R. Scott Shumate was a member of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) PENS Task Force on “Psychological Ethics and National Security,” also known as the “We don’t do torture, because we’ve never seen it, no matter what you do to them” Task Force. Someone just sent me this bio for Shumate:
Dr. R. Scott Shumate
Dr.Shumate served as the Director of Behavioral Sciences for the Department of Defense, Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA). Prior to joining the Department of Defense, Dr. Shumate worked as an undercover officer for the Central Intelligence Agency where he worked against a wide array of targets including the Middle Eastern, Russian, and Chinese. From April 2001 until May of 2003 he was the chief operational psychologist for the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC). He has extensive experience in the Middle East having spent considerable time in the region and has meet with and dealt with numerous known and suspected terrorists. He has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists as well as numerous other terrorists that were cooperating with the United States Government and or recruited to infiltrate various terrorist groups. Dr. Shumate retired from government service and is currently active as a private consultant.
“He has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists?” These were the guys submitted to the infamous “Enhanced Techniques.” So Shumate brags that he was present while these guys were tortured. No wonder the APA put him on the PENS Task Force. They didn’t have to worry that he would do something silly, like, say psychologists shouldn’t be present where torture was occurring. After all, the APA’s purpose with the PENS Task Force was to provide Aid and Comfort for Torturers. “Dr.” Shumate was the perfect choice.
April 27th, 2007
David Bromwich on Huffington Post understands what Guantanamo is all about, the assertion of absolute power [Slavery in Guantanamo]:
Torture and slavery have something in common. They are expressions of a power that admits no restraint on itself. They issue from the instinct for domination, hardened by a savage self-protectiveness. Yet a slave might always assert his freedom by choosing to die. This last resort has been denied to the Guantanamo prisoners. If they refuse to eat, they are force-fed intravenously. We keep them alive, and starve them of justice, and kill them by inches. Is this done to prevent their becoming martyrs? But they are already martyrs from the terms of their imprisonment. The force-feeding is really the last refinement of state coercion and cruelty.
The problem of Guantanamo is a problem for American society at large. How many fine careers, in how many professions, have been advanced by warm compliance with the new license regarding torture? Think of the authors of the “torture memos,” John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and others. Think of John Roberts, whose opinion against the prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan, when Roberts sat on the D.C. circuit court of appeals, came seasonably less than a week before his nomination to the supreme court. Or think of the stars and writers of the series 24, which insinuates at once the glamour and the dark necessity of torture.
“Our children,” someone said, “are less likely to be hurt by repeal of habeas corpus than they are by a terrorist bomb.” This was a muttered comment (nothing more) by a liberal and an opponent of the Iraq war. Yet it revealed a psychological process — the rationalization by which we barter liberty in order to maintain a vague conceit of security. Better to keep up the arbitrary imprisonment of a few hundred persons, who neither look nor think like us, than to diminish the muffled impression of safety. The train of thought is a sedative; it adds to the gentle suffocation of American freedom under the consensus of fear; but there is anyway this much justice in the tangle of self-deception and cynicism that holds us captive: we cannot possibly break free of it without also freeing others.
There is yet another aspect of Guantanamo. It is a laboratory for the destruction of the human soul, a place where techniques for humanicide can be investigated and refined. Psychology is a critical component of this experimental facility. No wonder the American Psychological Association is so determined to protect the participation of psychologists in this inhuman laboratory. After all, if certain elements of our society have their way, torturer (aka “interrogator” or “grand inquisitor”) may be one of the few growth professions should Americans rebel against the loss of other jobs and the decline of the “American way of life.”
April 27th, 2007
Karen Greenberg at TomDispatch writes of the horrible dilemma faced by those who supposedly want to close Guantanamo, but just can’t think of a way to do it: Can Guantanamo Be Closed?
U.S. officials have consistently held that they are guarding vital national security interests by keeping the never-to-be-charged detainees in custody. However, the sad truth is that, when it comes to most of these prisoners, what’s really been at stake is the administration’s need to save face by concealing its utter ineptitude. Privately, even Bush administration officials will acknowledge that the detainees were captured and sent to Gitmo capriciously. Rather than housing the “worst of the worst” (as the administration has regularly bragged), Gitmo penned up the easiest to grab, especially in Afghanistan. Often these were simply the individuals that local bounty hunters could provide or who were found on or near the battlefield. Many were put on planes to Guantanamo based on nothing but an American unwillingness to assert with confidence that they would never be a threat to the United States. Instead of masterminds, what the Bush administration netted were cooks, chauffeurs, wanderers, the mentally deranged, and — sometimes — children.
Of course, closing Guantanamo will n ever be sufficient. Also needed are trials for those who organized and conducted this assault on human decency and the rule of law. If the purpose of law is to send a message that society will not tolerate certain behaviors, then certainly this monstrous crime of arbitrary imprisonment and organized torture must be punished. What else will deter future criminals? If the law cannot censure Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Miller, et al., then what good is it?
.
April 27th, 2007