Psyche, Science, and Society

Greenberg: Can Guantanamo be closed?

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?

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Add comment April 27th, 2007

“Taxi to the Dark Side” to be released

Andrew Sullivan informs us that the new movie — Taxi to the Dark Side — on America’s descent into the hell of legailzed torture is being released this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival. Watch the trailer here, and make sure, when it is commercially released that it doesn’t die a quiet death.

Add comment April 26th, 2007

More on Steven Miles’ new archive on detention center medical activities

Here is a Twin Cities, Minnesota, press report on Stephen Miles’ new archive on medical activities (including psychological) in America’s detainee prisons. [I have highlighted a phrase, pointed out by Dr. Miles, in which a DoD spokesperson demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of the basic character of democracy.]:

U archives unvarnished look at war detainees
Treatment detailed online with U.S. documents
BY JEREMY OLSON

A University of Minnesota bioethicist has created an online database of government documents that he hopes will increase public scrutiny of how the U.S. has treated detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Steven Miles said the U archive is not an “anti-war site” but offers an unvarnished look at government documents with disturbing details of deaths, maltreatment and inadequate medical care.

There are records detailing:

“The idea of our government taking babies away from mothers who should be nursing so those mothers can endure interrogation is just flat-out wrong,” Miles said. “Read the account and see if it chills you. It chills me.”

Most of the documents were provided by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained them through Freedom of Information Act requests and a lawsuit.

The civil rights group has received the documents in large and unorganized batches that have been difficult to sort and organize in any usable way, said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU attorney who has handled the FOIA lawsuits.

The U archive took the specific documents dealing with medical care and death investigations, and organized them by their subjects and individuals involved. Miles said some documents had names blacked out, but he was able to link them with other investigative documents that still contained the names.

“The government has never admitted that a child died in these prisons,” he said. “To find where they failed to redact a sentence which describes a child dying of untreated tuberculosis is really part of the process of accountability.”

Miles included that incident in his book “Oath Betrayed,” which was published last year on the treatment of prison detainees.

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 that this has happened, Annas said it is a true public service.

“Otherwise, it’s too easy for people to say, ‘Oh it’s not real. You’re making this up. The military says we’re not doing this,’ ” Annas said.

A Defense Department spokeswoman acknowledged the U documents were originally sent to the ACLU, but she declined further comment.

“Further dissemination of this material isn’t in the spirit of the FOIA program,” spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said.

The documents reflect the new demand for “real-time” information instead of a delayed disclosure of government actions 30 years later that often has “a historian’s gloss on it,” Miles said.

Miles said he was startled by how documents reviewing the same account were widely different. A Navy investigative report on the escapee concluded that his death resulted from a fall during one of several attempts.

One Marine report mentioned the fall, but it ruled the cause of death as inconclusive and described how the man was tightly restrained for more than 90 minutes before his death.

According to the Marine report: “He was restrained, and this time the guards tied him to the window with his back to the window, his arms stretched apart, with his legs tied to the bars of the window. The guards also tied a strap of engineer tape to the detainee’s midsection, to further restrain him. His position resembled that of a person who had been crucified.”

A follow-up Marine investigation determined that the restraint was improper and potentially dangerous, but that the escapee likely died from injuries sustained in the fall. The report noted the improper restraint was partly the result of miscommunication caused by the death of the company commander.

The escapee was a combatant detained during attacks in April 2004 on a camp in Iraq that killed five Marines and wounded many more, the report noted. Marines at least once would have been justified in shooting him during an escape, but didn’t, the report said.

Some people may view these detainee deaths as the natural consequence of war, but Miles said it is important for the public to make that judgment. It is important for the U.S. to provide humane care of prisoners and to abide by international anti-torture laws if it expects other countries to meet those standards, Miles said.

The U’s Human Rights Library will continue to update the database as more documents become available. Missing right now are any documents from the CIA detailing how that intelligence agency has treated detainees.

“It is important,” Miles said, “given the gravity of issues here - where war crimes are at stake - that the data be as soundly presented as possible.”

Jeremy Olson can be reached at jolson@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5583.

Add comment April 26th, 2007

Canadian psychologist barred for life from US for using LSD 30 years ago

Alternet reports about a Canadian psychologist and psychotherapist who has been barred from the US for life because, as a Goodle search revealed, he used LSD 30 years ago:

The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he took away Feldmar’s passport and car keys. While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.

When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a “path” to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could “be preferable to psychiatry.” Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare….

The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar was being denied entry due to “narcotics” use. LSD is not a narcotic substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard wasn’t interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted Feldmar for an FBI file.

Then Feldmar disbelievingly listened as he learned that he was being barred from ever entering the United States again. The officer told him he could apply to the Department of Homeland Security for a waiver, if he wished, and gave him a package, with the forms.

He can appeal for a waiver, but it costs thousands of dollars in lawyers fees, and he would have to reapply every year!

Nine months after being turned back at the border, Feldmar has concluded that his banishment is permanent. The waiver process is exhausting, costly and demeaning. The David and Goliath aspect of the situation is too daunting.

This is devastating to his family and friends. “My father was doing nothing wrong, illegal, suspicious, or at all deviant in any way, when he was trying to visit the U.S.,” his daughter, Soma, an instructor at a Denver college, says. “In terms of family it really sucks. “

Feldmar is far from alone in his exclusion from “the land of the free”:

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security denied Professor John Milios entry into the country upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport last June. Milios, a faculty member at the National Technical University of Athens, had planned to present a paper at a conference titled “How Class Works” at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Milios told Academe Online that U.S. officials questioned him at the airport about his political ideas and affiliations and that the American consul in Athens later queried him about the same subjects. Milios, a member of a left-wing political party, is active in Greek national politics and has twice been a candidate for the Greek parliament. Milios’s visa, issued in 1996, was set to expire in November. The professor had previously been allowed entry into the United States on five separate occasions to participate in academic meetings.

The American Civil Liberties Union, on behalf of the American Academy of Religion, the American Association of University Professors and PEN American Center, filed a lawsuit this year challenging a provision of the Patriot Act that is being used to deny visas to foreign scholars. They did this after Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss intellectual, had his visa revoked under “the ideological exclusion provision” of the Patriot Act, preventing him from assuming a tenured teaching position at the University of Notre Dame. It’s a suit that attempts to prevent the practice of ideological exclusion more generally, a practice that led to the recent exclusions of Dora Maria Tellez, a Nicaraguan scholar who had been offered a position at Harvard University, as well as numerous scholars from Cuba.

In March 2005, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the government’s use of the Patriot Act ideological exclusion provision. Cuban Grammy nominee Ibrahim Ferrer, 77, who came to fame in the 1999 film Buena Vista Social Club, was blocked by the U.S. government from attending the Grammy Awards, where he was nominated for the Best Latin album award in 2004. So were his fellow musicians Guillermo Rubalcaba, Amadito Valdes, Barbarito Torres and the group Septeto Nacional with Ignacio Pineiro. The list goes on.

2 comments April 25th, 2007

Greg Palast on attorneygate: Don’t Fire Gonzales

Greg Palast sends the following article on the Justice Department attorney purge scandal. In it he reminds us that Alberto Gonzales is simply a patsy and that the real issue isn’t the firing of the federal attorney’s, but why they were fired, namely, bogus voter suppression claims being used to steal the 2008 election. Palast calls for firing Karl Rove. However, his evidence implies that the eight replacement attorney’s, carefully selected to be willing to pursue bogus election fraud claims in the run-up to the 2008 elections, must themselves be replaced immediately. And, while we’re at it, lets fire and prosecute Gonzales for his major crime: aiding and abetting torture.

Don’t Fire Gonzales

by Greg Palast
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Before President Bush fired his sorry ass, US Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, in a last sad attempt to suck up to his Republican padrones, allowed his chief mouthpiece, Norm Cairns, to speak with me. He shouldn’t have.

That was two years back, while I was investigating strange doings in New Mexico and Arizona, where, simultaneously, state legislators, Republicans all, claimed they had evidence of “voter fraud.” Psychiatrists call this kind of mutual delusional behavior folie a deux. I suspected something else: I smelled Karl Rove.

In the New Mexico legislature, a suburban Albuquerque political hackette, Justine Fox-Young (her real name), claimed to have “several” specific cases of vote identity rustling. Like Joe McCarthy waving his list of “Communists,” she waived documents of “evidence” of illegal voting on the floor of the Legislature. I called Ms. Fox-Young and asked her to send me the papers.

The “evidence” never arrived. Maybe her fax machine was broken. I called Justine.

Q. Justine, you’ve uncovered criminals! Did you turn their names over to the US Attorney?

A. Well, no, but someone did.

Whose initials are Karl Rove?

She swore to me that US Attorney Iglesias would back up her story: he was investigating the evil voters and was about to indict them.

So I got Iglesias’ guy Norm on the phone. Was Iglesias prosecuting, or actively investigating, one single real case of voter fraud?

Norm went into a lengthy swirly-whirly river of diving, ducking bullshit. I dove in.

Me: In other words, you can’t back her story?

Norm: Well, yeah, uh, I guess you’d say that’s true.

I guess I will say that, Norm. Fox-Young had just plain made it up; fibbed, lied, faked the evidence.

There was a multi-state con in operation. But what was it? Each of these bogus claims of voter fraud was attached to a sales pitch for a state law to tighten voter ID requirements — to prevent these ne’er-do-wells from voting twice. In Arizona, one crack-pot Republican legislator, the Hon. Russell Pearce, claimed he had evidence that five million Mexicans had illegally crossed the border to vote.

The point: Rove knew that a “challenge” operation by the Republican Party, run from his office, knocked out 300,000 voters — mainly poor ones, voters of color. His crew wanted to hike that higher.

The notable thing about this crime of voter identity theft is that it doesn’t happen. You are more likely to encounter ballot boxes that spontaneously combust. I found cases of voters struck by lightening — but out of 120 million votes cast, I couldn’t find a dozen criminal cases of a bandit stealing someone’s identity to vote.

Since the Republicans couldn’t find such criminals, they had to make them up. Force prosecutors to bring false charges against innocent voters (one did just that in Wisconsin) or at least claim they were hot on the trail of the fraudulent voters.

Iglesias, though a Republican, wouldn’t bring bogus charges. And he wouldn’t lie about active investigations that didn’t exist except in Rove’s imagination.

That was his mistake.

Rove’s right-hand hit-man, Tim Griffin, added Iglesias to the hit list of prosecutors who were cut down on December 7, 2006.

Griffin himself, after the December 7 firings, was appointed by Attorney General Gonzales, at Rove’s personal request, to one of the newly-vacated slots as US Attorney for Arkansas. The sleeper cell of Rove-bot US attorneys is now in place to bless voter suppression games in 2008.

I’ve previously reported for BBC that Griffin was the Man in the Memos who directed the massive, wrongful purge of African-American soldiers in 2004 — the ‘caging’ list scam. Based on that expose, voting rights lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said, “Griffin and Rove should be in jail, not in office.” That, too is another story — But the important thing to pick up here is:

1. It’s all about the 2008 election.
2. It’s not about Gonzales.

We’ve been here before. Gonzales is getting Libby’d. Takes the bullet for Karl Rove and the White House. If you wondered why the Republican jackals like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales — it’s because they were told to.

These guys learned from Richard Nixon. In 1973, when Nixon was getting hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, a schmuck named Kleindeist. Famously, Nixon’s own Rove, a devious creep named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, “twisting slowly in the wind.”

Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.

Look, I have no sympathy for Alberto the Doomed. He’s guilty of a crime I employed in racketeering cases: “Willful failure to know.” It’s a kind of fraud; Alberto was going way out of his way to not know what he had to know, that Rove and the President were toying with prosecutors.

Gonzales is their glove-puppet. Why fire him? The nation watches these hearings and wants to kill something. But why shoot the puppet? It’s time to fire the puppeteer. Eh, Mr. Rove?

Add comment April 25th, 2007

Lancet Iraq mortality author Riyadh Lafta’s Canadian talk cancelled

Dr. Ali Al-Ebadi of Vancouver, BC, posted this article in the Comments — on the refusal of the United States and Britain to give visas to Lancet Iraq mortality study author Riyadh Lafta resulting in cancellation of his American and Canadian talks — with a request that I publish it:

The first victim of US-led occupation of Iraq

The truth is certainly the first in an endless series of victims of the war.

A public talk by Dr. Riyadh Lafta of Baghdad’s Al-Mustansiriya University College scheduled for Friday, April 20, 2007 at Simon Fraser University’s Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, in Vancouver, has been cancelled. American and British authorities denied him a visit visa. Alternative arrangements at the University of Washington (U of W) in Seattle have been made for a talk by Dr. Les Roberts, co-author with Dr. Lafta of a Lancet article on Iraqi deaths published in October 2006. The study estimated 654,965 persons have died as a consequence of the occupation. Of these, 601,027 have died from violence. The event in Vancouver was moderated by Dr. Tim Takaro, who is studying the rise in childhood cancer in Iraq with Dr. Lafta and researchers from the U of W.

More than 100 Canadians in Vancouver, including three of Iraqi origin, attended the conference and, during the question period, many individuals enthusiastically discussed issues related to studies about victims of US occupation of Iraq.

Dr. Les Roberts told the audience in Seattle and Vancouver that he presented the project of Iraq casualties study to CNN and CBS. Both American channels declined to cooperate with him because of the inconvenience it might cause but they were willing to support him if he would have agreed to conduct a poll about freedom, democracy, and security in Iraq. Roberts said that he was astonished that such a report did not even move the US Congress to any investigation.

It is well-established that US Army intensively used depleted uranium ammunition against thousands of Iraqi tanks and soldiers’ trucks during George H. Bush 1991 war and George W. Bush 2003 war against Iraq. In both wars, the abandoned military vehicles literally became first a ‘playground’ for children and animals from neighboring villages in southern Iraq and near Basra before some of them was removed to military junkyards. All exposed individuals were practically subjected to a variable intensity of toxic uranium radiation. Depleted uranium ammunition is considered a weapon of mass destruction (WMD) by definition and practice.

For Iraqi researchers there is a well-known link between the US Army uses of depleted uranium ammunition in 1991 and 2003 and the drastic increase and / or new occurrence of many cancers and anomalies in humans, animals and plants. Thus far, there are no published comprehensive statistical data taken from pre- and post-occupation Iraqi government sources to clearly substantiate this link. In addition, White House and Pentagon officials maintained complete denial of such relationship and prevented any independent academic research to find out and publish the truth. Iraqi civilians are by no means the only victims of such denial. American and other allies’ soldiers who were subjected to the radiation of depleted uranium ammunition and other vaccination programs and later developed the so-called Iraq or Gulf War Syndrome are denied any specific medical care in their own countries.

More interestingly, on searching the name ‘Riyadh Lafta’ in Arabic on Google search engine Thursday night, April 19, 2007 only one hit was shown that was a translation from English about the study of 2006.

In conclusion, the academic truth-spreading mission of Dr. Riyadh Lafta fell a victim to the following unfortunate factors:

1. George W. Bush’s and Tony Blair’s mentality of warmongering, intolerance of occupation critic, and fear of international legal percussions of admitting wrongdoing and using WMD has its direct effect on government policy on all levels and on the media.

2. Necessity for hiding all genocidal activities of US-led occupation of Iraq, and mass destruction of civil infrastructures, including health and social care and, when revealed, simply denying and discrediting the source.

3. Strict monopoly of media moguls who are still supporting the main goals of occupation even if they disagree about some domestic political issues.

4. Lack of civil courage of many American and British journalists.

5. All of the above directly applies to US-loyal occupation governments and media in Iraq, and the translated Arabic media.

6. Overconfidence in the USA and UK authorities.

7. Fear of Congressmen, who supported the visit, of political escalation that may jeopardize financial support to the University of Washington.

The Canadian research partner, Dr. Tim Takaro, emphatically said at the end of the conference that he will not give up on the visit of Dr. Lafta to Canada during this year.

1 comment April 25th, 2007

Alfred McCoy lectures on psychological torture

On March 19, 2007, Survivors International in San Francisco sponsored a lecture by Alfred McCoy on the American development of psychological torture. It was filmed and can be watched here. Unfortunately, American Psychological Association Ethics Director Stephen Behnke has not so far given permission for SI to use his discussion material.

1 comment April 23rd, 2007

CNN’s Michael Ware on the state of Iraq

This extended interview with Michael Ware is an astounding, for the American corporate news, account of the reality on the ground in Iraq.

Iraq: The Hidden Wars

“There’s no progress politically, economically, or militarily”. Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

[Thanks to a comment from Mike, who referred us to Middlemostpost.]

1 comment April 23rd, 2007

Lancet Iraq mortality study author Gilbert Burnham interviewed by New Scientist

The New Scientist magazine has an interview with Lancet Iraq mortality study author Gilbert Burnham:

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Winning the war for Iraq’s dead

Counting the dead in war zones is what epidemiologist Gilbert Burnham and his team do for a living. But last year when they said 600,000-plus Iraqis had been killed in the war, the US, UK and Iraqi governments furiously attacked their figures for being far too high - though it turns out that UK experts agree with Burnham. Celeste Biever caught up with him recently

BY: Celeste Biever

There were already estimates of the dead in Iraq. Why did you decide to go ahead with your survey?

Our intentions were not political. Our centre is for refugee and disaster studies and this is simply the kind of thing we do. Other counts, such as the Iraq Body Count, which consists of volunteer academics and activists based in the UK and the US, rely on reports of deaths in the English-language press, but the press is in the business of producing news, not statistics. The IBC uses news reports mainly written in English, by people who can’t leave a very narrow area of Baghdad, while violence is worse in the Al Anbar and Diyala provinces. Mortuaries provide figures but a lot of bodies don’t make it there. Also press accounts and mortuary numbers record violent deaths, but people die in war from many causes.

Your figure was an order of magnitude higher than the IBC’s. Why should we trust your method?

Because it’s probably the best one for measuring the burden of conflict on the population. It’s used worldwide: in the Congo, in Banda Aceh after the Asian tsunami, for mortality data in Darfur, Angola and Uganda. And one of my former students, Paul Spiegel, used the technique to measure Serb activities against the Albanians in Kosovo. It was used as evidence in the trial of Slobodan Milosevic.

Why do you think your survey has been criticised?

These are unpleasant results, and they are associated with a war that has seriously divided the countries participating. Some people felt that we were not supporting the troops and were unpatriotic. I am not angry about that. As malicious as some of the hate mail I received is, I can see their point of view because I was in the military, in a combat unit in Korea during Vietnam. These soldiers in Iraq are volunteers, by and large, with good intentions, and they find themselves in a very difficult environment. As epidemiologists, we can produce the numbers, a good explanation for our methods and even a pretty strong statement on what they mean, but getting them accepted in policy circles and in people’s thinking takes time and is often difficult.

How did it feel to have the president attack you?

It’s not surprising to get criticism from people closely identified with the war. On the other hand, public health research often sends people to sleep so it was gratifying in an odd way to be associated with research that grabbed attention, especially heads of state.

You’ve said you will release the raw data to scientific groups who apply, “scrubbed” of the neighbourhoods where it was collected to avoid identifying the interviewees. Will this help?

I don’t know. Much of the criticism is based on unhappiness with the results. A repeat analysis won’t turn the figure from 600,000 to 60,000. Our intent is to be more transparent. We believe we will see numbers that are fairly consistent with ours. I received a lot of supportive emails from people who admired the courage of the team so I think many people already believe our figure.

What was your methodology?

We did a “cluster” survey, where we divided the country into clusters, picked a certain number from each province at random and sent Iraqi doctors to knock on doors in those clusters to ask how many people in each household (who had lived there at least three months) had died from any cause. We used that to produce a death rate for the clusters and then for the population of the whole country. The key is to try to be sure that you talk to enough people and you don’t have biases in selection.

How did Iraqis react to the interviewers?

The general sense the interviewers had was that people were happy to talk to them. They felt gratified that someone was asking and were eager to talk about their experiences.

Could you trust what people told interviewers?

People might forget exact dates, but death is a big event, so they don’t tend to forget that. To double-check, our interviewers asked for death certificates. Ninety per cent of the people who were asked produced them. Of course, a certificate doesn’t stop you hiding deaths: one could imagine households might be reluctant to mention it if someone got killed while involved in criminal activity or sectarian violence. But then the result would be an underestimate, not an overestimate.

Were there things you wanted to know you couldn’t get the interviewers to ask?

We were afraid, for example, to ask how people died as it might have made us look like we were representing a group looking for targets - and that could have endangered the interviewers. We also did not distinguish non-combatants from active combatants because asking that question was far too sensitive.

Were there other limits on your methodology?

Concern for the safety of our interviewers helped determine survey design. Coming up with a death estimate per governorate would have been the best but it would have required more clusters, and since each cluster has a risk associated with it we opted for a national figure. Also, we couldn’t use GPS devices as we had in 2004, where we randomly selected a GPS coordinate in each cluster and used that house as a start point. With more car bombs set off remotely, the team was concerned that if they were spotted holding a GPS receiver their life expectancy would be fairly short.

What did you do instead?

We went back to what we did before GPS. The interviewers wrote the principal streets in a cluster on pieces of paper and randomly selected one. They walked down that street, wrote down the surrounding residential streets and randomly picked one. Finally, they walked down the selected street, numbered the houses and used a random number table to pick one. That was our starting house, and the interviewers knocked on doors until they’d surveyed 40 households. It was more complicated than using GPS but not inferior: the results were very close to the GPS survey. The team took care to destroy the pieces of paper which could have identified households if interviewers were searched at checkpoints.

Why didn’t you accompany the interviewers?

I don’t speak Arabic and I don’t look like an Iraqi, so my chances of surviving very long were not strong. Our Iraqi colleagues said it would endanger them too. We met in Jordan to design the survey, at the end to begin analysis, and kept email and phone contact during.

Were the interviewers willing to risk their lives?

They knew there was a risk. Some dropped out before we started, but once we started, everybody stuck it out. There was a strong feeling of professionalism, and I take my hat off to them. These were the most courageous people in the whole operation. The rest of us took flak for the survey, but that’s nothing compared to their courage. We were very worried about someone dying. We took all the safeguards we could, and I tracked what was happening very closely throughout the three months it took. I remember the day word came back we had finished the last cluster and all eight interviewers, their supervisor and drivers were back safely. I was just elated.

Profile

Gilbert M. Burnham trained as a doctor, then went on to manage health services and oversee research in Zambia and Malawi for 15 years. He is now co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.

[h/t MediaLens Message Board. Original link requires subscription.]

12 comments April 23rd, 2007

Most satistying jobs

The General Social Survey is administered to a representative sample of Americans every two years. The2006 GSS asked respondents about job satisfaction and general happiness.

Here are the Top 10 most gratifying jobs and the percentage of subjects who said they were very satisfied with the job:

• Clergy—87 percent percent
• Firefighters—80 percent percent
• Physical therapists—78 percent percent
• Authors—74 percent
• Special education teachers—70 percent
• Teachers—69 percent
• Education administrators—68 percent
• Painters and sculptors—67 percent
• Psychologists—67 percent
• Security and financial services salespersons—65 percent
• Operating engineers—64 percent
• Office supervisors—61 percent

Here are the 10 least gratifying jobs, where few participants reported being very satisfied:

• Laborers, except construction—21 percent
• Apparel clothing salespersons—24 percent
• Handpackers and packagers—24 percent
• Food preparers—24 percent
• Roofers—25 percent
• Cashiers—25 percent
• Furniture and home-furnishing salespersons—25 percent
• Bartenders—26 percent
• Freight, stock and material handlers—26 percent
• Waiters and servers—27 percent

In general, the jobs associated with the highest satisfaction tend to be associated with service and allow a fair degree of autonomy for workers. They do not appear to be among the highest-paying jobs.

The authors also looked at how happy the people were in various professions. The professions with the happiest people are:

• Clergy
• Firefighters
• Transportation ticket and reservation agents
• Housekeepers and butlers
• Hardware/building supplies salespersons
• Architects
• Mechanics and repairers
• Special education teachers
• Actors and directors
• Science technicians

The clergy and firefighters get the best of both worlds: high job satisfaction and high happiness.

Of course, researchers will note that we can’t know from these data alone whether some jobs lead to satisfaction, or whether certain people, those who tend to be satisfied, tend to gravitate to certain jobs. But one can’t help suspecting that service to others combined with relative autonomy is a good recipe for job satisfaction.

Add comment April 22nd, 2007