Yee said the Quran, believed by Muslims to be the literal word of God, was 'desecrated in many different ways,' such as being urinated upon and 'tossed on the floor.' "]
These purely psychological techniques are often combined with another component:
Self-inflicted pain – the infamous “stress positions”, including chaining in positions for hours on end and the infamous Abu Ghraib picture of a detainee balancing on a box with arms outstretched and electrodes attached (this technique is referred to in the torture literature as the "Vietnam") [Remember, from the Honduras interrogation manual: 'On the other hand, pain which he feels he is inflicting upon himself is more likely to sap his resistance.']
Additionally, there have been repeated claims by detainees that they were subjected to drugging. [Remember that developing drugs for use in interrogations was a key element of the CIA's MKULTRA research.] Thus, as one example out of many, on March 2, 2007, the Sydney Morning Herald contained an account of Australian detainee David Hicks in US custody. In addition to the beatings, the isolation, the cultural assaults, the self-inflicted pain, there was this line: "He was also injected with a substance that 'made my head feel strange.' "
Many of these techniques, in reduced form, were used in the military’s SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program to teach American officers counter-resistance training. According to several journalists, these methods were "reverse-engineered" and exported to Guantánamo and elsewhere through training in SERE techniques. Thus Salon's Mark Benjamin, in an article entitled Torture Teachers documents that SERE techniques were indeed taught to interrogators at Guantánamo. Benjamin goes on to state:
"There are striking similarities between the reported detainee abuse at both Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib and the techniques used on soldiers going through SERE school, including forced nudity, stress positions, isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and exhaustion from exercise. The unnamed interrogation chief from Guantánamo notes in his statement that on his watch detainees were exposed to loud music and yelling. 'The rule on volume," he said, "was that it should not be so loud that it would blow the detainees' ears out.' The chief claimed interrogators would crank up the air conditioning to make detainees cold, and that one prisoner was also given a "lap dance" by a female interrogator 'to use sexual tension in an attempt to break a detainee.' "
While the role of psychologists at Guantánamo and elsewhere is still murky, due to the extreme secrecy surrounding it, more and more evidence is dribbling out. It increasingly looks like key agents in this were psychologists and, initially, psychiatrists, in so-called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) that participated in selected interrogations.
Mohammed al-Qahtani was interrogated over many months at Guantánamo. BSCT Psychologist Major John Leso was present during this interrogation.
During al-Qahtani’s interrogation he was subjected to extreme cold to the point where his heart slowed and he was hospitalized (he was then warmed up and again subjected to extreme cold), he was injected with several bags of saline solution while being strapped to a table until he urinated on himself, and he was forced to bark like a dog; we are not told what was done to him to get him to bark. He required cardiac monitoring after 60 days in a cell flooded with artificial light, being questioned for 48 out of 54 days for 20 hours at a time. He was briefly hospitalized and immediately returned for continued interrogation.
By the way, the US government insists that al-Qahtani was treated “humanely,” as are, it claims, all the Guantánamo detainees. And the American Psychological Association leadership has repeatedly claimed that the BSCT psychologists participate in interrogations to prevent abuse, to ensure "that such processes are safe and ethical for all participants". They have never commented publicly on the interrogation involvement of Major Leso, an APA member, not have they taken any steps whatsoever to investigate the repeated claims that BSCT psychologists are in Guantánamo to teach torture techniques, not to prevent their use.
In July 2005, the New Yorker published an article by Jane Mayer entitled The Experiment. In it she presents the evidence available at that time on SERE and its role in the interrogation process at Guantánamo. She quotes Baher Azmy, an attorney for one of the detainees whose client reported physical brutality, sexual humiliation, and being injected with debilitating drugs:
Attorney Azmy told Mayer:
"These psychological gambits are obviously not isolated events. They’re prevalent and systematic. They’re tried, measured, and charted. These are ways to humiliate and disorient the detainees. The whole place appears to be one giant human experiment."
The prominent Middle East scholar Juan Cole, on his Informed Comment blog posted an email from a former military officer:
"I'm a former US [military officer], and had the 'pleasure' of attending SERE school….
The course I attended . . . [had] a mock POW camp, where we had a chance to be prisoners for 2-3 days. The camp is also used as a training tool for CI [counter-intelligence], interrogators, etc….
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