To penetrate the walls of official secrecy, civil society needs to get better at publicly demanding accountability argues Professor Vian Bakir. She proposes a benchmark of demands for a more robust public discourse.
Governments across liberal democracies maintain that their intelligence agencies and national security services require secrecy from the public in order to avoid compromising their intelligence sources, methods and ultimately, effectiveness, of intelligence. Such secrecy makes it difficult for key organs of civil society – including the press, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), academics and professional organisations – to assess political-intelligence elite claims about the evidence base underpinning intelligence and national security policies.
In turn, this makes it hard to independently evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of these policies. This is problematic because, in the heat of efforts to counter pressing security risks and prevent future acts of terrorism, policies get put in place that have no proven track record, and that end up having deleterious effects on society in terms of social cohesion, trust, professional ethics and human rights norms and compliance. This has been demonstrated in the US Detention and Interrogation Programme, and appears also to be happening today in the UK’s CHANNEL Programme.
US Detention and Interrogation Programme
A now famous case in point is the use of psychologists in the George W. Bush era’s post-9/11 Detention and Interrogation Programme to come up with so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ (EITs, a.k.a. torture) designed to make al-Qa’eda detainees talk. This programme aimed to obtain information about how the 9/11 attacks occurred, whether future attacks were being planned and where future threats might come from, and to do so by breaking the will of uncooperative detainees. Soon after 9/11, the US Department of Defence (DoD) General Counsel’s Office began soliciting information from the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) regarding detainee ‘exploitation’. One of JPRA’s functions is to train American personnel to resist interrogation techniques considered illegal under the Geneva Conventions, and as such, JPRA oversees Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training (US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary 2009). Two US military psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, were contracted by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to reverse-engineer SERE, generating an interrogation paradigm that aimed to psychologically break down al-Qa’eda detainees’ resistance to their interrogators. This was to be achieved through detainee isolation (including from their own lawyers); and total environmental control involving indefinite detention at prisons like Guantanamo Bay and a host of other secret prisons across the world, and a regime of EITs including stress positions, sleep deprivation and waterboarding (mock drowning). The aim was to severely disrupt detainees’ ontological security, thereby making them more compliant (Carle 2011: 20, Rodriguez with Harlow 2012: 64).
Mitchell and Jessen had no specific background in al-Qa’eda or as interrogators. As such, the regime they devised was based on psychologist Martin Seligman’s theory of learned helplessness, arrived at from his experiments in the 1960s where he administered electric shocks to different groups of dogs. When given the chance to avoid their pain, the dogs that had been able to escape the shocks did so quickly. Those that could not stop the pain did not try to avoid it even when given the opportunity. They had learned that they had no ability to control their fates: they had learned helplessness (ACLU 2016a). Mitchell and Jessen theorised that once detainees were abused/tortured to the point of learned helplessness, their resistance would crumble, and they would divulge information. But, as ACLU (2016a) point out:
No legitimate science backs up this assumption. Research on inducing a sustained state of learned helplessness in humans through abuse, or on the role of learned helplessness in eliciting truthful information, does not exist for the simple reason that it can’t be legally or ethically conducted.
ACLU further note that the Detention and Interrogation Programme violated not only international and US prohibitions on torture but also The Nuremburg Code that, since 1947, has banned non-consensual human experimentation. Mitchell and Jessen’s programme required ongoing experimentation on its human subjects as the psychologists did not know how detainees would react to EITs; whether and how much torture would be needed to induce learned helplessness; or whether once a detainee’s mind was broken, he would produce truthful information.
The Detention and Interrogation Programme was kept secret for its first few years: only selected elements of the Bush administration knew who was detained and how they would be treated. However, the policy was gradually exposed after publication of leaked photos of detainee torture at abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in Spring 2004. This was followed by publication in November 2004 of allegations from a leaked report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that psychologists at Guantánamo Bay prison had been involved in psychological and physical coercion that was ‘tantamount to torture’. By the end of the Bush administration’s second term in office (2009), after evidence was forthcoming from a network of whistle-blowers, investigative journalists, NGOs, national and international political investigations and public inquiries, the world knew about the EITs, roundly condemned them as torture, and became aware of the string of secret prisons (‘black sites’) scattered around the world where EITs/torture had been practised by, or on behalf of, the USA (Bakir 2013). Barack Obama, on becoming US president in 2009, formally ended the Detention and Interrogation Programme and viewed to close Guantánamo.
From 2004 onward, as the secret policy became publicly known and evidenced, the Bush administration’s political-intelligence elite offered justifications for its programme. The isolation and secrecy of detainees was justified on the grounds of protecting intelligence – so that al-Qaeda would not know who was captured and alter their plans accordingly; so that detainees could be exposed to intelligence information during interrogations, allowing the CIA to crosscheck the information gleaned without risking information leaks (for instance, via lawyers) getting back to terrorists on the battlefield (Thiessen 2010: 260–61); and so that EITs would not become public knowledge and therefore al–Qa’eda’s next chapter in its training manual in how to resist interrogations (Thiessen 2010: 348).
Yet, as to whether this policy worked, according to Glenn Carle (2011: 297), a CIA ‘black site’ interrogator: ‘close review of most specific claims of critical intelligence obtained from rendition, detention, and enhanced interrogation techniques shows that, in almost every case, the ‘intelligence’ obtained was faulty and subsequently discredited or suspect, or of secondary importance.’ As observed by Ali Soufan, who had spent most of his professional career investigating, studying, and interrogating terrorists for the FBI, the CIA’s EITs from ‘an operational perspective, are ineffective, slow and unreliable’ (Soufan 2009). More recently, the Executive Summary declassified in 2014, summarising the 6,700 pages of the US Senate Intelligence committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program repeatedly evidences how EITs failed to produce good intelligence (Senate Intelligence Committee 2012) – a conclusion fiercely disputed by the CIA (Harlow 2015, CIA 2013).
In October 2015, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought a lawsuit against Mitchell and Jessen for their commission of torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, human experimentation and war crimes (ACLU 2015). In April 2016, a federal judge said that he would allow the lawsuit to move forward – an unprecedented decision for a lawsuit involving CIA torture (ACLU 2016b). It appears, then, that an adventurist policy was secretly instituted by a restricted circle of people (the political-intelligence elite), on minimal evidence and in a climate of fear and a desire to ‘do something’: the absence of public peer review meant that the evidence base behind the policy was neither professionally and independently interrogated nor achieved through ethical means.
As mentioned earlier, this secret policy was dragged into the open across 2004-2008. In 2005, following publication of the leaked abu Ghraib photos in spring 2004 and the leaked ICRC report in autumn 2004, the American Psychological Association (APA) – a scientific and professional organisation whose mission is to advance the creation, communication and application of psychological knowledge to benefit society and improve people's lives - put in place the 'presidential task force on ethics and national security' (PENS). This task force finalised a report in June 2005 containing 12 ethical guidelines that the APA Board adopted as official APA ethics policy. These ethical guidelines determined whether and under what circumstances psychologists who were APA members could ethically participate in national security interrogations.
These guidelines were condemned ten years later by the APA’s 566-page Hoffman report (Independent review relating to APA ethics guidelines, national security interrogations, and torture) published in 2015 into whether APA officials colluded with the US DoD, CIA, or other government officials across 2005-2008 ‘to support torture’. The Hoffman report found that while there was no hard evidence of collusion with the CIA (Hoffman et al. 2015: 45-46), plenty of evidence showed PENS colluding with the DoD to enable continued involvement of psychologists in EITs:
key APA officials, principally the APA Ethics Director joined and supported at times by other APA officials, colluded with important DoD officials to have APA issue loose, high-level ethical guidelines that did not constrain DoD in any greater fashion than existing DoD interrogation guidelines. We concluded that APA’s principal motive in doing so was to align APA and curry favor with DoD. There were two other important motives: to create a good public-relations response, and to keep the growth of psychology unrestrained in this area. (Hoffman et al. 2015: 9)
The Hoffman report elaborates on these conclusions. Currying favour with the DoD was a bid to ensure that APA psychologists could remain involved in intelligence activities (Hoffman et al. 2015: 11), and that the DoD would continue to ‘provide large-scale support to psychology as a profession’ (Hoffman et al. 2015: 69). The desire for a good public relations response arose from the fact that negative press reports on the abu Ghraib photos and leaked ICRC comments had generated a raging public debate within the USA over whether EITs constituted torture (the Bush administration maintained that they did not): APA silence on this issue would indicate poor leadership, but the APA endorsing psychologists’ role in EITs would mean that it was saying that it was ethical for psychologists to participate in torture (Hoffman et al. 2015: 208-210). The Hoffman report also found a pattern of ‘secret collaboration’ by APA officials with DoD officials in the three years following APA’s adoption of the 2005 PENS Task Force report as policy. It concludes that this secret collaboration aimed:
to defeat efforts by the APA Council of Representatives to introduce and pass resolutions that would have definitively prohibited psychologists from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. detention centres abroad. (Hoffman et al. 2015: 9)
Following these two Bush-era scandals involving psychologists – the first involving a secret, experimental policy with no evidentiary research base, and that contravened human rights and professional ethics; and the second involving the willingness of key APA staff to compromise professional ethics to retain close links with the DoD; a scandal is now brewing in the UK, again involving psychologists, the security state and secret evidence.
UK CHANNEL Programme
This potential scandal concerns the evidence underpinning the British government’s Extremism Risk Guidance 22+ that informs the CHANNEL programme – itself a key element of PREVENT, the UK government’s multi-agency approach to protecting people at risk from radicalisation. CHANNEL aims to ‘identify individuals at risk of being drawn into terrorism; assess the nature and extent of that risk; and develop the most appropriate support plan for the individuals concerned’ (HM Government 2012a: 2). ERG22+ comprises 22 risk factors that are supposed to enable public sector employees to spot signs of radicalisation in their students, patients or clients: such signs includes things like having feelings of grievance and injustice; ‘Them and Us’ thinking; and having individual knowledge, skills and competencies that could be used to cause harm. Under Section 21 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, the British government made it a statutory duty for the public sector to spot these signs.
In 2012 the UK government published the CHANNEL Vulnerability Assessment (CVA) Framework (HM Government. 2012a). It also published Channel: Protecting Vulnerable People from being drawn into terrorism. A guide for local partnerships (HM Government. 2012b) that acknowledges that it is based on the 22 risk factors (p12).
However, as a recent report by CAGE (2016) highlights, the research upon which these 22 risk factors is based is classified. CAGE’s investigation indicates that the ERG22+ framework is based on a secret Ministry of Justice document by HM Government National Offender Management Service (NOMS) called Extremism risk guidelines: ERG 22+ structured professional guidelines for assessing risk of extremist offending. After much searching, CAGE tracked down a published study by the then NOMS-based psychologists, Monica Lloyd and Christopher Dean, that shed some light on their classified research behind ERG22+.
This study, published last year, shows that their 22 risk factors are derived from a very limited, qualitative research base whose data sets remain publicly unscrutinised by the wider psychology peer group. Even the study’s authors point out that ‘ERG is a work in progress’ and that they ‘came to this work as practitioners with a strong imperative to develop products for correctional and managerial purposes’ (Lloyd and Dean 2015: 51).
Indeed, in September 2016 the UK’s Royal College of Psychiatry demanded that:
Public policy cannot be based on either no evidence or a lack of transparency about evidence. The evidence underpinning the UK’s Extremism Risk Guidance 22+ (ERG22+; HM Government 2011c), and other data relating to this this guidance, should be comprehensively published and readily accessible. (Royal College of Psychiatry 2016: 7)
Towards better public accountability
If policies are based on unproven theories (as in the Detention and Interrogation Programme) or based on minimal data-sets (as appears to be the case in both the Detention and Interrogation Programme and CHANNEL’S ERG22+), while the evidentiary basis is kept hidden from public scrutiny, then how is it possible for civil society to challenge the efficacy of such policies, still less suggest better alternatives? Even professional bodies cannot necessarily be relied upon to raise these basic questions, given strong desires to align with the security state (as in the case of APA’s PENS Ethical Guidelines). Less terrorism, less incitement to hatred, and less intolerance are valuable and vital social goals, but if the policies put in place to achieve these are based on flimsy evidence and unproven theories, then we cannot expect them to actually work. Meanwhile the unintended consequences proliferate. Not only is there, or has there been, a risk of the wrong people being targeted for state de-radicalisation procedures (at best) and torture (at worst), but the propaganda value of such controversial policies can only play into the hands of those who seek to incite terror, hatred and intolerance.
In a recent academic article, I propose that civil society needs to get better at publicly demanding accountability of political-intelligence elites (Bakir 2016). The twin challenges are political-intelligence elites’ prevalent secrecy, and their sometimes careful manipulation of public discourse. This secrecy and manipulation is used not just to protect intelligence methods and sources from being compromised, but also to justify and retain policies that are unproven to work, or that compromise professional ethical standards and human rights.
To encourage more robust public discourse, I propose a benchmark that makes specific public demands for accountability from political-intelligence elites. My proposed benchmark concerns three areas.
1. The accuracy and value of intelligence (or, for that matter, secret data) being used to justify policies. For instance, as the CHANNEL Vulnerability Assessment Framework has been published since 2012, where were civil society’s demands for evidence that ERG22+ actually works or can be confidently expected to work?
2. The benchmark concerns accountability demands about whether political responses to intelligence controversies are adequate. For instance, while CAGE and the Royal College of Psychiatry are now demanding that political-intelligence elites enable public examination of whether CHANNEL is fit for purpose, are mainstream media giving these demands a platform?
3. Thirdly, the benchmark concerns accountability demands about the ethics, morality and legality of how intelligence is gained or used. With CHANNEL, where is the public discussion assessing the morality and ethics of singling out people as potentially violent extremists on the basis of value judgements of public sector workers like teachers and doctors?
To penetrate walls of official secrecy and eddies of highly selective information provision, civil society might use the proposed benchmark of accountability demands as a repertoire – a standing reserve of critical questions focused on the political-intelligence elite – to help navigate this difficult area. The benchmark could serve as an orientation tool to avoid simply accepting and reproducing unsubstantiated, or selectively substantiated, claims made by political-intelligence elites. This could lead to more widespread civil society researching and reporting that, at the very minimum, adopts a critical stance, and which, if pushed to the level of campaigning, can demand better public policies.
More robust public discourse might encourage political-intelligence elites to be more mindful of eventual public exposure, and less inclined to rush into secret policies ranging from the socially divisive to the illegal, and that no one has any real idea will work.
References
ACLU. 2016a. Out of the darkness. https://www.aclu.org/feature/out-darkness
ACLU. 2016b. Judge rejects psychologists’ motion to dismiss case filed on behalf of three CIA torture victims. April 22. https://www.aclu.org/news/court-rules-aclu-lawsuit-against-cia-torture-…
ACLU. 2015. Salim v. Mitchell – lawsuit against psychologists behind CIA torture program. October 13. https://www.aclu.org/cases/salim-v-mitchell-lawsuit-against-psychologis…
Bakir, Vian. 2016. Political-Intelligence Elites, Strategic Political Communication and the Press: The Need for, and Utility of, a Benchmark of Public Accountability Demands. Intelligence and National Security, Sep, 1-22.
Bakir, Vian. 2013. Torture, intelligence and sousveillance in the War on Terror: Agenda–Building Struggles. Routledge.
Carle, Glenn L. 2011. The Interrogator: an Education. New York: Nation Books.
CAGE. 2016. The ‘Science’ of Pre-crime. The Secret ‘Radicalisation’ Study Underpinning PREVENT.
CIA. 2013. Memorandum for the Honorable Dianne Feinstein, the Honorable Saxby Chambliss. CIA Comments on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on the Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program. http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1377105-cias-june-2013-response-…
Harlow, Bill. 2015. Rebuttal: The CIA Responds to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study of Its Detention and Interrogation Program. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2015
Hoffman, David H. et al. 2015. Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture. Report to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association. Sidley Austin LLP. https://www.apa.org/independent-review/APA-FINAL-Report-7.2.15.pdf
HM Government. 2012a. CHANNEL: Vulnerability Assessment Framework for Partners. Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, November 2012. https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/fi…
HM Government. 2012b. Channel: Protecting Vulnerable People from being Drawn into Terrorism. A Guide for Local Partnerships. October 2012. http://www.npcc.police.uk/documents/TAM/2012/201210TAMChannelGuidance.p…
HM Government National Offender Management Service. N.d. Extremism Risk Guidelines: ERG 22+ Structured Professional Guidelines for Assessing Risk of Extremist Offending, London: Ministry of Justice Publications.
Lloyd, Monica and Dean, Christopher. 2015. The Development of Structured Guidelines for Assessing Risk in Extremist Offenders, Journal of Threat Assessment and Management, 2(1): 40-52.
Rodriguez, Jose. A. with Harlow, Bill. 2012. Hard Measures: how Aggressive CIA Actions after 9/11 Saved American Lives. New York: Threshold editions.
Royal College of Psychiatry. 2016. Counter-terrorism and Psychiatry, Position Statement PS04/16, September. London. http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/PS04_16.pdf
Senate Intelligence Committee Report. 2012. Executive summary: committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/cia-interrogation…
Soufan, Ali. 2009. Statement to US Senate committee on the judiciary. Subcommittee on Administrative Oversight and the Courts. What went wrong: torture and the office of legal counsel in the Bush administration. http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/what-went-wrong-torture-and-th…
Thiessen, Marc. 2010. Courting disaster: how the CIA kept America Safe and how Barack Obama is Inviting the next attack. Washington DC: Regnery Publishing Inc.
US House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. 2009. Reining in the imperial presidency: lessons and recommendations relating to the presidency of George W. Bush. http://www.house.gov/delahunt/imperialpresidency.pdf
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