Psyche, Science, and Society

Abusive interrogations: A defining difference between psychiatrists and psychologists

CounterPunch has my new article, Abusive Interrogations: A Defining Difference Between Psychiatrists and Psychologists. I’ve reproduced it here:

Ever since the United States government decided to deviate from accepted international and American standards of treatment of prisoners of war and other detainees in its Global War on Terror, the participation of health professionals in coercive interrogations of detainees has posed a fundamental moral issue for these, supposedly “helping,” professions. Unlike the American Psychiatric Association and the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association considers it acceptable for its members to participate in coercive interrogations at Guantanamo and the various other American detention centers around the world. [For those unfamiliar with the differences among mental health professions, psychiatrists are specialist medical doctors whereas psychologists are not medical doctors and receive a doctoral degree in psychology.]

American Psychiatric Association President Steven S. Sharfstein took the lead in getting that organization to change its policies. Last summer he delivered his Presidential Address at the organization’s May 2006 conference. This address has some very important and pertinent words on the issue. To a psychologist, especially disturbing is his use of the issue as a defining difference between the two, sometimes collaborating and sometimes competing, professions:

We must also exercise vigilance over our other core values. When I read in the New England Journal of Medicine about psychiatrists participating in the interrogation of Guantanamo detainees, I wrote to the Assistant Secretary for Health in the Department of Defense expressing serious concern about this practice. In mid-October I found myself on a Navy jet out of Andrews Air Force Base, along with the top health leadership in the military and other leaders from medical and psychological organizations, on a 3-hour trip to Guantanamo Bay. We were given an intensive 6-hour tour of the prison and briefed thoroughly on interrogation methods and the involvement of Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, known as BSCTs (pronounced “biscuits”) in the process.

We were introduced to two psychologists on these teams, and we asked pointed questions about their practice and involvement in giving advice during interrogations. We were reassured repeatedly that although there may have been various “stress techniques” used in the past on detainees, today’s interrogations focused on building rapport with detainees, as positive relationships were much more effective in gaining good information than anxiety-inducing stress that could rapidly evolve into frank torture.

Not good enough. After returning to Andrews, we began a spirited 3-hour discussion over dinner. I found myself looking eye to eye with top Pentagon brass-they are much taller than I am, but we were sitting down. I told the generals that psychiatrists will not participate in the interrogation of persons held in custody. Psychologists, by contrast, had issued a position statement allowing consultations in interrogations.

If you were ever wondering what makes us different from psychologists, here it is. This is a paramount challenge to our ethics and our Hippocratic training. Judging from the record of the actual treatment of detainees, it is the thinnest of thin lines that separates such consultation from involvement in facilitating deception and cruel and degrading treatment. Innocent people being released from Guantanamo-people who never were our enemies and had no useful information in the War on Terror-are returning to their homes and families bearing terrible internal scars. Our profession is lost if we play any role in inflicting these wounds.

It was clear to me that the military was not of the same mind on the subject, although within their ranks many good doctors are struggling with conflicting ethical pressures. There has been debate within our association on this topic, but we must be uncompromising about our standards in terms of working with military authorities when we are not serving a healing role.
I urge those of you who are interested in this topic to attend a special Presidential symposium on Wednesday, chaired by Dr. Paul Appelbaum and myself, when top psychiatric forensic psychiatrists and Army leaders will engage in a discussion with each other and the audience as we, as a profession, try to alter the debate that now rages on within the Administration.

As President Sharfstein looked eye to eye with Pentagon brass, then American Psychological Association President Ronald Levant was along for the trip to Guantanamo. While the psychiatrists’ President told the brass “that psychiatrists will not participate in the interrogation of persons held in custody,” here is what the psychologists’ President had to say:

” ‘I accepted this offer to visit Guantanamo because I saw the invitation as an important opportunity to continue to provide our expertise and guidance for how psychologists can play an appropriate and ethical role in national security investigations. Our goals are to ensure that psychologists add value and safeguards to such investigations and that they are done in an ethical and effective manner that protects the safety of all involved,’ stated Dr. Levant upon his return.

‘This trip gave me an opportunity to ask questions and observe a brief snapshot of the Guantanamo facility first hand,’ Levant stated. ‘As APA’s work in studying the issues presented by our country’s national security needs continues, this trip was another opportunity for the Association to inform and advise the process.’ “

As a psychologist who has had his share of tension with psychiatrists, it deeply saddens me to admit that President Sharfstein has it correct. What distinguishes the two professions is that psychiatrists have taken a moral position, at the cost of a potential loss of access to top military decision-makers and funding-providers, while the leadership of psychologists, in contrast, have put access and, potentially, funding, above taking a moral stand on the perversions of the War on Terror. In the process of protecting this access, the psychological association has regularly used deception and bad faith, trying to argue that participation in interrogations is, indeed, ethical.

Members of the psychological association have initiated efforts to change its policies. Perhaps realizing that psychologists are becoming the butt of jokes among professionals as medical doctors, psychiatrists, and anthropologists all take moral positions will motivate more of the association’s membership to actively reject their leadership’s trading morality and human decency for access to the powerful. When, at last, the organization’s support for abusive interrogations is changed, the members should push on to an independent, thorough, public investigation of the multiple sordid links between the psychological association and the military-security establishment. Perhaps then the differences between psychiatrists and psychologists can be refocused upon issues of best practices rather than worst practices.

2 comments December 12th, 2006

Microchip implanting: A generation is all they need

Kevin Haggerty in the Toronto Star shares my concern that surveillance technology is becoming omnipresent and sets up the conditions for a tyranny greater than the world has ever known. [A generation is all they need] The particular technology he deals with the implanting of microchips in people, allowing their movements to be identified and recorded. This technology already exists and is in use:

A select group of people are already “chipped” with devices that automatically open doors, turn on lights, and perform other low-level miracles. Prominent among such individuals is researcher Kevin Warwick of Reading University in England; Warwick is a leading proponent of the almost limitless potential uses for such chips.

Other users include the patrons of the Baja Beach Club in Barcelona, many of whom have paid about $150 (U.S.) for the privilege of being implanted with an identifying chip that allows them to bypass lengthy club queues and purchase drinks by being scanned. These individuals are the advance guard of an effort to expand the technology as widely as possible.

From this point forward, microchips will become progressively smaller, less invasive, and easier to deploy. Thus, any realistic barrier to the wholesale “chipping” of Western citizens is not technological but cultural. It relies upon the visceral reaction against the prospect of being personally marked as one component in a massive human inventory.

Haggerty outlines the likely scenario whereby such implanting will become routine, even required, as the cultural barrier is overcome:

n the West, chips will first be implanted in members of stigmatized groups. Pedophiles are the leading candidate for this distinction, although it could start with terrorists, drug dealers, or whatever happens to be that year’s most vilified criminals. Short-lived promises will be made that the technology will only be used on the “worst of the worst.” In fact, the wholesale chipping of incarcerated individuals will quickly ensue, encompassing people on probation and on parole.

Even accused individuals will be tagged, a measure justified on the grounds that it would stop them from fleeing justice. Many prisoners will welcome this development, since only chipped inmates will be eligible for parole, weekend release, or community sentences. From the prison system will emerge an evocative vocabulary distinguishing chippers from non-chippers….

Commercial success is contingent on making serious inroads into tagging the larger population of law-abiding citizens. Other stigmatized groups will therefore be targeted. This will undoubtedly entail monitoring welfare recipients, a move justified to reduce fraud, enhance efficiency, and ensure that the poor do not receive “undeserved” benefits.

Once e-commerce is sufficiently advanced, welfare recipients will receive their benefits as electronic vouchers stored on their microchips, a policy that will be tinged with a sense of righteousness, as it will help ensure that clients can only purchase government-approved goods from select merchants, reducing the always disconcerting prospect that poor people might use their limited funds to purchase alcohol or tobacco.

Civil libertarians will try to foster a debate on these developments. Their attempts to prohibit chipping will be handicapped by the inherent difficulty in animating public sympathy for criminals and welfare recipients — groups that many citizens are only too happy to see subjected to tighter regulation. Indeed, the lesser public concern for such groups is an inherent part of the unarticulated rationale for why coerced chipping will be disproportionately directed at the stigmatized.

The official privacy arm of the government will now take up the issue. Mandated to determine the legality of such initiatives, privacy commissioners and Senate Committees will produce a forest of reports presented at an archipelago of international conferences. Hampered by lengthy research and publication timelines, their findings will be delivered long after the widespread adoption of chipping is effectively a fait accompli. The research conclusions on the effectiveness of such technologies will be mixed and open to interpretation.

Officials will vociferously reassure the chipping industry that they do not oppose chipping itself, which has fast become a growing commercial sector. Instead, they are simply seeking to ensure that the technology is used fairly and that data on the chips is not misused. New policies will be drafted.

Haggerty points out that the time to avoid the potential “abuses” of this technology is now, before its widespread adoption:

Choirs of testimonials will soon start to sing the virtues of implants. Calm reassurances will be forthcoming about democratic traditions, the rule of law, and privacy rights. History, unfortunately, shows that things can go disastrously wrong, and that this happens with disconcerting regularity. Little in the way of international agreements, legality, or democratic sensibilities has proved capable of thwarting single-minded ruthlessness.

“It can’t happen here” has become the whispered swan song of the disappeared. Best to contemplate these dystopian potentials before we proffer the tender forearms of our sons and daughters. While we cannot anticipate all of the positive advantages that might be derived from this technology, the negative prospects are almost too terrifying to contemplate.

Either we shun the chimera of absolute security or we will become the dominated citizens we used to warn our children about by having them read 1984 and Brave New World.

Add comment December 12th, 2006

Minneapolis Star Tribune editorial on Iraqi casualties

An editorial from today’s Minneapolis Star Tribune. Key sentence: “Suddenly, the Johns Hopkins numbers are getting another, closer look, which they deserve.“:

Editorial: Pentagon undercounts deaths of Iraq civilians
Iraq Study Group finds “systematic” effort to cook the books.

We first heard about Iraqi war-casualty figures from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2004, when its researchers reported finding that 100,000 civilians had perished in the U.S. invasion and its aftermath. The researchers were almost booed off the public stage, so much higher were their figures than others. Undaunted, they came back two months ago with a new report, based on a house-to-house survey, of 655,000 civilian deaths caused by the U.S.-initiated violence. This figure, too, was widely rejected as far too high.

But now comes the Iraq Study Group with an explanation for the discrepancies between the Johns Hopkins numbers and other estimates: The Pentagon’s reporting system on civilian deaths systematically underreports violence in Iraq. How? “The standard for recording attacks,” the bipartisan group said, “acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases.”

Suddenly, the Johns Hopkins numbers are getting another, closer look, which they deserve.

In December 2005, long after the first John Hopkins estimate of 100,000 deaths, President Bush offered his belief that “only” 30,000 Iraqi civilians had died. When the researchers came back with their 655,000 figure in October, he was scathing in his criticism: “Six hundred thousand — whatever they guessed at — is just not credible.” The researchers’ methodology, he said, had been “pretty well discredited.”

Actually, it had been pretty well substantiated. Before the Lancet, a British medical journal, published the latest report, the results were examined by four independent experts who found the effort scientifically sound and urged publication. The methodology that Bush said had been discredited is basically the same methodology used in the U.S. census survey and employed sampling techniques that undergird every credible public opinion poll.

Of the 655,000 deaths the Johns Hopkins researchers calculated in their extrapolation from the sample, about 601,000 resulted directly from violence and about 54,000 from a generally deteriorating health and environmental climate in Iraq. The researchers estimated that American forces were responsible for almost one-third of the deaths.

But most of those deaths did not show up in Pentagon tallies, and the Iraq Study Group explains why: “A murder of an Iraqi is not necessarily counted as an attack. If we cannot determine the source of a sectarian attack, that assault does not make it into the database. A roadside bomb or a rocket or mortar attack that doesn’t hurt U.S. personnel doesn’t count. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence.”

The Iraq Study Group rather drolly concludes, “Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.” In other words, the Pentagon “systematically” cooked the books to make things look better in Iraq than they actually were.

Why are we not surprised? From the very beginning of the tragic Iraq adventure, the Bush administration has distorted the truth about pretty much everything, from weapons of mass destruction to Al-Qaida linkages to Iraq to the number of Iraqi civilians being killed. And in the process, the administration lied to itself, making sound policy choices almost impossible.

The Iraq Study Group recommends “immediate changes” in data collection on violence in Iraq “to provide a more accurate picture of events on the ground.” We have a neat solution for the White House: Hire the Johns Hopkins researchers.

Add comment December 12th, 2006

Link to Lancet Congressional briefing

Here is the link to the C-Span broadcast of the Congressional briefing on December 11, conducted by Gilbert Burnham, Les Roberts, and Juan Cole and introduced by Rep. Kucinich.

Add comment December 12th, 2006

New poll: Iraq a disaster, Republicans jumping ship

A new CBS News poll reports an 8% decline in one month, down to 21%, in the number of Americans approving of Bush’s handling of Iraq. [Poll: Iraq Going Badly And Getting Worse]

Daily Kos has more nuggets from the survey:

Approve of Bush’s job handling Iraq

____ Now 11/14
GOP 47% 70%
Dem 5% 3%
Ind 17% 23%

Cons. 34% 60%

Look at that drop. Look at that!

And:

* Overall job approve/disapprove: 31/63
* Will make right decisions on war: Dems in Congress, 53%; Bush, 27%
* 62% say Iraq a mistake; in 1971, 61% said the same of Vietnam

This is about as vicious an ass-kicking as I’ve seen in a poll on an issue like this. Which, by the way, 35% of respondents now identify as the country’s most important problem. Next leading contender: economy and jobs at just 9%.

Given the anti-antiwar stance of most Congressional Democrats, the peace movement is faced with the issue of how to translate these attitudes into policy change. So far, no one has solved that conundrum.

Add comment December 12th, 2006

Hypocricy or defense? Another megachurch pastor gay

What is hypocrisy? Is it simply the ego’s defenses at work? Or is there another element? Is the rash of homosexual radical Christian pastors just an accident, a sign that radical Christianity is fundamentally hypocritical, or yet another confirmation that defenses rule?

This question combines definitional, theoretical, and empirical elements. When is deception hypocrisy? The question is posed by yet another megachurch leader quitting over his homosexuality:

In a tearful videotaped message Sunday to his congregation, the senior pastor of a thriving evangelical megachurch in south metro Denver confessed to sexual relations with other men and announced he had voluntarily resigned his pulpit.

A month ago, the Rev. Paul Barnes of Grace Chapel in Doug las County preached to his 2,100-member congregation about integrity and grace in the aftermath of the Ted Haggard drugs-and-gay-sex scandal.

Now, the 54-year-old Barnes joins Haggard as a fallen evangelical minister who preached that homosexuality was a sin but grappled with a hidden life.

“I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy,” Barnes said in the 32- minute video, which church leaders permitted The Denver Post to view. “… I can’t tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away….”

Sitting cross-legged in jeans and an open-collar shirt, Barnes spoke in his video about evolving feelings growing up in a firm moral family: from confused little boy to adolescent racked with self-loathing and guilt.

In their only talk about sex, Barnes said his father took him on a drive and talked about what he would do if a “fag” approached him.

Barnes thought, “‘Is that how you’d feel about me?’ It was like a knife in my heart, and it made me feel even more closed.”

When Barnes experienced a Christian conversion at 17, it gave him a glimmer of hope. But his homosexual feelings never went away, he said. He said he cannot accept that a person is “born that way,” so he looks to childhood influences.

Barnes said he asked God many times why he was called to ministry, to start Grace Chapel, carrying a “horrible burden.”…

Barnes described struggling with what he believes is the biblical teaching that homosexuality is an abomination. Over the years, he grew to accept that “this is my thorn in the flesh.”

Barnes expressed hope for a future where one can “be who you are” and be accepted and loved in the Christian community and also spoke about “separating some of the teachings from Scripture” from Jesus Christ.

Palmer said he wasn’t sure what Barnes meant, but Barnes told him that he believes God views homosexuality as a sin.

Barnes said he has been in counseling three times and never found anyone he could talk to.

His wife said on the video that she didn’t know about her husband’s struggles until he confided in her last week. The couple has two daughters in their 20s.

Char Barnes said she feels “like I’m living someone else’s life” but was grateful her husband revealed himself. The couple said they hope to stay in Denver. Near the tape’s end, Paul Barnes says, “This is what it is, it’s right, and it’s time.”

Church elder Russ Pilcher said the reaction at services Sunday was largely concern for the couple. “I thought, ‘Where did I fall short in making myself so unapproachable that he couldn’t come to me?”‘ Pilcher said.

Paul and Char Barnes will get counseling, but unlike Haggard, they will not go into seclusion or report to a board of reconcilers, Palmer said. He said it will be more personal and that church members will play a role….

Given the Haggard story, Pal mer was asked whether Barnes’ fall from grace would expose the evangelical community to further charges of hypocrisy.

“The criticism is valid if you look at perfection being the mark, because the next person who stands at our pulpit is going to be guilty of not being perfect as well,” he said. “Does that mean we have to change what we say about the word of God? We can’t do that.”

2 comments December 12th, 2006

Latin American intellectuals Against Torture

Thanks to InformationClearinghouse, we bring you a resolution signed by many Latin American intellectuals and unveiled on November 28:

N NOVEMBER 28, A GROUP OF LATIN AMERICAN INTELLECTUALS PRESENTED THE MANIFESTO “AGAINST TORTURE” AT THE FERIA INTERNACIONAL DEL LIBRO IN GUADALAJARA MEXICO TOGETHER WITH A BOOK ON THE USE OF TORTURE IN LATIN AMERICA, AND ALSO IN THE SO CALLED WAR ON TERRORISM: CONTRA LA TORTURA (E. Subirats (editor) -Editorial Fineo, México).

THIS MANIFESTO HAS RECEIVED CONSIDERABLE ATTENTION IN THE SPANISH SPEAKING MEDIA, BUT NONE OUTSIDE ITS BORDERS.

12/11/06 “Information Clearing House” — - The Congress and administration of the United States of America have just enacted a law, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which justifies and promotes the practice of torture through the authorization of coercive interrogations and the infliction of mental and physical pain as an allegedly legal process. This measure has been taken in the name of a Global War on Terror whose purposefully undefined legal status permits, as part of its strategies and tactics, the inclusion not only of true criminals, but also of groups or persons that challenge military occupations or tyrannical governments—which, according to international law, should guarantee them combatant status—along with organizations and movements of civil defense or resistance and ordinary citizens. This legalization of torture is the culmination of a series of global scandals that have made evident its use by the agents and militaries of that same Global War on those whom they dispose of at their discretion, principally in secret prisons and military detention camps.

Torture is an instrument of violence whose purpose is to destroy the moral and physical integrity of human beings, and to nullify their will. The scientific methods of coercive interrogation, as much as the electrical, chemical, physical and psychical techniques of aggression, define one and the same system of violation, degradation and subjection of a person. Only despotic, corrupt and militaristic governments have made use of these dehumanizing practices. Only totalitarian systems have deemed them legitimate. Democratic communities, the moral and religious conscience of the people, and the most elemental humanism have not stopped opposing their atrocity and cruelty.

The implementation of torture deliberately encompasses a wide range of social groups, including the families, the social circles, or the religious communities that are able to provide direct or indirect information about any form of political resistance, be it violent or not. Thus, torture is not only a cruel practice, but rather it institutes an entire system of terror and social coercion. The ultimate objective is to humiliate and dehumanize the communities to which it is applied, to destroy their bonds of solidarity, to empty their confidence in themselves and to liquidate their collective will. It is the sinister expression of an unlimited power over the most intimate spaces of the body and over entire nations, in a world in which every day there is more injustice and inequality; and more desperation.

The militarily organized practice of torture, the sexual abuse, and all other abuses of men and women, clandestine incarcerations and forced disappearances, are not new in the history of the Third World, and of Latin America in particular. It has been instead an historical constant of colonial, neocolonial and neoliberal domination. The system of torture was promoted in a similarly criminal manner under the Cold War banner of yesterday, just as today it is promoted under the slogan of the War on Terror. However, the justification of torture by the North American authorities has consequences even more grave still. Many governments have been served by torture, but they could not legitimize it, nor did they attempt to defend and disseminate liberty with methods of this kind. The current propaganda that promotes torture in the name of the so-called War on Terror offers these governments a sinister alibi for their use of torture past, present and future. Whether legalized or not, torture is an aberrant practice condemned by fundamental principles of humanity.

The crimes against humanity committed during World War II made necessary a profound reformulation of the doctrine of human rights. In the recent past, we have been witness to the reduction, the instrumentalization and the neutralization of these same rights, to the extreme that they are made unrecognizable. The right to conserve the cultural patrimonies of the Third World, the earth, uncontaminated air and water, and the people’s right to autonomy, have all been the object of degenerative renegotiations and redefinitions. A person’s right to physical and moral integrity, to the legal defense of his or her innocence in the face of corporate and state powers, and the right to resist constant territorial violations, violations of the ecosystem and of the individual human life, have been encroached upon time and time again. The propaganda of war and the legitimization of torture crown this regressive process of a threatened humanity.

We appeal to the sacred respect for human dignity, for its physical and spiritual integrity, and for its moral sovereignty. We demand the rejection of torture as an inhuman practice that is contrary to every civilized form of coexistence and is opposed to the true restoration of a damaged peaceable community of the people: in the name of Human Rights.

Monterrey, México, 26 October 2006.

Pilar Calveiro (Political scientist, México, D.F.)
Carlos Castresana (Attorney, Madrid)
Rita Laura Segato (Anthropologist, Brasilia)
Margarita Serje (Anthropologist, Bogota)
Eduardo Subirats (Writer, Princeton)

This manifesto is being supported by the following intellectuals:

Gabriel García Márquez (Nobel Prize in Literature 1982, Aracataca)
Adolfo Pérez Esquivel (Nobel Peace Prize 1980, Buenos Aires)
José Saramago (Nobel Prize in Literature 1998, Lisboa)
Juan Goytisolo (Writer, Marrakech)
Javier Acevedo (Lawyer, Honduras)
Mariclaire Acosta Urquidi, (Promoter of Human Rights, Mexico)
Xavier Albó (Researcher, Bolivia)
Rafael Barrios M. (Member of the Colectivo de Abogados “Jose Alvear, Colombia)
Marisa Belausteguigoitia (Professor, Ciudad de México)
Alberto Binder, (Lawyer, Argentina)
Sonis Britto (Member of the Asamblea Permanente de los DD.HH. de La Paz, Bolivia)
Amilton Bueno de Carvalho (Lawyer, Brasil)
Gustavo Cabrera (Serpaj- America Latina)
Sandra Carvalho (Justicia Global, Brasil)
Carlos Correa (Espacio Público, Venezuela)
Benjamin Cuellar (Director of the Instituto de Derechos Humanos de la Universidad Centroamericana “José Simeón Cañas”, El Salvador).
Enrique del Val (Professor, Mexico)
Ariel Dorfman (Writer, Durham)
Tomás Eloy Martínez (Writer, Rutgers)
Diamela Eltit (Writer, Santiago de Chile)
Lúcio Flávio Pinto (Journalist, Belem do Pará)
Eduardo Galeano (Writer, Montevideo)
Roberto Garreton (Lawyer, Chile)
Rafael Gumucio (Writer, Santiago de Chile)
Noé Jitrik (Writer, Buenos Aires)
Horst Kurnitzky (Writer, México, D. F.)
Julio Maier (Jurist, Argentina)
Hna. Elsie Monge (Executive Director of the Comision Ecumenica de Derechos Humanos, Ecuador)
Carlos Monsivais. (Writer, México)
Alejandro Moreano (Writer, Quito)
Álvaro Mutis (Writer, Bogotá)
Daniel R. Pastor (Writer, Argentina)
Jorge Eduardo Pan (IELSUR, Uruguay)
Mireya del Pino (Centro de Derechos Humanos “Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez A.C., México)
Fernando Robles (Painter, Guadalajara, México)
Nery Rodenas (Lawyer, Guatemala)
Pablo Rojas (Coordinadora Nacional DD.HH, Perú)
Pilar Royg (Codehupy, Paraguay)
Emir Sader (Sociologist, Rio de Janeiro)
Judith Salgado (Professor at the Programa Andino de Derechos
Humanos, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador)
Francisco Soberón (Director of Aprodeh-Perú)
Juan Oberto Sotomayor (Lawyer, Colombia)
Adriana Valdés (Writer, Santiago de Chile)
Luisa Valenzuela (Writer, Buenos Aires)
Susana Villaran (Exboard member of CIDH, Perú)
Luis Villoro (Philosopher, México)
José Woldenberg (Political scientist, México).

Translated by Danielle Carlo

Add comment December 12th, 2006