Psyche, Science, and Society

Wikileaks: The Hidden Curse of Thomas Paine

From a Wikileaks investigative editor come this plea for independent analysis and reporting of the treasures contained in this archive of leaked material. He laments that this material is almost never reported except when Wikileaks staff lobby for its use by sending press releases and/or analyses to journalists and bloggers.

I have been a happy recipient of these lobbying efforts, resulting in a few articles using Wikileaks materials. I learned, though, that it these materials are difficult to use when I do not have background knowledge to bring to bear. When I do, I can add to the understanding of the documents by extracting nuggets that others fail to notice. Thus, I discovered the mandatory four-week isolation period in the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures, obtained from Wikileaks. This discovery has had major impacts upon the struggle against psychologist collaboration with US torture. Thus, this discovery helped push the American Psychological Association to take a stronger stand against isolation as an interrogation technique than they had previously.

But I also have trouble interpreting some of the documents there in the absence of extensive background knowledge. In one case, investigation resulted in questions regarding the authenticity of a document, leading me to decide not to post any comments. I still reconsider my decision on a regular basis. In other cases, I simply don’t know enough to figure out what is truly new in a document. In a couple of cases I have directly reproduced the Wikileaks press release, having no need to pretend that the intellectual work was originally mine.

So I agree with the commentator that Wikileaks is an incredible treasure that should be mined more frequently by bloggers, scholars, and independent journalists. But I also think that caution is needed lest we pollute discourse with even more nonsense than exists already.

So, at the risk of being accused of again reproducing a press release, here is The Plea:

The Hidden Curse of Thomas Paine

In 1789 Thomas Paine, American pamphleteer, philosopher and revolutionary, compared the sun to the truth: “[S]uch is the irresistible nature of truth,” Paine declared, “that all it asks, and all it wants, is the liberty of appearing.”

Thomas Paine, author of ‘Common Sense’ and ‘The Rights of Man’ was wrong. Paine gave away his copyright to ‘Common Sense’–allowing printers to pocket the authors fee. Printers, happy with this state of affairs, preferenced its production over other popular, but less profitable works. Thomas Paine had discovered the essential economic underpinning of the modern press release. Paine’s truth appeared not only because of its coherence but because Paine subsidised its production above competing ideas.

The modern press release may have been seen as a blessing by the fourth estate, for it made certain ideas more profitable without making other types less. Yet once electronic cut and paste came into play, the press release and similar content subsidies proliferated.

When the system of ideas regained its economic equilibrium, unsubsidized words became unprofitable and were eliminated. The consequence has been a great shift from words pulled out of writers by reader demand, to words pushed out of writers by special interest subsidies.

Competition to control perception has resulted in forums of influence, not limited to the world great newspapers, behaving as fresh faced coquettes with too many suiters. These coquettes long ago stopped cooking their own food and now expect everything to be lovingly presented on a silver platter. There are few exceptions and the phenomenon is mostly invisible to outsiders.

Print media, including internet media, should not be looked at as a content production industry, but rather, as a lobby selection industry, which balances production subsidies with reader interest.

In this manner it is analogous to the legislative economy which balanaces subsidies from political lobbies with electoral credulity.

In the last two weeks, the English Wikileaks has obtained and released over 50 individual or collected, original, unreported, confidential, classified or censored documents, books, photos or films.

You may have heard of some of them, for instance:
http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Zimbabwe_Chinese_weapons_shipment_documentation_%282008%29

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=105191

But if you did it was because Wikileaks lobbied for their uptake and like everyone else had its writers bribe everyone with subsidized copy. Take a look at the material, at least one part in 4 is worthy of reportage somewhere and ask yourself why none has been reported without our intervention–not even to the most obscure “activist”
blog.

In the last six months Wikileaks has exposed a lot of important stories, which have produced results from swinging the Dec 2007 Kenyan election to press conferences by the Iranian leadership, but every re-reported revelation has been the result of our staff lobbying other venues and providing content subsidies in excess of the source material.

For example, there has been no reportage about our release of this approachable, beautiful, and region defining leaked intelligence book on North Korea:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/US_North_Korea_Country_Handbook_%281997%29

Or this 2007 classified UK/US spy plane compendium and tasking guide, with plenty of approachable pictures and released in violation of the Official Secrets Act:

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/UK_ISTAR_intelligence_handbook_%282007%29

Or this detailed classified manual on JDAM, the most strategically significant U.S. military development in the past 15 years. A single B2 stealth bomber is capable of releasing 80 pre-targeted JDAM fitted bombs and leveling all the critical infrastructure of a medium sized city in one overflight. Most bombings in Iraq are now JDAM.

http://wikileaks.org/US_Air_Force_JDAM_Tactical_Manual

Wikileaks has not yet pushed this material because it has limited resources. Last week we focused, successfully, on reforming the prison system in western Iraq.

Any journalist, any blogger, any academic, and indeed any human being who could set aside a cumulative half a day to read and make a few phone calls could say something worthwhile, original and interesting using these documents. Professional journalists won’t without intervention because it doesn’t do anyone a favor that can be called in later and few can break even without plagiarism.

Internet media certainly won’t–with few exceptions, it has relegated itself to revealing the mood of the amateur commentariat. Its primary motivation is to demonstrate its authors in-group loyalties on the issue de-jour; consequently it slavishly copies from the very professional press it maligns, rarely adding more than is necessary to advertise peer value conformity.

What does it mean when only those facts about the world with economic powers behind them can be heard, when the truth lays naked before the world and no-one will be the first to speak without payment or subsidy? Wikileaks’ unreported material is only the most visible wave on a black ocean of truth in draws of the fourth estate, waiting for a lobby to subsidize its revelation into a profitable endevour.

The sun of truth is the only guiding beacon civilization has at its disposal. If we are to flourish in reality we must ultimately use it to chart our course. To do otherwise is to drift aimlessly in the dark, decoupled the real world and hearkening to every imagined wave.

But I leave you with a quote from Paine:

“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

And we will.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Wikileaks:Analysis_requested

Let the leaks, and the analysis, continue!

Add comment April 28th, 2008

Almerindo Ojeda: Guantánamo healthcare providers serve interrogators

Last week the Washington Post reported that Guantánamo and CIA detainees alleged that they were given strange psychoactive drugs by force. Jeff Stein of CQ had reported a similar things a few weeks ago. I wrote about this in my piece Involuntary Drugging of US Detainees. In response to the Post article, Almerindo Ojeda wrote a letter to the Post detailing additional evidence that the provision of health services and interrogations at Guantánamo have been intimately linked, with health providers serving the abusive interrogation regime.

Almerindo is the Director of the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas at the University of California at Davis, where they have a wonderful archive, the Guantánamo Testimonials Project with testimony from many sources on the conditions at the prison. The Project — by typing out many handwritten documents, transforming them into searchable text ,and carefully organizing them– is one of the premier sources for such materials as detaneee or FBI accounts of abuses there. My colleagues and I use it all the time.

In any case, the Post did not print Almerindo’s letter. He has thus revised it slightly and given me permission to post it here:

A recent article in the Washington Post (Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned, 04/22/08), quotes Pentagon spokesman Cmdr. J.D. Gordon as saying that interrogations at Guantanamo do not affect or influence medical treatment of the detainees held there. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise.

Attached to a recent motion on behalf of Guantanamo prisoner Salim Ahmed Hamdan are medical records stating that, on 8/28/02, an ointment was applied to Mr. Hamdan’s lower back and then covered with moleskin–a treatment which the attending medic described as a “special request for medical attention per FBI“. In addition, a medical record for the same detainee dated 2/19/04 carries the annotation “no rec time per Intel“–or “no recreation time per Intelligence” (I understand that exercise is an important component treatment of sciatica, which Mr. Hamdan suffered from then).
Moreover, one of the “counterresistance techniques” approved on December 2, 2002 by then Secretary Rumsfeld against Guantanamo detainees was the use of isolation facilities for up to thirty days. Here, and for selected detainees, “the OIC [or Officer in Charge], Interrogation Section, will approve all contacts with the detainee, to include medical visits of a non-emergent nature.” Although blanket permission to use this and other techniques was rescinded by then Secretary Rumsfeld a month later, their use was still allowed on a case-by-case basis and with approval of the Secretary of Defense (see memos 16-23 in The Torture Papers, by Greenberg and Dratel).

Similarly, section 30-6-d of the 2004 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures posted recently by Wikileaks reads as follows:

Detainees who are on self-harm precautions [i.e. those at high risk for suicide or other self-injury] that are scheduled for interrogation will have their clinical status and risk assessment verified by the licensed Behavioral Health staff prior to leaving the block. Detainees on self-harm precautions are generally not clinically stable enough to leave the block.

So the needs of interrogation may trump the reasons for placing a GTMO prisoner in a mental health ward. And this as a matter of standard operating procedure.

Almerindo Ojeda, Director
Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas
University of California at Davis
http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu

Add comment April 28th, 2008