Yale will train US Special Forces in interrogation techniques using immigrants

February 20, 2013

yaledailynews.com

Following a flurry of media attention concerning a possible military training center at the Yale School of Medicine, the University issued a statement Tuesday afternoon maintaining that the potential program would meet appropriate academic standards but also denying that it has yet been formally proposed.
School of Medicine psychiatry professor Charles Morgan told the News in January that he hopes to propose the creation of a center at the Medical School in cooperation with the U.S. Army Special Operations Forces called the U.S. Special Operations Command Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience, which would teach soldiers interview techniques. Yale’s statement said the School of Medicine has not formally proposed opening the center, and denied media reports that the training facility will teach interrogation tactics and that the research will take advantage of minority populations in New Haven.
Michael Siegel MED ’90, a donor for the Medical School, criticized the center in an open letter to Medical School Dean Robert Alpern on Monday morning, arguing that the center will violate the mission of the School of Medicine by fulfilling military objectives, and the letter grabbed the attention of the national media.
“In short, the center, if established, would be designed in the best traditions of Yale research and scholarship,” the Office of Public Affairs and Communications said in the release. “Public reports stating otherwise are premature and based on speculation and incomplete information.”
Morgan would direct the proposed center, using a $1.8-million grant from the Department of Defense. The center would ultimately function to teach Army soldiers interviewing techniques Morgan developed, he said in January.
Morgan also told the News in January that the Yale Office of Grant and Contract Administration is working with the Psychiatry Department to finish paperwork securing the grant funding, which was delayed due to both congressional budget issues and the need for more time to work out funding for administrative expenses. Morgan declined to comment for this article.
“No matter what I say, it doesn’t seem to quell rumors,” Morgan added.
Alpern told the News that the public would normally not know about ideas at the phase of development before a formal proposal but exposure from a Jan. 7 New Yorker Magazine article profiling a possible instructor for the center, theatrical pickpocket Apollo Robbins, exposed the plan to national attention.
Siegel said he sent the open letter to Alpern after learning about the proposed center on Monday, and he followed up with a second letter after speaking with Morgan Tuesday morning. He will stop donating to the Medical School, he said, because the proposed center’s goal of furthering military objectives contradicts the Medical School’s mission to improve health and further medical research. In addition, Siegel described the center as unethical because it will allow soldiers to practice interview techniques on New Haven immigrants — information that Siegel said he found in the Yale Herald.
But the statement declares that the interviewing techniques envisioned for the center are both central to the psychiatry discipline and part of medical student and resident education. According to the University, interviewees will be volunteers from diverse ethnic groups and will be protected by oversight from Yale’s Human Research Protection Program.
Alpern said he finds the center to be ethical because it will help the armed forces by building on research from within the Medical
School.
Siegel said his donations to the Medical School “don’t amount to a lot of money.” His intentions, he added, were not to use wealth to make a point, but to show the School of Medicine that alumni may feel alienated by the decision to open the center.
The proposed center has also incited an online petition, titled “Don’t Open a Department of Defense Training Center at Yale,” criticizing the University for housing the center. As of press time, the petition had 396 signatures.
University President Richard Levin declined to comment about the center beyond the statement OPAC released.
The proposed U.S. Special Operations Command Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience would break the year into trimesters, teaching up to 20 soldiers per session.

Yale's Proposed Interrogation Center

Alexa L. McMahon

nationalinterest.org

February 21, 2013

 

If a 1.8 million dollar Department of Defense grant goes through, Yale will soon establish (under the U.S. Special Operations Command) the Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience to train Green Berets in "interview techniques." What kind of interview techniques? That depends on who you ask. The interviewees? Paid members of New Haven's immigrant community.
Psychiatry professor Charles A. Morgan III, the proposed leader of the project, says that by practicing on immigrants it will teach soldiers a new "cross-cultural" approach to intelligence gathering that would replace more violent interrogation-style techniques. Critics argue that the project will victimize New Haven's large immigrant population and is inconsistent with medical ethics. Natalie Batraville and Alex Lew of the Yale Daily News asked on Friday: "Is there an assumption in Morgan’s desire to use more ‘authentic,’ brown interviewees as test subjects, that brown people lie differently from whites—and even more insidiously, that all brown people must belong to the same “category” of liar?"
The Yale Herald's original report about the center stated that by exposing trainees to "Moroccans, Columbians [sic], Nepalese, Ecuadorians, and others" it would help inform their sensibilities about when people from other countries were lying. This seems to be compounded by a paper co-authored by Morgan in 2010 with two other Yale psychiatry professors. According to the Huffington Post, "That research, funded by a grant from the Department of Defense, used 40 native Arabic speaking men 'self-identified as being conservative Muslims' to determine whether their heart rates changed when they were asked to lie."
While the center does not yet exist, these questions have already sparked a firestorm regarding the purpose of the proposed center and the role of academia in shaping future soldiers. Either way, the proposed use of the immigrant population in this training experiment certainly appears exploitive. After all, this being a university campus, why can't they practice these nonviolent techniques on broke college kids who need to make a buck? Or would that damage the realism of interviewing someone who looks more like a "terrorist"?

Yale Professor Under Fire For Proposed Special Forces Training, 'Interrogation' Research

Matt Sledge

huffingtonpost.com

 

02/20/2013

A Yale University professor currently being criticized for his recent proposal to train U.S. Special Forces in interview techniques has previously conducted research on how to tell whether Arab Muslim men are lying.
Psychiatry Associate Professor Charles A. Morgan III has proposed creating a center on the Yale campus that would teach up to 60 Green Berets per year in what he calls "cross-cultural" interviewing techniques. Critics say the plan is a violation of medical ethics and an affront to the immigrants who would be used as interview subjects.
The controversy began when a student newspaper, the Yale Herald, reported that Morgan would use $1.8 million in Department of Defense grants to create the the Center of Excellence for Operational Neuroscience. Slated to open as early as April, the center would operate as a joint venture between the United States Special Operations Command and Yale's School of Medicine.
The Herald reported that the center would help special forces soldiers to learn when subjects from other countries were lying by exposing them to "Moroccans, Columbians [sic], Nepalese, Ecuadorians, and others."
Students fumed that the project would be tantamount to an "interrogation" training center that would "target people of color -- brown people exclusively."
"Is there an assumption in Morgan’s desire to use more 'authentic,' brown interviewees as test subjects, that brown people lie differently from whites -- and even more insidiously, that all brown people must belong to the same 'category' of liar?" students Nathalie Batraville and Alex Lew asked in a letter to the Yale Daily News.
In an email to The Huffington Post, Morgan responded that there are "no plans to have anything to do at all with interrogations, interrogators etc." His research would focus, he said, on how to "prevent burnout, prevent or protect them [soldiers] from the effects of long deployments, and whether we could actually teach them better communication skills like the ones we try to teach medical students."
All of that, he added, "has somehow been turned into some nefarious plot to use the soldiers and exploit immigrant populations of New Haven."
Special Operations Command did not respond to a request for comment. Yale University declined to respond to specific questions about Morgan's proposed center, including its medical purpose. But in a statement released Tuesday, the university said, "Such a center would only be established and funded after rigorous academic and ethical review, and only if its goals are consistent with the University's educational and research missions, and its research is determined to be conducted to the appropriate stringent standards."
A student petition aiming to prevent the center from opening has backed off the claim that Morgan's center would teach interrogation. But critics still say that Morgan's response brings little comfort -- and they point to concerns about the professor's past research.
"Why should the School of Medicine lend its good name to a training program that is basically just an Army training program?" asked Michael Siegel, a graduate of Yale Medical who is now a professor at Boston University's School of Public Health.
Siegel wrote an open letter on Monday vowing not to donate to the School of Medicine if plans for the center go forward. He says he has heard from numerous other alumni who agree with him. "The medical school that I'm a graduate of, I don't want to turn into a program to train military personnel to help achieve military objectives," he said.
Morgan has a long history of cooperation with the military. He has worked with military Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) course trainers, researched post-traumatic stress disorder, and in 2011 he was deployed to Afghanistan with the Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group as an "operational adviser."
Siegel pointed to a paper that Morgan co-authored in 2010, with two other Yale psychiatry professors, as particularly concerning. That research, funded by a grant from the Department of Defense, used 40 native Arabic speaking men "self-identified as being conservative Muslims" to determine whether their heart rates changed when they were asked to lie.
"This is clearly the development of advanced interrogation, and it would have no use whatsoever in any setting other than the questioning of suspected terrorists," claimed Siegel.
Morgan's research has previously been cited as evidence that the so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques employed by the CIA under President George W. Bush's administration are not effective, and he criticized those tactics in a 2007 New York Times article.

Senator says 4,700 killed in US drone strikes

By Dan De Luce (AFP) – 2 days ago 

Feb 20, 2013

WASHINGTON — A US senator has said an estimated 4,700 people, including some civilians, have been killed in the contentious bombing raids of America's secretive drone war, local media reported Wednesday.
It was the first time a lawmaker or any government representative had referred to a total number of fatalities in the drone strikes, which have been condemned by rights groups as extrajudicial assassinations.
The toll from hundreds of drone-launched missile strikes against suspected Al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere has remained a mystery, as US officials refuse to publicly discuss any details of the covert campaign.
But Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch supporter of the drone raids, openly cited a number that exceeds some independent estimates of the death toll.
"We've killed 4,700," Graham was quoted as saying by the Easley Patch, a local website covering the small town of Easley in South Carolina.
"Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of Al-Qaeda," Graham told the Easley Rotary Club.
Graham's office did not dispute his reported remarks but suggested that he had not divulged any official, classified government figure.
A spokesman told AFP that the senator "quoted the figure that has been publicly reported and disseminated on cable news."
His remark was unprecedented, as US officials have sometimes hinted at estimates of civilian casualties but never referred to a total body count.
"Now this is the first time a US official has put a total number on it," said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
If there was an official death toll estimate, it would be classified as secret, he added, raising the prospect that Graham could have broken secrecy laws.
Several organizations have tried to calculate how many militants and civilians may have been killed in drone strikes since 2004 but have arrived at a wide range of numbers.
The figure cited by Graham matches the high end of a tally by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It says the number killed in drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia is between 3,072 and 4,756.
The Washington-based New America Foundation says there have been 350 US drone strikes since 2004, most of them during Barack Obama's presidency. And the foundation estimates the death toll at between 1,963 and 3,293, with 261 to 305 civilians killed.
US intelligence agencies and the White House have refused to divulge details about the strikes, which are officially termed classified, but officials have suggested that few if any civilians have been killed inadvertently.
In hearings this month on the nominee to lead the CIA, John Brennan, Senator Dianne Feinstein said she understood that the number of civilians killed was in the "single digits."
Despite criticism from lawmakers and rights advocates who have questioned the secrecy and the legality of the drone attacks, Graham defended Obama's reliance on the unmanned, robotic aircraft.
"It's a weapon that needs to be used," Graham said. "It's a tactical weapon. A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle that is now armed."
Drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere are covert attacks overseen by the CIA, while bombing runs by drones in Afghanistan fall under the US military's authority and are not cloaked in secrecy.
The Obama administration has insisted the "targeted killings" are "a last resort" against those plotting to attack the United States but who cannot be captured.
Opponents, however, say drone strikes amount to extrajudicial assassinations that sow resentment among local populations and lack oversight by Congress or courts.
Obama acknowledged for the first time this month that Americans needed more than just his word to be assured he was not misusing his powers in waging a secret drone war overseas.

Michael Moore: '5 Broken Cameras' Oscar nominee detained at LAX, threatened with deportation

It looks like it's a bumpy start for Emad Burnat this week

Hitfix

By Kristopher Tapley Wednesday, Feb 20, 2013

Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/michael-moore-5-broken-cameras-oscar-nominee-detained-at-lax-threatened-with-deportation#3ePd7WRBdZAk5jmq.99

"Emad Burnat, Palestinian director of Oscar nominated '5 Broken Cameras,' was held tonight by immigration at LAX as he landed to attend the Oscars," documentary filmmaker and Academy branch governor Michael Moore Tweeted to his 1.4 million followers this evening. "Emad, his wife and 8-year-old son were placed in a holding area and told they didn't have the proper invitation on them to attend the Oscars."
According to Moore, Burnat texted him for help after being detained. "Apparently the Immigration & Customs officers couldn't understand how a Palestinian could be an Oscar nominee," Moore continued. "I called Academy officials who called lawyers. I told Emad to give the officers my phone number and to say my name a couple of times."
Moore also stated that Burnat's producing the Oscar invitation "wasn't good enough" and that the nominee was being threatened with deportation.
"He was certain they were going to deport him," Moore said. "But not if I had anything to do about it…After one and a half hours, they decided to release him and his family and told him he could stay in LA for the week and go to the Oscars. Welcome to America."

Burnat's film, which he co-directed with Israeli Guy Davidi, is the first Palestinian documentary ever nominated for an Oscar. It is the result of Burnat's coverage of peaceful Palestinian protests in a small village in the West Bank that frequently turn into physical altercations with Israeli soldiers.
Moore said Burnat later told him, "It's nothing I'm not used to…When you live under occupation, with no rights, this is a daily occurrence."
So consider it a bumpy start indeed for what should have been a fun week in Southern California basking in the glow of awards recognition.
"5 Broken Cameras" earned the Cinema Eye Honor in January for non-fiction filmmaking.
The 85th Academy Awards will be held this Sunday.

UPDATE: Emad Burnat has released the following statement:
"Last night, on my way from Turkey to Los Angeles, CA, my family and I were held at US immigration for about an hour and questioned about the purpose of my visit to the United States. Immigration officials asked for proof that I was nominated for an Academy Award® for the documentary 5 BROKEN CAMERAS and they told me that if I couldn't prove the reason for my visit, my wife Soraya, my son Gibreel and I would be sent back to Turkey on the same day.

"After 40 minutes of questions and answers, Gibreel asked me why we were still waiting in that small room. I simply told him the truth: 'Maybe we'll have to go back.' I could see his heart sink.

"Although this was an unpleasant experience, this is a daily occurrence for Palestinians, every single day, throughout [t]he West Bank. There are more than 500 Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks, and other barriers to movement across our land, and not a single one of us has been spared the experience that my family and I experienced yesterday. Ours was a very minor example of what my people face every day."

Read more at http://www.hitfix.com/in-contention/michael-moore-5-broken-cameras-oscar-nominee-detained-at-lax-threatened-with-deportation#3ePd7WRBdZAk5jmq.99