Psyche, Science, and Society

Amy Goodman interviews Michael Ratner

Amy Goodman interviews the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Michael Ratner on the trials at Guantanamo. [This was before today's dramtaic action I reported on.] The last topic they discuss is the APA’s cozy relationship with Guantanamo, the recent referendum victory, and the Reisner campaign for President of the APA:

Here is the transcript:

Weeks After Prosecutor’s Resignation, US Drops Charges Against 5 Gitmo Prisoners—But Won’t Release Them

The US military has dropped all charges against five men held at Guantanamo Bay prison, but has no plans to release them. The news came just weeks after the resignation of Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who was the prosecutor in all five cases. He had accused the military of deliberately withholding evidence that could have helped clear them. We speak to Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

AMY GOODMAN: The US military announced Tuesday it’s dropped all charges against five men held at Guantanamo, but added it had no plans to release them. The news came just weeks after the resignation of Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld. He was the prosecutor in all five cases. He had accused the military of deliberately withholding evidence that could have helped clear them.

One of the five men is the Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed. His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said, “Far from being a victory for Mr. Mohamed in his long-running struggle for justice, this is more of the same farce that is Guantanamo.” He said the military has already said it plans to file new charges against Mohamed within a month.

Meanwhile, the White House has confirmed reports President Bush has no plans to close the prison at Guantanamo before leaving office. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday it was an issue for the next administration and Congress to take up.

We’re joined now by Michael Ratner, president of the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. He has been closely following developments in Guantanamo. He joins me here in the firehouse studio.

Welcome to Democracy Now!

MICHAEL RATNER: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s start with these five prisoners, who they are, charges dropped, but they remain in prison.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, they were people tried by the military commissions. And I think people want to be aware, there’s sort of two things going on. There’s the military commissions, and there’s the habeas corpus. Military commissions are what try people; the habeas corpus proceedings are what test the detention, even without trial. And I actually think that while there’s lots going on within the administration, lots of suppression, that what’s going on is they’re trying to put out all of these fires that people have caused them that try and give people rights, both with habeas as well as rights in the courts.

These five, of course, were before a military commission. They were two weeks away from a hearing. Typically of the Bush administration, they go and, right before a hearing, they try and change everything, because they cannot sustain a court hearing in any of their cases, really. And as you’ll see, that’s a pattern they followed. Of course, the fact that one of half a dozen prosecutors resigned in this case, claiming that they weren’t giving all the evidence they should have been to defendants, is obviously very significant here, as well. So, within the military commissions, you have those five.

You also have, of course, the administration now saying with Hamdan, the so-called bin Laden driver, that they are now going to ask for a higher sentence for him than he was given, five years and five months—six months. He’s supposed to be out December 31st. They’re going to ask to keep him in. Underlying that, of course—and I think it’s being destroyed right now—is the administration’s belief that the executive can do whatever he wants in the so-called war on terror, hold people forever and try them in kangaroo courts. So the military commissions system, the kangaroo courts, is really coming apart.

But I should also say, the habeas system is also coming apart, which is to say it—we won, after three Supreme Court victories, finally, the right to go into a court and challenge detentions. And what happened just in the last couple of days was, in the Boumediene case, which is the lead case in the Supreme Court, six people charged with allegedly a conspiracy to bomb an embassy in Sarajevo, the administration is no longer depending on those charges, charges which have been depending for years. And again, that’s right before the hearing of the habeas case in the district court. So you’re seeing, really, the administration policy, I think, coming apart, coming apart in the kangaroo courts, coming apart in trying to hold people.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the resignation of Lieutenant Colonel Darrel Vandeveld?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, you know, this is one of a half a dozen prosecutors. You’re not even talking about just the courts going after this administration, as sort of hard as it has been to get them to move. There’s been five—I think five or six prosecutors who have resigned, because the entire system is one in which the President decides, or the Pentagon, what they like and what they don’t like. I mean, if someone is pushed to do a prosecution or someone is pushed to withhold evidence, military prosecutors who are trained in the law are not going to accept it, and they resign. His resignation was a big one, because he basically said, we are not giving people what we lawyers call exculpatory evidence, evidence that might show their non-guilt.

AMY GOODMAN: What about President Bush, it being reported by the New York Times, saying he privately decided not to close Guantanamo, or Robert Gates saying it’s going to be up to the next administration?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, it’s certainly going to be up to the next administration. That’s a given, you know. But what—President Bush has been saying for a long time that he would close Guantanamo. Both presidential candidates have said they would close Guantanamo. And I remember promises, when I litigated the Haitian cases at Guantanamo, of President Clinton saying he would close Guantanamo. That didn’t happen. And the question in this next administration, will it really happen? Will they really close—will either of the candidates really close Guantanamo?

AMY GOODMAN: Do you have any indication, for example, that Obama would or that McCain would?

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, they’ve said they would close it. And, of course, there was an interesting reaction to the recent Supreme Court decision, the Boumediene decision, which gave habeas rights to people at Guantanamo. And McCain called it one of the worst decisions in American history; Obama celebrated the decision as an important decision. And that’s the same case, that I’ve just described, in which now the administration has withdrawn its charges about Sarajevo. So that’s an indication that at least one candidate may feel more strongly about fundamental constitutional rights than the other. But until they take office and until they act, it’s too difficult to say. I can only say that we’re going to have to keep pushing on all of these issues, no matter who takes office.

AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the recent referendum that was passed overwhelmingly by members of the American Psychological Association, over the objections of the leadership there, a movement that’s been going on for a while, approving a landmark measure banning members, psychologists, from taking part in interrogations at Guantanamo, and now this historic election for the APA, where the leading dissident psychologist, Steve Reisner, a New York psychoanalyst, is, as we speak, being voted on? The vote is being taken place for the next president of the American Psychological Association. They’re voting by email.

MICHAEL RATNER: Well, I give Democracy Now! tremendous credit for this whole change in the American Psychological Association. You went after these people really early and got them into very embarrassing positions about their cooperation in interrogations at Guantanamo and probably in other places around the world. The fact that it took them seven years to get there is pretty outrageous to me. The fact that they have psychologists drawing up interrogation plans for people, finding their weaknesses, finding the ways they exploit people, is a 1984 all the way. And so, it’s about time they pass that resolution. But I just want to credit DN! again for that.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Michael Ratner, thank you very much for joining us, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

October 28th, 2008

Jawad confession inadmissable

Major Frakt at Guantanamo has had a busy day. After the previous posting I heard that the judge in the trial of Mohammed Jawad has ruled that the main evidence against Jawad, a confession given to Afghan police, was extracted under torture and is therefore inadmissable as evidence. While this doesn’t automatically lead to dismissal of the war crimes charges, it is hard to see how the prosecution can continue.

Here is a Reuters report:

Guantanamo man tortured into confessing: U.S. judge

By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) – A young Guantanamo prisoner’s confession to Afghan police was obtained through torture and cannot be used as evidence in his trial on charges of wounding U.S. soldiers with a grenade, a judge in the U.S. war crimes court ruled on Tuesday.

High-ranking Afghan government officials threatened to kill Mohammed Jawad and his family unless he admitted throwing the grenade that wounded the soldiers and their Afghan interpreter at a bazaar in Kabul in December 2002, the judge found.

Jawad was 16 or 17 at the time and appeared to have been drugged, said the judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley. The Afghan officials who interrogated Jawad at the Kabul police station were armed and the death threat was credible, he ruled.

Jawad was turned over to U.S. forces after confessing and, two months later, was sent to the detention center at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The judge ruled that extracting a confession under threat of death met the definition of torture under the Guantanamo trial rules — an “act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain and suffering.”

Trial rules allow the use of evidence obtained via coercion but not torture and leave it up to the individual judges to determine which is which.

“While the torture threshold is admittedly high, it is met in this case,” Henley said in his ruling.

The ruling casts further doubt on the wobbly case against Jawad, who is scheduled for trial at Guantanamo on January 5.

The military prosecutor in the case quit last month, alleging the U.S. government was suppressing evidence that cast doubt on Jawad’s guilt. And a U.S. general who supervised the prosecutors was reassigned after fellow officers accused him of pushing for charges in the Jawad case prematurely because he felt it would excite the interest of U.S. citizens.

Jawad’s military lawyer, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said the suppressed evidence indicated Jawad was drugged by Afghans who recruited him for a purported mine-clearing operation and that he was one of three people who confessed to throwing the same grenade.

At a hearing in August, he presented testimony that Jawad was beaten and chained to the wall while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan then subjected to extreme isolation and sleep deprivation at Guantanamo even after the sleep deprivation program was ordered halted.

About 255 suspected members of al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated groups are now detained at Guantanamo. A total of more than 750 foreigners have been held without trial at the base in the seven years since President George W. Bush began a war against terrorism.

The two candidates for the U.S. presidential election on November 4 — Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain — have said they will close the Guantanamo prison, which is widely seen as a stain on the reputation of the United States.

October 28th, 2008

Prisoner and dfense attorney refuse to participate in Guantanamo war crimes farce

Maj. David Frakt, Guantanamo defense attorney, is again making waves. When the judge refuse to allow his client, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, to represent himself, Maj. Frakt asked to be relieved from the case, as his client wishes. The judge refused. So Maj. Frakt announced that he is joining his client in sitting silently at the defense  table.

The war crimes trials are rapidly sinking to a level well below farce. We need a new term.

AP reports:

Guantanamo prisoner and lawyer boycott trial

By David McFadden

UANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba – Al-Qaida’s former media director and his Pentagon-appointed lawyer refused to talk Monday, but their boycott didn’t stop a military judge from beginning Guantanamo’s second war crimes trial.

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, facing a possible life sentence, sat silently at his defense table in a tan prison jumpsuit. His lawyer, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said al-Bahlul was boycotting Guantanamo’s second war-crimes trial because he rejects a military attorney and has been barred from representing himself. Frakt then declared he would also remain silent in respect of al-Bahlul’s wishes.

Frakt refused to respond when asked by the judge if he wished to question a pool of 13 potential jurors — all U.S military officers flown in from other U.S. bases over the weekend.

More than half the jury pool told a Marine prosecutor, Maj. Charles Hale, that they had previously served in the military commission process for former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks, who wound up serving a nine-month prison sentence in his native Australia under a plea deal before the case went to trial here.

The judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, questioned prospective jurors about their previous commission experience or attitudes toward Islam, among other topics, then ordered a recess before a panel nine jurors is selected.

The war-crimes trials — which admit hearsay evidence and testimony obtained under harsh interrogations — have created many critics, including several former Guantanamo prosecutors.

Early in the session, Frakt asked Gregory to be allowed to leave in deference to his client’s boycott, but the judge said Frakt was obligated to attend the hearings even if he stays silent.

“I will be joining Mr. Al-Bahlul’s boycott, sitting silently at the table,” Frakt responded.

Prosecutors plan to introduce up to 31 witnesses for a trial Gregory said would last through this week. The list includes Navy interrogator Robert McFadden, who testified for prosecutors in the case of Osama bin Laden’s driver, Salim Hamdan.

The trial of Al-Bahlul on charges of conspiracy, supporting terrorism and solicitation to commit murder is the second of the military commission system. The first trial — for former bin Laden driver Hamdan — ended in August with a conviction and a 5 1/2-year sentence.

Al-Bahlul said at a pretrial hearing earlier this year that he wanted nothing to do with his trial and would attend only for the announcement of the verdict and sentence. He called the proceedings at this isolated U.S. Navy base a “legal farce.”

The 39-year-old from Yemen allegedly created a recruiting video glorifying al-Qaida’s attack on the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen that killed 17 American sailors in October 2000. He also is accused of arranging for lead Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta to swear a loyalty oath to bin Laden.

Al-Bahlul, who has been held at Guantanamo since 2002, has acknowledged working for bin Laden but said he does not agree that his actions constitute crimes.

Eighteen Guantanamo prisoners are currently facing charges.

October 28th, 2008

Telemarketers take diect action against McCain slime

Demonstrating the power of workers’ solidarity, dozens of workers at a telemarketing center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read a McCain robocall:

Dozens Of Call Center Workers Walk Off Job In Protest Rather Than Read McCain Script Attacking Obama

By Greg Sargent

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

Nina Williams, a stay-at-home mom in Lake County, Indiana, tells us that her daughter recently called her from her job at the center, upset that she had been asked to read a script attacking Obama for being “dangerously weak on crime,” “coddling criminals,” and for voting against “protecting children from danger.”

Williams’ daughter told her that up to 40 of her co-workers had refused to read the script, and had left the call center after supervisors told them that they would have to either read the call or leave, Williams says. The call center is called Americall, and it’s located in Hobart, IN.

“They walked out,” Williams says of her daughter and her co-workers, adding that they weren’t fired but willingly sacrificed pay rather than read the lines. “They were told [by supervisors], `If you all leave, you’re not gonna get paid for the rest of the day.”

The daughter, who wanted her name withheld fearing retribution from her employer, confirmed the story to us. “It was like at least 40 people,” the daughter said. “People thought the script was nasty and they didn’t wanna read it.”

A second worker at the call center confirmed the episode, saying that “at least 30″ workers had walked out after refusing to read the script.

“We were asked to read something saying [Obama and Democrats] were against protecting children from danger,” this worker said. “I wouldn’t do it. A lot of people left. They thought it was disgusting.”

This worker, too, confirmed sacrificing pay to walk out, saying her supervisor told her: “If you don’t wanna phone it you can just go home for the day.”

The script coincided with this robo-slime call running in other states, but because robocalling is illegal in Indiana it was being read by call center workers.

Representatives at Americall in Indiana, and at the company’s corporate headquarters in Naperville, Illinois, didn’t return calls for comment.

October 28th, 2008

Western psychotherapy gaining in China

The International Herald Tribune reports that Western psychotherapy, including psychoanalytically oriented therapy, is gaining in China:

As stress grows, Chinese turn to Western psychotherapy
By Dune Lawrence, Bloomberg News

BEIJING: When Li Xianyun began working as a psychiatrist at Hui Long Guan Hospital in Beijing in 1991, she did not discuss her job in public. People thought it was strange, she says, and they assumed she worked in an insane asylum. Now, those she meets are eager to learn more about her profession.

“If I tell them I’m a psychiatrist and talk about my job, they show their admiration,” said Li, 40. “They want my suggestion on how to raise children and how to deal with all kinds of difficulties.”

In the past 30 years, China’s Communist system of government-assigned jobs and apartments has become a capitalist free-for-all, with cutthroat competition for education and work and a widening gap between rich and poor. To cope with the stress, some people are turning to a Western tool: psychotherapy.

This is a radical shift in a nation where focus on the individual was discouraged by both socialist ideology and traditional culture.

“There are great changes happening in Chinese society, and people are more open and pay more attention to their inner mind,” says Zheng Yu, a therapist in Chengdu, about 1,500 kilometers, or 930 miles, southwest of Beijing.

Job pressures may be a contributing factor. Fifty-one percent of Chinese respondents to a survey by Hudson Highland Group reported higher work stress than a year ago. It is the second consecutive year in which China has registered the highest stress levels in Asia, the recruitment firm, based in New York, said in a report in October.

“When some people get rich, they say, ‘I’m successful, but I’m still unhappy,”‘ said Kathy Li, 37, who quit working in media in 2005 to start her own counseling business in Beijing. “People are realizing more and more what can make them happy is not from the outside world but from the inside.”

The May earthquake in Sichuan Province, which killed an estimated 87,500 people, has added to the demand for psychotherapy. Government officials called for help from specialists in other countries to treat the psychological, as well as physical, trauma from the disaster.

The need for outside assistance exposed the shortage of resources in China. The country has only 30,000 professional therapists and counselors in a population of 1.3 billion. World Health Organization figures show 1.3 psychiatrists for every 100,000 people in China, compared with 13.7 per 100,000 in the United States.

“You can see there’s a big gap,” Kathy Li said.

International cooperation is providing opportunities for training. The nonprofit China American Psychoanalytic Alliance has enrolled 57 Chinese in a two-year program taught by Americans using Internet telephone service.

American therapists are also providing training through the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center, where Li Xianyun, the psychiatrist, works.

Psychotherapy, which gained an entry in China with the country’s first psychology institute in 1917, was disparaged as unscientific after the Communists took power in 1949. It was banned during the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong, which ended in 1976.

China’s traditional culture values “saving face,” which means emphasizing the positive and addressing embarrassing issues obliquely. This approach conflicts with the process of openly discussing problems that is inherent to most psychotherapy.

Custom also emphasizes individual contributions to the group, especially the family, rather than self-fulfillment. The Communist era only deepened that idea, promoting love of the party and country over personal relationships.

Kathy Li said she did not receive any psychotherapy training in medical school. She uses counseling with many of her clients, partly because the Chinese also have a cultural aversion to drugs.

“People tell me, ‘I don’t want to take medication; drugs have significant side effects,”‘ she said.

Four days a week, Zheng Yu, the Chengdu therapist, lies down on a couch in his office and uses Skype to call his psychoanalyst 12 time zones away in New York, a routine he began in 2005. Zheng, 38, is oriented toward psychoanalysis, which was developed by Sigmund Freud a century ago in Vienna.

He says Freud’s theory of family dynamics – based symbolically on the Greek myth of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother – dovetails with the problems of his Chinese clients who are only-children struggling to gain independence from overprotective parents.

The current global financial crisis may raise pressure on China’s economy – and increase potential demand for therapy – if a slowdown in U.S. and European consumer spending has repercussions in the export-dependent country.

As more Chinese turn to counseling, Li Xianyun worries that people may develop overblown expectations.

Many now “treat psychotherapy as some miracle,” she says. They will need to understand it is more like medical science: “Psychotherapy cannot resolve every problem.”

[h/t International Psychoanalysis]

October 28th, 2008

Ducat: The psychodynamics of Obama fear

Psychologist Stephen Ducat discusses the psychodynamics of Obama fear:

Why They Hate Obama: Miscegenation and Other Nightmares of the Racist Political Imagination

By Stephen Ducat

The frank comments of unapologetic anti-Obama racists across the country have recently gained a wide national audience. As Ricky Thompson, a pipe fitter from Mobile, Alabama, told a New York Times reporter, “He’s neither-nor. He’s other. It’s in the Bible. Come as one. Don’t create other breeds.” Another denizen of the GOP’s “real America” shared his spiritual insights with the same interviewer. Glenn Reynolds, of Martinsdale, Virginia pointed out, “God taught the children of Israel not to intermarry.” Such shameless declarations of prejudice reveal something obvious but easily overlooked: It is not Obama’s blackness that disturbs these pious bigots, but his grayness.

Ideas that now seem like crackpot notions of race were, not long ago, regarded as common sense, and found themselves codified in law. The “one-drop rule” asserted that a single drop of black blood in an otherwise white citizen rendered that person black. Blackness was widely viewed as a contaminant that sullied white purity. (In antebellum America, white slave owners got around this problem by either denying the ordinary practice of raping and impregnating black women, or by justifying this predation as a racial improvement of the population of black slaves.) The rule was adopted by numerous state legislators in the first third of the 20th century, and used as the basis for Jim Crow laws.

In 1924 Dr. Walter Plecker, a public health advocate who worked for Virginia’s Vital Statistics Department, said, “Two races as materially divergent as the White and Negro, in morals, mental powers, and cultural fitness, cannot live in close contact without injury to the higher.” It wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Supreme Court proclaimed Plecker’s Virginia Racial Integrity Act and the one-drop rule unconstitutional. This decision, which eliminated the ban on interracial marriage, bore the wonderfully apt title of Loving v. Virginia.

Sadly but not surprisingly, such legal victories have not kept Plecker’s sentiments from being embraced by contemporary guardians of racial boundaries. And, Barack Obama, the child of a black African father and a white American mother, is for these folks the very embodiment of what must not be brought together.

As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has succinctly observed, “We hold ourselves together by keeping things apart.” While legally sanctioned racial segregation in public life may be moldering in history’s dustbin, a corresponding segregation in our inner lives continues to structure our thoughts and emotions.

Some people consciously, most unconsciously, hold on for dear life to the pure and invariant categories of “good” and “bad.” Keeping them apart and unambiguously distinct helps us retain a reassuring infantile fantasy of safety, order and certainty. “Race” lends itself well to this process of splitting. Imagined as fundamentally unlike us, the racialized other becomes the perfect receptacle into which we are free to project all the wishes, impulses, and longings that we cannot bear to see in our ethnic group or ourselves. In other words, racism allows us to be all-good because there is someplace outside of us to put the bad.

Of course, this ruse we perpetrate on ourselves only works if we can sustain the delusion of absolute difference. Those who are more consciously racist rely on what Erik Erickson called “pseudo-speciation,” viewing other racial groups as separate species. “Inter-breeding” thereby becomes a psychological, as well as a theological abomination.

Speaking of spiritual matters, we should not be too surprised that most openly racist people are religious fundamentalists. This is not just because so many Biblical fairy tales endorse slavery, ethnic warfare and genocide, and inveigh against “race mixing,” but because the structure of fundamentalist theology and racism are the same – they both rely on splitting. A recent example of this symmetry is the fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones University, which didn’t overturn its ban on interracial dating until 2000. (This was done with considerable reluctance, and primarily to save George W. Bush from political embarrassment after having given a campaign stump speech in their chapel.) Such racist thumpers of holy books literally as well as metaphorically think in black and white terms.

Thus, the very visibility of Barack Obama – let alone his candidacy for the most powerful and, before Bush, the most esteemed job in the world – creates a category crisis of epic proportions. He not only mouths a rhetoric of transcending division, but is himself a seamless genetic integration of what should be immiscible. The decent, God-fearing racist must be plagued by unanswerable questions: What is this incomprehensible mutation of badness and goodness? How can the same person contain that with which I identify and which I despise? What does that make me?

In the course of the presidential campaign, we have heard Republican ads and seen GOP viral emails that pose more rational-seeming derivatives of these questions: Who is Barack Obama? Do we actually know him? Doesn’t he sound kind of uppity and elitist? Is he a Christian or a Muslim? Is he really like us? Didn’t he grow up in one of those anti-American parts of America, like Hawaii?

By way of concluding, I want to emphasize that most Americans are not consciously racist, and would abhor the prejudice and ignorance manifested by the good white Christians cited above. But as Drew Westen and other researchers have shown, the majority of people – black as well as white – harbor an unconscious negative bias against anyone perceived as black. At a deep level, most of us make use of racial categories to navigate the world, manage its vague and unseen threats, and define our worth.

And why should we expect otherwise? Every person in this country is embedded in a culture and history founded on racist beliefs, practices, and emotions. There is no place to stand outside this psychological and social reality. It saturates our national sense of self and structures our neural networks.

What is possible, however, is to acknowledge and remain mindful of this ugly and disturbing legacy so that we can minimize its influence on how we treat others, and how we elect leaders to public office. And, as the enthusiastic throngs of citizens, here and abroad, attest, it is even possible to move beyond “tolerance” – to embrace and celebrate the fluidity of categories, cultures, and identities that Obama’s candidacy has come to symbolize.

October 28th, 2008