Psyche, Science, and Society

Patrick Cockburn on the disintegration of Iraq

Patrick Cockburn explains the effects of the US-sanctioned Turkish invasion on the US project in Iraq:

The Turkish invasion could destroy a unified Iraq

by Patrick Cockburn

Iraq is disintegrating faster than ever. The Turkish army invaded the north of the country last week and is still there. Iraqi Kurdistan is becoming like Gaza where Israel can send in its tanks and helicopters at will.

The US, so sensitive to any threat to Iraqi sovereignty from Iran or Syria, has blandly consented to the Turkish attack on the one part of Iraq which was at peace. The Turkish government piously claims that its army is in pursuit of PKK Turkish Kurd guerrillas, but it is unlikely to inflict serious damage on them as they hide in long-prepared bunkers and deep ravines of the Kurdish mountains. What the Turkish incursion is doing is weakening the Kurdistan Regional Government, the autonomous Kurdish zone, the creation of which is one of the few concrete achievements of the US and British invasion of Iraq five years ago.

One of the most extraordinary developments in the Iraqi war has been the success with which the White House has been able to persuade so much of the political and media establishment in the US that, by means of “the Surge”, an extra 30,000 US troops, it is on the verge of political and military success in Iraq. All that is needed now, argue US generals, is political reconciliation between the Iraqi communities.

Few demands could be more hypocritical. American success in reducing the level of violence over the last year has happened precisely because Iraqis are so divided. The Sunni Arabs of Iraq were the heart of the rebellion against the American occupation. In fighting the US forces, they were highly successful. But in 2006, after the bombing of the Shia shrine at Samarra, Baghdad and central Iraq was wracked by a savage civil war between Shia and Sunni. In some months the bodies of 3,000 civilians were found, and many others lie buried in the desert or disappeared into the river. I do not know an Iraqi family that did not lose a relative, and usually more than one.

The Shia won this civil war. By the end of 2006 they held threequarters of Baghdad. The Sunni rebels, fighting the Mehdi Army Shia militia and the Shia, dominated the Iraqi army and police, and also under pressure from al Qa’ida, decided to end their war with US forces. They formed al-Sahwa, the Awakening movement, which is now allied to and paid for by the US.

In effect Iraq now has an 80,000 strong Sunni militia which does not hide its contempt for the Iraqi government, which it claims is dominated by Iranian controlled militias. The former anti-American guerrillas have largely joined al-Sahwa. The Shia majority, for its part, is determined not to let the Sunni win back their control of the Iraqi state. Power is more fragmented than ever.

This all may sound like good news for America. For the moment its casualties are down. Fewer Iraqi civilians are being slaughtered. But the Sunni have not fallen in love with the occupation. The fundamental weakness of the US position in Iraq remains its lack of reliable allies outside Kurdistan. At one moment, British officers used to lecture their American counterparts, much to their irritation, about the British Army’s rich experience of successful counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Northern Ireland. “That showed a fundamental misunderstanding of Iraq on our part,” a former British officer in Basra told me in exasperation. “In Malaya the guerrillas all came from the minority Chinese community and in Northern Ireland from the minority Roman Catholics. Basra was exactly the opposite. The majority supported our enemies. We had no friends there.”

This lack of allies may not be so immediately obvious in Baghdad and central Iraq because both Shia and Sunni are willing and at times eager to make tactical alliances with US forces. But in the long term neither Sunni nor Shia Arab want the Americans to stay in Iraq. Hitherto the only reliable American allies have been the Kurds, who are now discovering that Washington is not going to protect them against Turkey.

Very little is holding Iraq together. The government is marooned in the Green Zone. Having declared the Surge a great success, the US military commanders need just as many troops to maintain a semblance of control now as they did before the Surge. The mainly Shia police force regards al-Sahwa as anti-government guerrillas wearing new uniforms.

The Turkish invasion should have given the government in Baghdad a chance to defend Iraq’s territorial integrity and burnish its patriotic credentials. Instead the prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has chosen this moment to have his regular medical check up in London, a visit which his colleagues say is simply an excuse to escape Baghdad. Behind him he has left a country which is visibly falling apart.

1 comment February 29th, 2008

Wikileaks responds to Bank Julius Baer lies

In the battle against the totally unprecedented judicial censorship of the entire Wikileaks.org web site, Wikileaks (still available at Wikileaks.be) has issued an editorial rebutting a number of false claims (i.e., lies) contained in press release issued by Bank Julius Baer & Trust, the bank that asked the judge to shut Wikileaks.org down. (Fortunately, the bank, in initiating this action, has caused itself enormous damage):

Wikileaks blasts Cayman Islands bank

Bank Julius Baer & Trust — the Swiss-Cayman “private banking” entity currently attempting to sue Wikileaks before US Federal court Justice Jeffery White in San Francisco today released a press release onto the “Business Wire” vanity wire service. The press release was subsequently picked up by Reuters and other wire services.

Wikileaks responds.

Bank Julies Baer & Trust, from here on in, simply referred to as Baer, claimed in relation to Wikileaks:

“It wasn’t our intention to shut down the Web site”.

This is a lie.

Baer’s requests to the court to do just that are a matter of public record. The only change made by Judge Jeffery White to Baer’s proposed “Wikileaks.org’ takedown order was to cross out the word ‘proposed’! Baer also wrote-for-the-judge a separate order in relation to the documents alone, which was similarly granted. Further, at any time subsequent Baer could have asked the court that its earlier request on the shutdown order be rescinded. It has not done so. While one might be tempted to blame the bank’s Hollywood lawyers Lavely & Singer for running amuck, Baer continues to employ the same law firm. This can only be seen as an endorsement of its conduct.

Baer claimed that:

“This decision was arrived at only after a month long effort on the part of Julius Baer.. to engage the operators of Wikileaks in a dialogue..”

This is a lie.

Wikileaks responded with grace and speed to every one of Baer’s highly irregular (see below) demands and left communication open. A full record is available as:

http://Wikileaks.be/wiki/Full_correspondence_between_Wikileaks_and_Bank_Julius_Baer

The last letter is from Wikileaks. The entire correspondence covers a period of two days. Baer did not submit the correspondence to the court for hearing although it was absolutely central to the issues and Wikileaks was not represented. A clear abuse of process.

Wikileaks is confident about its place in the court of public opinion, but the shadowy Swiss-Cayman “Bank and Trust” Baer, has been allergic to the sun from the very beginning. The first sign of this hyper-sensitivity to light was when its lawyers, Lavely & Singer refused to put their demands in writing — even email — as requested. The second sign was when the same lawyers refused to even identify their client!

Finally Baer’s (as it turned out) lawyers refused to even state what city they would be taking their threatened action in so Wikileaks could arrange representation in that city, instead preferring to abuse process and arrange a hearing where Wikileaks was not represented. But don’t take our word for it — see the submissions to the court by our then pre-litigation council Julie Turner and:

http://Wikileaks.be/wiki/Full_correspondence_between_Wikileaks_and_Bank_Julius_Baer

http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Bank_Julius_Baer_vs._Wikileaks

It is Baer who decided to hire Hollywood lawyers Lavely & Singer, who like to describe themselves as “all-around bad cop for stars from Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to Jim Carrey and Celine Dion.”. It is Baer who stood by these lawyers while they abused process with the assistance of negligent Bush appointed Federal Judge. It is Baer who has refused to make amends for its misdeeds and it is Baer who is now suffering, and will continue to suffer the consequences.

Baer “has form” in engaging in quasi-criminal conduct not just in relation to offshore banking asset hiding. The Swiss court records reveal Baer hired Zurich-based private detectives Ryffel AG to engage in car chases down the streets of Zurich of the person Baer claims is the whistleblower concerned — including while the alleged whistleblower took his daughters to primary school. The police apprehended one of the chases which then because a matter of public record in a Dec 2007 case in Switzerland as did Baer’s attempts to bribe the suspected whistleblower into keeping quiet. See:

http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Rudolf_Elmer_vs._Bank_Julius_Baer

http://wikileaks.be/wiki/Clouds_on_the_Cayman_tax_heaven (Wikileaks story)

Baer claimed that:

“The posting of confidential bank records by anonymous sources significantly harms the privacy rights of all individuals.”

This is misrepresentation.

Baer likes to spin the documents as ‘bank records’ and never likes to talk about the dates concerned. The documents are nearly all Microsoft Word files setting up trust arrangements used as anonymizing shell structures. In its court filings, Baer claims to have been aware of the documents release since 2003 and the Swiss media had the documents in 2005. The only relevence these documents have now is that they expose the bank’s ultra-rich clients funneling money through Cayman Islands trusts nearly a decade ago under a variety of suspicious circumstances.

Wikileaks took a skeptical position on the documents until attacked by the bank. Baer, in attempting to shoot the messenger has only succeeded, spectacularly, in shooting itself.

Wikileaks awaits Baer’s apology.

Please contribute to the legal costs of Wikileaks essential protection of our First Amendment liberties here.

Add comment February 28th, 2008

Torture Playlist

Mother Jones allows us to get a sense of one of the “interrogation techniques” used in America’s gulags, sensory overload via music. They have the

Torture Playlist

By Justine Sharrock

Music has been used in American military prisons and on bases to induce sleep deprivation, “prolong capture shock,” disorient detainees during interrogations—and also drown out screams. Based on a leaked interrogation log, news reports, and the accounts of soldiers and detainees, here are some of the songs that guards and interrogators chose.

Imagine these being played for hours on end at the maximum volume that won’t break your eardrums, with you tied up and unable to escape in any way:

No wonder the Society for Ethnomusicology has condemned the use of music in torture. Notice how, unlike the American Psychological Association, which can’t find it within them to mention, much less condemn the use of psychological expertise in US torture, the Ethnomusicologists have no trouble calling a spade a spade. But, then again, the musicologists probably don’t get tens of millions of dollars from the US military-intelligence community:

The SEM is committed to the ethical uses of music to further human understanding and to uphold the highest standards of human rights. The Society is equally committed to drawing critical attention to the abuse of such standards through the unethical uses of music to harm individuals and the societies in which they live. The U.S. government and its military and diplomatic agencies has used music as an instrument of abuse since 2001, particularly through the implementation of programs of torture in both covert and overt detention centers as part of the war on terror. [Emphasis added]

One day the profession of psychology will speak in such simple terms.

Add comment February 27th, 2008

Jason Isbell/Drive-By Truckers: Dress Blues

[H/t CounterPunch.]

Add comment February 27th, 2008

Rescind order shutting down Wikileaks.org, judge asked

The LA Times reports that a broad range of civil liberties groups are asking the court to void its order shutting down the Wikileaks.org web site:

Judge is asked to rescind shutdown of website

Media and public interest organizations tell the jurist that his order violates constitutional provisions against prior restraint of free speech.

A coalition of media and public interest organizations went to federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday urging a judge to reconsider his order to shut down a muckraking website that publishes leaked documents from businesses and government agencies worldwide.

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and several news organizations, told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White that two orders he issued last week against wikileaks.org were prior restraints that violated the 1st Amendment.

Laura Handman, a Washington, D.C., attorney for the news organizations, said White’s order was so expansive that the only way to describe it was as if a judge had shut down a newspaper because of controversy over one article.

“I can’t think of another injunction that was so broad,” said Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that focuses on digital issues.

White acted in response to a lawsuit filed Feb. 6 by Julius Baer & Co., a Zurich-based bank, alleging that a disgruntled former employee had posted internal documents alleging money-laundering and tax evasion schemes at its Cayman Islands branch.

Wikileaks.org specifically urges readers to post leaked documents in an effort to discourage “unethical behavior” by corporations and government agencies. Among the 1.2 million documents that Wikileaks says it has posted over the last several years is an operations manual for the controversial U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Julius Baer, represented by the Century City firm Lavely & Singer, past lawyers for several celebrities in battles with news organizations, alleged that the postings violated privacy and bank secrecy laws of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands and posed a serious threat of identity theft.

Judge White issued a temporary restraining order, barring Wikileaks from posting the bank documents on the Internet. White has scheduled a Friday hearing on whether to make the injunction permanent.

White also issued a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot of San Mateo, Wikileak’s domain name registrar, to disable the website’s domain name.

That blocks access to the site through its principal entrance, although the content remains available on mirror sites and through its numerical address.

Dynadot did not contest the judge’s actions. “The only agreement by Dynadot was to comply with the court’s . . . order to preserve evidence,” said the company’s attorney, Garrett D. Murai.

Zimmerman, whose organization filed a motion seeking to intervene in the case, said he was disappointed in Dynadot’s action. He said that a specific provision of the Communications Decency Act providing immunity for an “interactive computer service” protects the company against the bank’s claims.

On a broader level, attorney Thomas Burke and colleagues Handman and Kelli Sager, representing 12 media groups that filed a friend-of-the-court brief, cited the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers dispute as authority for their position.

In that case, the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s bid to bar publication of a secret government history of the Vietnam War.

“The 1st Amendment prohibits prior restraints in nearly every circumstance, even where national security may be at risk and even when the source unlawfully obtained the documents,” said the attorneys, whose clients include the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, The Times, Gannett Co. and Hearst.

Public Citizen and the California First Amendment Coalition filed a separate brief contending that the case did not come under U.S. jurisdiction because the parties include subjects of foreign states — the Swiss bank and Wikileaks, many of whose members are abroad.

“In shutting down this website through an unlawful prior restraint, the court has muzzled a very important voice in the fight against corporate and government misdeeds,” said Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen.

Peter Lurie, deputy director of Public Citizen’s health policy wing, filed a declaration saying that the organization frequently uses leaked government documents to bring attention to important public issues, such as the Food and Drug Administration’s consideration of “a drug company plan to conduct research on its new drug in Latin America using a design that the agency acknowledged would be unacceptable in the United States.” After the plan was exposed, the company redesigned its study, Lurie said.

“If Wikileaks is shut down,” Lurie said, “the ability of Public Citizen and its members to access” information from whistle-blowers “will be significantly impaired.”

Attorney William Briggs, who represents Julius Baer, said his firm was preparing a response to the briefs lodged Tuesday. “This is a case that presents a conflict between an individual’s right of privacy versus the press’ ability to publish private information about private individuals,” he said.

“I think the individual privacy rights outweigh the right of the press to report that information because of reasons of identity theft. If financial industry customers do not think their information is protected, those institutions could go out of business.”

Add comment February 27th, 2008

Haaretz on the effects of occupation on Israelis

Haaretz has an editorial on command responsibility for abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, and what it reflects about Israeli society as their occupation of Palestinian lands grinds on:

Something bad is happening to us

by Haaretz

Three years ago, the CBS television network broadcast photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The horrifying pictures led to the trials of eight soldiers, dismissals and a storm of outrage in America. At the trial of one prison guard, who was sentenced to eight years in jail, a psychologist gave his evaluation: that the man was an entirely ordinary person, without any particular violent tendencies, who served as a guard for many years in civilian life but never behaved sadistically toward American prisoners. The situation of occupier and occupied, as opposed to that of citizen versus citizen, causes ordinary people to become violent and lose restraint. At Abu Ghraib, the trial found, there was institutionalized contempt at every level. The prison guards understood that “this is the way to behave here.”

Last night, the investigative television program “Fact” broadcast pictures of our own Abu Ghraib affair. It is doubtful whether a country that has grown used to 40 years of occupation, and the stories that accompany it, will be shocked. We have become accustomed to treating the Palestinians as inferior people. Generations come and go, and new soldiers abuse the residents of occupied Hebron in almost the same manner. Stories similar to those broadcast last night were exposed by the Breaking the Silence group three years ago. The saying “occupation corrupts” has become a slogan of the left instead of a warning signal to everyone.

This time, it was regular soldiers in the Kfir Brigade. They exposed their backsides and sexual organs to Palestinians, pressed an electric heater to the face of a young boy, beat young boys senseless, recorded everything on their mobile phones and sent it to their friends. One of their “mischievous acts” was to test how long a Palestinian who was being choked could survive without breathing. When he passed out, the experiment was stopped. The soldiers described activities to “break the routine” that consisted entirely of abuse. It was enough for a boy “to look at us the wrong way” for him to be beaten.

Earlier, at the trial of First Lieutenant Yaakov Gigi, officers spoke of burnout, of “something bad happening to the brigade,” of a Wild West, of a moral crisis. The commander of the brigade, Colonel Itai Virov, said “we failed on several parameters.” His words reflect a denial of the depth of the failure. This continuing routine, far from the eyes of the commanders, must lead to a series of investigations, and perhaps to dismissals as well. It is unconscionable for the head of the Hebron Brigade, the division commander, the GOC Central Command and even the chief of staff to ignore the ongoing behavior of soldiers in the brigade responsible for routine security in the West Bank. Colonel Virov admitted that there was a conspiracy of silence in the brigade - in other words, a norm of abuse and its concealment. To change norms, one has to shock and be shocked, not be satisfied with a few imprisonments and empty words about a loss of values.

Perfectly ordinary people, as the American psychologist said of the Abu Ghraib abusers, are capable of behaving like monsters when they receive a message from the top that it is permissible to abuse, beat, choke, burn, make people miserable and generally do anything that man’s evil genius is capable of inventing to others who are under their control. Something bad is happening to us, they are saying in the Kfir Brigade. That “something” is the occupation.

Add comment February 26th, 2008

Guardian article contrasts IRB protections with APA moral vacuousness on torture

A column in today’s Guardian Comment is Free by Ben Goldacre relates the federal Office for Human Research Protections [OHRP] ridiculous actions interfering with life saving I’d blogged about on New Years Day to the complete lack of any ethical concern by the America Psychological Association for the ethical lapses of psychologists designing Bush’s torture regime. Goldacre points out that OHRP stopped a study in a New York Intensive Care Unit which was using a simple checklist to remind people to follow simple safety protocols. Seems, if it’s research you can’t check the boxes without time-consuming Institutional Review Board [IRB] approval. Of course, if they don’t call it “research,” hospitals can do almost anything they want. The only difference is that in the “research” case, they are actually collecting data to find out if the checklist works. The basic idea, is you can do anything you want without onerous review, as long as you don’t bother to try and find out if it’s helpful.

Goldacre contraststs this silliness, leading potentially to many dead patients, with the ethical blindness that has guided the American Psychological Association [APA] for years when faced with the horrifying roles played by psychologists in the U.S. regime of abusive interrogations. The APAhad its ridiculous silliness as well. They were so concerned about unethical interrogations that they appointed a task force composed mainly of those psychologists most likely involved in unethical interrogations to formulate ethics policy for the association. Makes sese that one would appoint those accused of abuses to formulate your ethics policy, doesn’t it? After all, it wasn’t “research,” so stringent protections weren’t needed.

Here is Goldacre’s article (taken from his Bad Science blog rather than the Guardian because the blog version has many links, including several to this site). Make sure to read the last three paragraphs which discuss the APA madness:

Where’s your ethics committee now, science boy?

by Ben Goldacre

The Guardian,

Saturday February 23 2008

People have done some terrible things, over the years, with science, and with their science skills. I’m talking about Zyklon B, electrocuting gay people straight, torturing people in concentration camps, leaving syphillis untreated in large numbers of black men for an experiment (without telling them, in the US, until the 1970s), and more. Stuff where it’s hard to find any humour.

This is why we have research ethics committees, codes of practise, professional bodies, and regulators like the The US Office for Human Research Protections. Sometimes these organisations can cock up quite badly. Let me tell you about two stories which have been unfolding over the past few months.

In New York, a fiendishly clever trial in ITU departments has looked at one of the simplest interventions imaginable: a ticklist for giving IV lines, a helpful little reminder to wash your hands, wear gloves, and so on. Can something as simple as “using a ticklist”, to check if people are doing the right thing, reduce infections and save lives?

This is the bread and butter of medical academic research, which is usually not about pills, or placeboes, or molecules, but about looking pragmatically at whether one thing works better than another. You will remember that homeopaths and various other quacks are philosophically opposed to this process.

The results were spectacular: in 3 months, the incidence of blood infections from these IV lines fell by two-thirds, and over 18 months, the program saved 1,500 lives and an estimated $200 million. Then someone complained to the OHRP, because this was a research study, and they did not have ethics committee clearance. The project was shut down. This week, the OHRP grandly lifted their ban, explaining that now – since it turns out the research bit is over, and the hospitals are just putting the ticklist into practise – they may tick away unhindered.

This is what we might call the “ethical paradox”. You can do something as part of a treatment program, entirely on a whim, and nobody will interfere, as long as it’s not potty (and even then you’ll probably be alright). But the moment you do the exact same thing as part of a research program, trying to see if it actually works or not, adding to the sum total of human knowledge, and helping to save the lives of people you’ll never meet, suddenly a whole bunch of people want to stuck their beaks in.

Hilary Hearnshaw did an elegant study where she pretended to apply to do a medical research project in the Israel, the UK, and 11 other countries in Europe. She said she wanted to do a trial on a leaflet – contain your excitement - which was designed to help older patients get more engaged with their GP.

Only three countries required the project to go through a process of ethical approval, and in the UK, this was more arduous than in any other country. Getting ethical clearance took ten weeks, required two submissions (because they demanded changes), and five full days of administration, during which the proposal had to be reviewed by full committees, some of which required multiple copies of the application paperwork.

This is just the tip of the iceberg (and I would always welcome more examples by email). For one multicentre clinical trial, each of 125 local research ethics committees required between 1 and 21 copies of a protocol. Ethics approval for another trial, involving 51 centres, required over 25 000 pieces of paper, 62 hours of photocopying, and an average of 3.3 hours of investigator time for each centre. You feel like you’re dying when administrators drag their heels. In the case of medical research, when you delay research findings, and deter researchers from even bothering, people really are dying. This wider harm seems to be a blindspot for the ethics committees, captivated by their own mission creep.

But it’s not the only ethical blindspot. These regulations have their roots in the Nuremburg Code. But while the world of clinicians and academics splits ethical hairs, with our eye off the ball, an elephant has walked into the room.

February has seen another string of prominent psychologists resigning from their membership of the American Psychological Association, in disgust at its failure to take a stand on “abusive interrogation techniques”, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and other activities which you might consider to be torture.

Psychologists are key to these interrogations and other activities, both in designing and enacting what I would rather not call “protocols”, out of compassion for the people on whom they are grimly enacted, in places cameras do not go.

APA members, trained, clinical professionals on their register, who have signed up to their codes of practise, now participate in these activities. The APA’s response has been to specifically bend the codes of conduct to permit their actions, and to obfuscate. Where’s your ethics committee now, science boy?

Bits:

Ken Pope, prominent member of the American Psychological Association (and a former chair of its Ethics Committee), resigned his membership on February 6. He’s the latest of a growing number of professional psychologists who have quit APA in protest of its position on the use of psychologists in government interrogations in the “War on Terror.”

Lots more on the APA and torture at Mindhacks.

Add comment February 24th, 2008

Prosecuting using “clean” information after torture? Give me a break

Joseph Margulies and George Brent Mickum, attorneys for Abu Zubaydah, in the Washington Post,  discuss the absurdity of the US government’s claim that they can prosecute tortured detainees, using only “clean” information willingly revealed after they were tortured for months. Zubaydah, you may recall, is the former CIA prisoner whose torture, directed by psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, was described by Katherine Eban in Vanity Fair last July and whose interrogation tapes were destroyed. More recently, we have learned that his torture even included waterboarding. to get a sense of the horrors to which Zubaydah was subjected, in addition to Eban’s article, read this excerpt from the Council of Europe’s report on life inside a CIA torture center.

Here is the article:

Inside the Mind of a Gitmo Detainee

By Joseph Margulies and George Brent Mickum

As you read this, we expect to be in Guantanamo, meeting with the man President Bush mentions when he talks about the intelligence gained and the lives saved because of “enhanced” interrogation techniques. We represent Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah in a legal effort to force the administration to show why he is being detained. And this week, with our first meeting, we begin the laborious task of sifting fact from fantasy. Yet we worry it may already be too late.

The administration declares with certainty that Zubaydah is a “senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden” who “helped smuggle al-Qaeda leaders out of Afghanistan.” Dan Coleman, a former FBI analyst who was on the team that reviewed Zubaydah’s background file, disagrees, describing him as “insane, certifiable” and saying he “knew very little about real operations, or strategy.” We do not presume to know the truth. So far, we know only what has been publicly reported. But we hope to uncover the facts and present them to those with the power to act upon them.

Yet Zubaydah’s mind may be beyond our reach. Regardless of whether he was “insane” to begin with, he has gone through quite an ordeal since his arrest in Pakistan in March 2002. Shuttled through CIA “black sites” around the world, he was subjected to a sustained course of interrogation designed to instill what a CIA training manual euphemistically calls “debility, dependence and dread.” Zubaydah’s world became freezing rooms alternating with sweltering cells. Screaming noise replaced by endless silence. Blinding light followed by dark, underground chambers. Hours confined in contorted positions. And, as we recently learned, Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding. We do not know what remains of his mind, and we will probably never know what he experienced.

Of course, the challenge of reconstructing what took place was made infinitely more difficult when the CIA destroyed the recordings of Zubaydah’s interrogation. But we already know something about what these techniques produce. It was the Cold War communists who perfected the dark art of touchless torture. And with it, they brought U.S. soldiers to the tipping point, where the adult psyche shatters, leaving behind a quavering child. At the end of their ordeal, these soldiers made fantastic admissions of American perfidity and spoke unreservedly about their supposed misdeeds.

The Bush administration says Zubaydah and other products of the CIA “black site” program repeated their confessions to FBI agents — a “clean team” that used authorized interrogation techniques to scrub away the fetid stain of torture. But the communists didn’t need to hold our soldiers at gunpoint as they recited their confessions. Continued cruelty becomes unnecessary when a prisoner has lost the will to resist.

What will we be able to learn, at this point, from Zubaydah? Will we be able to recreate the interrogations without the tapes? Will we get access to the material that led Coleman to a conclusion so different from the administration’s?

Because we represent Zubaydah, some people will likely discount whatever we say. But do not misunderstand; this is not a plea for pity. Whether people approve or disapprove of what has happened to Zubaydah, that’s a separate question.

The American system of justice is founded on the idea that truth emerges from vigorous and informed debate. And if that debate cannot take place, if we cannot learn the facts and share them with others, the truth is only what the administration reports it to be. We hope it has not come to that.

Joseph Margulies is assistant director of the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University Law School. George Brent Mickum is an attorney in Washington, D.C.

Add comment February 23rd, 2008

New paper on the Ethics of Interrogation and the APA

Brad Olson, Martha Davis and I have a new paper in the online open-access journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine:

The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A critique of policy and process

Abstract

The Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) task force was assembled by the American Psychological Association (APA) to guide policy on the role of psychologists in interrogations at foreign detention centers for the purpose of U.S. national security. The task force met briefly in 2005, and its report was quickly accepted by the APA Board of Directors and deemed consistent with the APA Ethics Code by the APA Ethics Committee. This rapid acceptance was unusual for a number of reasons but primarily because of the APA’s long-standing tradition of taking great care in developing ethical policies that protected anyone who might be impacted by the work of psychologists. Many psychological and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as reputable journalists, believed the risk of harm associated with psychologist participation in interrogations at these detention centers was not adequately addressed by the report. The present critique analyzes the assumptions of the PENS report and its interpretations of the APA Ethics Code. We demonstrate that it presents only one (and not particularly representative) side of a complex set of ethical issues. We conclude with a discussion of more appropriate psychological contributions to national security and world peace that better respect and preserve human rights.

Readers can also post comments on the paper. Please read, comment, and help us distribute it.

Also, a reminder that the Swedish Journal of Psychology recently covered the interrogations debate, with an article by the editor of the SJP and responses to questions by the APA and by myself.

Add comment February 23rd, 2008

Commercialization of play and overconcern for safety bad for children’s development, NPR reports

NPR reports on the negative consequences of the commercialization of children’s play combined with parents’ increased emphasis on safety at the cost of children’s imaginative play. Another reason why the capitalist takeover of all areas of life is bad for us:

Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills

by Alix Spiegel

Morning Edition, February 21, 2008 · On October 3, 1955, the Mickey Mouse Club debuted on television. As we all now know, the show quickly became a cultural icon, one of those phenomena that helped define an era.

What is less remembered but equally, if not more, important, is that another transformative cultural event happened that day: The Mattel toy company began advertising a gun called the “Thunder Burp.”

I know — who’s ever heard of the Thunder Burp?

Well, no one.

The reason the advertisement is significant is because it marked the first time that any toy company had attempted to peddle merchandise on television outside of the Christmas season. Until 1955, ad budgets at toy companies were minuscule, so the only time they could afford to hawk their wares on TV was during Christmas. But then came Mattel and the Thunder Burp, which, according to Howard Chudacoff, a cultural historian at Brown University, was a kind of historical watershed. Almost overnight, children’s play became focused, as never before, on things — the toys themselves.

“It’s interesting to me that when we talk about play today, the first thing that comes to mind are toys,” says Chudacoff. “Whereas when I would think of play in the 19th century, I would think of activity rather than an object.”

Chudacoff’s recently published history of child’s play argues that for most of human history what children did when they played was roam in packs large or small, more or less unsupervised, and engage in freewheeling imaginative play. They were pirates and princesses, aristocrats and action heroes. Basically, says Chudacoff, they spent most of their time doing what looked like nothing much at all.

“They improvised play, whether it was in the outdoors… or whether it was on a street corner or somebody’s back yard,” Chudacoff says. “They improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules.”

But during the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff argues, play changed radically. Instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts. Essentially, instead of playing pirate with a tree branch they played Star Wars with a toy light saber. Chudacoff calls this the commercialization and co-optation of child’s play — a trend which begins to shrink the size of children’s imaginative space.

But commercialization isn’t the only reason imagination comes under siege. In the second half of the 20th century, Chudacoff says, parents became increasingly concerned about safety, and were driven to create play environments that were secure and could not be penetrated by threats of the outside world. Karate classes, gymnastics, summer camps — these create safe environments for children, Chudacoff says. And they also do something more: for middle-class parents increasingly worried about achievement, they offer to enrich a child’s mind.

Change in Play, Change in Kids

Clearly the way that children spend their time has changed. Here’s the issue: A growing number of psychologists believe that these changes in what children do has also changed kids’ cognitive and emotional development.

It turns out that all that time spent playing make-believe actually helped children develop a critical cognitive skill called executive function. Executive function has a number of different elements, but a central one is the ability to self-regulate. Kids with good self-regulation are able to control their emotions and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.

We know that children’s capacity for self-regulation has diminished. A recent study replicated a study of self-regulation first done in the late 1940s, in which psychological researchers asked kids ages 3, 5 and 7 to do a number of exercises. One of those exercises included standing perfectly still without moving. The 3-year-olds couldn’t stand still at all, the 5-year-olds could do it for about three minutes, and the 7-year-olds could stand pretty much as long as the researchers asked. In 2001, researchers repeated this experiment. But, psychologist Elena Bodrova at the National Institute for Early Education Research says, the results were very different.

“Today’s 5-year-olds were acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago,” Bodrova explains. “So the results were very sad.”

Sad because self-regulation is incredibly important. Poor executive function is associated with high dropout rates, drug use and crime. In fact, good executive function is a better predictor of success in school than a child’s IQ. Children who are able to manage their feelings and pay attention are better able to learn. As executive function researcher Laura Berk explains, “Self-regulation predicts effective development in virtually every domain.”

The Importance of Self-Regulation

According to Berk, one reason make-believe is such a powerful tool for building self-discipline is because during make-believe, children engage in what’s called private speech: They talk to themselves about what they are going to do and how they are going to do it.

“In fact, if we compare preschoolers’ activities and the amount of private speech that occurs across them, we find that this self-regulating language is highest during make-believe play,” Berk says. “And this type of self-regulating language… has been shown in many studies to be predictive of executive functions.”

And it’s not just children who use private speech to control themselves. If we look at adult use of private speech, Berk says, “we’re often using it to surmount obstacles, to master cognitive and social skills, and to manage our emotions.”

Unfortunately, the more structured the play, the more children’s private speech declines. Essentially, because children’s play is so focused on lessons and leagues, and because kids’ toys increasingly inhibit imaginative play, kids aren’t getting a chance to practice policing themselves. When they have that opportunity, says Berk, the results are clear: Self-regulation improves.

“One index that researchers, including myself, have used… is the extent to which a child, for example, cleans up independently after a free-choice period in preschool,” Berk says. “We find that children who are most effective at complex make-believe play take on that responsibility with… greater willingness, and even will assist others in doing so without teacher prompting.”

Despite the evidence of the benefits of imaginative play, however, even in the context of preschool young children’s play is in decline. According to Yale psychological researcher Dorothy Singer, teachers and school administrators just don’t see the value.

“Because of the testing, and the emphasis now that you have to really pass these tests, teachers are starting earlier and earlier to drill the kids in their basic fundamentals. Play is viewed as unnecessary, a waste of time,” Singer says. “I have so many articles that have documented the shortening of free play for children, where the teachers in these schools are using the time for cognitive skills.”

It seems that in the rush to give children every advantage — to protect them, to stimulate them, to enrich them — our culture has unwittingly compromised one of the activities that helped children most. All that wasted time was not such a waste after all.

Add comment February 22nd, 2008