The Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs, pronounced "biscuits") are groups of psychiatrists, other medical doctors and psychologists who study detainees in American extrajudicial detention. [1]
The Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCTs, pronounced "biscuits") are groups of psychiatrists, other medical doctors and psychologists who study detainees in American extrajudicial detention. [1]
The groups were being officially authorized by the US Department of Defense in mid-2002, following the advice of General Michael E. Dunlavey, later chief interrogator at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The BSCTs proposed a three-step pattern for harsh interrogations, including sleep deprivation and psychological pressure:
Additional detention conditions they believed would further assist intelligence-gathering operations. These included using fans and generators to create white noise as a form of psychological pressure; restricting "resistant" detainees to no more than four hours of sleep a day; depriving them of "comfort items" such as sheets, blankets, mattresses, and washcloths; and controlling their access to the koran. "All aspects of the [detention] environment," they argued, "should enhance capture shock, dislocate expectations, foster dependence, and support exploitation to the fullest extent possible." [2]
The teams are controversial because some critics consider their participation in what is called enhanced interrogation of detainees in the war on terror a breach of medical ethics. [3]
When Darrel Vandeveld, one of the lawyers assigned to serve as one of military commission prosecutors looked into the case against Mohammed Jawad, one of the individuals he was assigned to prosecute, he realized that the record showed that Jawad, then still a minor, had been subjected to long periods of sleep deprivation, a torture technique that had already been de-authorized, on the advice of Army psychologist Lieutenant Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer. [4] [5]
Such was the consternation of the American Psychological Association that in 2007 it adopted the resolution 'Reaffirmation of the American Psychological Association Position Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and Its Application to Individuals Defined in the United States Code as "Enemy Combatants"' to make clear that any torture and other cruel, Inhuman, or degrading treatment was unethical, whatever the situation. [6]
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 122,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has 54 divisions—interest groups for different subspecialties of psychology or topical areas. The APA has an annual budget of around $115m.
Mustafa al-Hawsawi is a Saudi Arabian citizen. He is alleged to have acted as one of many financial facilitators of the September 11 attacks in the United States. However, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture which was publicly released on December 9, 2014, disclosed an internal CIA cable between the chief of interrogations and the CIA Headquarters wherein he expressed reservations regarding al-Hawsawi's alleged role and involvement in the plot. The report reveals "following al-Hawsawi's first interrogation session, Chief of Interrogations asked CIA Headquarters for information on what al-Hawsawi actually "knows," saying: "he does not appear to the [sic] be a person that is a financial mastermind."
Medical torture describes the involvement of, or sometimes instigation by, medical personnel in acts of torture, either to judge what victims can endure, to apply treatments which will enhance torture, or as torturers in their own right. Medical torture overlaps with medical interrogation if it involves the use of professional medical expertise to facilitate interrogation or corporal punishment, in the conduct of torturous human experimentation or in providing professional medical sanction and approval for the torture of prisoners. Medical torture also covers torturous scientific experimentation upon unwilling human subjects.
Stress and duress is a term which has been used by the United States to describe interrogation techniques authorized for use by the United States Armed Forces upon detainees who are determined to be a threat to the United States during the War on Terrorism. These techniques are claimed to cause "inhuman and degrading treatment" but which the George W. Bush administration claims do not cause "suffering of the particular intensity and cruelty implied by the word torture".
The War Crimes Act of 1996 is a law that defines a war crime to include a "grave breach of the Geneva Conventions", specifically noting that "grave breach" should have the meaning defined in any convention to which the United States is a party. The definition of "grave breach" in some of the Geneva Conventions have text that extend additional protections, but all the Conventions share the following text in common: "... committed against persons or property protected by the Convention: willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health."
The five techniques are illegal interrogation methods which were originally developed by the British military in other operational theatres and then applied to detainees during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. They have been defined as prolonged wall-standing, hooding, subjection to noise, deprivation of sleep, and deprivation of food and drink.
Binyam Ahmed Mohamed, also referred to as Benjamin Mohammed, Benyam Mohammed or Benyam Mohammed al-Habashi, is an Ethiopian national and United Kingdom resident, who was detained as a suspected enemy combatant by the US Government in Guantanamo Bay prison between 2004 and 2009 without charges. He was arrested in Pakistan and transported first to Morocco under the US's extraordinary rendition program, where he claimed to have been interrogated under torture.
Psychological torture or mental torture is a type of torture that relies primarily on psychological effects, and only secondarily on any physical harm inflicted. Although not all psychological torture involves the use of physical violence, there is a continuum between psychological torture and physical torture. The two are often used in conjunction with one another and often overlap in practice, with the fear and pain induced by physical torture often resulting in long-term psychological effects, and many forms of psychological torture involving some form of pain or coercion.
Mohamed Jawad, was accused of attempted murder before a Guantanamo military commission on charges that he threw a grenade at a passing American convoy on December 17, 2002. Jawad's family says that he was 12 years old at the time of his detention in 2002. The United States Department of Defense maintains that a bone scan showed he was about 17 when taken into custody.
Torture in the United States includes documented and alleged cases of torture both inside and outside the United States by members of the government, the military, law enforcement agencies, intelligence agencies, health care services, and other public organizations.
"Enhanced interrogation techniques" or "enhanced interrogation" is a euphemism for the program of systematic torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and various components of the U.S. Armed Forces at remote sites around the world, including Bagram, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bucharest authorized by officials of the George W. Bush administration. Methods used included beating, binding in contorted stress positions, hooding, subjection to deafening noise, sleep disruption, sleep deprivation to the point of hallucination, deprivation of food, drink, and medical care for wounds, as well as waterboarding, walling, sexual humiliation, subjection to extreme heat or extreme cold, and confinement in small coffin-like boxes. A Guantanamo inmate's drawings of some of these tortures, to which he himself was subjected, were published in The New York Times. Some of these techniques fall under the category known as "white torture". Several detainees endured medically unnecessary "rectal rehydration", "rectal fluid resuscitation", and "rectal feeding". In addition to brutalizing detainees, there were threats to their families such as threats to harm children, and threats to sexually abuse or to cut the throat of detainees' mothers.
Music can be used as a tool of psychological warfare. The term "music torture" is sometimes used to describe the practice. While it is acknowledged by United States interrogation experts to cause discomfort, it has also been characterized as having no "long-term effects".
The nature of international human rights law has been seemingly altered by Americans since the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001. The Guantanamo Bay detention camp is one example of recent developments that seem to disregard long standing human rights. The United States of America (USA) has pursued a 'seemingly deliberate strategy' to put suspected terrorists outside the reach of habeas corpus protections. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay serves as the location for a United States military prison in Cuba designed for the detention of non-citizens suspected of terrorist activity. At the time of its creation President Bush stated that its purpose was to respond to serious war crimes, primarily 'a new way to deal with terrorists'. The first camp was set up 3 months after the attacks on the twin towers and since then a human rights debate has begun over the legality of denying detainees the right to petition habeas corpus.
Mohammed Mizouz is a citizen of Morocco who was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, in Cuba. His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 294. Joint Task Force Guantanamo counter-terrorism analysts report he was born on December 31, 1973, in Casablanca, Morocco.
Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed, and Jamal Al-Harith, four former Guantánamo Bay detainees, filed suit in 2004 in the United States District Court in Washington, DC against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. They charged that illegal interrogation tactics were permitted to be used against them by Secretary Rumsfeld and the military chain of command. The plaintiffs each sought seek compensatory damages for torture and arbitrary detention while being held at Guantánamo.
David Frakt is an American lawyer, law professor, and officer in the United States Air Force Reserve.
James Elmer Mitchell is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contract from the CIA to carry out the interrogation and torture of detainees, euphemistically referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques".
Michael Gelles is an American forensic psychologist. He is notable for the role he played in uncovering the unauthorized use of abusive techniques during the interrogation of captives held in extrajudicial detention, apprehended during the "war on terror".
Separate facilities exist to provide for Guantanamo detainees' medical care.
The phrase No Blood, No Foul insinuates that as long as violence does not leave a mark, it is not prosecutable. It has been used in streetball, Camp Nama, torture, and medical malpractice.
Zierhoffer (who was identified separately in an article [16] at Daily Kos), working with interrogators, "encouraged them to continue to dial up the emotional pressure on Jawad: 'He appears to be rather frightened and it looks as if he could break easily if he were isolated from his support network and made to rely solely on the interrogator,' according to an excerpt of the report read to Newsweek.
Since 2002 psychologists have observed interrogations and suggested specific ways to exploit the weaknesses of detainees, including Mohammed Jawad, whose disturbing case is now being heard by a military tribunal in Guantánamo.