The Senate Armed Services Committee is conducting hearings right now on the origins of the Defense Department’s abusive interrogation techniques, including the SERE and psychologist connections. The hearings can be watched on C-SPAN3 here. SASC has released a batch of important documents that are available here. Marty Lederman on Balkinization has already posted an analysis of these documents.
2 comments June 17th, 2008
Bryant Welch, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst who played pivotal roles in the history of American psychology, has a new book — State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind – trying to explain the psychological origins of our country’s current predicament. Some of you may recall that Bryant Welch was the founder of the American Psychological Association’s Practice Directorate and its director for 10 years. He also played a pivotal role in the lawsuit in which psychologists sued and defeated the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations over their restrictive practices keeping psychologists and social workers out from training and membership in their institutes.
Bryant send me this book announcement. I haven’t had time to read the book yet, but am looking forward to the opportunity. I’m sure it will be more than worthwhile.
Book Description: State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind
Finally, the answer to the many questions that have been preying on the minds of millions of Americans has arrived. Why are Americans so vulnerable to divisive political tactics? Why did Americans get dragged into such an unwise war in Iraq? Why do fundamentalist religious groups, Fox News, and right- wing radio still play such influential roles in America’s political landscape? And why are long-accepted rational scientific ideas like evolution under siege?
These questions hold America’s future in the balance. Ultimately, they are questions about the American mind. Psychologist-attorney Dr. Bryant Welch has the answers.
If America is going to change the mind-set that led us to war in Iraq and left us unable to confront our serious national problems, this book is vitally important. Drawing on his unique experience both as a clinical psychologist and a Washington, D.C., political figure with the American Psychological Association, Dr. Welch shows how the long-term effects of sophisticated new forms of political manipulation have not only led to our debacle in Iraq but are also currently undercutting America’s ability to address its very serious problems.
In the 1944 movie Gaslight, a husband drives his wife to the brink of insanity by playing games with her sense of reality. Just as in the movie, America’s most recent political “gaslighters,” such as George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and many religious leaders, have generated and exploited confusion in the minds of countless Americans.
Gaslighters prey on their victim’s vulnerability to paranoia, sexual perplexity, and envy to undermine the mind’s ability to function rationally. Welch examines why millions of Americans, in response to such assaults, subconsciously and dangerously create their own simplistic reality, even if it is completely different from the more complex reality of the world.
Most important, State of Confusion explains how and why Americans must act now to fight back against this harmful manipulation before it’s too late. Dr. Welch’s exploration of the American mind is both fascinating and frightening, and State of Confusion is a must- read for everyone who cares about the future of this great country.
Advance Praise for State of Confusion
“Bryant Welch makes a fascinating and compelling case that right-wing politics has subverted our democracy by infecting us with a form of national political neurosis. This book unmasks the politics of fear—the deeper chords touched by campaigns that appeal to the dark side.”—Robert Shrum, senior strategist of the Gore and Kerry presidential campaigns and author of No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner
“Bryant Welch was born to write this vitally important and highly readable investigation of how a cadre of ethically challenged political operatives and their religious and journalistic allies have gradually distorted and disabled the minds of ordinary Americans-and have all but crippled the once- extraordinary mind of America. It is not too late for us to reclaim our identity, but we will succeed only if we take to heart the lessons so lucidly laid bare by the remarkable work of this insightful psychologist and experienced political activist.”—Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard Law School
“State of Confusion is intense, clear, logical, and striking in its message. It will grab you emotionally and intellectually, the message cannot be missed, Bryant Welch sees through the smoke and mirrors and offers the only remedy that will place democracy firmly in the grip of the people from whom it is being stolen: the truth.” —Dr. Harold I. Eist, M.D., clinical professor of psychiatry, George Washington University, and former president of the American Psychiatric Association
“Dr. Welch is a master of making complex psychological concepts understandable and using them to explain the disturbing political climate of our time. This beautifully written, urgently relevant work should be on the bookshelf of everyone who cares about the survival of American democracy.”—Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., president of the Division of Psychoanalysis, American Psychological Association, and professor, Rutgers Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology
“[State of Confusion] is a unique and successful effort to understand the machinations of politicians and others who have significant influence on others. With professional credentials in both law and psychology, Dr. Bryant Welch is ideally suited to raise the issues – fascinating reading.” —-Lewis P. Lipsitt, Ph.D., professor of psychology, emeritus, Brown University
June 16th, 2008
Newly obtained by Wikileaks is the US Special Forces counterinsurgency manual. Here is brief report by Wikileaks investigative editor Julian Assange:
How to train death squads and quash revolutions from San Salvador to you
By Julian Assange (investigative editor)
Monday June 15, 2008Wikileaks has obtained a sensitive US military counter-insurgency manual. The manual, Foreign Internal Defense Tactics Techniques and Procedures for Special Forces (1994, 2004), may be critically described as “What we learned about running death squads and propping up corrupt government in Latin America and how to apply it to other places”. Its contents are both history defining for Latin America and, given the continued role of US Special Forces in the suppression of insurgencies and guerilla movements world wide, history making.
The document, which has been verified, is official US Special Forces doctrine. It directly advocates training paramilitaries, pervasive surveillance, censorship, press control and restrictions on labor unions & political parties. It directly advocates warrantless searches, detainment without charge and the suspension of habeas corpus. It directly advocates bribery, employing terrorists, false flag operations, concealing human rights abuses from journalists. And it directly advocates the extensive use of “psychological operations” (propaganda) to make these and other “population & resource control” measures more palatable.
The document has been particularly informed by the long United States involvement in the El Salvador. However it is worth noting what the US Ambassador to El Salvador, Robert E. White had to say in FOIA documents obtained from the US State Department about the situation, as early as 1980:
The major, immediate threat to the existence of this government is the right-wing violence. In the city of San Salvador, the hired thugs of the extreme right, some of them well-trained Cuban and Nicaraguan terrorists, kill moderate left leaders and blow up government buildings. In the countryside, elements of the security forces torture and kill the campesinos, shoot up their houses and burn their crops. At least two hundred refugees from the countryside arrive daily in the capital city. This campaign of terror is radicalizing the rural areas just as surely as Somoza’s National Guard did in Nicaragua. Unfortunately, the command structure of the army and the security forces either tolerates or encourages this activity. These senior officers believe or pretend to believe that they are eliminating the guerillas.[1]
Selected extracts follow. Note that the manual is 219 pages long and contains substantial material throughout. These extracts should merely be considered representative. Emphasis has been added for further selectivity. The full manual can be found at US Special Forces counter-insurgency manual FM 31-20-3.
Here are a few of the quotes selected out by Wikileaks:
Most of the counterintelligence measures used will be overt in nature and aimed at protecting installations, units, and information and detecting espionage, sabotage, and subversion. Examples of counterintelligence measures to use are
- Background investigations and records checks of persons in sensitive positions and persons whose loyalty may be questionable.
- Maintenance of files on organizations, locations, and individuals of counterintelligence interest.
- Internal security inspections of installations and units.
- Control of civilian movement within government-controlled areas.
- Identification systems to minimize the chance of insurgents gaining access to installations or moving freely.
- Unannounced searches and raids on suspected meeting places.
- Censorship.
[...]
PSYOP [Psychological Operations] are essential to the success of PRC [Population & Resources Control]. For maximum effectiveness, a strong psychological operations effort is directed toward the families of the insurgents and their popular support base. The PSYOP aspect of the PRC program tries to make the imposition of control more palatable to the people by relating the necessity of controls to their safety and well-being. PSYOP efforts also try to create a favorable national or local government image and counter the effects of the insurgent propaganda effort.
Control Measures
SF [US Special Forces] can advise and assist HN [Host Nation] forces in developing and implementing control measures. Among these measures are the following:
- Security Forces. Police and other security forces use PRC [Population & Resources Control] measures to deprive the insurgent of support and to identify and locate members of his infrastructure. Appropriate PSYOP [Psychological Operations] help make these measures more acceptable to the population by explaining their need. The government informs the population that the PRC measures may cause an inconvenience but are necessary due to the actions of the insurgents.
- Restrictions. Rights on the legality of detention or imprisonment of personnel (for example, habeas corpus) may be temporarily suspended. This measure must be taken as a last resort, since it may provide the insurgents with an effective propaganda theme. PRC [Population & Resources Control] measures can also include curfews or blackouts, travel restrictions, and restricted residential areas such as protected villages or resettlement areas. Registration and pass systems and control of sensitive items (resources control) and critical supplies such as weapons, food, and fuel are other PRC measures. Checkpoints, searches, roadblocks; surveillance, censorship, and press control; and restriction of activity that applies to selected groups (labor unions, political groups and the like) are further PRC measures.
[...]
Psychological Operations
PSYOP can support the mission by discrediting the insurgent forces to neutral groups, creating dissension among the insurgents themselves, and supporting defector programs. Divisive programs create dissension, disorganization, low morale, subversion, and defection within the insurgent forces. Also important are national programs to win insurgents over to the government side with offers of amnesty and rewards. Motives for surrendering can range from personal rivalries and bitterness to disillusionment and discouragement. Pressure from the security forces has persuasive power.
[...]
Special Intelligence-Gathering Operations
Alternative intelligence-gathering techniques and sources, such as doppelganger or pseudo operations, can be tried and used when it is hard to obtain information from the civilian populace. These pseudo units are usually made up of ex-guerrilla and/or security force personnel posing as insurgents. They circulate among the civilian populace and, in some cases, infiltrate guerrilla units to gather information on guerrilla movements and its support infrastructure.
Much time and effort must be used to persuade insurgents to switch allegiance and serve with the security forces. Prospective candidates must be properly screened and then given a choice of serving with the HN [Host Nation] security forces or facing prosecution under HN law for terrorist crimes.
Government security force units and teams of varying size have been used in infiltration operations against underground and guerrilla forces. They have been especially effective in getting information on underground security and communications systems, the nature and extent of civilian support and underground liaison, underground supply methods, and possible collusion between local government officials and the underground. Before such a unit can be properly trained and disguised, however, much information about the appearance, mannerisms, and security procedures of enemy units must be gathered. Most of this information comes from defectors or reindoctrinated prisoners. Defectors also make excellent instructors and guides for an infiltrating unit. In using a disguised team, the selected men should be trained, oriented, and disguised to look and act like authentic underground or guerrilla units. In addition to acquiring valuable information, the infiltrating units can demoralize the insurgents to the extent that they become overly suspicious and distrustful of their own units.
[...]
After establishing the cordon and designating a holding area, the screening point or center is established. All civilians in the cordoned area will then pass through the screening center to be classified.
National police personnel will complete, if census data does not exist in the police files, a basic registration card and photograph all personnel over the age of 15. They print two copies of each photo- one is pasted to the registration card and the other to the village book (for possible use in later operations and to identify ralliers and informants).
The screening element leader ensures the screeners question relatives, friends, neighbors, and other knowledgeable individuals of guerrilla leaders or functionaries operating in the area on their whereabouts, activities, movements, and expected return.
The screening area must include areas where police and military intelligence personnel can privately interview selected individuals. The interrogators try to convince the interviewees that their cooperation will not be detected by the other inhabitants. They also discuss, during the interview, the availability of monetary rewards for certain types of information and equipment.
[...]
Civilian Self-Defense Forces [Paramilitaries, or, especially in an El-Salvador or Colombian civil war context, right wing "death squads"]
When a village accepts the CSDF program, the insurgents cannot choose to ignore it. To let the village go unpunished will encourage other villages to accept the government’s CSDF program. The insurgents have no choice; they have to attack the CSDF village to provide a lesson to other villages considering CSDF. In a sense, the psychological effectiveness of the CSDF concept starts by reversing the insurgent strategy of making the government the repressor. It forces the insurgents to cross a critical threshold-that of attacking and killing the very class of people they are supposed to be liberating.
To be successful, the CSDF program must have popular support from those directly involved or affected by it. The average peasant is not normally willing to fight to his death for his national government. His national government may have been a succession of corrupt dictators and inefficient bureaucrats. These governments are not the types of institutions that inspire fight-to-the-death emotions in the peasant. The village or town, however, is a different matter. The average peasant will fight much harder for his home and for his village than he ever would for his national government. The CSDF concept directly involves the peasant in the war and makes it a fight for the family and village instead of a fight for some faraway irrelevant government.
Now go read the entire manual and report on what tidbits you find.
June 16th, 2008
Naomi Klein in the Nation reminds us that Obama is a prototypical “free market” defender, whose economic advisers include some of the most disturbing voices in American economics, including the “Chicago School.” Whatever positive outcomes we may expect from Obama’s Presidency, a break with that right-wing capitalist orthodoxy that dominates the US is probably not on the cards:
Obama’s Chicago Boys
By Naomi Klein
Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.”
Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, anointing the company a “progressive success story.” On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, it’s Wal-Mart’s critics who are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing ‘Kum-Ba-Ya’ in the interests of progressive harmony.” Obama’s love of markets and his desire for “change” are not inherently incompatible. “The market has gotten out of balance,” he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama–who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade–is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School.
He chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right. Goolsbee, unlike his more Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education–a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan. In their hometown, Goolsbee has been eager to link Obama to the Chicago School. “If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament, the guy’s got a healthy respect for markets,” he told Chicago magazine. “It’s in the ethos of the [University of Chicago], which is something different from saying he is laissez-faire.”
Another of Obama’s Chicago fans is 39-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. Griffin, who gave the maximum allowable donation to Obama, is something of a poster boy for an unbalanced economy. He got married at Versailles and had the after-party at Marie Antoinette’s vacation spot (Cirque du Soleil performed)–and he is one of the staunchest opponents of closing the hedge-fund tax loophole. While Obama talks about toughening trade rules with China, Griffin has been bending the few barriers that do exist. Despite sanctions prohibiting the sale of police equipment to China, Citadel has been pouring money into controversial China-based security companies that are putting the local population under unprecedented levels of surveillance.
Now is the time to worry about Obama’s Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, “President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy.”
Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free-trade agenda. Add to that Goolsbee’s February meeting with Canadian consulate officials, who left with the distinct impression that they had been instructed not to take Obama’s anti-NAFTA campaigning seriously, and there is every reason for concern about a replay of 1993.
The irony is that there is absolutely no reason for this backsliding. The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. “The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive,” the letter states. “Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world’s population.”
When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times–written by Austan Goolsbee. Yet now, just two years later, Friedman’s name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?
The news is not all bad. Furman claims he will be drawing on the expertise of two Keynesian economists: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, son of Friedman’s nemesis John Kenneth Galbraith. Our “current economic crisis,” Obama recently said, did not come from nowhere. It is “the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long.”
True enough. But before Obama can purge Washington of the scourge of Friedmanism, he has some ideological housecleaning of his own to do.
Naomi Klein is the author of many books, including her most recent, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.Visit Naomi’s website at www.naomiklein.org, or to learn more about her new book, visit www.shockdoctrine.com .
June 16th, 2008
I can’t imagine many politicians making this speech. “We’ve got some work to do.”:
[h/t Effect Measure.]
June 15th, 2008
Isabel Macdonald in Extra! traces the history of “Water Torture” becoming the much more benign sounding “Waterboarding.” Surprise. The new term only arose in 2004 as word was seeping out of the Bush administration’s torture policy. Another surprise. Torture supporter Alan Dershowitz coined it.
From Water Torture to ‘Waterboarding’
Media rehabilitate torture as aquatic sport
By Isabel MacdonaldOn May 13, 2004, a novel euphemism was delivered into the public lexicon by anonymous “counterintelligence official” sources cited in a New York Times article. The piece reported the CIA had been using “a technique known as ‘water boarding,’ in which a prisoner is strapped down, forcibly pushed under water and made to believe he might drown.” The technique was described by the Times as one of several “methods [that] simulate torture.”
Before long, Alan Dershowitz (Boston Globe, 5/15/04)—the Harvard law professor who advocates for a system of “torture warrants” (San Francisco Chonicle, 1/22/04)–had coined a brand new catchphrase by stringing the two words together into one: “waterboarding.” As Dershowitz himself acknowledged to Times columnist William Safire (3/9/08), “When I first used the word, nobody knew what it meant.”
Indeed, a search of newspaper archives reveals that until May 2004, the term had actually meant an aquatic sport similar to surfing. Meanwhile, the technique now known as “waterboarding”—in which the person being tortured is actually drowning, aspirating fluid to the point of being unable to breathe—had previously been called “water torture,” or simply “torture,” by the media.
Water torture had cropped up in media reports on several occasions prior to the New York Times’ revelations about CIA “water boarding.” During the insurrection against the U.S. occupation of the Philippines (1899–1902), the U.S. military tortured suspected members of the Filipino resistance with a similar technique that they referred to as the “water cure.”
A Washington Post (9/23/1902) news article on this practice, which referred to it as “the form of torture known as the water cure,” was typical of newspaper reporting of the time—which used the term “water cure” more or less interchangeably with the word “torture.” When a U.S. Army major was court-martialed and then found not guilty after being accused of administering the “water cure” to Filipinos, the Post reported on the verdict (6/7/1902) under the headline “Torture Is Upheld.” Similarly, a Chicago Daily Tribune headline (1/9/1903) referred to “torture orders” in an article about another army major accused of having authorized the use of the “water cure.” Newspaper reports about the use of the “water cure” by U.S. occupation forces in Haiti similarly identified it as “torture” (New York Times, 5/4/1907, 5/9/1921).
Following World War II, when U.S. military tribunals tried Japanese military officials for war crimes for torturing prisoners of war, graphic accounts surfaced about the practice called “the water treatment,” which, as federal judge and laws of war scholar Evan Wallach observed (Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, 2007), “differ[ed] very little” from the “descriptions of waterboarding as it is currently applied.” One of the common practices of the Japanese military was described as follows in the Judgment of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East: “The victim was tied or held down on his back and cloth placed over his nose and mouth. Water was then poured on the cloth.”
This practice, first defined in the New York Times (7/27/42) as “forced drownings,” was referred to by the Washington Post (10/7/46) as “water torture” and by the New York Times (9/6/45) as “the Oriental ‘water torture.’” Other newspaper accounts (New York Times, 8/16/42, 8/31/42, 12/25/45, 7/26/47; Washington Post, 9/6/42; Chicago Tribune, 6/9/46) unequivocally defined the “water treatment” as a form of torture. Meanwhile, reports of the use of identical practices against American POWs in the Korean War were covered in the New York Times (8/9/53) as “stories of planned and deliberate torture.”
Over a decade later, “water torture” was mentioned in the headline of a Washington Post article (3/15/68) about the Australian army’s admission that a soldier had administered the “water treatment” to a Vietnamese woman suspected of being a guerilla. Six months later, the Post (8/12/68) published a front-page photographic expose of U.S. soldiers administering this same “water treatment” to a Vietnamese prisoner. A follow-up report in the Post (10/29/70) referred to this practice, which resulted in charges against the commander of the U.S. Army troops in South Vietnam, as “an ancient Oriental torture called ‘the water treatment.’”
Media reports commonly used the term “water torture” to describe the Cambodian Khmer Rouge’s practice of tying prisoners to a board and pouring water over their noses and mouths. In a feature article about the late Cambodian artist Vann Nath, who painted pictures of the Pol Pot regime’s various torture devices (including perhaps the clearest visual precursor of today’s “water board”), the L.A. Times (8/8/97) described the artist’s “contributions to history as a witness to the systematic torture and execution of Pol Pot’s victims. He painted images of acts he witnessed or heard described while in prison: electric shock treatment, water torture.” The San Diego Union-Tribune (12/16/89) also referred to the Khmer Rouge’s methods of interrogating through “water torture.”
In 1983, media reports on the trial of a Texas sheriff who had used a technique remarkably similar to today’s “waterboarding” also used the term “water torture” (UPI, 8/31/83, 9/1/83, 9/7/83). One article published in the New York Times (9/2/83) about the case began, “Two convicted burglars testified today that they had watched in fear as a former East Texas sheriff and his deputies used a water torture.” In another New York Times article (9/1/83), the news that “another former deputy testified that they had handcuffed prisoners to chairs, placed towels over their faces and poured water on the cloth until the prisoners gave what the officers considered confessions” was summarized with the headline: “Ex-Deputy Tells Jury of Jail Water Torture.”
Media also referred to the practice as torture when it was used by the U.S. to train intelligence agents and military personnel who were at risk of being captured by enemy forces. In a column tracing the origins of the word “waterboarding,” New York Times columnist William Safire (3/9/08) noted that a 1976 article had referred to U.S. Navy trainees being
strapped down and water poured into their mouths and noses until they lost consciousness. . . . A Navy spokesman admitted use of the “water board” torture . . . to “convince each trainee that he won’t be able to physically resist what an enemy would do to him.”Outside of newspaper editorial pages and commentary programs, the phrase “water torture”—used in the media to refer to nearly identical interrogation practices in the past—has been strikingly absent from the news coverage of the CIA and military interrogations of U.S. detainees. Prior to the publication of the Times article that substituted the term “water boarding,” the new term had only ever been used in the newspaper of record to refer to the sport. A search of the terms “waterboarding” and “interrogation” in the Nexis database prior to the date of the article’s publication yields not a single newspaper or newswire article.
In contrast, in the four years since the New York Times first mentioned “water boarding,” the term has cropped up in 1,000 stories in U.S. newspapers and wires, frequently being mentioned in the contracted single word form first introduced by Dershowitz, and without quotation marks.
While in the past the practice had been referred to as “forced drownings” (e.g., New York Times, 7/27/42), “waterboarding” has been almost universally referred to as “a type of simulated drowning” (Washington Post, 4/2/08) or as a “simulated drowning technique” (New York Times, 4/2/08), which, on occasion, some media organizations will go so far as to point out is “considered torture by many rights advocates” (Knight Ridder, 4/4/08). In short, as Dershowitz recently observed (New York Times, 3/9/08), “Waterboarding has in the last few years taken on the generic meaning ‘simulated drowning.’”
Yet this meaning is incorrect: As Wallach has pointed out in an op-ed (Washington Post, 11/4/07), “To be effective, waterboarding is usually real drowning that simulates death.” He elaborated that the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted.
Malcolm Nance, a former instructor at the U.S. Navy’s Advanced Terrorism, Abduction and Hostage Survival program who has taught American service members what to expect under torture, concurred with this assessment of “waterboarding” in an interview with Extra!: “There is nothing simulated about it.”
U.S. Justice Department legal counsel John Yoo’s 2003 memo, which provided a legal justification for the use of “waterboarding,” has deservedly been rebuked by the media for having “redefined torture to justify repugnant, clearly illegal acts,” as one New York Times editorial (4/4/08) put it. Unfortunately, the same can be said of much of the news reporting on “waterboarding.”
June 14th, 2008
Simon Owens over at Bloggasm reminds us of the torment right wing bloggers faced yesterday with the issuance of the Supreme Court decision restoring Habeas rights to Guantanamo prisoners:
I felt sympathy for right wing bloggers today after the Supreme Court ruled that habeas corpus would be restored to Guantanamo detainees. I knew that they not only had to disagree with the justices but they also had to declare their rulings unconstitutional and the work of “judicial activism.” But to make those claims right wing bloggers would actually have to read the court opinions, and those opinions are just so gosh darn long.
Well, luckily they employed their Woodward/Bernstein investigative journalism skills to speed up the process:
He goes on to give examples of the careful research process they engaged in.
June 13th, 2008
An incredibly heartwarming story of human decency overcoming divisions:
June 12th, 2008
In a landmark day for human rights and simple decency, the Supreme Court today ruled that the government cannot strip Guantanamo detainees of their habeas corpus rights to appeal their detention in court.
The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 which, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.
Congress and the administration had passed a shortened alternative to a habeas procedure for the prisoners in the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority, said that procedure “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”
Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Justice Scalia had a temper tantrum:
“It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed,” he said. “The nation will live to regret what the court has done today.” He said the decision was based not on principle, “but rather an inflated notion of judicial supremacy.”
Tonight we raise a glass to those courageous habeas attorneys who pursued these cases from their unpopular beginnings till this important victory. We are all a bit freer because of them.
June 12th, 2008
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