Psyche, Science, and Society

The audacity of torture: The White House and the Yoo-Bybee memos

In an interview by Rachel Maddow, Michael Isikoff expands upon his recent Newsweek article on the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility investigation of the witting of the Yoo-Bybee torture memos. In this interview, Issikoff speculates that the White House [think David Addington, I'd imagine] may have directed the witting of the memos in order to make sure they got the derision they wanted. This could prove to be the smoking gun that demonstrates a conspiracy to commit torture. And the witting of the memos would then be a crucial element in that conspiracy:

[H/t Scott Horton.]

February 17th, 2009

Greenwald: No accountability, foreign or domestic

Glenn Greenwald today rips apart an op ed in the Washington Post which argues for absolute immunity for American leaders in American courts for all crimes that matter (that is, other than fornicating while Democratic, which is undoubtedly still impeachable). Since the same authors previously argued that it should be a crime for foreign countries to prosecute American officials for anything, they obviously believe that American leaders are protected fro all accountability “both foreign and domestic.” Neat trick! no wonder the authors are Republican lawyers!

I assume that, as soon as the Bush torturers are off the hook, they will again discover the need for accountability for Democratic Presidents.

In an update, Greenwald reminds us that the Bush regime torturers abrogated to themselves to prosecute and convict foreign torturers, resulting in the conclusion:

Lawrence Walsh and America’s law-free zone

By Glenn Greenwald

No torturer is safe from American judicial accountability — as long as the torturer is not an American political official.

Can we as citizens sit by and allow such brazen lwlessness become the official policy? Is American democracy that dead? are concepts of human rights, or even basic fairness that empty? I guess we will find out over the next few years.

Here is Greenwald’s article:

David Rivkin and Lee Casey are right-wing lawyers and former Reagan DOJ officials who, over the last eight years, have been extremely prolific in jointly defending Bush/Cheney theories of executive power. Today, they have one of their standard Op-Eds, this time in The Washington Post, demanding that there be no investigations or prosecutions of Bush officials.  Most of the arguments they advance are the standard platitudes now composing Beltway conventional wisdom on this matter.  But there is one aspect of their advocacy that is somewhat remarkable and worth noting.

Rivkin and Casey have long been vigorous opponents of the legitimacy of international tribunals to adjudicate crimes committed by American officials.  In February, 2007, they wrote an Op-Ed in the Post bitterly criticizing Italian officials for indicting 25 CIA agents who had literally kidnapped a Muslim cleric from Italy and “rendered” him from Milan to Egypt.  In that Op-Ed, the Bush-defending duo argued that Italy had no right to prosecute these agents (h/t reader tc):

An Italian court announced this month that it is moving forward with the indictment and trial of 25 CIA agents charged with kidnapping a radical Muslim cleric. These proceedings may well violate international law, but the case serves as a wake-up call to the United States . . . .

[T]he United States must still vigorously resist the prosecution of its indicted agents. . . . [I]t is up to American, not Italian, authorities to determine whether any offense was committed in the capture and rendition of Nasr.

Unfortunately, the effort to prosecute these American agents is only one instance of a growing problem. Efforts to use domestic and international legal systems to intimidate U.S. officials are proliferating, especially in Europe. Cases are pending in Germany against other CIA agents and former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld — all because of controversial aspects of the war on terrorism. These follow Belgium’s misguided effort to pursue “universal jurisdiction” claims for alleged violations of international law, which also resulted in complaints against American officials including Vice President Cheney and former secretary of state Colin Powell. That law was amended, but the overall problem is unlikely to go away.  The initiation of judicial proceedings against individual Americans is too attractive a means of striking at the United States — and one often not subject to control by the relevant foreign government.

Accordingly, Congress should make it a crime to initiate or maintain a prosecution against American officials if the proceeding itself otherwise violates accepted international legal norms.

So it’s up to the U.S. — not any foreign tribunals — to prosecute war crimes and other felonies committed by American officials (for reasons that, at least in part and under certain circumstances (not prevailing in the Italian case), I find persuasive).  In fact, they argue, international prosecutions are so illegitimate that such proceedings themselves should be declared crimes.  Indeed, like most of their political comrades, Rivkin and Casey have consistently argued that U.S. jurisdiction over alleged violations of international law and U.S. treaties by U.S. citizens — including our leaders — is exclusive.

They made the same argument when opposing U.S. ratification of the enabling statute of the International Criminal Court (.pdf), arguing that “[t]he question is whether [international] law can, or should, be enforced outside national legal systems that have generally functioned well.”  Their answer, of course, is that, when it comes to Americans, international law obligations cannot and shouldn’t be enforced anywhere but America:

There are many problems with the Rome Treaty.  The most immediate one, for Americans, is the danger of its being used as a political instrument against us.  But the most profound flaw is a philosophical one:  The concept of “international” justice underpinning the ICC project is more apparent than real. . . .

The prosecution of political leaders is inherently political, and there are at least two sides to every political conflict. . . . From America’s perspective, the greatest practical danger of joining the ICC regime would be that the court, driven by those who may resent American global preeminence, could seek to restrain the use of U.S. military power through prosecutions of U.S. leaders.

They then went on to call for the Bush administration to vocally and decisively reject the legitimacy of the ICC  so that the whole edifice would collapse.  This is because American leaders should not be subjected to prosecution in foreign countries for their crimes — only in America.

Yet what do these two argue today?  That domestic investigations and prosecutions — by American tribunals and American courts — are also inappropriate, illegitimate and destructive.  Though they acknowledge that “the Justice Department is capable of considering whether any criminal charges are appropriate,” they nonetheless insist that this must not be done:

For his part, President Obama has reacted coolly to calls to investigate Bush officials. Obama is right to be skeptical; this is a profoundly bad idea — for policy and, depending on how such a commission were organized and operated, for legal and constitutional reasons. . . .

Attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad, however much one disagrees with their policy choices while in office, is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery. As the history of the late, unlamented independent counsel statute taught, once a Pandora’s box is opened, its contents can wreak havoc equally across the political and party spectrum. . . .

Obama and the Democratic Congress are entitled to revise and reject any or all of the Bush administration’s policies. But no one is entitled to hound political opponents with criminal prosecution, whether directly or through the device of a commission, and those who support such efforts now may someday regret the precedent it sets.

So no international tribunals or foreign countries have any power to investigate or prosecute American officials for war crimes (even when those war crimes are against citizens of those countries and/or committed within their borders).  And, American political officials must also not be prosecuted inside the U.S., by American courts.  “Nobody is entitled” to do that either, because “attempting to prosecute political opponents at home or facilitating their prosecution abroad is like pouring acid into our democratic machinery.”

The implication of their argument — which is now the conventional Beltway view — is too obvious to require much elaboration.  If our political leaders can’t be held accountable for their war crimes and other serious felonies in foreign countries or international tribunals, and must never be held accountable in the U.S. either (because to do so is to “pour acid into our democratic machinery”), then it means that American political officials (in contrast to most other leaders) are completely and explicitly exempt from, placed above, the rule of law.  That conclusion is compelled from their premises.

At least to me, it’s just endlessly perplexing how anyone — let alone our political class in unison — could actually endorse such absolute lawlessness for political leaders.  Didn’t our opinion-making elites learn in the eighth grade that the alternative to a “nation of laws” was a “nation of men” — i.e., the definition of tyranny?  Those are the only two choices.  It’s just so basic.

Apparently, though, this is all fine with our political establishment, since none of this is new.  Here’s what Iran-contra prosecutor (and life-long Republican official) Lawrence Walsh said in 1992 after George H.W. Bush pardoned Casper Weinberger days before his trial was set to begin:

President Bush’s pardon of Caspar Weinberger and other Iran-contra defendants undermines the principle that no man is above the law. It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office — deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence.

Weinberger, who faced four felony charges, deserved to be tried by a jury of citizens. Although it is the President’s prerogative to grant pardons, it is every American’s right that the criminal justice system be administered fairly, regardless of a person’s rank and connections.

The Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed with the pardon of Caspar Weinberger. . . . Weinberger’s early and deliberate decision to conceal and withhold extensive contemporaneous notes of the Iran-contra matter radically altered the official investigations and possibly forestalled timely impeachment proceedings against President Reagan and other officials. Weinberger’s notes contain evidence of a conspiracy among the highest-ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public. . . .

In light of President Bush’s own misconduct, we are gravely concerned about his decision to pardon others who lied to Congress and obstructed official investigations.

Does anyone deny that we are exactly the country that Walsh described:  one where “powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office — deliberately abusing the public trust without consequence”? And what rational person could think that’s a desirable state of affairs that ought not only be preserved — but fortified still further– as we move now to immunize Bush 43 officials for their far more serious and disgraceful crimes? As the Rivkin/Casey oeuvre demonstrates, we’ve created a zone of lawlessness around our highest political leaders and either refuse to acknowledge that we’ve done that or, worse, have decided that we don’t really mind.

UPDATE:  In a world in which the Rivkin/Casey mentality dominates (i.e., the world in which we actually live), imagine that you’re the American President, sitting in the Oval Office, tempted to issue a secret order that you know directs that laws be broken.  What possible pragmatic motive would you have to refrain from doing that?  Wouldn’t any rational person in that situation think to themselves:

There’s nothing that would stop me from doing this because, fortunately, we live in a country where the President actually has the right to break the law and to do so without consequences.  In fact, amazingly enough, the citizenry — or at least the opinion-making elite — has somehow become convinced that it’s a good thing — vital even — for the President to have this lawbreaking right and to be shielded from consequences when he commits crimes.  I don’t know how that they got convinced of that, but that’s actually how they think.  As strange as it is, I know that if I decide to commit this crime, political and media figures from across the political spectrum will join together to insist that there must be no consequences for what I have done.

Ironically, while there is consensus horror in America’s political class over the idea that our political leaders might be charged and tried in the U.S. (let alone a foreign country) for their torture and other war crimes, we — Americans — have adopted a statute that expressly arrogates unto ourselves the power to do exactly that to leaders of other countries, and the Bush administration — even as they presided over their own torture regime — actually invoked that law to pursue such prosecutions.  After a torture prosecution of a Liberian official last December, Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, actually spoke these words — what very well might be the most audaciously hypocritical quote of all of 2008:

Law without conscience is no guarantee of freedom; that even the seemingly most advanced of nations can be led down the path of evil; and that we must confront horror with action and vigilance, not lethargy and cowardice. . . .

His conviction – the first in history under our criminal anti-torture statute – provides a measure of justice to those who were victimized by his reprehensible acts, and it sends a powerful message to human rights violators around the world that, when we can, we will hold them accountable for their crimes.

No torturer is safe from American judicial accountability — as long as the torturer is not an American political official.

February 17th, 2009

PsySR: Activism in a New Era

“On Sunday, February 15th at Georgetown University, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) sponsored a program entitled Activism in a New Era for the Washington D.C. peace, social justice, and human rights community. Speakers included PsySR members Fathali Moghaddam, Tony Marsella, and Jancis Long. This video provides brief excerpts from their presentations. ”

[From the PsySR blog.]

February 17th, 2009

Are video games liked for sense of control, not violence?

My son is always playing video games. Especially this, vacation, week. As parents, my wife and I don’t like how much he plays or the violence of his games. A new study described in Science News may provide some comfort for us:

Gamers crave control and competence, not carnage

Study turns belief commonly held by video game industry, gamers, on its head

By Laura Sanders

Blood, guts and gore aren’t what thrill avid gamers when they slaughter zombies in The House of the Dead III video game, a new study suggests. Instead, feelings of control and competence are what the players crave. The new research, led by psychologist Richard Ryan at the University of Rochester in New York, appears online January 16 in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

“A common belief held by many gamers and many in the video game industry — that violence is what makes a game fun — is strongly contradicted by these studies,” comments Craig Anderson, a psychologist who directs the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University in Ames.

Many studies aim to determine how video game violence impacts players. Recently, lawmakers in the House of Representatives introduced a 2009 bill requiring violent video games to carry the following label: “WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.”

Some psychologists and lawmakers think the link between exposure to such violence and committing violent acts is well substantiated, but others, including Ryan, think the topic is “unfinished business.”

To figure out how enticing violence is for gamers, Ryan and colleagues conducted a series of survey-based studies to identify the reasons players enjoy a certain game. The results from two surveys, based on responses from over 2,500 people who participate in an Internet chat group focused on video games, found that the inclusion of violent content did nothing to enhance players’ enjoyment. What did matter was feeling in control and feeling competent. “Games give autonomy, the freedom to take lots of different directions and approaches,” says Ryan.

In a smaller experimental study, the researchers extensively modified a popular first-person shooter video game called Half-Life 2 to have less gore. Half the people in a group of 36 male and 65 female college students were instructed to dispatch adversaries as the original game intended, “in a thoroughly bloody manner,” says Ryan. The other half was instructed to tag enemies with a marker. “Instead of exploding in blood and dismemberment, they floated gently into the air and went back to base,” Ryan describes.

An extensive survey of the two groups showed that the exclusion of violence didn’t diminish players’ enjoyment of the game.

In a different study of avid gamers, a group of 39 males who were, on average, 19.5 years old and played video games for 7.5 hours a week were asked to play the game The House of the Dead III with a low violence or high violence setting. Instead of realistic wounds and gratuitous blood on slain enemies, the wounded were covered in neon green goo in the low-violence version of the game. As before, violence did not affect players’ enjoyment of the games.

Feelings of competence and autonomy are factors important to many different aspects of happiness, according to Ryan’s previously proposed “self-determination theory.” Bruce Bartholow, a psychologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, is not surprised that the same is true for video game enjoyment. “It’s a decent thing to know, but it’s not something to shout from the rooftops.”

Bartholow cautions that the new study did not take subjects’ past exposure to violence into account. Ryan and colleagues note in the paper that more behavioral data, such as tracking video game choices and purchases over time, would add to the initial findings.

The results here are good news for game developers, gamers and also for parents who are concerned about their kid’s reasons for playing violent games, says Ryan.

“They may not be in it for the blood. They’re in it for the fun.”

February 17th, 2009

SERE graduate says “The military should close its torture school!”

This SERE graduate says “The military should close its torture school.” In addition to raising the question of the ethics of torturing our troops to help protect them along with concerns about the spill-over to abusive treatment of US detainees, he raises an important utility question, arguing that it is training for exactly the wrong skills to protect our troops:

The question is especially pertinent because America’s enemies haven’t used SERE’s techniques of “mind control” since the Korean War. No doubt some military officials will argue that SERE has never been more necessary than it is today, given that there is no front line in the war on terrorism. Our troops are in constant danger of being captured, as in the kidnapping of two soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division near Yousifiyah, Iraq, in May 2007.

But a review of the experiences of American servicemen captured in Iraq and Somalia shows that our enemies don’t water-board their captives. Nor do they have the resources to mount a program of systematic sensory deprivation and humiliation, as we did in Guantanamo and in the American prison at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. In fact, our soldiers need training from SERE based on an entirely different premise, as illustrated by the experience of Michael Durant, the helicopter pilot who spent several weeks in captivity when he was captured by Somali fighters during the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” raid. Durant survived by befriending his captors and forcing them to see him as a fellow human being. SERE conditions servicemen to expect nothing but the worst from their captors; Durant’s life depended on his ability to understand his captors and find ways to manipulate them psychologically.

Here is the complete article. It is well worth reading:

Cancel Water-Boarding 101

The military should close its torture school. I know because I graduated from it.

By David J. Morris

On his first day in office, President Obama kept his most important campaign promise and began the process of closing Guantanamo. But this eliminates only the most visible part of the U.S. torture bureaucracy. In order to ensure that the atrocities of Guantanamo aren’t visited upon the world by future administrations, Obama must also eviscerate the structures that enabled and supported torture. At the top of a long list is the U.S. military’s secretive torture school, known as SERE, which stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape.

Founded in the aftermath of the Korean War to train U.S. servicemen to withstand enemy interrogation, the school was central to the development of the notorious “enhanced interrogation techniques” at Guantanamo. It was the SERE program that sent instructors and staff psychologists to Guantanamo shortly after 9/11 and provided the technical expertise on tactics like water-boarding. As Jane Mayer put it in her study of U.S. torture policy, The Dark Side, “SERE is a repository of the world’s knowledge about torture, the military equivalent, in a sense, of the lethal specimens of obsolete plagues kept in the deep-freeze laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control.”

I served in the Marine Corps in the 1990s, and I attended SERE as a young lieutenant in November 1995. I have since been to Iraq three times (as a reporter), and I can attest that the school isn’t relevant to the threats American soldiers face abroad. It resembles more of an elaborate hazing ritual than actual training.

While I was in the school, I lived like an animal. I was hooded, beaten, starved, stripped naked, and hosed down in the December air until I became hypothermic. At one point, I couldn’t speak because I was shivering so hard. Thrown into a 3-by-3-foot cage with only a rusted coffee can to piss into, I was told that the worst had yet to come. I was violently interrogated three times. When I forgot my prisoner number, I was strapped to a gurney and made to watch as a fellow prisoner was water-boarded a foot away from me. I will never forget the sound of that young sailor choking, seemingly near death, paying for my mistake. I remember only the sound because, try as I might, I couldn’t force myself to look at his face. I was next. But for some reason, the guards just dropped the hose on my chest, the water soaking my uniform.

I was incarcerated at SERE for only a few days, but my mind quickly disintegrated. I became convinced that I was being held in an actual prisoner of war camp. Training had stopped, from my point of view. We had crossed over into some murky shadow land where the regulations no longer applied. I was sure that my captors, who wore Warsaw Pact-style uniforms and spoke with thick Slavic accents, would go all the way if the need arose.

Based on my conversations with recent graduates of SERE, it’s clear that the school continues to inflict on trainees the techniques I experienced, such as sensory deprivation, extreme confinement, and exposure to loud music and recordings of wailing babies. According to congressional testimony given in November 2007 by Malcolm Nance, a former SERE instructor, they still water-board at SERE. If water-boarding is torture, then why are we still doing it to U.S. servicemen? Yes, enlistment in the units that attend SERE is a voluntary act, but must it entail the signing away of basic human rights?

The question is especially pertinent because America’s enemies haven’t used SERE’s techniques of “mind control” since the Korean War. No doubt some military officials will argue that SERE has never been more necessary than it is today, given that there is no front line in the war on terrorism. Our troops are in constant danger of being captured, as in the kidnapping of two soldiers from the 10^th Mountain Division near Yousifiyah, Iraq, in May 2007.

But a review of the experiences of American servicemen captured in Iraq and Somalia shows that our enemies don’t water-board their captives. Nor do they have the resources to mount a program of systematic sensory deprivation and humiliation, as we did in Guantanamo and in the American prison at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. In fact, our soldiers need training from SERE based on an entirely different premise, as illustrated by the experience of Michael Durant, the helicopter pilot who spent several weeks in captivity when he was captured by Somali fighters during the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” raid. Durant survived by befriending his captors and forcing them to see him as a fellow human being. SERE conditions servicemen to expect nothing but the worst from their captors; Durant’s life depended on his ability to understand his captors and find ways to manipulate them psychologically.

At the same time, the problem with SERE extends far beyond its questionable relevance to the threats that the war on terrorism pose to American soldiers. The school, which all pilots and special-forces soldiers attend, unintentionally serves to legitimize the use of torture by U.S. personnel in the field. In at least one documented case, special-forces soldiers in Afghanistan modeled their interrogations on the SERE training they received. The unit, the “20^th Special Force Group,” forced prisoners to kneel outside in wet clothing and repeatedly kicked and punched prisoners in the kidneys, knees, and nose if they moved, resulting in the death of one detainee, according to Mayer’s book.

The experience of torture at SERE surely plays a role in the minds of the graduates who go on to be interrogators, and it must on some level help them rationalize their actions. It’s not hard to imagine them thinking, Well, if I survived this, then it’s OK to do it to this guy. This acceptance of abuse from up high down to the lowest levels is the root of our military’s torture problem. Unlike other Western militaries (Britain’s, for example), ours thrives on sometimes-cartoonish authoritarianism and contrived rites of passage (like those hazing scandals that continually plague all the service academies). To young, impressionable soldiers, it is a too-short mental leap to the depredations of Abu Ghraib, as evidenced by a 2007 Army Times poll showing that 44 percent of enlisted Marines thought torturing a detainee was OK under certain circumstances. As John McCain said of torture in 2005, “It’s not about them—it’s about us.”

Because the operation of SERE is entirely a military matter, its role hasn’t received anything like the attention of the legal machinations that licensed the Bush administration’s abuses at Guantanamo. But unless we stop torturing our own servicemen and training them how to torture others, unless we close SERE and retrain its instructors, Guantanamo could happen again.

February 17th, 2009

US generals in Iraq contradict key US claims

A top US general, “Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, U.S. commander for the eight southern provinces of Iraq”, cast doubt upon claims of Iranian involvement in training Shia militias

He also cast doubt on Iranian involvement with Shi’a militias in the south, saying he had “no evidence or reports of people training in Iran”, despite periodic “anecdotal intelligence reports” of such training camps.

The IPS article also reports that several generals in Iraq are implicitly casting doubt upon claims by Gens. Petraeus and Odierno that Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan is more risky than the Petraeus -Odierno 23 month plan:

[A] senior commander in Iraq appeared to contradict that premise last week by declaring that security gains in the Shi’a provinces of Iraq are “permanent”, and a field commander in Iraq says there is no objective basis for any Petraeus-Odierno finding that Obama’s plan carries greater risk than their 23-month plan.

And:

A field commander in Iraq, who spoke with IPS on the understanding that he would not be identified, asserted flatly that there is no greater risk associated with President Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan than with the 23-month plan, contrary to Petraeus and Odierno.

The officer said that the U.S. military presence has already “passed the tipping point of diminishing returns” in relation to stability and security in Iraq. “The longer we stay now, the less we achieve,” he said.

February 17th, 2009

British government endorsed torture, Guardian reveals

While we in the US are debating the appropriate level of acountability for those in our government who ordered, condoned, or carried out official torture and cruel and inhuman treatment, in Britain they are going through similar discussions. The Guardian has revealed that British citizens were qustioned by MI5 officers after they were tortured in Pakistan, and that their torture was likely known at the highest levels of the British government. British intelligence also gave questions to US officers (probably CIA) to be asked during tortures in Morocco.

As usual, government on both sides of the Atlantic are doing all they can to cover up these abuses. But members of Parliament and British courts and press are looking into the matter. Many more revelations will no doubt be emerging:

Whitehall devised torture policy for terror detainees

MI5 interrogations in Pakistan agreed by lawyers and government

By Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor

A policy governing the interrogation of terrorism suspects in Pakistan that led to British citizens and residents being tortured was devised by MI5 lawyers and figures in government, according to evidence heard in court.

A number of British terrorism suspects who have been detained without trial in Pakistan say they were tortured by Pakistani intelligence agents before being questioned by MI5. In some cases their accusations are supported by medical evidence.

The existence of an official interrogation policy emerged during cross-examination in the high court in London of an MI5 officer who had questioned one of the detainees, Binyam Mohamed, the British resident currently held in Guantánamo Bay. The officer, who can be identified only as Witness B, admitted that although Mohamed had been in Pakistani custody for five weeks, and he knew the country to have a poor human rights record, he did not ask whether he had been tortured or mistreated, did not inquire why he had lost weight, and did not consider whether his detention without trial was illegal.

Mohamed is expected to return to Britain soon after ending a five-week hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay, where he was being force-fed. After he was seen by British officials and a doctor over the weekend, the Foreign Office said he was medically fit to travel.

Cross-examined in the high court last year, Witness B acknowledged that Mohamed was in “an extremely vulnerable position” when he questioned him in Karachi in 2002. The MI5 officer admitted telling him that “he would get more lenient treatment if he cooperated”, and said that he knew he was to be transferred to US custody.

Witness B was asked by Dinah Rose QC, for Mohamed: “Was it your understanding that it was lawful for Mr Mohamed to be transferred to the US authorities in this way?” Witness B replied: “I consider that to be a matter for the security service top management and for government.”

Asked then whether the transfer concerned him, Witness B replied: “I was aware that the general question of interviewing detainees had been discussed at length by security service management legal advisers and government, and I acted in this case, as in others, under the strong impression that it was considered to be proper and lawful.” He denied that he had threatened Mohamed and said the prisoner appeared well enough to be questioned.

Mohamed was eventually able to tell lawyers that before being questioned by MI5 he had been hung from leather straps, beaten and threatened with a firearm by Pakistani intelligence officers. After the meeting with MI5 he was “rendered” to Morocco where he endured 18 months of even more brutal torture, including having his genitals slashed with a scalpel. Some of the questions put to him under torture in Morocco were based on information passed by MI5 to the US.

The Guardian has learned from other sources that the interrogation policy was directed at a high level within Whitehall and that it has been further developed since Mohamed’s detention in Pakistan. Evidence of this might emerge from 42 undisclosed US documents seen by the high court and sent to the MPs and peers on the intelligence and security committee (ISC).

Lawyers representing Mohamed went to the high court in an attempt to secure the disclosure of the documents, but the court reluctantly refused earlier this month after David Miliband, the foreign secretary, said such a move would damage national security and UK-US relations.

Miliband’s position in the affair came under renewed attack yesterday after it emerged that his officials solicited a letter from the US state department to back up his claim that if the evidence was disclosed, Washington might stop sharing intelligence with Britain. The claim persuaded the high court judges to suppress what they called “powerful evidence” relating to Mohamed’s ill-treatment.

Edward Davey, the Liberal Democrat foreign affairs spokesman, today described the move as possibly “one of the most outrageous deceptions of parliament, the judiciary and the British people. There must be an immediate investigation, with all related correspondence made public.”

The FCO said it asked the US to make its position clear in writing “to inform both us and the court”. It said it was “both perfectly sensible and the correct thing to do”.

The high court said it was now up to the ISC to “hold those in charge of the secret intelligence service and security service and her majesty’s government to account”.

In a letter to the committee, Clive Stafford Smith, the director of Reprieve, says: “The ISC would want to know whether the intelligence services brought the issue of Mr Mohamed’s abuse to the attention of the prime minister (then Mr Blair) – and, if not, why not.” He said if the evidence had been brought to Blair’s attention, “the ISC would want to know what, if anything, was done about it. If nothing was done, that would raise serious questions about the respect that the UK government has for its obligations under the convention against torture.”

Richard Norton-Taylor on the foreign secretary’s involvement in the Guantánamo interrogation case Link to this audio

Evidence heard by the court in-camera – once the public and the media had been excluded – resulted in Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, asking the attorney general, Lady Scotland, to investigate “possible criminal wrongdoing” by both American and British security and intelligence officers.

Witness B’s testimony is expected to be considered by MPs and peers on parliament’s joint committee on human rights, which has begun an inquiry into allegations of British collusion in the torture of detainees in Pakistan, and is asking Miliband and Smith to give evidence.

A number of British terrorism suspects have been questioned by British intelligence officials, including MI5 officers, after periods of alleged torture by Pakistani interrogators. Last year Manchester crown court heard that MI5 and Greater Manchester police passed questions to Pakistani interrogators so they could be put to Rangzieb Ahmed, 35, from Rochdale. MI5 officers also interviewed him while he was in custody, although the head of the consular division at the British high commission was not informed about his detention for nine months. By the time Ahmed was deported to the UK 13 months later, and successfully prosecuted for terrorism offences, three of his fingernails had disappeared from his left hand. He says they were removed with pliers while he was being questioned about his associates in Pakistan, the July 2005 terrorist attacks in London, and an alleged plot against the United States.

While other detainees have also subsequently been prosecuted or deported to the UK and made subject to control orders, one vanished in bizarre circumstances and was subsequently said to have been killed in a US missile attack, although his family has not been given his body. A number have been released without charge.

A medical student from London who was held for almost two months in a building opposite the offices of the British deputy high commission in Karachi says he was tortured while being questioned about the 2005 London bombings before being questioned by British intelligence officers. He was released without charge and is now working at a hospital on the south coast of England, but is thought to remain deeply traumatised.

February 17th, 2009

Engelhardt: Economic recovery meets world drought

Tom Engelhardt, discusses the world drought situation from the perspective of an amateur trying to make sense of climate trends and their human effects. While he openly acknowledges limitations, he concludes by raising questions which openly need discussion. He wonders if the world we have left with the economic meltdown will ever return, as recovery meets climate catastrophe.

Burning Questions

What Does Economic “Recovery” Mean on an Extreme Weather Planet?

By Tom Engelhardt

It turns out that you don’t want to be a former city dweller in rural parts of southernmost Australia, a stalk of wheat in China or Iraq, a soybean in Argentina, an almond or grape in northern California, a cow in Texas, or almost anything in parts of east Africa right now. Let me explain.

As anyone who has turned on the prime-time TV news these last weeks knows, southeastern Australia has been burning up. It’s already dry climate has been growing ever hotter. “The great drying,” Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery calls it. At its epicenter, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever this month at a sweltering 115.5 degrees, while temperatures soared even higher in the surrounding countryside. After more than a decade of drought, followed by the lowest rainfall on record, the eucalyptus forests are now burning. To be exact, they are now pouring vast quantities of stored carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas considered largely responsible for global warming, into the atmosphere.

In fact, everything’s been burning there. Huge sheets of flame, possibly aided and abetted by arsonists, tore through whole towns. More than 180 people are dead and thousands homeless. Flannery, who has written eloquently about global warming, drove through the fire belt, and reported:

“It was as if a great cremation had taken place… I was born in Victoria, and over five decades I’ve watched as the state has changed. The long, wet and cold winters that seemed insufferable to me as a boy vanished decades ago, and for the past 12 years a new, drier climate has established itself… I had not appreciated the difference a degree or two of extra heat and a dry soil can make to the ferocity of a fire. This fire was different from anything seen before.”

Australia, by the way, is a wheat-growing breadbasket for the world and its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought.

Meanwhile, central China is experiencing the worst drought in half a century. Temperatures have been unseasonably high and rainfall, in some areas, 80% below normal; more than half the country’s provinces have been affected by drought, leaving millions of Chinese and their livestock without adequate access to water. In the region which raises 95% of the country’s winter wheat, crop production has already been impaired and is in further danger without imminent rain. All of this represents a potential financial catastrophe for Chinese farmers at a moment when about 20 million migrant workers are estimated to have lost their jobs in the global economic meltdown. Many of those workers, who left the countryside for China’s booming cities (and remitted parts of their paychecks to rural areas), may now be headed home jobless to potential disaster. A Wall Street Journal report concludes, “Some scientists warn China could face more frequent droughts as a result of global warming and changes in farming patterns.”

Globe-jumping to the Middle East, Iraq, which makes the news these days mainly for spectacular suicide bombings or the politics of American withdrawal, turns out to be another country in severe drought. Americans may think of Iraq as largely desert, but (as we were all taught in high school) the lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, the “fertile crescent,” are considered the homeland of agriculture, not to speak of human civilization.

Well, not so fertile these days, it seems. The worst drought in at least a decade and possibly a farming lifetime is expected to reduce wheat production by at least half; while the coutry’s vast marshlands, once believed to be the location of the Garden of Eden, have been turned into endless expanses of baked mud. That region, purposely drained by dictator Saddam Hussein to tame rebellious “Marsh Arabs,” is now experiencing the draining power of nature.

Nor is Iraq’s drought a localized event. Serious drought conditions extend across the Middle East, threatening to exacerbate local conflicts from Cyprus and Lebanon to Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel where this January was reported to have been the hottest and driest in 60 years. “With less than 2 months of winter left,” Daniel Pedersen has written at the environmental website Green Prophet, “the region has received only 6%-50% of the annual average rainfall, with the desert areas getting 30% or less.”

Leaping continents, in Latin America, Argentina is experiencing “the most intense, prolonged and expensive drought in the past 50 years,” according to Hugo Luis Biolcati, the president of the Argentine Rural Society. One of the world’s largest grain exporters, it has already lost five billion dollars to the drought. Its soybeans — the country is the third largest producer of them — are wilting in the fields; its corn — Argentina is the world’s second largest producer — and wheat crops are in trouble; and its famed grass-fed herds of cattle are dying — 1.5 million head of them since October with no end in sight.

Dust Bowl Economics

In our own backyard, much of the state of Texas — 97.4% to be exact — is now gripped by drought, and parts of it by the worst drought in almost a century. According to the New York Times, “Winter wheat crops have failed. Ponds have dried up. Ranchers are spending heavily on hay and feed pellets to get their cattle through the winter. Some wonder if they will have to slaughter their herds come summer. Farmers say the soil is too dry for seeds to germinate and are considering not planting.” Since 2004, in fact, the state has yoyo-ed between the extremities of flood and drought.

Meanwhile, scientists predict that, as global warming strengthens, the American southwest, parts of which have struggled with varying levels of drought conditions for years, could fall into “a possibly permanent state of drought.” We’re talking potential future “dust bowl” here. A December 2008 U.S. Geological Survey report warns: “In the Southwest, for example, the models project a permanent drying by the mid-21st century that reaches the level of aridity seen in historical droughts, and a quarter of the projections may reach this level of aridity much earlier.”

And talking about drought gripping breadbasket regions, don’t forget northern California which “produces 50 percent of the nation’s fruits, nuts and vegetables, and a majority of [U.S.] salad, strawberries and premium wine grapes.” Its agriculturally vital Central Valley, in particular, is in the third year of an already monumental drought in which the state has been forced to cut water deliveries to farms by up to 85%.

Observers are predicting that it may prove to be the worst drought in the history of a region “already reeling from housing foreclosures, the credit crisis, and a plunge in construction and manufacturing jobs.” January, normally California’s wettest month, has been wretchedly dry and the snowpack in the northern Sierra Mountains, crucial to the state’s water supplies and its agricultural health, is at less than half normal levels.

Northern California, in fact, offers a glimpse of the havoc that the extreme weather conditions scientists associate with climate change could cause, especially when combined with other crises. In a Los Angeles Times interview, new Secretary of Energy Steven Chu offered an eye-popping warning (of a sort top government officials simply don’t give) about what a global-warming future might hold in store for California, his home state. Interviewer Jim Tankersley summed up Chu’s thoughts this way:

“California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming… In a worst case… up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture. ‘I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen,’ [Chu] said. ‘We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.’ And, he added, ‘I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going’ either.”

As for East Africa and the Horn of Africa, under the pressure of rising temperatures, drought has become a tenacious long-term visitor. For East Africa, the drought years of 2005-2006 were particularly horrific and now Kenya, with the region’s biggest economy, a country recently wracked by political disorder and ethnic violence, is experiencing crop failures. An estimated 10 million Kenyans may face hunger, even starvation, this year in the wake of a poor harvest, lack of rainfall, and rising food prices; if you include the drought-plagued Horn of Africa, 20 million people may be endangered, according to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

Recently, climatologist David Battisti and Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, published a study in Science magazine on the effect of extreme heat on crops. They concluded, based on recent climate models and a study of past extreme heat waves, that there was “a 90% chance that, by the end of the century, the coolest temperatures in the tropics during the crop growing season would exceed the hottest temperatures recorded between 1900 and 2006.” According to the British Guardian, under such circumstances Battisti and Naylor believe “[h]alf of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the end of the century as rising temperatures take their toll on farmers’ crops… Harvests of staple food crops such as rice and maize could fall by between 20% and 40% as a result of higher temperatures during the growing season in the tropics and subtropics.”

Not surprisingly, it’s hard to imagine — perhaps I mean swallow — such an extreme world, and so most of us, the mainstream media included, don’t bother to. That means certain potentially burning questions go not just unanswered but unasked.

The Grapes of Wrath (Updated)

Mind you, what you’ve read thus far represents an amateur’s eye view of drought on our planet at this moment. It’s hardly comprehensive. To give but one example, Afghanistan has only recently begun to emerge from an eight-year drought involving severe food shortages — and, as journalist Christian Parenti writes, it would need another “five years worth of regular snowfall just to replenish its aquifers.” Parenti adds: “As snow packs in the Himalayan and Hindu Kush ranges continue to recede, the rivers flowing from them will diminish and the economic situation in all of Central Asia will deteriorate badly.”

Nor is this piece meant to be authoritative, exactly because I know so relatively little. Think of it as a reflection of my own frustration with work not done elsewhere — and, by the way, thank heavens for Google University. Yes, Googling leaves you on your own, can be time-consuming, and tends to lead to cul-de-sacs (“Nuggets end 17-year drought in Orlando”), but what would we do without it? Thanks to good ol’ G.U., anyone can, for instance, check out the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Drought Information Center or its U.S. Drought Monitor, or the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center and begin a self-education.

Now let me explain why I even bothered to write this piece. It’s true that, if you’re reading the mainstream press, each of the droughts mentioned above has gotten at least some attention, several of them a fair amount of attention (as well as some fine reporting), and the Australian firestorms have been headlines globally for weeks. The problem is that (the professional literature, the science magazines, and a few environmental websites and blogs aside) no one in the mainstream media seems to have thought to connect these dots or blots of aridity in any way. And yet it seems a no-brainer that mainstream reporters should be doing just that.

After all, cumulatively these drought hotspots, places now experiencing record or near-record aridity, could be thought of as representing so many burning questions for our planet. And yet you can search far and wide without stumbling across a mainstream American overview of drought in our world at this moment. This seems, politely put, puzzling, especially at a time when University College London’s Global Drought Monitor claims that 104 million people are now living under “exceptional drought conditions.”

Scientists generally agree that, as climate change accelerates throughout this century (and no matter what happens from here on in, nothing will evidently stop some form of acceleration), extreme weather of every sort, including drought, will become ever more the planetary norm. In fact, experts are suggesting that, as the Washington Post reported recently, “The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems.”

Now, no one can claim beyond all doubt that global warming is the cause of any specific drought, or certainly the only cause anyway. As with the Texas drought, a La Niña weather pattern in the Pacific is often mentioned as a key causal factor right now. But the crucial point is what the present can tell us about the impact of a global pattern of extreme weather, especially extreme drought, on what will surely be a more extreme planet in the relatively near future.

If global temperatures are on the rise and more heat means lower crop yields, then you’re talking about more Kenyas, and not just in Africa either. You’re probably also talking about desperation, upheaval, resource conflicts, and mass out-migrations of populations, even — if scientists are right — from the American Southwest. (And in case you don’t think such a thing can happen here, remember Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or think of any of Dorothea Lange’s iconic photos of the “Okies” fleeing the American dustbowl of the 1930s.)

Burning Questions

Right now, the global economic meltdown has massively depressed fuel prices (key to farming, processing, and transporting most crops to market) and commodity prices have generally fallen as well, including food prices. Whatever the future economic weather, however, that is not likely to last.

So here’s a burning question on my mind:

We’re now experiencing the extreme effects of economic bad “weather” in the wake of the near collapse of the global financial system. Nonetheless, from the White House to the media, speculation about “the road to recovery” is already underway. The stimulus package, for instance, had been dubbed the “recovery bill,” aka the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the question of when we’ll hit bottom and when — 2010, 2011, 2012 — a real recovery will begin is certainly in the air.

Recently, in a speech in Singapore, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, suggested that the “world’s advanced economies” — the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan — were “already in depression,” and the “worst cannot be ruled out.” This got little attention here, but President Obama’s comment at his first press conference that delay on his stimulus package could lead to a “lost decade,” as in Japan in the 1990s (or, though it went unmentioned, the U.S. in the 1930s), made the headlines.

If, indeed, this is “the big one,” and does result in a “lost decade” or more, here’s what I wonder: Could the sort of “recovery” that everyone assumes lies just over a recessive or depressive horizon not be there? What if our lost decade lasts long enough to meet an environmental crisis involving extreme weather — drought and flood, hurricanes, typhoons, and firestorms of unprecedented magnitude — possibly in some of the breadbasket regions of the planet? What will happen if the rising fuel prices likely to come with the beginning of any economic “recovery” were to meet the soaring food prices of environmental disaster? What kind of human tsunami might that result in?

Once we start connecting some of today’s drought dots, wouldn’t it make sense to try to connect a few of the prospective dots as well? After all, if you begin to imagine what the worst might look like, you can also begin to think about what might be done to mitigate it. Isn’t that more sensible than looking the other way?

If the kinds of hits regional agriculture is now taking from record-setting drought became the future norm, wouldn’t we then be bereft of our most reassuring formulations in bad times? For example, the president spoke at that press conference of our present moment as “the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.” On an extreme planet, no such comforting “since the…” would be available, nor would there be any historical road map for what was coming at us, not if we had already run out of history.

Maybe the world we knew but scarce months ago is already, in some sense, long gone. What if, after a lost decade, we were to find ourselves living on another planet?

Feel free, of course, to ignore my burning questions. After all, I’m only an amateur with the flimsiest of credentials from Google U. Still, I do keep wondering when the media pros will finally pitch in, and what they’ll tell us is on that distant horizon, the one with the red glow.

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Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site and an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

February 17th, 2009

Ann Coulter on SNL

February 17th, 2009