Blogger Valtin is even more critical of the new APA resolution than were Brad Olson and myself. Valtin summarizes the issue thus:
The issue boils down to this: Are psychologists involved in interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo, CIA prisons, and other theater of war prison sites? Yes. Are these sites in violation of basic human rights laws and treaties? Yes. Have psychologists been implicated in torture of prisoners, and training other personnel in such torture? Yes. Does APA have an ethics policy in place that allows military psychologists to follow orders, regardless of ethical demands? Yes. Has anyone in the 50 plus year history of psychologist participation in mind control and interrogation research ever been held responsible for unethical practices? No. Has any military psychologist, or for that matter any health professional, been held responsible for torture-related activities since 9/11? No.
March 3rd, 2008
Glenn Greenwald uses the example of the current wiretapping debate to show how far toward the radical authoritarian right our political discourse has gone. When the FISA court was proposed, it:
“was considered to be one of the great threats to civil liberties, the very antithesis of how an open, democratic system of government ought to function. The FISA court was long the symbol of how severe are the incursions we’ve allowed into basic civil liberties and open government.
The FISC is a classically Kafka-esque court that operates in total secrecy. Only the Government, and nobody else, is permitted to attend, participate, and make arguments. Only the Government is permitted to access or know about the decisions issued by that court. Rather than the judges being assigned randomly and therefore fairly, they are hand-picked by the Chief Justice (who has been a GOP-appointee since FISA was enacted) and are uniformly the types of judges who evince great deference to the Government. As a result, the FISA court has been notorious for decades for mindlessly rubber-stamping every single Government request to eavesdrop on whomever they want.”
Now, of course:
“embracing this secret, one-sided, slavishly pro-government court defines the outermost liberal or “pro-civil-liberty” view permitted in our public discourse. And indeed, as reports of imminent (and entirely predictable) House Democratic capitulation on the FISA bill emerge, the FISA court is now actually deemed by the establishment to be too far to the Left — too much of a restraint on our increasingly omnipotent surveillance state. Anyone who believes that we should at the very least have those extremely minimal — really just symbolic — limitations on our Government’s ability to spy on us in secret is now a far Leftist.”
Read Greenwald’s article and see how far we have gone down the road toward the total surveillance state.
March 3rd, 2008