Theater of the Absurd--Gitmo Style

The latest act in the tragi-comedy known as the Military Commission got under way in its conveniently out-of-town venue at Guantanamo Navy Base last Friday. You have to pity the poor handful of journalists who are allowed to "cover" the performance.

(As an old and highly unofficial song of the Navy had it Gitmo is the "home of the cockroach, the flea and the whore.")

The whores left fifty years ago. The terrorist jihadists arrived five years back. About the cockroaches and fleas, the Geek is not prepared to take a position.

One one matter the Geek is quite ready to take a position. He is willing to go so far as to wager a foot or more of his hair on the proposition that the Great Gitmo Military Commission Gambit (GGMCG) will hand al-Qaeda and all other Islamist/jihadist entities including governments a major propaganda victory.

Was that hard to swallow?

Try this.

No matter how it plays out, the current administration's blockheaded insistence on off-shore, semi-secret, military tribunals as the proper venue to try and convict the murderers of 9/11 and other felonious Warriors of Islam will hurt the interests of the US. The GGMCG is a self-inflicted wound.

A completely avoidable wound.

The Military Tribunal approach to justice has been employed before. It was used, for example, during World War II and the War Between the States. The usual defendants appearing before these tribunals were enemy agents of espionage, subversion and sabotage.

Looking at World War II since that occurred more recently than the Civil War and the historical record is much less in dispute, the most important wartime trial was of a collection of German saboteurs landed by submarine in Long Island and Florida.

One of the Nazi wannabe saboteurs rolled over to the FBI immediately. Another cooperated fully with the Feebies later. The tribunal was not secret. No torture or "intensified interrogation" was employed. The uncooperative majority of the agents was sentenced to death and electrocuted in the Washington, D.C. jail. The cooperative ones were repatriated to Germany after V-E Day.

Case closed. A slam-dunk. No controversy. No soul searching in Congress or the media. No compromise of the American traditions of due process or judicial fairness as such were generally understood at the time.

What a difference a few decades makes!

The current Military Commission operates at a remote, inconvenient location in semi-secrecy. While journalists are allowed in a glass enclosed "peanut gallery" and can listen to the proceedings with a twenty second delay, this is not a working definition of open court.

The twenty second delay makes the process take on the appearance of a badly translated Japanese movie where the actors' lips stop moving long before the dialogue is audible. See a good, short treatment at http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/hotline/2008/06/report-from-guantanamo-arraignment-of_09.php.

The justification for the secrecy?

The defendants have had access to classified information.

Yeah. Right.

The Geek doubts that the US government has shared its nuclear secrets with the defendants. He doubts that any have been briefed on our forthcoming military operations--or any other subject rightly covered by the term "classified information."

They have, however, been subjected to "intensified interrogation," particularly during the long years between either 2002 or 2003 and the transfer to Gitmo in 2006. The use of intensified interrogation (to use the formal term) or torture (to use the more common vernacular) has been admitted by no less a figure than the DCI, Michael Hayden. At least Hayden allowed that the 9/11 honcho, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been subjected to waterboarding.

That exercise in simulated drowning, as the Geek knows from personal experience, is most unpleasant. It is not out of line to consider it torture.

But waterboarding would not have been the only feature of intensified interrogation employed in the long years of black custody. To get the whole picture, it is necessary to step back in time more than a half century. Step back to the foundations of the CIA approach to the interrogation of "resistant sources."

During the 1950's CIA entered into a series of contracts with more than forty researchers. The contracts were mediated by sanitary front organizations so that some of those doing the work did not know for whose benefit it was being conducted.

One man did. He was also the most important figure in developing the psycho-physiological basis for later exercises in intensified interrogation.

His name was Dr Ewen Cameron. Cameron was a Scot by birth, an American by nationality, who worked at the time in Canada. He was a pillar of the psychiatric establishment having been president of the American Psychiatric Association, its Canadian equivalent and even the World Psychiatric Association.

Cameron was also a sadistic charlatan on a level with the Nazi medical experimenters.

The doctor had a theory he called "psychic driving." It consisted of two parts. The first part was to reduce the individual to an infantile state by a combination of sensory deprivation, sensory overload and extreme use of electro-convulsive therapy in which a current was passed through the brain of the individual.

The goal of the combination of deprivation, over-stimulation and electro-shock was to unmoor the individual from a sense of rootedness in time as well as to destroy the perceived boundaries between self and non-self.

Once this state of infantilism was reached, Cameron believed that the person would be wide open to suggestion. Exposure to a new set of paradigms via hypnopedia would result in a new, stable, normal personality structure.

The second part never worked out in practice.

The first part--the destruction of a personality through the combination of sensory deprivation, over stimulation of the senses including the use of psychotropic drugs such as LSD and PCP, and the extreme use of electro-convulsion did work. It worked so well that many of Cameron's "patients" were left in a state of life-long human wreckage.

(The Canadian government recognised the consequences of Cameron's efforts years later when it paid each surviving victim a hundred thousand dollars reparations.)

CIA, which had used as a cover story the justification that the research was needed to understand and counter Communist "brainwashing" of the sort alleged to have been used on Korean War POWs, actually was after a fool-proof technique of breaking the will of "resistant sources." It was believed that an infantile state captive would be dependent upon the interrogator as a small child is on the parents.

Kind of "Give me the answers and I'll give you my love," situation.

The Agency wrote up its version of the Cameron technique in a manual issued in 1963 with the catchy title, Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation. The manual was reissued at least once according to information in the public domain. That was in 1983. (The operative word in the foregoing was "public.)

The KCI acknowledges on page one that "many of the techniques are illegal." Authorization for use of "chemical or electrical" techniques was required. In short, the heavies back in Langley had to be kept in the loop. Presumably at least tacit approval would have to be obtained from the highest authority.

(A declassified version of the manual can be found at the National Security Archive http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv.)
The techniques laid out in the KCI were used in Vietnam. The Agency dispatched a pair of genuine psychiatrists equipped with the very same model electro-shock machine used by Cameron. (This fun piece of hardware administered six shocks in quick succession rather than the single shock delivered by the standard issue psycho-zapper.)

The lads from HQ got their hands (and electrodes) on a collection of the usual suspects (presumed Viet Cong cadre members) and went to work with zeal. Indeed they were so zealous that at least two of the suspects died.

(When he heard the buzz regarding the shrinks and their zapper, the Geek thought the use of electro-shock was a poor way of obtaining useful information since one of the best known effects of the treatment is memory loss.)

Were KSM and his compatriots treated to the full Cameron/KCI experience while in the black slammers? Presumably that is what our government wants to assure that neither we nor the rest of the world find out.

We can, however, make some informed inferences from the treatment that has been documented, in part, given to Jose Padilla while he was in pre-trial custody in a US Navy prison. We know that the one time Chicago gangsta and accused "dirty bomber" was held in an environment of high sensory deprivation for more than 1,300 days. We know that the psychologist retained by the defense found that Padilla had been infantilised and was unable to cooperate in his own defense.

We also know that the Federal Bureau of Prisons shrink rung in by the prosecution found Padilla to be fully intact and well-functioning.

Boy! What a surprise! A man who works for the Bureau of Prisons which pioneered extreme isolation and sensory deprivation in the prototype "supermaxes" at Marion, Illinois and Florence, Colorado found that confinement of this nature did no psychological harm.

Left uncertain are Padilla's allegations that psychotropic drugs were administered to him. Other questions regarding his treatment have not yet (nor are ever likely to be) independently investigated.

An interesting and useful treatment of what happened to Padilla is found at the following: http://www.esquire.com/features/john-yoo-0608

The treatment of Padilla as well as the long standing use of the KCI make it highly likely to almost certain that most, if not all the adumbrated approaches were used on KSM and his fellow defendants. Given the uproar over the use of waterboarding and the current Attorney General's unwillingness to characterise simulated drowning as torture, it is not shocking that the USG wants no disclosure of the real deal in the black slams.

While wanting to hide process in the mists of secrecy, USG insists it has the right to use information gained by torture admitted as evidence against the defendants. Dirtying the water surrounding information gained by torture is the "standard operating procedure" instruction to all interrogators to "destroy" their handwritten (and presumably, taped) notes of interrogations so as to prevent "legal" problems. Take a look at the following sites: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2008/06/guantanamo-interrogators-instructed-to.php, http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iIRLqjwiDr2FiFi7V04eYFxV4rwgD9168HSO2, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/08/AR2008060802344.html.

Dirty water surrounds dirty treatment of dirty suspects. The last--dirty suspects--is a reality and has to be. Mass murderers are not clean souls. The first two--dirty water and dirty treatment--do not have to be. They are conscious artifacts of government policy.

The dirt of policy and the secrecy in the time-delay courtroom combine with other features such as the well known impact of "command pollution" automatically resident in courts martial and other military tribunals to assure that no one can be assured that the GGMCG will be anything other than a travesty of justice.

The Geek is not suggesting that the US should cut loose KSM and his colleagues. Far from it. We have them in our hands. We should try them. If possible we should convict them.

In a Federal Court with all the customary safeguards of due process normally present in Federal trials. A jury of American citizens should decide their fate.

(Their fate should not be death. As KSM made clear, martyrdom is what he and they want. It doesn't matter how martyrdom is achieved. A needle in the vein is as good as an aircraft in a building wall as far as KSM is concerned.)

Hopefully the Supreme Court will find that the GGMCG is not the Constitutional way to go and open the door to transferring the case to civilian jurisdiction. True the Federal courts are not the perfect answer--as the Padilla case shows--but in the civilian setting the secrecy will be diminished, the use of self-incriminating evidence prevented, the use of hearsay evidence precluded and both the appearance and substance of fairness of process protected.

Leave Gitmo to the cockroaches and fleas. Leave justice to the civilian courts. Don't leave matters to the next administration. Time is on the side of the opposition. On the side of the Islamists and jihadists.