According to new Pentagon rules, psychologists serving at Guantanamo could contribute to executions that are little more than legalized lynching:
“The new regulations lack some protections used in civilian and military courtrooms, such as against coerced or hearsay evidence.”
Why is the APA willing to abet legalized lynching?
Add comment January 18th, 2007
Psychologist Floyd Rudmin uses psychological research on how perceptions can be shaped by linguistic manipulation to provide insight into the propaganda preparing us for the attack on Iran.
American psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, and her colleagues have shown how rhetorical tricks can make people misconceive reality. In one study by Loftus and Zanni (1975), people were shown a film of a car accident, and then asked questions about what they saw. A random half of the witnesses were asked “Did you see a broken headlight?” and the other half were asked “Did you see the broken headlight?” In the first version, 7% of the people said they saw a broken headlight. In the second version, 17% said they saw the broken headlight. In fact, there was no broken headlight. If someone uses the definite article “the”, then listeners and readers tend to presume that what follows actually exists.
In another study by Loftus (1975), people viewed a film and one group answered a questionnaire that included, “Did you see the children getting on the school bus?” and the other group did not get this question. A week later, people filled out a second questionnaire that contained the question, “Did you see a school bus?” Only 6% of the people who had not been exposed the the question a week earlier recalled seeing a school bus, but 26% of those who had been exposed to the the question a week earlier said “yes” they had seen a school bus. In fact, there was no school bus.
Thus, by the simple use of the, just one time, 10% of the people could be made to believe that something was there that was not there. With some additional details that fit, like children getting on school buses, and with the delay of a week to consolidate the false information, 20% of people could be made to believe that something was there that was not there.
Imagine the effectiveness of the, repeated over and over and over and over, for weeks and months, by authorities whom we are trained to trust, providing lots of information that coherently fits with the false claims. For example, the Independent article quoted President Bush using the three times:
“We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We will interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.”
There are in fact attacks on US forces (but done by anti-Iranian Sunni insurgents), and there are in fact networks providing advanced weapons for these attacks (but coming from pre-war Iraqi caches and pilfered from US supplies). Those two true facts serve to add coherence and believability to the unsubstantiated claim about “the flow of support from Iran and Syria” for which there is in fact no evidence. Thus we come to confidently believe something is there that is not there.
1 comment January 17th, 2007
Tuesday’s Washington Post had a sympathetic portrait of the sailors behind the Appeal for Redress signed by over 1,000 active -duty service-people and presented to Congress yesterday. The Appeal:
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq . Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.
1 comment January 17th, 2007
Vienna Teng performs One Bedroom, One Bath:
Add comment January 17th, 2007
Today is the day that 50 active Officers will hand in the Appeal for Redress from the War in Iraq.
Meanwhile, in Virginia:
Several dozen service members joined peace activists today to call for an end to the war in Iraq, part of a nationwide effort that links a growing group of active-duty protesters to the peace movement…
“We served in combat and we’ve seen the futility of this war,” said Sgt. Jabbar Magruder of Los Angeles, a member of the National Guard who served 11 months in Tikrit, a town northwest of Baghdad. “The soldiers want to resist. The soldiers want to come home now. We need the citizens to back us.”
Add comment January 16th, 2007
In another bizarre outcome of the failed “War on Drugs” a Michigan law has been interpreted by a judge as allowing a life sentece for anyone committing adultery:
n a ruling sure to make philandering spouses squirm, Michigan’s second-highest court says that anyone involved in an extramarital fling can be prosecuted for first-degree criminal sexual conduct, a felony punishable by up to life in prison.
“We cannot help but question whether the Legislature actually intended the result we reach here today,” Judge William Murphy wrote in November for a unanimous Court of Appeals panel, “but we are curtailed by the language of the statute from reaching any other conclusion.”
“Technically,” he added, “any time a person engages in sexual penetration in an adulterous relationship, he or she is guilty of CSC I,” the most serious sexual assault charge in Michigan’s criminal code.
No one expects prosecutors to declare open season on cheating spouses. The ruling is especially awkward for Attorney General Mike Cox, whose office triggered it by successfully appealing a lower court’s decision to drop CSC charges against a Charlevoix defendant. In November 2005, Cox confessed to an adulterous relationship.
Murphy’s opinion received little notice when it was handed down. But it has since elicited reactions ranging from disbelief to mischievous giggling in Michigan’s gossipy legal community.
The ruling grows out of a case in which a Charlevoix man accused of trading Oxycontin pills for the sexual favors of a cocktail waitress was charged under an obscure provision of Michigan’s criminal law. The provision decrees that a person is guilty of first-degree criminal sexual conduct whenever “sexual penetration occurs under circumstances involving the commission of any other felony.”
Charlevoix Circuit Judge Richard Pajtas sentenced Lloyd Waltonen to up to four years in prison after he pleaded guilty to two felony counts of delivering a controlled substance. But Pajtas threw out the sexual assault charge against Waltonen, citing the cocktail waitress’ testimony that she had willingly consented to the sex-for-drugs arrangement.
Charlevoix prosecuting attorney John Jarema said he decided to appeal after police discovered evidence that Waltonen may have struck drugs-for-sex deals with several other women.
Cox’s office, which handled the appeal on the prosecutor’s behalf, insisted that the waitress’ consent was irrelevant. All that mattered, the attorney general argued in a brief demanding that the charge be reinstated, was that the pair had sex “under circumstances involving the commission of another felony” — the delivery of the Oxycontin pills.
The Attorney General’s Office got a whole lot more than it bargained for. The Court of Appeals agreed that the prosecutor in Waltonen’s case needed only to prove that the Oxycontin delivery and the consensual sex were related. But Murphy and his colleagues went further, ruling that a first-degree CSC charge could be justified when consensual sex occurred in conjunction with any felony, not just a drug sale.
The judges said they recognized their ruling could have sweeping consequences, “considering the voluminous number of felonious acts that can be found in the penal code.” Among the many crimes Michigan still recognizes as felonies, they noted pointedly, is adultery — although the Prosecuting Attorneys Association of Michigan notes that no one has been convicted of that offense since 1971.
Some judges and lawyers suggested that the Court of Appeals’ reference to prosecuting adulterers was a sly slap at Cox, noting that it was his office that pressed for the expansive definition of criminal sexual conduct the appellate judges so reluctantly embraced in their Nov. 7 ruling….
The Court of Appeals opinion could also be interpreted as a tweak to the state Supreme Court, which has decreed that judges must enforce statutory language adopted by the Legislature literally, whatever the consequences.
In many other states, judges may reject a literal interpretation of the law if they believe it would lead to an absurd result. But Michigan’s Supreme Court majority has held that it is for the Legislature, not the courts, to decide when the absurdity threshold has been breached.
[Emphasis added.]
Add comment January 16th, 2007
Add comment January 16th, 2007
Nir Rosen reports rumors that Saddam’s execution was a wedding present for Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki’s daughter or son.
A United Nations source has confirmed what at first seemed like an impossible rumor, that Saddam’s execution may have been a wedding present from Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki to his daughter. Other sources maintain it was his son who was married on the day of Saddam’s execution. It is also possible that this wedding would have been innocuous or coincidental as Shias cannot get married for the next two months because of their holiness, hence many marry on Eid. Readers with information that confirms or contradicts this story are requested to send it tips@iraqslogger.com
Add comment January 15th, 2007
Raw Story reports that major investment bank has issued a warning of a possible Israeli-American attack on Iran. It says that the most likely time for such an attack is February-march of this year:
The banking division of ING Group released a memo on Jan. 9 entitled “Attacking Iran: The market impact of a surprise Israeli strike on its nuclear facilities.”
ING is a global financial services company of Dutch origin that includes banking, insurance, and other divisions. The report was authored by Charles Robinson, the Chief Economist for Emerging Europe, Middle East, and Africa. He also authored an update in ING’s daily update Prophet that further underscored the bank’s perception of the risks of an attack.
ING’s Robertson admitted that an attack on Iran was “high impact, if low probability,” but explained some of the reasons why a strike might go forward. The Jan. 9 dispatch, describes Israel as “not prepared to accept the same doctrine of ‘mutually assured destruction’ that kept the peace during the Cold War. Israel is adamant that this is not an option for such a geographically small country….So if Israel is convinced Iran is aiming to develop a nuclear weapon, it must presumably act at some point.”
Sketching out the time line for an attack, Robertson says that “we can be fairly sure that if Israel is going to act, it will be keen to do so while Bush and Cheney are in the White House.”
The January 9th report was updated on January 15th:
In his Jan. 15 update, Robertson points to a political reason that could make the assault more likely - personnel changes in the Bush administration may have sidelined opponents of attacking Iran.
Preisdent Bush recently removed General John Abizaid as commander of US forces in the Middle East and John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence, both of whom have said attacking Iran is not a priority or the right move at this time. The deployment of Patriot missile batteries, highlighted in President Bush’s recent White House speech on America’s Iraq policy, also pointed to a need to defend against Iranian missiles.
Last year I was a skeptic regarding a US attack on Iran, assuming that the administration wasn’t that crazy. I no longer have confidence in my analysis. The combination of a grandiose but ignorant President seeking a place in history with neocons committed to US total dominance at all costs poses an extremely dangerous combination.
2 comments January 15th, 2007
In a recent letter to the New York Times, writer Rachelle Marshall eloquently expresses the reality that Guantanamo exists and is organized to destroy the human beings incarcerated there:
To the Editor:
Re “Military Taking a Tougher Line With Detainees” (front page, Dec. 16):
A desire to inflict suffering is the only plausible motive behind the new security tightening at Guantánamo Bay. The detainees are now confined to tiny cells most of the day and denied contact with each other. There is no danger that they will escape — no prisoner has ever done so. The detainees no longer have useful information to impart, assuming they ever did.
The Guantánamo task force commander, Rear Adm. Harry B. Harris Jr., is convinced that “they’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants,” but their guilt has never been determined in court, and more than 200 detainees once labeled dangerous “enemy combatants” have been released to their home countries and are now free.
One official reason for the new policy is to prevent inmates from committing suicide, but it is prolonged isolation and punishment, without hope of release, that make suicide an option. Capital punishment is often condemned as barbaric. Destroying human beings from within while keeping their bodies alive is infinitely crueler.
Rachelle Marshall
Stanford, Calif., Dec. 16, 2006
Of course, the leadership of the American Psychological Association understands this too. That’s why they take refuge in abstract principles, such as opposition to “torture,” while fighting tooth, claw, and nail to avoid any discussion of the real world in which psychologist-interrogators operate. The mere mention of the real world in which these psychologist-interrogators ply their craft drives the APA leadership into apoplexy, as in this retort from the 2006 APA President Koocher in his February 2006 President’s Column, titled “Speaking Against Torture”, but which should rather be titled “Protecting the Torturers”:
A number of opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars have continued to report on alleged abuses by mental health professionals.
While condemning us “opportunistic commentators”, President Koocher touts, rather, the Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS), in which a hand-picked membership, including six (out of nine) members from the military and intelligence establishment, were carefully guided by the APA leadership to the predetermined conclusion that psychologist participation in interrogations at Guantanamo and the numerous other U.S. detention facilities around the world was ethically permissible, indeed, President Koocher gives the sense, even admirable.
While condemning “torture” in the abstract, the APA has systematically refused to deal with the reality of what occurs at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base (see also Papers reveal Bagram abuse), or any of the numerous other places around the world where tens of thousands are detained and abused, with no rights, legal protections, or sense of when, or if, they will ever be released.
Thus, through this subterfuge, psychology has become one of those professions accepting the deliberate infliction of human suffering and the systematic destruction of human beings. If the APA policy allowing participation in interrogations is not reversed soon, the phrase “American psychologist” will start being uttered in sentences that also include phrases like “Soviet psychiatrists” or “Nazi doctors”
As occurred in response to Soviet psychiatry, which contributed to the maintenance of “state security” by locking up dissidents in mental hospitals, perhaps it is time for psychological and other professional associations around the world to cease collaborating with the torture-accepting American Psychological Association.
Add comment January 15th, 2007
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