the abu ghraib pictures raise the question where were the doctors while this was going on either they directly would asleep use or they witnessed the consequences of it why hadn't they protested. here the doctors were complicit they were the center piece of torture they were enablers they were the selectors they will authorize years. from apocrypha he's to now the standard for the healing professions has been simple that obligation is first and foremost to the patient's interest while being torture

satyrs backup. how have american physicians and psychologists come to sanction and implement torture in our military prisons and why haven't they been held accountable for their actions. on. tonight we are our country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies. justice will be done i.

less than three weeks later u.s. forces invaded afghanistan in retaliation to the september eleventh terrorist attacks on the united states. in a radical new policy the bush administration declared afghan prisoners enemy combatants no longer protected by the geneva convention. before nine eleven prisoners of war were interrogated according to the army field manual that followed the geneva convention. the new interrogation methods involve torture. we have no alternative but to meet the enemy worried ways we must and we will. use every means at our disposal to ensure the freedom and security of the american people. the experience of american p.o.w.'s in korea led the united states to

develop a program to train soldiers how to survive torture if captured. the program was called seer. to psychologists contracted by the cia were among the first to introduce abusive interrogation techniques doctors james mitchell and bruce jessen were experts in serious survival training they adapted this sere torture regimen for us. dr bruce justin was the chief of psychology the air force's survival school the psychologists were there so that if someone actually was having a difficulty some kind of psychological breakdown that then we can stop doing timeout and actually bring in the psychologist so they could talk people through what we were doing just to interrogation training it was for the benefit of our own

forces. seeing that these people actually were the architects find the torture program just it made me physically ill. and lock up the dirt on ads organized by psychologists mitchell and jess interest cia interrogators came to be called enhanced interrogation techniques. these techniques were soon adopted by army interrogators at guantanamo the day help of a psychiatrist and a psychologist from there they were exported to afghanistan and iraqi detention sites the program became so widespread it was only a matter of time before the world knew that the united states was torturing detainees those torture became more and more controversial and the lawyers were more and more under pressure to find a justification for these methods they turned to the doctors for an opinion on

whether they impose of your pain mental pain or physical pain or suffering which is the legal definition of torture. in two thousand and nine the special review of the enhanced interrogation program by the cia office of inspector general was declassified over the fears objections of the intelligence agency special guidelines from the cia office of medical services were also declassified the critical role of doctors in the enhanced interrogation program can be traced through these documents and the memos of the office of legal counsel the cia doctors and the legal counsel lawyers described the enhanced techniques in such detail that their instructions could be the script for a training video for doctors assigned to detainee interrogations. in the government memos enhanced interrogation techniques fall roughly into three groups. methods

that involve physical assault. those that can induce dangerous levels of physical stress. and those that can cycle logically debilitate the prisoner. methods are combined to increase the pressure this also increases the severity of the abuse. as for most people who've been subjected to that they will have. thinking will be

very disorganized and i think very unreliable terms of what. kind of very harsh and very cruel to try and keep people awake the doctor is responsible for keeping the detainee a lot of the checks that the blood pressure and heart rate are not dangerously high and measures the blood oxygen level with this pulse oximetry. after prolonged exposure to cold water he may check the body temperature in case of hypothermia. when there are more than fifteen applications of the water borne in a twenty four hour period yes to do careful medical assessments after the later applications in the rare cases when a prisoner is difficult to resuscitate the doctor has to perform an emergency tracheotomy. physicians for human rights believes that a safety officer fallacy. takes physicians from being.

healers to being calibrators of harm they serve as a sort of gasoline on the far because interrogators think that they can go harder because there's a health professional there that they can push the detainees closer to the edge because there's a safety net there in the form the health professional to catch them the cia office of medical services instructs the doctor to keep systematic records. in order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented how long each application and the entire procedure lasted how much water was unused realizing that much splashes are. if the nasal or oral pharynx was filled what sort of volume was expelled and have a subject looked between each treatment so to warp

a person to warp a professional a doctor for example and to doing this kind of thing really is quite a trick. the sad part about it is so easy with these groups and all the kinds of things that you can if you lay people it's going against their better instincts and they turn to the doctors they basically said we determine that severe pain means it's very intense and in a lot of long duration and sometimes violent. because this method meet that threshold and not one according to either the legal documents or the medical memos not once did the doctors ever say no you can't do this the cia had special equipment built for the enhanced techniques the waterboarding is built so that the gators could swing the detainee upright in an emergency.

cramped confinement came in in large sizes. we've had a lot of debate about torture in this country and whether it's ever justified i think it's never justified in part because as we've seen that once you start down the road of torture it never stops and it gets worse and worse and worse today doctors are essential to torturing regimes. all half of all torture survivors report seeing a doc supervising their torture. the doc keeps alive the ones who are supposed to be kept alive the doc devises methods of torture such a shock such as cold such as isolation or psychological stress. that does not leave wounds that can be interpreted as evidence and the doc uses the

bureaucracy of the modern state to conceal the medical records to falsify medical records and to falsify death certificates or is clear that the abuse have been quite extensive involve very large numbers of prisoners and also involved really extraordinary levels of gratuitous violence. i decided given the gravity of the issues to be extremely conservative in my approach. i wouldn't use witness accounts i wouldn't use lawyers statements i wouldn't use press accounts i would only use first source government documents. but as it happened the

a.c.l.u. was conducting a gigantic set of several lawsuits under the freedom of information act to obtain government records. they put these documents up on a website. i read somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred eighty thousand pages. one should start getting that many documents it's possible to cross link. the story of the iceman for example. did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioned in the constitution and. that's because a free and open press is critical to our democracy. in

fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of our government and across several we've been hijacked why handful of friends dash and the corporations they will profit by destroying what our founding fathers once built up my job market and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on in the world we go beyond identifying the problem to try rational debate in a real discussion critical issues facing america to find ready to join the movement then walk a little bit. least . a.

little. cross talk rules and if they've got these you can jump in anytime you want to. look . i got a quote for you with pretty tough. stay with that story. let's get this guy i'd like to but smear that guy instead of working for the people all the tissues the mainstream media for each other right right speech about. the dead rather.

were. that story resides in about fifteen different documents and until you put them all together you can't see the extraordinary narrative because this guy was picked up at his home by navy seals there was a huge fight at his home they took him to a navy seal's base. he was naked it was november he said i feel like i'm going to die and the inter gator said to him you're going to wish you were dead the medic watched as they worked him over and something called the romper room. then they took him to abu ghraib he said i can't breathe to the entry people but was not given a physical exam. the seals turned him over to the cia the cia took him into a shower room and they had the guards tires hands behind his back and they hoisted

to mop. when you hang somebody backwards by their wrists to prevents the lungs from expanding and when you add to that broken ribs and a sandbag over his head that makes breathing even more difficult the final cause of death was a strict ca. then they called the guards back in and the guards at the cia guy told the guards look. he's faking it he won't talk and he keeps slumping down the guards tried to lift him up he was dead weight in fact he was dead. the cia freaked out the sky being dead they called intelligence commander epis who came in and said i'm not going down for this what do you do for this guy so

they sent one of their lieutenants off to grab some ice and packed them in the body bag. and then the guards had their photo shoot. the next thing that happened was in the morning they had to get him out of the shower room and they had to take them through the prison cell blocks. so they called in a medic who put an i.v. in his arm and they wheeled him out saying he was sick. the narrative of where his autopsy was done who did it and why the death certificate was suppressed is still classified. although the united states was obligated to return his body to the family he was buried in an unmarked grave his family learned what happened to him through the abu ghraib photos. the world knows mr al jamaat

e as the body defiled by abu ghraib guards the press focused on who tortured him and whether officers would be prosecuted for his murder one fact is rarely noted mr alger his fate was sealed by two medics a doctor and the medical command responsible for his health care according to the third geneva convention ratified by the united states. the number of doctors involved in detainee abuse is unknown but indeed classified government documents the case is just one among many involving medical complicity and cover up of torture a pathologist working for the armed forces institute of pathology collectively systematically and uniformly suppressed death reports in.

u.s. prisons in afghanistan and iraq today extent that they ever became aware of them in the cia rendition prisons as well. they have been detainees here since last july nobody knows what cave they're in well you want nobody can reach the detainees the detainee is under the control of the american the super. secret deaths in prisons and populations profoundly and in fact when you look in iraq and what happened after the. experience including the death of jamal he came out what happened was that support for our presence in iraq dropped from around seventy percent to around twenty percent we lost the moral authority that we had in iraq we lost the iraqi people and a way that radically transformed the rock the iraqi military and political

landscape. and then of course the ultimate folly of all this was that according to military intelligence eighty five percent of the persian or zob are entirely innocent of any insurgency activity whatsoever. one. under pressure to obtain useful intelligence the department of defense established behavioral science consultation teams made up of both psychiatry and psychologists to advise interrogators on strategy after observing interrogations on t.v. monitors like this. it is.

one of our. regular i. love it is really well. you know not often but i mean you're getting there. you're a lawyer. the behavioral science consultation teams or biscuits helped interrogators exploit the physical and emotional vulnerabilities of the detainees these doctors were pulled out of clinical services and thrust into the role of consultants without any experience with interrogation. which. according to going to most standard operating procedures on arrival each detainee was isolated for four weeks and allowed contact only with interrogators and the behavioral science consultants in violation of the laws set down by the geneva convention.

for. human beings are social were creatures that thrive on communication with others connection with others so when you deprive someone of that you automatically start . raising risk factors for the kinds of reactions for reaction such as depression anxiety panic attacks suicide ality in sort of more extreme cases and psychosis even in worse extreme cases. investigative journalists were among the first to expose some of the techniques recommended by the behavioral science consultants. there was one one plan in particular that dick a nice lawyer described to me in which the detainee was told that

a psychiatrist had monitored the amount of toilet paper he was had he was only allowed seven squares a day and that was actually an improvement over earlier when the psychiatry according to these sources had taken away all of his toilet paper each detainee's had kind of us psychological assessment and a plan kind of created for interrogating him depending on his weaknesses involvement villainies. as a doctor he's been evaluating and caring for torture victims from all over the world for over fifteen years the individuals that i examined who've been detained at guantanamo are the most traumatized. scored both physically and psychologically most of the individuals who were detained at how great were going on about were not terrorists they were individuals who were picked up in sweeps who were in the wrong place at the wrong time got arrested put through this hell like no other that they or i could describe

and then were released but really shells they were. mohammed jawad was one of these detainees in two thousand and two he was arrested in a crowded marketplace in kabul after a grenade exploded injuring three u.s. servicemen. did not have a birth certificate and his age at the time is uncertain but he was estimated to be between fourteen and sixteen. after a short detention in afghanistan he was moved to guantanamo bay one time the bears were supposed to be you know group keep them the worst in the worst you know the best really bad people and you have a child who's being accused of a strong narrative you know sort of the cold war criminal just it just didn't make sense. during an interrogation of mohammed jawad the interrogator became alarmed

when the youth began talking to a wall he asked a psychologist assigned to detainee interrogations to observe jawad and check his mental state her response was reported by another officer in a sworn deposition. he appears to be rather frightened and it looks as if he could break easily if he were isolated from his support network and major allies soley on the interrogator make him as uncomfortable as possible. working as hard as possible. the psychologist concluded that you would was faking gloom sickness and depression and recommended more severe isolation to induce his cooperation. after a period in this extreme isolation. attempted to kill himself by banging his head

off the metal structures in his cell. he survived and was kept relatively isolated for five more years when dr katherine porterfield examined him at the request of july defense team. over the course of my violation with mr jawad he it was clear he was suffering with major depression he had intense sadness and despair. difficulty sleeping he had severe sleep problems appetite had been basically. profoundly impaired you know he barely ate very much and he had almost he said no taste for food anymore he was a very very depressed young man when i went into jawad. i wanted to take the initiative and you know get to the point as quickly as possible and he basically stopped me and i was with an interpreter who doesn't speak english. and he said you

know i don't want to you know talk about who you are why are doing what you're doing. all i want to do is find out when i can go see my mom all the sudden the curtain got pulled back and you know there was this boy sitting in a chair asking for his mom really changed the way that i approach that case when i would ask a recount. anything about his time on top of mt he would become very distressed put his head in his hands and just say i can't it's too hard i wrote a declaration stating that i felt that the conditions he was in were not appropriate or harming him and his lawyers basically then argued to the authorities that he should be moved out of a situation of isolation. and that response did not come for many months he was never viewed as an innocent person you know within the system it was always he's guilty so how do we get to the conviction as fast as possible. lawyer eric montoya into extraordinary lengths for his client to get the missing records and

depositions he travelled to kabul in an armory without the protection of u.s. forces he returned with messages of support from jawad family and powerful evidence that mohammad to wind was innocent. and i think the day was such a mess for chase and it was so i'm going manic of all things wrong with kuantan that they just got him out of there and try to make it go away. i marinate join me. in that impartial and financial commentary interview and much much. only on us and.

there were nate and abby martin two of the coast guard team that work. it's going to give you the numbers but give you one stock never i'll give you the information you make the decision don't worry about how breaking this war of the mind it's rubbish ideas and consciousness in for us through the system. would be described as angry i think in a strong denial or single. hypoxic

. over by the way to go did you know the price is the only industry specifically mentioning the constitution. that's because a free and open prize is critical to our democracy shrek all books. are. going to go on i'm sorry and on this show we reveal the little picture of what's actually going out into the world simply go beyond identifying the problem trying to fix rational debate a real discussion critical issues facing america have by a number of them ready to join the movement then welcome aboard. oh i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture.