyerson | Washington Bureau
April 19, 2009

WASHINGTON — The conclusion in recently released Justice Department memos that CIA interrogation techniques would not cause prolonged mental harm is disputed by some doctors and psychologists who say that the mental damage incurred from these practices is significant and undeniable.

An August 2002 memo from the Justice Department released last week outlined 10 interrogation techniques that could be used on top Al Qaeda prisoners, including waterboarding, stress positions, and for one prisoner with a known fear of insects, cramped confinement with a bug.

"I disagree wholeheartedly with their contention that there are no long-term psychological effects of these treatments," said Nina Thomas, an adjunct clinical associate professor of New York University's postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She said her stance on the detrimental effects of the CIA's practices is based on her experience working with torture victims from Bosnia, Myanmar and Africa.

Interrogation techniques like those used by the CIA undoubtedly have lasting effects, she said, such as paranoia, anxiety, hypervigilance, and "the destruction of people's personalities."

Brad Olson, a research professor of psychology at Northwestern University, agreed that the Justice Department's approved methods could be extremely damaging.

"Even given individual differences in a person's resilience, over time, using any of those techniques in combination, there's absolutely no question they are going to lead to permanent mental harm ... even individually." said Olson. "The insects—that's what woke me up in the middle of the night."

When interrogators learned of a prisoner's fear of insects, they planned to put him and a bug in a box, although the CIA said it never did so.

"Some of these [techniques] clearly have a very real physical component," said Dr. Allen Keller, director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. He cited waterboarding—the interrogation technique that makes a prisoner believe he is in imminent danger of drowning—as an example. Interrogators kept a doctor on hand in case a prisoner subjected to the technique did not recover immediately, according to one of the memos released.

However, he said, "All these things have a clear physical and psychological component." A prisoner deprived of sleep may be overwhelmed with memories of torture when they become fatigued years later, Keller said. The same is true, he said, for the stomach growls of persons once tortured by starvation.

But David Rivkin, who served in the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, defended the practices. The military has long subjected its own to these same techniques during training, he said.

"If this is torture, we've been torturing our own soldiers for years," Rivkin said. "Why is it that we are all of a sudden revolted and aghast?" In Rivkin's view, these techniques are better than other methods of coercion.

"These techniques of course are tough, they're not easy, but they're enormously restrained, they're not relying on brute force, they're not relying on infliction of pain," he said.

Regardless of its lasting damage, torture is not a particularly effective way of extracting information, according to Fathali Moghaddam, professor of psychology at Georgetown University.

"We know from very good evidence that torture does not get us good information," Moghaddam said. "Depending on the individual being tortured, all of these can have the effect of leading the individual being tortured to give completely incorrect information—as a way of stopping the pain."

The real question, Thomas said, is not whether these methods are damaging, but how something as qualitative as mental health can be measured in the black and white terms of "safe" and "unsafe."

"How you choose to measure distress or pain is somewhat abstruse," she said. "How do you measure shame and humiliation?"