Maxwell-Gunther Dispatch.com, the web news site for personnel and interested partisans of Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, reported on September 17 that Col. (Dr.) James W. Walter has been awarded the Air Medal “for his meritorious service on delicate assignments providing medical care to enemy detainees.”

From January 2007 to 2009 as the senior detainee movement flight surgeon, he provided 106 combat hours of support to the 14 Joint Task

An important new filing by military JAG defense counsel in the Military Commission proceeding USA v. KSM, et al. challenges the validity of the 2006 MCA, which has been passed in revised form by the Senate as part of its FY 2010 Defense Authorization Act.

An article in today’s Washington Post by Karen de Young (H/T Spencer Ackerman) highlights the determination to race to catastrophe by the Obama administration. In an ever-ending reconsideration and analysis of Afghanistan party, the Obama administration is said to be internally assessing the progress of the Afghan-Pakistan War over the next few weeks.

An extraordinary article by a Harvard lecturer and former Chief of Neuropsychiatry at Guantanamo Bay made the shocking claim that “hard-core zealots” had “brains that are structurally and functionally different from us.” Furthermore, the article stated, 100,000 “zealots” within the Muslim body politic would have to be eliminated, the way “malignant [cancer] cells” are removed from a healthy body.

When Was the Evaluation Written?

The report was almost certainly written in July, not long before it was passed to OLC. It likely was part of a packet of material used to present the “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques,” including waterboarding, as potentially “safe” to use.

There are plenty of indications in the report that Zubaydah had been under observation and interrogated prior to the drafting of the report (emphasis added).

It is clear the evaluation was written specifically to get permission for waterboarding, and not to undertake a serious psychological evaluation of the prisoner. The report lacks details related to relevant past history that any psychologist would find important in a psychological evaluation, e.g., the quality of his family relationships, the existence of prior traumas, his actual work and school history, etc. Hell, the report never even mentions the “subject’s” age. [Correction: it does; it reports he's 31 years old. - JK]

In parts one and two of this series on the origins of the SERE torture program, we examined how unlikely it was that James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, relying on entrepreneurial guile and chutzpah alone, convinced a passive Pentagon and CIA, eager to find some way to get terror intelligence, to buy into their “learned helplessness” interrogation paradigm.

The first installment of this three-part series on the origins of the Mitchell-Jessen torture program concentrated on the insufficiency of reducing our understanding of the spread of torture during the Bush administration to the interventions of just two men. This is essentially the way the story was presented in a 12 August New York Times article by Scott Shane, leaving the question unanswered:

Scott Shane’s new article in the New York Times on the background to the Mitchell-Jessen story may work as a prosecutorial brief, but it presents a narrative about the origins of the SERE-inspired torture program that is misleading in its particulars. As a result, though the article has some interesting new bits of information, and appears to be the result of a great deal of work, it presents an overly simplistic

Joost Meerloo was a Dutch psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who, having fled German-occupied Holland in 1942, and survived torture by the Gestapo in Belgium, made a name for himself in British and U.S. medical establishments. By the early 1950s, he had undertaken an examination of the supposedly new phenomena of “brainwashing.” The latter had made headlines when U.S.