Naked photos are just the latest sorry episode for the CIA
The agency has been using sexual humiliation tactics for years
According to a story broken by the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman last week, CIA officials took photographs of naked detainees before sending them “to its foreign partners for torture.” The pictures are supposed to serve as evidence that detainees weren’t tortured while in American hands, but the fact that they were taken at all demonstrates the agency’s sketchy relationship with sexual humiliation.
How the CIA came to use obscene, ineffective methods of humiliation in the first place is kind of nuts. Two decades ago the agency hired private subcontractors to create new interrogation techniques for the war on terror. The subcontractors, who had previously worked for the US Air Force, “reverse engineered” torture methods used to train airmen. The Air Force wanted to teach the airmen how to survive should they ever be captured by enemies who don’t adhere to the Geneva Conventions.
And to be clear, photographing prisoners naked definitely defies the Geneva Conventions. “The Geneva Convention indicates that it’s not permitted to photograph and embarrass or humiliate prisoners of war.” Donald Rumsfeld said that back in 2003 when complaining about Iraqi television interviewing American POW’s. And he was uncharacteristically correct. Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention states that “Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated … prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity.” Nathaniel Raymond, an expert on detainee abuse and researcher at Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, told The Guardian, “Any evidence that the CIA or any other US government agency intentionally photographed naked detainees should be investigated by law enforcement as potential violation of domestic and international law.”
So then why was sexual humiliation such a large part of not just the CIA’s interrogation techniques, but the Pentagon’s, too? A 2008 Senate Armed Services Committee investigation into the Abu Ghraib scandal found that the appalling sexual abuse perpetrated there — genitals packed in ice, nude photo shoots, sodomy with handheld objects — “was not a technique developed at Abu Ghraib but rather a technique which was imported and can be traced through Afghanistan and GITMO.”
Specifically, it can be traced to the psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. According to VICE, “In preparing their interrogation program, the CIA asked for advice from the commanders of the military’s SERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape] school, and hired two retired US Air Force (USAF) psychologists … who ran SERE training. Mitchell and Jessen’s company was paid $81 million for helping design and run interrogations, using SERE techniques.”
The crimes of Abu Ghraib echo the sexual humiliation used in SERE training. According to a 1996 hearing, one United States Air Force cadet engaged in the training “was forced to lie down on the ground, her shirt was removed and her legs pried apart. She was hooded during the proceedings …[o]ther cadets stood by and observed, joking about what was proceeding.” The simulated rape was “filmed and shown to other cadets.” Obscene and harrowing stories like this from mid-’90s SERE training (and sadly there are many many more) eventually reached the light of day and caused something of a backlash. SERE training was suspended for three years before being reintroduced with the sexual humiliation aspect removed.
The two architects of the CIA interrogation program had zero experience as actual interrogators. Instead they constructed their program around a training regimen meant to replicate brutal, counterproductive and illegal acts. In the words of clinical psychologist Bryant Welch, Mitchell and Jessen “used the very therapeutic interventions psychologists use to ameliorate psychological suffering, but ‘reversed’ their direction to create psychological distress and instability. … In reverse engineering, the environment is deliberately made more confusing and the victim’s trust in his own perceptions is intentionally undermined. In extreme form, this can ultimately drive a person to insanity from which some never come back.” It was never an interrogation program. It was a torture program.
