{"id":16657,"date":"2016-03-14T08:00:40","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T15:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/torture-is-illegal-but-theres-the-issue-of-appendix-m\/"},"modified":"2016-03-14T08:00:40","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T15:00:40","slug":"torture-is-illegal-but-theres-the-issue-of-appendix-m","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/torture-is-illegal-but-theres-the-issue-of-appendix-m\/","title":{"rendered":"Torture is illegal, but there’s the issue of Appendix M"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON<\/strong> \u2014 A little-known appendix to the Army Field Manual, the government rulebook for interrogations that bans the harsh practices used after the Sept. 11 attacks, still allows sleep deprivation and other sensory techniques that some say amount to a loophole to the U.S. ban on torture.<\/p>\n

Interrogation professionals and international human rights groups want to see the entire 10-page Appendix M axed from the Army Field Manual, which is undergoing a congressionally mandated review. U.S. officials insist that Appendix M doesn\u2019t condone ill treatment of detainees, and that all parts of the manual must be applied in ways that ensure detainees are treated humanely.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have been asking for changes to the Army Field Manual and Appendix M in particular for years now,\u201d said Raha Wala, senior counsel for defense and intelligence at Human Rights First. \u201cThere hasn\u2019t been momentum. I now sense that in the first time in years, there is a real interest in looking at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their objections come at the same time that GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump wants the U.S. to bring back torture, including waterboarding, a practice that simulates drowning. \u201cThey have no rules. They have no regulations. They chop off heads. They drown 40, 50, 60 people at a time in big steel cages, pull them up an hour later, everyone dead. And we\u2019re working on a different set of parameters,\u201d he said in Thursday\u2019s presidential debate, explaining why he favors torturing Islamic State captives to get information.<\/p>\n

Mark Fallon, who has spent more than 30 years working in federal law enforcement and counterintelligence, said that domestic and international law forbids waterboarding and other so-called \u201cenhanced\u201d interrogation techniques.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s much validity to Appendix M,\u201d Fallon said. \u201cI think it can open the door to the types of abuses we have seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fallon leads the research committee of the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group, a team of interrogators from the FBI, Defense Department and intelligence agencies that is deployed to gather intelligence from violent extremists in the U.S. and overseas. He was among more than two dozen former national security, law enforcement, intelligence and interrogation professionals who sent a letter last fall to all of the presidential candidates, urging them to reject torture and cruel treatment.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is counterproductive. It tends to produce unreliable information because it degrades a detainee\u2019s ability to recall and transmit information, undermines trust in the interrogator, and often prompts a detainee to relay false information that he believes the interrogator wants to hear,\u201d the letter said.<\/p>\n

That too was the finding of a 2014 Senate report, describing the CIA\u2019s practice of torture against al-Qaida detainees after 9\/11. The report said the agency\u2019s interrogation program was more brutal than previously understood and failed to produce unique intelligence that couldn\u2019t have been obtained through more traditional methods.<\/p>\n

Some former CIA officials, however, insist that waterboarding and other harsh methods have yielded vital intelligence. \u201cI believe that waterboarding was one of the two most effective of the all the harsh techniques (the other being sleep deprivation),\u201d former deputy CIA director Mike Morell wrote in his book \u201cThe Great War of Our Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Human Rights First says a 2006 revision of the Army Field Manual opened the door to tactics that could be viewed as torture. The group said the revision also put unnecessary restrictions on an effective, humane interrogation technique known as \u201cseparation\u201d \u2014 the practice of keeping a detainee away from negative influences of fellow detainees. The practice is not to be confused with \u201cisolation\u201d as a form of punishment or coercion.<\/p>\n

The United Nation\u2019s Committee Against Torture also has expressed specific concerns about two sections of the field manual as it is currently written:<\/p>\n

Appendix M permits detainees to be limited to four hours of sleep every 24 hours for up to 30 days, or more, with permission. Doing this \u201camounts to authorizing sleep deprivation \u2014 a form of ill treatment \u2014 and is unrelated to the aim of … preventing communication among detainees,\u201d the U.N. committee has told the U.S.<\/p>\n

Another section aims at \u201cprolonging the shock of capture by applying goggles or blindfolds and earmuffs to generate a perception of separation.\u201d The U.N. committee said recent scientific evidence indicates this can cause a \u201cstate of psychosis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last year, the State Department said neither section of the manual would be implemented in an abusive way, and that all interrogation practices authorized in the field manual, including those in Appendix M, must be conducted in a way that ensure detainees are treated humanely.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe four-hour (sleep) standard is a minimum standard and it would not allow, for example, 40 continuous hours of interrogation with only four hours of sleep on either end,\u201d the State Department said in a written response to the U.N.\u2019s concerns. \u201cNothing in the Army Field Manual, including Appendix M, authorizes or condones the use of sleep manipulation or sensory deprivation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 A little-known appendix to the Army Field Manual, the government rulebook for interrogations that bans the harsh practices used after the Sept. 11 attacks, still allows sleep deprivation and other sensory techniques that some say amount to a loophole to the U.S. ban on torture. Interrogation professionals and international human rights groups want […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-16657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16657"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=16657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}