Dr. Steven Miles

Former U.S. Sen. Mark Dayton insists his alcoholism (recurrent but treated) and depression (mild and controlled) aren’t debilitating. To a former DFL rival who’s also a physician, that sounds right. Dr. Steven Miles says the effects of both afflictions are overrated in politics.

“Depression is rarely disabling,” Miles tells the Minnesota Independent by email, adding that “only jackals would suggest that it alone renders him unfit for office compared to someone like [U.S. Rep.] Michele Bachmann who appears stone-cold sober.”

Miles concedes that “alcoholism can be disabling for some kinds of activities.” But he says “it is rarely disabling for effective political careers.” He cites as examples the late Minnesota Gov. Karl Rolvaag and “the extraordinary leadership of [the late U.S. Rep.] Wilbur Mills (who ushered in Medicare)”.

Indeed, many times it is alcoholism itself that gets abused — as an excuse for bad behavior.

“Today, when politicians get caught with their pants down, they reveal and blame alcoholism — exaggerating its impact and the corresponding public perception that it impaired their judgment,” Miles says. An early example is the late Sen. Joe McCarthy — “a mean SOB who happened to be an alcoholic.”

Miles is no automatic Dayton apologist. When Dayton and his wallet made a late entry in the 2000 U.S. Senate race, Miles told Minnesota Public Radio that a bank account doesn’t equal a political base, and that Dayton seemed to be running because he had nothing else to do.

But Miles has personal experience with bipolar disorder. His dealings with depression became public when he successfully fought to keep his mental health files out of the hands of the state Board of Medical Practice (pdf), and he remained open about his condition during his 2000 U.S. Senate run.

Miles was a runner-up that year, a second-place finisher in the first two ballots at the state party convention, behind former state Sen. Jerry Janezich, who went on to win endorsement after the ninth ballot but lost to Dayton in the DFL primary.

What were the chances that two people in the DFL’s 2000 field of Senate candidates would suffer from depression?

Actually, pretty good. According to Miles, the lifetime risk of depression is about 10–15 percent, and for alcoholism about 5 percent.

“The nation would lose enormous talent and productivity by sidelining these people,” Miles says.

STATE CAPITOL: Pawlenty South America-bound. Overshooting the Southern United States altogether, the boy from South St. Paul heads to the homeland of the Girl from Ipanema on Saturday. [St. Cloud Times]

MINNEAPOLIS: Ordinance would require businesses to recycle. It’s just a matter of sorting one thing from another, says the manager of a bar called The Library. [Minnesota Daily]

VIRGINIA: “1984” on Chestnut Street? The chief says privacy is too much to expect along the main drag, but some don’t want police to install a surveillance camera there, even with federal subsidy. [Mesabi Daily News via Associated Press]

STATEWIDE: State cuts endanger “Greater Minnesota Physician Factory.” Physician and onetime DFL U.S. Senate aspirant Steven Miles says “Hennepin County Medical Center” is a misnomer. [Star Tribune]

WELCH: Protesters want Native remains buried — not more nuclear waste. Sixty members of the Prairie Island Indian Community rallied against Xcel Energy plans to store more spent nuclear fuel casks. [Rochester Post Bulletin]

MSP INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT: Pilots pled “cockpit distractions.” Northwest Airlines radio transcripts don’t explain how its plane managed to miss what is after all the nation’s 16th-largest metropolitan area. [Associated Press]

A Chinook helicopter flies over Afghanistan (U.S. Army photo)

WASHINGTON — Last year, as Dr. Steven Miles, professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School and faculty member of its Center for Bioethics, was researching the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, he noticed something strange. Although the Department of Defense had in the past issued press releases when detainees died at U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, at some point in 2006, he says, the “entire prisoner death reporting system was turned off in Afghanistan.” Although at that time deaths in Iraq were still being reported, he says, that system was “turned off” at the beginning of 2008.

Miles, a member of the board of the Center for Victims of Torture and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity and America’s War on Terror,” was working on an updated edition of his 2006 book, which documents how physicians and psychologists working for the U.S. military violated the Hippocratic oath and American Medical Association rules by helping the government design and monitor abusive interrogations. The Hippocratic oath requires doctors to consider above all the health of their patients and to do no harm, while an AMA directive prohibits physicians from “providing or withholding any services, substances, or knowledge to facilitate the practice of torture” and obliges doctors to support victims and to “strive to change situations in which torture is practiced.”

Instead, Miles documented, first in the British medical journal the Lancet and then more expansively in his book, physicians actually helped facilitate torture. “The medical system collaborated with designing and implementing psychologically and physically coercive interrogations” in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, he wrote. Death certificates were falsified and military health officers were either reporting instances of torture late, or not reporting them at all, he found. And, he observes in the Appendix to the book’s second edition, titled “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors,” published by University of California Press this year, the military appeared to be using physicians and psychologists to test the reactions of detainees to particular interrogation techniques, which may well violate ethical bans on experimentation on human subjects. Physicians for Human Rights recently released a report documenting similar concerns.

As Miles was working on his book, he realized there were huge gaps in the military’s reporting about the torture, injury and death of detainees in its custody. Although Miles says the Pentagon never reported the deaths of detainees subjected to “extraordinary rendition” — those sent to other countries for interrogation, sometimes under torture — the Pentagon had, at least, been reporting the deaths of some prisoners it acknowledged having in its custody.

Then one day, the press releases stopped. “They just stopped reporting it,” said Miles last week. It couldn’t be that no one died, he said, because “you have a certain expected death rate based on the size of the population. I’ve been able to trace all public death reports and can show when they turned them off.”

Last week, the Washington Independent first reported that the Department of Defense appears to have stopped releasing information about the deaths of detainees in its custody in Afghanistan and Iraq. (It has continued to release them concerning detainees at Guantanamo, most of whom are represented by lawyers.) Despite numerous daily requests for a response from the Pentagon since the middle of last week, the site has still not received any information from the government about whether or why it stopped issuing these reports for its other detention centers abroad.

Miles, meanwhile, has used his findings to write an article about the Pentagon’s failure to disclose detainee deaths and their causes. The paper is now being prepared for publication in the American Journal of Bioethics, a leading bioethics journal and website. In his paper, Miles writes:

In May 2004, shortly after media published photographs of lethal abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, DoD disclosed 22 prisoner deaths; of which 12 (54%) were attributed to natural causes. DOD did not disclose another 67 deaths that occurred during that same period. Only 13 (15%) of the total 89 deaths were due to natural causes. By the end of 2008, 93 of 165 known decedents (56%) are unnamed. Death certificates are available for 37 (22%). Homicides and shelling of prisons are the leading causes of death. DoD has completely suppressed prisoner death reports from Afghanistan since 2004 and adopted a similar policy for Iraq in 2008.

That the government has concealed or delayed reporting on deaths in its custody is nothing new. The New York Times reported in 2004 that the Defense Department had provided incomplete or inaccurate information about deaths of prisoners in its custody. And Human Rights First, a leading human rights legal advocacy organization, in a comprehensive report in 2006 documented similar gaps in the government’s reporting of deaths in U.S. custody.

“Our report found that commanders failed to report deaths in custody,” said Devon Chaffee, advocacy counsel with Human Rights First. “Sometimes they reported them days or weeks later. But there clearly was a reporting problem. Some were simply not reported at all,” she said, although Army regulations require that deaths in U.S. custody be reported within 24 hours.

Human Rights First’s report, Command’s Responsibility, based on its study of autopsy reports and interviews with military personnel, witnesses and physicians, found that between August 2002 and February 2006 nearly 100 detainees had died “while in the hands of U.S. officials in the global ‘war on terror.’” Although the military had deemed 34 of those deaths suspected or confirmed homicides, Human Rights First counted a total of 45 cases where the facts suggested “death as a result of physical abuse or harsh conditions of detention.” What’s more, in almost half the cases surveyed, “the cause of death remains officially undetermined or unannounced.” Overall, the group found, by the beginning of 2006, “eight people in U.S. custody were tortured to death.”

The international Geneva Conventions, which govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, requires each signatory country to report publicly the deaths of detainees in its custody. But because President Bush early on decided that detainees in the “war on terror” are not technically “Prisoners of War” entitled to the protections the Geneva Conventions, the U.S. military has not followed that requirement.

The Obama administration does not appear to have changed the reporting policy, although at least some officials in the administration have declared the “war on terror” over. Still, the Pentagon under President Obama has not resumed regular reporting on the deaths of prisoners in custody, says Miles. The system is “still shut down,” he said. “Obama hasn’t opened it up. It’s just mysterious to me.”

The Washington Independent has called and written to officials in the Defense Department at least six different times in the last week, asking for a response to this claim about its reporting and for a statement of the current policy on reporting detainee deaths. Late yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman confirmed that the DoD issues press releases when detainees die at Guantanamo Bay; the Washington Independent still has not received an answer with regard to the deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Regardless of the DoD policy, however, the result of the suppression of this information is that no one seems to know how many detainees in U.S. custody have died – including how many of those have been murdered or tortured to death – since the “war on terror” began.

Chafee said that Human Rights First and other human rights organizations, as far as she knows, have not had the resources to update their reports to keep an accurate count.

Representatives for the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights said those organizations have not been able to track those numbers, either. Both have sought information from the government related to detainee deaths through the Freedom of Information Act.

Daphne Eviatar is a law reporter for the Washington Independent.

Protestors demonstrate the use of water boarding on volunteer/actor Maboud Ebrahim Zadeh in Washington. (WDCpix)

The Minnesota Independent contacted four outspoken critics of America’s torture policies and practices for reaction to revelations about Bush-era treatment of prisoners. None of them said, “I told you so.” But the truth is … they told us so.

Steven Miles

On Monday, just as the nation’s interest in the torture issue was resurging, Miles’ 2006 book “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors” came out in paperback. The new, updated edition reworks the original subtitle (“Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror”), delves into whether psychologists used interrogations to perform coercive experiments and provides a handy guide for book groups.

Miles, a physician and University of Minnesota professor of bioethics, lauds the Obama administration for releasing four “torture memos” last week, but says that move alone is far from sufficient:

The decision [to release the memos] is another step to restoring international law and the United States’ role as a leader for civil society. However, the task is not done. We need a Truth Commission and an independent prosecutor.

The American Bar Association and state physician and psychologist licensing boards must investigate and sanction health professionals for misconduct. Such sanctions are necessary for us to criticize the health [professionals] of other nations that cooperate with torture and to resume our role in supporting those groups who dare to challenge torturing regimes.

Miles tells the Independent he’s currently focused on researching all the doctors from around the world who have been punished for assisting torture.

Douglas Johnson

Douglas Johnson, executive director at the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), issued a statement Thursday (pdf) applauding President Obama’s stated openness to “investigations of those policymakers and lawyers who authorized torture.”

The Center issued an e-mail alert asking members to urge lawmakers to launch investigations, which includes this message:

It is clear to the world that the U.S. committed torture. It is equally clear that authorizing, ordering or perpetrating torture is illegal. At this point, we urgently need an investigation to determine who authorized and ordered torture. We do not need to strengthen our laws. We need to enforce them; in fact, we are required to as a matter of law. … Whether this is a politically convenient time is not part of the equation.

“Prosecutions tend to strengthen democratic regimes,” Johnson told MnIndy  Wednesday. But he said the center’s clients tend to be mixed on the issue, with some strongly in favor of prosecutions and others who say an apology is what’s needed.

Attitudes toward prosecutions can change during treatment, Johnson said, as victims’ sense of safety slowly returns. CVT’s clients, he said, are “filled with fear”:

The predominate purpose of torture is to create a climate of fear and a culture of fear. … It produces a sense of panic, a brittleness, that makes it difficult to accurately judge what political space is available [in which] to work.

The politics of torture in America is based on warped views. “I don’t think either the media or the people have a very good handle on it,” Johnson said.

We’re hearing a lot from Bush’s people’s perspective. … The question is not “Does torture work?” but “Work for what?” … The focus is on the interrogation chamber instead of the costs we’ve paid as a country.

Johnson offers three ways torture costs America, saying it endangers American personnel in the future, it gives enemies incentive to fight to the death, and it contributes to a drop in approval of the United States by our allies.

America’s turn to torture, in Johnson’s estimation, was the work of “amateurs and a lack of respect for the rule of law.” Referencing World War II, he noted that though the post-9/11 world is scary, “We’re not fighting two wars in Europe and Asia. We did that without resorting to torture.”

Kirk Anderson

That’s a point picked up by Kirk Anderson, a St. Paul-based political cartoonist.

“The Nuremburg trials helped to carve in stone some basic premises about the rule of law, like you don’t get to ignore it when things get rilly rilly bad, even in a national emergency, even if there’s a national emergency with NAZIS, fer krine out loud,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We have apparently forgotten those lessons, and even now spout the Germans’ legal and moral rationalizations. They were only following orders! Somebody higher up said it was okay!”

Late last year Anderson published “Banana Republic,” a book compiling the weekly cartoons he drew for the Star Tribune for more than two years from 2005 to 2007. In the strip, Anderson relentlessly excoriated the Bush administration for treating prisoners as poorly as does the stereotypically repressive regime that controls his fictional Latin American country of Amnesia.

Is Obama’s move “courageous,” as some have said? Anderson responded by e-mail:

I suppose it is. Pretty sad that when your country commits war crimes, it’s “courageous” not to sweep it under the rug. … I am a very cynical, pessimistic guy. But the last eight years, I’m repeatedly astounded that my cynicism is no match for the day-to-day morality of Washington movers and shakers. Just when I think all the scales have fallen from my eyes, I read the morning paper, and realize that more scales are falling into my cereal. …

Anderson isn’t shy about wishing for prosecutions up and down the chain of command:

Of course, the higher-ups must be tried, but we need not gloss over lower level torture bureaucrats. This isn’t a difficult case, the former president and vice president admitted they were accomplices to torture on national TV … . We don’t need a “truth commission” or a “fact-finding commission,” many or most of the facts are already known. We need perpetrators rotting in jail, so this doesn’t happen again. At least not for a good ten years or so. …

But also, we should not let ourselves off the hook. We are all complicit, we all had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Congress, the Democrats, the media, us citizens, we let it happen, and often facilitated it. Part of the reason any accountability is unlikely is that Democrats are complicit, so they’re not real anxious for any hearings either. …

Coleen Rowley

Photo: Jill Brady (The Vigil)

That sense of broader national complicity is on Rowley’s mind as well. She told MnIndy: “Torture cannot be ended by being swept under the rug. And we, the American people, have already been seen as complicit.”

The former FBI agent, one-time DFL congressional candidate and now peace and government-openness activist, has been all over the mediascape, from the New York Times to the Huffington Post, since the torture memos’ release.

Torture is wrong, illegal and it doesn’t work. … The FBI agents should be speaking out right now bc the FBI all along was not a part of it. They knew it was wrong from the start. They started a “war crimes” file. … but all that time they were keeping quiet.

So Rowley said she was encouraged to see an op-ed titled “My tortured decision” in Thursday’s New York Times by Ali Soufan — the former FBI agent who Rowley called on more than a year ago to tell the truth about CIA torture.

“That’s a big deal,” Rowley said. “He specifically counters the things Cheney is lying about in terms of [torture's] effectiveness.”

To Rowley’s way of thinking, Obama is confusing the issue by rejecting “retribution.”

“Retribution” is pejorative term for the penalty phase of the criminal justice system. … He’s jumping over the fact finding phase. The little people, some of them didn’t like this. They didn’t want to do it. There’s a mixture of reasons why lower-end people went along with it. Obama should not be skipping over that.

On the other hand, Rowley said, “I don’t think there’s a lot of excuses for Cheney.”

Rowley recommends what she calls a “two-tiered approach” — congressional committee hearings combined with a special prosecutor’s investigation.

She cites the 1970s congressional committee led by the late Sen. Frank Church as the last to effectively investigate the country’s intelligence agencies and recalls that former Vice President Walter Mondale was a member.

“There have been 11 commissions since the Bush Administration started on intelligence failures. No one cares about these stupid commissions,” Rowley said.

Still, she figures it’s worth a try: “It’s such a historical moment. I think you could get the stellar people who are beyond reproach.” Mondale and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor are two she has in mind.

A Congressional committee should have purview only over non-criminal matters, Rowley said. Leave that to a special prosecutor, who in her view must be named by Attorney General Eric Holder, not Obama.

The president is not supposed to be doing it. Appoint [a special prosecutor] and do not even tell people who it is [for a while]. … If we had a good prosecutor, it couldn’t be reckless. It would take a long, long time.

Miles is the author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror,” and on Sunday he was scheduled to speak more generally on the topic during the adult education time that precedes mass. With a chuckle, he describes the talk, “Torture and the Courage to Be Inconvenienced” [pdf], as “a serious church chat.”

“I was writing it for a religious context, so it’s not like a progressive editorial,” he said. “I do a lot of church chats, so I’m a little taken aback to find this one so controversial.”

The controversy isn’t torture (although St. Joan’s description of the talk said, “Polls show that American Catholics are more likely to endorse torture than the public at large”). In fact, archdiocese communications representative Dennis McGrath commended Miles’ work on the topic, adding, “We’re not anti-Steven Miles.”

Still, Miles notes a sad link. “The interesting thing here is that torture causes abortions,” he said. “Women who are tortured abort during the application of torture. Furthermore, women with PTSD choose abortion after they survive torture.” Plus, it is just the kind of “sanctity of life” issue the church often addresses.

But it’s pro-life or no deal, Miles says. “The position the MCCL is taking is that no voice can address any subject within the church unless that voice is anti-abortion, which would seem to cut the church off from a fair amount of social dialogue.”

In fact, that’s the church’s stated policy, too.The archdiocese’s official statement reads:

This decision was necessitated solely because of Dr. Miles’ public advocacy of abortion, which is fundamentally contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church. It is also consistent with guidance offered by a task force of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at a meeting on Faithful Citizenship in Dallas in 2004. This guidance states that ‘the Catholic community should not provide speaking platforms for those who act in defiance of our basic moral principles.’ The decision is in no way a repudiation of Dr. Miles’ commendable work in the area of torture and torture victims.

Reached by phone late Friday, McGrath acknowledged that Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life had a role in getting the talk shut down. Miles has an inkling, which he calls “pure speculation,” why the organization has it in for him. Several years ago, MCCL was instrumental in getting language added to the Minnesota Department of Health’s materials that linked abortions to the risk of breast cancer. “They got that through the Legislature essentially on a pro-life, anti-choice argument,” he says. “I got it taken out by restructuring the public discussion: that we need a credible health department and that it was too deep a price to pay to sacrifice the credibility of the health department for this political agenda, because of all the other issues we depended on them for for information.” He says Minnesota’s action in pulling the questionable information led several other states to do the same.

The talk will go on. St. Joan’s peace and justice coordinator Julie Madden called up another Catholic institution and asked to use their space. Next Tuesday night, Miles will give a presentation at the Carondelet Center, owned by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, in St. Paul.

Madden wouldn’t comment for this story, except to say, “I will do everything I can to ensure that Dr. Miles’ commitment to ending state-sanctioned torture is heard by as many people as possible.”

A year ago Dr. Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics published a book about medical doctors being complicit with torture proceedings in the U.S. military. Though the book was hardly a best-seller (#120,156 in Amazon.com’s book list), it did create some controversy. For example, “when George Annas of the Boston University School of Public Health reviewed the book, he challenged Miles to make the source documents publicly available.”

Now Miles and the U of M have done just that. According to a U of M press release, those records can be accessed from the home page of the Human Rights Library or directly here.