This blog is a part of my body of research that seeks to analyse civil society's and academia's understanding of national security models from an academic perspective with a focus on Canada, Israel and the UK.
Showing posts with label CIA and Torture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CIA and Torture. Show all posts
On July 14, Iran and six world powers signed a historic nuclear deal to limit Tehran’s nuclear ambitious in exchange for the lifting of international sanctions. The deal evoked some skepticism among Middle Eastern countries, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, that view Iran as a destabilizing force.
Sterling has long maintained that the CIA retaliated against him for questioning racial bias at the agency, where, as he put it in a letter to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, he was deemed “too big and too black” to move up the ranks. The CIA does not release data on its racial demographics, but a recent internal report on diversity affirms some of Sterling’s allegations of bias. Minorities accounted for less than 24.8 percent of its workforce and only 10.8 percent of its top leadership, according to the report. The CIA’s lack of diversity underscores the racial underpinnings of the global “war on terrorism,” in which white CIA officers torture nonwhite others in secret prisons and incinerate them with drone missiles.
The CIA, which defines ethnic and racial minorities as anyone other than whites of European descent, appears to disregard the values of racial equality that other taxpayer-funded institutions are legally bound to embrace. Coupled with the agency’s treatment of Sterling, the latest findings paint a picture of an organizational culture that identifies whiteness with leadership ability and loyalty. The elevation of whiteness also suggests that nonwhite Americans cannot be trusted with the agency’s highly secretive and sensitive work. Even more disconcerting, the report foundthat “the agency does not recognize the value of diverse backgrounds, experiences and perspectives,” and as a result, it does not consistently promote an inclusive “speak up culture.”
The Sterling saga
Sterling joined the CIA in 1993. He was assigned to the agency’s Iran task force and went to language school to learn Farsi. In 1997, as he was preparing to leave for his first overseas posting, he was replaced at the last minute. “We were concerned that you would stand out as a big black guy speaking Farsi,” he said his supervisor told him. Sterling, who was often the only African-American at a given subunit, was then moved around various offices. The CIA often tried to portray him as an angry black spy. His internal discrimination complaint went nowhere, and he was fired in 2001. His federal discrimination lawsuit was dismissed after the agency argued the trial would reveal state secrets.
After leaving the CIA, Sterling contacted several elected officials about his qualms regarding the Iran program. In 2003 he told Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staffers that the program had serious flaws, including that portions of the blueprints that the CIA planned to pass to the Iranians through a Russian intermediary could help Tehran improve its nuclear technology. The CIA was livid when that became public, and the Justice Department launched an investigation into Sterling. The lengthy battle ended earlier this year when all-white jury in Virginia found him guilty for leaking state secrets to investigative journalist James Risen, who wrote extensively about the CIA’s program.
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta touted ‘a comprehensive initiative to strengthen workforce diversity.’ But his initiative went nowhere.
The CIA’s diversity report substantiates many of Sterling’s allegations — lack of an inclusive culture, the dominance of white male career officers, lack of appreciation for diversity of opinions and exclusion of nonwhite officers. The report makes stern recommendations to reverse this trend. But the CIA’s deeply entrenched culture suggests immediate changes are unlikely.
The agency’s unethical and illegal practices are widely known. In the past few months, the public was treated to the CIA’s repeated failings, from the Senate report that disclosed torture of detainees to the cache of 14,000 photographs that show naked detainees and at least one waterboarding bench. In the latest expose, a review conducted by the American Psychological Association revealed that the CIA colluded with the group’s members to facilitate human experimentation, which included forcing detainees do dog tricks such as forcing them to bark and hydrating them until they urinated on themselves.
Nevertheless, the CIA’s organizational culture, which values whiteness and sees the recasting of its foreign covert action as requiring the abuse and torture of nonwhite enemies, is rarely discussed. To be sure, a racially egalitarian CIA that values diversity would not be a foil against torture. Black, Asian and Latino spies are no less capable of committing abusive acts than their white counterparts. But that different perspectives are not valued in the agency shows how institutionalized racial dynamics replicate themselves in its penchant for defining global warfare as requiring the torture and abuse of racially disparate others.
Many minorities express interest in and apply to work for the CIA. However, it appears that white spies are more easily able to satisfy the lengthy background checks and security clearances. In other words, white recruits have a better chance of being deemed loyal enough to be hired as spies.
Consequently, that the CIA continues to have a white leadership and to engage in torture of nonwhites paints a picture of rogue agency that is not democratically accountable, in which the “unqualified” officer and the enemy are both racially constructed. In this sense, the agency’s lack of diversity and flagrant abuse of detainees are symptoms of the same condition: an organization intoxicated by the secrecy of its work and the racial uniformity of its workforce, which deems nearly anything it does, from harassing African-American whistleblowers to torturing detainees, as acceptable and necessary.
The Iran deal is expected to render the CIA’s covert Iran program and its accusations against Sterling moot. But unfortunately, the CIA’s race problem is likely to remain untouched for some time to come.
Opposition is building to intended anti-torture reforms within the largest professional organization of psychologists in the US, which faces a crossroads over what a recent report described as its past support for brutal military and CIA interrogations.
Before the American Psychological Association (APA) meets in Toronto next Thursday for what all expect will be a fraught convention that reckons with an independent review that last month found the APA complicit in torture, former military voices within the profession are urging the organization not to participate in what they describe as a witch hunt.
Reformers consider the pushback to represent entrenched opposition to cleaving the APA from a decade’s worth of professional cooperation with controversial detentions and interrogations. TheAPA listserv has become a key debating forum, with tempers rising on both sides.
A recent letter from the president of the APA’s military-focused wing warns that proposed ethics changes, likely to be discussed in Toronto, represent pandering to a “politically motivated, anti-government and anti-military stance”. A retired army colonel called David Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor whose scathing inquiry described APA “collusion” with US torture, an “executioner”.
Tom Williams, who helms the APA’s Division 19, called the Society for Military Psychology, wrote this week to APA officials that he was “deeply saddened and very concerned by what too often appears a politically motivated, anti-government and anti-military stance that does not advance the mission of APA as much as it seems to appease the most vocal critics of APA and Division 19”.
Reiterating a position the APA took for 10 years before abandoning it after the Hoffman report, Williams said the PENS report “helped ensure torture would not occur”. Larry James, a PENS task-force member who also served as an army colonel and Guantánamo psychologist, wrote separately to colleagues that Hoffman’s findings of collusion to aid torture was an “intentional lie” and a “clear defamatory insult to our military”.A retired army veteran currently on theUS Army War College faculty, Williams blasted “misrepresentations of thePENS [Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security] report that serve an effort to advance an unspoken political agenda”, referring to a critical 2005 APA task force that Hoffman found was stacked with psychologists tied to the Department of Defense.
Rather than internal Pentagon reforms, it was congressional intervention, led by torture survivor John McCain and GOP presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, that reigned in US military interrogation. Both McCain and Graham are veterans. Their bill, the Detainee Treatment Act, was a response to Abu Ghraib and passed five months after the PENS report.
Once Williams posted his letter to the APA listserv, Jean Maria Arrigo, a member of the 2005 PENS taskforce, shot back: “To uphold the dignity of Division 19 operational psychologists following the Hoffman report, the burden falls upon Division 19 to censure the task force operational psychologists as APA committee members … I am speaking to you as a person with a vested interest in military honor, not as a detractor of military service.”
Another letter, from a retired army colonel and psychologist, said “executioner Hoffman” received “carte blanche [from the APA] to malign and to conduct a search and destroy mission”.
The former officer, Kathy Platoni, wrote in a dear-colleague letter that a wave of firings and resignations that have swept through the APA after the Hoffman report were unfounded.
“That the APA board of directors allowed this and now have martyred and fallen all over themselves to apologize for crimes against humanity among their own that never occurred and for which not a lick of evidence exists, is bizarre and preposterous. And now we have mass resignations among the APA elite senior leaders … and for what purpose? What do they and APA have to hide?”
Nadine Kaslow, one of the chairs of the APA committee liaising with Hoffman, told the Guardian earlier this month she supported ending psychologist support to US military and CIA interrogation and detention operations. Kaslow, a former APA president, was one of the recipients of Williams’ letter.After investigating claims that have dogged the APA for years, Hoffman concluded last month that APA officials, including the group’s ethics chief, colluded with the US militaryand to a lesser extent the CIA to soften its internal prohibitions on torture while insisting publicly that they had done no such thing. Hoffman concluded that for several responsible APA leaders, influence and the prospect of lucrative military contracts provided sufficient motivation.
In a joint response to the Guardian, Kaslow and co-recipient Susan McDaniels, the APA’s president-elect, said that they took Williams’ concerns seriously. But they also signaled a new, post-Hoffman direction for the APA.
“We will review them with the council of representatives as they meet next week to consider the action steps already recommended by the board of directors and a variety of constituency groups, and put forth recommendations of their own,” they said.
“We understand and appreciate the need for a balanced approach that embraces many voices – including those of military psychologists – as the association develops new policies, processes and oversight mechanisms so that ethics and humans rights are clearly at the center of all our decision-making and the problems identified in the Hoffman report cannot recur in the future.”
Longtime critics of torture within the APA consider themselves to have momentum after the Hoffman report, but they also see structural impediments to their project of cleaving psychology from detentions and interrogations. The Pentagon has said it has no plans to recall psychologists from Guantánamo Bay, where they assess the mental health and behavior of detainees subject to forced feedings that detainees and even a Guantánamo nurse have called torture.
“It is unfortunate that a small faction of military psychology leadership is peddling the same discredited falsehoods that APA leaders peddled for the last decade, that APA’s actions were designed to protect human rights,” said Stephen Soldz of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology.
“Since the Hoffman report deconstructed those claims, this faction is seeking to discredit that report and those who requested it. But these tactics won’t work this time.”
Williams did not return an email seeking comment. Platoni, who said she would not be able to attend the Toronto conference, said she hoped for a “middle ground” that involved civilian colleagues better understanding military responsibilities.
“When you’re in the military, if you’re ordered to fill a position in which detainee operations are involved, you have no say in the matter. You have to perform the duties for which you were trained,” said Platoni, a veteran of both US ground wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, where she did not interact with detainees.
“After 34 years in the military, I can tell you that almost every psychologist that I served with, whatever their role, was among the most valiant, highly regarded, ethical performers of the duties to which they were assigned.”
The Senate report released earlier this week is mainly about the CIA personnel who authorized and used torture. But the report also includes references to CIA personnel who raised concerns about the torture policies. CIA personnel raised...
