Psyche, Science, and Society

Wikleaks on the crisis in Kenya

Wikileaks has a new Editorial on the crisis in Kenya that provides useful background on the struggle there and a perspective on the way forward. [Clearly some of those affiliated with Wikileaks are Kenyan]:

An American Solution to the Kenyan Constitutional Crisis

Wikileaks EDITORIAL (Kenya)
2008-01-23

Kenya is home to more than 70 ethnic groups of different origins but with a long history of interaction. Most were already here when the colonialists arrived towards the end of the nineteenth century. In pre-colonial times, these ethnic groups all had historical connections to groups outside present-day Kenya:

The pre-colonial peoples of Kenya

The ethnic groups making up the black African population represented in Kenya fall under four main language divisions:

• The Bantu
• The Western Nilotes
• The Eastern and Southern Nilotes
• The Cushites

The groups can further be broken down into so-called tribes. Tribalism is primitive in a Globalised world and has no place in Kenya today.

The Independent peoples of Kenya

The Constitution Of Kenya carries the definition of a Kenyan Citizen in Chapter V1. There is a clear definition of a KENYAN citizen and no reference whatsoever to any ethnic group. All ethnic groups are Kenyans and all are equal under the Constitution of Kenya. For Kenya’s black communities to see themselves as Kenyan, they must also learn to see the other communities as equally Kenyan too. Nonetheless sensitive issues remain, such as land and the economic, political and educational privileges historically enjoyed by certain communities.

Kenya is a Democracy

The word democracy comes from the Greek demokratia, from demos, ‘the people,’ and kratein, ‘to rule’, and it means simply ‘rule by the people’. Democracy in its broadest sense thus means a way of governing based on people’s consent or the ‘will of the people’. It stands for the welfare of all and for the common good. The basic rules of democracy include recognition of the fact that power belongs to the citizens and the importance of achieving the following goals:

• the greatest possible freedom for all;
• a just society;
• the same rules for all;
• equality before the law;
• respect for the rule of law; and
• equal opportunities for all.

In a democracy, people rule themselves either directly or indirectly through their representatives. In a democracy, a high degree of political legitimacy is therefore necessary, because the electoral process periodically divides the population into ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. A successful democratic political culture implies that the losing parties and their supporters accept the judgment of the voters, and allow for the peaceful transfer of power – the concept of a ‘loyal opposition’

There are various ways in which different societies and governments seek to achieve democracy as an ideal. In some cases, people are involved directly in making decisions about public affairs. In other cases, people choose representatives to act on their behalf.

In direct democracy, the people themselves directly express their will on public issues. Direct democracy can also be described as participatory democracy as it involves all citizens in making decisions on public matters. Each person is given the opportunity to take part in making public decisions directly. People do not need to delegate that right to another person – or a representative – who represents their choices. The best example of participatory democracy is where citizens vote in a referendum. A referendum is a direct vote by all the citizens to decide on a political matter of national importance. For instance, a referendum can be used to decide whether to adopt or reject a new constitution, as happened in Kenya in November 2005.

Since, it is practically impossible to gather all the citizens of Kenya together to play a part of government, the function of Government must be performed by a number of individuals smaller than the totality of its citizens. An election is the chief basis of political legitimacy. The General election is the platform that we use to select a few Kenyan citizens to the National Assembly in order to represent our interests and perform the function of Government. The Members of Parliament are elected by the Kenyan citizens to watch over their interests and to, either form or check Government. This is indirect Democracy. In indirect democracy, people elect their representatives periodically to govern on their behalf and to specifically express people’s feelings on public issues. The state in this form of democracy is not directly governed by the people themselves but by their representatives. This form of democracy is practised in the modern nation-states because they are large in area and in population. Their structures and problems are also complex and varied. It is difficult to involve everybody in such a situation. As a form of indirect democracy, representative democracy requires individuals to elect other persons to exercise power and make decisions on their behalf. A person exercises his or her power through a representative. Kenyans elect their representatives every five years to govern on their behalf and to specifically express people’s feelings on public issues.

But, a democratic Kenya cannot survive, unless the people of Kenya feel that they can affect their system of Government and see all their preferences enacted. Nothing could be more important. Power must at all times; be exercised by the citizens of the Republic of Kenya, rather than the president!. Power can only be exercised by the citizens where the will of the people is seen to be done.

The problem with this country, lies in the fact, that we as citizens have for 43 years been elevating unqualified citizens to public office. The risks we have taken have resulted in Incompetence and Greed! We are responsible for creating a breed of Kenyan politicians who are not at all serious about the electoral process and the meaning of the phrase political accountability. These Politicians are not only low, uncouth, immoral individuals but also clearly visionless. These people have without any regard taken away one by one, all our Individual Rights guaranteed to all Kenyans under our Constitution in the pretext of exercising our mandate.

The Bill of Rights

The Constitution of Kenya under chapter V guarantees all Kenyans the Bill of Rights. NO ONE HAS THE POWER OR AUTHORITY BY LAW TO TAKE AWAY THESE RIGHTS FROM KENYANS. Any attempt to do so is unconstitutional, treasonable and punishable by death, as it amounts to a subversion of our Constitution.

Civil Rights upheld in the Constitution of Kenya

• The right to life,
• The right to personal freedom,
• Protection against slavery and forced labour,
• Protection from inhuman treatment,
• Protection from property being taken away illegally,
• Protection against illegal search or entry,
• The right to the protection of the law,
• Freedom of conscience,
• Freedom of expression,
• Freedom of association and assembly,
• Freedom of movement, and
• Freedom from discrimination.

This means that all Kenyans have—

Political freedom

• hold your own views and talk about what you think and believe,
• associate and meet with others, and
• move freely without hindrance.

Economic freedom

• the ability to own and use property,
• the chance to work and provide for your livelihood, and
• freedom from forced labour and slavery.

Social freedom

• the fair treatment of all citizens,
• no interference with one’s body, premises or private life, and
• no inhuman treatment.

In a democracy, all people are seen as having been born equal and are treated equally before the law. Democracy rejects any form of discrimination among people and provides a framework for justice, fairness and equality. Justice is a set of rules that provide each person and/or groups in society with basic rights. These include:

• Human rights,
• The rule of law,
• Economic justice, and
• Gender equity.

The current Administration is abusing these rules even though Kenya has ratified several United Nations conventions on human rights, among them:

• The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights;
• The International Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights;
• The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment;
• The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women;
• The Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The concept of the ‘rule of law’ is based on the idea of government by law. This means that no person is above the law. That is to say, all citizens (from the President to the lowliest Kenyan) are subject to and equal before the law. It means that no person can suffer punishment unless that person has broken the law and is rightly judged through the established judicial process. Leaders, too, must exercise their powers according to laid down law. Anybody who makes a decision must do so within the law. For example: The Constitution Of Kenya provides for freedom of assembly, and the government is bound by this rule. It cannot prevent a public meeting simply because it dislikes or disagrees with the views of those responsible for calling that meeting. Government officers must first obtain a court order before preventing a meeting from taking place.

Controlling the Abuse and exercise of political power

The state has legitimate power to control and influence actions within its borders. The principal organs (called arms of the government) through which the government exercises its powers are:

• The Legislature: that makes policies and laws and also supervises the work of the Executive;
• The Executive: that carries out the policies and laws passed by the Legislature; the institution that runs the government;
• The Judiciary: that interprets and applies the laws passed by the Legislature and deals with any disputes that occur within the state.

The principle of separation of powers sets limits on the work of the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Executive. It provides the checks and balances that prevent misuse of power by any of the three arms of government. The principle of separation of powers requires that:

• There should be the least possible overlap in the powers and functions of the different arms of government;
• There should be no overlap of staff in the different arms of government;
• No arm of government should interfere with the functions and work of any of the other arms; and
• No arm of government should be more powerful than any of the others.

But is this the case in Kenya today? No it is not. Why?

Corruption

Checks and balances are mechanisms to make sure that no part of the government has too much power, or goes beyond its functions, and that each arm of the government can check the misuse of power by the other arms of the government. Examples of the checks and balances contained in the Constitution of Kenya are:

• The President, as head of the executive, can reject a Bill passed by Parliament, although Parliament may override the President’s decision with a second vote.
• The Judiciary can cancel laws passed by Parliament if these laws are not in line with the Constitution.
• The Judiciary can cancel any action by the Executive if this action is not in line with the law or with the rules of natural justice.
• The Executive has to get permission, by asking Parliament to pass the national budget, to use public money for administration.
• The President cannot dismiss a judge from office unless a tribunal has been appointed to investigate and recommend an action against the judge.

The act by Kibaki to steal the election and swear himself into Office was the ultimate Act of Corruption. That of Abuse of Power for personal gain. The check for this action would have been that the Judiciary can cancel any action by the Executive if this action is not in line with the law or with the rules of natural justice. But rather than this course of action the Judiciary swore Kibaki into Office, following his illegal declaration as winner of the Presidential Election. Here the principle of separation of powers between the executive and judicial functions of the government has not been applied leaving Kenyans with very few options.

Will it be Kenyans that set the democratic agenda?

A democracy represents the ‘will of the people” We went to the polls, voted peacefully and weeks later, we still do not know who won the election. What we do know is that Kenyans are killing Kenyans, the Police are killing Kenyans, The country is on fire and our Constitutions seems to have been suspended by Kibaki who seems to be ruling by decree! We have lost every single one of our Constitutional Rights. So, What is the way forward?

We declare ourselves Independent from Constitutional office bearers who have abused the Constitution and refuse to be governed by them by cutting all ties. How?

We try going the American Way. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson between June 11 and June 28, 1776, the Declaration of Independence is at once the nation’s most cherished symbol of liberty and Jefferson’s most enduring monument. Here, in exalted and unforgettable phrases, Jefferson expressed the convictions in the minds and hearts of the American people. The political philosophy of the Declaration was not new; its ideals of individual liberty had already been expressed by John Locke and the Continental philosophers. What Jefferson did was to summarize this philosophy in “self-evident truths” and set forth a list of grievances against the King in order to justify before the world the breaking of ties between the colonies and the mother country. The American Declaration of Independence, opens with a preamble describing the document’s necessity in explaining why the colonies have overthrown their ruler and chosen to take their place as a separate nation in the world. All men are created equal and there are certain unalienable rights that governments should never violate. These rights include the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. When a government fails to protect those rights, it is not only the right, but also the duty of the people to overthrow that government. In its place, the people should establish a government that is designed to protect those rights. Governments are rarely overthrown, and should not be overthrown for trivial reasons. In this case, a long history of abuses led the colonists to overthrow a tyrannical government.

The president of Kenya, Mwai Kibaki, is guilty of very specific abuses. The President has interfered with Kenyans Constitutional rights to their Fundamental rights and for a fair judicial system. Acting with other Constitutional Office bearers (the Chief Justice, the Registrar of the High Court, the Chairman of the Electoral Commission of Kenya, the Attorney General, and the Heads of all the disciplined forces of the Republic) the President has unconstitutionally sworn himself in as President and is in office illegally. Acting with Constitutional Office bearers, the President has instituted legislation S.25A without the consent of Parliament that will affect the people of Kenya without their consent. This legislation allows appointees by the President to forgive and negotiate with individuals who have looted Kenyan tax payers money in a non transparent manner. Acting with Constitutional Officers , the President has given shoot to Kill orders against the People of Kenya to quash dissent. Acting with Constitutional Officers, the President has removed their right to judicial trial by courts, and prevented Kenyans from trading freely. Additionally, the President and the Police Commissioner are guilty of outright destruction of Kenyan life and property by their refusal to protect the Kenyan and their Fundamental rights to property and life. The president acting with Constitutional Officers has allowed foreign mercenaries to come to Kenya (some from Uganda) and threaten the security of the citizens.

The People of Kenya have tried to reach a peaceful reconciliation of these differences with the President and the constitutional offices, but are being continually ignored. International Mediators who have appealed to the President have been similarly ignored. despite their shared concern with Kenyans for their just cause. After many peaceful attempts, Kenyans have no choice but to declare independence from these Constitutional office bearers. The new nation will be called the ————and will incorporate the people driven Constitution the BOMAS DRAFT as the new Constitution of Kenya. The new government under this Constitution will reserve the right to levy war, make peace, make alliances with foreign nations, conduct trade, and do anything else that nations do.

Kibaki will have to go and will go- by whatever means necessary. Kenya will not have a Dictator. Never Again. We must restore Democracy in our Country at whatever cost. This is our Patriotic Duty that will protect Kenyan generations from Tyranny.

Add comment January 24th, 2008

Aljazeera on the Grat Gazan Jailbreak

Yesterday the world experienced the amazing spectacle of a jailbreak from the prison that Gaza has become under Israeli blockade. 350,000 people crossed the breached prison walls into Egypt to buy needed supplies. Here is an Aljazeera report on this extraordinary event.

Add comment January 24th, 2008

Guantanamo: Lying to mental health staff to avoid worse conditions?

According to the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, Guantanamo prisoners lie to mental health professional (the article refers to “psychologists,” “psychiatrists,” and “psychtechs” so it is hard to know who is really involved), in order to avoid receiving worse treatment:

Gulf News UAE:Prisoners forced to lie to doctors

by Habib Toumi

Manama: Prisoners at Guantanamo Bay are invariably telling psychologists that they were fine in order to avoid stricter detention conditions, Juma Al Dossary, Bahrain’s most famous inmate at the US centre, has said.

Quoted by his lawyer Joshua Bryan-Colangelo, Al Dossary said that he and the other detainees were providing positive answers to weekly questions by psychologists about their mental condition.

“Al Dossary said that all detainees have learned to report that they are fine because otherwise they will be held under even stricter conditions,” said Bryan-Colangelo who visited his client last month.

“Two psychiatrists visit Al Dossary once a week to spend a few minutes with him and ask the same questions about his condition,” the lawyer said, raising doubts about the ‘mental health care’. He said that the ‘psychtech’ saw him every day and asked the same questions: “Are you eating well?, Are you sleeping well?, Do you think about hurting yourself? and, Do you think about hurting others?”

The lawyer charged that the attention that his client was receiving at Guantanamo was ‘inadequate’.

Add comment January 23rd, 2008

MLK: The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement

Dr. Martin Luther King addressed the American Psychological Association convention in 1967, as reprinted in the APA Monitor in 1999:

King’s challenge to the nation’s social scientists

APA Monitor Introduction

In September, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr., was only 38-years-old but already president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize when he took the podium at APA’s Annual Convention in Washington, D.C.
A re-reading of his powerful address today captures the urgent tone of the 60s, as he cajoled the nation’s social scientists to ‘tell it like it is.’ In fact, to APA’s membership, whom he addressed as ‘concerned friends of good will,’ his plea for help in changing a society ‘poisoned to its soul by racism,’ seems now ever more poignant in light of the tragedy that struck only seven months later.

The words he spoke that Sept. 1, as the convention’s Invited Distinguished Address, were reprinted in the Journal of Social Issues (Vol. 24, No. 1, 1968). While the speech was in galley proofs, the shocking and numbing news of his assassination was released.

Here is the full text of his speech

The Role of the Behavioral Scientist in the Civil Rights Movement

Martin Luther King Jr.

It is always a very rich and rewarding experience when I can take a brief break from the day-to-day demands of our struggle for freedom and human dignity and discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of good will all over the nation. It is particularly a great privilege to discuss these issues with members of the academic community, who are constantly writing about and dealing with the problems that we face and who have the tremendous responsibility of molding the minds of young men and women all over the country.

The Civil Rights Movement needs the help of social scientists

In the preface to their book, ‘Applied Sociology’ (1965), S. M. Miller and Alvin Gouldner state: ‘It is the historic mission of the social sciences to enable mankind to take possession of society.’ It follows that for Negroes who substantially are excluded from society this science is needed even more desperately than for any other group in the population.

For social scientists, the opportunity to serve in a life-giving purpose is a humanist challenge of rare distinction. Negroes too are eager for a rendezvous with truth and discovery. We are aware that social scientists, unlike some of their colleagues in the physical sciences, have been spared the grim feelings of guilt that attended the invention of nuclear weapons of destruction. Social scientists, in the main, are fortunate to be able to extirpate evil, not to invent it.

If the Negro needs social sciences for direction and for self-understanding, the white society is in even more urgent need. White America needs to understand that it is poisoned to its soul by racism and the understanding needs to be carefully documented and consequently more difficult to reject. The present crisis arises because although it is historically imperative that our society take the next step to equality, we find ourselves psychologically and socially imprisoned. All too many white Americans are horrified not with conditions of Negro life but with the product of these conditions-the Negro himself.

White America is seeking to keep the walls of segregation substantially intact while the evolution of society and the Negro’s desperation is causing them to crumble. The white majority, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change, is resisting and producing chaos while complaining that if there were no chaos orderly change would come.

Negroes want the social scientist to address the white community and ‘tell it like it is.’ White America has an appalling lack of knowledge concerning the reality of Negro life. One reason some advances were made in the South during the past decade was the discovery by northern whites of the brutal facts of southern segregated life. It was the Negro who educated the nation by dramatizing the evils through nonviolent protest. The social scientist played little or no role in disclosing truth. The Negro action movement with raw courage did it virtually alone. When the majority of the country could not live with the extremes of brutality they witnessed, political remedies were enacted and customs were altered.

These partial advances were, however, limited principally to the South and progress did not automatically spread throughout the nation. There was also little depth to the changes. White America stopped murder, but that is not the same thing as ordaining brotherhood; nor is the ending of lynch rule the same thing as inaugurating justice.

After some years of Negro-white unity and partial success, white America shifted gears and went into reverse. Negroes, alive with hope and enthusiasm, ran into sharply stiffened white resistance at all levels and bitter tensions broke out in sporadic episodes of violence. New lines of hostility were drawn and the era of good feeling disappeared.

The decade of 1955 to 1965, with its constructive elements, misled us. Everyone, activists and social scientists, underestimated the amount of violence and rage Negroes were suppressing and the amount of bigotry the white majority was disguising.

Science should have been employed more fully to warn us that the Negro, after 350 years of handicaps, mired in an intricate network of contemporary barriers, could not be ushered into equality by tentative and superficial changes.

Mass nonviolent protests, a social invention of Negroes, were effective in Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma in forcing national legislation which served to change Negro life sufficiently to curb explosions. But when changes were confined to the South alone, the North, in the absence of change, began to seethe.

The freedom movement did not adapt its tactics to the different and unique northern urban conditions. It failed to see that nonviolent marches in the South were forms of rebellion. When Negroes took over the streets and shops, southern society shook to its roots. Negroes could contain their rage when they found the means to force relatively radical changes in their environment.

In the North, on the other hand, street demonstrations were not even a mild expression of militancy. The turmoil of cities absorbs demonstrations as merely transitory drama which is ordinary in city life. Without a more effective tactic for upsetting the status quo, the power structure could maintain its intransigence and hostility. Into the vacuum of inaction, violence and riots flowed and a new period opened.

Urban riots.

Urban riots must now be recognized as durable social phenomena. They may be deplored, but they are there and should be understood. Urban riots are a special form of violence. They are not insurrections. The rioters are not seeking to seize territory or to attain control of institutions. They are mainly intended to shock the white community. They are a distorted form of social protest. The looting which is their principal feature serves many functions. It enables the most enraged and deprived Negro to take hold of consumer goods with the ease the white man does by using his purse. Often the Negro does not even want what he takes; he wants the experience of taking. But most of all, alienated from society and knowing that this society cherishes property above people, he is shocking it by abusing property rights. There are thus elements of emotional catharsis in the violent act. This may explain why most cities in which riots have occurred have not had a repetition, even though the causative conditions remain. It is also noteworthy that the amount of physical harm done to white people other than police is infinitesimal and in Detroit whites and Negroes looted in unity.

A profound judgment of today’s riots was expressed by Victor Hugo a century ago. He said, ‘If a soul is left in the darkness, sins will be committed. The guilty one is not he who commits the sin, but he who causes the darkness.’

The policymakers of the white society have caused the darkness; they create discrimination; they structured slums; and they perpetuate unemployment, ignorance and poverty. It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. When we ask Negroes to abide by the law, let us also demand that the white man abide by law in the ghettos. Day-in and day-out he violates welfare laws to deprive the poor of their meager allotments; he flagrantly violates building codes and regulations; his police make a mockery of law; and he violates laws on equal employment and education and the provisions for civic services. The slums are the handiwork of a vicious system of the white society; Negroes live in them but do not make them any more than a prisoner makes a prison. Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.

Vietnam War.

There is another cause of riots that is too important to mention casually-the war in Vietnam. Here again, we are dealing with a controversial issue. But I am convinced that the war in Vietnam has played havoc with our domestic destinies. The bombs that fall in Vietnam explode at home. It does not take much to see what great damage this war has done to the image of our nation. It has left our country politically and morally isolated in the world, where our only friends happen to be puppet nations like Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea. The major allies in the world that have been with us in war and peace are not with us in this war. As a result we find ourselves socially and politically isolated.

The war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has seriously impaired the United Nations. It has exacerbated the hatreds between continents, and worse still, between races. It has frustrated our development at home by telling our underprivileged citizens that we place insatiable military demands above their most critical needs. It has greatly contributed to the forces of reaction in America, and strengthened the military-industrial complex, against which even President Eisenhower solemnly warned us. It has practically destroyed Vietnam, and left thousands of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated. And it has exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare.

As I looked at what this war was doing to our nation, and to the domestic situation and to the Civil Rights movement, I found it necessary to speak vigorously out against it. My speaking out against the war has not gone without criticisms. There are those who tell me that I should stick with civil rights, and stay in my place. I can only respond that I have fought too hard and long to end segregated public accommodations to segregate my own moral concerns. It is my deep conviction that justice is indivisible, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. For those who tell me I am hurting the Civil Rights movement, and ask, ‘Don’t you think that in order to be respected, and in order to regain support, you must stop talking against the war?’ I can only say that I am not a consensus leader. I do not seek to determine what is right and wrong by taking a Gallop Poll to determine majority opinion. And it is again my deep conviction that ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher of consensus, but a molder of consensus. On some positions cowardice asks the question, ‘Is it safe?!’ Expediency asks the question, ‘Is it politic?’ Vanity asks the question, ‘Is it popular?’ But conscience must ask the question, ‘Is it right?!’ And there comes a time when one must take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular. But one must take it because it is right. And that is where I find myself today.

Moreover, I am convinced, even if war continues, that a genuine massive act of concern will do more to quell riots than the most massive deployment of troops.

Unemployment.

The unemployment of Negro youth ranges up to 40 percent in some slums. The riots are almost entirely youth events-the age range of participants is from 13 to 25. What hypocrisy it is to talk of saving the new generation-to make it the generation of hope-while consigning it to unemployment and provoking it to violent alternatives.

When our nation was bankrupt in the thirties we created an agency to provide jobs to all at their existing level of skill. In our overwhelming affluence today what excuse is there for not setting up a national agency for full employment immediately?

The other program which would give reality to hope and opportunity would be the demolition of the slums to be replaced by decent housing built by residents of the ghettos.

These programs are not only eminently sound and vitally needed, but they have the support of an overwhelming majority of the nation-white and Negro. The Harris Poll on August 21, 1967, disclosed that an astounding 69 percent of the country support a works program to provide employment to all and an equally astonishing 65 percent approve a program to tear down the slums.

There is a program and there is heavy majority support for it. Yet, the administration and Congress tinker with trivial proposals to limit costs in an extravagant gamble with disaster.

The President has lamented that he cannot persuade Congress. He can, if the will is there, go to the people, mobilize the people’s support and thereby substantially increase his power to persuade Congress. Our most urgent task is to find the tactics that will move the government no matter how determined it is to resist.

Civil disobedience.

I believe we will have to find the militant middle between riots on the one hand and weak and timid supplication for justice on the other hand. That middle ground, I believe, is civil disobedience. It can be aggressive but nonviolent; it can dislocate but not destroy. The specific planning will take some study and analysis to avoid mistakes of the past when it was employed on too small a scale and sustained too briefly.

Civil disobedience can restore Negro-white unity. There have been some very important sane white voices even during the most desperate moments of the riots. One reason is that the urban crisis intersects the Negro crisis in the city. Many white decision- makers may care little about saving Negroes, but they must care about saving their cities. The vast majority of production is created in cities; most white Americans live in them. The suburbs to which they flee cannot exist detached from cities. Hence powerful white elements have goals that merge with ours.

Role for the social scientist.

Now there are many roles for social scientists in meeting these problems. Kenneth Clark has said that Negroes are moved by a suicide instinct in riots and Negroes know there is a tragic truth in this observation. Social scientists should also disclose the suicide instinct that governs the administration and Congress in their total failure to respond constructively.

What other areas are there for social scientists to assist the civil rights movement? There are many, but I would like to suggest three because they have an urgent quality.

Social science may be able to search out some answers to the problem of Negro leadership. E. Franklin Frazier, in his profound work, Black Bourgeoisie, laid painfully bare the tendency of the upwardly mobile Negro to separate from his community, divorce himself from responsibility to it, while failing to gain acceptance in the white community. There has been significant improvements from the days Frazier researched, but anyone knowledgeable about Negro life knows its middle class is not yet bearing its weight. Every riot has carried strong overtone of hostility of lower class Negroes toward the affluent Negro and vice versa. No contemporary study of scientific depth has totally studied this problem. Social science should be able to suggest mechanisms to create a wholesome black unity and a sense of peoplehood while the process of integration proceeds.

As one example of this gap in research, there are no studies, to my knowledge, to explain adequately the absence of Negro trade union leadership. Eight-five percent of Negroes are working people. Some two million are in trade unions but in 50 years we have produced only one national leader-A. Philip Randolph.

Discrimination explains a great deal, but not everything. The picture is so dark even a few rays of light may signal a useful direction.

Political action.

The second area for scientific examination is political action. In the past two decades, Negroes have expended more effort in quest of the franchise than they have in all other campaigns combined. Demonstrations, sit-ins and marches, though more spectacular, are dwarfed by the enormous number of man-hours expended to register millions, particularly in the South. Negro organizations from extreme militant to conservative persuasion, Negro leaders who would not even talk to each other, all have been agreed on the key importance of voting. Stokely Carmichael said black power means the vote and Roy Wilkins, while saying black power means black death, also energetically sought the power of the ballot.

A recent major work by social scientists Matthew and Prothro concludes that ‘The concrete benefits to be derived from the franchise-under conditions that prevail in the South-have often been exaggerated.,’ that voting is not the key that will unlock the door to racial equality because ‘the concrete measurable payoffs from Negro voting in the South will not be revolutionary’ (1966).

James A. Wilson supports this view, arguing, ‘Because of the structure of American politics as well as the nature of the Negro community, Negro politics will accomplish only limited objectives’ (1965).

If their conclusion can be supported, then the major effort Negroes have invested in the past 20 years has been in the wrong direction and the major pillar of their hope is a pillar of sand. My own instinct is that these views are essentially erroneous, but they must be seriously examined.

The need for a penetrating massive scientific study of this subject cannot be overstated. Lipset in 1957 asserted that a limitation in focus in political sociology has resulted in a failure of much contemporary research to consider a number of significant theoretical questions. The time is short for social science to illuminate this critically important area. If the main thrust of Negro effort has been, and remains, substantially irrelevant, we may be facing an agonizing crisis of tactical theory.

The third area for study concerns psychological and ideological changes in Negroes. It is fashionable now to be pessimistic. Undeniably, the freedom movement has encountered setbacks. Yet I still believe there are significant aspects of progress.

Negroes today are experiencing an inner transformation that is liberating them from ideological dependence on the white majority. What has penetrated substantially all strata of Negro life is the revolutionary idea that the philosophy and morals of the dominant white society are not holy or sacred but in all too many respects are degenerate and profane.

Negroes have been oppressed for centuries not merely by bonds of economic and political servitude. The worst aspect of their oppression was their inability to question and defy the fundamental precepts of the larger society. Negroes have been loath in the past to hurl any fundamental challenges because they were coerced and conditioned into thinking within the context of the dominant white ideology. This is changing and new radical trends are appearing in Negro thought. I use radical in its broad sense to refer to reaching into roots.

Ten years of struggle have sensitized and opened the Negro’s eyes to reaching. For the first time in their history, Negroes have become aware of the deeper causes for the crudity and cruelty that governed white society’s responses to their needs. They discovered that their plight was not a consequence of superficial prejudice but was systemic.

The slashing blows of backlash and frontlash have hurt the Negro, but they have also awakened him and revealed the nature of the oppressor. To lose illusions is to gain truth. Negroes have grown wiser and more mature and they are hearing more clearly those who are raising fundamental questions about our society whether the critics be Negro or white. When this process of awareness and independence crystallizes, every rebuke, every evasion, become hammer blows on the wedge that splits the Negro from the larger society.

Social science is needed to explain where this development is going to take us. Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction.

We know we haven’t found the answers to all forms of social change. We know, however, that we did find some answers. We have achieved and we are confident. We also know we are confronted now with far greater complexities and we have not yet discovered all the theory we need.

And may I say together, we must solve the problems right here in America. As I have said time and time again, Negroes still have faith in America. Black people still have faith in a dream that we will all live together as brothers in this country of plenty one day.

But I was distressed when I read in the New York Times of Aug. 31, 1967; that a sociologist from Michigan State University, the outgoing president of the American Sociological Society, stated in San Francisco that Negroes should be given a chance to find an all Negro community in South America: ‘that the valleys of the Andes Mountains would be an ideal place for American Negroes to build a second Israel.’ He further declared that ‘The United States Government should negotiate for a remote but fertile land in Equador, Peru or Bolivia for this relocation.’

I feel that it is rather absurd and appalling that a leading social scientist today would suggest to black people, that after all these years of suffering an exploitation as well as investment in the American dream, that we should turn around and run at this point in history. I say that we will not run! Professor Loomis even compared the relocation task of the Negro to the relocation task of the Jews in Israel. The Jews were made exiles. They did not choose to abandon Europe, they were driven out. Furthermore, Israel has a deep tradition, and Biblical roots for Jews. The Wailing Wall is a good example of these roots. They also had significant financial aid from the United States for the relocation and rebuilding effort. What tradition does the Andes, especially the valley of the Andes Mountains, have for Negroes?

And I assert at this time that once again we must reaffirm our belief in building a democratic society, in which blacks and whites can live together as brothers, where we will all come to see that integration is not a problem, but an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity.

The problem is deep. It is gigantic in extent, and chaotic in detail. And I do not believe that it will be solved until there is a kind of cosmic discontent enlarging in the bosoms of people of good will all over this nation.

There are certain technical words in every academic discipline which soon become stereotypes and even clichés. Every academic discipline has its technical nomenclature. You who are in the field of psychology have given us a great word. It is the word maladjusted. This word is probably used more than any other word in psychology. It is a good word; certainly it is good that in dealing with what the word implies you are declaring that destructive maladjustment should be destroyed. You are saying that all must seek the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.

But on the other hand, I am sure that we will recognize that there are some things in our society, some things in our world, to which we should never be adjusted. There are some things concerning which we must always be maladjusted if we are to be people of good will. We must never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and racial segregation. We must never adjust ourselves to religious bigotry. We must never adjust ourselves to economic conditions that take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few. We must never adjust ourselves to the madness of militarism, and the self-defeating effects of physical violence.

In a day when Sputniks, Explorers and Geminies are dashing through outer space, when guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, no nation can finally win a war. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence, it is either nonviolence or nonexistence. As President Kennedy declared, ‘Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.’ And so the alternative to disarmament, the alternative to a suspension in the development and use of nuclear weapons, the alternative to strengthening the United Nations and eventually disarming the whole world, may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation. Our earthly habitat will be transformed into an inferno that even Dante could not envision.

Creative maladjustment.

Thus, it may well be that our world is in dire need of a new organization, The International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment. Men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet Amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream’; or as maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln, who in the midst of his vacillations finally came to see that this nation could not survive half slave and half free; or as maladjusted as Thomas Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery, could scratch across the pages of history, words lifted to cosmic proportions, ‘We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. That they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. And that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ And through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.

I have not lost hope. I must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. And these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace.

Add comment January 21st, 2008

Tirman: Right-Wingers Can’t Cover Up Iraq’s Death Toll Catastrophe

John Tirman describes the right wing hatchet job on the Lancet Iraq mortality study in detail in Alternet:

Right-Wingers Can’t Cover Up Iraq’s Death Toll Catastrophe

by John Tirman

Now I know what Hillary Clinton meant, first hand, by that “vast right-wing conspiracy.” When the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the Sunday Times in London are going after you — along with about 100 right-wing bloggers — rest assured you’ve hit a nerve.

Or is it just Soros Derangement Syndrome at work?

More than two years ago, I commissioned a household survey of Iraq to learn how many people had died in the war. This topic had been virtually ignored by the news media and the U.S. government. It was important to know for at least three reasons. The first was to try to understand the nature of the violence there, which was steadily growing and creating a humanitarian crisis, possibly a regional conflagration. Second, it might tell us something about how and when to exit. Third, we needed to know for the sake of our national soul. What had we wrought?

So I contacted the people who had done a previous, largely ignored survey-top public health professionals at Johns Hopkins University. They had published a survey in October 2004 that showed 98,000 had died in the first 18 months of the war, which was greeted with disbelief and charges of politicizing science, and quickly dismissed.

I said: ‘do a bigger survey to improve the accuracy, and I will make sure it gets the proper attention in the news media.’ They did do a bigger survey, and I managed a public education campaign that permitted the results to be considered more broadly, results that estimated total deaths at 600,000 by violence after 40 months of war. The survey was published in The Lancet, the British medical journal. And get attention it did, roundly disbelieved and scorned by war supporters, but spurring a brief but intense debate about the human cost of the war.

Dozens of statisticians and other professionals scoured the study and its data to see if the methods and implementation were proper; a special committee at the World Health Organization was convened to review it, and the Lancet had also subjected it to rigorous peer review. The survey held up to this scrutiny, with quibbles and some lingering “should have done this” and “might have done that.” But virtually every competent person agreed that the study provided the best estimate we have.

Then, earlier this month, the National Journal, a Capitol Hill “insider” weekly, ran a cover story titled “Data Bomb” by Neil Munro and Carl Cannon. In a note by Munro published by the National Review blog, he asserts:

“George Soros funded the survey. The U.S. authors played no role in data-collection, and did not apply standard anti-fraud measures. The chief Iraqi data-collector had earlier produced medical articles to help Saddam’s anti-sanctions campaign in the 1990s, and said Allah guided the prior 2004 Lancet/Johns Hopkins death-survey. Some of the field surveyors were employed by Moqtada Sadr’s Ministry of Health. The Iraqis’ numbers contain evidence of fakery, and the Lancet did not check for fakery.”

It’s a neat summary of their allegations, which include dozens of unfounded charges, promiscuous innuendo, misquoting of the principals, and misunderstanding statistics, and relies on two disgruntled critics. It was a hatchet job, pure and simple. Not a sentence of Munro’s summary is truthful, and that goes for much of the NJ article, too, which I have demolished elsewhere (PDF). The principal author, Gilbert Burnham, M.D., Ph.D., and his colleagues have taken time from their clinics in Afghanistan and Jordan and Africa to answer the charges on the John Hopkins website, too ( with a letter here, and a FAQ here).

But lies have a way of proliferating on the Internet, and so it was with this set of schoolyard bully brickbats. What seemed most to get under the skin of the right-wing media was a small grant for public education funded by the Open Society Institute, a foundation created by George Soros.

The charges of fraud that NJ clumsily made but never came close to proving were of course a tonic to the war supporters who were shamed by the estimate of 600,000 fatalities. There is nothing as devastating to the increasingly discredited case for war as the specter of the U.S. invasion having caused, directly and indirectly, more deaths than were attributed to the bloody reign of Saddam Hussein.

But it was news that “Soros” was a donor, and the wingnuts went berserk. The line that Munro and Cannon took was that “Soros” was somehow behind the survey from the start, which was timed to affect the 2006 elections. It was not only fraud, they contend, but the perversion of science for political ends backed by the disgruntled, Bush-hating billionaire.

It’s classic right-wing defamation, and of course none of it is true. Munro and Cannon were painstakingly walked through the chronology and donors, but deliberately ignored it to fashion their paranoid fairy tale, and the Wall Street Journal et al lapped it up.

We commissioned the survey on October 25, 2005, hoping to get it done as quickly as it could be done professionally, and perhaps have the results out in the spring. Why wait? But Iraq quickly became too violent to permit teams of questioners go out to 1,000 randomly chosen households. So it was not until late spring that they did begin the door-to-door work-still very perilous-and completed the survey in early July. It took another two months to enter the data, have biostatisticians at Johns Hopkins analyze it, and write up the article. The Lancet then took weeks to peer review. It was released when ready. There was no political agenda; there didn’t need to be. The results spoke for themselves.

The Open Society Institute came late to the process, announcing to me that a grant had been made for public education on May 4, 2006. That is six and a half months after the survey process began. We had already paid for the survey out of internal funds. Less than half of the cash needs of the survey, the analysis, and the public education effort was paid for by OSI. (If the real cost of the effort were totaled-to include salaries of Burnham, myself, and many others who were not compensated directly-then the OSI contribution would have offset about 10 percent of the cost.) I doubt very much whether George Soros himself was ever aware of the grant. OSI is a very large, humanitarian foundation, and their $46,000 grant to MIT is small by their standards.

And, needless to say, OSI and “Soros” had no influence over the initiation, conduct, or findings of the survey. Neither Burnham and his colleagues nor the Lancet editors knew OSI was one of the donors. The contract was with MIT.

I carefully told this to Munro on the telephone, and Burnham’s colleague Les Roberts emailed the same information to Cannon last autumn. Munro had asked, among other hostile questions, whether any Muslims or Arabs were supporting the survey, a racism reflected in his remark about Allah above and a charge in the NJ piece that the survey teams lacked American oversight and were thereby suspect. But he was emotionally fixated on Soros, and asked about his role repeatedly. When I tried to offer corroborating evidence for the survey, he screamed at me that none of that mattered. I could see where this was going.

Of course, Munro himself has been a rabid supporter of the war from the start. In the tradition of former NJ editor Michael Kelly, who called opponents of the war traitors, Munro agitated for the “destruction of Iraq” as early as November 2001. He had elsewhere insisted that the peace in Northern Ireland was the result of the British Army’s iron fist. His sentiments were on display through the hatchet job on us, not least in alleging that The Lancet article was a spur to jihadists.

So the headlines-”Soros Underwrites Osama’s Talking Points,” and “$oros Iraq Death Claim was a Sham” are typical. The Soros Derangement Syndrome derives, I suspect, from his special status as a traitor to his class, as the right used to refer to FDR. Someone so intelligent, articulate, actively compassionate, and rich cannot be tolerated.

In an odd twist, a new mortality survey-approvingly mentioned by the NJ piece-appeared earlier this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Conducted by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, it found 151,000 deaths by violence as of June 2006, about the same period as the Lancet article. Newspaper coverage duly noted that their estimate was only one-quarter that of the Lancet. But a little digging would have revealed much more: the total deaths attributable to the war, non-violent as well as violent, was about 400,000 for that period, now 19 months ago. If the same trends continued, that total today would be more than 600,000.

The deaths-by-violence in that latter survey remained the same from year-to-year, however, which is not plausible-all observers agree that violent deaths were rising sharply in 2005 and 2006. The discrepancy is found in how the survey was conducted: interviewers identified themselves as employees of the Ministry of Health, then under the control of Shiite cleric Moktada al Sadr. Those interviewed, therefore, would be wary of saying a brother or son or husband had been killed by violence, fearing retribution. And, indeed, there are non-violent categories in the survey that suggest just such equivocation: “Unintentional injuries” would equal about 40 percent of the death-by-violence toll, for example. Road accidents were ten times their pre-war totals-if someone is run off a highway by a U.S. convoy, is that a “non-violent” death?

The researchers, to their credit, acknowledge that their estimate is likely too low due to several factors. They did not go into dangerous neighborhoods, which made up 11 percent of the sample, and could not accurately estimate the death toll in those, which would of course have been high. Still, the survey is revealing on the non-violent mortality, too: deaths by kidney failure, cancer, diabetes, and others rose by several times, signaling the near-collapse of the health care system.

The MoH survey is the fifth trying to measure mortality during the war, and there is significant congruence among all. (The Lancet estimate is not actually the highest; that belongs to the private British polling firm, Opinion Research Business, which found that as of August 2007, 1.2 million Iraqis were dead due to the war.) But all the surveys point to one thing: a colossal amount of killing and dying has been going on, far more than numbers used in most discussions of the issue in the fleeting instances when concern for Iraqis appears.

And that, of course, should be the real issue here, not whether George Soros is interested in the issue. The NJ calumny and the many gleeful references to it are a sign that the pro-war legions are really at wit’s end. The catastrophe they created and supported must be blamed on others-the conveyors of bad news, the quisling liberals, and the Iraqis themselves.

But the dead in Iraq cannot be silenced as long as we have courageous researchers who will go into the warzone to gather data and tell us the truth. That’s what five surveys-against perilous of odds-have done, and the findings should haunt us every day.

John Tirman is Executive Director of MIT’s Center for International Studies.

1 comment January 21st, 2008

Pro Bono Statistics: 5 problems with the science of the IFHS study

The Pro Bono Statistics blog has some excellent pieces on the new NEJM Iraq Family Health Survey estimate of violent mortality. PBS raises several issues. First (s)he finds a correlation of .94 between governorate (province)) population size and sample size, which apparently contradicts the published description of the sampling procedure.

PBS also finds fault with the way the IFHS dealt with missing data, by extrapolating from Iraq Body Count data for two governorates.

While the more detailed postings described above are important to read, I’ll reproduce here a summary of five issues with IFHS raised by PBS. Evidently, PB is in the process of writing separate postings on each issue:

5 problems with the science of the IFHS study

Reviewing the IFHS study, I found 5 problems with the science of the study. I believe that taken together (but particularly the first three points, regarding the crucial role extrapolation plays in arriving at the estimates in the study, and regarding the ratio of under-reporting) those problems should be seen as grave. At the very least, they should be seen as putting the findings of the IFHS on equal or inferior footing to those of Burnham et al., rather than as being on superior footing due to the nominal large size of the sample in the IFHS.

I now give a brief abstract of the five problems. As I write a fuller description of each, I will add a link to it from the list here. Unless explicitly stated otherwise, death rates and counts below refer to violent deaths as defined by the IFHS authors.

1. Missing clusters and extrapolation using IBC numbers. The IFHS surveyors did not visit all of the clusters in their sample. Those areas that were judged to be dangerous went unsurveyed. A minority of those gaps (in Nineveh and Wasit) seem to be ignored, introducing potential bias. To fill in the rest of the gaps, the IFHS authors extrapolated from other areas. The extrapolation method was to calculate the mortality rate in all of Baghdad as a fixed factor times the mortality rate in some reference area, where the fixed factor was calculated using Iraq Body Count data. The same method (with a different factor) was applied to all of Anbar as well.

It is important to note that these extrapolations determined the total number of deaths estimated for Baghdad and Anbar. Any data that was collected within those areas was in effect ignored in calculating the death estimates. Thus the death count in Baghdad and Anbar, that together account for over 60% of the deaths in the estimate for the total, are purely a matter of extrapolation, and depend directly on the IBC extrapolation factors. To illustrate: the extrapolation factor used for Baghdad was 3.08. If instead the number was 6, that would have added about 80,000 deaths to the estimate.

The reliability of the IFHS estimate thus depends directly and substantially on certain properties holding for the IBC data (namely coverage rates which are constant across space and across political characteristics). We have no reason to assume that those properties hold, and have some reason to assume they don’t. The IFHS authors have apparently made no attempt to account for those issues - not so much even as to factor uncertainties into the size of the confidence interval.

In addition, the extrapolation method is the reason for the close resemblance, emphasized by the IFHS authors, between the IBC and IFHS breakdown of deaths by area. This resemblance is an artifact rather than a feature of the raw data and should not be seen as showing coherence between IFHS and IBC.

2. The extrapolation procedure is problematic even if the IBC extrapolation factors are assumed accurate. The extrapolation basis is the death rate in 3 reference governorates (the paper does not say exactly which, describing them only as the “three provinces that contributed more than 4% each to the total number of deaths reported for the period from March 2003 through June 2006″). Most governorates were sampled with 3 x 18 = 54 clusters each. Nineveh was sample with 72 clusters. Thus the estimate of deaths for Baghdad and Anbar (which, again, account for over 60% of the total) relies on at most 2 * 54 + 72 = 180 clusters. This number, much smaller than the nominal size of 971, is the dominant factor in determining the uncertainty of the estimate of the total (again, even if the extrapolation factor is assumed to be correct and known precisely).

This is the reason why the length of the confidence interval for the IFHS study (about 120,000 deaths) is not much smaller than that of Burnham et al. (about 370,000) despite the fact that Burnham et al. used only 47 clusters.

3. The IFHS does not account properly for uncertainty in under-reporting. In the same way that the IFHS estimate depends on the extrapolation factor, it depends on the assumed under-reporting factor. The justification for the factor used seems slim (I have not made an attempt to follow the reference given). Even accepting their assumptions - i.e., treating the proportion being reported as a normal variable with mean 0.65 and standard deviation of about 0.075, the authors fail to properly account for the uncertainty in the under-reporting in their calculation of the confidence interval of the estimate of the death rate. A proper accounting would increase the size of the confidence interval by about 25%.

4. In the IFHS paper, the heading “violent deaths” does not include certain types of injuries. I could not find this mentioned in the paper itself, but table 3 in the supplementary material and a statement by WHO official indicate that car accidents and “unintentional injuries” are not included in the estimate. This may seem reasonable a-priori regarding car-accidents, and to a lesser extent regarding unintentional injuries. However, contrary to the statement, those two categories account for more than a third of the deaths by injury in the survey. Also, there has been a dramatic increase in both of those categories as compared to pre-war rates. Under those circumstances, it appears unjustified to exclude these categories from the estimate. Including them in the estimate would increase it by more than 50%.

5. The last point is more of an indication of trouble (either in the methodology of the survey or in the way it is described in the paper) than a specific problem with the estimation. According to the description of the sampling method, 10 households were surveyed in each cluster, and there were (with few exceptions) 3 x 18 = 54 clusters per governorate. In such a set-up there should be no correlation between the number of people surveyed in each governorate and the size of the population in the governorate. However, looking at table 2 in the supplementary material of the paper, there appears to be a strong correlation between those two figures. It seems that the only way such a correlation could show up is the unlikely situation in which the size of the population in the a governorate is strongly correlated with the average household size in the the governorate.

Add comment January 20th, 2008

Tirman: Implications of Iraq mortality studies

John Tirman, the director of MIT’s Center for International Studies, which funded the second Lancet Iraq mortality study, has an Op Ed in the Boston Globe this weekend on the implications of the multiple Iraq mortality studies. [One assumes that this is, in part at least, a response to the recent despicable and dishonest right wing hatchet jobs on the Lancet 2 study in the National Review, and by Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby]:

The murky toll of the Iraq war

By John Tirman
January 19, 2008

ONCE AGAIN, a controversy has erupted over how many people are being killed in Iraq. It’s an important debate, not only for beleaguered Iraqis, but for Americans seeking stability and a timely exit.

Mortality figures alone can tell a compelling story. Add to that other numbers that fill in our understanding even more - such as the scale of the flow of refugees or the women widowed by the war - and we have useful information.

So what are these statistics, and what do they tell us about this nearly five-year-old conflict?

Two kinds of accounts have emerged on the question of mortality. One is a literal count, body by body, from reports in the English language press. Because the media, mostly based in Baghdad, cannot grasp most of the violence, this is an undercount (now about 84,000) even by the reckoning of its authors, the UK-based Iraq Body Count.

The second method is to go out and ask the question in surveys of randomly selected households. This has been done five times under very dangerous conditions. Surveys of this kind during war are relatively new, and, as a result, it’s not surprising that the numbers they’ve produced have varied. But there is significant congruence.

The surveys agree that mortality is much higher than is typically held in political discussions about Iraq. The highest figure, from Opinion Business Research, a private survey firm in London, is 1.2 million through August 2007. It is also the most recent.

About 15 months ago, a survey commissioned by my center at MIT and published in The Lancet found that 601,000 had died by violence through June 2006. This figure has created a firestorm of criticism, but the methods are sound and none of the many peer reviews found anything greatly amiss. (One recalculation brought the death-by-violence total down to 450,000.)

Then last week, Iraq’s Ministry of Health released its large survey, also ending in June 2006, finding that 151,000 had died by violence. But their data tables show an enormous “excess death” total of nearly 400,000 caused by the war, and a peculiarly flat rate of violence throughout the war. Because the interviewers worked for the government, it’s likely that many respondents attributed deaths to nonviolent causes, in order to protect themselves from unwanted attention.

What to make of all this? The first conclusion is that hundreds of thousands of people have died as a result of the war - this seems incontrovertible. It is buttressed by the large number of displaced - some 3 million to 3.5 million caused by the war - and a reported total of 500,000 war widows.

The second conclusion, which helps us understand the violence, is that such a human catastrophe accounts for the insurgency in ways that no other explanation does. Whatever one makes of these insurgents, they appear to be fighting to defend their towns and tribes (apart from Al Qaeda’s foreign operation). Violence begets violence, especially when foreigners are involved.

The third conclusion is that Iraq’s devastation runs deep and wide. A generation of young men is being wiped out. Many of the most educated have left. The poverty of widespread widowhood may become chronic. The healthcare system is in shambles. Neighborhoods and towns ethnically cleansed means long-lasting displacement for tens of thousands. The humanitarian aid challenge is vast, and will last for many years.

How this affects US strategy is complex, of course, but two things stand out. First is that strategies to reduce violence against civilians and to increase economic and physical security are paramount. US leaders seem to grasp this, but their actions (arming Sunni militias, for example) may prove foolhardy.

Second, Iraq’s neighbors must be part of the solution, given the scale of misery. President Bush has never embraced this idea, but it seems more and more obvious as the war drags on. Yet on Bush’s recent trip to the region, Iraq was nearly absent from his agenda.

The lessons from the killing fields and refugees and widows won’t go away. The sooner we fully realize the scale of this catastrophe, the better we may be able to work on reconstructive remedies.

John Tirman is executive director and a principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for International Studies.

Add comment January 20th, 2008

Judge criticizes CIA tape handling

A Federal judge is upset with the CIA’s alleged handling of the torture tapes and says that, if seen in a criminal trial, the CIA’s claims would be “not credible,” the New York Times reports:

Federal Judge Criticizes C.I.A. Handling of Interrogation Tapes

By Alan Feuer

A federal judge in New York said Thursday that he was “disappointed” in how investigators from the Central Intelligence Agency had handled videotapes documenting the harsh interrogation of detainees from Al Qaeda, adding that he was considering questioning agency officials who had watched the tapes about why they had made no record of them in their files.

The judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said from the bench that he was astonished that the C.I.A. investigators had not kept records about the tapes, which were destroyed in 2005, even though they were an important part of an internal C.I.A. review of interrogation methods.

“I’m asked to believe that actual motion pictures, videotapes, of the relationship between interrogators and prisoners were of so little value” that no record of them was kept in C.I.A. investigative files, Judge Hellerstein said.

“I just can’t accept it,” he said. “If it came up in an ordinary case, it would not be credible.”

The tapes are now the subject of Congressional hearings and form the basis of a separate criminal investigation seeking to determine whether agency officials broke the law by destroying them or by concealing their existence. They showed agency operatives using harsh interrogations methods on two Qaeda detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

The hearing in New York stemmed from another matter concerning the tapes. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a freedom of information request, asking the C.I.A. to produce information about the tapes and various other documents related to interrogation methods.

Judge Hellerstein said he was inclined to deny an A.C.L.U. request to hold the C.I.A. in contempt of court for not producing information about the tapes. But he said he was considering ways, including subpoenas, to determine why the C.I.A. had not given the documents to the A.C.L.U.

The main issue at the hearing was the C.I.A.’s contention that the tapes were immune to a freedom of information request because they were in the agency’s secret and sprawling operational files. Under federal law, documents in operational files are not subject to freedom of information requests, but documents in investigative files are.

Lawyers for the A.C.L.U. argued that even though the tapes were not physically in investigative files kept by the C.I.A.’s Office of the Inspector General, officials from that office watched the tapes at a clandestine location overseas, in 2003, as part of the internal review of interrogation methods. Judge Hellerstein said the mere fact that the tapes had been watched as part of the internal review meant that they were part of an investigation and, thus, subject to a freedom of information request.

In fact he had stern words for a government lawyer, Peter M. Skinner, who argued that the C.I.A. had searched the investigative files and, even though officials had found nothing related to the tapes, had therefore fulfilled its obligations to the A.C.L.U.

Judge Hellerstein raised the possibility that C.I.A. officials had intentionally not placed the tapes in the investigative files so as to avoid a freedom of information request.

“It seems to me that you were gulled,” he told Mr. Skinner, “and that the court was gulled.”

Add comment January 19th, 2008

CCR: More CIA torture tapes

In a court filing, Center for Constitutional Rights attorneys say that there are more CIA torture tapes, the Washington Post reports:

Lawyers for Detainee Refer In Filing to More CIA Tapes

By Carol D. Leonnig

Attorneys for a former detainee at a secret CIA prison said in a court filing this week that intelligence officials had falsely claimed in public statements that his interrogations were not videotaped, that all videotaped interrogations stopped in 2002 and that only a small number of CIA detainees were subjected to unusually harsh interrogation techniques.

The basis of the assertions was redacted from the filing by the Bush administration, under an unusually stringent security order that blocks the attorneys for Majid Khan from disclosing evidence of the alleged falsehoods or detailing how Khan was treated while in CIA custody.

Khan, one of 14 detainees whom the CIA secretly imprisoned before transferring them last year to the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has said he was systematically tortured. His attorneys at the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights have been pressing for a court order to prevent the government from destroying evidence of his treatment.

“Inaccurate statements by senior intelligence officials about the tape destruction, and false statements about Khan’s experience in CIA custody, raise substantial concern that torture evidence in this case may be lost or destroyed absent a court order,” attorneys Wells Dixon and Gita Gutierrez wrote.

The three statements that Khan’s lawyers said were false were made by CIA Director Michael V. Hayden and unnamed intelligence officials quoted in news reports.

CIA spokesman George Little said yesterday that Hayden has said in speeches that the videotaping of interrogations stopped in 2002 and that about 30 of 100 CIA prisoners had required “special methods of questioning.”

“The agency stands by those statements,” Little said. ”I can’t speak to unattributed quotes in press reports.”

Khan’s attorneys, citing their top-secret security clearances and their agreement not to disclose classified information, said they could not comment on their court filings.

“We’re under an extremely restrictive gag order that in many ways is making our representation extremely difficult and certainly compromises the public’s ability to know what’s happening,” Gutierrez said. “We are challenging a state-sanctioned system of torture, the details of which the government is keeping secret.”

Gutierrez said she hopes the government will release more information about the detainees’ incarcerations.

Add comment January 19th, 2008

Scott Horton: CIA Tape Destruction — The Official Story Unfolds

Scott Horton at No Comment dissects the Official Story, a.k.a. coverup, of the destruction of the CIA torture tapes:

The Official Story Unfolds

by Scott Horton

The destruction of the CIA torture tapes is still a fairly young scandal as Washington scandals go. It hasn’t even acquired a “gate” suffix. But the Administration is already busily choreographing it, with the dozens of shiny metal parts clicking away in synchronicity, like a finely designed mechanical watch. There is an admirable efficiency to the political process. If only these people were a fraction as good at the work of government as they are at political shenanigans, I keep thinking. The Bush Administration plan is simple: let’s think of this as a movie–Abu Ghraib, The Sequel. Instead of offering up a group of young grunts for the sacrifice, this time it will be a retired senior management figure at the CIA and some of his subordinates. And this sacrifice will, in the White House’s view, divert attention from the real source of both scandals, which is high in the upper reaches of the Executive Branch. Inside the White House, in fact.

But understanding how this will be accomplished requires us to start examining the details of the process that will take us there.

Mukasey’s Probe
On January 2, 2008, Attorney General Mukasey announced that the preliminary examination headed by National Security Division head Ken Wainstein had concluded that a more formal investigation was appropriate. His announcement was immediately greeted by positive acclaim in the news media, including a highly flattering AP story and a New York Times editorial that read “The Right Move on the CIA Tapes.” My own immediate reaction to the Mukasey action was very positive, but then lawyerly caution got the better of me. I decided to look carefully into the details and confer with some of my sources at Justice before making any comment. What I have learned leaves me very suspicious about the arrangements in place.

The Bigotry of Low Expectations
The positive reactions were fueled by a pattern of seriously abusive conduct which has characterized the Bush Justice Department’s generally charade-like internal investigations. There have been bright spots, of course. Department of Justice Inspector General Glenn Fine is a courageous and highly competent professional, and his team have produced impressive products. Patrick Fitzgerald performed brilliantly as a special prosecutor. In fact, I believe that Fine and Fitzgerald come very close to setting the standard for detached professionalism that this sort of work calls for.

But the public should be demanding exactly that sort of professionalism and should accept nothing less. The abysmal experience of the Bush years leaves a lot of people prepared to compromise on integrity issues. That’s extremely unfortunate. Mukasey is clearly getting a lot of mileage from the depressed standards that his predecessors trained Washington to expect.

Let’s start with the positive. John H. Durham is the man tapped to head this probe. He’s a career prosecutor, an assistant U.S. attorney in Connecticut. I’ve spent some time asking about Durham among those who have worked with him and on the other side. I reached out to lawyers in Boston, Hartford and Stamford.

What I heard was very encouraging. He is described as tireless, aggressive, rigorously ethical in his approach and consummately fair. About half of the people I spoke with identified Durham immediately as a Republican, the other half had no idea of his politics (he is a registered Republican). But no one considered him to be deeply engaged in partisan politics by any stretch. He has a very strong track record coming out of a very sensitive probe of Justice Department corruption in Boston. It seems clear that Durham has the right mix to do the job.

The problem here is not the choice of prosecutor. It’s the blinders and harness that Mukasey has put on him. The Valerie Plame investigation shows how this should be done. Patrick Fitzgerald was appointed as special prosecutor and was given free range to pursue his investigation and bring charges. But Durham is not being given this freedom of action. And the restrictions imposed on him have a very disturbing genesis.

The Meeting
As Michael Mukasey was being prepared to be nominated for the post of attorney general, the White House strongly encouraged him to meet with a group of “movement conservative” lawyers to try to address their “concerns” about his suitability to be the nominee. When the meeting took place, Mukasey found himself being pressed aggressively. They wanted his assurance that there would be no special prosecutors to look into wrongdoing by Team Bush. Several of those who were pleading against the appointment of a special prosecutor had more in mind than just good prosecutorial ethics. They played a role in the U.S. attorney’s scandal and potentially other mischief. If a prosecutor were appointed, they might well find themselves in the crosshairs.

Mukasey hasn’t yet completed his second month in office, but already there’s reason to be concerned about just what came out of this meeting. The scandal surrounding the destruction of CIA blacksite tapes continues to unfold. And at this point, the Bush Administration’s strategy for dodging a bullet couldn’t be clearer. Here are its parameters:

No Special Prosecutor
In the view of the “movement conservative” team dispatched to check out Mukasey, Patrick Fitzgerald was a brush with disaster. Indeed, it could have been much worse. After all, Fitzgerald took down Scooter Libby and the evidence he had could just as easily have been wielded against the Shogun himself, Dick Cheney. The prime concern the “movement conservatives” articulated was that any investigator have blinders and a harness to keep him out of “trouble.” And that meant away from examining the dealings of the “movement conservative” elves, always busily working behind the scenes, and away from the White House. So Mukasey has not opted to appoint a special prosecutor. Instead he has used the recusal process. The U.S. Attorney in Alexandria, Chuck Rosenberg, recused himself and Mukasey appointed an Acting U.S. Attorney.

But in fact, Durham’s latitude is considerably less than that of a U.S. Attorney, since he is empowered only to handle a specific matter. He has been given “blinders” that narrowly restrict the scope of the investigation he can conduct. Following the Mukasey mandate, he’s going to look at a fairly simple issue–whether the destruction of the tapes broke the law. He’s not permitted to look at what’s on the tapes.

Once More: It’s All About Torture
Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University hits it just right.

There is a concerted effort in Washington to keep the focus of the investigation away from torture. Both Democrats and Republicans are struggling to do that, as if there is nothing on the tapes.

He won’t be permitted to second-guess the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel, which tells us that waterboarding, long-time standing and hypothermia are not torture. Of course in the fairytale land (or more accurately, psychotic nightmare) of current OLC jurisprudence, “torture” doesn’t exist–if the president has approved it, it cannot be torture. And most certainly Durham won’t be able to take this scandal where it obviously leads, straight into the White House.

And there are other important questions. As Professor Martin Lederman of Georgetown argues, the real question may be less who destroyed the tapes than who directed that the CIA stop taping?

the greater scandal is not that these tapes were destroyed, but instead that the CIA did not create tapes of all its high-level interrogations. That is to say, the real outrage was the orders from the CIA to stop taping. No one is talking about this. . . But it is really rather remarkable that the CIA decided not to videotape its investigations of high-level al Qaeda officials. This is an enemy bent on committing horrifying terrorist acts. Our intelligence about that enemy is minimal, and therefore any information we obtain from these interrogations could be of critical importance. (That was, recall, the justification for the “enhanced” techniques in the first place.)

Exactly. If there were such compelling reasons to create these records, what led to the decision to stop, and who took that decision? Spencer Ackerman raises the same question in the Washington Independent here.

But of course we know the answer to the “why” part of the question. If techniques like waterboarding were being used, then the tapes were systematically documenting criminal conduct. No reasonable person viewing them would come away with any different view. They were likely to be turned into a series of exhibits in a criminal prosecution. So it was recognition of the fundamentally criminal nature of the conduct involved that led to the decision to stop creating the records. But that leaves the question as to process and people involved in that decision.

Lack of Independence
The appeal of the “movement conservative” group that met with Mukasey was targeted at the horrifying prospect of an independent prosecutor who would pursue the law without political blinders. Mukasey has met this concern. Fitzgerald was told he would have free range to pursue things where he needed to pursue them. But Durham has had his wings clipped before his appointment even went into effect. His work is to be reported to and supervised by the Deputy Attorney General. At present, of course, there is no Deputy Attorney General. There is an acting Deputy, Craig Morford, a career prosecutor who has been tied to a series of politically volatile cases and has a remarkably thin job history for so high a position, though plenty in his résumé that would appeal to a Republican theocon (including a degree from a conservative Christian college and church ministry work). If Morford or, if he is confirmed, Mark Filip, is going to do right by this matter, he needs to follow in the footsteps of James Comey, who gave Fitzgerald free range.

The Official Story
Yesterday, the Bush Administration’s official account of what happened also unfolded a bit further. In the lead-up to the Iraq War, the Administration was extremely careful to place its load in the two most important organs of the national print media: The New York Times and Washington Post. True to this pattern, the first installment of the official story appeared in the Times (and I published my commentary on the first installment in “The Scapegoat”) and on Wednesday the second installment appeared in the Washington Post.

Keep in mind that there is a very heavy-handed lockdown in place inside the intelligence community on sharing information relating to this matter with the media. Laura Rozen has reported on this, and my own sources say that Rozen’s reporting is right on the mark–members of the intelligence community have been warned that anyone speaking to the media will be subject to severe disciplinary action, most likely criminal prosecution. An FBI probe of the statements of John Kiriakou is already underway.

This has been done so that the Administration can spell out its official narrative through the media with a minimum of background noise and contradiction.

Again, the Post presents an account from a number of official sources. Director Michael Hayden, we learn, gave an interview that provided much of the account. So, whereas the corps of the agency is threatened with ruin and destruction if they discuss these matters, Hayden and a select handful of his trusted seniors lay out all the details. Isn’t there something inherently lacking in credibility about this approach?

In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda members.

The tapes had been sitting in the station chief’s safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for nearly three years. Although those involved in the interrogations had pushed for the tapes’ destruction in those years and a secret debate about it had twice reached the White House, CIA officials had not acted on those requests. This time was different.

The CIA had a new director and an acting general counsel, neither of whom sought to block the destruction of the tapes, according to agency officials. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left, the officials said. And in November 2005, a published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an international outcry.

Those three circumstances pushed the CIA’s then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved.

Notice how perfectly this coincides with the White House’s program. Move the scene away from Washington. Make it a request from way down the line. Insure no involvement at high levels.

And then we come to what I’d call the “payoff” passage–what all the official leaks were designed to secure.

Those three circumstances pushed the CIA’s then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved.

Is this statement correct? No. At a minimum, it’s seriously misleading. Remember, Kiriakou told us that each incident and each technique had to be the subject of a request in writing which wound its way to the White House for approval from the National Security Council–with the president’s imprimatur. The White House knew of the existence of the tapes, and currently manages only a vague “failure of recollection” when pressed on the question whether President Bush had actually seen the tapes. Larry Johnson says it’s highly likely that Bush viewed at least part of them. I’m with Larry on that. Then four senior lawyers at the White House were involved with the question: Bellinger, Miers, Addington and Gonzales. And one of them argued strenuously in favor of the destruction of the tapes. The New York Times gave us that account, and the White House confirmed it. I have my hunch as to which of the quartet advocated destruction of torture evidence. I anticipate we’ll learn it was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, certainly speaking with his boss’s authority. And I’d also bet that his comments were presented in a way calculated to provide plausible White House authority for the destruction of the tapes.

Now let’s ask: why have these essential facts mysteriously disappeared down the rat hole in the Post’s otherwise carefully presented account? A good question. I wish I knew why. Obviously these facts present an impediment to Operation Scapegoat because they create a trail of questions right into the White House.

And then we come to the ultimate scapegoat, who is meticulously prepared for the slaughter. Rodriguez, we are told, is a rogue agent who doesn’t take guidance well.

The destruction of the tapes was not the first occasion in which Rodriguez got in trouble for taking a provocative action to help a colleague. While serving as the CIA’s Latin America division chief in 1996, he appealed to local Dominican Republic authorities to prevent a childhood friend, and CIA contractor, who had been arrested in a drug investigation, from being beaten up, according to a former CIA official familiar with the episode.

Such an intervention was forbidden by CIA rules, and so Rodriguez was stripped of his management post and reprimanded in an inspector general’s report.

So there you have it. Rodriguez was a rogue agent who disobeyed instructions in the past and ignored the guidance provided in this case to leave the tapes alone. That is the essence of the official account. Does anyone who’s tracked this issue consider this to be even marginally plausible? I don’t doubt that the Washington Post has accurately reported the facts that it’s been given, and I would never dismiss a report produced by Walter Pincus, who is the dean of national security reporters and a figure of consummate professionalism. I also expect that these facts will withstand independent inspection. But it’s best to view this as a work still in progress: one more chapter in what will ultimately be a lengthy narrative. And this chapter takes the heading “the official story.” As the case proceeds, other facts need to be tested against this official account.

I doubt severely that this is a complete portrait of what occurred. The official story is a meticulous cherry-picking of the facts to pull out every nugget and detail which serves the ultimate purpose: exculpate the White House and scapegoat Rodriguez. And let’s not forget the fact that this is already the third official account put out for public consumption by the Bush Administration–following the initial account given by General Hayden, and the second account given to the New York Times–at odds with prior accounts on vital points, including the level and nature of authorization given for the destruction.

In Argentina in early eighties, in the wake of the Dirty War, the regime presented la historia oficial–the formal account of what had transpired, which reached even to provide false backgrounds for the children of the Dirty War’s victims who were given up for adoption. Everyone was bound to accept it. And everyone knew it was a lie. We are now witnessing the crafting of the official story of the destruction of the CIA tapes. The scope and meticulousness with which it is being presented are truly impressive. Yes, let’s be impressed with the Machiavellian ingenuity of this process. But the severest skepticism is warranted when it comes to the truth and completeness of the account. Even when the words appear in the hallowed pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. We are watching a grand bamboozlement, and the integrity of our government is at stake.

Add comment January 18th, 2008