Victims of U.S. torture take home mental illness

Records, experts attest to signs of affliction

After enduring agonizing treatment in secret CIA prisons around the world or coercive practices at the military detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, dozens of detainees developed persistent mental health problems, according to previously undisclosed medical records, government documents and interviews with former prisoners and military and civilian doctors.

Some detainees emerged with the same symptoms as U.S. prisoners of war who were brutalized decades earlier by some of the world's cruelest regimes.

Those subjected to the tactics included victims of mistaken identity or flimsy evidence that the United States later disavowed. Others were foot soldiers for the Taliban or al-Qaida who were later deemed to pose little threat. Some were hardened terrorists, including those accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks or the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. In several cases, their mental status has complicated the nation's long effort to bring them to justice.

At least half of the 39 people who went through the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" program, which included depriving them of sleep, dousing them with ice water, slamming them into walls and locking them in coffinlike boxes, have since shown psychiatric problems, The New York Times found. Some have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, paranoia, depression or psychosis.

Hundreds more detainees moved through CIA "black sites" or Guantanamo, where the military inflicted sensory deprivation, isolation, menacing with dogs and other tactics on men who now show serious damage. Nearly all have been released.

"There is no question that these tactics were entirely inconsistent with our values as Americans, and their consequences present lasting challenges for us as a country and for the individuals involved," said Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser.

The U.S. government has never studied the long-term psychological effects of the interrogation practices it embraced. A Defense Department spokesman, asked about long-term mental harm, responded that prisoners were treated humanely and had access to excellent care. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

Researchers caution that it can be difficult to determine cause and effect with mental illness. Some prisoners of the CIA and the military had underlying psychological problems that may have made them more susceptible to long-term difficulties; others appeared to have been remarkably resilient. Incarceration, particularly the indefinite detention without charges that the United States devised, is inherently stressful. Still, outside medical consultants and former government officials said they saw a pattern connecting the harsh practices to psychiatric issues.

Those treating prisoners at Guantanamo for mental health issues typically did not ask their patients what had happened during their questioning. Some physicians, though, said they saw evidence of mental harm almost immediately.

After prisoners were released from U.S. custody, some found neither help nor relief. Mohammed Abdullah Saleh al-Asad, a businessman in Tanzania, and others were snatched, interrogated and imprisoned, then sent home without explanation. They returned to their families deeply scarred from interrogations, isolation and the shame of sexual taunts, forced nudity, aggressive body cavity searches and being kept in diapers.

Asad, who died in May, was held for more than a year in several secret CIA prisons.

"Sometimes, between husband and wife, he would admit to how awful he felt," his widow, Zahra Mohamed, wrote in a statement prepared for the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. "He was humiliated, and that feeling never went away."

At the end of the Vietnam War, military doctors noticed that former prisoners of war developed psychiatric disorders far more often than other soldiers, an observation also made of former POWs from World War II and the Korean War. The data could not be explained by imprisonment alone, researchers found. Former soldiers who suffered torture or mistreatment were more likely than others to develop long-term problems.

By the mid-1980s, the Veterans Administration, now the Department of Veterans Affairs, had linked such treatment to memory loss, an exaggerated startle reflex, horrific nightmares, headaches and an inability to concentrate. Studies noted similar symptoms among torture survivors in South Africa, Turkey and Chile. Such research helped lay the groundwork for how American doctors now treat combat veterans.

"In hindsight, that should have come to the fore" in the post-Sept. 11 interrogation debate, said John Rizzo, the CIA's top lawyer at the time. "I don't think the long-term effects were ever explored in any real depth."

Instead, the government relied on data from a training program to resist enemy interrogators, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. The military concluded there was little evidence that disrupted sleep, near-starvation, nudity and extreme temperatures harmed military trainees in controlled scenarios.

Two veteran SERE psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, worked with the CIA and the Pentagon to help develop interrogation tactics. They based their strategies in part on the theory of "learned helplessness," a phrase coined by the U.S. psychologist Martin Seligman in the late 1960s. He gave electric shocks to dogs and discovered that they stopped resisting once they learned they could not stop the shocks. If the United States could make men helpless, the thinking went, they would stop resisting and give up their secrets.

In the end, Justice Department lawyers concluded that the methods did not constitute torture, which is illegal under U.S. and international law. In a series of memos, they wrote that no evidence existed that "significant psychological harm of significant duration, e.g., lasting for months or even years" would result.

With fear of another terrorist attack, there was little incentive or time to find contrary evidence, Rizzo said. "The government wanted a solution," he recalled. "It wanted a path to get these guys to talk."

But President Barack Obama banned coercive questioning on his second day in office, and his administration has whittled the Guantanamo prison population to 61, down from nearly 700 at its peak. Interrogations ended long ago. Except for the so-called high-value detainees, kept in a building hidden in the hills, most of the remaining prisoners share a concrete jail called Camp 6.

Asked about their psychological well-being, Rear Adm. Peter Clarke, the commander at Guantanamo, said in an interview: "What I observe are detainees who are well-adjusted, and I see no indications of ill effects of anything that may have happened in the past."

Information for this article was contributed by Jawad Sukhanyar, Rami Nazzal, Nour Youssef, Hwaida Saad, Maher Samaan, Suliman Ali Zway, Karam Shoumali, Kitty Bennett and Alain Delaqueriere of The New York Times.

A Section on 10/09/2016

Upcoming Events