Psyche, Science, and Society

Signs of a third way: Iraq oil workers strike

As we glimpse the unravelling civil war in Iraq that accompanies the brutal United States occupation, I, for one, look for any signs of an alternative to the sectarian frenzy and the puppet government. the Associated Press today reports an oil workers strike. While small, perhaps (hope spring eternal) it symbolizes the beginning of something larger.

Iraq Oil Workers on Strike
By QAIS AL-BASHIR Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq — Hundreds of oil company employees went on strike Tuesday for higher pay, officials said.

The job action cut supplies to power stations and factories as Iraq faces its worst fuel shortage since Saddam Hussein’s 2003 ouster.

About 350 workers from the Iraqi Pipes and Lines Company in the southern city of Basra and another 200 in Nasiriyah, about 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, walked off the job Tuesday morning, according to the head of the workers’ union.

The workers want higher salaries, paid holidays and a share of the profits. Monthly salaries at the company currently range from $130 to $280.

The company runs tankers and pipelines transporting oil and gas from the Shuaiba refinery in Basra to electricity stations, factories and companies in southern Iraq.

Although the strike was likely to add to the current fuel shortage, its effects would be limited, said Oil Ministry spokesman Assim Jihad.

“Definitely that will create a shortage in oil products, but not to a big degree,” Jihad said, adding that refineries at Beiji in northern Iraq and Dora in southern Baghdad were still functioning and able to supply fuel.

Iraq has been plagued by periodic fuel shortages since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. Even though the country has the world’s third-largest proven oil reserves, it is forced to depend on imports because of an acute shortage of refined products such as gasoline, kerosene and cooking gas. Sabotage of pipelines by insurgents, corruption and aging refineries have been blamed.

Iraq’s three main oil refineries _ Dora, Beiji and Shuaiba _ are working at half their capacity, processing only 350,000 barrels per day compared to 700,000 barrels a day before the war.

Add comment August 23rd, 2006

Juan Cole on Bush’s narcissism

In his Informed Comment blog, Juan Cole analyzes President Bush’s Monday press conference in light of the DSM [Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders] criterion for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Shades of my Narcissism, the Public, and the President.

Juan Cole:

Bush said again on Monday that he would keep US troops in Iraq until 2009 and argued that for the US to withdraw would send a bad message to reformers in the region. He said he is concerned about that talk of civil war in Iraq and seemed to admit that he isn’t very happy most of the time about the way things are going, but added that he doesn’t expect to be joyous in wartime. He admitted again that Saddam Hussein did not “order” 9/11, but went on to again link Baathist Iraq to the threat of terrorism against the US, an unproven charge.

I am not a psychiatrist and don’t play one on t.v., so treat what follows as political satire please, and nothing more.

But what strikes me about Bush’s Monday appearance is how consistent it is with what I understand of the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder. Let’s look at it this way:

‘1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).’

Bush is not content to be the most powerful man in the world. He thinks he is on a mission from God, and has decided that he is going to “reform” the Middle East, and turn Middle Easterners into something else. He is the Great Transformer of these other peoples’ lives. The reason he has to stay in Iraq until the end of his presidency (it is all about him) is that he cannot admit that he did not succeed in being the great Transformer of the Middle East, that in fact he screwed up the Middle East royally. Because such an admission of any slightest mistake, much less a major series of failures, would fatally threaten his sense of grandiosity. Thus, he can’t pull troops out of Iraq not because of practical military considerations, but because it would send the wrong signal to regional “reformers,” i.e. Bush’s mini-me’s, the people fulfilling his sense of grandiosity.

Nobody else is in the picture here, just Bush. He doesn’t ask any sacrifice from the US public for the war, as Bill Maher and others have noted. The heroics are his alone. The rest of us should go shopping (so as not to interfere with his self-image as Atlas of the Middle East.)

‘ 2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. ‘

Bush suffers from T. E. Lawrence (”Lawrence of Arabia”) syndrome. Lawrence, despite polite denials, clearly thought that he led the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire during World War I and wrote:

‘ All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant. ‘

Bush, like Lawrence before him, imagines that he is inspiring a people to accomplish things they couldn’t do without him. (That is why he can’t admit that the Lebanese have been having elections for decades, and has to pretend it all started with him.) And all he gets for his inspired Transformation of others’ lives is carping about the expected oil contracts in Iraq not being there. There is even prickliness from the French. Lawrence might have sympathized.

3. Believes he is “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions) 4. Requires excessive admiration 5. Has a sense of entitlement.

He is the Decider. He doesn’t need Security Council resolutions to start wars. He doesn’t need warrants for wire taps. He is entitled. He is the War President (never mind that he chose to go to war in Iraq and so made himself into the war president, and that the war presidency would be over with by now if he were any good at it.)

‘ 6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends. 7. Lacks empathy’

Bush only “worries” that eventually there may be a civil war in Iraq. He doesn’t admit that he made a whole country of 25 million people into guinea pigs, and that as a result 3,000 are dying a month in civil war violence of the most brutal kind. ‘

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him 9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes. ‘

Saying that he can understand that having over 2600 of our troops come home in body bags and over 8,000 come home seriously wounded, with limbs gone or brain or spinal damage, is a cause of “anxiety” to the American “psyche” is patronizing. He knows better about why this has to be. The inferior people are a little upset, but that is because they don’t understand that he is the Transformer. What they’re upset about is just the side effect of the Transformation. They don’t believe. They can’t see the Transformation before their eyes. They are inferior.

Add comment August 23rd, 2006

American Psychological Association and torture: A picture worth a thousand words

Larry Wright of the Aug. 14th Detroit News perfectly captures the charade that went on last week at the Convention of the American Psychological Association regarding psychologists and torture:

I was out of the country (in Australia and Fiji) at the time of the convention and did not have an opportunity to closely examine what went on there. But it is clear that the APA reaffirmed its existing policy that psychologists should not participate in torture. However, they did not specify clearly what activities constitute torture, nor did they ban psychologists’ participation in coercive interrogations. On the definition issue: Is waterboarding torture? Is prolonged sesory deprivations? How about prolonged heat or cold or lound noises? They do not say. In legalistic jargon they state:

“BE IT RESOLVED, that the term “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” means treatment or punishment by any psychologist that is of a kind that, in accordance with the McCain Amendment, would be prohibited by the Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984.”

Note the key “as defined in the United States Reservations, Declarations and Understandings to the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Forms of Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment done at New York, December 10, 1984” phrase. I have yet to make a careful examination of these Reservations, as I haven’t been able to locate them [can anyone send them to me, or a relevant analysis?]. But it appears to be the language used in the so-called McCain Amendment that appeared to ban torture by the United States but was immediately proclaimed to be null and void by President Bush, when he said in his signing statement he would decide if and when it should be followed.

Benjamin Greenberg, on his Hungry Blues blog discusses the history of the McCain Amendment and its apparent weakening of the definition of the definition of torture and abuse from those previously existing.

More importantly, as Greenberg clearly points out, the APA did not vote to forbid psychologists participating in coercive interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere. As Greenberg explains:

While yesterday’s APA statement “condemns any involvement by psychologists in torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” there is no mention of BSCTs [Behavioral Science Consultation Teams]. There is no explicit prohibition against psychologists continuing in this “consulting” role.

Let’s connect the dots.

The DOJ and the DOD work to maintain intentionally vague definitions of torture that allow for Category II interrogation techniques. The APA resolves to oppose torture but continue allowing psychologists to participate in interrogations. Interrogations revolve around Category II techniques, which are determined and orchestrated by BSCTs. The only Behavioral Scientists allowed on the Consultation Teams are psychologists. Psychologist participation in interrogations is essential to the continuation of current US torture policy.

Thus, last week’s “victory” at the APA Convention is largely a figleaf used as a PR stunt to blunt criticism of psychologist participation in coercive interrogations. Nothing substantive has changed, so far.

4 comments August 20th, 2006

Excellent discussion of Lebanon by Shalom

Stephen R. Shalom has an excellent Lebanon War Question and Answer article on ZNet. It addresses such questions as:

“Doesn’t Israel have the right to defend itself?”

“But can any country accept having rockets raining down on its citizens?”

“But doesn’t Hezbollah place its fighters and its weapons amid civilians, making Hezbollah — and not Israel — responsible for any civilian deaths?”

and,

“But didn’t Israel withdraw from Gaza as the first step in giving the Palestinians a state?”

Read it for a rationale discussion of the complex issues, and an antidote to the propaganda from all sides.

1 comment August 10th, 2006

Israelis deliberately miss targets

Israel is a complex society. At the same time the country is ruthlessly attacking Lebanese civilians with all the weapons of modern mass murder available to modern states, some Israeli pilots are resisting by deliberately missing their targets in order to avoid deliberately killing civilians, according to Democracy Now!

YONATAN SHAPIRA: Yeah. I just spoke to some friends in the Air Force, an F-15 pilot, and he told me an interesting thing. He told me that since the third day of this war, they are waiting for Bush to stop the war. They also understand that they are playing some kind of role in this whole big war of interests between major forces, not just Israel and not just Hezbollah.

Also he tells me that they are not counting anymore on intelligence. Sometimes they see — you know, they get the coordinates, and they see a house in their target, and they prefer to shoot beside the house, because they don’t know. Maybe there are civilians, maybe there are innocent people sleeping there. Sometimes this intelligence are being based on the fact that Israel told those civilians to evacuate their villages, and then afterwards, they just tell the pilots to bomb some houses then. And I know that more and more pilots are feeling very, very uncomfortable with this situation. And we are waiting for the first pilot to refuse to do these crimes and to help us, Israelis and Arabs in this region, to stop this crazy war.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, Yonatan Shapira, this is very significant, what the Guardian newspaper was talking about and also quoting you about this: at least two Israeli fighter pilots deliberately missing bombing targets in Lebanon, because they were concerned they were being ordered to bomb civilians.

YONATAN SHAPIRA: Yeah, I know that — I guess there are several of them. I spoke with one of them, who told me especially of one case that he just got a target — it was a house on a hill — and he just didn’t want to shoot at the house, and he shot beside the house, and later on, the commanders told him that it’s okay. And my question is, you know, if they can give pilots a target, and later on when the pilot is not shooting the house and telling him that it’s okay, you know, what is all this idea behind those missions, if, you know, you can shoot the house, you can not shoot the house? I think there is a problem, you know, spilling behind all these missions that these pilots are getting.

And just so you know, as pilot, I’m not a fighter pilot. I was a helicopter pilot, and I didn’t shoot anyone, but I know, just like most of the people can understand, a fighter pilot is flying up in the sky, thousands of feet above the ground. He cannot see people. He cannot see — he can maybe see some dots, something on the screen inside the cockpit, but he cannot know whether there are civilians or enemies, or, you know, that the truck is bringing missiles or bringing kids. And if now we see that pilots cannot trust the system, I think it’s a sign that maybe, maybe in the near future, some of them will speak out, not just quietly and continue to serve, but to speak out to the world to help us to stop this war.

Other Israeli soldiers are resisting going to Lebanon:

DAN TAMIR: Well, I have already twice told my commanders that I’m not willing to carry out such mobilization orders. The first time was in 2001, and the second time in 2004. That time, it was considering going into military regime at the Occupied Territories in Judea and Samaria. Personally, I refused twice, and I was sent twice to jail for one month every time, although it doesn’t have to be like this. Some people just say, “We are not going,” and their commanders just let them go. I must emphasize maybe that going to jail is not some kind of an aim for itself. Some people are sent to jail, but many others are being just dismissed. This is why the actual number of refuseniks, of people who refuse to take actions, is actually much higher than the number of people actually sitting in jail.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean?

DAN TAMIR: I mean that there are many people, many soldiers and officers, who say, “We are not going,” and since the Israeli military is the — how should I put it? — doesn’t have the strongest disciplines, many people are just being dismissed by their officers telling them, “Okay, don’t come this year. We’ll call you in a few months,” just in order not to make such a big fuss out of this whole issue.

If only Hezbollah fighters would start refusing to fire missiles into civilian areas in Lebanon. We can dream that the fighters on both sides wouls refuse to continue their kiling. Sometimes, just sometimes, dreams come true…

Add comment August 10th, 2006

Serving in Iraq bad for your thinking

From the New York Times:

August 2, 2006

Study Links Military Duty in Iraq to Lapse in Some Mental Ability

By BENEDICT CAREY

A large study of Army troops found that soldiers recently returned from duty in Iraq were highly likely to show subtle lapses in memory and in ability to focus, a deficit that often persisted for more than two months after they arrived home, researchers are reporting today.

But the returning veterans also demonstrated significantly faster reaction times than soldiers who had not been deployed, suggesting that some mental abilities had improved.

The slight deficit, often unnoticed by the soldiers, could make it difficult for some of them to learn and remember information as quickly as they are accustomed to, the authors said. These lapses are more common but less disabling than emotional reactions to combat like depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers said, and in many cases probably reflect a natural adaptation to life in Iraq, with the reaction time strengthening at the expense of some other mental functions.

“We’re talking about a level of change that is not alarming and shouldn’t send people running to the doctor, but changes that some may notice when they are trying to perform in very demanding contexts” like a challenging civilian job, said the lead researcher, Jennifer J. Vasterling of the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System and Tulane University.

The study, appearing in The Journal of the American Medical Association, is the first to track carefully such changes in mental functioning over time in soldiers who deployed to a war zone and those who did not.

Researchers tried to measure similar changes in troops after the Persian Gulf war of 1991. Many of those veterans, reporting chronic problems with concentration, suspected that they had been exposed to toxic gases that might have been a cause. But investigators had too little information about them from before they went to war to make meaningful comparisons.

Dr. Andy Morgan, a psychiatrist at Yale, said the new findings, when further tracked over time, could help doctors predict which soldiers will adapt quickly to civilian life and which will have chronic problems adjusting. “This kind of data should help us find early markers of trouble,” Dr. Morgan said, “and help us learn how to intervene if someone is headed for pathology.”

The research team led by Dr. Vasterling administered a battery of mental tests to 654 male and female soldiers who served in Iraq at various times from April 2003 to May 2005. The tests, more than 20 in all, were given before and after deployment, and included one in which participants had to pay close attention to a computer screen as letters flashed by, waiting to flag each F they saw. In another test, they were asked to memorize simple diagrams and try to recreate them 30 minutes later.

The soldiers did significantly worse in tasks that measured spatial memory, verbal memory and their ability to focus than did 307 soldiers who had not been deployed to Iraq.

But the returning soldiers scored about the same as their peers on most of the other tests. And they outperformed those who had not been deployed in a test of reaction time, measured in the fraction of a second it takes to spot a computer icon and react. This finding in itself suggests that the soldiers’ minds had adapted to the dangerous, snap-judgment conditions of war, experts said.

The deficits the soldiers showed “are perhaps better considered as essentially normal coping experiences,” Matthew Hotopf of King’s College London and Simon Wessely of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, also of London, wrote in an editorial accompanying the article.

In effect, the brain, like the rest of the body, builds the muscles it most uses, sometimes at the expense of other abilities, say psychologists who study short-term memory and concentration. If reaction time is more critical to survival than verbal memory, the brain will devote its limited resources to that mental quickness.

Living for months at a time on adrenaline also affects brain function, soldiers and psychiatrists say. In a coming paper, Dr. Morgan and a team of other researchers found that elite soldiers under intense stress performed no better than pre-teenage children in tests of spatial memory. They recovered their abilities when the threat had subsided.

“We think this prefrontal brain area involved in organization and complex spatial memory is knocked out temporarily by high levels of adrenaline,” Dr. Morgan said.

Add comment August 3rd, 2006

The most ridiculous message I’ve ever received

Does anyone know if these bozos are for real?

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it has come to our attention that you have used the term LISTSERV(R) to describe electronic mail distribution lists in the article, “Psychologists, Guantanamo and Torture”, published in The Baltimore Chronicle, August 2, 2006. Unfortunately, that term is a registered trademark and should only be used to refer to our e-mail list management software product.

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Add comment August 3rd, 2006

A Profession Struggles to Save Its Soul: Psychologists, Guantanamo and Torture

My newest article, A Profession Struggles to Save Its Soul: Psychologists, Guantanamo and Torture is now available on CounterPunch.

Excerpt:

For years, the varied mental health professions in the United States have been fighting turf wars. Psychiatrists tried to keep psychologists from being able to conduct therapy or, more recently, from prescribing psychotropic medications. Psychologists fought for rights to conduct these treatments. Psychologists, in turn, fought the attempts of their Masters-level colleagues for professional recognition. Social workers, mental health counselors, and psychoanalysts each fight for recognition against opposition from others.
These battles are fought out through traditional legislative lobbying and pressure. They are, however, also fought through showing one group’s value in furthering the interests of the powerful and through organized representatives of each profession maintaining access to non-legislative corridors of power. Thus, keeping in favor with the powerful and not alienating them can be a central aspect of a profession’s strategy of advancement.

In this decades-long struggle, the profession of psychology has tried to distinguish itself in various ways. One of these ways is through emphasizing its scientific character. Thus, representatives of organized psychology have been at pains to demonstrate the value of the “science of psychology” to the powerful in industry and in government, including the military and the national security establishment. In addition, psychology’s value to the education establishment has been emphasized, as has its value in industrial relations and marketing. World War II provided many opportunities for psychology to demonstrate its value to the war effort including through the screening of soldiers, the development of propaganda techniques to motivate the home front and to undermine enemy morale, the use of human factors engineering to improve airplanes, and the treatment of psychological casualties from the war.

The post-World War II development of a militarized national security state provided many further opportunities for psychology to garner attention to its contributions to the art of propaganda and the development of useable high-tech weapons through human factors engineering, among numerous others.

One particularly disturbing area where psychologists were attempting to demonstrate their value was in the development of sophisticated techniques of interrogation that could obtain information from unwilling captives through the application of behavior modification techniques based on psychological science. Historian Alfred W. McCoy has shed light in this area in his recent book A Question of Torture and in numerous articles and interviews. He documents the decades-long CIA effort to utilized psychological expertise to develop forms of torture that could break down the personality of detainees, rendering them, it was hoped, incapable of withholding desired information. Many of these technique were utilized during the Vietnam conflict and in the various brutal U.S.-supported counterinsurgency campaigns in Latin American in the 1970s and 1980s….

Add comment August 2nd, 2006