Slapping David Shedd, Part 2, or How to Spin the Torture Story in Two Simple Lessons

Marcy Wheeler's over at Emptywheel picked up on Daniel Klaidman's version of Bush CIA Director Michael Hayden's December 2008 briefing of then-President-elect Barack Obama, and in particular of Hayden's defense of certain interrogation techniques then in use by the CIA.

Wheeler notes the discrepancy between the kinds of techniques Hayden said were in use at that time and the techniques approved by Bush's Department of Justice Office of Legal Council in the final year of that administration. Steven Bradbury was the author of these memos, of which the most substantive appears to be his July 20, 2007 memo to John Rizzo, then-CIA Acting General Counsel on "Application of the War Crimes Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, and Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions to Certain Techniques That May Be Used by the CIA in the Interrogation of High Value Al Qaeda Detainees."

Now in that memo, the techniques the CIA proposed as "necessary" were "dietary manipulation," "extended sleep deprivation," "insult (or facial) slap," "facial hold," "attention grasp," and "abdominal slap." The latter four are meant to shock the detainees, who supposedly (and this is a lie on Bradbury's part) believe the U.S. will not touch them during interrogation.

How Bradbury can get away with such a statement three years after the Abu Ghraib revelations is strange enough, but the Manchester Manual explicitly told detainees to expect physical maltreatment from intelligence agency interrogations, as former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan pointed out in his book The Black Banners: "It was on the basis of the information in this manual that the two [former SERE psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen] reportedly concluded that harsh techniques would be needed to break al-Qaeda detainees.... This constituted a misreading of the Manchester manual and in fact Boris’s [CIA/EIT] techniques played into what the manual instructed captured terrorists to do.”

But that's not what I'm here to write about today.

Klaidman's tale of the Hayden briefing was actually told once before, but I've not seen anyone note that. Bob Woodward wrote about it in his book, Obama's Wars, back in 2010, and I analyzed that portion of Woodward's narrative in a posting at Firedoglake not long after.

Learn this Mantra: "Debility, Dread, Dependency"

In Woodward's earlier version of the account of Hayden’s Shedd shaking we get a somewhat different listing of what techniques Hayden was selling Obama.

Woodward's version:

Hayden said: Isolation of the detainee; noise or loud music; and lights in the cells 24 hours a day. There was limited use of shackles when moving a prisoner or when the prisoner was a danger. In addition, blindfolds were used when moving prisoners or when the prisoners might gain information that could compromise the security of the facility.

And then followed Hayden's demonstration of the facial slap upon Director of National Intelligence Deputy Director for Policy Shedd. "Then [Hayden] shook the deputy DNI." The latter could be construed as the "attention grasp," which, per Bradbury's memo cited above, used a towel or other collaring device... to prevent any whiplash from the sudden motion."


While Woodward reports Shedd was "shaken," he doesn't mention "walling." He may not have had the entire story and his reporting of Shedd being shaken may have lacked the missing explanation about the "flexible artificial wall" Klaiman's sources provide. Or there may not have ever been any discussion of "walling," and it was about "attention grasp" all along, with "walling" added later, as I explain below.

Klaidman's version:

Not long into his presentation., Hayden called Shedd over. Suddenly, unexpectedly, Hayden slapped Shedd's face. Then he grabbed him by the lapels and started to shake him. He'd wanted to throw him up against the wall during this demonstration, but there were chairs in the way. Instead he explained to Obama and his aides about the interrogation technique known as "walling," in which detainees were thrown against a flexible artificial wall that made a loud noise on impact but cause little physical pain.

Hayden went on to explain that the only other three techniques still used then were playing loud music, keeping lights on all day and sleep deprivation. He didn't mention that sleep deprivation was accomplished by hanging prisoners from ceiling hooks.

So, whoever Klaiman's sources were, they left out the use of isolation and use of blindfolds on the detainees, itself a form of sensory deprivation. And where do we find such techniques used otherwise? In the Army Field Manual on interrogation's Appendix M, precisely the approved standard for all interrogation per Obama's Executive Order. Can this sudden switch in narrative be accidental?

Klaiman's sources elide the blindfolding entirely, while Isolation is replaced (supposedly) by Walling, as there must be only "six techniques," and the narrative is bound by the numerical restriction, which was originally laid out in Bradbury's 2007 memo.

Even more, while Wheeler notes that "Walling" is not an approved technique in the latter-stage Bush OLC memos, it's worth noting that neither is Isolation, or the sensory overload techniques noted by both Woodward and Klaiman ("loud music," 24-hour lights).

Every opponent of torture should note carefully this very important statement from Bradbury's 7/20/07 memo:

The [CIA] program is designed to dislodge the detainee’s expectations about how he will be treated in U.S. custody, to create a situation in which he feels that he is not in control, and to establish a relationship of dependence on the part of the detainee.

This is not spin, but the psychological core of the program, based, as I’ve repeatedly emphasized, on decades-old research showing that the induction of Debility (sleep deprivation, isolation, dietary restrictions) and Dread (the physical assaults, dislocating the expectations, humiliation) produced Dependency for the purpose of CONTROL.

(Interested readers should see how this is all documented in early writings by Bruce Jessen, in a story Jason Leopold and I wrote at Truthout in March 2011.)

As I wrote in my first Shedd-related posting (bold emphasis added here):

From reading this account [Woodward's], apart from the hilarious bit of play-acting with the ever-obliging David Shedd, it’s difficult to see what six of the EITs were retained, and what, besides waterboarding, was eliminated. For one thing, Hayden’s reply focuses on techniques that were not part of the EITs — isolation, sensory overload, and partial sensory deprivation — while demonstrating by a slap to O’Connell’s deputy that “Facial or insult slap” was still in use.

Hayden then makes his play to keep “these methods” under an Obama administration, because “the very existence of the interrogation program was more important than its content.” The CIA director told the President-elect, “Terrorists would know they faced a more severe interrogation if picked up by the CIA than by the military, which used the Army Field Manual.”

But how would the terrorists know this, when even I can’t figure out what exactly the U.S. intelligence agencies do? Woodward quotes Hayden in an unintentional moment of self-revelation. For the CIA, the form is more important that the content. The “terrorists” don’t really know, but they believe they know they can expect something terrible, something especially bad. The point of this is to engender fear. And fear is an essential component to psychological torture. It enhances the effects of sensory overload and sensory deprivation, and contributes to the psychological breakdown of the victim. The use of SERE trainees as experimental subjects for coercive interrogation and techniques did not begin in 2001 or 2002 — it began at least over 50 years ago.

It's easy to get righteously indignant over the torture program of the CIA, but I'm amazed at how easy it's been to be lulled over the torture program inserted into the 2006 Army Field Manual. I think it's not an outrageous thought to believe that in the interim between Woodward's tale of the Hayden meeting and the Shedd slap-heard-round-the-intertubes and the one told by Klaiman, someone said "hey, icksnay on the the isolation-ay."

Slapping David Shedd, or How I Learned to Love the CIA Interrogation Program

Originally posted at FDL/The Seminal

Bob Woodward's new book, Obama's Wars, is full of the same insider tales of government gossip as his previous books. One reads Woodward to pick out the various gems strewn along the way, cognizant that even those are the products of spin manufactured by the various principals involved. A particularly interesting nugget concerns the way the intelligence agencies passed on information about their torture program to the incoming Obama administration.

Woodward spends precious few pages on this subject, and the anecdotes involved can't be relied upon to provide a real study of just what went on. But the couple of stories provided are juicy enough.

According to Woodward, on December 9, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama was shepherded into a tiny SCIF office to meet with CIA Director Michael Hayden and Director of National Intelligence Michael O'Connell. "Hayden sat directly across from Obama at a table so narrow that they were uncomfortably close to each other." Obama had brought Joe Biden, Jim Jones, Greg Craig, and "several others." Hayden and O'Connell reviewed various top secret clandestine and anti-terrorism programs, secret operations against North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. Craig was apparently "shocked" when Hayden told Obama's group that the U.S. "owned" the political structure and security forces of Iraq.

Be that as it may, Hayden, who apparently ran the briefing, got to their review of the CIA's Rendition, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program at the end of the meeting. While Obama apparently sat mostly impassively, Biden and the others were not convinced by CIA claims they got promises of "no torture" from the countries to which they sent kidnapped victims in the "war on terror." Hayden also noted that the CIA "black sites" had been shut down and "all the prisoners transferred to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba." This timeline conflicts with the claim by Obama that he had closed the black sites himself in his early executive order on detentions.

Then the discussion wheeled around to the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EIT). At this point, Woodward's narrative gets a bit confusing. Hayden tells Obama that, per a 2006 finding by President Bush, only six of the 13 original EITs remained in use. Woodward reminds us of the original 13 in an endnote. They are Dietary manipulation; Forced nudity; Attention grasp; Walling (slamming the prisoner into a wall multiple times); Facial hold; Facial or insult slap; Abdominal slap; Cramped Confinement; Wall standing (a kind of stress position); Stress positions proper; Water dousing; Sleep deprivation; and Waterboarding. (What happened to the insects in a box, Bob?) Woodward does describe the sleep deprivation in a way consistent with my contention in May 2009 that "sleep deprivation" was always combined with stress positions, shackling, partial nudity or humiliation, and dietary manipulation or partial starvation. This aspect of sleep deprivation, never totally emphasized by Woodward in the main text of the book, must be kept in mind when Woodward has Hayden tell Obama that the attenuated version of the EITs (which includes sleep deprivation) are more than enough to "break" "suspected terrorists" in "less than a week."

Obama asked what the remaining six EITs were? And Hayden's reported answer appears to veer off from the EITs.

Hayden said: Isolation of the detainee; noise or loud music; and lights in the cells 24 hours a day. There was limited use of shackles when moving a prisoner or when the prisoner was a danger. In addition, blindfolds were used when moving prisoners or when the prisoners might gain information that could compromise the security of the facility.

"David, stand up please," Hayden said to David Shedd, the DNI's deputy director for policy. Shedd rose. Hayden gently slapped his face, then shook the deputy DNI.

It was as rough as what might happen in "Little League football," Hayden said. [pg. 54]

From reading this account, apart from the hilarious bit of play-acting with the ever-obliging David Shedd, it's difficult to see what six of the EITs were retained, and what, besides waterboarding, was eliminated. For one thing, Hayden's reply focuses on techniques that were not part of the EITs -- isolation, sensory overload, and partial sensory deprivation -- while demonstrating by a slap to O'Connell's deputy that "Facial or insult slap" was still in use.

Hayden then makes his play to keep "these methods" under an Obama administration, because "the very existence of the interrogation program was more important than its content." The CIA director told the President-elect, "Terrorists would know they faced a more severe interrogation if picked up by the CIA than by the military, which used the Army Field Manual."

But how would the terrorists know this, when even I can't figure out what exactly the U.S. intelligence agencies do? Woodward quotes Hayden in an unintentional moment of self-revelation. For the CIA, the form is more important that the content. The "terrorists" don't really know, but they believe they know they can expect something terrible, something especially bad. The point of this is to engender fear. And fear is an essential component to psychological torture. It enhances the effects of sensory overload and sensory deprivation, and contributes to the psychological breakdown of the victim. This is not a theory, but was the conclusion of years of research by the U.S. government into interrogation and torture. The use of SERE trainees as experimental subjects for coercive interrogation and techniques did not begin in 2001 or 2002 -- it began at least over 50 years ago.

In 1956, in the pages of an obscure academic journal, Sociometry, I.E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow, and psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West published a classic work on interrogation, Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread) (BCD). It was based on a report for the Study Group on Survival Training, paid for by the U.S. Air Force. (See West LJ., Medical and psychiatric considerations in survival training. In Report of the Special Study Group on Survival Training (AFR 190 16). Lackland Air Force Base, Tex: Air Force Personnel and Training Research Centers; 1956.) This research linked Air Force “Survival” training, later called SERE, with torture techniques, and as we will see, use of such techniques by the CIA, something we would see again decades later in the Mitchell-Jessen “exploitation” plan.

BCD examined the various types of stress undergone by prisoners, and narrowed them down to “three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread”.

Debility was a condition caused by “semi-starvation, fatigue, and disease”. It induced “a sense of terrible weariness”.

Dependency on the captors for some relief from their agony was something “produced by the prolonged deprivation of many of the factors, such as sleep and food… [and] was made more poignant by occasional unpredictable brief respites.” The use of prolonged isolation of the prisoner, depriving an individual of expected social intercourse and stimulation, “markedly strengthened the dependency”.

Dread probably needs no explanation, but BCD described it as “chronic fear…. Fear of death, fear of pain, fear of nonrepatriation, fear of deformity of permanent disability…. even fear of one’s own inability to satisfy the demands of insatiable interrogators.”

.... This form of carrot and stick torture may not seem that sophisticated, but it is the use of basic nervous system functioning and human instinctual need that makes it “scientific”. The need for sensory stimulation and social interaction, the need to eat, to sleep, to reduce fear, all of these are used to build dependencies upon the captor, using the fact that “the strengthening effects of rewards — in this instance the alleviation of an intensely unpleasant emotional state — are fundamentally automatic” [p. 278]. This impairment of higher cognitive states and disruption and disorganization of the prisoner’s self-concept, producing something like “a pathological organic state”, was subsequently modified and used by the CIA in its interrogations of countless individuals. If more brutal forms of torture sometimes were used, especially by over-eager foreign agents or governments, DDD remained the gold standard, the programmatic core of counterintelligence interrogation at the heart of the CIA’s own intelligence manuals.

Now Bob Woodward is not going to explain all that. Being a stenographer for spooks and politicians, he offers very little analysis at all. His fable of how Obama got briefed on the use of torture by the CIA, and Obama's subsequent decision to ban all the EITs and utilize the Army Field Manual may bear some elements of truth. It seems certain Obama knows very little if any of the historical material I adverted to above. And Barack Obama, like much of America, may not know that the Army Field Manual contains the very techniques that Hayden said the CIA was using (isolation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, driving up of fear). The operative word here is ignorance: ignorance about what has gone on and is going on.

This nation has not gotten the full truth about this country's torture program, past, present, and plans for the future. As the commentators latch onto the upcoming election with ever-greater avidity, it appears certain that these issues will get shoved even farther onto the back burner. We can't let that happen. The City of Berkeley has announced that October 10-16 will be "Say No to Torture Week." I'll be participating with a slew of other celebrities, bloggers, psychologists, and political activists to make it clear that "the community finds it unacceptable for an American torture apparatus to remain operational while those responsible remain unaccountable." What is your community doing?

CIA Tries to Evade Senate Hearings on SERE

Stephen Soldz has an important posting on his blog, Psyche, Science and Society: "Scott Horton on CIA evasion of SASC hearings on Mitchell-Jessen torture".

Soldz has dug a nugget out of Scott Horton's new Harper's article, "General Hayden Flunks an Interrogation Test". Both blog and magazine article are must reads.

From the Soldz piece:

In the midst of a long post on the lies and evasions of Gen. Hayden, Scott Horton provides insight into how the CIA is trying to evade the Senate Armed Service Committee hearings on the transformation of SERE techniques into US torture by CIA “contractors” Mitchell and Jessen:

Right now the intelligence community is engaged in one of recent history’s more outrageous games of three-card monte with an inquiry launched by the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, into contracts with two private individuals to develop a regime of highly coercive interrogation techniques. Full battle array has been brought out and extraordinary measures taken to shield these two individuals, who may well be guilty of serious crimes. An attempt is being made to avoid inquiry by claiming that the contracts are beyond the jurisdiction of the Committee. A series of consciously misleading representations have been made to the Committee; an effort has been undertaken to disguise and deny the source of these dealings in the Department of Defense and involving Dr. Stephen Cambone. This inquiry goes right to the core of the current concerns about his agency’s evasion of law and Congressional oversight. And Hayden is not cooperating with oversight; he’s fighting it with the tools that he is authorized to use with foreign governments—but not the U.S. Congress.

For those unfamiliar with the role of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE, program, and the role of same in implementing torture at Abu Ghraib, CIA black sites and elsewhere, or who want to know more about military psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, implicated in a CIA torture scandal, check out the following:

The Black Sites, by Jane Mayer

Rorschach and Awe, by Katerine Eban

The CIA's Torture Teachers, by Mark Benjamin

Sec. Gates: Stop SERE-type Torture! Drop Appendix M from Army Field Manual, by Valtin